Absolute Monarchs (54 page)

Mirari Vos
was directed primarily against the priest Félicité-Robert de Lamennais, editor of the newspaper
L’Avenir
—which carried the words
Dieu et Liberté
on its masthead—and spokesman of the French liberal clergy. Lamennais maintained that the Church must ally itself with the people rather than their oppressors: with the Catholic Poles against Tsar Nicholas, with the Catholic Belgians against the Dutch Protestant King William I, with the Catholic Irish against Protestant Westminster. But, as the encyclical made all too clear, Pope Gregory would have none of it; and by his refusal—perhaps his inability—to accept progressive ideas he cut off both himself and the Papacy from modern political thought. Lamennais later denounced Rome as “the most hideous cloaca that has ever soiled the human eye.” He was going, arguably, a little far; but few things in the world are more infuriating than blinkered bigotry on the scale then demonstrated by the Roman Papacy, and it is hard not to feel some sympathy for him.

Gregory’s record was not wholly disastrous. He reorganized all foreign missions, bringing them more firmly under papal control. He established some seventy new dioceses across the world and nearly two hundred missionary bishops. He denounced slavery and the slave trade. He founded the Christian Museum in the Lateran and the Etruscan and Egyptian Museums in the Vatican. But he brought sad discredit on the Church; and when on June 1, 1846, he died after a short illness, there were few indeed who mourned him.

1.
It was brought back to Rome in 1802 and buried at St. Peter’s.

2.
Formerly Francis II of the Holy Roman Empire. This, however, had been dissolved after Pressburg. In 1804 he had founded the new Empire of Austria, of which he was now the Emperor Francis I. He was thus nicknamed the
Doppelkaiser
(double emperor), the only one in history.

3.
The Camaldolesi were a strict and austere branch of the Benedictines who lived only part of their life in the monastery, spending the rest of it as hermits.

4.
Adam Zamoyski,
The Polish Way
, p. 275.

CHAPTER XXV

Pio Nono

Each day the Pope shows himself more lacking in any practical sense. Born and brought up in a
liberal
family, he has been formed in a bad school; a good priest, he has never turned his mind towards matters of government. Warm of heart and weak of intellect, he has allowed himself to be taken and ensnared, since assuming the tiara, in a net from which he no longer knows how to disentangle himself, and if matters follow their natural course, he will be driven out of Rome.

Those prophetic words were written by the Austrian State Chancellor Prince Metternich in October 1847 to his ambassador in Paris. Their subject was Giovanni Maria Mastai-Ferretti, who in the previous year, at the age of only fifty-four and after a forty-eight-hour conclave, had been elected Pope Pius IX. He was as unlike his predecessor as it was possible to be; indeed, he was known to have been openly critical of Gregory’s rule in the Papal States, just as he was of the Austrian presence in Italy. Gregory had made him a cardinal but had never trusted him: even his cats, he maintained, were liberals.

The reaction of the cats to Pius’s election is not known, but by the liberals of Italy and indeed all western Europe, the news had been greeted with excitement and delight. The new pontiff, it seemed, was one of themselves. In his first month of office he amnestied more than a thousand political prisoners and exiles.
¹
A few weeks later he was giving garden parties—for both sexes—at the Quirinal. Meanwhile, he actively encouraged plans for the railways his predecessor had so detested and for gas lighting in the streets of Rome. He established a free—or very nearly free—press. He made a start on tariff reform, introduced laymen into the papal government, and abolished Leo XII’s grotesque law which obliged Jews to listen to a Christian lecture once a week. Mobbed wherever he went, he was the most popular man in Italy.

But his reputation carried its own dangers. Every political demonstration, from the mildest to the most revolutionary, now claimed his support; his name appeared on a thousand banners, frequently proclaiming causes to which he was strongly opposed. With the outbreak of the revolutions of 1848—they occurred in Sicily, Paris, Vienna, Naples, Rome, Venice, Florence, Lucca, Parma, Modena, Milan, Berlin, Cracow, Warsaw, and Budapest—his position became more untenable still.
“Pio Nono! Pio Nono! Pio Nono!”
—the name became a battle cry, endlessly chanted by one mob after another as it surged through the streets of city after city. When the pope concluded one speech with the words “God bless Italy!” his words were immediately seen as an endorsement of the popular dream of a united peninsula, freed forever from Austrian rule. (Pius, it need hardly be said, had no desire to see Italy united; apart from anything else, what would then become of the Papal States?) In short, he now found himself on a runaway train; his only hope was to try to apply the brakes whenever he could.

