A. The French Revolution
At the end of the eighteenth century the political, social, and economic order of Western Europe was ready to explode. Unrest in Paris in 1789 became a revolution, and the revolution became the spark that changed the world forever.
Italy in 1789 was a political, social, and economic backwater that Metternich would later dismiss as just a geographical expression. But it too was ripe for change. The Church and a few wealthy and noble families controlled the peninsula, as they had since the Middle Ages. There was no middle class of any significance; an aristocracy ruled, though Genoa and Venice were nominal republics.
It was the small middle class of Paris that touched off the French Revolution. At its start it was not a democratic movement; it was an attempt by the middle class to get a share of the power and prestige enjoyed by the nobility and the clergy. The Declaration of the Rights of Man stressed the rights of property as much as it did liberty.
But the middle class did not control the streets of Paris. The lower class, the great mass of the people, began its own revolution alongside the middle classes, and it was far more radical. For the masses, all of the upper classes, the Church included, were the oppressors and became the targets of the revolution. The middle class provided the leadership, but the people provided the power that radicalised the French Revolution and brought on the Republic, the Reign of Terror, and the executions of the king, the queen, and thousands of nobles, clergy, and private citizens. Christianity itself (apart from such abuses as individual churchmen committed) was rated as an enemy of the people – of liberty, equality, and fraternity. The Goddess Reason replaced Christ. A new calendar, dating 1792 as Year I, replaced the Christian calendar. A new political order, the republic of all the citizens, replaced the ancien regime of King, Church, and Nobility.
The monarchs of Europe took note and were alarmed for themselves and their own nations. They declared war on the French Revolution. Europe was to be at war from 1793 till 1815, one side trying to export the Revolution (or later, Napoleon’s tyranny), the other side trying to stamp it out.
It was the threat to the Revolution that propelled Napoleon to power. Before he was thirty, he was a general with a proven ability to defeat France’s enemies and a charismatic ability to inspire the troops. His first victories were won in northern Italy at the expense of the Austrians and their Piedmontese allies. From 1796 until 1814 the French controlled northern Italy. They proved to be hard masters, depleting the country of money, art, livestock, produce, and able-bodied men. At least forty-five thousand Italians died in Napoleon’s Russian and Spanish campaigns. But the French also brought something for Italy: change.
Napoleon linked the city-states of northern Italy into the form of a republic. The form was artificial and temporary, but the ideas of unity and of shared political power were planted. Later, when France took over the government of the whole peninsula, the traditional bureaucratic government was shaken up. Aristocracy was tossed out, and merit was led in; an efficient government administered justice, built roads and bridges, and supported education. The internal customs barriers came down, diverse legal systems were codified, the remnants of feudalism were abolished, and so were aristocratic and ecclesiastical privileges. Vast estates belonging to the Church were confiscated, broken into parcels, and sold. Therefore, wrote Sir J A R Marriott, among the makers of modern Italy, Napoleon holds a foremost place.”21”
The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic influences on Italy, northern and central Italy particularly, produced a movement that embodied nationalism and economic and social reform. It also included anti-Christian elements; but initially these did not dominate it, nor was the movement’s eventual anticlericalism inevitable. This complex movement took the name Risorgimento, and it lasted from the Congress of Vienna until the capture of Rome by Italian forces in 1870. One could even say that it lasted until 1918, when the postwar settlement awarded the Trentino and Istria to Italy at the expense of the defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire, or until 1929, when the Lateran Treaty at last resolved the relationship between the new Italian State and the Papacy.
The Risorgimento stood for a unified national state for all Italians; the elimination of foreign domination, whether by the French or the Austrians; the modernisation of the economy; universal education; a broadening of the base of political power by enfranchising the educated middle class of merchants and industrialists, professors, writers, minor clergy and military officers, and civil servants, if not all classes of the people; recognition of fundamental civil rights such as freedom of speech, of the press, and of religion; and a reduction of the economic, social, and political power of the Catholic Church.
The British, Prussian, Austrian, and Russian alliance brought Napoleon down in 1814 and then assembled its diplomats in Vienna to try to put Europe back together. The Congress of Vienna met from November 1814 until June 1815. In March, Napoleon fled Elba, returned to power in France, and was finally crushed at Waterloo in June.
