Read The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara Online
Authors: David I. Kertzer
In the words of a Bolognese journalist, looking back on the case a half century later, the taking of Edgardo Mortara constituted the coup de grâce for the pontifical government. In fine patriotic fashion, the journalist attributes this not to the impact that the case had on the French but to its effects on liberals and Freemasons in Italy itself, for whom papal rule was already largely discredited.
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French journalists, on the other hand, who portrayed the Mortara case as the straw that broke the back of papal rule, focused on its impact on French public opinion. An article in
L’Espérance
published in the wake of the fall of the Legations, at the dawn of 1860, reported, no doubt hyperbolically, that there was not a single French soldier who, returning to his natal village, did not tell the tale of the little Jewish boy who had been stolen from his parents.
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Nor is this view of the impact of the Mortara case limited to journalists or boosters of Italy’s minuscule Jewish community. Arturo Carlo Jemolo, the foremost historian of Church-state relations in Italy, cites Pope Pius IX’s actions in the Mortara affair as among the most significant of his papacy, a papacy that was one of the most consequential in Church history. Jemolo lists the Mortara case alongside the Pope’s 1864 proclamation of the
Syllabus of Errors,
the Church’s famed rejection of modernity, and his convening of the First Vatican Council in 1869–70, at which papal infallibility was made Church dogma, as the principal actions that signaled the Pope’s philosophy to the wider world. It was a philosophy that fatefully undermined the inclination of constitutional Catholic governments to come to the aid of the Holy See.
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Pius IX’s principal biographers similarly make the connection between his handling of the Mortara affair in 1858 and his loss of most of his earthly kingdom the following year. “In a broader historical perspective,” writes Giacomo Martina, the Pope’s most distinguished Italian biographer, “the Mortara case shows Pius IX’s profound zeal, his firmness in doing what he took to be his precise duty, even at the cost of losing his popularity, his still largely intact prestige, and, above all, French support for his temporal power.”
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The premonition that major changes were on the way had kept the people of Bologna in a state of anxious excitement for months. The city was no stranger to revolts against papal rule, nor to the realization that battles waged farther north might decide their own fate. Although Bologna’s famous university was under pontifical rule, its students remained a potentially seditious lot.
In mid-April 1859, when a lecture on Napoleon Bonaparte was scheduled, a great crowd of students packed the hall, excited by the prospect that Bonaparte’s nephew might soon be leading the way toward Italian unification. Appalled by the sight, authorities advised the lecturer—a priest—not to hold
the class, and a squad of papal police, their swords drawn, descended on the assembled students to disperse them. Bologna’s liberal diarist Enrico Bottrigari describes the encounter: “ ‘Get out of here, you ugly swine! Out, dogs!’ These were the words uttered by these brutal soldiers, who, not satisfied with their insults, began to beat and wound these unarmed youths with the blades and the tips of their swords.” As the students fled the hall, they found two more columns of gendarmes waiting for them, under the command of the mastermind of the operation, Colonel De Dominicis.
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On the night of June 12, 1859, at 3 a.m., Austrian troops, having been stationed continuously in Bologna ever since they put down the revolt of 1848–49, marched out of the city. A group of local notables—identified with the National Society that sought Bologna’s annexation to the kingdom of Sardinia—met in the middle of the night with the Cardinal Legate. Cardinal Milesi was still hoping somehow to hold on to power, although he must have realized that the cause was, at least in the short term, lost. Embarrassingly, in the city ruled for more than two and a half centuries by papal authorities, absolutely no one tried to prevent the overthrow of the pontifical regime.
At 6 a.m., Piazza Maggiore, outside the Palazzo Comunale, began to fill up and, urged on by members of the National Society, the people waved tricolored banners and took up the chant: Viva l’Italia! Viva Vittorio Emanuele! Viva the War of Independence! Viva Napoleone III! Viva la France! Cavour! Garibaldi! The city band hurriedly assembled, pumping out stirring war songs and patriotic hymns. From the windows looking out onto the piazza, women waved white kerchiefs and hung the national colors from their sills. A group of men climbed the face of the Palazzo Comunale and, to the crowd’s delight, tore down the papal insignia, substituting the Italian flag imprinted with the cross of the House of Savoy. Papal rule had fallen. But it had fallen other times in recent memory. No one could be sure it would not rise again.
