CHAPTER XXVIII
‘Italy,’ declared Metternich, ‘is a geographical expression.’ He spoke no more than the truth. Never in all its history had the Italian peninsula constituted a single nation; even in the days of imperial Rome it had been merely a part–and usually quite a small part–of the Roman state. Since the early Middle Ages, however–and perhaps even earlier–the concept of Italian nationhood had existed as a distant ideal: Dante and Petrarch had both dreamed of it, as later had Machiavelli. Geographically and linguistically, it obviously made sense; but the land was so deeply divided against itself, the medieval rifts and rivalries so bitter between city and city, Guelf and Ghibelline, Emperor and Pope, that the nineteenth century was already half-way through its course before unification was seen even as a possibility.
But then came the quarantotto, and all was changed. The distant dream had suddenly become an attainable objective. Count Camillo Cavour had no good reason to call his newspaper Il Risorgimento–there could be no question of resurgence towards an objective that had never existed before–but the word had a fine ring to it and was soon generally adopted. What was now needed was leadership.
As 1849 opened, there was only one serious contender on the national level. Venetia-Lombardy was still under Austrian rule. Rome was obviously excluded since, although Pope Pius had been for some weeks in voluntary exile, the problem of the Papacy–and therefore of the Papal States, which effectively divided the peninsula into two–remained unsolved. Naples under the sadly unreconstructed King Bomba was scarcely worth considering, and the other states of Italy were too small and weak to qualify. Piedmont was the obvious choice. Though still smarting from its defeat the previous year, it was energetic, ambitious and steadily increasing in size.243 Its King, Charles Albert, had been on the throne since 1831 and was uncompromisingly anti-Austrian.
But Charles Albert, as a reigning monarch, could not give the movement–which was, after all, largely republican–the charismatic personal leadership that it so obviously required. This, in the early years at least, was to be the task of Giuseppe Mazzini. Mazzini had been born in Genoa in 1805, but ten years later the dispensations of the Congress of Vienna had automatically made him a Piedmontese citizen; though he somewhat desultorily studied both medicine and law, from his university days onward he was obsessed by the idea of Italian regeneration–to the point where his subversive activities resulted in a brief sentence of internment, followed in February 1831 by exile in Marseille. Living principally there and in London, he was to remain essentially an exile for the rest of his life.
It was on his arrival in Marseille that Mazzini founded the movement that he called la giovine Italia–Young Italy. As its name implied, it was directed exclusively at the under-forties, in an attempt to develop their national consciousness; it would be a ‘great Italian national association’, which had as its avowed object the liberation of Italy, by revolution if necessary. It had an immediate success: within two years of its foundation it could boast some 60,000 members. It also ran a periodical–bearing the same name as the society–of which six copies were produced in the first two years: no mean achievement, considering that each number contained some 200 pages, many of them written by Mazzini himself.
By 1833 he was ready for action. Young Italy had attracted a remarkably large number of the young officers and men of the Piedmontese army; with his boyhood friend Jacopo Ruffini he now planned simultaneous risings in Genoa and Alessandria, which he believed would spread across the country, overthrowing the government and eventually toppling Charles Albert. Alas, before these risings were even begun the plot was discovered. The discovery was in fact the fault of neither of the two chief conspirators, but virtually all their associates were arrested, twelve of them being executed by a firing squad. Ruffini slashed his veins in prison.
Mazzini, over the border in France, was in no immediate danger, but Marseille was full of Piedmontese agents, and soon afterwards he left for the greater safety of Geneva. Three years later, however, after several more unsuccessful conspiracies, even Switzerland had become too hot for him. In January 1837 he arrived in London, where he was to spend the next eleven years and which was to become his second home. Here he flung himself once again into a whirlpool of feverish activity: breathing new life into Young Italy, working to improve the lot of Italian immigrants, establishing a free school for Italian children, founding another newspaper, writing dozens of letters every day to Italian patriots and exiles throughout the world–for by now there were revolutionary committees not only in Italy but in several other European countries as well as in the USA, Canada, Cuba and Latin America.
