Italian opposition began through art. Italians became captivated by a wave of romantic novels, histories, paintings, plays and operas in which patriots battled to defend the honour of their wives and daughters from defilement by brutal foreigners. Next came rebellion. Revolts broke out in northern Italy in 1820 and again in the early 1830s. Though all failed, by 1847 an expectation had grown up that a great revolutionary upheaval was coming. This belief was first inspired, rather surprisingly, by the same Pope Pius IX who we just saw scurrying down dark corridors to flee his own state.
Pius began his career as a radical. His family, the Mastai, were supporters of Italy’s revolutionary national movement and his predecessor as pope, the reactionary Gregory XVI, complained that even Cardinal Mastai’s cat was a Freemason (a supporter of liberal reforms). Mastai, whose Church career had been outside Rome, and who knew little of Vatican politics, was something of an innocent: approachable, informal and very devout. Having been elected in June 1846 as a compromise candidate between two high-profile cardinals, he quickly showed his political colours. He freed political prisoners and allowed political exiles to return, removed censorship, created an elected advisory council, and even established a French revolutionary style National Guard of Roman citizens. He also announced his intention of modernizing his state by introducing the telegraph, gas lighting and railways.
Reform-starved Romans were ecstatic. When Pius freed political prisoners people wept with joy and a huge crowd marched to the Quirinal Palace to give thanks. Thereafter, when Pius passed through the city people threw flowers from balconies, knelt down by the roadside, and even removed the horses from his carriage and pulled it along themselves. A patriotic fervour seized the city as festivals were held, bands played revolutionary hymns and churches were illuminated with the Italian tricolour. It was not only Romans who were excited by the strange spectacle of a radical pope, and by 1847 his reforms raised expectations across Europe. These hopes became self-fulfilling and in early 1848 uprisings broke out in Palermo, Naples and across the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, whose intensely reactionary king, Ferdinand II, was forced to offer his people a constitution. In February and March revolutions engulfed mainland Europe. In Paris, Vienna, Berlin and across Germany and Italy, governments teetered as monarchs fled their palaces and offered constitutions to their peoples. After five days of street fighting the Milanese flung out a 19,000-strong Austrian garrison and King Carlo Alberto of Piedmont declared war on Austria. To Romans it seemed it could only be a matter of time before Pius IX was president of a free and united Italy.
Their pope, though, had rather different ideas. Pius enjoyed his popularity but he had no intention of losing his kingdom, even to become president of Italy. He also feared that if he provoked the Habsburgs, Austria might secede from the Catholic Church, as England had under Henry VIII. Stresses grew as Romans began to doubt his revolutionary convictions. On 29 April 1848, against the advice of his cabinet, who resigned en masse, Pius shocked Romans by announcing that he would not join other Italian states in going to war with Austria.
Greater disappointment followed. Over the next few months Italians, disunited and poorly led in battle, saw their hopes of a free, unified Italy slipping away. At the battle of Custoza in late July, Carlo Alberto’s Piedmontese army was routed by a smaller Austrian force and, shamefully, Carlo Alberto abandoned the Milanese to the Austrians. The revolutionary tide was turning all across Europe as conservatives rediscovered their confidence. In Naples, Ferdinand shelled his rebellious subjects into submission, earning himself the nickname, ‘King Bomba’. It seemed Rome was doomed to go the same way as everywhere else. Pope Pius, who was now detested for his betrayal of the national cause, tightened his grip on power. He appointed a conservative chief minister, Pellegrino Rossi, who purged the Roman police of radicals, exiled two leading revolutionaries and reintroduced censorship. By the autumn there was a widespread expectation that Rossi was about to launch a coup d’état and that the constitution that Pius had recently granted would be annulled.
The Romans, though, were in no mood to be suppressed. In the early afternoon of 15 November Rossi set out to meet the legislature of the Papal States, which was meeting in the Palazzo della Cancelleria. The American writer Margaret Fuller, who lived in Rome throughout these times, recounted what happened. Rossi’s
carriage approached, attended by a howling, hissing multitude. He smiled, affected unconcern, but must have felt relieved when his horses entered the courtyard of the Cancelleria. He did not know he was entering his place of execution. The horses stopped; he alighted in the midst of a crowd; it jostled him as if for the purposes of insult; he turned abruptly and received as he did so the fatal blow.2
He had been stabbed in the throat and within moments he was dead. It was a measure of his unpopularity that papal troops watched the killing without a word, while neither they nor anybody else made any attempt to seize his assassin. Soldiers later joined a large crowd which, cruelly, gathered beneath the house of Rossi’s new widow to sing, ‘happy the hand which rids the world of tyrants’.
The Quirinal Palace under siege, contemporary engraving.