B. The Restoration of the Old Order
The Congress of Vienna was dominated by its host, Austrian foreign minister Prince Metternich (1773-1859). Metternich, in turn, was dominated by two ideas: restoring the pre-1789 European order, and maintaining the balance of power among the European states, i.e. the four victorious allies and France. Lesser states such as Piedmont, Spain, and the Papal States would have to respect the wishes of the major powers. No power should grow either too powerful or too weak. The Revolution and all its fruits must be obliterated. Republicanism meant mob rule, terror, and war; the Old Regime meant order, peace, and prosperity.
And so the statesmen of Vienna decreed that the genie should return to its bottle. Royal dynasties and old borders should be restored, with due compensations being made to the victors, of course.
The Austrians reclaimed their former province of Lombardy; the better to secure it – and to obliterate a reminder of 1789 – they also grabbed the ancient republic of Venice and incorporated it into their empire. These two provinces were the economic and strategic prizes of all Italy. From them the Austrians could ensure that the rest of the Italians behaved. In the next forty years, the two provinces would provide the Austrian Empire with about one-third of its revenues, though they were only about an eighth of its territory. (Austrian puppets were established in the duchies of Parma, Modena, and Tuscany.)
The papal government of Pius VII (reigned 1800-1823) was restored in the States of the Church, but the Austrians kept garrisons in Ferrara and Bologna. The Bourbons returned to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies (Sicily and southern Italy, with Naples as capital). And the house of Savoy, under King Victor Emmanuel I (reigned 1802-1821), returned to the Kingdom of Sardinia, which included Savoy, Piedmont, Sardinia, and Nice, with Turin as the capital. To complete, nearly, the abolition of any trace of republicanism, Liguria was also granted to Sardinia, and Genoa’s centuries-old independence came to an end. (The insignificant republic of San Marino survived the massacre, as it later survived the Risorgimento; for that, stamp collectors are ever grateful.)
Into this world John Bosco was born eight weeks after Waterloo. He grew up in the religious and social world of the Restoration. The first twenty-nine years of his priestly ministry in the Sardinian capital were spent in the feverish world of the Risorgimento, and the last eighteen coped with its effects in Church and State (as well as with the tensions of French politics in the Third Republic).
Victor Emmanuel resolved on a thorough restoration. If powdered wigs and tricorn hats were worn in 1789, so they would in 1815. If the French had reformed the laws, their laws would be annulled. If the French had built bridges, their bridges would be blown up. (One bridge over the Po was spared; the queen used it to drive to the royal summer house.) If the Church had been robbed of its rights and its lands, the rights at least would be given back (not much land was). Competent civil servants under the French, such as Michele Cavour (see chapters 37 and 41), had to go, and the king’s men had to come, regardless of their incompetence. The nobility required royal permission to read foreign newspapers. Protective tariffs went up again.
Some of the more liberal Piedmontese intellectuals chose exile over such a stifling environment. Massimo d’Azeglio and Silvio Pellico, for instance, found even Austrian-ruled Milan preferable. Others like Cesare Balbo, Luigi Provana, and Santorre di Santarosa laid low until better times should come. Younger army officers were alienated by royal interference and the preference given to royal favourites.
But the Piedmontese were generally tolerant of the royal nonsense. Indeed, in Piedmont as elsewhere in Europe, people were ready for peace, order, respect for religion, and an end to French taxation and conscription. But Metternich was not fooled into complacency. Of all the Italian governments, he wrote to his emperor in 1817, the Piedmontese is indisputably the one which calls for the most anxious attention. This country unites in itself all the different elements of discontent.”22” It was only a matter of time before the educated men of the middle class realised that the Restoration meant economic and social stagnation and their own exclusion from political power.
The Church, having been restored to its traditional powers and privileges, fully supported the restored monarchs and the ancient order. The Church had its own legal system for trying clerics (regardless of the alleged crimes) and for handling various matters such as marriage. The Church controlled education. Both Church and State censored the press and the stage. The State used its political power to support the Church, and the Church used its moral force to support the State.
Besides this wedding of throne and altar, the Church enjoyed a privileged social position. In 1854 Sardinia had a population of five million. There were forty-one dioceses, five hundred religious houses, fourteen hundred canonries, and eighteen thousand monks and nuns. All in all, one person in every 214 was an ecclesiastic.”23” The Napoleonic era notwithstanding, the Church held vast lands, from which it drew an annual income of about 9,000,000 lire; to that the State added generous subsidies totalling 11,000,000 lire more. All that wealth, however, was not enough to lift the average parish priest out of misery; the government felt compelled to supplement his salary of about 500 lire per year with 250 more just so he could survive.