Such was his energy and his industry that this remarkable Italian soon became a well-known figure in London. Seven years after his arrival, however, he was to enjoy a sudden and unexpected celebrity which proved of immense benefit to his cause. Early in 1844 he began to suspect that his letters were being secretly opened before delivery–a fact which a few simple experiments were enough to confirm. He at once complained to a friendly Member of Parliament, who obligingly put a question in the House of Commons. The Home Secretary, Sir James Graham, at first denied the accusation, but when faced with the evidence was compelled to admit that his office had indeed been opening the letters, at the request of the Austrian ambassador. The resulting scandal–people began writing ‘Not to be Grahamed’ on their envelopes–not only threw Mazzini into the limelight; it also enabled him to write an ‘open letter’ to Graham which set out the Italian case in detail and–since it was widely reprinted–gave him just the publicity he needed. His friend Thomas Carlyle maintained that the opening of his letters was the best thing that had ever happened to him.
The hurried departure of the Pope took Rome by surprise. The Chief Minister of the papal government, Giuseppe Galletti–an old friend of Mazzini’s who had returned to Rome under the amnesty and had courageously succeeded the murdered Rossi–first sent a delegation to Gaeta to persuade Pius to return; only when this was refused an audience did Galletti call for the formation of a Roman Constituent Assembly, of 200 elected members, which would meet in the city on 5 February 1849. Time was short but the need was urgent, and 142 members duly presented themselves in the palace of the Cancellaria on the appointed date. Just four days later, at two o’clock in the morning, the Assembly voted–by 120 votes to ten, with twelve abstentions–to put an end to the temporal power of the Pope and to establish a Roman republic. Mazzini was not present; by far the most dominant personality in the proceedings was a forty-one-year-old adventurer named Giuseppe Garibaldi.
Born in 1807 in Nice–which would be ceded to France only in 1860–Garibaldi was, like Mazzini, a Piedmontese. He had started his professional life as a merchant seaman, and had become a member of Young Italy in 1833. Always a man of action, he was involved the following year in an unsuccessful mutiny–one of the many failed conspiracies of those early years–and a warrant was issued for his arrest. Just in time, he managed to escape to France; meanwhile, in Turin, he was sentenced in absentia to death for high treason. After a brief spell in the French merchant navy he joined the navy of the Bey of Tunis, who offered him the post of Commander-in-Chief. This he declined, and finally, in December 1835, he sailed as second mate in a French brig bound for South America. There he was to stay for the next twelve years, the first four of them fighting for a small state that was trying–unsuccessfully–to break away from Brazilian domination. In 1841 he and his Brazilian mistress, Anita Ribeiro da Silva, trekked to Montevideo, where he was soon put in charge of the Uruguayan navy, also taking command of a legion of Italian exiles–the first of the Redshirts, with whom his name was ever afterwards associated. After his victory at the minor but heroic battle of Sant’ Antonio in 1846 his fame quickly spread to Europe. By now he had become a professional rebel, whose experience of guerrilla warfare was to stand him in good stead in the years to come.
The moment Garibaldi heard of the revolutions of 1848, he gathered sixty of his Redshirts and took the next ship back to Italy. His initial offers to fight for the Pope and then for Piedmont having both been rejected–Charles Albert, in particular, would not have forgotten that he was still under sentence of death–he headed for Milan, where Mazzini had already arrived, and immediately plunged into the fray. The armistice following Charles Albert’s defeat at Custoza he simply ignored, continuing his private war against the Austrians until at the end of August, heavily outnumbered, he had no choice but to retreat to Switzerland. There he spent the next three months with Anita, but on hearing of the flight of the Pope hurried at once with his troop of volunteers to Rome. He was elected a member of the new Assembly, and it was he who formally proposed that Rome should thenceforth be an independent republic.
