It is too bad, because the true story of the birth of modern Italy, involving the demise of the Papal States and the pope's efforts to undo Italian unification, offers a gripping tale of intrigue and pathos filled with outsized characters and high drama. It features an Italian king, Victor Emmanuel II, whose greatest passion in life was hunting and who viewed his government ministers with disdain, but who somehow rose to the challenge of unifying Italy. Although he had little love for the Church or the clergy, the king never stopped dreaming of the day that the pope would deign to receive him. It was a day that he would never live to see.
For his part, Pius IX was without doubt the most important pontiff in modern history. While deeply religious, he was politically inept. Remarkably gregarious, he loved nothing more than hosting audiences and, before Rome was taken, strolling through Rome's streets and chuckling at people's startled reactions to the white-robed pope-king in their midst. Yet, if he was a man of great charm and warmth, a man with a famous smile, he also had a fearful temper and a short fuse. And, as if from the cast of a twopenny melodrama, ever at the goodly pope's side was the dark figure of Giacomo Antonelli, long his secretary of state, his right-hand man, who compensated for the pope's lack of political sophistication with his own diplomatic savvy. A cardinal without ever having been ordained a priest, Antonelli fit the popular stereotype of the goodly pope's evil adviser, an image promulgated in this case not only by Italy's anticlericals and nationalists but by many of the Curia's cardinals as well, jealous of the stranglehold Antonelli seemed to have over Pius.
Rounding out the cast of characters at the center of this dramatic history as it began to unfold, and whose true role in the rise of modern Italy is today obscured from popular view, is Giuseppe Garibaldi, a man for whom "colorful" seems too weak a term. Condemned to death as a young man for taking part in a nationalist uprising in Genoa, he spent most of his early adult and middle-age years in exile as a sailor, adventurer, and frequent participant in popular uprisings, including a series of wars in South America, where he had taken refuge. When, in the face of a popular revolt, Pius IX fled Rome in 1848 and the end of papal rule was proclaimed, Garibaldi returned to Italy to lead the makeshift army that defended the new Roman Republic. Yet when the French responded to the pope's plea and sent their troops to retake Rome, Garibaldi, despite all his heroic efforts, could not long hold them back and was forced into exile once again. Almost single-handedly responsible for the fact that the new Italian state that took shape in 1860 included Sicily and the entire Italian South—not a part of the peninsula in which Victor Emmanuel or his ministers had any interest—Garibaldi lacked all political artifice. Yet he did have one unshakable belief: he was convinced that the priests were a parasitic scourge on the Italian nation, the papacy a cancer that had to be excised.
And then there were all the foreign rulers and diplomats whose decisions would determine whether the pope would one day return to power, whether Italy would remain united or soon crumble. There was the massive, mustachioed Otto von Bismarck, the German chancellor who presided over what by late 1870 had emerged as the continent's leading power. Bismarck's six-foot, four-inch frame and considerable bulk would cast a large shadow over Europe in these years, inspiring a mixture of respect, anger, and fear. With a huge head, a shrinking fringe of whitening hair, a drooping mustache, bushy eyebrows, and large protruding eyes, Bismarck carried himself with military bearing and, indeed, always wore a white military uniform in Berlin as befitted a member of the Prussian gentry who held the rank of major general. Also, befitting his origins, he despised urban life, retreating as much as possible to his rural estates. Known to sit down for a meal and eat what would normally feed three men and to drink one or two bottles of champagne at his midday meal alone, he was apt to smoke his way through eight or ten Havana cigars a day and cap off his dinner with a bottle or two of brandy.
