FIFTEEN
‘There is storm in the air,’ Pope Gregory XVI said to a friend shortly before his death in 1846. ‘Revolutions will soon break out.’ Revolutions had, indeed, been likely ever since the Congress of Vienna had set about the task of undoing the work of Napoleon and of breaking up Italy into its former small components so that the pieces could be handed back, wherever possible, to their former masters. The watchword of the Congress had been ‘legitimacy’, a doctrine invented by Talleyrand to express the advantages of the Bourbon restoration in France. In pursuit of ‘legitimacy’ in Italy, the Bourbons had been re-established in Naples, the House of Savoy recovered Piedmont and Sardinia, whose territories were extended to include Savoy and Nice as well as the former Republic of Genoa, and the Pope had been returned to power in the Papal States. This fragmentation of Italy suited the Austrian Foreign Minister, Prince Metternich, very well. To him Italy was ‘ein geographischer Begriff, a mere geographical expression; so long as it remained divided, Austria would be able to maintain her hold over Lombardy and Venetia. At Vienna he succeeded not only in acquiring these two valuable territories for his country, but he also arranged for Tuscany to be accorded to an Austrian archduke and for Parma to be ceded to the daughter of the Austrian Emperor. And in the Kingdom of Naples the wife of the restored monarch, Ferdinand IV, was an Austrian. Austria was thus restored to the dominant position she had enjoyed in Italy at the end of the eighteenth century; and over those large areas which she controlled, the clouds of reaction gathered and darkened. So they also did in most of the rest of Italy where police spies, clerical privileges and press censorship became commonplace.
In the Papal States all the officials who had served the French were dismissed from their posts; the French codes of law were destroyed; education was limited while taxes were increased; and power was concentrated in the hands of the Cardinal Secretary of State and of those other ecclesiastics appointed to direct the various departments of the Government. In the time of Pius VII some reforms had been effected by Cardinal Consalvi, his Secretary of State; but these had been nullified by Pius's successor, Leo XII; while Pope Gregory XVI, an obscurantist of the most extreme persuasion, went so far as to prohibit the building of railways – he called them ‘chemins d'enfer’ – in the Papal States, fearing that they might ‘work harm to religion’ and lead to the arrival in Rome of deputations of malcontents from restless provinces beyond the Appenines. He set his mind firmly against reform. In Cardinal Lambruschini he had an adviser who, though more personally attractive than himself, was no less uncompromising. And in Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli, the Roman dialect poet, whose sonnets are a vivid memorial of the lives and conversations of the Romans of the period, he had an adversary who delighted in satirizing his views. ‘I really liked Pope Gregory,’ Belli wrote, ‘because it gave me so much pleasure to speak ill of him.’
In the Papal States, as elsewhere in Italy, there were occasional demonstrations, disturbances and uprisings. But the demands of the rebels, beset by economic pressures and social discontents, were for independence, constitutions and reforms rather than, as yet, for national unity. The main causes of complaint were the failure of the papacy to restore municipal liberties or to allow laymen to play any significant part in government.
There were, however, various secret organizations in the peninsula whose members looked forward to the day when, at some unspecified date and by vaguely suggested means, Italy would attain freedom from foreign domination and achieve
70. Dancing in the Trastevere during the Carnival.
the ultimate unity of its separate states. One such secret society was the Carbonari who took their name, symbolically, from carbone (coal) which, black and lifeless, burns brightly when it is kindled, and who used charcoal-burners’ shops as covers for their activities. Another was Young Italy, whose motto, ‘Dio e popolo’, expressed the religious foundation of the national cause, and whose oath required its members to work ‘wholly and for ever to constitute Italy one, free and independent’. Both organizations took heart when, on the death of Pope Gregory XVI, Cardinal Mastai Ferretti, the 54-year-old Bishop of Imola, was elected to succeed him; for the new Pope, who took the name of Pius IX, was a kindly, polite, good-looking man who was believed to have pronounced liberal tendencies. His election certainly distressed the reactionary Cardinal Lambruschini, who had hoped to become Pope himself, and Cardinal Bernetti, Lambruschini's predecessor as Secretary of State, who, when the Bishop of Imola appeared on the point of fainting at the prospect of his likely election, murmured in his neighbour's ear, ‘Well, after the policemen come the ladies.’
In Rome, where he was little known, Pope Pius was greeted at first with some distrust; but by the time his carriage had been driven away from the Quirinal to the Vatican his handsome face, calm expression and gentle gestures had impressed all who saw him. ‘Ah! the women said. ‘Ah! Che bello!’ The reports that subsequently emanated from the Vatican were highly favourable: the new Pope was a charming man, sensitive and generous, simple and devout, with a most endearing self-deprecating humour. He was also evidently not prepared to tolerate his predecessor's regressive policies. He formed a council to watch over all branches of the administration and to investigate proposals for modernization and change. He appointed a commission on railways and on the civil and penal codes; he granted an amnesty for political offences; planned gas lighting in the streets, and the introduction of laymen into the government. Metternich was appalled by these signs that the Pope was prepared to align himself with liberal Europe. ‘We were prepared for everything but a liberal pope,’ he said. ‘And now that we have one, who can tell what may happen?’ It was ‘the greatest misfortune of the age’.
Metternich was also deeply concerned by Pius's evidently genuine feeling for Italy, by his apparent attraction to the idea that the papacy should play a vital role in the regeneration of the nation, and that the Pope should preside over a confederation of Italian states. Yet Pope Pius was not really in sympathy with the motives behind the liberal movement; nor did he in his heart believe that representative government could be reconciled with papal authority. He doubted that he was capable, even if willing, to lead a national movement to fulfilment. They wanted to make a Napoleon out of him, he complained, when he was really nothing but a priest. And it was undoubtedly true that despite his fine voice and commanding presence, he did not have the strength of character to fulfil the hopes and control the enthusiasm of the applauding thousands who followed him through the streets of Rome shouting ‘Evviva!’ and waving the scarves and handkerchieves which were made in his colours. He enjoyed the acclaim, his enemies said, but he was nervous of its consequences, of the repeated cry, ‘Viva Pio
71. Pope Pius IX (1792–1878), whose pontificate, marked by a transition from liberalism to conservatism, was the longest in history.
72. Pius IX acclaimed at the Quirinal Palace on the night of 16 July 1846 for having granted amnesties to some four hundred political offenders imprisoned by his predecessor, Gregory XVI.
Nono, solo! Solo!’ He saw that he was being held up for popular acclaim not so much as a reforming pope but as one who had ‘sided with the revolution against tradition’. His cautious and sensible early reforms were now dismissed as unworthy of the times; he was presented no longer as a saint, but caricatured as a tortoise.
