"I myself, although born in Italy, and although I love my country and my language a great deal, can't understand how one could sacrifice the Church's least interest to it. There are questions that are more important than Italy, just as there are nations that are much more important [here Monbel noted parenthetically: "alluding to France"] which the Church should prefer over it. Consequently I don't understand how any hesitation is possible." 12
Crispi, meanwhile, was doing all he could to convince his allies of the pope's plan to launch a war on Italy. The pope's idea, Crispi charged, was to take refuge abroad, hoping to return behind a triumphant French army. Some of Crispi's spies in the Vatican offered him grist for his mill. Béhaine, they claimed, had written from Paris on July 8, urging the pope to act immediately. "If the Holy See can do nothing more than talk," Béhaine was said to have warned him, "France cannot act." To which, in this account, the Vatican responded by telegram: "Act quickly, because all is ready."13
On July 11 Crispi told Domenico Farini, the president of the Italian Senate, he was certain that war with France would begin before fall. When Farini reported this to Umberto, the king initially dismissed the alleged plot as a product of Crispi's all-too-fertile imagination. But on the thirteenth Crispi himself went to see Umberto, a meeting he described telegraphically in his diary entry for that day: "I am with the King at 10 o'clock. I inform him of the possibility of an attack. The necessity for defensive measures. He must see the minister of War, Bertole, and a special council must be formed." The king, still skeptical but now uncertain, agreed to Crispi's request to establish a special four-member war council, presided over by the king himself and including Crispi and the minister of war.
On the sixteenth Crispi met with the Italian ambassador to London, whom he had recalled to Rome for urgent consultations. Crispi described the meeting in his diary: "I inform him that in France they are ready for war, and their intention would appear to be to attack us by sea. The plan is a bold one, I might also say a foolhardy one, but as the information came to me from a perfectly trustworthy source, we must believe the report, and prepare to defend ourselves." Crispi told the ambassador to find out what the British government was prepared to do. "Should we be defeated," Crispi pointed out, "England would lose a faithful ally on the seas."
Two days later Crispi again went to see the king. "I give him the latest news from the Vatican," Crispi wrote, "which causes him much surprise." That same day, the prime minister sent a dramatic telegram to the Italian ambassador in Paris: "I have received news from the border that French troops are massing there with hostile intent. That, combined with pressures coming from the French embassy to the Vatican, is aimed at forcing the pope to abandon Rome." Crispi added, by way of reproach: "I am amazed at Your Excellency's silence." 14
That evening, after midnight, Crispi telegraphed his ambassadors in Berlin, Vienna, and London to tell them that war was at hand: "The redoubled weaponry on the French border and the news that comes from Paris confirm that we are close to war ... The pope's departure from Rome, on the advice of the government of the [French] Republic, seems to have been decided upon." By getting the pope to leave Italy, he charged, "France is trying to manufacture a pretext for a conflict that, in our view, would lead to war." The ambassadors were to speak of the threat with the German, Austrian, and British foreign ministers.
Yet Crispi failed to get the other governments to support his campaign. Typical was the reaction reported in a telegram that Costantino Nigra, the Italian ambassador to Vienna, sent on July 18. The ambassador had hurriedly arranged a meeting with Kalnoky and had read him Crispi's telegram. "He has asked me to tell you," wrote Nigra, "that he does not believe that France has the least intention of making war on Italy at this time, nor that the pope intends to leave Rome any time soon ... Nor does Kalnoky believe in any conspiracy between France and the pope on this subject."15
Nigra's response angered Crispi, who summoned him immediately to Rome. Crispi described their meeting: "I acquaint him with the news we have from France and with what we know about the Vatican. I point out that the pressure brought to bear by M. de Monbel [to get the pope to leave Rome] is meant seriously, and he has failed so far simply owing to the pope's indecision." Crispi went on to attribute the Austrian government's refusal to see the danger to the incompetence of their ambassador to the Holy See. But Nigra was unmoved, insisting that any plans for papal departure could not be concealed from Kalnóky.