Disdaining any crass appeal for popularity, in his nearly three decades in power Bismarck confined his speeches almost entirely to parliament. His voice came as a surprise to those who had never heard him, for the big man spoke in something of a thin falsetto. Yet, when he was spotted ordering a mug of beer from a parliamentary aide—a sure sign that he was getting ready to mount the podium—word spread quickly, and the deputies rushed in from the halls to hear him. Bismarck's speeches were typically witty, sardonic, sarcastic, and—although he rarely used a prepared text—filled with rarefied literary allusions. Of his subordinates he expected information but not advice, still less criticism. If Pius IX's angry outbursts were entirely spontaneous and fleeting, Bismarck's were more calculated. "It's useful for the entire mechanism if I get angry at times," he said. "It puts stronger steam in the engine." Although he would soon lead Germany's own campaign against the Catholic Church, Bismarck—himself, like the German emperor, a Protestant—was above all a political opportunist. As we shall see, at one point he even toyed with the idea of providing a German refuge for the pope and pronouncing Germany the world center of Catholicism. 2
Then there was Napoleon III, emperor of France. Born in 1808, seven years before Bismarck, Louis Napoleon grew up in the wake of his uncle and namesake's bitter defeat. A participant in the Italian nationalist uprisings in 1831, he was arrested nine years later in France for conspiring to overthrow the monarchy there. Escaping from prison after six years, he took part in the French revolt of 1848 and by the end of that year was elected president of the new regime. Although he was a champion of nationalism who viewed the pope-king as a regrettable relic of the Middle Ages, his first priority on taking power was to solidify his rule. And so, in an effort to attract domestic Catholic support, he dispatched his army in 1849 to defeat Garibaldi and retake Rome for Pius; three years later, he orchestrated a plebiscite that pronounced him emperor of France. He was no longer Louis Napoleon but Napoleon III. Meanwhile, the French troops remained in Rome, charged with protecting the pontiff from revolt or invasion. There, but for brief periods, they remained until the historic summer of 1870, when the declaration of papal infallibility by the First Vatican Council, coinciding with the outbreak of France's war with Prussia, led Napoleon to withdraw his troops. Only then—when the coast was clear—was Victor Emmanuel willing to send in his own army and claim Rome as Italy's new capital.
We are about to enter a world that no longer exists, of a pope who was a king, of a king ashamed to share his capital with the pope who had excommunicated him, of nervous nobles, anticlericals bent on seizing the Vatican, would-be assassins, and suspicions of conspiracies everywhere. Some of its characters were eloquent, some playful, some sober, and some grim; some were witty and urbane, some abusive and inebriated. Some invoked the highest principles of Enlightenment morality, some the sacred principles of revealed truth. Still others seemed more intent on bellowing epithets as loudly as their voices would allow. The result was the mixture of contradictory traits that is the hallmark of modern Italy.
Many books deal with one aspect or another of this story, although most were written a century or more ago, when none of the Vatican archives for the period were available. Books that try to tell the whole story addressed in these pages, based on the original documents but written for a broad audience, are few indeed. None, so far as I know, are based on both the historical archives of the Vatican and the records of the Italian state. Curiously, in fact, most of the great Italian historians of national unification—reflecting their secular allegiances—felt uncomfortable even setting foot in the Vatican. To a considerable extent, this odd division of labor continues even today, with the historians of Italian unification—identified with the proponents of a secular Italy—generally avoiding research that would entail working in the Vatican archives, leaving it to Church historians, some of the most illustrious being priests themselves. Even among the latter, however, the great majority who have written on our topic lacked access to the Vatican's documents from the period following Leo XIII's ascendancy to the papacy in 1878, for most wrote before 1979, when these ar
chives were first opened to researchers. It is, in part, the use of this rich trove of material that allows us here to shed new light on the battle waged by the pope and his Curia aimed at depriving the new Italian state of its capital.
Today, we all take for granted that the pope is forever on the move, traveling thousands of miles at a time to minister to his far-flung flock. How strange it is to be reminded that, for fifty-nine years after the taking of Rome, no pope would set foot outside the Vatican, no pope would even enter Rome's own churches nor escape Rome's summer heat by retreating to the papal villa in the nearby hills at Castel Gandolfo. To travel beyond the minuscule patch of land that remained under his control would mean acknowledging that the pope was no longer a prisoner of the Vatican. This, for almost six decades, no pope was willing to do.