Mazzini was, surprisingly, not present during these stirring events. From Milan he had travelled on to Florence–from which Grand Duke Leopold had somewhat hurriedly decamped–with the vain hope of persuading the government to proclaim a republic and unite it with that of Rome; it was only at the beginning of March that he made his way–for the first time–to the new capital, where a seat in the Assembly was awaiting him. He was, predictably, given a hero’s welcome, and was invited to sit at the President’s right hand.
It was unfortunate that the King of Piedmont should have chosen this moment to denounce the armistice concluded less than seven months before and to resume his war with Austria. Why he did so remains a puzzle. It may be that he feared another insurrection and the loss of his throne; more probably he saw himself as the champion and liberator of Italy, and was determined not to allow the defeat of Custoza to spell the end of his military career. That defeat had shown him, however, that he was no general; for the next phase of the war, while retaining the nominal supremacy, he entrusted the effective command to a Pole, a veteran of the Napoleonic wars named Wojtiech Chrzanowski.
Chrzanowski doubtless did his best, but as a general he proved little better than his chief. Less than a fortnight after the war was resumed the Piedmontese found themselves up against Radetzky at Novara, some thirty miles west of Milan. As at Custoza, they were no match for the slightly outnumbered but infinitely more disciplined and professional Austrians. Charles Albert showed exemplary courage, moving fearlessly across the field as the bullets whistled around him. He survived unscathed, but his troops were routed and the battle lost. One city, Brescia, stood alone for a few more days, but it was soon subdued in its turn by the Austrian General Julius von Haynau, with all the savagery and brutality for which he was notorious.244 Charles Albert, declaring that he could not face signing another armistice, abdicated in favour of his son Victor Emmanuel, Duke of Savoy. Permitted as a private citizen to pass through the Austrian lines, he retired to Oporto, where he died only four months later of what seemed suspiciously like a broken heart.
Giuseppe Mazzini had long believed that imperial Rome and papal Rome would be followed by a third Rome: a Rome of the people. Now that dream had come true. The Assembly had put the new republic in the hands of a triumvirate; of its three members, however, two were virtually ignored. Mazzini was now effectively dictator of Rome. He was by no means the first, nor would he be the last, but it can safely be said that no other was remotely like him. In his cramped little office in the Quirinal Palace he was accessible to all comers; he ate every day at the same cheap trattoria; his monthly salary of thirty-two lire he gave to charity. Now, too, the propagandist and demagogue became a quietly conscientious administrator. He abolished the death penalty, introduced universal male suffrage, declared total freedom of the press and restored order to the Papal States, which had been terrorised by republican extremists. He would doubtless have done a great deal more, but he knew that he was working against time: ‘We must act,’ he told the Assembly, ‘like men who have the enemy at their gates, and at the same time like men who are working for eternity.’ He spoke no more than the truth; in early April there came ominous news from Paris. A French expeditionary force was on the march.
On 18 February Pope Pius in Gaeta had addressed a formal appeal for help to France, Austria, Spain and Naples. By none of these four powers was he to go unheard; to Mazzini, however, the greatest danger was France–whose response would clearly depend on the complexion of its new republic and, in particular, on Prince Louis Napoleon, its recently elected president. Nearly twenty years before, the Prince had been implicated in an anti-papal plot and expelled from Rome; he still had no particular affection for the Papacy. Since Novara, on the other hand, he could see that Austria was more powerful in Italy than ever; how could he contemplate the possibility of the Austrians now coming south and restoring the Pope on their own terms? If he himself were to take no action, that–he had no doubt at all–was what they would do.
He gave his orders accordingly, and on 25 April 1849 General Nicholas Oudinot–son of one of Napoleon’s marshals–landed with a force of about 9,000 at Civitavecchia and began the forty-mile march to Rome. From the start he was under a misapprehension. He had been led to believe that the republic had been imposed by a small group of revolutionaries on an unwilling people and would soon be overturned; he and his men would consequently be welcomed as liberators. His orders were to grant the triumvirate and the Assembly no formal recognition, but to occupy the city peacefully, if possible without firing a shot.