Crispi would have none of it. "Be that as it may," he said, "we must know what Austria would do in case we are attacked by France. She would be in duty bound to defend us." Should Austria and Germany come to Italy's aid, Crispi added, "the joint action of the three fleets would overpower France, and if, as is probable, England should join us, we might be sure of victory." 16
By this time, the French envoy to the Holy See was having second thoughts about his earlier report that the pope was about to leave Rome. "It would seem," he wrote to the French foreign minister, "just as I had initially believed, that the Holy See has raised this burning question both to rekindle Catholics' sentiments for the Head of the Church and to slow the hostile acts that the Italian government and a part of the Italian nation have shown themselves so willingly to aim at the papacy." What prompted Monbel's turnabout was a recent meeting with Rampolla, who had told him that the decision to abandon Rome was being put off.
Monbel added that Italy's leaders, despite their feigned nonchalance, were terrified by the thought that the pope might go, believing that neither the government nor the monarchy itself would last long with the pope outside Italy. He explained:
The pope in Rome offers the surest guarantee for the Government, both in resisting the invasions of socialism and republican propaganda, and in preventing the formation of a dangerous opposition in the country and in parliament. With the pope here—which is to say with an enemy in the Capital always ready to undermine the legitimacy of the institutions and to ally itself with adversaries from within as from without—no opposition is possible. The simple words "temporal power" are enough to rally men of different opinions around the Government. In the midst of this terror a prime minister can do what he wants, go where he wants, without any pressure, assured of the nation's prior approval. In a word, if Italy did not have the pope, and a hostile pope, it would have to invent him.17
In France, meanwhile, the press was becoming ever more antagonistic to the Italian government. On July 15 the prestigious—and secular —Revue des Deux-Mondes warned that Crispi's recklessness risked disastrous consequences for Italy: "No country would go to war to put Rome back under ecclesiastical domination," the journal observed. "But any country that ends up in a war with Italy will be forced to play the pontifical card against it ... For Italy, a major war would quite simply mean ruination ... Bankruptcy, poverty, revolution, may not be the only price of its defeat. It would put something else at risk: its capital."18
On July 21 Crispi invited an old friend, Cardinal Gustav von Hohenlohe, to his home. Hohenlohe, from an aristocratic German family, had been made a cardinal at the age of forty-four in 1866, a choice that Pius IX came to regret. A champion of the forces against infallibility at the First Vatican Council, Hohenlohe was nominated by Bismarck as Berlin's first nuncio to the Holy See in 1872, only to suffer the humiliation of having the pope reject his candidacy. Long a proponent of reconciliation, he also, as a good German, strongly supported the Triple Alliance. One of the intransigents' most illustrious enemies, he lived in fear of assassination and had, a few months before his meeting with Crispi, asked for Italian police protection. As a result, he traveled with a secret police agent as his bodyguard. Whether there was any basis for his fears is not clear, but there had been a series of suspicious deaths and murders of high-ranking liberal priests over the past years, including one of his own assistants.19
"There is talk of the pope's departure," Crispi told Hohenlohe, "and a certain party is seeking to persuade him to quit the Vatican." He then asked
the cardinal to carry a message to the pope:
"I wish to recommend—and this I beg Your Eminence to repeat to the pope—that he be careful not to trigger hostilities, and that he remember what Pius IX's appeal to foreign arms cost him. Not only would religion suffer through such an act, but so would the man himself who is the sovereign prince of that religion."
According to the account that Crispi recorded that day in his diary, Hohenlohe listened carefully, "frequently manifesting his approval of what I was saying by a nod or exclamation." The cardinal then replied: "I do not often go to the Vatican, but I will go now, and do what you have asked of me. The pope will not leave, but one cannot always be sure of him. He likes the world to be talking about him, and is subject to fits of nervous excitement which not infrequently lead to imprudent decisions."
