The Pursuit of Italy

by David Gilmour

  As soon as Cavour realized that Garibaldi would conquer Sicily, he was eager to annex the island to Piedmont. He had always detested home-grown revolutionaries more than he disliked Bourbons and Austrians, and the last thing he wanted was to see Sicily and possibly Naples in the hands of democrats and other radicals. Once the redshirts had reached Palermo, he therefore sent his representative, La Farina, who arrived in early June with posters proclaiming ‘We want annexation’. It was a strange appointment because La Farina was an insensitive individual and a well-known antagonist of both Garibaldi and Crispi. So much of his time in Sicily was spent intriguing and causing friction among members of the new government that after a month Garibaldi had him arrested and sent back north.

  In Naples Cavour chose to employ a tactic similar to that which La Farina had failed with the previous year in the Po Valley: arranging a ‘spontaneous’ uprising in the city – and doing so before Garibaldi arrived. He duly sent Persano to the Bay of Naples with money in his pockets to bribe officials, and soldiers hidden on his ships ready to rush to the aid of the conspirators on land. In the city the Piedmontese ambassador duly gave the signal for revolt but, as so often with these Cavourian schemes, nothing happened. The Neapolitans were sensibly waiting to see which side was likely to win before committing themselves to the conflict.

  Cavour’s next project was more successful. Believing that Garibaldi would not stop at Naples but carry on to Rome, he decided to invade the Papal States, ostensibly to protect the pope from the redshirts, in reality to take the initiative from their leader, finish the war on an heroic note and ultimately acquire Naples. Garibaldi would be unable to offer resistance, he calculated, because although both his king and his prime minister considered him an enemy, he was publicly fighting for them with the slogan ‘Italy and Victor Emanuel’. He was presumably unaware that the king was hoping for his defeat and even in September was urging Francesco to take the offensive, defeat Garibaldi and execute him. Cavour’s tactics were more subtle and devious. In June he suggested an alliance with the Bourbons and as late as October was assuring Francesco that Piedmont’s quarrel was not with him but with Garibaldi. But simultaneously he was plotting to undermine the Neapolitan regime and annex its territories. Although Cavour admitted he had little knowledge and no experience of Naples, he now managed to delude himself into thinking that its inhabitants were eager for annexation by Piedmont and could be absorbed by the expanding new kingdom without difficulty. A more perceptive calculation came from Azeglio, who knew the city and believed that only one Neapolitan in twenty wanted his country to be annexed.

  Although Cavour professed protectiveness to the pope and amity to Francesco, he treated their subjects as if they were the eternal enemies of Piedmont. In September he dispatched an ultimatum to the papal government demanding the disbanding of its army and ordered his own troops to cross the border before an answer could be received; he also tried – and failed – to stage an uprising in Rome. The Piedmontese army, commanded by General Cialdini, then brushed aside a papal force before bombarding the port of Ancona into submission. At Ancona the army was joined by Victor Emanuel himself, along with Farini, the designated viceroy of Naples, and they moved south towards the Neapolitan border, still uncertain whether they were meant to be fighting the Bourbons or the redshirts. For Cialdini they were both enemies, as were the peasants whom he executed on the spot if they were found with firearms. It did not matter if they were trying to defend their property or support their legitimate sovereign; in the general’s eyes they were simply ‘rebels’ and ‘brigands’.

  In Naples Garibaldi was more cooperative than his adversaries expected. After capturing the large Bourbon fleet there, he handed it over to Persano, thereby more than doubling the size of the Piedmontese navy and closing his option of using the ships to sail up the coast and attack Rome with his redshirts. Despite his undoubted authority, he did not attempt to thwart Piedmontese plans and he was willing to hand over his government to Victor Emanuel after the results of the planned plebiscites were known. He also submitted to the king’s decision to take personal military command, a move that allowed Cialdini to turn his attention to Francesco’s army and bombard the town of Capua. Garibaldi, who had never shelled a civilian population, was amazed and horrified, while Neapolitans must have been puzzled to observe how Victor Emanuel, who had ordered the bombardment, was proving to be so much more of a ‘Bomba’ than their old King Ferdinand.