Between political conservatism and economic feudalism, there was plenty of fuel for anticlericalism in Italy even if the Papal States had not existed as a stumbling block to nationalism.
C. The Revolutions of 1820-1821
By 1820 popular unrest was evident throughout southern Europe, particularly in the army, among students, and in the small merchant class. Secret societies were formed to advocate political reform and/or national unification. The Freemasons were the chief of these; in Italy there were also the Carbonari.
Revolution broke out first in Spain. In March 1820 Ferdinand VII was compelled to accept a constitution he had earlier rejected. Written constitutions limited monarchs, established representative government, and specified civil rights. Similar situations (with local variations) followed in Portugal, Naples, and Piedmont. Metternich convened the powers, and after a great deal of discussion an intervention by the Austrians was permitted. They smashed the Neapolitan revolution early in 1821.
In March 1821 the army garrison at Alessandria in Piedmont rose in rebellion, hauled down the blue flag of Savoy, and raised the green, white, and red tricolour of Italy. A regiment marched on Turin, hoping to get Victor Emmanuel to grant a constitution and lead a war to drive the Austrians out of Italy. The soldiers had solid middle-class support; both they and the businessmen wanted the power that until then only the nobility enjoyed.
But the soldiers failed to stir popular support. Two smaller Piedmontese garrisons joined their Alessandrian comrades, and there was an anti-Austrian rising in Milan;”24” but otherwise the Alessandria garrison was isolated. The old king, for his part, lacked the nerve to face the situation and abdicated in favour of his brother, Charles Felix. Charles Felix was in Modena; his twenty-three-year-old nephew Charles Albert became Regent.
Charles Albert displayed the tendency to waffle that would be his downfall in 1848-1849. He was caught between his uncle’s rights, public pressure, and personal inclination. After some hesitation, he granted a constitution based on Spain’s model.
Charles Felix was not pleased. He repudiated his nephew’s act, exiled him, and invited the Austrians to help him quell the uprising. They were more than willing. The new king swiftly and ferociously suppressed liberalism wherever he found it. He wrote to his brother the former king, All those who have studied at the University are corrupt. The bad are the educated; the good are the ignorant.”25” For ten years he was a model of the absolute monarch.
Next it was Spain’s turn. This time a French army supplied the muscle. By April 1823 legitimate government had been restored to all of Europe once more, except Greece, where a rebellion continued against Turkish overlords. That national revolution would eventually involve the great powers but would drag on into the 1830s.”26”
Charles Felix issued new education regulations in 1822. Under these rules, which were in force when John Bosco was a student, every commune was to establish and support an elementary school. The clergy was to do the teaching and approve all the books. Prayer, catechism, and religious services were as mandatory as instruction in reading, writing, and arithmetic.
The King also returned the Jews to the ghettos from which Napoleon had liberated them. Criminal and military punishments were stiffened and the use of capital punishment and of torture broadened.”27”
D. The Revolutions of 1831
Charles Felix died in April 1831. He had wished to disinherit his nephew as unreliable; but Charles Albert was the legitimate heir, and Metternich required that legitimacy be honored. So unlucky Charles Albert became king. In the meantime revolution had burst across Europe again. This time, as in 1789, it began in Paris. King Charles X was overthrown in July 1830 because of his absolutist tendencies, and a monarchy under King Louis Philippe, more responsive to the middle class, installed. Rebellions ensued in Belgium (for independence from the Netherlands) and Poland (for independence from Russia), and in the central Italian duchies and the Papal States (for better government).
Britain and France would not allow Austria, Prussia, and Russia to intervene in Belgium, though the Dutch requested it; and so Belgian independence was recognised in 1831. The Poles and the Italians were not so fortunate. Russian troops in the first case, and Austrians in the second, quickly restored their versions of order. Meanwhile, the Greeks had successfully established their independence from the Ottoman Empire (1830), which Austria and Russia found acceptable because it weakened a powerful neighbour.
If the new king of Sardinia had been genuinely liberal as a youth, he was no longer so in 1831. He made sure everyone understood that in 1833 by imprisoning a crowd of Mazzinian conspirators and having fourteen of them shot.
E. Economic Development in Piedmont
Economic liberalism was another matter for Charles Albert. The Sardinian economy was a shambles. Based on subsistence agriculture, it could not feed its own small population and had to rely upon imported grain. There were painful famines in 1817, 1827, and (over most of Europe) 1842-1847. Besides hunger, pauperism resulted.
