It was plain that the end was near. On 19 August two gondolas set off for Mestre flying white flags; three days later, agreement was reached. The Austrian terms were surprisingly generous. Their principal requirement was that all officers and all Italian soldiers who were subjects of the Empire and had fought against it should leave Venice at once; forty leading Venetians were also to be expelled. On 27 August the Austrians reoccupied the city. That same afternoon the French ship Pluton sailed from the Giudecca. On board were, with thirty-seven others, Guglielmo Pepe, Niccolò Tommaseo and Daniele Manin.
Manin, with his wife and daughter, settled in Paris, where he wrote articles for the French papers and gave lessons in Italian. By now he had given up his republican ideals; his sights, like Mazzini’s, were set on his country’s unification. ‘I am convinced,’ he wrote, ‘that our first task is to make Italy a reality…the republican party declares to the house of Savoy: “If you create Italy, we are with you; if not, not.” ’ He died in Paris on 22 September 1857, aged fifty-three. Eleven years later his remains were brought back to Venice and placed in a specially designed tomb against the north wall of St Mark’s. Outside his house in the former Campo S. Paternian–now Campo Manin–there crouches a huge bronze lion, angrily lashing his tail.
Had the quarantotto been in vain? By the autumn of 1849 it certainly seemed so. The Austrians were back in Venice and in Lombardy; Pius IX had returned to a French-occupied Rome; in Naples, King Bomba had torn up the constitution and once more wielded absolute power; Florence, Modena and Parma, all under Austrian protection, were in much the same state. In the whole peninsula, only Piedmont remained free–but Piedmont too had changed. The tall, handsome, idealistic Charles Albert was dead. His son and successor, Victor Emmanuel II, was short, squat and unusually ugly, principally interested–or so it seemed–in hunting and women. But he was a good deal more intelligent than he looked; despite his genuine shyness and awkwardness in public, politically speaking he missed very few tricks. It is hard to imagine the Risorgimento without him.
Yet even Victor Emmanuel might have foundered had it not been for his Chief Minister, Camillo Cavour, who succeeded the strongly anticlerical Massimo d’Azeglio at the end of 1852 and remained in power, with very brief intermissions, for the next nine years–years which were crucial for Italy. Cavour’s appearance, like that of his master, was deceptive. Short and pot-bellied, with a blotchy complexion, thinning hair and spectacles that looked more like goggles, he was shabbily dressed and at first acquaintance distinctly unprepossessing. His mind, on the other hand, was like a rapier, and once he began to talk few were impervious to his charm. Domestically, he continued d’Azeglio’s programme of ecclesiastical reform–often in the teeth of opposition from a pious and conscientiously Catholic king–while doing everything he could to strengthen the economy; his foreign policy, meanwhile, was ever directed towards his dream of a united Italy, with Piedmont at its head.
But what, it may be asked, did the cause of a united Italy have to do with the Crimean War, in which Piedmont allied herself with the western powers in January 1855? Cavour had several reasons. He knew, first of all, that Britain and France were hoping to bring Austria into the war; this in turn might lead to a long-term Franco-Austrian alliance which would effectively destroy his chances of ending the Austrian presence in the peninsula. If, on the other hand, Italy could show the world her fighting spirit, those chances would be proportionately increased; the greater her military glory, the more likely it was that Britain and France would at last take her aspirations seriously. The experiment was not entirely successful: the Piedmontese were to fight in one battle only, and that a relatively insignificant one. Just twenty-eight of them were killed, few indeed compared with the 2,000 lost to cholera by the end of the year. Infuriatingly, too, it was Austria’s threat to enter the war which persuaded the Russians to sue for peace. But if Piedmont failed to impress on the field of battle, she at least earned invitations for Victor Emmanuel to pay state visits to Queen Victoria and Napoleon III248 in December 1855 and gained a seat at the Paris peace table two months later. It was, moreover, in the course of his conversations with the French at this time that Cavour began to entertain a new and exciting hope: that Napoleon III, after his distinctly unhelpful policies in the past, might now be prepared to assist in the long-awaited Austrian expulsion.