  While Cavour was reassuring both Pius and Francesco, he was pressing ahead with the annexation of most of the remaining Papal States (Umbria and the Marches) and the whole of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. He insisted that Garibaldi should hold plebiscites in Naples and Sicily as soon as possible and promised autonomy to both if voters chose annexation, though not everyone was convinced of his sincerity in this matter: Cattaneo’s journal in Milan regarded the promise as ‘a mere hoax to attract the public opinion of Naples and Sicily’.18 Like Ricasoli in Tuscany, Crispi wanted to belong to a new entity, a new Italy, not to an old but greatly enlarged Piedmont. Yet Cavour insisted on ‘annexation’, though he was careful not to put the word on the ballot paper. Annexation plainly meant ‘piedmontization’, the imposition of northern laws, customs and institutions on distant regions with no experience of their workings. Such a process was already under way in Sicily, where Piedmontese laws were introduced in August, where the lira with the king’s head appeared in the same month and where officials were forced to swear loyalty to Victor Emanuel and his constitution. In October the minister of justice in Turin persuaded his colleagues to agree to the abolition of the law codes in force in the southern lands and their replacement by the less enlightened legal system of Piedmont.

  The plebiscites were held on 21 October and, as in the north, men went to the urns in an atmosphere of exhilaration, hope, pressure and intimidation. Undoubtedly a large majority voted for union with Piedmont and – also without doubt – the majority was not as big as the figures claimed: 99 per cent, with four-fifths of the Sicilian districts reporting no negative votes at all. The vote itself was hardly unbiased since the ballot paper offered the alternatives of simply ‘yes’ and ‘no’ to the supposition that ‘the Sicilian people desire to form an integral part of Italy one and indivisible under Victor Emanuel as their constitutional king’; people tempted to vote ‘no’ were not told what they might get instead. It was difficult also to hold a free vote when Francesco was still holding out, when Cialdini was still bombarding Capua, and when most voters were illiterate and had no idea who Victor Emanuel was. In Naples the French writer Maxime Du Camp witnessed crowds of people shouting ‘Long live Italy!’ before asking him to explain what Italy was and what it meant.19

  The results of the plebiscites deceived Cavour into believing that southerners wanted annexation and would not mind if he relinquished complicated ideas of autonomy in favour of a programme of piedmontization. If he had only gone to Naples, he might have come to understand the situation and avoid the mistakes that soon led to civil war. But he refused to travel to the largest city in Italy because he had already visited too many northern provinces with Victor Emanuel and could no longer tolerate the royal company. So instead he sent the Modenese Farini to take over from Garibaldi as governor of the southern mainland. This appointment was even more disastrous than that of the Sicilian La Farina to Palermo the year before. Both men were tactless, self-important and personal enemies of Garibaldi. Farini was also contemptuous of southerners, whom he described as a compound of ‘sloth and maccheroni’. Ten days after his arrival in October, he concluded that the south was ‘not Italy but Africa’ and that ‘the bedouin’ were ‘the flower of civic virtue when compared’ to Neapolitans. Writing from the ‘hell-pit’ of Naples a few weeks later, he recognized that the plebiscite result had given an erroneous impression of the southern desire for annexation. People now appeared to oppose unification in exactly the same ratio as they had voted for it in October. ‘In 7 million inhabitants of Naple
s there are not a hundred who want a united Italy. Nor are there any liberals to speak of.’ If the Turin parliament did not impose its authority, he believed the annexation of Naples would become ‘the gangrene of the rest of the state’.20

  Garibaldi had offered to become viceroy instead of Farini, and he would have been both a more suitable and a more popular choice. But Cavour was intent on removing the man who had just handed him such vast new territories to govern. Persistently churlish to Garibaldi, he had even gone so far as to order his subordinates ‘to hurl the garibaldini into the sea’ if they resisted Cialdini’s advance. Other Piedmontese figures, jealous of the ‘liberator’s’ success and fearful of his popularity, competed in the belittling of the one indisputably heroic figure among the leaders of the Risorgimento. Cialdini even told Garibaldi not to exaggerate his successes and claimed, absurdly, that the Piedmontese army had rescued him on the Volturno.