The middle class was growing in economic power and therefore in social and political influence. Charles Albert abolished the remaining feudal customs and reformed the post office. He encouraged the arts, sciences, and works of public charity. He even extended unofficial toleration to non-Catholics. Canals were dug, marshes drained, new land brought under cultivation, mines opened (still on a small scale), roads built, the first miles of rail tracks laid, and banks (nonexistent before 1844) organized. Stone quarrying, more extensive than mining, was essential to construction, which boomed as a result of these other activities. Serious industry began in ceramics, tanning, leather-working, and textiles (silk, wool, and cotton). Most of this industry was still of the cottage variety rather than in factories. Italy has practically no coal, severely limiting industrial possibilities; there was, additionally, an inherent prejudice against the evils of the factory system. In 1844 about 114,000 Piedmontese worked at various industrial occupations.”28”
In Turin, the city government. controlled by wealthy landowners, began to see a need for rational planning. The first zoning laws were passed in an attempt to keep industry out of the city centre. Building codes, public health, the water supply, fire protection, and the paving and lighting of the streets began to receive attention.”29”
F. Political Development in the 1830s and 1840s
Economic liberalism necessarily led to more pressure for political liberalism. Conservative men like Camillo Cavour (see Chapter 45) wanted a more liberal government so that they and their economic interests could run it, but not so liberal that the masses would take control. At the radical extreme was Giuseppe Mazzini (1805-1872), who in 1831 founded Young Italy to press for one republican national state, proud of its cultural and religious heritage, free of all foreign domination. Mazzini stood for God (but not Christianity), humanity, and progress. He wrote a great deal, and he also fomented rebellion, requiring his followers to be armed and a number of times trying to stage uprisings. His pen was far more powerful than his sword, as it turned out.
Truly formidable obstacles faced Italian patriots. Italians did not think of themselves as such but as Sicilians, Neapolitans, Genoese, Florentines, etc. When Don Bosco spoke of his patria, he meant Castelnuovo, not Italy or even Piedmont. The Italians were of mixed ancestral stock: largely Teutonic in the north, Etruscan and Latin in the centre, predominantly Greek in the south, and Arabic, Roman, Spanish, and Norman in Sicily. Each region had its own dialect, with only about 2.5 percent of the population speaking Italian. Fewer than a quarter of them could read or write. Barriers – rugged mountains, lack of roads, and tariffs – hindered commerce from one region to another and even within provinces.
The republican Mazzini was not always a practical man. But he showed a practical wisdom in 1831 by appealing to Charles Albert as the only man who could call the people to arms and expel the Austrians, and who should then reign over a united nation as a constitutional monarch. Whether Mazzini saw this as just the first step toward a republic or not, the king wanted no part of it and, as was said, crushed Mazzini’s first try at organising a nationalist uprising. Nevertheless, most nationalists remained convinced that anti-Austrian leadership would have to come from the top. Without independent Piedmont in the lead, national unity just was not going to happen. Cesare Balbo and Massimo d’Azeglio said as much in their influential patriotic writings.
One other option was put forward by Vincenzo Gioberti in The Moral and Civil Supremacy of the Italians, published in 1843: a national federation under the presidency of the Pope. This idea was adopted by a large section of the middle class and the nobility, which thought in national terms, but which dreaded any sort of revolutionary upheaval and saw the Papacy as a guarantee of the stability of political and social institutions.”30” This was not realistic in view of the Austrian position in northern and central Italy, for the Pope could not force them out.
The Popes had their own problems. In the nineteenth century, the Papal States were probably the most wretchedly governed area of Western Europe. The Papacy was an absolute monarchy; its secular government over a third of the Italian peninsula was totally clerical and generally incompetent. Lay advisors were all appointees. Finances were chaotic. Discontent was widespread, and after the Austrian intervention of 1831, the Austrians and the French occupied parts of the Papal States for several years to maintain order. Gregory XVI (reigned 1831-1846) was a well-meaning and serious man; but he was a monk and not an administrator, and he utterly distrusted liberalism. Typical of his attitude were his opposition to building railroads in the Church’s territory (for with them would come trade and then subversive ideas) and his opposition to any and all revolutions (even those of Catholic Belgium and Poland against their Protestant and Orthodox masters, and to Irish emancipation).”31”
Early in his pontificate Pope Gregory made it understood that there was no compromising with the spirit of the French Revolution. Some Catholic thinkers maintained, nonetheless, that the Church that had baptised Greco-Roman culture, Aristotle, and the Renaissance could also baptise the Revolution. Chief among these was the French priest Flicit de Lamennais (1782-1854). Finding that the union of throne and altar was, in the long run, harmful to the Church, they advocated popular sovereignty, separation of Church and State, and liberty of conscience, press, association, and education – principles which had been proving their advantages to the Church in the United States since 1789. They even urged the Pope to abandon his temporal sovereignty and rely solely upon his spiritual authority, which had been wondrously revivified by Pius VII’s heroic opposition to Napoleon.
