1848 (25 page)

 

Yet Mazzini could not resist giving a thinly veiled warning to beware of the monarchists: the powerful, he cautioned, had a habit of wresting the rights from those who were too compliant or too reckless. The Lombards should not yield their rights to the mighty; to do so would be to surrender the entire national cause. Still, Mazzini accepted the political truce because the Piedmontese army was the means by which the first step towards national unity would be achieved. Independence and unification should come first, while a republic and democracy (words which Mazzini studiously avoided in the proclamation) could wait if they would compromise the struggle against the Austrians. The republicans could unleash their political campaign for democracy once the war was won.
¹⁰²

This political truce played into the hands of the monarchists. The Lombards at large were spellbound by word that 23,000 Piedmontese troops had crossed the River Ticino on 25 March. The next day, in pouring rain, their advance guard marched into Milan, hemmed in by cheering crowds. Mazzini arrived on 7 April and for the next two nights he was cheered by crowds who gathered outside his window. He may have been inspired by this display of support, but the republicans were all too aware that they were in a minority. They could count among their core supporters radical students and urban artisans, but the challenge was to reach the peasantry, who would play a vital role in the political decisions to come.

That any compromise between the republicans and the monarchists would be almost impossible to sustain was emphasised on 11 April when Charles Albert invited Mazzini to accept the monarchy in return for a role in drafting a democratic constitution for northern Italy. Mazzini rebuffed this overture with impossible demands of his own: ‘let Ch. Albert break openly every diplomatic tie, every connection with other princes: let him sign a proclamation to Italy for
absolute
unity, with Rome as a metropolis, and for an overthrow of all other Italian princes: we shall be soldiers under his banner:
se no, no
[if not, then no]'.
¹⁰³
Mazzini's adherence to the political truce was bitterly opposed by other republicans, including a repentant Cattaneo, who regarded Charles Albert as a reactionary, religious bigot whose impulses were even more oppressive than those of the Austrians. In a fit of frustration, Cattaneo went so far as to say that if he had to choose between Austrian and Piedmontese rule, he would opt for the former. The essential difference between Mazzini and Cattaneo lay in their priorities. Mazzini was willing to secure national unity even if that meant delaying the creation of a democratic republic. Cattaneo's loyalties were essentially to Lombardy, so he put winning political liberty there above the dream of national unity.
¹⁰⁴

While the republican opposition was weakened by infighting, the monarchists broke the political truce. The Piedmontese began to turn the screw on the Lombard moderates. On 16 April Count Di Castagnetto of the court of Turin wrote to Casati with a stern warning that the King was far from pleased with the republican shenanigans in Milan: ‘This, my dear Casati, is too much. The only talk at Milan apparently is of a republic; and they even want Genoa to go republican too. Bad faith comes into this, and so does foreign intrigue and foreign money.' He appealed to Casati to ‘save your country and mine! Save it a second time, for this danger is no less than that you overcame a month ago.'
¹⁰⁵
How the Lombard liberals were meant to save their country was becoming clear: it was expected that they were to put the question of ‘fusion' with Piedmont to a plebiscite. It was easily done: Milan's war committee had disbanded at the end of March and was replaced by a Lombard provisional government that included precious few republicans. On 12 May it hastily declared that a referendum would be held over the next seventeen days - and the question posed was simply over the timing of ‘fusion' - whether it should take place immediately or at the end of the war. No other option - be it a federation or a republic - was offered. The one concession that the republicans managed to wring from the provisional government was a promise that a constituent assembly would meet to discuss changes to the Piedmontese constitution - but even this promise angered the court in Turin. Mazzini, whose new newspaper
Italia del Popolo
rolled off the press for the first time on 13 May, immediately and roundly condemned both the breach of the political truce and the idea of a northern Italian kingdom.
¹⁰⁶
Such protests availed the republicans nothing. When the question was put to the Lombard peasantry, there seemed to be little choice: one observer wrote that the ‘fusionists'

 