It is a curious fact that what seems finally to have decided the Emperor to take up arms on Italy’s behalf was a plot by Italian patriots to assassinate him. The attempt took place on 14 January 1858, when he and the Empress were on their way to the Opéra for a performance of William Tell and bombs were thrown at their carriage. Neither was hurt, though there were a number of casualties among their escort and surrounding bystanders. The leader of the conspirators, Felice Orsini, was a well-known republican who had been implicated in a number of former plots. While in prison awaiting trial he wrote the Emperor a letter, which was later read aloud in open court and published in both the French and the Piedmontese press. It ended: ‘Remember that, so long as Italy is not independent, the peace of Europe and Your Majesty is but an empty dream…Set my country free, and the blessings of twenty-five million people will follow you everywhere and forever.’
Although these noble words failed to save Orsini from the firing squad, they seem to have lingered in the mind of Napoleon III, who by midsummer 1858 had come round to the idea of a joint operation to drive the Austrians out of the Italian peninsula once and for all. His motives were not, however, entirely idealistic. True, he had a genuine love for Italy and would have been delighted to present himself to the world as her deliverer, but he was also aware that his prestige and popularity were fast declining. He desperately needed a war–and a victorious war at that–to regain them, and Austria was the only potential enemy available. The next step was clearly to discuss the possibilities with Cavour, and in July 1858 the two met secretly at the little health resort of Plombières-les-Bains in the Vosges. Agreement was quickly reached. Piedmont would engineer a quarrel with the Duke of Modena and send in troops, ostensibly at the request of the population. Austria would be bound to support the Duke and declare war; Piedmont would then appeal to France for aid. In return, she would cede to France the county of Savoy and the city of Nice. The latter, being the birthplace of Garibaldi, was a bitter pill for Cavour to swallow, but if it was the price of liberation, then swallowed it would have to be.
To set the seal on this agreement, the two men agreed on a dynastic marriage: Victor Emmanuel’s eldest daughter, the Princess Clotilde, should be espoused to the Emperor’s cousin, Prince Napoleon. When this engagement was announced there were many–especially in Piedmont–who threw up their hands in horror. The princess was a highly intelligent, pious and attractive girl of fifteen; her fiancé–universally known as Plon-Plon–a well-known and slightly ridiculous roué of thirty-seven. Victor Emmanuel, who had apparently not been consulted in advance, made no secret of his displeasure and left the final decision to Clotilde herself. It says much for her sense of duty that she agreed to go through with the marriage–which, to everyone’s surprise, proved to be a not unhappy one.
The wedding ceremony took place at the end of January 1859, while France and Piedmont were actively–and openly–preparing for war. Soon afterwards Napoleon III began to have second thoughts about the whole affair–to the dismay of Cavour, who was well aware that his country could not possibly tackle Austria alone. Worse still, Britain, Prussia and Russia were now talking of a possible international congress, which would almost certainly involve the voluntary disarmament of Piedmont. Cavour, in short, was staring disaster in the face. He was saved in the nick of time by Austria herself, which sent an ultimatum to Turin on 23 April demanding that very disarmament within three days. Austria had now declared herself the aggressor; Napoleon could no longer hope to wriggle out of his commitments and did not attempt to do so. He ordered the immediate mobilisation of the French army. Of its 120,000 men, one section would enter Italy
across the Alps while the rest went by sea to Genoa.
Cavour was well aware that all this would take time; meanwhile, the Austrians were already on the march. For at least a fortnight, the Piedmontese would have to face the Austrians alone. It was a daunting prospect; fortunately he was saved again–this time by torrential rains and dissension over strategy within the Austrian staff. The consequent delay gave time for the French to arrive, led by the Emperor himself who, landing at Genoa on 12 May, for the first time in his life took personal command of his army. It was on 4 June that the first decisive battle took place–at Magenta, a small village some fourteen miles west of Milan, where the French army, fighting alone under General Marie-Patrice de MacMahon–whom Napoleon subsequently promoted to marshal and made Duke of Magenta–defeated an Austrian army of 50,000. Casualties were high on both sides, and would have been higher if the Piedmontese, delayed by the indecision of their own commander, had not arrived some time after the battle was over. This misfortune did not, however, prevent Napoleon and Victor Emmanuel from making a joint triumphal entry into Milan four days later.
