by Lucy Riall
Rival Romes
In assessing the achievements (or otherwise) of the cultural process of nation-building in early liberal Italy, we should keep in mind that the radicals were not alone in being one symbolic step ahead of the Italian state. The Church too was well on its way to challenging all secular conceptions of italianità and offering an extremely successful rival form of identity. With national unification, all liberal hopes of compromise with the Church had faded drastically. In 1861, Cavour had tried to reach an agreement with the Church on the basis of ‘a free Church in a free state’, but these negotiations had come to nothing and, thereafter, the Pope rejected all possibility of conciliation. Loyal Catholics were even urged to follow a policy known as non expedit, that is, they were told to abstain from either standing or voting in any political elections in Italy. There followed a series of much-publicised battles between Church and state: over Church property, control of education, and the appointment of bishops. After the Italian army seized Rome in 1870, Pius IX withdrew behind the walls of Vatican City and declared himself a ‘prisoner’. Although the government passed a law of guarantees, giving the Pope the effective status of an independent sovereign power, the Pope continued to play the part of the hostage, and never again left the Vatican (and, once elected, none of his successors set foot outside the Vatican walls until 1929).163
During the same period, the Pope assumed an ever more aggressive stance towards the wider liberal world, and worked tirelessly to reassert his traditional authority over the Church. In 1861 he issued an allocution refusing to compromise with ‘modern civilisation’; and in 1864, an encyclical Quanto Cura together with a Syllabus (list) of the eighty errors of modernity (the eightieth stated, ‘It is wrong to believe that the Pope can and ought to reconcile himself with progress, liberalism, and modern civilisation’). The Syllabus of Errors was followed by the summoning of a General Vatican Council, attended by some 700 bishops, and in 1870, shortly before the arrival of Italian troops in Rome, it declared the dogma of papal infallibility, which stated that when the Pope spoke ex cathedra (in an official capacity and on matters of doctrine) he was ‘possessed of that infallibility with which the divine Redeemer willed that his Church should be endowed for defining doctrine concerning faith and morals’.164 The dogma of papal infallibility confirmed the victory of ultra-montanism, so that the Church which emerged at the end of the political upheavals in Italy, and after the loss of the Pope's temporal power, was ‘more uniform, more centralised and more “Roman”’ than its predecessor.165
Pius IX called on loyal Catholics for their support in his intransigent stance, and met with a great and enthusiastic response. In fact, the cultural conflicts of this period in Italy can be better understood if we remember that the growing authoritarianism of the Pope was justified as a popular defence of Catholic liberty against political interference, and that the clerical activism inspired by Rome converged with a period of popular religious revival, especially with the growth of extra-sacerdotal expressions of popular piety (pilgrimages, miraculous encounters and other acts of devotion).166 Women, in particular, began to find in the Church a space for themselves which was closed off by the state.167 From the 1850s onwards, Pius IX embarked on an intense programme of sanctifications and beatifications, of religious commemoration and festivals, in a way which was quite different from that of his predecessors, and which can be seen as an attempt to combat (or, indeed, pre-empt) the creation of secular heroes in Italy and elsewhere.168 He also made a direct appeal to the faithful. He identified modernity, liberalism and secularisation with the all-encompassing enemy – revolution – and developed a personal cult based on his own suffering and victimhood at the hands of this enemy. As Christopher Clark tells us:
Catholics were encouraged to see in the suffering, despoliation, ‘imprisonment’ and ‘martyrdom’ of the pontiff the embodiment of the troubles currently afflicting the church. The Pope's intransigence in negotiations with the Kingdom of Italy was likened to Christ's steadfastness in the face of Satan's blandishments. There was even a widespread tendency to equate the Sacred Heart of Jesus with the person of the ‘suffering’ pontiff.169