All over Italy there were feelings of hopes unfulfilled, expectations unrealized, opportunities missed; and the desires awakened were surging beyond control. At the beginning of 1848, in fulfilment of Pope Gregory's prophecy, revolutions broke out from Sicily and Naples to Florence, Venice and Milan. News of these uprisings and of the war of liberation against Austria was received in Rome with the greatest excitement. But on 29 April Pope Pius felt it his duty as Pope to deliver an Allocution separating himself once and for all from the nationalists and indeed from the Risorgimento – the campaign for a united Italy itself: ‘We assert clearly and openly that war with Austria is far from our thoughts, since we, however unworthy, are the Vicar of Him who is the author of peace and the lover of concord.’
This unequivocal announcement aroused a storm of protest, and led to the temporary appointment of the liberal Count Terenzio Mamiani della Rovere as head of the administration which the Pope had been forced to accept under the terms of a constitution granted the previous March. In the middle of September, however, after the resignation of Mamiani followed by that of his liberal successor, Count Eduardo Fabbri, neither of whom felt capable of controlling the political situation or the extreme demands of the revolutionary clubs, the government was placed in the hands of the ex-revolutionary conservative Count Pellegrino Rossi, a tall, pale, thin scholar of strong character and varied gifts. His books were on the Index, he had a Protestant wife and he was intensely disliked in the Curia. Yet the Pope trusted him, for Rossi saw in the papacy ‘the one great thing that was left to Italy’; and he was determined to preserve its temporal power, not by making concessions to the democrats but by wise economic reforms and enlightened administration. But he was a proud, aloof and provocative man who took no trouble to hide his contempt for his opponents, whether Republican or conservative, and made many enemies among them by his cruel sarcasm.
The bitterness of his enemies’ hatred was demonstrated on 15 November when he dismounted from his carriage outside the Palazzo della Cancelleria for the new session of the Council of Deputies. A small crowd shouted insults as he approached the broad stone steps of the palace: ‘Abbasso Rossi! Abbasso Rossi! Morte a Rossi!’ He took no notice. His expression was one of scorn and distaste, emphasized some observers said, by a slight contemptuous smile. Suddenly a man struck him, then another stabbed him in the neck, severing the carotid artery, before escaping into the crowd, his head hidden in the folds of a cloak.
The next day Rome was in uproar. Armed gangs paraded through the streets shouting slogans and singing songs in praise of the assassins. A large crowd of soldiers, policemen and well-known citizens surged about the Quirinal demanding a democratic programme; and, when it seemed that the Pope was unwilling to give way, they attacked the palace, firing through the windows, trying to set fire to the doors and killing the Latin Secretary. Protesting that he did so only under duress, the Pope surrendered to the radicals and agreed to the formation of a cabinet sympathetic towards them. Soon afterwards, virtually a prisoner in his own palace, he left Rome for Gaeta in the Kingdom of Naples disguised as an ordinary priest, his features partially concealed behind large spectacles. And from Gaeta, advised by Cardinal Antonelli, an ambitious, clever and devious politician, he demanded the submission of the rebels. He denounced as ‘a monstrous act of unconcealed treason’ the proposal that a constituent assembly be elected in Rome
73. Count Pelligrino Rossi (1787–1848), who was murdered outside the Palazzo della Cancellería.
on the basis of universal suffrage, and threatened anyone who so voted with the ‘Greater Excommunication’. His condemnations, however, had little effect. It was impossible now to check the enthusiasm in Rome by so uncompromising a stand. The American Margaret Fuller, a former schoolteacher from Boston, now mistress of the Marchese Ossoli, expressed a common sentiment when she wrote that she thought she could never have heard of a violent death with satisfaction but that Rossi's assassination seemed to her ‘one of terrible justice’.
In spite of papal condemnation, the representatives of a constituent assembly were elected in due course and these, on 9 February, voted the end of the papal state and its replacement by the Roman Republic. This fired the imagination of liberals all over Italy, but it also aroused the anger of Catholic Europe to which the Pope appealed for its suppression. He appealed to King Ferdinand of Naples who
74. Cardinal Antonelli (1806–76), Pope Pius IX's artful, able and sensual Secretary of State.
lost no time in moving his army up to the frontier; he appealed to the Austrian Emperor whose forces, having defeated those of Piedmont, also marched towards Rome; and, most ominously for Rome, he appealed to France where the nephew of the Emperor Napoleon I, Louis Napoleon – whose election the year before to the French Assembly had been compared by a journalist to the sudden and unexpected appearance of the demon king in a pantomime – had recently been proclaimed President. Although personally sympathetic towards the Italian nationalists, Louis Napoleon had good reasons for responding to the Pope's call: he needed the support of the French clergy to achieve the destiny he already envisaged for himself as creator of the Second Empire. He could not afford to allow the Austrians to extend their influence in Italy, nor did he want to be eclipsed by the King of Naples, the choice of whose kingdom as a place of exile by the Pope had been interpreted as a diplomatic defeat for France. Besides, there was a strong feeling in France that the Pope had been disgracefully ill used, and the mounting of an expedition to restore him would not, therefore, be unpopular. So a French army also advanced upon the Roman Republic which prepared itself to fight for its existence by creating on 29 March a Triumvirate to dictate its policy during the imminent emergency. The members of this Triumvirate were Carlo Armellini, a respected Roman lawyer, Count Aurelio Saffi, the leader of the liberals from the Romagna, and Giuseppe Mazzini, a man whose fame and genius were to ensure that he was to be the inspiration of the Republic's defence.
The son of a doctor from Genoa who had become professor of anatomy at the university, Mazzini had been born in 1805. He had thought of becoming a doctor himself, but after fainting at the sight of his first operation, he had turned to law. He had little taste for this either and, although he did well enough in his examinations, he was a troublesome and argumentative student, restless, impatient, moody, slow to make friends and quick to take offence. He remained a difficult personality throughout his life. When he was well and happy he could be generous, charming and lively, but in the moods of dispirited tiredness which often overcame him he was irritating, exacting and didactic. He dressed always in black and allowed himself no luxuries other than expensive writing-paper and scent. He ate the simplest food and for days on end would exist on a diet largely composed of bread and raisins. He had a beautiful voice and striking features. His eyes were dark and flashing, the only eyes that one man who knew him had ever seen that ‘looked like flames’. His skin was smooth and olive, his hair black and long; he walked quickly with a feline grace, holding his head forward.
The suppression of a revolt in Genoa when he was sixteen had brought the Carbonari to his admiring notice and he had later joined the society. The unification of Italy was a cause which he had thereafter embraced with passionate intensity, and he gave up his whole life to its realization with single-minded stubbornness. ‘Mine is a matter of deep conviction,’ he would say dogmatically. ‘It is impossible for me to modify or alter it.’ And this very refusal to compromise, this blind dedication to an ideal that allowed him to disregard the obstacles in the way of its realization, this intolerance of views other than his own, formed his unique and essential contribution to the birth of his country.
75. Giuseppe Mazzini (1805–72), inspiration of the Roman Republic. ‘Rome was the dream of my young years,’ he wrote, ‘the religion of my soul.’
For him there could be no other capital of Italy but Rome, ‘the natural centre of Italian unity’; and Rome became for him, in the words of the Countess Martinengo Cesaresco, ‘a talismanic obsession’.