1. Destroying the Papal States
PIUS IX had not always been such a bitter enemy of progress, of things modern. When he ascended to St. Peter's throne in 1846, among his first acts was the introduction of gas streetlights and railways to the Papal States, an implicit rebuke to his predecessor, Gregory XVI, who had viewed them as dangerous departures from the way God meant things to be. The new pope also won popular favor in these first months by freeing political prisoners and calling for the reform of the Papal States' notoriously corrupt and inefficient bureaucracy.
But, caught up in the intoxicating spirit of revolt that swept Europe with shocking speed in 1848, people soon wanted—no, demanded—more, much more. In April of that year, Pius rejected pleas that he support efforts to drive the Austrians out of the Italian peninsula. In November, amid increasing disorder, calls for a constitution, and demands for an end to the papal dictatorship, his prime minister was stabbed to death in the middle of Rome in broad daylight.
Fearing for his life and by then practically a prisoner in his Quirinal Palace in central Rome, the pope decided to escape. Dressed as a simple priest, his face partially concealed by tinted glasses, he furtively boarded the carriage of the Bavarian ambassador and, with his help, made his way south to the seaside fortress of Gaeta, north of Naples in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.
The pope's earthly realm was slipping from his grasp as revolts from Bologna to Rome drove out the cardinal legates and ushered in local governing committees that proudly proclaimed the end of papal rule. In Rome, a Constituent Assembly elected by popular vote in January 1849 put power in the hands of a triumvirate that would soon include Giuseppe Mazzini, Italy's great theorist of nationalism, who was living in exile in London. Article 1 of the constitution of the new Roman Republic pronounced the pope's temporal power forever ended. The people were now free to say, think, write, and act as they liked; the Inquisition was no more. The Jews were freed from their ghettoes, and even Protestants could worship freely. From then on, the government was to be elected by the people.
The new Utopia did not last long before the French and Austrian troops marched in and restored the pope to power. Any sympathies that Pius had previously felt for offering more civil liberties or a measure of democracy were now gone. As he saw it, God had intended the pope to rule over the Papal States and, indeed, only by having such temporal power could the pontiff enjoy the freedom that he needed to perform his spiritual duties. The Inquisition was restored, as was the Index of prohibited books; the Jews were forced back into their ghettoes; all newspapers and books were again heavily censored. French troops patrolled the streets of Rome, propping up papal rule.
The Kingdom of Sardinia quickly emerged as the best hope for those who sought change. Despite its name, the kingdom's capital was Turin, in the northwestern region of Piedmont, and included the neighboring region of Liguria as well as the kingdom's namesake, the island of Sardinia. Under the Savoyard dynasty it alone had preserved the reforms introduced in 1848, which had turned an authoritarian state into a constitutional, parliamentary monarchy. Church control of schools was ended, freedom of religion proclaimed, and the Jesuit order, viewed as the subversive agent of papal power abroad, banished.
By midcentury, most of the educated classes of central and northern Italy had become alienated from the Church—or at least from its center of power in Rome—and were hostile to the continued presence of foreign troops in the peninsula. Resentment in Lombardy and Veneto to the Austrians' rule kept tensions high, as did their troops, who patrolled much of the Papal States, and the French soldiers who guarded Rome.
The king of Sardinia, Victor Emmanuel II, whose penchant for military adventure—and incompetence—was notorious, began to glimpse his chance for greatness. What could be more glorious than putting himself at the head of an army that would conquer much of Italy and, in so doing, not only dramatically enlarge his realm but cast him as a great Italian patriot? Yet his advisers, Prime Minister Count Camillo Cavour chief among them, urged caution. To take on both the French and the Austrians would, he knew, be suicidal.
The king's big chance came in July 1858, when Napoleon III met secretly with Cavour in France and hatched a plan to drive the Austrians—their common enemy—from the Italian peninsula. The plan also involved removing three-quarters of the Papal States from the pope's control, leaving only Rome and the region around it for the pontiff, under French protection, a measure designed in part to placate French Catholic opinion. There was no discussion at the time of attacking the Kingdom of Naples in the South nor of unifying all of Italy under a single government. In fact, Napoleon III seems to have envisioned some kind of loose confederation of weak states taking shape in Italy, possibly under the titular presidency of the pope himself. This would have the virtue of weakening his chief rival, Austria, and creating an ally to his south in the Kingdom of Sardinia while ensuring that the fractionated Italian peninsula would never produce a state strong enough to compete with the French for European influence.
