1848 (54 page)

That assault came as the aftershock of the war between Piedmont and Austria, which was rekindled in March. Charles Albert had many reasons for taking up the cudgel again. Domestically, he faced intense pressure from the democrats, who after Custozza appeared to be the only dedicated and persistent supporters of Italian independence. It was to calm the domestic political opposition, to salve his own bruised pride and to efface the humiliation of the previous year that, now supported even by moderates, he repudiated the armistice on 12 March. The British and French had tried to mediate and turn the truce into a lasting peace, but neither Austria nor Piedmont was willing to relinquish its claims to Lombardy. On the outbreak of war, the fledgling Roman republic offered to place its fifteen-thousand-strong force under Charles Albert's orders, but the offer from a bunch of republican usurpers was turned down scornfully by the monarch. This was to be - more nakedly than in 1848 - a war of dynastic expansion. So hostile was the Piedmontese leadership to the republicans that some, such as the liberal politician Count Camillo di Cavour (who would become one of the central figures of nineteenth-century Italy), argued that an Austrian victory in the coming war would be preferable to a triumph in which the likes of Mazzini had a share of the spoils.
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Cavour should have been careful what he wished for. The campaign was embarrassingly brief. The Piedmontese had an army of eighty thousand, but many of the men had been hastily recruited and were still untrained. They were no match for the hardened, professional Austrians, nor for the steely Radetzky, who routed them at the battle of Novara on 23 March. As his dreams fell to dust around him, Charles Albert rode into the thick of the fighting, unsuccessfully trying to die heroically (‘even death has cast me off', he bitterly observed). Back in Turin, he was threatened with the loss of his throne, because he was faced by the twin prospects of the Austrians overrunning his kingdom and a democratic uprising. There was an insurrection in Genoa (as fractious as ever), set off by the false rumour that Charles Albert had rejected the constitution and signed over the port to the Austrians. The revolt was crushed by the same army units that had retreated from Novara. They fought bitterly in the streets for two days and then bombarded the city, which capitulated on 10 April. The King chose to pre-empt any further disaster for his dynasty by abdicating in favour of his son, Victor Emmanuel II. After considerable debate in parliament, an armistice was accepted: the terms were fairly generous, not least because Radetzky had the desire neither to fan further the flames of Italian republicanism nor to provoke French intervention. In the final peace treaty Piedmontese territory was left intact, the Piedmontese had to pay a war indemnity of 75 million lire (the Austrians had initially demanded 230 million), and Victor Emmanuel promised to make no claim to territory outside his own kingdom. The Austrians agreed to amnesty all but a hundred of the most incorrigible Venetian and Lombard revolutionaries - a clause that the Piedmontese parliament, to its credit, tried to neuter by naturalising all those who were excluded from the amnesty.

The Piedmontese state therefore emerged from the crisis relatively unscathed. Most significantly, the new king promised his subjects that he would uphold the
statuto
granted by his father. This made the Sardinian monarchy unique in Italy in that it remained constitutional even after the revolutionary torrent had subsided. For the bruised Italian nationalists of the 1850s, this very fact would give Piedmont, already the premier military state in Italy, a strong claim to both moral and political leadership in Italian unification. Victor Emmanuel himself declared, ‘I will hold the tricolour high and firm,' while Massimo D'Azeglio, his cerebral prime minister, appointed in May 1849, stated, ‘I am Premier to save the independence of this fort of Italy'
²⁶
- a reference to Piedmont as the putative nucleus of a united Italian kingdom.

With the Piedmontese disaster, Tuscany was suddenly left horribly exposed to the vengeance of the Habsburgs. Guerrazzi now knew that his only task was to save Tuscany from an Austrian invasion. On 27 March, he rose in the Constituent Assembly and openly renounced the earlier proclamation of the republic in an effort to prepare the ground for a peaceful restoration of the Grand Duke. Montanelli then had the Assembly elect Guerrazzi dictator before he himself wisely left the country. Guerrazzi used his powers to try to stamp order on the counter-revolution in the countryside and to prepare the country for the inevitable invasion, but he negotiated in vain with the moderates over the terms of Leopold's return. Matters came to a head on 11 April when the Florentines rioted outside the church of Santa Maria Novella against the swaggering, brutal behaviour of volunteers from Livorno brought into the city by Guerrazzi. The moderates harnessed the outpouring of popular anger and led the peasantry from the surrounding countryside into the city. The city council, which had remained in moderate hands, declared that it was now the Grand Duke's provisional government. The Constituent Assembly was expelled from the Palazzo Vecchio. Guerrazzi, pursued by a crowd baying for his blood, surrendered himself to the protection of the new interim government. None of this saved Tuscany from invasion: on 26 April fifteen thousand Austrian troops streamed into the grand duchy. Leopold did not even return on their coat-tails, but pointedly took his time, waiting until July before resuming his place over his cowed subjects.