Already by the end of January of that fateful year, the spate of new constitutions had begun. King Ferdinand had given one to Naples on the twenty-ninth; in Florence, just a week later, the grand duke had offered his subjects another. On March 5, after the Paris Revolution and the flight of Louis-Philippe, King Charles Albert of Savoy had granted one to the Piedmontese in Turin. Then, on March 13, it had been the turn of Vienna, and Metternich himself had taken to his heels. This was the most important event of all; new hope surged in the breast of every Italian patriot—who, as always, looked to the pope for a lead. There was nothing for it: on the fifteenth, Pope Pius granted a constitution to the Papal States, providing for an elected chamber. It was not exaggeratedly liberal—his chief minister, Cardinal Giacomo Antonelli,
²
had seen to that—nor, as things turned out, did it last very long; but it served its purpose. Pius, unwilling as he was to spearhead European revolution, could hardly be seen to be lagging behind.

Metternich’s resignation and flight left Austria in chaos. The government was rudderless, the army bewildered and uncertain in its loyalties. Here, unmistakably, was the signal to insurgents and revolutionaries throughout Italy. In Milan, the great insurrection known to all Italians as the
cinque giornate
—the five days of March 18 to 22—drove the Austrians from the city and instituted a republican government. On the last of those days, in Turin, a stirring front-page article appeared in the newspaper
Il Risorgimento
, written by its editor, Count Camillo Cavour. “The supreme hour has sounded,” he wrote. “One way alone is open for the nation, for the government, for the King. War!”

Two days later, King Charles Albert proclaimed the readiness of Piedmont to take up arms against the Austrian occupiers. Grand Duke Leopold II of Tuscany dispatched an army composed of both regular troops and volunteers. Rather more surprisingly, there was a similar response from King Ferdinand of Naples, who sent a force of 16,000 under a huge Calabrian general named Guglielmo Pepe. Strategically these contributions probably made little difference; they showed, however, beyond all possible doubt, that the cause was a national, Italian one. As they took their places beside the Piedmontese, Charles Albert’s fellow rulers saw themselves not as allies but as compatriots.

On March 24 General Giovanni Durando led the advance guard of a papal army out of Rome, to protect the northern frontier of the Papal States against any possible Austrian attack. This was conceived as a purely defensive measure, but the warmongers refused to accept it as such. Austria, they claimed, had declared war on Christian Italy. This was therefore a holy war, a Crusade, with the divine purpose of driving the invader from the sacred Italian soil. Pope Pius was horrified. Never for a moment would he have condoned such a policy of aggression, least of all against a Catholic nation. It was clearly essential for him to make his position clear once and for all. The result was the Allocution of April 29, 1848. Far from leading the campaign for a united Italy, he declared, he actively opposed it. God-fearing Italians should forget the whole idea of unification and once again pledge their loyalty to their individual princes.

By all true Italian patriots up and down the country the news of the allocution was received with horror. As things turned out, the cause of unification was virtually unaffected; the movement was by now so widespread as to be unstoppable. The only real damage done was to the reputation of Pius himself. Until now he had been a hero; henceforth he was a traitor. Moreover, the allocution had shown, as perhaps nothing else could have shown, just how powerless he was to influence events. All his fantastic popularity disappeared overnight; now it was his turn to look revolution in the face. For seven months he struggled to hold the situation, but when, on November 15, his chief minister, Antonelli’s successor, Count Pellegrino Rossi, was hacked to death as he was entering the chancery, he realized that Rome was no longer safe for him. On the twenty-fourth, aided by the French ambassador and the Bavarian minister and disguised as a simple priest, he slipped secretly out of the Quirinal Palace by a side door and fled to Gaeta—in Neapolitan territory—where he was joined by Cardinal Antonelli and a small staff. King Ferdinand gave him a warm welcome and settled him in his local palace, where he established a small Curia and continued the papal business.

At first the Piedmontese army enjoyed a measure of success. All too soon, however, on July 24, Charles Albert was routed at Custozza, a few miles southwest of Verona. He fell back on Milan, with the old Austrian Marshal Josef Radetzky in hot pursuit,
³
and on August 4 he was obliged to ask for an armistice, by the terms of which he and his army withdrew behind their own frontiers. Two days later the Milanese also surrendered, and the indomitable old marshal led his army back into the city. The first phase of the war was over, and Austria was plainly the victor. It was not only that she was back in undisputed control of Venetia-Lombardy. Naples had made a separate peace; Rome had capitulated; France, in the person of her foreign secretary, the poet Alphonse de Lamartine, had published a republican manifesto which had made encouraging noises but had offered no material help. The forces of the counterrevolution were triumphant across mainland Italy.