‘Rome was the dream of my young years, the religion of my soul,’ Mazzini wrote. ‘I entered the city one evening, early in March [1849], with a deep sense of awe, almost of worship… I had journeyed towards the sacred city with a heart sick unto death from the… dismemberment of our Republican party over the whole of Italy. Yet nevertheless, as I passed through the Porta del Popolo, I felt an electric thrill run through me – a spring of new life.’
Inspired by the hope that the liberation of Italy would be accomplished by a pure, spreading fire set off by a spark in Rome, he addressed the Assembly with brilliant eloquence:
There are not five Italies, or four Italies or three Italies. There is only one Italy. God, who, in creating her, smiled upon her land, has awarded her the two most sublime frontiers in Europe, symbols of eternal strength and eternal motion – the Alps and the sea… Rome shall be the holy Ark of your redemption, the temple of your nation… Rome, by the design of Providence, and as the People have divined, is the Eternal City to which is entrusted the mission of disseminating the word that will unite the world…Just as to the Rome of the Caesars, which through action united a great part of Europe, there succeeded the Rome of the Popes, which united Europe and America in the realm of the spirit, so the Rome of the People will succeed them both, to unite Europe, America and every part of the terrestrial globe in a faith that will make thought and action one… The destiny of Rome and Italy is that of the world.
As undisputed leader of the Republic, Mazzini, brooking no arguments nor any rival, made many enemies in Rome. He ‘thinks he is Pope and infallible,’ wrote one of them. Another, Luigi Carlo Farini, was soon to say, ‘He is pontiff, prince, apostle, priest. When the clerics have gone he will be thoroughly at home in Rome… He has the nature of a priest more than a statesman. He wants to tether the world to his own immutable idea.’
To the Romans at large, however, he was an inspiring figure who infected them with his own feverish, almost hysterical enthusiasm. He went to live in a small room in the Quirinal from which he emerged each morning to walk about the streets ‘with the same smile and warm handshake for all’, radiating confidence in the destiny of the Republic, in the unique greatness of the city of its birth in whose air could be felt ‘the pulsations of the immense eternal life of Rome, the immortality stirring beneath those ruins of two epochs, two worlds’. The city might fall if no further help arrived, he had to concede, but even in its fall the people would regain their ‘Religion of Rome’ and from the ashes of its defeat would arise a new spirit, fierce and purified.
To outsiders its collapse seemed inevitable. A leader in The Times referred dismissively to the ‘degenerate remnant of the Roman people’ preparing to fight in the mistaken belief that they were heroes; and foreign residents in Rome did not disguise their belief that the Triumvirate would soon be dismissed, that the defenders of Rome would run away at the first shot, and that the people were only too anxious for the French to arrive and for the suppression of the Republic. Certainly, the forces which the Triumvirs had been able to assemble for the defence of Rome offered little ground for hope that the French could be kept out. There were only about a thousand men in the National Guard and these were scarcely a match for the well-trained troops of the French army. Admittedly, they had shouted their readiness for war when addressed by Mazzini; but their officers, some timid and many unsure that the Republic's cause was one worth dying for, expressed among themselves far less bellicose sentiments. There were some 2,500 regular papal troops who had declared their readiness to support the new government against the allies of their former master; but most of them were believed to be activated not so much by faith in the Republic as by jealousy of the Swiss Guards who, they believed, had been more favoured than themselves in the past. There was also, however, a strong force of irregular troops, seasoned and fervent, who had entered Rome on 27 April under the leadership of a bearded Messianic-looking figure in a flamboyant black felt hat decorated with a plume of ostrich feathers. He had ridden a white horse, darting keen glances to right and left, his long brown hair falling to his broad shoulders, his deeply set eyes divided by a long, aquiline nose with a very high bridge.
‘I shall never forget that day,’ wrote a young artist who left his studio to fight beside this imposing newcomer. ‘He reminded us of nothing so much as of our Saviour's head in the galleries. Everyone said so. I could not resist him. I went after him. Thousands did the same. He only had to show himself. We all worshipped him. We could not help it.’
Giuseppe Garibaldi, then aged forty-two, was a guerilla leader of outstanding gifts. The son of a sailor, he had been born in Nice, which had been taken by Napoleon from the Kingdom of Piedmont, and he had been brought up to speak the Ligurian dialect as his first language and French as his second. Italian did not come easily to him, therefore, and his accent betrayed his frontier origins. Like his father, he had been born to the sea and had become a cabin-boy apprentice before he was seventeen. A year later he had sailed down the coast of the Papal States and then up the Tiber in a small boat drawn by oxen, with a cargo of wine for Rome. ‘The Rome that I then beheld with the eyes of my youthful imagination,’ he wrote, ‘was the Rome of the future – the Rome that I never despaired of even when I was shipwrecked, dying, banished to the farthest depths of the American forests – the dominant thought and inspiration of my whole life.’
He had gone to South America after having been condemned to death in an ill-fated insurrection planned by Young Italy, and while living there he had, as he put it, ‘served the cause of nations’ by fighting in various revolutions. Returning to Italy in 1848 he found that he had arrived by chance in a year of ferment, a year in which his dream of a united Italy, with Rome as its capital, might be realized. The appearance of his followers did not, however, inspire confidence in the Roman people. With their long, unkempt hair, their matted beards and dusty, high-crowned, black-plumed hats, they looked more like bandits than soldiers. Some carried muskets, others lances, all wore daggers in their belts. They did have a kind of uniform: dark blue tunics for the men, and for the officers and orderlies red smocks of the kind that Garibaldi's Italian troops had worn in South America ever since a stock of them had been acquired in Montevideo where they had been awaiting export for use in the slaughterhouses of the Argentine. ‘They rode on American saddles,’ an Italian regular officer recorded disdainfully, ‘and seemed to pride themselves on their contempt for all the observances more strictly enjoined on regular troops.’ They were indeed, a ‘parcel of brigands’, as an English resident in Rome told a visitor; they were not in the least likely to enhance the reputation of the Republic. Yet such was the enthusiasm which their leader aroused that their numbers were soon swelled by hundreds of volunteers, artists and clerks, schoolboys and boatmen, Romans and foreigners Englishmen, Dutchmen, Swiss and Belgians. Students and young lecturers from the University formed a special Students’ Corps. Soon even the most conservative and sceptical observers had to admit that, as excitement mounted, hopes for the Republic increased and that there was little to complain about in its declared programme of ‘no war of classes, no hostility to existing wealth, no wanton or unjust violation of the rights of property; but a constant endeavour to ameliorate the material condition of the classes least favoured by fortune Church property was to be nationalized; the offices of the Inquisition turned into apartments; ecclesiastical estates partitioned into smallholdings to be let at nominal rents. Yet the government decreed that there was to be no persecution of priests, even of those who preached against its policies. And there was, indeed, very little anti-clerical violence in Rome. The Times correspondent, who was not there at the time, accepted the most lurid reports that came out of the city and wrote of priests who had the courage to appear in the open being cut into pieces and thrown into the Tiber. But, in fact, so friends of Arthur Hugh Clough, the English poet, were informed, priests walked about ‘in great comfort’. ‘Be assured,’ Clough continued, ‘the worst thing I have witnessed has been a paper in manuscript put up in two places in the Corso, pointing out seven or eight men for popular resentment. This has been done by night. Before the next evening a proclamation was posted in all the streets, from (I am sure) Mazzini's pen, severely and scornfully castigating such proceedings.’