But, as it turned out, Leo refused to see the cardinal, an affront to Hohenlohe's dignity that was compounded by Rampolla's suggestion that the cardinal speak with him instead. "It seems that they are afraid of me. I don't know why!" he later told Crispi. Rather than talk to Rampolla, Hohenlohe decided to send the pope a letter, which, it seems, simply angered Leo even more.20
While Crispi kept warning his Triple Alliance partners of the imminent threat of war, Europe's leaders kept urging him to calm down.21 But Crispi was undeterred, using La Riforma, the newspaper that had become his unofficial mouthpiece, to keep sounding the alarm. On July 21 La Riforma once again warned that the pope's secret plans for departure could only be understood as part of a plot aimed at the restoration of temporal power through foreign invasion. Should Leo put this plan into effect, the paper predicted, it would produce a schism in the Church in Italy, for not only would virtually all lay Italians turn against the pope, but many of the clergy would as well.
Monbel, who reported all this to Paris, added, "The goal that Monsieur Crispi's paper is pursuing is clear, passing Leo XIII off as an enemy of his own country, and arousing, so to speak, in advance the revolt of Italian Catholics and clergy against the Vatican's declared intention of abandoning Rome." The semiofficial paper, Monbel concluded, was certainly not expressing itself in this way out of any concern for the Vatican. Rather, in discouraging the pope from fleeing, the newspaper's fulminations revealed Crispi's strong belief that "Leo XIII's continued residence in Rome is indispensable for the Italian government's security."22
Angry that the Germans were not taking his warnings seriously, Crispi wrote to his ambassador in Berlin. The ambassador had earned Crispi's scorn by suggesting that because those in power in France were anticlerics, they would never champion the Vatican's cause against Italy. "Let me observe," Crispi wrote, "that the pope, in France, is, independently of religion, a political force that is used against us. On November 28,1848, General Cavaignac ordered the expedition to Rome to restore Pius IX, and in that France succeeded. Today they want to repeat the same thing, dragging Leo XIII abroad with the promise of having him return as pope-king. I have positive information to this effect."23
Still no one would heed Crispi's warnings. On July 28,1889, in the latest in what was becoming a monotonous chorus, Italy's ambassador to Vienna telegraphed Crispi on his recent conversation with Kalnoky: "He has authorized me to confirm that all of his information, coming from the best sources, exclude the possibility of France's launching a war on Italy, as well as the possibility of the pope's leaving in case of war.24
While not convincing any of the European powers, Crispi's accusations were beginning to rattle the Italian royal court and the military. By late July their anxiety was evident in the pages of Fanfulla, the newspaper most closely identified with the court and the upper echelon of the armed forces. Examining the prospect that France might convince the pope to leave Rome in order "to create the grounds for a war based on the revolt of international Catholic sentiment," the paper fretted: "With the pope outside Rome, public opinion in the Catholic countries would quickly turn against us. Our relations with Austria and its freedom of action in our favor would be impeded, and Spain, His Holiness's likely refuge, would quickly be led into the French orbit." The fact that France's government was dominated by men who were firmly secular might at first sight make this prospect seem unlikely. But, the paper warned, so great were France's internal problems that it was now "plausible that France might really be interested in aiding the intransigents to overcome the pope's resistance."25
On July 30, in the wake of the flood of articles appearing in newspapers from Venice to Naples predicting the pope's imminent flight and trumpeting the critical role being played by France, Cardinal Rampolla sought out the French chargé d'affaires to the Holy See. While assuring Monbel that the newspaper stories of the pope's purported decision to leave were filled with "lies and calumnies," he did not deny it was a possibility. On the contrary, he dwelled on the warm welcome the pope would receive were he to go to Spain.
