The Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean (74 page)

Venice was once more a republic; but it was plain, from its earliest days, that that republic was in mortal danger. The Austrians had retreated, but they were by no means beaten; the revolution, after all, had been confined only to the major towns. Radetzky was still in control of most of the countryside, and after the fall of Vicenza on 10 June the whole of the Venetian
terra firma
was back in Austrian hands. Venice could not hope to stand alone. And so, on 4 July, the newly-elected Venetian Assembly reluctantly voted for fusion with Piedmont, where Cavour was calling ever more insistently for the unification of Italy. It was a tragic day for Daniele Manin, who at once handed over to an interim ministry and retired from public life. (A few days later he was spotted in the uniform of a private in the Civic Guard, on sentry-go in the Piazzetta.) Meanwhile, 3,000 Piedmontese troops were billeted in the city; for many Venetians, it was almost as bad as having the Austrians back again.

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.

These prophetic words were written by the Austrian State Chancellor Prince Metternich to his ambassador in Paris in October 1847. Their subject was Giovanni Maria Mastai-Ferretti, the former Bishop of Imola and Archbishop of Spoleto who, the previous year at the age of fifty-four, had been elected Pope Pius IX. By the liberals of Italy and indeed all western Europe, the news of his election 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 1,000 political prisoners and exiles.
²⁴¹
A few weeks later he was giving garden parties–for both sexes–at the Quirinal. Meanwhile, he actively encouraged plans for railways (anathema to his predecessor, Gregory XVI, who called them
chemins d’enfer
) 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 the ridiculous law whereby Jews were obliged to listen to a Christian sermon 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 which he violently opposed. With the outbreak of the revolutions of 1848, 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 Italy, freed forever from Austrian rule. (Pius, it need hardly be said, had no desire to see Italy united; apart from anything else, what then would become of the Papal States?) In short, the Pope now found himself on a runaway train; his only hope was to try to apply the brakes in whatever way he could.

Already by the end of January of that fateful year, the spate of new constitutions had begun. Ferdinand had given one to Naples on the 29th; in Florence, just a week later, the Grand Duke had offered another. On March 5, after the Paris revolution and the flight of Louis-Philippe, King Charles Albert of Savoy had granted one in Turin. Then on 13 March it had been the turn of Vienna, and Metternich himself had taken to his heels. This was the most important news of all; new hope surged in the breast of every Italian patriot–who, as always, looked to the Vatican for a lead. There was nothing for it: on the 15th, Pope Pius granted a constitution to Rome. It was not exaggeratedly liberal–his Chief Minister, Cardinal Antonelli,
²⁴²
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.

On 24 March–the very day that Charles Albert declared war on Austria–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 predictably furious. 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 so-called Allocution of 29 April 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.

The Allocution was welcomed by King Ferdinand, who saw it as a perfect excuse to recall the army he had sent north under General Pepe. (Pepe, to his eternal credit, was to disobey him and lead 2,000 of his men to the defence of Venice.) By true Italian patriots up and down the country, on the other hand, the news was received with horror; yet, as things turned out, the cause of unification was almost unaffected. The movement was 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 the Pope was to influence events. All his fantastic popularity disappeared overnight; now it was his turn to look revolution in the face. For the next seven months he struggled to hold the situation, but when his Chief Minister, Count Pellegrino Rossi, was hacked to death as he was about to enter the Chancellery, he realised that Rome was no longer safe for him. On 24 November, disguised as a simple priest, he slipped secretly out of the Quirinal Palace by a side door and fled to Gaeta, where King Ferdinand gave him a warm welcome.

At first the Piedmontese army enjoyed a measure of success. All too soon, however, on 24 July, Charles Albert was routed at Custoza, a few miles southwest of Verona. He fell back on Milan, with Radetzky in hot pursuit; and on 4 August 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 active or material help. Less than five months after the proclamation of the new Venetian Republic, the forces of the counter-revolution were triumphant across mainland Italy.

Venice was not sorry to say goodbye to the Piedmontese, but once again she stood alone. Her only hope was Manin, who now cast aside his private’s uniform and on 13 August was invited by the Assembly to assume dictatorial powers. He declined, on the grounds that he knew nothing of military matters, but he was eventually persuaded to accept the leadership of a triumvirate. Such was his reputation that his two colleagues allowed themselves to fade into the background: Manin was in fact a dictator in all but name. It was 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
had been a momentous year. Strategically, the situation had changed remarkably little; in most places Austria remained master. 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 realising their long-cherished dream. The Risorgimento had begun.