It was true that rumour of a cell in the dungeons of the Inquisition being found stuffed with bones and human hair had led to a violent riot. It was also undeniable that, after the siege had begun, several priests, some, though not all of whom had fired at soldiers, were all murdered, together with three peasants who had been mistaken for spies; and that in May a furiously anti-clerical terrorist from Forli, who had been placed in charge of a volunteer regiment of provincial customs officers, was responsible for a number of savage crimes in Trastevere. But it was generally agreed that the Pope's claim that Rome had become ‘a den of wild beasts… who infringe the personal liberty of decent people and expose their lives to the daggers of cut-throats’ was quite unjustified, and that the Republic's maxim, ‘Firmness in principles, toleration to individuals’, was being widely observed.
Yet, despite the brief enthusiasm aroused by the arrival of the Garibaldini, there was continued scepticism among the foreign colony in Rome as to the ability of
76. Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807–82), defender of the Roman Republic in 1849. ‘He reminded us of nothing so much as of our Saviour's head in the galleries,’ said a young artist who left his studio to become one of his soldiers. ‘We all worshipped him. We could not help it.’
the Republic to withstand the powerful enemies it had raised up against itself. William Wetmore Story, the American sculptor and writer, watched the barricades going up at Porta San Giovanni and ‘voted the workmen too lazy to live’. Another day he went to Porta Cavalleggeri and Porta Angelica
to see the barricades, or rather earth mounds, ramparts, stockades, which the Romans are building in the event of a French attack. They had been working at these some thirty hours and in some places had gone three feet. Bunker Hill ramparts were thicker. Here nothing is right earnest. The labourers were leaning picturesquely on their spades, doing nothing, and everything was going on as leisurely as if the enemy were in France instead of a few hours’ march of the city.
The next day Story heard the commander of the Guardia Civica haranguing his men in the Piazza SS. Apostoli. He asked them if they were prepared to defend Rome with their lives. ‘Si!’ they shouted, ‘Si!’ holding up their caps on their bayonets, ‘making the Piazza ring with huzzas. But the enthusiasm did not seem of the right stuff – it was rather a festa demonstration.’
Emilio Dandolo, who entered Rome with a battalion of bersaglieri from Lombardy on 29 April, formed the same impression. He felt that the applause which greeted his men from the windows on every side might well have been welcoming the last scene of some absurd comedy.
There was the same superabundance of standards, of cockades, of badges of party that had characterized the last few months of Milan's liberty [before the Austrians resumed control], the same clanking of swords along the public streets, and those various and varied uniforms of the officers, not one matching the other but all seeming more suitable for the embellishment of the stage than for military service… This array of warriors in glittering helmets with double-barrelled guns and with belts full of daggers reconciled us but little to the scanty numbers of real, well-drilled soldiers.
Behind the flourish and the bombast, however, work was progressing rapidly upon the defences of Rome, Story's caustic comments notwithstanding. Ramparts were being raised, loopholes made in walls; the trees in the gardens of the Villa Borghese were being cut down for barricades; the covered way from the Vatican to Castel Sant' Angelo was being demolished. In every rione men were appointed to take command of the citizens when the bells of the Capitol and Montecitorio summoned them to arms; platforms were erected in the squares so that the most accomplished of the Republic's orators could address the people; priests and nuns were asked to pray for victory; pensions were promised to those who might be killed; hospitals were organized by Princess Belgioso who could rely upon the help of nearly six thousand volunteers.
Garibaldi was seen everywhere. It had been decided not to appoint him commander-in-chief, since accusations that the city had been taken over by outsiders were already common enough. But he was regarded by all as the natural military leader and whenever he appeared, accompanied by a gigantic and outlandishly dressed Negro orderly who had followed him from South America, he was greeted with loud cheers. His own men, strengthened by some 1,300
77. A Garibaldian lancer carrying a message through the streets.
volunteers from Rome and the Papal States and supported by troops of the Papal Army and the National Guard, were given the formidable task by the Republic's Minister of War, General Avezzana, of defending the most dangerous part of the front. This was the high ground of the Janiculan hill, south of St Peter's between the Porta Cavalleggeri and the Porta Portese. It was protected by a line of walls stretching south from Castel Sant’ Angelo which had been either built or extended by Urban VIII after the development of gunpowder had revolutionized the art of siege warfare. They were much more capable both of being used offensively by artillerymen and of resisting bombardment than the ancient walls of Aurelian; but they had a serious disadvantage in that the open ground beyond them was as high as the defences and in one place even higher. It was here that the French were likely to concentrate their batteries so that they could fire upon the fortifications by the Porta San Pancrazio, the gate between the Porta Cavalleggeri and the Porta Portese which led directly into the Trastevere quarter. On the high ground beyond this gate were the gardens of two villas, the Villa Corsini1 and the Villa Pamphilj.2 It was in the exposed Villa Corsini that Garibaldi established his headquarters, while, out of sight, north of the vineyards in the valley, the French army marched through a deserted countryside.
Assured by their commander, General Oudinot, that the Romans considered them as liberators from the papal yoke and that no resistance would be offered them, they marched with confidence in the warm April sun, without siege guns or scaling-ladders, their scouts only a short way in front of the resplendently uniformed columns. Oudinot's intention was to enter Rome either by the Porta Angelica between the Vatican and Castel Sant' Angelo or by the Porta Pertusa which, in fact, had been walled up. As his leading troops in their white coats and heavy shakos approached the Porta Pertusa shots were fired from two cannon on the Leonine Wall. This was taken to be the customary signal for midday. But when further shots were fired, the French were forced to conclude that the Romans were, after all, prepared to offer a token resistance and orders were given to unlimber the artillery and make an assault upon the walls.
The assault, however, was not so easy an undertaking as the more sanguine French officers had supposed. A succession of infantry attacks upon the Vatican and the Borgo were repulsed by heavy artillery and musket fire from the walls, to whose defence men from the poorest quarters of the Trastevere had rushed with guns and knives; and the French troops were sent scurrying for cover behind the mounds and in the dykes that cut across the valley beneath the Vatican hill. Watching these preliminary operations from the terrace of the Villa Corsini, Garibaldi decided that the moment had come for his men to move. Few of the French had yet been engaged, and their initial repulse was a minor set-back rather than a defeat; but if his men were to attack now while the enemy were reorganizing and considering how best to proceed, he would catch them at a serious disadvantage. So, sending forward about three hundred of his young volunteers as an advance guard, he prepared to follow them with his own Garibaldini.