He was in for a surprise. The Romans, although they had little hope of defending their city against a trained and well-equipped army, were busy preparing themselves for the fight. Their own forces, such as they were, consisted of the regular papal troops of the line, the carabinieri–a special corps of the Italian army entrusted with police duties–the 1,000-strong Civic Guard, the volunteer regiments raised in the city amounting to some 1,400, and–by no means the least formidable–the populace itself, with every weapon it could lay its hands on. But their total numbers were still pathetically small, and great was their jubilation when, on the 27th, Garibaldi rode into the city at the head of 1,300 legionaries which he had gathered in the Romagna. Two days later there followed a regiment of Lombard bersaglieri, with their distinctive broad-brimmed hats and swaying plumes of black-green cock’s feathers. The defenders were gathering in strength, but the odds were still heavily against them and they knew it.
That first battle for Rome was fought on 30 April. The day was saved by Oudinot’s ignorance and incomprehension. He had brought no siege guns with him, and no scaling-ladders; it was only when his column, advancing towards the Vatican and the Janiculum hill, was greeted by bursts of cannon-fire that he began to realise the full danger of his situation. Soon afterwards Garibaldi’s legion swept down upon him, swiftly followed by the bersaglieri lancers. For six hours he and his men fought back as well as they could, but as evening fell they could only admit defeat and take the long road back to Civitavecchia. They had lost 500 killed or wounded, with 365 taken prisoner, but perhaps the humiliation had been worst of all.
That night all Rome was illuminated in celebration, but no one pretended that the French were not going to return. The French had now learned that Rome was to be a tougher nut to crack than they had expected; nonetheless, they intended to crack it. Little over a month later–during which time Garibaldi, with his legionaries and the bersaglieri, marched south to meet an invading Neapolitan army and effortlessly expelled it from republican territory–Oudinot had received the reinforcements he had requested, and it was with 20,000 men behind him and vastly improved armament that, on 3 June, he marched on Rome for the second time.
Advancing as he was from the west, his primary objectives were the historic Villa Pamfili and Villa Corsini, high on the Janiculum hill. By the end of the day both were safely in his hands, his guns drawn up into position. Rome was effectively doomed. The defenders fought back superbly for nearly a month, but on the morning of 30 June Mazzini addressed the Assembly. There were, he told them, three possibilities: they could surrender; they could continue the fight and die in the streets; or they could retire to the hills and continue the struggle. Around midday Garibaldi appeared, covered in dust, his red shirt soaked in blood and sweat; his mind was made up. Surrender was obviously out of the question. Street fighting, he pointed out, was also impossible; when Trastevere245 was abandoned–as it would have to be–French guns could simply destroy the city. The hills, then, it would have to be. ‘Dovunque saremo,’ he told them, ‘colà sarà Roma.’246
Strangely enough, the majority of the deputies disagreed, choosing a fourth possibility: not to surrender, but to declare a ceasefire and remain in Rome. This was a course which Mazzini appeared not to have previously considered; eventually, however, he decided to adopt it himself. The French, who had been led to believe that he was a hated tyrant, were astonished to see a man who walked fearlessly through the streets hailed and greeted with respect wherever he went, to the point where they did not dare to arrest him. But Mazzini knew that even if he remained at liberty he would henceforth be powerless, and after a few days he slipped back to London. ‘Italy is my country,’ he used to say, ‘but England is my home–if I have one.’
Garibaldi, meanwhile, appealed for volunteers. ‘I offer,’ he declared, ‘neither pay, nor board, nor lodging; I offer only hunger, thirst, forced marches, battle and death. Let him who loves his country in his heart, and not with his lips only, follow me.’ Four thousand men hastened to join him, though it was to be little more than a handful that a month later, having escaped the attentions of no less than three enemy armies, dragged itself to refuge in the little republic of San Marino.247 There the troop disbanded, and Garibaldi, with Anita and a few faithful followers, set off for the only Italian republic which was still fighting for survival: Venice.