As the voting drew towards a close, a despairing Cattaneo begged Mazzini to join him and other republicans in toppling Lombardy's provisional government. Mazzini, stubbornly true to the principles of legality, refused. On 29 May, the last day of voting, desperate Milanese democrats invaded the municipal chambers, but the civic guard stood firm.
Italia del Popolo
denounced the uprising: force, Mazzini urged, was no substitute for freedom of speech and persuasion and should not ‘interrupt the course of our pacific evangelism'.
¹⁰⁸
The result of the referendum was almost a foregone conclusion: since a vote against fusion would provoke a Piedmontese withdrawal from the war and expose Lombardy to the vengeance of the Austrians, most Lombards - including, if the voting figures are to be believed, many republicans - felt they had no choice but to fall into the immediate embrace of the Savoyard monarchy. With an overwhelming turnout of some 84 per cent of eligible voters, the results were unquestionably impressive: some 560,000 votes in favour of immediate fusion to fewer than 700 against. Milan was soon joined by the duchies of Parma and Modena in voting for annexation by Piedmont. Northern Italians now awaited the decision of Venice.
¹⁰⁹

The early decision by Milan to accept Charles Albert's support left Daniele Manin's Venice politically isolated. Rather than joining arms with a sister republic in Lombardy, the newly proclaimed Venetian republic was sitting uneasily alongside a region that had unambiguously declared for the Piedmontese monarchy. Manin tried to delay Venetia's decision by adopting the policy of
a causa vinta
, putting off political discussions until after the war. He hoped that this would encourage all the Italian states to stand shoulder to shoulder until the Austrians were expelled - and Venetia was very much in the front line of the fighting. He was bitterly opposed by his colleague and rival Nicolò Tommaseo, who, like Manin, did not trust Charles Albert, but who also had a firm faith in the sincerity of Pius IX and the promise of troops from the south. Yet the Neapolitan, Tuscan and papal troops were still a long way off, making their painfully slow marches northwards. Meanwhile, immediate military assistance was urgently required. Manin was virtual dictator of a state that had no army of its own and so required time to recruit and train its citizens. Meanwhile, as early as the end of March, there were reports of Austrian forces building up along the eastern border, under Count Laval Nugent. If Nugent managed to cut through rural Venetia and link up with Radetzky, who was licking his wounds in the Quadrilateral, then the Austrians could crush the Venetian republic with overwhelming force. Manin was therefore almost bound to swallow his republican scruples and go on bended knee to the Piedmontese, who were making their ponderous advance across Lombardy, heading for the Quadrilateral. If the Piedmontese could flush Radetzky out of Italy, then they could face Nugent separately and drive his rather hastily assembled, rag-tag army back into Croatia. It was therefore a race between Charles Albert and Nugent for the Quadrilateral. The latter began his advance on 17 April, reaching Udine after five days. This town was important for its command of the roads fanning out through the sparsely defended countryside of Venetia. When it capitulated after a nighttime bombardment, Manin was finally pushed into making a frantic appeal to Charles Albert: ‘In the name of Italy, of humanity, of justice, we demand immediate assistance.'
¹¹⁰

The best hope now for the Venetian republicans was that a united Italy would be a loose confederation in which Venice could coexist with the monarchical states, but it was highly unlikely that Charles Albert would accept such an outcome: the Piedmontese wanted nothing less than to annex successively Lombardy and then Venice as ‘another leaf of the Italian artichoke'.
¹¹¹
To Venetian delegates who appeared at the King's headquarters, the Piedmontese minister of war bluntly declared that ‘Piedmont cannot be inspired by a purely chivalrous spirit and awaits some recompense for its great sacrifices'. The minister did not spell out what such compensation should be, but it was made obvious that the price was to be ‘fusion'. Manin initially baulked at this heavy cost, but as news of one military setback followed another, monarchist propaganda began to hit home. Believing that Manin's republican intransigence was jeopardising the promise of Piedmontese help, the people of the
terra firma
began to turn against the city itself. In Padua anti-Venetian slogans were painted on walls, while the provincial committee in Rovigo refused to send taxes to Venice because the great city was ‘isolating itself from the rest of Italy'. While the poorer sections of the city supported Manin, the mass of the middle classes and the nobility leaned towards Charles Albert, both for his promise of troops and in the hope that he would prevent further revolution at the hands of the republicans. Some provincial committees in the region spontaneously held their own local plebiscites for fusion, which Manin desperately tried to counter by sending republican speakers out to the countryside to dissuade the locals from taking such a drastic step. But the republicans were ignored, and province after province voted in favour of fusion. By 5 June the advancing Austrian army and the provinces acquiescing to annexation by Piedmont had together reduced Manin's republic to Venice itself and its lagoon. On 4 July the Venetian Constituent assembly, elected on 9-10 June, also agreed to the ‘fusion'. Nominally, at least, all of northern Italy was now a united kingdom.
¹¹²