After Magenta the Franco-Piedmontese army was joined by Garibaldi, who had returned from America in 1854 full of all his old ardour and enthusiasm. He had now been invited by Victor Emmanuel to assemble a brigade of cacciatori delle Alpi,249 and he had won a signal victory over the Austrians some ten days before at Varese. Army and cacciatori then advanced together and met the full Austrian army on 24 June at Solferino, just south of Lake Garda. The ensuing battle–in which well over 250,000 men were engaged–was fought on a grander scale than any since Leipzig in 1813. This time Napoleon III was not the only monarch to assume personal command: Victor Emmanuel did the same, as did the twenty-nine-year-old Emperor Franz Josef of Austria, who had succeeded his uncle Ferdinand in 1848. Only the French, however, were able to reveal a secret weapon: rifled artillery, which dramatically increased both the accuracy and the range of their guns.
The fighting, much of it hand-to-hand, began early in the morning and continued for most of the day. Only towards evening, after losing some 20,000 of his men in heavy rain, did Franz Josef order a withdrawal across the Mincio river. But it was a Pyrrhic victory; the French and Piedmontese lost almost as many men as the Austrians, and the outbreak of fever–probably typhus–that followed the battle accounted for thousands more on both sides. The scenes of carnage made a deep impression on a young Swiss named Henri Dunant, who chanced to be present and organised emergency aid services for the wounded. Five years later, as a direct result of his experience, he was to found the Red Cross.
Nor was Dunant the only one to be sickened by what he had seen at Solferino. Napoleon III had also been profoundly shocked, and his disgust for war and all the horrors it brought in its train was certainly one of the reasons why, little more than a fortnight after the battle, he made a separate peace with Austria. There were others too. Things had gone badly for the Austrians, but they remained secure in what was known as the Quadrilateral–the four great fortresses of Peschiera, Verona, Legnago and Mantua–from which the Emperor had no realistic hope of removing them. He was worried, too, about German reactions. The German Confederation was mobilising some 350,000 men; were they to attack, the 50,000 French soldiers remaining in France would be slaughtered.
Finally, there was the situation in Italy itself. Recent events had persuaded several of the smaller states–notably Tuscany, Romagna and the duchies of Modena and Parma–to think about overthrowing their former rulers and seeking annexation to Piedmont. The result would be a formidable state, immediately over the French border, covering virtually all north and central Italy: a state which in time might well absorb some or all of the Papal States and even the Two Sicilies. Was it really for this that those who fell at Solferino had given their lives?
And so on 11 July 1859 the Emperors of France and of Austria met at Villafranca, near Verona, and the future of north and central Italy was decided in under an hour. Austria would keep two of the fortresses of the Quadrilateral, Mantua and Peschiera; the rest of Lombardy she would surrender to France, who would pass it on to Piedmont. The former rulers of Tuscany and Modena would be restored to their thrones,250 and an Italian confederacy would be established under the honorary presidency of the Pope. Venice and Venetia would be a member of this confederacy, but would remain under Austrian sovereignty.
The fury of Cavour when he read the details of the Villafranca Agreement can well be imagined. Without Peschiera and Mantua, not even Lombardy would be entirely Italian; as for central Italy, that was lost even before it had been properly gained. He himself would have nothing to do with the agreement; after a long and acrimonious interview with Victor Emmanuel, he submitted his resignation. ‘We shall return,’ he wrote to a friend, ‘to conspiracy.’ Gradually, however, he recovered himself. There had at least been no mention in the agreement of the French annexation of Savoy and Nice, which he had reluctantly offered at Plombières; the present situation, if not all that he had hoped, was certainly a good deal better than it had been the year before.