The volunteers went forward down the slope beyond the Pamphilj gardens towards a deeply sunken lane, the Via Aurelia Antica, that led from the Porta San Pancrazio towards the road to Palo. And here, beneath the arches of the Pauline Aqueduct, the volunteers, most of them untrained students, came suddenly upon eight companies of the well-disciplined 20me de Ligne. The students dashed recklessly forward, firing their muskets, brandishing their bayonets, shouting patriotic slogans, and, to their excited surprise, driving the French regulars back. But the 20me soon recovered their composure. The students’ headlong charge was halted, the French advance was resumed, and within minutes both the young volunteers and the men of Garibaldi's legion who had come forward to support them were being pushed back towards the walls of the city.
Garibaldi himself then appeared, a commanding figure in a poncho riding his white horse. He had called up reserves of papal troops and bersaglieri from Rome; and with the help of these and the men of his legion who had not yet been
78. Garibaldian staff officers outside the headquarters at the San Silvestri convent in Rome.
engaged, he rallied his forces and rode forward to counter-attack, shouting encouragement. Responding to his call, the Italians rushed across the gardens against the French, cheering wildly as they raced past the fountains and the statues which were already covered by a pall of smoke, stabbing at the enemy in their heavy uniforms, splashing the flowers and the grass with blood, ‘savage as dervishes,’ so one French officer recalled, ‘clawing at us even with their hands.’
Unable to withstand so ferocious an assault for long, the French fell back towards the aqueduct, and then across the vineyards and over the Palo road as far as Castel di Guido, some twenty miles from Rome, leaving behind them about five hundred killed and wounded and almost as many prisoners. And at the news of the wonderful victory, the Romans, ‘all elated and surprised at themselves’, as Story described them, took to the streets in joyful celebration. Far into the night the city was ablaze with lights from the uncurtained windows of the houses and the crowded cafés and restaurants. The streets and piazzas were full of happy people congratulating each other on the bravery of the Romans and their faithful friends. ‘The Italians fought like lions,’ Margaret Fuller said. ‘It is a truly heroic spirit that animates them. They make a stand here for honour and their rights…’
Garibaldi pressed Mazzini to take advantage of this spirit and of the victory of 30 April to pursue the enemy and attack him again. But Mazzini was anxious for a settlement with France and refused to consider any action which might make arapprochementdifficult to achieve. ‘The Republic is not at war with France,’ he insisted, ‘merely in a state of defence.’ French prisoners were to be entertained as guests of the city, provided with meals, wine and cigars before being returned to their army. Their wounded were to be treated with all the care that an Italian officer might hope to receive. Such considerations, however, had little effect upon the French President, Louis Napoleon, who considered the army's repulse a disgrace which could not be tolerated. ‘Our military honour is in peril,’ he told General Oudinot. ‘I will not allow it to be compromised. You can be certain of being reinforced. In the meantime he sent Ferdinand de Lesseps to Rome to enter into negotiations for a settlement so as to gain time for these reinforcements and for General Vaillant, France's greatest military engineer, to join the French army in Italy.
Garibaldi could never forgive Mazzini for what he took to be an appalling error of judgement on what was, and remained, ‘a burning question’ between them. ‘If Mazzini had been willing to understand that I might possibly know something of war… how differently things would have turned out,’ he wrote caustically years later. Mazzini had always had ‘an urge to be a general, but he did not know the first thing about it.’
Garibaldi's own limitations as a general, as well as his consummate skill as a guerilla leader, were shown in operations which the Roman Republics defenders had now to undertake against the Neapolitan army of King Ferdinand of the Two Sicilies. The Neapolitans were satisfactorily dealt with near Palestrina; but soon after Garibaldi's return to Rome, the expected French reinforcements also arrived outside the city and there was a far more dangerous enemy to face.
‘My government's orders are positive,’ General Oudinot now informed the Roman Republic. ‘They require me to enter Rome as soon as possible… I have abrogated the verbal armistice which, at the instance of M. de Lesseps, I agreed to grant for the time being. I have warned your outposts that either army has the right to reopen hostilities. Solely to give time for any of our French residents to leave Rome… I am deferring the attack upon the place until Monday morning.’
Taking ‘the place’ to mean not only the city itself but all the outposts, including the Corsini and Pamphilj villas which were essential to its defence, the Roman generals concluded that all their men could relax on Sunday. But by ‘the place’ Oudinot afterwards claimed that he had referred only to the city itself and, having rejected the idea of an assault on the other side of Rome which might involve prolonged street fighting, he prepared to take the two vital villas as a necessary preliminary to an assault from the west. Accordingly, in the early hours of Sunday morning 3 June, the villas were attacked; and, since the defenders were fast asleep in their bivouacs at the time, they were captured without much difficulty, together with another smaller house, the Villa Medici del Vascello,3 at the foot of the slope.
Rome was soon in uproar. All over the city bells were pealing in the campanili, drums beating, crowds collecting in the piazzas. Soldiers ran shouting through the streets to their posts, cab-drivers drove at full tilt through the narrow streets of the Trastevere to help with the wounded who were being carted through the Porta San Pancrazio in wheelbarrows. An orderly burst into the lodgings in Via delle Carrozze near Piazza di Spagna where Garibaldi was ill in bed with rheumatism and a month-old, still festering wound. He leapt out of bed, buckled on his sword-belt and hurried off to the Porta San Pancrazio as the roar of the cannon on the Janiculum thundered in his ears. Outside the gate he looked up towards the ornate, four-storeyed Villa Corsini, strongly occupied now by the French whose sharpshooters, crouching behind a low wall on which were rows of large earthenware pots containing orange trees, covered with their fire the entire slope between the villa and the Porta San Pancrazio. In front of the villa a narrow drive, flanked by high box hedges, led down from the bottom of an outside staircase to a gate in the garden wall. The place might have been designed to repel a frontal attack. And even if it were to be captured, behind it the grounds of the Villa Pamphilj afforded ample space for troops to reform for a counter-attack on a wide front supported by artillery. Yet, having considered the difficulties presented by the ground for an outflanking movement, Garibaldi considered that he had no alternative other than an attack from the front. This would inevitably entail a dreadful loss of life as his men, under constant fire from the well-entrenched enemy, debouched from the narrow Porta San Pancrazio, ran across the open ground to the villa's boundary walls, and closed up again to pass through the garden gate and along the narrow, high-hedged drive beneath the many windows of the villa.
Time and again the attempt was made, and on every occasion it failed. Shouting ‘Long live the Roman Republic!’ soldiers and volunteers charged across from Urban VIII's wall to fall dead or wounded in the sweltering sun. And all the while behind the walls a band played the ‘Marseillaise’ at full blast in the vain hope that this might induce the French, fellow-Republicans after all, to throw down their arms in shame. Once or twice a group of desperate Italians, running through the dust and smoke, reached the steps, gained access to the entrance hall and toppled the defenders from the windows; but always the French counter-attacked successfully before other Italians could reach the villa. One brave assault by some four hundred bersaglieri was described by one of their officers: men fell to the ground around him on every side, yet, rather than turn back, the survivors knelt to fire, as though they had come to a wall which afforded them some protection. Many more had died before the bugler was ordered to sound the retreat. As the rest ran back, so many of them fell that the officer thought ‘they had stumbled in their haste over the roots of the vines. But their motionless bodies soon showed [him] the truth.’