Such liberal views were unacceptable to most of the French bishops, to the Austrian government, and to the Pope. In 1832 Gregory issued the encyclical Mirari Vos condemning them as promoting rebellion and religious and moral indifferentism.”32”
G. Pius IX’s Reforms
Enough of the cardinals were concerned about the state of the Church’s secular domain. When Pope Gregory died, they elected. as his successor, a relatively young moderate who took the name Pius IX (reigned 1846-1878). The new Pope promptly startled the world with a vigorous programme of administrative and political reform in the States of the Church: amnesty for political prisoners and exiles, prison inspection, freedom of the press, toleration of the Jews, improvements in education, an agricultural institute, a railroad, a telegraph system, street lighting, and the establishment of a civic guard and an indirectly elected consultative assembly of laymen. In a move that appeared to be nationalistic, when the Austrian archbishop of Milan died, Pius appointed an Italian.”33”
Reaction to the papal reforms varied. They were applauded in Great Britain and the United States. Piedmontese liberals saw in them the first steps toward the fulfillment of Gioberti’s programme. Pius’s reforms were imitated in Tuscany, and they inspired increasing excitement in Lombardy and the Two Sicilies, regions oppressed by a foreign and a tyrannical government, respectively.
Metternich was confounded: A liberal Pope is a contradiction in terms.”34”He responded in July 1847 by doubling the Austrian army in Lombardy and Venetia and ordering the Austrian garrison in papal Ferrara to occupy the entire city. That brought a strong protest from Pius, reinforcing his stature in patriot eyes. Charles Albert’s stature rose too when he offered his army to the Pope. From South America the exile Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807-1882) offered his generalship. Universal condemnation compelled Metternich to withdraw the soldiers in December.
A myth developed around Pius IX, that of the liberal and nationalist Pope. He was a reformer, he was a patriot, and he was a man of genuine charity, deeply loved by ordinary people. In the uprisings of 1831 he had earned the trust of the rebels. He may have been somewhat naive, as Metternich thought. But Pius did not see himself able to go much further; specifically, he could not conceive of separating the secular government of the Church’s States from their spiritual government, and therefore he could not yield genuine power to laymen. Nor could he conceive of a Pope retaining his spiritual freedom, and therefore the Church’s, unless the Pope remained a temporal sovereign.”35”
In the Kingdom of Sardinia, Charles Albert had established his freedom from Austrian control early in his reign, but in the process he had alienated the other European powers. His internal concerns were economic reform, rebuilding the army that his uncle had neglected, the repression of dissent, deep personal piety, and an upright life. But popular protests in Genoa and Turin, stimulated by events in Rome, had their slow effect on Charles Albert, nicknamed The Wavering King. By the end of 1847 the king had shuffled his cabinet in favour of moderate politicians, lifted most press censorship, and received a petition for the recognition of the civil rights of Jews and Protestants, which he granted a few months later (see chapter 48). Sardinia negotiated a customs union with Tuscany and the Papal States, which Modena and Naples were invited to join.
H. The Revolutions of 1848-1849
Elsewhere in Italy, progress was too slow or nonexistent. The lid blew off on January 12, 1848, not in Rome or Turin but in Palermo. Ferdinand II responded savagely, but foreign pressure and the spread of the rioting to Messina and Naples obliged him not only to back off but to grant a constitution by the end of the month. The Sicilians were not satisfied, however, and declared their independence.
Metternich asked the Pope to allow an Austrian army to cross his territory, as one had in 1821, to restore order in the Two Sicilies. Mindful of the recent Austrian insult at Ferrara, Pius refused.