War broke out near the Piedmontese border with Lombardy in May 1859 and quickly spread to the Papal States as Italian nationalists fueled revolts that again sent the cardinal legates packing. Plebiscites demanding unification with the Kingdom of Sardinia quickly followed. Meanwhile, responding to a plea from the Sicilian proponents of unification, Garibaldi assembled a force of a thousand volunteers—wearing open-collared red shirts in place of regular uniforms—and set sail. Landing near Palermo in May 1860, these poorly trained irregulars dispatched the Bourbon army with embarrassing ease, so, after conquering Sicily, they headed north, up the Italian boot, on their way to Rome.
Alarmed yet excited, Victor Emmanuel II could no longer merely stand by. To do nothing while Garibaldi's red shirts, in the name of unifying Italy, marched into the Holy City would court disaster. Should Garibaldi succeed in taking Rome, he would put Victor Emmanuel to shame. In place of a large northern Italian state under the Savoyard monarchy, the frightening specter of all Italy unified under a revolutionary republic became all too real. And so the king sent his army south, intercepting Garibaldi north of Naples before he could attack
Rome. There, a curious military ceremony took place, with Garibaldi handing over control of the newly fallen Kingdom of Naples to the Savoyard king. Rome—at least for the moment—remained in papal hands.
A year later, the new Kingdom of Italy was officially inaugurated. Technically, it was simply the continuation of the old Kingdom of Sardinia, so no new constitution was thought necessary. Although the Italian state was much larger than the king or his ministers had imagined three years earlier, when they had hatched their plot with the French emperor, two big holes remained. Rome and the region around it were still in the pope's hands and, in the Northeast, Veneto and its capital, Venice, were still under Austrian control.
Faced with the demise of most of his earthly domain, Pius IX struck back as best he could. Rebuffing Victor Emmanuel's attempts to negotiate, the pope, in an encyclical in January 1860, demanded the "pure and simple restitution" of the Papal States, excommunicated all those guilty of usurping the papal lands, and voiced his belief that God would not long allow the outrage to stand. The days
of a unified Italian state, he was sure, were numbered.1
Yet the unification of Italy under the Savoyard king left many of Italy's most ardent nationalists unhappy. Mazzini, a principled opponent of monarchy and a committed republican, had been willing to hold his nose during the battle against the Austrians because he believed that the first priority should be driving the foreigners out of the peninsula. But the situation had changed. His already dim view of the monarchy got even dimmer when it became clear that the new government had no immediate plan to take Rome. For the nationalists, an Italian state without Rome as its capital was inconceivable.
In 1862 Garibaldi, the peripatetic Hero of Two Worlds—so called because of his exploits in South America—again tried to force the king's hand by summoning his motley army of red shirts for a march on Rome. Gathering his forces in Sicily, the scene of his triumphs two years earlier, he prepared for the march north into the Holy City, leaving the Savoyard king and his ministers in a painful quandary. They could hardly allow a private army to march across the country, nor were they prepared to turn against the French, whose troops were guarding the pope. Yet, realizing that Garibaldi was far more popular than anyone in the government—more popular than the king himself—they feared sending the army against him.
After much hand-wringing, the Italian leaders decided that they had no choice. Garibaldi had to be stopped. A contingent of Italian troops caught up with the red shirts at the edge of a mountain forest in southern Calabria, at Aspromonte. Thinking that the approaching Italian colonel had come to talk, Garibaldi told his men not to shoot. But the Italian troops opened fire. In the resulting carnage, a bullet shattered Garibaldi's foot, a wound that plagued him for the rest of his life. Some of his red shirts were killed, others injured, and not a few were seized and then summarily executed, charged with having deserted the regular army.
Prisoner of the Vatican Page 2