This Piedmontese stripping of the artichoke excited the jealousy and animosity of other Italian princes. Shortly before Charles Albert decided on war, Piedmont's putative allies, the Tuscans, sent in troops to seize a strip of territory linking the Duchy of Modena to the sea, as well as the small, formerly independent state of Massa and Carrara. Charles Albert had clearly been eyeing these lands hungrily himself, for the Tuscan volunteers skirmished with Piedmontese troops. In a later incident, when Tuscany and Piedmont were theoretically on the same side, the Piedmontese refused to assist a small Tuscan unit that had been overwhelmed by the Austrians.
¹¹³

Throughout the peninsula, the movement for unification itself proved to be fragile, and it began to fragment as different states pursued their own interests rather than the goal of national unity. Moreover, not all revolutionaries envisaged an Italy forged into a single, unitary state along the lines imagined by Mazzini. Cattaneo fought above all for a republic in Lombardy, while even the Piedmontese, who stood to gain most from the war, worried that their capital, Turin, would lose its pre-eminence to Milan. Venice was accused of putting its local republicanism above the Italian cause: Manin himself unfurled the banner of the Venetian republic because he knew the revolution would receive wider support among Venetians if he evoked the ancient ‘Republic of Saint Mark', which - to Manin's regret - had been the main battle cry of the Venetian revolutionaries in the March days. The Sicilians, too, were more concerned for their local autonomy than for the national struggle. The parliament that opened in Palermo on 25 March proclaimed that the ancient rights of the island were restored, but that it would be willing to form part of an Italian federation. In the end the islanders had to devote more energy to their struggle to defend their independence from Naples than to the wider fight for unification. Italian patriots later accused Sicily of waging a separatist ‘civil war' while the cause of Italian unity floundered.

But the first significant blow to the struggle for independence was the Pope's withdrawal from the conflict. Pius rapidly regretted his decision to send troops against the devoutly Catholic Habsburgs, an action that might have caused a schism within the Church. He was shoved decisively against the war on 5 April when Durando issued an order that left him with little choice but to act as pontiff rather than as an Italian patriot. In a tactless proclamation penned by Massimo d'Azeglio, Durando summoned his men to nothing less than a holy war: Pius, he shockingly declared, ‘has blessed your swords which . . . are to exterminate the enemies of God and of Italy . . . Such a war is not merely national, but highly Christian.'
¹¹⁴
The intoxicating blend of religion and nationalism was an inspiring, lethal and insidious cocktail. It was more than Pius could stomach. He had carefully avoided any formal declaration of war (which would have run against his role as Pope), yet now Durando had not only openly proclaimed war on Austria, making the Pope appear to be the aggressor, but had shouted from the rooftops that Catholic Austria and its Catholic soldiers were ‘enemies of God'. Pius soon heard that the German bishops were reacting angrily and the feared schism seemed to be looming. After more than a fortnight of angry debate, Durando, disobeying orders, crossed the frontier on 22 April. The Pope could not stop him, but he could disavow him. On 29 April Pius issued an ‘allocution' in which he repudiated ‘the treacherous advice . . . of those who would have the Roman Pontiff to be the head and to preside over the formation of some sort of novel republic of the whole Italian people'.
¹¹⁵
He also informed the other princes that he was abandoning his project for a league of Italian states. The ‘liberal' Pope had set off on a path that would lead him to repudiate unification and liberalism altogether: it was a parting of ways between Italian nationalism and Roman Catholicism that would endure until the twentieth century. The reaction in Rome was one of stunned disbelief giving way slowly to anger: one flabbergasted republican growled that ‘the Papacy is unchangeable, it is the chief enemy of Italy, and Rome must not suffer it any longer'.
¹¹⁶