The following day the pope’s powerlessness was fully revealed. A crowd gathered in the piazza in front of the Quirinal Palace to demand the appointment of a radical, pro-nationalist government. When the tiny force of Swiss Guards inside the palace fired, causing injuries, the piazza filled with the pope’s own troops, from papal regiments and also the new National Guard of Roman citizens. After they shot at the palace windows, killing one cleric, the pope accepted defeat and appointed revolutionaries to his government. He also replaced his Swiss Guards with members of the National Guard, becoming a prisoner in his palace. One week later he made his escape to the territory of King Bomba of Naples. On 6 January 1849 any last hopes of reconciliation were extinguished when Pius excommunicated the Romans for their ‘monstrous act of undisguised felony and of actual rebellion.’3
Popeless, the Papal States proceeded down the revolutionary path they had chosen. Elections were held for a constitutional assembly and on 9 February a new Roman Republic was declared. The Italian tricolour flew from the Senatorial Palace on the Capitoline, the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius wore a tricolour garland round its neck, bells were rung, cannon fired and even beggars wore red liberty caps. After the defeats of the year before, Rome’s revolution gave new hope to Italian republicans and nationalists, many of whom made their way to the city.
Proclamation of the Second Republic from the balcony of the Capitoline, 9 February 1849.
Notable among these were two of the greatest figures in the history of Italian unification, Giuseppe Garibaldi and Giuseppe Mazzini. Superficially the two men had much in common. Both came from the same part of Italy. Mazzini was born in Genoa, where he grew up reading patriotic romantic novels and dreamed of becoming a literary critic. Garibaldi was brought up just along the coast at Nizza – now French Nice, but then a half-French, half-Italian city that belonged to the Italian kingdom of Savoy – where he spent his younger years working aboard sailing ships trading to the Black Sea. Both men took part in the failed revolutionary uprisings of the 1830s and both were arrested. Garibaldi – always the more dramatic of the two – was sentenced to death but escaped.
In terms of their characters, though, the two men could hardly have been more different, as was revealed by how they spent their years of exile. Mazzini quickly assumed the mole-like existence of a revolutionary conspirator. He hid himself away in an apartment in Marseilles, hardly leaving the building, though his enemies managed to discover him nonetheless, causing him to move to Switzerland, and then, in 1837, to London. Here he became accustomed to the city’s dirt, bedbugs and drunkenness and led an austere, monk-like existence, working day and night and keeping himself awake with coffee and cigars. At times he was so short of money that he was forced to pawn his watch, to walk rather than pay for omnibus fares, and he struggled to buy postage stamps for his coded letter
s. Yet he gradually built up a revolutionary organization, the Young Italy Movement. Creating a network of informants and supporters across Europe, Mazzini became the PR man of Italian nationalism, cultivating contacts among English liberals and producing a stream of journalistic pieces. It was a measure of his success that the leader of European conservatism, the Austrian chancellor Prince Metternich, considered him the most dangerous man in Europe.
By contrast, Garibaldi’s exile was exhilaratingly outdoors. He fled to newly independent South America where he soon became involved in a doomed separatist struggle, fighting for the Republic of Rio Grande that sought to break away from Brazil. Garibaldi was shipwrecked, captured and tortured yet remained largely unscathed. He learned how to ride a horse, how to fight guerrilla warfare and, from free-living gaucho ranchers, he acquired his distinctive look, which he would make famous, including the felt hat and poncho. He also found the love of his life, Anita, whom he stole away from a dull husband, and who, fortunately, was no less adventurous and fearless than he was.
Losing hope in the struggles of the Republic of Rio Grande, Garibaldi and Anita made their way to Montevideo, which was also embroiled in war, against the dictator of Buenos Aires, Juan Manuel de Rosas. Garibaldi created an Italian Legion of like-minded exiles who took as their uniform a consignment of red shirts intended for abattoir workers. In early 1846 the Italian Legion defeated Rosas’ forces at San Antonio del Salto. Afterwards Garibaldi and his followers enhanced their reputation by refusing to take any reward from the Uruguayan government. The battle of Salto was a turning point in Garibaldi’s career. Thanks largely to Mazzini’s tireless journalistic promotion his name began to be known in Europe. He was eminently promotable. His public persona – the courageous, self-denying patriot – perfectly matched a hero from the pages of one of the romantic novels that Italians had been reading for decades.
News that revolution had broken out in Italy brought both him and Mazzini hurrying home and in the summer of 1848 they finally joined forces. It was an unhappy collaboration. By then the Italian national cause was already struggling. After Piedmontese armies were defeated by the Austrians at Custoza, Mazzini joined Garibaldi’s volunteers, who were harassing Habsburg troops near Lake Maggiore. Mazzini’s mole-like existence had left him poorly prepared for the life of a foot soldier and a few days of forced marches were enough to send him hurrying across the frontier to Switzerland. Garibaldi’s volunteers defeated an Austrian unit, in one of the few Italian successes of that disastrous summer, but he was soon forced to follow Mazzini to Switzerland, where the two had a bitter falling-out over tactics.