CHAPTER XXVIII

Risorgimento

‘Italy,’ declared Metternich, ‘is a geographical expression.’ He spoke no more than the truth. Never in all its history had the Italian peninsula constituted a single nation; even in the days of imperial Rome it had been merely a part–and usually quite a small part–of the Roman state. Since the early Middle Ages, however–and perhaps even earlier–the concept of Italian nationhood had existed as a distant ideal: Dante and Petrarch had both dreamed of it, as later had Machiavelli. Geographically and linguistically, it obviously made sense; but the land was so deeply divided against itself, the medieval rifts and rivalries so bitter between city and city, Guelf and Ghibelline, Emperor and Pope, that the nineteenth century was already half-way through its course before unification was seen even as a possibility.

But then came the
quarantotto
, and all was changed. The distant dream had suddenly become an attainable objective. Count Camillo Cavour had no good reason to call his newspaper
Il Risorgimento
–there could be no question of resurgence towards an objective that had never existed before–but the word had a fine ring to it and was soon generally adopted. What was now needed was leadership.

As 1849 opened, there was only one serious contender on the national level. Venetia-Lombardy was still under Austrian rule. Rome was obviously excluded since, although Pope Pius had been for some weeks in voluntary exile, the problem of the Papacy–and therefore of the Papal States, which effectively divided the peninsula into two–remained unsolved. Naples under the sadly unreconstructed King Bomba was scarcely worth considering, and the other states of Italy were too small and weak to qualify. Piedmont was the obvious choice. Though still smarting from its defeat the previous year, it was energetic, ambitious and steadily increasing in size.
²⁴³
Its King, Charles Albert, had been on the throne since 1831 and was uncompromisingly anti-Austrian.

But Charles Albert, as a reigning monarch, could not give the movement–which was, after all, largely republican–the charismatic personal leadership that it so obviously required. This, in the early years at least, was to be the task of Giuseppe Mazzini. Mazzini had been born in Genoa in 1805, but ten years later the dispensations of the Congress of Vienna had automatically made him a Piedmontese citizen; though he somewhat desultorily studied both medicine and law, from his university days onward he was obsessed by the idea of Italian regeneration–to the point where his subversive activities resulted in a brief sentence of internment, followed in February 1831 by exile in Marseille. Living principally there and in London, he was to remain essentially an exile for the rest of his life.

It was on his arrival in Marseille that Mazzini founded the movement that he called
la giovine Italia
–Young Italy. As its name implied, it was directed exclusively at the under-forties, in an attempt to develop their national consciousness; it would be a ‘great Italian national association’, which had as its avowed object the liberation of Italy, by revolution if necessary. It had an immediate success: within two years of its foundation it could boast some 60,000 members. It also ran a periodical–bearing the same name as the society–of which six copies were produced in the first two years: no mean achievement, considering that each number contained some 200 pages, many of them written by Mazzini himself.

By 1833 he was ready for action. Young Italy had attracted a remarkably large number of the young officers and men of the Piedmontese army; with his boyhood friend Jacopo Ruffini he now planned simultaneous risings in Genoa and Alessandria, which he believed would spread across the country, overthrowing the government and eventually toppling Charles Albert. Alas, before these risings were even begun the plot was discovered. The discovery was in fact the fault of neither of the two chief conspirators, but virtually all their associates were arrested, twelve of them being executed by a firing squad. Ruffini slashed his veins in prison.

Mazzini, over the border in France, was in no immediate danger, but Marseille was full of Piedmontese agents, and soon afterwards he left for the greater safety of Geneva. Three years later, however, after several more unsuccessful conspiracies, even Switzerland had become too hot for him. In January 1837 he arrived in London, where he was to spend the next eleven years and which was to become his second home. Here he flung himself once again into a whirlpool of feverish activity: breathing new life into Young Italy, working to improve the lot of Italian immigrants, establishing a free school for Italian children, founding another newspaper, writing dozens of letters every day to Italian patriots and exiles throughout the world–for by now there were revolutionary committees not only in Italy but in several other European countries as well as in the USA, Canada, Cuba and Latin America.

Such was his energy and his industry that this remarkable Italian soon became a well-known figure in London. Seven years after his arrival, however, he was to enjoy a sudden and unexpected celebrity which proved of immense benefit to his cause. Early in 1844 he began to suspect that his letters were being secretly opened before delivery–a fact which a few simple experiments were enough to confirm. He at once complained to a friendly Member of Parliament, who obligingly put a question in the House of Commons. The Home Secretary, Sir James Graham, at first denied the accusation, but when faced with the evidence was compelled to admit that his office had indeed been opening the letters, at the request of the Austrian ambassador. The resulting scandal–people began writing ‘Not to be Grahamed’ on their envelopes–not only threw Mazzini into the limelight; it also enabled him to write an ‘open letter’ to Graham which set out the Italian case in detail and–since it was widely reprinted–gave him just the publicity he needed. His friend Thomas Carlyle maintained that the opening of his letters was the best thing that had ever happened to him.