Novara galvanised the Roman republic, where Mazzini finally came to power. It would be his only practical experience of government, and it lasted only a hundred days.
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He had arrived in Rome in early March ‘with a deep sense of awe, almost of worship . . . I felt an electric thrill run through me - a spring of new life.'
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Soon he relaunched his newspaper,
Italia del Popolo
, calling on all patriotic Italians, of whatever political stripe, to unite and confront their enemies. He was therefore dismayed to learn of the crushing of the Genoese insurrection by the Piedmontese army. The republicans in Rome had been preparing to wage war against Naples, in an attempt to spread their revolutionary message to the allegedly benighted population of the south. Now news of the Piedmontese rout forced the Romans to look anxiously northwards. The Constituent Assembly appointed a new emergency government, a triumvirate consisting of Mazzini, the lawyer Carlo Armellini and a Romagnol radical, Aurelio Saffi. Their wide mandate was to prepare for war against Austria and to secure the republic. Mazzini, in particular, exercised his power with considerable care: even his critics had to admit that he was moderate, hardworking and at times even wise. Unlike Rome's former rulers, he lived simply, unguarded in a single room, and remained accessible to all citizens: he ate in a local
trattoria
where he could be approached by all and sundry.

His actions were driven by a sense that the republic almost certainly would not survive, but that it had to be remembered for posterity. ‘We must', he told the Constituent Assembly, ‘act like men who have the enemy at their gates, and at the same time like men who are working for eternity.'
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These sentiments seemed to run through the triumvir's actions during his hundred days in power. Religious belief and practice were protected in a republic which, in the circumstances, could have unleashed a wave of anti-clerical and anti-religious violence. There were certainly some horrifying murders, but they were not sponsored by the government - or even justified by it after the fact. When a particularly bloodthirsty extremist named Callimaco Zambianchi and his small gang of followers shot a friar and then slaughtered six residents of a convent in the slums of Trastevere, he was arrested by the authorities. In Ancona, where the violence was more widespread, the government's commissioner, Felice Orsini (later to gain notoriety - and be guillotined - for trying to assassinate Napoleon III with a bomb in 1858), cracked down hard (ironically enough) on the ‘terrorists'. The Inquisition and censorship were abolished, the ecclesiastical courts were replaced by secular ones and the Church's grip on education was loosened. Some church property was confiscated to shelter the homeless and taxation was structured to help fund poor relief. All this was desperately needed, since after Rossi's murder many of Rome's wealthier families had fled, so the tradesmen and artisans whom they usually patronised suddenly faced unemployment. Yet Mazzini worked hard to protect Catholic sensibilities, ostentatiously attending Easter Mass in Saint Peter's, as the republic proclaimed religious toleration for all faiths.

For ordinary citizens, the streets of Rome felt safer now than they had been under the Pope - and this under a democratic regime that had just abolished the death penalty. None of this added up to the accusations of Mazzini being a ‘communist' or (as Cavour put it) a latter-day Robespierre. ‘No war of classes, no hostility to existing wealth . . . but a constant disposition to ameliorate the material condition of the classes least favoured by fortune' ran the triumvirate's programme of 5 April.
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Those who met Mazzini in those days were impressed: the American consul, Lewis Cass, described him as ‘a man of great integrity of character and of extensive intellectual acquirements'.
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An astonished Ferdinand de Lesseps, the French envoy sent to Rome in May, noted that there were even plenty of devout Catholics who certainly wanted to see the Pope return to the Vatican, but only as a religious leader, not as an absolute monarch. Nevertheless, the republic would not last. It was destroyed not, as initially expected, by an Austrian invasion, but by a French assault on Rome. In a cruel twist, throughout 1848-9 the Italian republicans had yearned for French intervention to save them. Eventually it arrived, but it was not on the side of the revolution.