Popular pressure, the example of Naples, and Pius’s stance led in February to the promises of constitutions in Tuscany and Piedmont. At this critical juncture, Pius IX attracted notice in a motu proprio by asking God to bless Italy – a phrase he would shortly rue, for the radical nationalists seized it out of context and turned it into a blessing on the war of liberation.
On February 22nd Paris rose against King Louis Philippe, and the Second Republic was established. Two weeks later the revolution struck Germany, and in another week Austria. On March 15th Metternich fled. Pius IX had to concede a constitution for the States of the Church, also on March 15th. The Chartist demonstrations were shaking England. By the end of the year revolution had affected Prussia and Hungary and forced an imperial abdication in Vienna.
Charles Albert, meanwhile, promulgated a conservative constitution on March 4th (see chapters 48 and 51). Pressure for a war of liberation against Austria was incessant. Metternich’s flight was the signal for Venice and Milan to declare their liberation from Austria and the establishment of republics. The uprising in Milan (March 18th-22nd) forced Marshal Radetzky’s garrison to withdraw. The rulers of Parma and Modena abandoned their duchies.
The Milanese had immediately called upon the Sardinians to join them in driving the Austrians out of Italy. This was the critical moment, and the Wavering King did not seize it in time. Charles Albert had serious problems: inexperienced generals, lack of equipment, and lack of maps. He was concerned about the attitude of Britain and the new republic in France. On the other hand, if he did not act, republican governments would be set up in Milan and Venice, and that was intolerable. On the 23rd he declared war.
More weaknesses became evident: the generals bickered with one another; the regulars did not accept the volunteers; and the king insisted on directing the war – he had personal courage in this regard, but no skill. Still, with vigor the Piedmontese might have caught the Austrians quickly and in the open. Instead, they moved their small army of twenty-three thousand men too slowly to cut off Radetzky’s retreat to the safety of four major forts straddling the Lombard-Venetian frontier. Reinforcements from Tuscany were not substantial enough for the Piedmontese to risk an assault on the strong Austrian lines. The two armies sat facing each other. Token armies from Rome and Naples moved northward as if to join the great national cause, but in fact the Pope had clearly instructed his general not to cross the frontier.
Plans were laid for the formation of a Kingdom of Upper Italy, uniting Venice, Lombardy, and the duchies to Piedmont under a constitutional monarchy. Military plans received less attention, as though the Austrian defeat were taken for granted.
On April 25th the Pope’s general – who just happened to be a Piedmontese – disobeyed orders and led his army into Lombardy to join his countrymen. Since public opinion already generally saw the Pope taking the Italian side, and some wanted him as the president of a federated nation, Pius took a decisive step on April 29th. In an address to his cardinals, he made it clear that he was not the leader of the Risorgimento; that as a spiritual leader he could not declare war; and that he would not be president of a united Italy, but everyone should be loyal to his own prince. If his own subjects wished to volunteer as individuals, as Italians from all over were doing, they were free to do so.
As Pope he really could do little else; the Austrians, too, were his Catholic children. It was a great turning point, forever separating Pius IX from the tidal wave of nationalism. He could not liberate and then rule a united Italy. Nor could he imagine a Pope merely reigning over his own State, much less the whole nation, or yielding his temporal sovereignty. The Papacy had become an obstacle to national unity. Pius effectively turned the leadership of the Risorgimento over to either Piedmont or Mazzini, the house of Savoy or the forces of republicanism, whichever could take the lead and keep it.”36”
On the diplomatic front, the British were pressuring the Austrians to withdraw from Italy entirely. The French republic was friendly to Italy, but that was more discomfort to Charles Albert than consolation. He was trying to keep an eye on the political situation in Turin and in Milan, lest the republicans out manoeuvre him.
The Piedmontese army, its Tuscan allies, and various volunteers grew to nearly sixty thousand men. They probed the Austrian defenses and won a couple of skirmishes on April 30th and May 6th; the first offered a solid opportunity to catch the defenders off guard, but the king called off the pursuit. In mid-May, Ferdinand II staged a counter-revolution in Naples and recalled his army. His general and half the soldiers ignored the order and joined the Venetians defending their republic, but others felt which way the wind was blowing and drifted home. At the end of May the Piedmontese captured the major fort of Peschiera. On June 15th Emperor Ferdinand offered to cede Lombardy to Sardinia. Quite honorably but not very wisely, Charles Albert declined; he would not abandon the Venetians.