That the French were far from being part of a secret agreement with the Vatican was again clear from Monbel's closing words in his report of this conversation to Paris: "On the actual state of the question, there is no doubt that the greatest reserve is being observed in the Vatican, and that the project, if project there is, has not yet taken any definitive form. In their conversations, the cardinals always admit the possibility of a departure, but there is a notable difference of opinion among them regarding the time when it should occur."26
If Crispi was using fears of the pope's flight to drum up political support inside Italy and abroad, Leo and his secretary of state were no less busy doing the same. By this time, Europe's papers were so filled with stories of the pope's likely move to Spain that the Spanish government itself began worriedly asking for the latest news from the Vatican so that it could better divine the pope's intentions. The Spaniards' belief that the pope might be planning a move to their soil got further support when Rampolla called in the Spanish ambassador to the Holy See and asked him to reaffirm Spain's earlier invitation. Rampolla sought and received similar assurances from the Portuguese ambassador. 27
In a conversation with Monbel in early August, Rampolla put the French on notice that departure might come quickly, telling the French envoy that "public opinion has just about accepted the need for departure, and even for a departure to come soon. Moreover, Spain is the destination practically imposed by its location and climate, and by its inhabitants' wishes." The Vatican had taken the offensive. "For the first time in many years," Rampolla noted with satisfaction, "Italy has been stopped in its tracks and has had to retreat as a result of the Holy Father's action." The French should be very pleased, he added, for it was not France but the Holy See itself that was now "most responsible for holding the Triple Alliance in check."28
In the wake of the dedication of the Bruno monument, with the anticlerical diatribes growing ever louder on the streets, in club meetings, and in the pages of the press, the intransigents were increasingly pressuring the pope to go. In mid-August a new anticlerical paper, Cronaca Nera, appeared, with a new series of attacks on Rome's most prominent cardinals. Using apostate priests to write their stories, the inaugural issue took special aim at the cardinal vicar of Rome, Lucido Parocchi. Enraged, Parocchi was ready to pack his bags. "We will certainly be forced to leave Rome," he told one colleague.
A few days after hearing of this episode, Monbel had a long conversation with Monsignor Pujol, Superior of Saint-Louis, France's church in Rome. Pujol too was furious about the newspaper attacks on the high clergy, which he believed the government was behind. He reported that in a recent conversation with Parocchi, the cardinal vicar had told him that it would take just one more unpleasant incident to trigger a move. "Ah," Parocchi had exclaimed, "if only Leo XIII would be so great as to decide to leave Rome!"29
Amid these threats of war, of papal flight, and the possibility that Italy's unification could itself be undone, the embattled prime minister decided he needed to relax. Finding himself in Naples, he decided to take his daughter out for an afternoon ride. It was Friday, September 13.
As Crispi and his daughter admired the view from their open carriage, a thin young man, shabbily dressed all in gray, appeared out of nowhere running alongside their carriage. He jumped onto the sideboard, and, holding on to the door with his left hand, pulled a large rock out of his right pocket and hurled it with all his strength at the prime minister's face. A middle-aged priest, Don Vito Massari, having stopped by the side of the road to watch Crispi pass, witnessed the attack. Shouting "Stop Crispi's assassin!" he ran toward the carriage just as the attacker began to pull a second large rock from his pocket. Blood poured down Crispi's face where the first rock had hit him; his daughter wailed in horror. Hearing the shouts, a young man passing by also began running toward the site and, arriving first at the scene, collared the would-be assassin before he could hurl his second missile. Blood flowed from the jagged wound on Crispi's face and, more worryingly, oozed from his left ear. The semiconscious Crispi was rushed away. The doctors at first feared a cranial lesion, and with it an uncertain prognosis, but they soon discovered that Crispi was not seriously hurt. Apart from a few stitches needed to close the wound and the discomfort caused by the facial bruising, the prime minister was in good shape and as feisty as ever.
Over the next days, the Catholic press told of the heroic priest who had saved the prime minister's life. The liberal press, for its part, made no mention of him.
In the weeks that followed, try as they might, police investigators could not get the would-be assassin, an impoverished twenty-one-year-old enamored of republican ideals and no friend of the Church, to name any accomplices. The Church papers argued that Crispi—the old revolutionary—had reaped what he had sown. The liberal press charged that it was the Church that was to blame for the near-tragedy, its ceaseless vilification of the prime minister having spread the hatred that had, as filtered through the mind of a disturbed young man, come close to ending the prime minister's life. Characteristically, Crispi himself suspected that the young man had not acted alone but was part of a French plot against him.30
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