After hours of pounding from the Roman batteries, the Villa Corsini, occasionally bursting into flames, began to collapse into ruins. From the walls of Rome men could see the floors give way and the French defenders clinging to the ends of the shattered beams. Garibaldi, who had spent the morning shouting encouragement as he sent one assault party after another across the open ground, had himself escaped injury, though his poncho and huge hat had been torn in many places by musket balls and scraps of flying metal. He now decided to make one last assault upon the villa and to take part in it himself. The attempt almost succeeded: the ruined villa was captured and the French driven out of its grounds into those of the Villa Pamphilj. Civilian spectators, overcome with excitement, poured out of the Porta San Pancrazio and began to run up the hill to congratulate the victors. But their rejoicing was premature. The French counter-attacked yet again; they retook the villa, and many more Italians fell to join the littered dead.
Among those officers who survived there was much criticism of Garibald's crude handling of the forces at his command. He ‘had shown himself,’ wrote one of them, Emilio Dandolo, ‘to be as utterly incapable as a general of division as he had proved himself an able and efficient leader in the skirmishes against the Neapolitans.’ In Rome that night, however, few voices were raised against him. Men spoke instead of the treacherous conduct of the blackguardly French, of the heroism of the Italian soldiers and volunteers, of the young men who had bravely died in answer to the call ‘Roma o morte!’
Romans! [Mazzini declared in a proclamation to the people] You have sustained the honour of Rome, the honour of Italy… May God bless you, guardians of the honour of your forefathers, as we, proud of having recognized the greatness within you, bless you in the name of Italy.
Romans! This day is a day of heroes, a page of history. Yesterday we said to you, be great. Today we say to you, you are great… We say with perfect trust… that Rome is inviolable. Watch over her walls this night. Within those walls is the future of the nation… Long live the Republic!
The defenders of Rome responded to these moving words with what appeared to the French to be tireless energy. The guns in the batteries maintained a regular fire; companies of bersaglieri, Garibaldini, papal troops and volunteers rushed out with bayonets whenever the French launched an attack upon an exposed part of the line; men worked bravely under fire to repair emplacements and dig new defences. Arthur Hugh Clough, on a visit to the Monte Cavallo hospital, saw Italian soldiers recovering from their wounds and formed the impression that ‘they would fight it out to the last’. Certainly the civilians, although the explosions were increasing and getting nearer to the heart of the city, were taking it all ‘coolly enough’. In the Trastevere, the most endangered part of Rome, the people seemed wholehearted in their support of Mazzini and, ‘recently so Catholic’, now cursed the Pope and clergy ‘in whose names they saw this carnage and these horrors committed’. ‘Ecco un Pio Nono!’ they would shout when a cannon-ball flew over; and, when one landed among them and did not explode, they would run forward to pick it up and throw it in the river. Even when, towards the end of June, many
79. French troops attempting to enter Rome through the Porta Cavallaggeri on 30 April 1849.
of them had to abandon their ruined homes, their determination to resist appeared unbroken.
Clough thought, however, that middle-class Romans were less enthusiastic in their defence of the Republic. He fancied they considered it ‘rather useless work’, though they did not ‘feel strongly enough on the matter to make them take active steps against a government which [had] won their respect alike by its moderation and its energy’. As the days passed, the feeling that the cause of the Republic was doomed grew even more widespread. It became increasingly difficult to maintain vigilance and discipline in the fortifications. Gunners in the batteries began to fire shots at random, as though it did not much matter where they landed; and civilians were so reluctant to help with the digging that on one occasion they had to be driven up to the walls at the point of the bayonet.
Remorselessly and skilfully, General Vaillant's engineers advanced their siege-works closer and closer to the city. The French batteries on Monte Verde and in the grounds of the Villa Corsini ceaselessly pounded the defences around Porta San Pancrazio, while night patrols ensured that the defenders could never rest in peace. It was still expected that the attack would come from the west, and Garibaldi insisted that he must have more men to defend the Janiculum. But Pietro Roselli, the Roman professional officer who had been placed in supreme command, could not neglect other parts of Rome's defences, particularly in the south where there were large numbers of French troops around S. Paolo fuori le Mura and in the north where they had captured Ponte Molle. So Garibaldi adopted an even more independent line than usual. He appropriated soldiers who had been allocated to other duties; and when, after a ferocious bombardment, the French threatened to dominate the city from S. Pietro in Montorio, he refused to obey an order to counter-attack on the grounds that it would be better to establish an inner line of
80. The attack on the Villa Corsini on 3 June 1849. On the left, Angelo Masina, the rich young democrat who raised a squadron of lancers to serve under Garibaldi, is seen dying.
defence on the Aurelian Wall and that his men were in no condition to counter-attack anyway.
His disagreements with the Roman High Command exacerbated the uneasiness of Garibaldi's relationship with Mazzini. It had never seemed likely that the two men, both obstinate, self-willed and headstrong, would be able to cooperate without friction. They were, it was often suggested, jealous of each other. Garibaldi, envious of Mazzini's acknowledged intellect, described him as ‘a doctrinaire’ whose followers were ‘learned academics, accustomed to legislate for the world from their studies’. Mazzini, who did not enjoy Garibaldi's influence and standing as a man of action, considered his rival ‘weak beyond expression’, ‘the most easily led of men’. If ‘Garibaldi has to choose between two proposals,’ Mazzini complained, ‘he is sure to choose the one that isn't mine.’ ‘You know the face of a lion?’ he once said to a friend. ‘Is it not a foolish face? Is it not the face of Garibaldi?’
Mazzini considered now that ‘Rome had already fallen’, but that if its fall was to have any significance in the future it must die in great suffering and self-sacrifice so that it should provide an inspiration to Italy. His feeling for Rome was more obsessive than ever and the suggestion that the defenders should abandon it and fight the French outside the walls appalled him. He himself was prepared to die within the city, and he called upon the people, in the last resort, to follow him to the front and throw back the enemy with their bare hands. ‘God grant that they will assault,’ he said, ‘and then we could have a noble defence of the people at the barricades. My mind is overwhelmed with grief that so much bravery, so much heroism should be lost.’