The hurried departure of the Pope took Rome by surprise. The Chief Minister of the papal government, Giuseppe Galletti–an old friend of Mazzini’s 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 5 February 1849. Time was short but the need was urgent, and 142 members duly presented themselves in the palace of the Cancellaria on the appointed date. Just four days later, at two o’clock in the morning, the Assembly voted–by 120 votes to ten, with twelve abstentions–to put an end to the temporal power of the Pope and to establish a Roman republic. Mazzini was not present; by far the most dominant personality in the proceedings was 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 started his professional life as a merchant seaman, and had become a member of Young Italy 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 the navy of the Bey of Tunis, who offered him the post of Commander-in-Chief. This he declined, and finally, in December 1835, he sailed as second mate in 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 soon 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 afterwards associated. After his victory at the minor but heroic battle of Sant’ Antonio 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 Custoza he simply ignored, continuing his private war against the Austrians until at the end of August, heavily outnumbered, he had no choice but to retreat to Switzerland. There he spent the next three months with Anita, but on hearing of the flight of the Pope hurried at once with his troop of volunteers to Rome. He was elected a member of the new Assembly, and it was he who formally proposed that Rome should thenceforth be an independent republic.

Mazzini was, surprisingly, not present during these stirring events. From Milan he had travelled on to Florence–from which Grand Duke Leopold had somewhat hurriedly decamped–with the vain hope of persuading the government to proclaim a republic and unite it with that of Rome; it was only at the beginning of March that he made his way–for the first time–to the new capital, where a seat in the Assembly was awaiting him. He was, predictably, given a hero’s welcome, and was invited to sit at the President’s right hand.

It was unfortunate that the King of Piedmont should have chosen this moment to denounce the armistice concluded less than seven months before and to resume his war with Austria. Why he did so remains a puzzle. It may be that he feared another insurrection and the loss of his throne; more probably he saw himself as the champion and liberator of Italy, and was determined not to allow the defeat of Custoza to spell the end of his military career. That defeat had shown him, however, that he was no general; for the next phase of the war, while retaining the nominal supremacy, he entrusted the effective command to a Pole, a veteran of the Napoleonic wars named Wojtiech Chrzanowski.

Chrzanowski doubtless did his best, but as a general he proved little better than his chief. Less than a fortnight after the war was resumed the Piedmontese found themselves up against Radetzky at Novara, some thirty miles west of Milan. As at Custoza, they were no match for the slightly outnumbered but infinitely more disciplined and professional Austrians. Charles Albert showed exemplary courage, moving fearlessly across the field as the bullets whistled around him. He survived unscathed, but his troops were routed and the battle lost. One city, Brescia, stood alone for a few more days, but it was soon subdued in its turn by the Austrian General Julius von Haynau, with all the savagery and brutality for which he was notorious.
²⁴⁴
Charles Albert, declaring that he could not face signing another armistice, abdicated in favour of his son Victor Emmanuel, Duke of Savoy. Permitted as a private citizen to pass through the Austrian lines, he retired to Oporto, where he died only four months later of what seemed suspiciously like a broken heart.

Giuseppe Mazzini had long believed that imperial Rome and papal Rome would be followed by a third Rome: a Rome of the people. Now that dream had come true. The Assembly had put the new republic in the hands of a triumvirate; of its three members, however, two were virtually ignored. Mazzini was now effectively dictator of Rome. He was by no means the first, nor would he be the last, but it can safely be said that no other was remotely like him. In his cramped little office in the Quirinal Palace he was accessible to all comers; he ate every day at the same cheap
trattoria
; his monthly salary of thirty-two lire he gave to charity. Now, too, the propagandist and demagogue became a quietly conscientious administrator. He abolished the death penalty, introduced universal male suffrage, declared total freedom of the press and restored order to the Papal States, which had been terrorised by republican extremists. He would doubtless have done a great deal more, but he knew that he was working against time: ‘We must act,’ he told the Assembly, ‘like men who have the enemy at their gates, and at the same time like men who are working for eternity.’ He spoke no more than the truth; in early April there came ominous news from Paris. A French expeditionary force was on the march.

On 18 February Pope Pius in Gaeta had addressed a formal appeal for help to France, Austria, Spain and Naples. By none of these four powers was he to go unheard; to Mazzini, 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 recently elected president. Nearly twenty years before, the Prince had been implicated in an anti-papal plot and expelled from Rome; he still had no particular affection for the Papacy. Since Novara, on the other hand, he could see that Austria was more powerful in Italy than ever; how could he contemplate the possibility of the Austrians now coming 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.

He gave his orders accordingly, and on 25 April 1849 General Nicholas Oudinot–son of one of Napoleon’s marshals–landed with a force of about 9,000 at Civitavecchia and began the forty-mile march to Rome. From the start he was under a misapprehension. He had been led to believe that the republic had been imposed by a small group of revolutionaries on an unwilling people and would soon be overturned; he and his men would consequently be welcomed as liberators. His orders were to grant the triumvirate and the Assembly no formal recognition, but to occupy the city peacefully, if possible without firing a shot.