Except in Venice. On March 22, 1848, a Venetian lawyer named Daniele Manin and his followers had occupied the Arsenal and commandeered all the Austrian arms and ammunition that were stored there. Manin had then led a triumphal procession to the piazza, where he had formally proclaimed the rebirth of the republic, abolished by Napoleon half a century before. The Austrian governor had signed an act of capitulation, promising the immediate departure of all Austrian troops. But now Venice stood alone. Her only hope was Manin, whom in August she invited to assume dictatorial powers. He refused; it was nevertheless under his sole guidance that the Venetian Republic was to fight on throughout the following winter, courageously but with increasing desperation.

For all the states of Italy, the
quarantotto
—the forty-eight—had been a momentous year. Strategically, the situation had changed remarkably little; in most places Austria remained in control. Politically, on the other hand, there had been a dramatic shift in popular opinion. When the year began, most patriotic Italians were thinking in terms of getting rid of the Austrian forces of occupation; when it ended, the overriding objective, everywhere except in Venice, was a united Italy. Change was in the air. At last, it seemed, the Italians were on the verge of realizing their long-cherished dream. The Risorgimento had begun.

THE HURRIED DEPARTURE
of the pope had taken Rome by surprise. The chief minister of the papal government, Giuseppe Galletti, an old friend of Mazzini who had returned to Rome under the amnesty and had courageously succeeded the murdered Rossi, first sent a delegation to Gaeta to persuade Pius to return; only when this was refused an audience did Galletti call for the formation of a Roman Constituent Assembly of 200 elected members, which would meet in the city on February 5, 1849. Time was short, but the need was urgent, and 142 members duly presented themselves in the Palazzo della Cancelleria on the appointed date. Just four days later, at two in the morning, the Assembly voted, by 120 votes to 10, with 12 abstentions, to put an end to the temporal power of the pope and establish a Roman Republic. It was dominated by a forty-one-year-old adventurer named Giuseppe Garibaldi.

Born in 1807 in Nice, which would be ceded to France only in 1860, Garibaldi was, like Mazzini, a Piedmontese. He had begun his professional life as a merchant seaman and had become a member of Mazzini’s Giovane Italia in 1833. Always a man of action, he was involved the following year in an unsuccessful mutiny—one of the many failed conspiracies of those early years—and a warrant was issued for his arrest. Just in time, he managed to escape to France; meanwhile, in Turin, he was sentenced in absentia to death for high treason. After a brief spell in the French merchant navy he joined that of the Bey of Tunis, who offered him the post of commander in chief. This, however, he declined, and finally, in December 1835, he sailed as second mate on a French brig bound for South America. There he was to stay for the next twelve years, the first four of them fighting for a small state that was trying—unsuccessfully—to break away from Brazilian domination. In 1841 he and his Brazilian mistress, Anita Ribeiro da Silva, trekked to Montevideo, where he was put in charge of the Uruguayan navy, also taking command of a legion of Italian exiles—the first of the Redshirts, with whom his name was ever after associated. After his victory at the minor but heroic Battle of San Antonio del Santo in 1846 his fame quickly spread to Europe. By now he had become a professional rebel, whose experience of guerrilla warfare was to stand him in good stead in the years to come.

The moment Garibaldi heard of the revolutions of 1848, he gathered sixty of his Redshirts and took the next ship back to Italy. His initial offers to fight for the pope and then for Piedmont having both been rejected—Charles Albert, in particular, would not have forgotten that he was still under sentence of death—he headed for Milan, where Mazzini had already arrived, and immediately plunged into the fray. The armistice following Charles Albert’s defeat at Custozza he simply ignored, continuing his private war against the Austrians until at the end of August, heavily outnumbered, he was obliged to retreat to Switzerland. Three months later, however, on hearing of the pope’s flight, he hurried at once with his troop of volunteers to Rome. There he was elected a member of the new Assembly, and it was he who formally proposed that Rome should thenceforth be an independent republic.

ON FEBRUARY 18, 1849
, Pope Pius, in Gaeta, addressed a formal appeal for help to France, Austria, Spain, and Naples. By none of these four powers was he to go unheard; to the Assembly, however, the greatest danger was France—whose response would clearly depend on the complexion of its new republic and, in particular, on Prince Louis-Napoleon, its newly elected president. Nearly twenty years before, the prince had been implicated in an antipapal plot and expelled from Rome; he still cherished no particular affection for the Papacy. But it was all too clear to him that Austria was more powerful in Italy than ever; how could he contemplate the possibility of the Austrians now marching south and restoring the pope on their own terms? If he himself were to take no action, that—he had no doubt at all—was what they would do.