Pius IX was a new kind of pontiff. His image was ‘more personal’ and less regal; ‘the office was lent a magic by flesh, and speech, and smile, and greeting, and blessing’; anyone who talked to him ‘felt that at that moment he cared about him or her more than about anyone else in the world’.170 Part of his appeal lay in the contrast with the Piedmontese monarchy. After 1870, there were two courts in Rome: one at the Quirinale, presided over by Vittorio Emanuele, an essentially foreign sovereign who missed his native Piedmont and ‘was bad at public functions’; the other in the Vatican, with a pope-king ‘who was superb with crowds’. The Quirinale was ‘cold and formal’; the Vatican ‘warm and emotional’.171 When both men died, within three weeks of each other in 1878, three times as many people turned out for the funeral of the Pope in St Peter's as had turned out for the king (although, when the Curia tried to move the Pope's body across Rome to its burial place in San Lorenzo in 1881, there were riots and the coffin was nearly thrown into the Tiber by a hostile, anti-clerical crowd).172
While the divisions between Church and state were far from monolithic, and there is evidence of de facto co-operation and agreement, especially over the threat of socialism,173 it is undeniable that both sides competed for the rhetorical high ground. Moreover, the Pope's resolute stance against modernity did not include a rejection of its technology. As we saw earlier, Catholic mobilisation against the unification of Italy involved the very successful use of modern methods of mass communication, notably newspapers and prints. Railways also made pilgrimages to Rome much easier. Pius IX's warm personality combined with modern transport to alter the quality of his audiences with the faithful and of their response to him. He was the first pontiff to be photographed, and people's sense of personal intimacy with their Pope was encouraged by photographic portraits, and by reports and other pictures of him in the Catholic press. Thus, the use of the new mass media defined the so-called ‘culture wars’ between Catholics and anti-clericals, and between Church and state, which broke out all over Catholic Europe in the latter decades of the nineteenth century. These were, above all, ‘wars of words and images’,174 or a ‘communicative phenomenon’ where ‘the bugles and drums of the media spectacle’ were as crucial to both sides in the conflict ‘as the heavy guns of legislative or police action’.175 There was a striking similarity between the communicative methods of Catholic Europe and those used to promote Garibaldi, which I have described in the course of this book.
Unfortunately, there has been relatively little research on the role of the Catholic media in the struggle for Italy and to ‘make Italians’ in this period.176 What is clear, nonetheless, is that its presence made the struggle a three-way process, in which the monarchy's efforts to represent and unite the nation were undermined as much by the clerical right as by the radical left. Ironically perhaps, one of the most popular targets of the Church's counter-attack on the kingdom of Italy was Garibaldi, another of the kingdom's adversaries. Rome had always been hostile to Garibaldi, but in the aftermath of Mentana it felt able to launch a major new assault on his reputation in the press and by publication of numerous pamphlets and histories of the recent events. For La Civiltà Cattolica, Garibaldi was a coward, a hypocrite and, increasingly, a clown. The paper mocked his fame:
Wherever Garibaldi goes he has been accustomed to be met with cheers, drums, trumpets, bells and frantic applause. Fashions of dressing alla Garibaldi have given work to tailors, and makers of hats and shoes. Cafés have been called after him. His sulky face was shown in shop windows, and his pictures figured on the walls of taverns and public lavatories.
But at Monterotondo (before Mentana), he was just ‘a comic hero’ who had ‘sneaked off under cover of night’:
Why did you turn tail, O hero? … Surely it is better to die bravely than to run away like a coward. You yourself
had given the watchword ‘Either Rome or death’, and no one would have imagined that you had a third alternative up your sleeve – flight! … Poor Garibaldi! Until now he has been the hero of Marsala. Henceforward he will be the coward of Monterotondo.
‘It is not our fault if mention of his name makes soldiers of any regular army burst out laughing’, the paper went on, warming to its subject: ‘We too, it must be confessed, have also been tempted to laugh when studying this “legendary epoch from Montevideo to Marsala”’:
This valiant lion, this Achilles, this Hercules, this Mars, this Jove – the more you try to force him into the light of day, the more he retreats into the shadows, the more he melts before your very eyes. Finally he is no bigger than a puppet – gross, bearded, redshirted, made to dance by other people without him ever perceiving the fact.