The flight of Pope Pius IX and the declaration of the Roman Republic took them both south, and each assumed a key role in Rome’s new revolutionary state. In March 1849 Mazzini, riding high on his name as a revolutionary organizer, became the Roman Republic’s effective leader, so dominating the ruling triumvirate that its decisions were largely his. Garibaldi led his legion of volunteers. It was clear to both men that the Roman Republic was unlikely to survive for long. By early April 1849 Europe’s revolutionary tide had ebbed to the point where Rome, Venice and Hungary were the last holdouts in a sea of reaction. Four powers – Austria, Spain, Naples and France – had announced their determination to defeat Rome’s Republic and place Pope Pius back on his throne. Austria was in the process of seizing towns in the northern Papal States and Ferdinand of Naples – King Bomba – was threatening from the south and east.
Yet, doomed though it seemed to be, Garibaldi and Mazzini were agreed that the Roman Republic was of immense importance, as it might breathe new life into the national cause by offering an inspiring example. As ever, they had different ideas as to what kind of example this should be. Garibaldi wanted the Romans to show their courage and prove, after the humiliations of the previous year, that Italians would fight bravely for their country. To Mazzini, the public relations man, Romans needed also to show their moderation so the national cause could win foreign friends. To this end he acted quickly against any attacks on churchmen, Church property or the rich. Mazzini was not a traditional Catholic – his beliefs were mystical – but he was careful to show that, though he was at war with the pope, he was not at war with Catholicism. During the popeless Easter of 1849 he found a pro-revolutionary churchman to bless the crowd from the balcony of St Peter’s as Mazzini stood beside him.
Mazzini also tried to impress with his own lifestyle. He lived as frugally as ever in a single room, unguarded and approachable, and he dined simply at a nearby trattoria. His efforts may not have held much sway with Europe’s great powers but they did with foreign writers, such as Margaret Fuller. They also impressed Romans and Mazzini gained the support of a key local figure, the wine merchant Angelo Brunetti, who was known by Romans as Ciceruacchio (and whose son Luigi had assassinated the prime minster, Rossi). With Ciceruacchio’s support Romans, though they were at first doubtful of Mazzini, were won round. The new and fragile Republic had grown some roots.
Mazzini saw Garibaldi as something of a liability. For all his popularity, Garibaldi was unpredictable and his views could be radical. His loathing of priests had led him to declare himself an atheist: a stance that was seen as beyond the pale by most Europeans at this time. There were also his views on marriage. He had famously stolen Anita from her legitimate husband and they did not marry until after the birth of their first child. Accordingly, Mazzini declined to appoint Garibaldi as the Republic’s military commander, instead choosing a plodding and stodgily respectable Roman, Pietro Roselli. Garibaldi was sent to the hill town of Rieti, to train his legion and guard the Republic’s eastern border against possible Neapolitan attack. Garibaldi, who knew full well why he had been sent there and was struck by a bad bout of rheumatism, became frustrated and moody, one moment excitable, the next grumbling that his volunteers were a generation of hermaphrodites.
It was not from the east, though, that danger would come. On 25 April General Oudinot landed a large, well-equipped and professional French force at Civitavecchia, just forty miles west of Rome. It was discouraging news yet Mazzini remained optimistic, sure his publicity talents might yet carry the day. Of the Republic’s four declared enemies, France was the least obdurate. Its new president, Louis Napoleon, was an unlikely reactionary as, like Mazzini, he had spent most of his life as a radical conspirator, plotting and enduring time in jail. In his youth he had dabbled in Italian nationalist revolutionary politics, and Mazzini had met him in London when they were fellow political exiles. Nor did Louis Napoleon seem a leader who would have much stomach for conflict. One of the few women close to him with whom he had not had an affair, Hortense Cornu, offered a memorable assessment of his character. He was kind and loyal, she said, but also lazy and lacking in any kind of principle. ‘Everything wearies him,’ she reported. ‘He gets up bored, he passes the day bored and goes to bed bored.’4
Mazzini had hopes also of winning round French public opinion. Only a year before, France had been a beacon of revolution, and though the country had been moving steadily to the right since then, it was still a republic and elections to its new assembly were approaching. Mazzini had posters printed that displayed, in French, the fifth article of France’s new republican constitution – ‘The French Republic will never employ its forces against the liberty of any other people’ – which he had placed on walls along the road from Civitavecchia to Rome.
Mazzini’s hopes, though, were misplaced. Most of the French population outside radical Paris admired the pope and they believed him when, from his exile in Gaeta, he declared that Rome was ‘a forest of roaring beasts, overflowing with men of every nation, apostates, or heretics, or leaders of communism and socialism’. (The foreigners were Mazzini, Garibaldi and their supporters.) General Oudinot’s officers were not republicans and nor were his troops, most of whom were farmers conscripted from France’s conservative countryside. They paid no attention to Mazzini’s posters but marched straight on towards Rome.
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