The idea of a foreign invasion to restore the Pope had been mooted almost from the moment when Pius had fled to Gaeta. In February Cardinal Antonelli had proposed that the Catholic powers of Naples, Spain and Austria, possibly joined by France, should jointly occupy the Papal States. King Ferdinand, enthusiastic reactionary that he was, had already assembled his forces on his northern frontier. The Austrians had retaken Ferrara and were contemplating another assault on Bologna. Spain was marshalling a seaborne expedition. The attitude of the French was uncertain. On learning of Novara, President Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte at first wanted to fight against the Austrians. Much as conservative opinion in France sympathised with the Pope, it was still patriotic enough to fear and despise Austrian power. At the end of March, the National Assembly approved a six-thousand-strong French force under General Nicolas Oudinot to occupy Rome's port, Civita Vecchia, but not to march on the city itself unless he was certain that his approach would not be received by hot lead. Ostensibly, the mission was to protect Rome from an Austrian attack, but Bonaparte had issued Oudinot with secret orders for the Roman republic to be crushed. By doing this, the president was consolidating his conservative base by appealing to the sensibilities of the French Catholic right. The French troops disembarked on 24 April. Six days later, they marched on the Vatican, but assorted Italian democrats - with up to nine thousand men commanded by, among others, Garibaldi - beat them back, causing considerable carnage: the French lost five hundred dead and wounded.

Although Oudinot brazenly claimed that this disastrous operation had merely been a ‘reconnaissance' and a ‘gloriously executed' one at that,
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the defeat was deeply embarrassing to Louis-Napoleon, whose fundamental resonance with the French electorate was associated with the military glories of his uncle. He was now under political pressure, facing a National Assembly that was overtly hostile to Oudinot's ‘new' mission. On 7 May, in a republican charge led by the lawyer Jules Favre, the government's policy was rejected by the Assembly. Yet fresh elections gave Bonaparte the conservative majority he desired. Moreover, it was becoming clear that, unless he moved quickly, he would be denied his victory because the Austrians, Spanish and Neapolitans were on the move. The Austrians threw themselves against Bologna on 8 May and, after eight days of fighting, broke the city's resistance under the weight of a bombardment. They then marched down to Ancona, laying siege to the port. The French were anxious that the hated Austrians would soon grab the jewel of Rome: Thiers later remarked that ‘to know that the Austrian flag was flying on the Castle of Saint Angelo is a humiliation under which no Frenchman could bear to exist'. Among those who agreed was the new French foreign minister, none other than Alexis de Tocqueville, who had taken office on 2 June and for whom it was essential to assert France's presence as a great power.
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Action appeared to be all the more urgent because the Spanish had embarked some five thousand men bound for Fiumicino. The Neapolitans had also struck, occupying the countryside around Palestrina, but they were routed by Garibaldi at Velletri on 19 May. As Ferdinand's broken troops tumbled back across the frontier, those who had seen Garibaldi in his distinctive shirt described him as a bullet-proof ‘red devil'. It was time for the French to make their move, so their peace envoy, de Lesseps, was recalled. Oudinot was furnished with new and ominous hardware: heavy siege guns were seen being hauled ashore at Civita Vecchia.

The coming fight would be hopelessly unequal: Oudinot now had thirty thousand men ranged against Rome's determined but motley force of sixteen thousand loyal regulars,
carabinieri
, civic guards, citizen volunteers and, of course, Garibaldi's men, some of whom had been with him since South America. Having been badly burned in April, Oudinot changed the focus of his assault to the Janiculum Hill, a long ridge along which ran the city's western defences. From there, he could mount artillery and rain shells on to Rome with impunity, which was precisely why Garibaldi's defence of this position was so determined and desperate. In the early hours of 3 June French troops swooped on the Italian outposts, the Pamfili and Corsini villas. The former was taken easily, but the Corsini, whose position on a knoll gave it a commanding view of the San Pancrazio city gate, was shattered by cannon fire and musketry after some sixteen hours of relentless combat. By the end of the fighting on 4 June the Italians had lost at least 550 killed and wounded, many in the narrow hornets' nest of the road between the Porta San Pancrazio and the Corsini, which had fallen to the French. Only the Vascello, a building on that same road, held out, supported by the Italian guns mounted on the city walls.