  Garibaldi’s behaviour during the handover of power was irreproachable. He asked for no reward and rejected the king’s offers of money, estates, titles and a senior position in the regular army. In early November he handed over to Victor Emanuel and left for his home on Caprera, an island off Sardinia, with just a sack of seed-corn and a few packets of coffee.

  The disparagement of Garibaldi and his redshirts continued after his departure. Within days the garibaldini – the men who had marched from Marsala to the Volturno and captured a kingdom – had been disbanded; although they had fought better than the Piedmontese in every war of the Risorgimento (and would do so again in 1866), very few of them were allowed to join the regular army. The humiliations of their leader were more petty and symbolic but still hurtful. At their meetings in Naples Farini had refused to shake hands or even speak to him. When Garibaldi sailed away to Caprera, British ships in the Bay of Naples fired their guns in salute, but Persano’s fleet was ordered to stay quiet.

  Garibaldi departed the scene as Cialdini was preparing to besiege Gaeta, where the King of Naples remained resolute. The northern general hoped to batter the town into submission from both land and sea, but unfortunately the French navy was patrolling the coast and preventing access to Persano’s ships. The British tried to persuade it to leave, arguing that the Neapolitans had good reason to get rid of their ‘tyrannical’ dynasty, but Napoleon had a more nuanced view of the rights and wrongs of the conflict, and his ships remained off Gaeta for several months. In the meantime Cialdini persevered with the tactic of bombarding the enemy while keeping his own troops out of danger. Over the winter the defenders of Gaeta died in their hundreds from typhoid as well as artillery shells, and in February Francesco decided to negotiate a surrender. While the talks were taking place, Cialdini refused a ceasefire and even intensified the bombardment, killing numbers of civilians as well as soldiers, until the king departed. For this victory he was made Duke of Gaeta.

  Francesco left with dignity, admitting he was a victim of his own inexperience as well as of the cunning and unscrupulous ambitions of Piedmont. His queen, the nineteen-year-old Maria Sofia, had behaved heroically during the siege. A member of the Bavarian ruling house and a sister of the Empress of Austria, she had stayed beside her husband, visiting the wounded, encouraging the soldiers and refusing to take safety precautions that were denied to others. She went to Rome with Francesco and lived in exile there and further north for another sixty-four years. Her husband died in 1894, and her sister, the Empress Elizabeth, was assassinated a few years later by an Italian anarchist. She herself died in penury, still wondering how the Piedmontese kings could have treated a legitimate fellow dynasty as they had, taking not only the riches of the kingdom but grabbing the family’s private wealth as well. Marcel Proust wrote her a premature epitaph towards the end of his great novel, describing the aged former queen as a ‘woman of great kindness’ and much fortitude, a ‘heroic woman who, a soldier-queen, had herself fired her musket from the ramparts of Gaeta, always ready to place herself chivalrously on the side of the weak’. After Proust’s death – and just before her own – Maria Sofia listened to passages in the novel depicting her behaviour at a Parisian party and remarked that, although she could not remember ‘this Monsieur Proust’, he seemed to have known her very well because he had made her ‘act as precisely as’ she thought she would have done.21

  Few Europeans mourned the fall of the Bourbons. Nor did later Neapolitans greatly regret the passing of a dynasty that had provided them with five kings over a century and a quarter – longer than the rule of either the Tudors or the Stuarts in England. Sentimental attachment was subdued perhaps by distant memories of earlier dynasties and by the presence of so many monuments of previous ages. The family had indeed produced no outstanding monarch but nor – despite what propaganda said – had it supplied a very bad one. In any case, was the general standard any lower than those of their cousins in Spain, the Savoia in Piedmont or the Hanoverians in Great Britain? The victors and their international supporters claimed that the Bourbon exit was an inevitable episode on the road to Italian unity, a necessary consequence of a war of liberation, the conflict having been simply a logical stage in the process of nation-building, a way of absorbing natural national territory – as Wessex had ingested Mercia or France had taken in Provence. Few people outside the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies saw it for what it ultimately was, a war of expansion conducted by one Italian state against another. The unusual feature of the contest was that it was a three-sided one, two sides playing the recognized parts of protagonist (the garibaldini) and antagonist (the Bourbons) while the third (the Piedmontese) took on a more subtle role, pretending to be a friend of the others but in reality being the enemy (and eventual conqueror) of both.