‘[N]o puppet is more obedient than Garibaldi’, the paper wrote, seeking to deflate his heroic reputation by revealing its empty substance. For the Church, in this representation, Garibaldi was ridiculous – a mere performer in a drama directed by the Savoy monarchy.177
For the majority of the Catholic press there was no difference between the Italian nationalists: they were all in it together and as dangerous as each other. Garibaldi was ‘the armed hand of Mazzini’, both had a ‘marriage’ with Vittorio Emanuele, and Rattazzi was behind all their actions.178 According to General Kanzler, who led the defence of Rome and published his report to the Pope, the events of 1867 were a political scandal. ‘A government, which calls itself legitimate, favoured a treacherous invasion: a General of this government dared, with the cry of Rome or Death, to order a war against the most August of Thrones.’179 In the Catholic version of Mentana, Garibaldi was a coward (leaving Mentana, he changed ‘the godless cry: “Rome or death” with the other “get out if you can”’) but he was also a dangerous fanatic – ‘a modern blasphemer’ who promised to ‘demolish all the altars of the living God, in order to replace them with the abominable orgies of the she-god reason, and convert St Peter's into a grand Masonic lodge’.180
In one history of Mentana, Garibaldi is reinvented once more as the brutal bandit of 1849. He rides on horseback into a church:
his head was covered with a round grey cap with a wide brim … with flowing locks; the blond beard mixed with white hair fell down to his chest: a bright red tie edged in black was tied around his neck: an old overcoat came down to his knees … With a lit cigar in his mouth, with a fine whip in his hand, he let his gaze fall to this side and that: and since from every side his followers cheered him to the skies; now and then he slowly bent his head, showing them that he enjoyed the applause, or signalling that it was now time to quieten down.181
He was accompanied by ‘a proud Amazon in a garibaldi skirt’, and his followers were violent, undisciplined and sacrilegious: a ‘revolutionary horde'; a ‘furious revolutionary phalanx’; a ‘garibaldish torrent’; ‘new Muslims’; and ‘children of Satan’.182 All of the histories of Mentana recounted the actions of the garibaldini in gruesome detail: confessionals were destroyed, churches burnt and sacred images defamed. In one convent ‘they vandalised and sacrilegiously cut an arm off the image of Saint Anthony; they rolled down the stairs an image of the Baby Jesus; they stole the holy Pyx from the holy ciborium; they irreverently squandered the sacred communion wafers, and gave themselves over entirely to sack and to pillage’.183 Sermons were preached to the ‘God Garibaldi’; a pulpit was used as a latrine; his men stole and drank the communion wine and they used the churches as brothels: ‘they committed outrages against women’.184 The worst insults were said to have been aimed at the Madonna: ‘their most usual blasphemies were against the Holy Madonna and against her inviolable Virginity, using such shameful and disgusting words that the pen shakes just to think of them!’185
In general, the Catholic representations of Garibaldi and his followers follow a well-defined stereotype of the revolutionary as a dangerous and savage ‘other’. The events of Mentana had, in the words of General Kanzler, shocked ‘the entire civilised World’.186
It is clear that future generations will be astonished [another writer confirmed], nor will they be able to understand how, in the heart of this Italian land, mother to so many famous heroes, creator of so much noble genius, masters of every science, seat of every virtue, there could emerge men of such savagery and excess as to emulate the terrible bondage of the Goths and Saracens.187
Yet this juxtaposition of Catholic ‘civilisation’ with revolutionary ‘barbarism’ bore a striking rhetorical similarity to the terms of Garibaldi's opposition between revolutionary ‘virility’ and corrupt ‘priestism’. It used the same demonisation of the enemy and, notably, the same identification of the enemy with degenerate or ‘incontinent’ sexuality; and each accused the other of offending the native genius of Italy. Both appealed to Italian identity by referring to a remarkably analogous sense of family, place and model of heroism, and both recognised the affirmation of Italian-ness in the heroic defence of a holy cause.