Cardinal Milesi, whom Edgardo’s uncles had so desperately sought out the previous year, finally recognized that he would have to go. At 9 a.m., guarded by a squad of papal soldiers, he was allowed to leave the Palazzo Comunale unmolested. Just before departing, he issued a proclamation, his last: “Bolognesi. The Austrian garrison has left this city. This does not, however, mean the end of the solemn agreements by which the Sovereignty of the Holy Father is guaranteed by both of the Catholic Emperors who are now belligerents [i.e., Austria and France].” The Legate concluded: “I appeal to the good sense of this city and province. All those who love order join me to maintain and defend it. And it will be maintained, if the first and most sacred of rights—that of the Prince, the Holy Father—is respected.”
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In response to this appeal, members of the hastily assembled provisional government of Bologna proclaimed the city’s adherence to the “War of
Independence” and their desire to have Bologna annexed to the Kingdom of Sardinia. That night, homes throughout the city were ablaze with candles and gaslights celebrating the end of papal rule, and huge crowds gathered, caught up in the festivities. The city band marched through the streets, trailed by a line of men holding flaming torches aloft to light the way, with the chords of popular tunes rumbling through the air.
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The day of the Austrians’ departure was the Sunday of Pentecost, the day of Confirmation. Notwithstanding the mayhem, the city’s children who were scheduled to be confirmed that year, dressed in white, gathered in Bologna’s cathedral. The children saw a strange, almost surreal sight, as one such child recalled years later.
Alberto Dallolio first noticed that something odd was happening when he and his grandfather, hand in hand, passed near the central piazza on their way to the cathedral. A rowdy procession was moving toward them, shouting—in obvious joy—muffled words whose meaning the boy could not make out. A boisterous man led them, waving a large flag and heading toward the piazza. When they passed, one of the men stopped Alberto’s grandfather and pulled something out of a box he carried. It was a little, brightly colored ribbon, which the man attached to the buttonhole of the grandfather’s jacket. He then turned to the boy and fastened the tricolored cockade to him as well. Wearing the cockade on his confirmation suit, Alberto entered San Pietro cathedral. Who knows, he later wrote, what a disagreeable impression he must have made on Cardinal Viale-Prelà as he did so.
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The Archbishop indeed found himself in an impossible position, one that was deeply galling. Although the Cardinal Legate might flee, he could not. He was pastor of the flock, responsible for the souls of all those in his diocese. He was urgently needed where he was, to defend a Church and a Pope under merciless attack.
On the very day of the Austrian departure, a delegation of noblemen and others from the provisional government met with the Archbishop to assure him that he would not be harmed, nor would he be prevented from exercising his religious duties. But Cardinal Viale-Prelà was not won over. The new governors were illegitimate usurpers of papal authority, and he could not recognize their right to rule. The Cardinal’s newspaper,
L’osservatore bolognese,
centerpiece of his campaign for religious renewal, was closed down by the new government, charged with subversion.
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The Archbishop’s first acts of defiance were fueled by the deep repugnance he felt toward the rebels and the sacrilege they were committing against the Church. But his efforts were sustained as well by the hope that a day of reckoning might soon come when the proper order would be restored and the rebels would receive their just deserts. In Rome, as news of one setback after
another came in, Cardinal Antonelli continued to place events of 1859 in the mold that had been established for him by the revolt of a decade before. A month after the fall of Bologna, the British military attaché, Odo Russell, reported in a letter to London:
The Cardinal Secretary of State, who is also Minister of War, told me yesterday that at the beginning of the year the Papal army numbered about 8000 men: 2500 had deserted to join the Piedmontese army so that the army of His Holiness was now reduced to about 5500 men. His Eminence was organizing new regiments and recruitment was carried on with great energy so as to bring the Papal army to its normal condition which was 14,000 men.
This was to be effected by the end of the year and Cardinal Antonelli assured me that he sincerely hoped he could by that time insist on the withdrawal of the French army of occupation from Rome and Civitavecchia—a measure he now had more than ever at heart. The French Government had obtained from King Victor Emmanuel the recall of Marquis d’Azeglio from Bologna. The next step, he hoped, would be the withdrawal of the Piedmontese troops from the Legations, and once they were free, His Eminence foresaw no difficulty in attacking and reconquering those rebellious provinces. At the request of the Emperor he had given up the idea of breaking off diplomatic relations with Sardinia and in return he expected France would keep order on this side of the Apennines while the Papal troops effected the submission of the Legations.
