CARDINAL CONSALVI, THE pope’s devoted secretary of state and the guiding spirit behind many of his reforms, died six months after his master, and the way was now clear for the zelanti, the more reactionary cardinals, who hated those reforms and looked for a conservative regime dictated by spirituality rather than pragmatism, to select one of their own. Their choice fell on the sixty-three-year-old Cardinal Annibale della Genga, who had spent much of his career in the papal diplomatic service until he was dismissed by Consalvi after disastrously bungling the negotiations for the return of Avignon. He took the name of Leo XII. Pious but narrow-minded, in constant pain from chronic piles, he represented a throwback to the most blinkered days of the eighteenth century, condemning toleration, reinforcing censorship and the Index, once again restricting Jews to ghettos and in Rome obliging three hundred of them to attend a weekly Christian sermon. In the Papal States the old aristocracy was reestablished, the old ecclesiastical courts reintroduced. Education was strictly controlled, morality enforced by a thousand pettifogging regulations. The playing of games on Sundays and feast days was punishable by a prison sentence. The free sale of alcohol was forbidden. The enlightened modern state that Consalvi had been so carefully building up was replaced by a police regime of spies and informers of the kind all too accurately depicted in Puccini’s Tosca.
During the first months after his accession, there were fears both in Rome and abroad that Leo would reverse all the conciliatory policies of Pius VII. Fortunately, they were unfounded. Bigoted the pope might be, but he well understood the advantages of good relations with the European powers. Indeed, it was thanks to his intervention with the Ottoman Sultan Mahmud II that the Armenian Catholics were at last emancipated in 1830. But by then Leo was dead. His five-and-a-half-year pontificate had been a near disaster. He had undoubtedly meant well, but his lack of any understanding of the modern world made him a detested figure in Rome and undid much of the splendid work of his predecessor.
Since Cardinal Francesco Saverio Castiglione, who succeeded him in March 1829 as Pope Pius VIII, was to reign for only twenty months, he might have been seen as a stopgap. He was in fact a good deal more. A brave man of high principle, he had served an eight-year prison sentence for refusing to swear allegiance to Napoleon. Pius VII, whose name he had deliberately adopted, had greatly admired him and had hoped that he might be chosen as his successor; and the new pope’s declared aim was to continue in the great man’s footsteps. He could not altogether abolish Leo’s police state, but he drew its teeth and made life for the average Roman infinitely more bearable than it had been; and when, in August 1830, France deposed her morbidly pious and hugely unpopular Charles X, the pope was not slow in recognizing Louis-Philippe as King of the French and bestowing upon him the traditional title “Most Christian King.”
Four months later, however, Pius died in his turn. His successor, elected after sixty-four days and eighty-three ballots, was a former Camaldolese3 monk from the Monastery of San Michele in Isola on the island of Murano in the Venetian lagoon. His name was Cardinal Bartolomeo Alberto Cappellari, and he took the name Pope Gregory XVI. Just as Pius VIII had continued the work of Pius VII, so—alas—was Gregory XVI to follow in the footsteps of Leo XII. Like Leo, he was a creature of the zelanti; he also had the backing of the Austrian chancellor, Prince Metternich, who had set his heart on an absolutist pope who would not surrender to what he described as “the political madness of the age.” The prince certainly got what he wanted.
Gregory succeeded to the Papacy in a moment of crisis. Since the fall of Napoleon, a wave of radical discontent had been steadily gathering force the length and breadth of the Italian Peninsula, deriving much of its strength from a vast semisecret society known as the Charcoal Burners, or Carbonari. Their principal ideals were, first, political liberty; second, the unification of Italy. And although few of them were yet aware of the fact, there was another group still in the process of formation for whom a united Italy was to be the only goal. This group was called La Giovane Italia—Young Italy—and was founded in 1831 by an exile in Marseille, a young man of twenty-six named Giuseppe Mazzini.
In 1830 rebellion broke out in the Papal States, several of the cities falling into rebel hands. Gregory had to move swiftly. Terrified that the unrest might spread, he appealed to the Austrian emperor to send troops to defend Rome. Francis did not need to be asked twice. His firm action quickly restored order in the Papal States, but it solved none of the fundamental problems which underlay the uprising; and with the immediate danger averted the pope settled down to a policy of grim repression. He openly condemned the very idea of freedom of conscience or of the press, or the separation of Church and state. On those who upheld these ideals he clamped down mercilessly, by means of a police regime even more severe than that of Leo before him. Before long the papal prisons were overflowing, the papal exchequer emptied by the cost of spies and informers.
Gregory’s mind was totally closed to progress, indeed to any innovation. It was typical of him, for example, that he banned the new railways—which he called chemins d’enfer—from all papal territories. Less than four months after his accession, the great powers came together to demand radical reforms in the Papal States. The pope refused; civil disorder broke out once again; the Austrian troops were recalled; and Louis-Philippe—in a remarkable display of ingratitude—seized Ancona. For the next seven years the Papal States lay under foreign military occupation.
BUT GREGORY’S WORST failure was in Poland. By the terms of the Third Partition in 1795, Poland as a state had ceased to exist, its territory split among Russia, Prussia, and Austria, and ever since his accession in 1825 Tsar Nicholas I had been making life as difficult as he could for the Catholics—and the Poles were virtually all Catholics—under his rule. Upon the Uniates (those who, while accepting papal supremacy, followed the Eastern rite) he put heavy pressure to join the Russian Orthodox Church, while the bishops—the vast majority—who preferred the Latin rite found that communications with Rome had been made well nigh impossible. Resentment of the Russians steadily grew, until, in November 1830, the Poles rose against them. Everything that could go wrong did so; yet they somehow managed to establish a provisional government, and when, in February 1831, a force of 115,000 Russian troops marched on Warsaw, they fought back. A great wave of pro-Polish feeling now swept across Europe, and from all over the continent men hastened to join the Polish colors, including hundreds of officers from Napoleon’s Grande Armée. Other contingents came from Germany, Italy, Hungary, and Britain. In France, Louis-Philippe made sonorous speeches suggesting military support, and James Fenimore Cooper started a Polish-American Committee.
Alas, their efforts were in vain. On September 8 Warsaw was forced to capitulate. Tsar Nicholas took hideous vengeance. The leaders of the revolt were beheaded, 350 sentenced to hang, 10,000 officers sent off to hard labor. The estates of more than three thousand families were confiscated. In the countryside, whole villages were burned.
The accent was on humiliating the proud, degrading the noble, removing the vertebrae. Prince Roman Sanguszko, who was of Rurik’s blood and might have qualified for some respect in Russia, was sentenced to hard labour for life in Siberia and made to walk there chained to a gang of convicts. When his wife, a friend and former lady-in-waiting to the Empress, fell at the feet of Nicholas and begged for mercy, she was told she could go too. She did.4
At some stage it might have been expected that Gregory XVI would utter a word or two of support for his Catholic flock; he did nothing of the kind. Instead, in June 1832, he published a brief in which he categorically condemned the insurrection and denounced “those who, under cover of religion, have set themselves against the legitimate power of princes.” Two months later, in his encyclical Mirari Vos, he went still further, referring to “that absurd and erroneous doctrine, or rather delirium, that freedom of conscience is to be claimed and defended for all men.” As to any ideas for the regeneration of the Church, “it has been instr
ucted by Jesus Christ and his Apostles and taught by the Holy Spirit.… It would therefore be completely absurd and supremely insulting to suggest that the Church stands in need of restoration and regeneration … as though she could be exposed to exhaustion, degradation, or other defects of this kind.”
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 shou
ld 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.
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