More than one clerical writer described the victory at Mentana using topoi which we tend to associate with Risorgimento discourse. The papal soldiers were an invincible ‘handful of heroes’ led by courageous leaders; and they defended Catholicism against ‘a formidable army … that enormous mass of garibaldini’.188 One writer, Paolo Mencacci, wrote of ‘the heroism of Papal soldiers, a heroism which placed them at the front of the most hardened armies in the world’.189 Those who died were martyrs, whose biographies were published along with letters of tribute from priests and other clerical dignitaries. An obituary for an English zouave, Julian Waits Russell, was published first in the Rome periodical, Il Divin Salvatore, and then translated into English and published as a pamphlet. His father was said to be consoled by the heroism of his son's death, and announced: ‘If I had ten sons, I would willingly sacrifice them for God in so holy a cause.’ Readers were assured that there were many more like Julian: ‘all were chosen victims and glorious heroes, whose memoirs, if collected, would read like a page out of the history of the crusades, or even the Acts of the Martyrs’.190 In Rome, General Kanzler was given a triumphal welcome, and both the Pope and the king and queen of the Two Sicilies (in exile in Rome) made a great show of caring for the wounded. The dead were given ‘splendid’ funerals, and Pio IX ordered a monument to be erected to the ‘martyrs’ of Mentana in the Church of San Lorenzo (where he was eventually buried).191 Catholics were told that ‘[t]he sect will make still more gigantic efforts, but in vain. The Hand of God hangs visibly over it and the defeat of Mentana has brought about its fatal Downfall.’ The victory at Mentana revived memories of the historical victories of Catholicism, notably its triumph over the Ottoman Empire at the battle of Lepanto.192
Although the absence of research permits us to do little more than guess at the popular reception of papal propaganda, we do know that it had a wide international reach. In London, Father Beste of the London Oratory called Garibaldi a ‘cruel blasphemer [who] has dared to call a Pope the vampire of Italy, and Rome its plague spot … he, too, has cursed his Father and his Mother – he, too, will die the death!’193 In Catholic Ireland, the capture of Rome in 1870 as well as Mentana was marked by the publication of songs and pamphlets celebrating the ‘Downfall of Garibaldi’, ‘The Pope's triumph over Garibaldi’, ‘The sorrowful lamentation of Garibaldi’ and ‘A new song on the capture of Garibaldi’. Archbishop Cullen of Dublin held what he called ‘a grand high mass’ in a crowded church for the papal soldiers killed at Mentana. He delivered the funeral oration which lasted for an hour, and did, in his words, ‘all I could to extol the Zouaves, but I think I succeeded better in assailing Garibaldi. I told … [the] story of … how he got into the church of the conventuals, and hid himself in the confessional – the poor Catholics were delighted to hear the scoundrel so well abused.’194 Above all in France, where there was a vibrant group of Catholic publicists well used to tackling any sign of sympathy with Italian nationalists, the Ca
tholic press attacked Garibaldi. Catholic writers belittled Garibaldi, pointed out his lack of military skill and the slightness of his achievements; while other publications stressed the involvement of the Italian government and of Rattazzi in particular.195 As for Garibaldi's wicked reputation, there was no doubt that it was true: he was a ‘brigand … who has spent his life conspiring and fighting in the two worlds’; a ‘Wandering-Jew of the revolution’; and the ‘master’ of Italy who ‘declares war at will; and is stopped every time he runs any kind of risk’.196 The French volunteers were all selfless heroes, ‘beautiful souls’ and glorious martyrs.197
Furthermore, if the government was embarrassed and silenced by its casting as a national villain at the hands of Garibaldi after 1867, the Church had no such problem. Indeed, after the death of Pius IX in 1878, when there seemed to be a possibility of better Church–state relations in Italy, a renewed clerical assault was mounted on Garibaldi's reputation. In 1878, the Catholic historian Cesare Cantù judged Garibaldi's legacy to be a divisive and destructive one. Garibaldi was an arrogant and vulgar man, Cantù insisted, who ‘[a]lways … gave himself airs as though he were another Washington … He could destroy, but did not know how to build.’198 La Civiltà Cattolica initiated a major attack on Garibaldi in 1879, ‘maximum idol of the Italian Revolution’, at the time of his organisation of the League of Democracy. Calling him the ‘hero of two millions’ (a reference to a government pension he had accepted in the mid-1870s), the paper mocked his physical incapacity, his political ideas and his literary pretensions.199 It took the side of his estranged wife, Giuseppina Raimondi, and protested against ‘the shameful insinuations circulated about her’ in Garibaldi's ongoing attempts to divorce her. Giuseppina was the victim of Garibaldi's self-interest, and ‘the hero of two millions’ wanted simply to ‘get rid of Giuseppina, so that Francesca is able to enjoy the pension rights of a General's widow and of that General’. All this was proof, the paper wrote, that ‘the rotten source’ of the proposed divorce law in Italy was Freemasonry.200