The assault that Mazzini had prayed for came at about one o'clock in the morning on the last night of June. The day before had been celebrated as usual as the Feast of St Peter and St Paul; and, encouraged by the government, who thought that they might serve as a demonstration of the Romans' defiance of their enemies, the people had let off fireworks and rockets into the darkening sky, and coloured lanterns had been hung up in the streets. Before midnight a heavy summer storm had sent rain pouring in torrents upon the city, so that when the bombardment began cascades of mud spattered the ruins. The subsequent fighting under the moonless sky was savage and bitter; but it was also brief. The French attack, carefully planned, was swift and determined. One column stormed through a breach in the wall built by Urban VIII, while another burst upon the Aurelian Wall and then fanned out to the left towards the battery near the Porta San Pancrazio and to the right to surround the Villa Spada where Garibaldi, having withdrawn from the Villa Savorelli, had established his headquarters.
Summoned to an emergency meeting of the Republican Assembly, Garibaldi left for the Capitol convinced that further resistance in Rome was pointless and that the government must now be forced to accept the alternative he had long pressed upon them – a guerilla campaign against the French outside the city walls. His Negro orderly was dead; his chief-of-staff was dying; he had often barely escaped death himself. He entered the Capitol, the sweat pouring from his face, his clothes covered with mud and drying blood, his bent sword sticking out of its scabbard. The members rose to cheer him. He reiterated his belief that the struggle must now be carried on outside the city. ‘Ovunque noi saremo,’ he said, ‘sarà Roma’ – ‘Wherever we go, there will Rome be.’
‘I am going out of Rome,’ he declared later from the saddle of his horse to the crowds collected around the obelisk in St Peter's piazza. ‘Whoever is willing to follow me will be received among my people. I ask nothing of them but a heart filled with love for our country. They will have no pay, no provisions and no rest. I offer hunger, cold, forced marches, battles and death. Whoever is not satisfied with such a life must remain behind. He who has the name of Italy not only on his lips but in his heart, let him follow me.' Those who were prepared to go with him must meet that evening by the Lateran, ready to leave Rome by the Porta San Giovanni.
About four thousand volunteers gathered there at the appointed hour, soldiers and civilians, men and boys, patriots, politicians and several criminals who were leaving Rome in order to escape the law or in the hope of loot. Garibaldi's pregnant wife, a short, dark, masculine, South American woman of mixed Portuguese and Indian descent was also there, having come to Rome to share his dangers with him. They filed out slowly through the gate in their civilian clothes and motley uniforms, followed by a single cannon.
Mazzinini had never considered going with them: never a man to follow anyone happily, to follow Garibaldi would have been intolerable. At the meeting of the Assembly he had resigned his office as Triumvir in protest against its decision to capitulate. Afterwards, he had walked about the streets of Rome in order, so it was alleged, to offer himself to the knife of an assassin and, by surviving, to demonstrate that the Catholic press was lying when it claimed that the Romans wished him dead for having forced a tyranny upon them. ‘In two short months he had grown old,’ wrote Margaret Fuller who saw him that evening. ‘All the vital juices seemed exhausted. He had passed all these nights without sleep; his eyes were all bloodshot; his skin orange. He was painfully thin; his hair was flecked with white; his hand was painful to the touch.’ He was still in Rome on 3 July when the French made their formal entry into the city. Their arrival was described by A. H. Clough:
I stood in the Corso with some thirty of the people and saw them pass. Fine working soldiers, indeed dogged and business-like, but they looked a little awkward while the people screamed and hooted and cried, ‘Viva la Repubblica Romana,’ etc. When they got past, some young simpleton sent a pail after them; four or five raced down with bayonets presented, while my young friend cut away up the Corso double-quick. They went on. At this moment, some Roman bourgeois as I fancy, but perhaps a foreigner, said something either to express his sense of the folly of it, or his sympathy with the invaders. He was surrounded and I saw him buffeted a good deal… I was told he got off. But a priest who walked and talked publicly in the Piazza Colonna with a Frenchman was undoubtedly killed… Poor man, he was quite a liberal ecclesiastic, they tell me; but certainly not a prudent one. To return to my own experience: After this, the column passed back by another street in the Corso, and dispersed the crowd with the bayonet point… An English acquaintance informed me that in passing by the Café Nuovo, where an Italian tricolour hung from the window, Oudinot plucked at it and bid it be removed. The French proceeded to do this but the Romans intervened. Cernuschi, the Barricade Commissioner, took it down and kissed it, and, as I myself saw, carried it in triumph amidst thers to the Piazza. I didn't follow; but on my bolder friend's authority I can state here the French moved up with their bayonets and took it from Cernuschi, stripping him moreover of his tricolour scarf.
P.S. The priest is not dead and perhaps will survive. But another I hear was hewed to pieces for shouting, ‘Viva Pio IX, a basso la repubblica!’… The French soldiers showed excellent temper. At the same time some faces I have seen are far more brutal than the worst Garibaldian and we have hitherto seen nothing so unpleasant in the female kind as the vivandiéres.
The Times correspondent agreed that the occupying forces behaved themselves well, though they were hissed and groaned at as they passed the Caffè Nuovo, ‘one of the strongholds of the Ultra-Liberals’,4 and, outside the Caffè delle Belle Arti, assailed with repeated cries of ‘Death to Pio Nono! Death to the priests! Viva the Roman Republic! Death to the Cardinal Oudinot!’ ‘The General's staff, who had borne with the good humour of French soldiers the first part of these insults, became furious on hearing the Commander-in-Chief personally vituperated and without a moment's hesitation they charged the crowd.’
The occupying forces, however, were rarely thus provoked. In the first few days the cafés and restaurants which they patronized were boycotted by the Romans, and some, such as the large Caffè Nuovo where ‘unmistakable disgust was evinced’, were closed down. But generally, as at the Bon Gout in Piazza di Spagna, the French were treated with ‘polite indifference’; and gradually the insults decreased. Search parties were sent out for leaders of the now defunct Republic, but they were conducted with so little thoroughness that they were seen as a matter of mere form. Most of the so-called ‘revolutionaries’ were allowed to escape with the help of sympathetic foreign consuls, the British consul, for example, issuing so many hundreds of diplomatic passes that Lord Palmerston was constrained to reprove him. With the assistance of the American chargé d'affaires, Mazzini got away to Civitavecchia and eventually to England, without interference from the authorities.
Nine months after Mazzini's departure from Rome, Pope Pius returned in state through the Lateran gate, escorted by French troops. He rode to the Vatican, where he had chosen to live instead of at the Quirinal; and from the Vatican he presided over the restoration of his authoritarian and paternalistic papal rule. Soon the hotels and lodging-houses of Rome were again filled with foreign tourists and the workshops of the city were busy once more.
One visitor who had spent three months in Rome almost twenty years before found it ‘scarcely changed at all’: her favourite restaurant had the same owners, the same cooks and the same waiters. The Romans she met were as friends as ever. She felt no sense of that repression which enemies of the régime were later to describe. Nor did Jean-Jacques Ampère, the French historian and philologist, who
81. Pope Pius IX blessing the victorious French army drawn up in the piazza of St Peter's on 18 April 1850.
was in Rome at the same time and who thought that there was more liberty in Rome than anywhere else in Italy – that the priests were quite prepared to abide by a policy of laissez-faire outside the sphere of their special requirements.
