Absolute Monarchs

by John Julius Norwich

  Except in Venice. On March 22, 1848, a Venetian lawyer named Daniele Manin and his followers had occupied the Arsenal and commandeered all the Austrian arms and ammunition that were stored there. Manin had then led a triumphal procession to the piazza, where he had formally proclaimed the rebirth of the republic, abolished by Napoleon half a century before. The Austrian governor had signed an act of capitulation, promising the immediate departure of all Austrian troops. But now Venice stood alone. Her only hope was Manin, whom in August she invited to assume dictatorial powers. He refused; it was nevertheless 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—the forty-eight—had been a momentous year. Strategically, the situation had changed remarkably little; in most places Austria remained in control. 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 realizing their long-cherished dream. The Risorgimento had begun.

  THE HURRIED DEPARTURE of the pope had taken Rome by surprise. The chief minister of the papal government, Giuseppe Galletti, an old friend of Mazzini 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 February 5, 1849. Time was short, but the need was urgent, and 142 members duly presented themselves in the Palazzo della Cancelleria on the appointed date. Just four days later, at two in the morning, the Assembly voted, by 120 votes to 10, with 12 abstentions, to put an end to the temporal power of the pope and establish a Roman Republic. It was dominated by 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 begun his professional life as a merchant seaman and had become a member of Mazzini’s Giovane Italia 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 that of the Bey of Tunis, who offered him the post of commander in chief. This, however, he declined, and finally, in December 1835, he sailed as second mate on 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 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 after associated. After his victory at the minor but heroic Battle of San Antonio del Santo 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 Custozza he simply ignored, continuing his private war against the Austrians until at the end of August, heavily outnumbered, he was obliged to retreat to Switzerland. Three months later, however, on hearing of the pope’s flight, he hurried at once with his troop of volunteers to Rome. There he was elected a member of the new Assembly, and it was he who formally proposed that Rome should thenceforth be an independent republic.

  ON FEBRUARY 18, 1849, Pope Pius, in Gaeta, addressed a formal appeal for help to France, Austria, Spain, and Naples. By none of these four powers was he to go unheard; to the Assembly, 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 newly elected president. Nearly twenty years before, the prince had been implicated in an antipapal plot and expelled from Rome; he still cherished no particular affection for the Papacy. But it was all too clear to him that Austria was more powerful in Italy than ever; how could he contemplate the possibility of the Austrians now marching 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 April 25, 1849, General Nicolas Oudinot, the son of one of Napoleon’s marshals, landed with a force of about 9,000 at Civitavecchia and set off on the forty-mile march to Rome. From the start he was under a misapprehension. He had been led to believe that the Roman 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 Assembly no formal recognition but to occupy the city peacefully, if possible without firing a shot.

  He was in for a surprise. The Romans, although they had little hope of defending their city against a trained and well-equipped army, were busy preparing themselves for the fight. Their own forces, such as they were, consisted of the regular papal troops of the line; the carabinieri, a special corps of the Italian army normally entrusted with police duties; the thousand-strong Civic Guard; the volunteer regiments raised in the city, which amounted to some 1,400; and, by no means the least formidable, the populace itself, with every weapon it could lay its hands on. But their total numbers were still pathetically small, and great was their jubilation when, on the twenty-seventh, Garibaldi rode into the city at the head of 1,300 legionaries whom he had gathered in the Romagna. Two days later there followed a regiment of Lombard bersaglieri, with their distinctive broad-brimmed hats and swaying plumes of black-and-green cock’s feathers. The defenders were gathering in strength, but the odds were still heavily against them and they knew it.

  The first battle for Rome was fought on April 30. The day was saved by Oudinot’s ignorance and misunderstanding of the situation. He had brought no siege guns with him and no scaling ladders; it was only when his column, advancing toward the Vatican and the Janiculum Hill, was greeted by bursts of cannon fire that he began to realize the full danger of his position. Soon afterward Garibaldi’s legion swept down upon him, swiftly followed by the bersaglieri lancers. For six hours he and his men fought back as best they could, but as evening fell they could only admit defeat and take the long road back to Civitavecchia. They had lost 500 killed or wounded, with 365 taken prisoner—but perhaps the humiliation had been worst of all.

  That night all Rome was illuminated in celebration, but no one pretended that the invaders were not going to return. The French had learned that Rome was to be a tougher nut to crack than they had expected; nonetheless, they intended to crack it. Little more than a month later, during which time Garibaldi, at the head of his legionaries and the bersaglieri, marched south to meet an invading Neapolitan army and effortlessly expelled it from republican territory, Oudinot had received the reinforcements he had requested, and it was with 20,000 men behind him and vastly improved armaments that, on June 3, he marched on Rome for the second time.