Over the next few months that situation improved still further, as it gradually became clear that Tuscany and Modena refused to accept the fate prescribed for them; nothing, they made it clear, would induce them to take back their former rulers. In Florence, Bologna, Parma and Modena virtual dictators had sprung up, all of them determined on fusion with Piedmont. The only obstacle was presented by Piedmont itself. The terms agreed at Villafranca were now incorporated in a formal treaty signed at Zurich, and General Alfonso La Marmora, who had succeeded Cavour as Chief Minister, was unwilling to take any action in defiance of it. But the dictators were quite prepared to bide their time. Florence, meanwhile, kept her independence; Romagna (which included Bologna), Parma and Modena joined together into a new state which–since the Roman Via Aemilia ran through all three of them–they called Emilia.
Camillo Cavour, who had withdrawn after his resignation to his estate at Leri near Vercelli, followed these developments with satisfaction; the Villafranca Agreement had not turned out so badly after all. When, therefore, in January 1860 Victor Emmanuel–not without some personal reluctance251 –recalled him to take over a new government, he was happy to return to Turin. Scarcely was he back in office before he found himself swept up in negotiations with Napoleon III, and it was not long before the two reached agreement: Piedmont would annex Tuscany and Emilia; in return, Savoy and Nice would be ceded to France. Plebiscites were held in all these states, and in every one the majority in favour of the arrangement was overwhelming. In Emilia, for example, the voting was 426,000 against 1,500; in Savoy, 130,500 to 235. There was a predictable explosion of wrath from Garibaldi, but against such majorities there was little that he could do. But in fact, of the powers principally concerned, only the annexed territories were entirely happy. Piedmont hated losing Savoy and Nice; France opposed the annexation of Tuscany, which the Emperor feared would give too much strength to Piedmont at the expense of the central Italian kingdom that he would greatly have preferred; Austria, quite apart from the loss of Lombardy, mourned the departure of the Grand Duke of Tuscany and the Duke of Modena, both of whom she had effectively controlled.
One of Garibaldi’s closest political colleagues was a Sicilian lawyer named Francesco Crispi. In 1855, during a period of exile in London, this man had also been a friend of Mazzini’s, and Mazzini had long dreamed of an invasion of Sicily. Four years later Crispi had visited Sicily in disguise and under a false name, and returned to London convinced that it was once again ripe for revolution. A small armed expedition was all that was required, and the whole island would be up in arms. The only question was, who was to lead it? The name of Garibaldi immediately sprang to mind, but Garibaldi was hesitant. He was still seething over Villafranca, and he himself had a rather different dream: the capture of Nice and its return to Piedmont.
Thoughts of Nice, however, were soon to be indefinitely postponed. On 4 April 1860 there was a popular insurrection in
Palermo. If all had proceeded according to plan it would have been accompanied by a simultaneous rising among the aristocracy, but something went badly wrong. The Neapolitan authorities had been secretly informed, and the insurgents found themselves surrounded almost before they had left their homes. All who were not killed instantly were executed later. The operation, like virtually every other inspired by Mazzini, had been a disastrous failure, but it provided a spark for many others throughout northern Sicily, and the authorities could not cope with them all. Nor could they suppress the rumour that ran like wildfire across the island, adding fuel to the revolutionary flames that Garibaldi was on his way.
At the time it was wishful thinking, but when Garibaldi heard the news he acted at once. Cavour refused his request for a brigade from the Piedmontese army, but within less than a month he had assembled a band of volunteers, who sailed from the little port of Quarto (now part of Genoa) on the night of 5 May 1860, landing unopposed at Marsala in western Sicily on the 11th. They represented a broad cross-section of Italian society, about half consisting of professional men such as lawyers, doctors and university lecturers, the other half drawn from the working classes. Some were still technically republicans, but their leader made it clear to them that they were fighting not just for Italy but also for King Victor Emmanuel–and this was no time to argue.
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