Cardinal Antonelli seemed very sanguine as to success of these measures. Perhaps His Eminence is not aware that the Emperor’s positive orders to General Goyon at the commencement of the war were to maintain order in and about Rome, but in no way to interfere in any other portion of the Papal States.
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In fact, the arrival of Massimo d’Azeglio, sent to Romagna as emissary of the Kingdom of Sardinia, had triggered a new confrontation with Cardinal Viale-Prelà, for he viewed it as the first step toward annexation, recognition by King Victor Emmanuel II that Bologna and all Romagna were part of his expanded kingdom. Two years after crowds had lined the streets leading into the city to catch an eager glimpse of the Pope’s triumphal entry, they reappeared to welcome D’Azeglio. His horse-drawn carriage made its slow way through the flag-draped city streets as a shower of flowers and garlands rained down from the windows. By the time the carriage had reached Piazza Maggiore, it was so covered with flowers that the Marquis could barely be seen. Behind him marched a long line of militiamen—many mustered as quickly into the new service as they had been unceremoniously mustered out of the
old—followed by officials of the new provisional government, trailed by hundreds of carriages carrying Bologna’s elite, paying tribute to the new rulers.
Repeating Pius IX’s gesture of two years before, the Marquis entered the Palazzo Comunale and climbed to the window overlooking the throbbing piazza. To the right, he saw the majestic facade of San Petronio, lit by six huge candelabra and adorned with banners and wreaths. To his left was the medieval Palazzo del Podestà, washed in shadowy light by the flickering flames that burned in a huge pot on its roof. Amidst those flames stood eight placards, each bearing the name of a recent victorious battle waged by the allies along with the insignia of the House of Savoy. On the far side of the piazza, the banners of Bologna and of Savoy hung together, alongside the Italian and French flags, while in the middle of the piazza stood a bust of the King—pathetically small, given the grandeur of the piazza and the splendor of the occasion, but the best that the patriotic artist could come up with on such short notice. The aroused multitude, viscerally moved by the spectacle of so much light after nightfall and by the sounds of the four military bands and the cheers of their delirious compatriots, shouted for D’Azeglio to come out and address them. The Marquis, amazed at the sight, walked onto the balcony and waved to the crowd.
Amidst the lights of the city, one large palazzo, that of the Archbishop, remained conspicuously dark. The gesture did not go unnoticed. Angry crowds made their way to his courtyard, hurling insults and muttering profanities. When at last they were driven out by the police, they left behind a grove of candles to illuminate the buildings.
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Accustomed to reading
L’osservatore bolognese, Il vero amico,
and other papers reporting local news through ecclesiastical eyes, the people of Bologna soon found themselves getting a very different picture. New papers sprang up, singing the virtues of the Savoyard king and praising the courageous soldiers of national unification. Anticlerical sentiment—indigenous to Bologna and Romagna, where the Church had long been identified with autocratic rule—was overnight transformed from furtive mutterings into black-and-white, official-looking declarations.
On August 17, for example, Bologna’s new
Gazzetta del popolo
addressed the rural peasants, who, it was feared, were especially susceptible to the clergy’s cries of alarm. “Your Priests have deceived themselves, and they deceive and hurt you immensely by speaking constantly against the new government.… Did the Pope’s government ever make you happy?” asked the correspondent. He continued: The Pope, in an attempt to hold on to his kingdom, and the priests, out of ignorance, claimed that papal rule was necessary for the Pontiff’s free exercise of his spiritual duties. “But we can ask, just how is it that a sovereign is free in his rule when he relies on some other power
to keep him on the throne?” And wasn’t it Jesus himself who said, “My reign is not of this earth?… Perhaps our religion isn’t exercised freely in Piedmont? The Priests say it isn’t. But how dare they utter such a lie? In Piedmont there are more priests than there are here, and more beautiful churches, and everyone goes to mass when they like.” Warming to the theme, and styling himself as the true defender of the message of Christ, the indignant correspondent concluded: “How dare the representative of Jesus Christ tell such lies so that he can continue to hold wealth and lands, and what is worse, wealth and lands that are not his. How dare he excommunicate people because they have taken from him that which he has no right to have.… Shame! Shame! don’t you see that the Pope is deceiving you?”
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