  Advancing once again from the west, his primary objectives were the historic Villa Pamfili and Villa Corsini, high on the Janiculum. By the end of the day both were safely in his hands, his guns drawn up into position. Rome
was effectively doomed. The defenders fought back superbly for nearly a month, but on the morning of June 30 Mazzini addressed the Assembly. There were, he told them, three possibilities: they could surrender; they could continue the fight and die in the streets; or they could retire to the hills and continue the struggle. Around midday Garibaldi appeared, covered in dust, his red shirt caked with blood and sweat; his mind was made up. Surrender was obviously out of the question. Street fighting, he pointed out, was also impossible; when Trastevere, the area of Rome lying west of the Tiber, was abandoned, as it would have to be, French guns could simply destroy the city. The hills, then, it would have to be. “Dovunque saremo,” he told them, “colà sarà Roma.”4

  Rome now awaited the pope’s return, but Pius took his time. It would be weeks or months, he knew, before the city reverted to normal; what should his own policy be? He was glad on the whole that Louis-Napoleon had agreed to leave a French garrison indefinitely in or near Rome—he might have need of it—but he was resolved not to let the prince-president tell him what to do. On no account would he reintroduce the Constitution of 1848; he would allow nothing more than a limited amnesty, a State Council, and a Legislative Assembly. Only when the French agreed to these conditions did he consent to return; it was not till April 12, 1850, that he made his formal reentry into the city. This time, however, he avoided the Quirinal Palace; it had too many unhappy memories. Instead he went straight to the Vatican—where his successors have lived ever since.

  HAD THE QUARANTOTTO been in vain? By early 1850 it certainly seemed so. Pius IX had returned to a French-occupied Rome; the Austrians were back in Venice and in Lombardy; in Naples, King Ferdinand II (“King Bomba”) had torn up the Constitution and once again 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, 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 Count Camillo Cavour, who became his chief minister 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 potbellied, with a blotchy complexion, thinning hair, and wire-rimmed spectacles, 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 pursued a program of ecclesiastical reform, often in the teeth of opposition from a pious and conscientiously Catholic king; his foreign policy, meanwhile, was ever directed toward his dream of a united Italy, with Piedmont at its head. But how could this be achieved with Austria in control in Venetia-Lombardy and a French army protecting the Papal States? By early 1866, when he and Napoleon III5 found themselves sitting together at the Paris peace table after the Crimean War, he began to entertain a new and exciting hope that the emperor, despite his distinctly unhelpful policies in the past, might now be prepared to assist in the long-awaited Austrian expulsion.

  Surprisingly enough, what seems finally to have decided Louis-Napoleon to take up arms on Italy’s behalf was a plot by Italian patriots to assassinate him. Their attempt took place on January 14, 1858, when bombs were thrown at his carriage as he and the empress were on their way to the opera. Neither was hurt, though there were several casualties among their escort and the 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 Louis-Napoleon, who by midsummer had come around to the idea of a joint operation to drive the Austrians from the Italian Peninsula once and for all. His motives were not, it need hardly be said, wholly 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 at home 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 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, and France would help her to expel the Austrians from Italy and to annex Venetia-Lombardy. 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.

  The emperor landed with his army of 54,000 at Genoa on May 12, 1859, and on June 4 the first decisive battle was fought—at Magenta, a small village some fourteen miles west of Milan, where the French scored a decisive victory over some 60,000 Austrians. Casualties were high on both sides and would have been higher if the Piedmontese, delayed by the indecision of their commander, had not arrived some time after the battle was over. This misfortune did not, however, prevent Louis-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 been invited by Victor Emmanuel to assemble a brigade of Cacciatori delle Alpi—Alpine hunters—and had won another battle against the Austrians some ten days before at Varese. They then all advanced together and met the full Austrian army on June 24 at Solferino, just south of Lake Garda. The ensuing battle, in which well over a quarter of a million men were engaged, was fought on a grander scale than any since Leipzig in 1813. The French were able now to reveal a secret weapon: rifled artillery, which dramatically increased both the accuracy and range of their guns. Much of the fighting, however, was hand to hand, beginning early in the morning and continuing throughout most of the day. Only toward evening, after losing some 20,000 of his men in heavy rain, did the twenty-eight-year-old Emperor Franz Josef order a withdrawal across the Mincio. 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 organized emergency aid services for the wounded. Five years later, as a direct result of his experience, he was to found the Red Cross.

  Louis-Napoleon, too, had been profoundly shocked, and that was certainly one of the reasons why, a little more than a fortnight after the battle, he made a separate peace with Austria. There was another reason too: recent events had persuaded several of the smaller states—notably Tuscany, Romagna, and the duchies of Modena and Parma—to think about overthrowing their rulers and seeking annexation to Piedmont. The result would be a formidable state immediately across the French border, covering much of North and Central Italy, a state which might well absorb some or all of the Papal States and even the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. Was it really for this that the gallant Frenchmen who fell at Solferino had given their lives?
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  And so, on July 11, 1859, the emperors of France and Austria met at Villafranca near Verona, and the future of North and Central Italy was decided in less than an hour. Austria would keep Venetia, as well as Mantua and Peschiera, the great fortress on Lake Garda; the rest of Lombardy she would surrender to France, which would pass it on to Piedmont. The former rulers of Tuscany and Modena would be restored to their thrones, and an Italian confederacy would be established under the honorary presidency of the pope. Venetia, including Venice itself, would be a member of this confederacy, while remaining under Austrian sovereignty.

  The fury of Cavour when he read the details of the Villafranca Agreement can well be imagined. Without Venice, Peschiera, or Mantua, not even Venetia-Lombardy would be entirely Italian; as for Central Italy, that was lost even before it had been properly gained. 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 agreed to 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 it improved still further, as several of the smaller states categorically 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 dictators had sprung up, all of them determined on fusion with Piedmont. The only obstacle was presented by Piedmont itself; the terms agreed on 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 to form a new state, which—since the Roman Via Aemilia ran through all three of them—they called Emilia.