In one way, however, Rome had changed: it was no longer the centre of the art world, which was gradually moving to Paris. Jacques-Louis David, who had come to Rome with Comte Joseph-Marie Vien, a pioneer of the neo-classical style, when Vien had been appointed Director of the French Academy, had long since returned to Paris. Antonio Canova, the sculptor whose studio was in Palazzo Venezia and whose monument to the Stuarts in St Peter's5 and sculpture of Pauline Bonaparte in the Borghese Gallery6 are among several of his works which can be seen in Rome, had gone home to Venice. The Icelandic sculptor Bertel Thorwaldsen, in whose studio in Rome there were at one time no less than forty assistants, had returned to Denmark in 1838. And the Nazarenes, who were among the first primitives of the nineteenth century and had come from Germany to occupy an abandoned monastery, had begun to break up even before the completion of the frescos for the Casino Massimo.7
Yet if Rome was no longer the art centre it had formerly been, interest in its classical monuments and early Christian art was now more intense than ever. For this the archaeologists Luigi Canina and G. B. de Rossi were largely responsible, Canina by his excavations of the Appian Way and his etchings of reconstructions of hundreds of Roman antiquities, de Rossi by his digs in the Colosseum, the Forum and in the early churches of Rome and his discoveries of the catacombs of St Calixtus and St Agnese.
Pope Pius took the greatest interest in de Rossi's work and his eyes filled with tears when the archaeologist took him down to show him the fragments of inscriptions he had found in the Crypt of the Popes in the Catacombs of St Calixtus. ‘Are these really,’ he asked in wonderment, ‘the tombs of my predecessors who repose here?’ The Pope was also deeply interested in those modern inventions which in the 1850s and 1860s were beginning to transform life in Rome and the Papal States, in hydraulics and telegraphs, in steam power, machinery and railways, taking particular pride in his own special train with its white and gold painted coaches which included a chapel on bogie wheels. He frequently walked out to watch progress on these wonders of science and to bless them when they were completed. He blessed the first train which left Rome for Frascati in 1860 and which, travelling at thirty miles an hour, arrived there to be welcomed by a band which made puffing, grinding and whistling sounds in imitation of mechanical locomotion. Lord John Manners, Chief Commissioner of Works in the British government, was present when in 1863 the Pope attended the opening of the steel drawbridge across the Tiber near Porta Portese and was embarrassed to be presented to His Holiness, since he was wearing an old straw hat and carrying an umbrella. But he was soon made to feel at ease as the Pope said to him, ‘I am very glad to see you, especially at this moment. You will be able to tell them, when you return to London, that the Roman pontiff is not always at prayer, surrounded with incense and monks. You will be able to tell the Queen that Her Majesty's Minister of Public Works one day surprised the old Pope in the midst of his workmen, attending the opening of a new bridge over the Tiber, and himself explaining pretty well the mechanism of the new invention.’
Yet interested as he was in scientific progress, the Pope closed his mind firmly to proposals for a united Italy of which Rome would be the capital and to which the temporal estates of the Church, held in trust from God and for centuries an instrument for the preservation of the papacy's spiritual independence, would have to be surrendered. But the Risorgimento was gaining a momentum that made the Pope's stand irrelevant. Cavour, the King of Sardinia's brilliant and unscrupulous chief minister, was elaborating those policies which were to enable his master to expand his territories from Piedmont into Lombardy and south across Parma, Modena and into Tuscany. Garibaldi was preparing the forces which would seize Sicily and Naples from the Bourbons. In September 1860 the Piedmontese army invaded the Papal States; and by the end of the year King Victor Emmanuel II, by a series of well-manipulated plebiscites, had gained control of all Italy with the exception of the Veneto and Rome.
On 17 March by a unanimous vote of the Parliament in Turin, Victor Emmanuel was proclaimed King of Italy and ten days later, although it was still in the hands
82. Victor Emmanuel II (1820–78), first King of the United Italy, the only Knight of the Garter the Duchess of Sutherland had ever seen who ‘looked as if he would have the best of it with the dragon’.
of the Pope, Rome was declared the capital of the new kingdom. At the Vatican the Pope was assured by the French Ambassador, the Duc de Grammont, that France would oppose any aggression on Rome with ‘force of arms’. At first the Pope believed that France would do so, convinced by the protestations of the Ambassador who, in the opinion of his British counterpart, Odo Russell, was ‘an amiable humbug… affecting, like all French diplomatists in Italy, the greatest contempt for Italian aspirations, wishing to hang Cavour and shoot Garibaldi’. And so, advised by his Secretary of State, Cardinal Antonelli, the Pope refused to make any concessions on what had become known as the Roman Question. He told Odo Russell that the crisis would pass, that one day soon the Church would triumph over her enemies; and, in the meantime, there were 6,000 French troops in Rome as well as an international force of volunteers in the pay of the papacy. As though in defiance of his enemies, in 1864, the Pope issued his Syllabus of Errors which stigmatized as an error the view that ‘the Roman pontiff can and should reconcile himself to and agree with progress, liberalism and modern civilization’; and on 18 December 1869, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, he opened the Vatican Council at which the dogma of Papal Infallibility was defined. But then in 1870 France declared war on Prussia, and by the time the battle of Sedan had deprived Louis Napoleon of his empire, nearly all the French soldiers had been withdrawn from Rome in a vain attempt to avert a catastrophic defeat. Immediately King Victor Emmanuel's troops prepared to take their place. On 16 September the Pope went to S. Maria d'Aracoeli to pray before the Santo Bambino, the figure, so revered in Rome, which is said to have been carved out of wood from one of the olive trees in the Garden of Gethsemane. Three days later, for the last time, he crossed Rome in his carriage from the Vatican to St John Lateran to review the troops assembled in the piazza. Slowly, the frail, white-haired old man of seventy-eight climbed the Scala Santa on his knees and at the top, after praying aloud, he stood up to bless the soldiers below him.
In the early hours of the morning of 20 September, the King's cannon opened fire upon the city gates. In the Vatican the windows rattled in their frames. But the Pope had given orders that no more than a token resistance should be offered, a resistance sufficient to demonstrate that he was yielding to the usurpation of Rome by force. Soon the firing died away as a white flag was hoisted from the cupola of St Peter's.
Next year Italy transferred her capital to Rome, the King established his court at the Quirinal and the Pope withdrew into the Vatican, where he died, a self-styled prisoner, in 1878, having reigned for longer than any other pontiff in the history of the papacy. The King also died in 1878. He had never settled contentedly in Rome, seeming happy only at the Villa Ludovisi8 which he leased from the Duke of Sora for his morganatic wife, Rosina Vercellina. Homesick for Turin, he much disliked the gloomy Quirinal, where for several years foreign royalty, Catholic and Protestant alike, were unwilling to stay the night for fear of offending the Pope. For many years to come, indeed, the Pope and the new regime were to remain unreconciled; and Roman society was to be torn by conflicting loyalties.