  Moral and historical justifications for the conquest of Naples are perplexing. According to G. M. Trevelyan, the doyen of British eulogists of the Risorgimento, unification was necessary because of ‘the utter failure of the Neapolitans to maintain their own freedom when left to themselves in 1848’.22 Yet other people have failed in similar fashion without needing or deserving conquest. Another argument, still favoured by certain Neapolitan historians, is that the rapid collapse of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in 1860 proved that it was rotten and required elimination. Again, other regimes have collapsed before a sudden onslaught only to be resuscitated later by their allies. A distinguished historian of Naples, an elderly man whose great-grandparents were all Neapolitans, insists that his country could not have become a modern nation by itself after 1860, that it needed the partnership of Piedmont to give it the apparatus of a modern state.23 His argument does not convince. Piedmont was undoubtedly a richer and more liberal state than the Two Sicilies in 1860, but for most of the eighteenth century Naples had possessed a more enlightened regime than Turin, and only a generation before union it had had more industry and more progressive codes of law. The belief that Naples, unlike other countries in western Europe, was incapable of evolving by itself is simply illogical, an example of that southern inferiority complex which was engendered by the triumphalism of the Risorgimento and reinforced by much subsequent talk, northern and condescending, about ‘the southern question’ and ‘the problem of the mezzogiorno’.

  VENICE (1866) AND ROME (1870)

  On 17 March 1861 the Kingdom of Italy was formally proclaimed. Although it now included the territories of Parma, Modena, Tuscany, most of Lombardy, most of the Papal States and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, it was constitutionally still Piedmont with a new name but with the same monarch, the same capital and indeed the same constitution: the first legislature of the new state was labelled the eighth because it followed Piedmont’s seven previous ones. The Piedmontese character of the kingdom was further emphasized by the king’s retention of his old title, Victor Emanuel II, though of course Italy had never had a Victor Emanuel I.

  The new parliament, consisting of an elected Chamber and a Senate nominated by the king, was populated overwhelmingly by men without parliamentary experience. In the Chamber, where fifty-seven seats
were symbolically left vacant for future deputies from the unconquered regions of Venetia and Rome, few current members doubted that those seats would be occupied soon, and Cavour, who a few years earlier had dismissed the goal of unity as ‘nonsense’, was determined to fill them while he was still prime minister. It would be for the next generation, he suggested, to acquire further desirable territories such as Trieste and Istria, the Swiss Ticino and the South Tyrol.

  Cavour himself was not destined to see any further accretion of territory. He had seldom paid much attention to his health, eating too much, working too hard and seldom taking exercise except walking along Turin’s pavements between parliament, his house, his favourite cafés and the aristocratic Whist Club, which he had founded. Prone to gout, he suffered also from an undiagnosed fever that must have been malaria, probably picked up from the rice fields on his estate. The fever worsened during the spring of 1861, and, weakened by bleeding and poor medical care, he died in June, less than three months after the establishment of the Italy he had done so much to create. His death at the age of fifty was a catastrophe for the new state, which needed its inventor to make his invention work, just as a new Germany later needed his equivalent, Otto von Bismarck, who remained in power for twenty years after his country’s unification under Prussian leadership. However unscrupulous in his dealings, Cavour had been an outstanding politician, intuitive and energetic, capable of exploiting even the most unpromising of circumstances. None of his colleagues approached him in stature except perhaps the Tuscan Ricasoli, whose effectiveness was limited by his rigidity and shortage of political skills. Cavour had been prime minister for almost a decade and was expected to continue in the role for many years to come. The governments of his four successors lasted on average for ten months, a duration typical of Italian politics – except in the 1880s – until Mussolini monopolized the premiership in 1922.