Radetzky was not inclined to yield; when he received thirty-five thousand reinforcements he engaged the renegade papal army and forced it to surrender. Then he turned on the Sardinians, still poorly supplied and poorly led, no match for a well-trained army that now outnumbered them. In a five-day battle at Custoza (July 22nd-27th), the Austrians broke Charles Albert’s army and drove it back through Milan and home to Piedmont, reduced now to twenty-five thousand men. On August 9th an armistice was agreed to. Eighty-one-year-old Radetzky’s brilliant generalship saved the Hapsburg Empire by stemming the tide of revolution in Italy, which in turn had its effect throughout Europe.
But revolution was not quite finished. After Pius IX renounced the Risorgimento, tension built up in Rome. The radicals won control of the civic guard and of the streets of Rome. The liberal and capable prime minister Count Pellegrino Rossi was assassinated on November 15th. The mob demanded war with Austria, the convocation of a constituent assembly, and the appointment of the most radical leaders to the government. On the night of the 24th the Pope fled to Gaeta in the Kingdom of Naples, whence he appealed to the Catholic powers for help in recovering the Church’s lands (see chapters 50 and 59).
The vacuum left at Rome suited Mazzini, who moved in and helped establish a Roman Republic in February 1849. The idealistic rulers expected the rest of Italy to rally to them. Garibaldi joined them; he had been fighting a guerrilla war in the north with some volunteers up till then. But outside the Papal States there was little response.
The Piedmontese were not quite finished either. They were loath to abandon the Lombards and Tuscans who had chosen union under the flag of Savoy. The new prime minister, Vincenzo Gioberti, tried to arrange an alliance with Tuscany (which now wavered between union with republican Rome and retention of the grand duke) and with Rome (where he hoped to restore the Pope without foreign intervention). None of his stratagems worked.
The Austrians consolidated their position at home, rejected French and British diplomacy, and announced that they would not yield a foot of their territory. Popular pressure urged on Charles Albert a renewal of the war. On March 12th, 1849, the armistice expired and Sardinia declared war on the 20th. Two days later Radetzky crushed the king’s army of eighty thousand men at Novara and dictated harsh terms of surrender. The king accepted responsibility for the debacle, though his generals had again performed poorly. Charles Albert abdicated in favour of his son, Victor Emmanuel II, and left at once for Portugal, where he died in July.
The new king appointed Massimo d’Azeglio, a writer of sterling character and no political experience, as prime minister. Then he negotiated with the Austrians, who offered generous terms provided that the year-old constitution be abolished. Victor Emmanuel earned himself a nickname, The Gallant King, by refusing absolutely:
Sooner than subscribe to such conditions I would lose a hundred Crowns. What my father has sworn I will maintain. If you want war to the death, be it so. I will call my people once more to arms. If I fail, it shall be without shame. My house knows the road of exile but not of dishonour.”37”
Radetzky relented on the point but imposed an indemnity and partial occupation of Piedmont until peace was concluded. The war had been a complete disaster militarily and financially. But two important lessons were learned: Italian unity would need outside help, which France would supply in 1859 and Prussia in 1866 and 1870; and the States of the Church would pose a major problem for national unification. Furthermore, a courageous, conscientious, and able leader had been found in Victor Emmanuel.
The Austrians proceeded to the mop-up work of restoring their puppets in Florence, Parma, and Modena and subduing the Venetians, which was completed on August 23rd. Ferdinand of Naples set about reconquering Sicily.
There was a great deal of diplomatic maneuvering in response to the Pope’s appeal for restoration by the Catholic powers. At first the French and British hoped for an Italian solution. The French were now a republican state, but their leader, Louis Napoleon Bonaparte (the future Napoleon III), was eager to win clerical support by restoring Pius IX, who was as adamant against any compromise with the republicans in Rome as they were against any with him.
A French army of eight or nine thousand soldiers landed near Rome on April 25th and was stunned by the heroic defense of Garibaldi’s recruits. It took until July 3rd for French artillery and numbers, reinforced to somewhere between twenty and thirty thousand, to overwhelm the ten thousand enthusiastic but mostly untrained republicans and open the city for the return of the Pontiff.
So Mazzini’s republican way to unification had also failed. In 1859-1860 other ways would succeed. Victor Emmanuel’s constitutional monarchy would provide a moderate centre to which most Italians could rally. Cavour’s moderate conservatism would ensure middle class support, and his careful diplomacy would win critical international support for the unification of northern Italy. And Garibaldi’s bold generalship would secure the south.
Michael Mendl SDB