Alas, the vessel in which they sailed was intercepted by an Austrian warship. Garibaldi was forced to disembark on a remote stretch of the coast–now known as Porto Garibaldi–and before he could reach the Venetian lagoon his beloved Anita died in his arms. Temporarily, the spirit went out of him. Once again he left Italy, and a few weeks later arrived in New York, there to begin his second period of American exile.
Even if Garibaldi had managed to reach Venice, there was little that he could have done. All through the previous winter, despite an intermittent Austrian blockade, Daniele Manin had concentrated on building up an effective army–a task which he entrusted to General Pepe, who cheerfully proclaimed his readiness to give his life for Italy and the Venetian Republic. As a Calabrian, Pepe proved able to recruit a large number of officers and men formerly in the Neapolitan army; the result, by the beginning of April 1849, was a reasonably disciplined fighting force some 20,000 strong, which gave the Assembly the confidence to publish a heroic decree: ‘Venice will resist Austria at all costs. President Manin is invested, for that purpose, with unlimited powers.’
The blockade continued until May 1849, when the Austrian commander finally accepted that a lagoon ninety miles in circumference could never be completely cordoned off, while a city of some 200,000 inhabitants would take a long time to starve; there was nothing for it but a full military siege. The first target was the fort at Malghera (now Marghera), at the mainland end of the railway bridge. After three weeks’ bombardment it finally gave in, but the bridge itself, with several other makeshift forts along its length, somehow held. Early in July the Austrians had the extraordinary idea of trying to drop bombs on Venice from a fleet of large balloons; the experiment proved a fiasco and gave the Venetians at least something to laugh about–but they had very little else. The siege had at last given rise to a serious shortage of food, and as the month wore on they found themselves on the brink of famine. Even fish–the Venetian staple–was in short supply, since the amount furnished by the lagoon was hopelessly inadequate for the city’s population. Bread rationing was introduced, but the situation continued to deteriorate. On 28 July Manin formally asked the members of the Assembly whether it was possible for Venice to resist any longer; his hearers, however, were determined to fight to the end.
On the night of the 29th, the bombardment of Venice began in earnest. It was confined to the western half of the city, if only because the Austrian guns, even when raised to their highest elevation, could lob their cannonballs no further; the Piazza was fortunately just out of range. Fortunately, too, the vast majority of the projectiles were merely balls, and not shells that exploded on impact. The Austrians frequently made them red-hot before firing, but there were not enough furnaces to heat them all and the occasional small fire that resulted could normally be dealt with by the Venetian fire brigade–which now included Daniele Manin as one of its members.
Nevertheless, the sheer intensity of the bombardment over the next three and a half weeks could not fail to take its toll on Venetian morale, and by now the city had fallen victim to the greatest scourge of all: cholera. By the end of July the disease was raging in every quarter of the city. In the heat of August it grew worse still, especially in the hideously overcrowded easternmost region of Castello, to which most of the people from the exposed western areas had fled. The grave-diggers could not hope to keep pace–burial is anyway a difficult process in Venice–and the corpses awaiting their attention remained piled up in the campo of Venice’s old cathedral, S. Pietro di Castello. The smell, we are told, was asphyxiating.
It was plain that the end was near. On 19 August two gondolas set off for Mestre flying white flags; three days later, agreement was reached. The Austrian terms were surprisingly generous. Their principal requirement was that all officers and all Italian soldiers who were subjects of the Empire and had fought against it should leave Venice at once; forty leading Venetians were also to be expelled. On 27 August the Austrians reoccupied the city. That same afternoon the French ship Pluton sailed from the Giudecca. On board were, with thirty-seven others, Guglielmo Pepe, Niccolò Tommaseo and Daniele Manin.
Manin, with his wife and daughter, settled in Paris, where he wrote articles for the French papers and gave lessons in Italian. By now he had given up his republican ideals; his sights, like Mazzini’s, were set on his country’s unification. ‘I am convinced,’ he wrote, ‘that our first task is to make Italy a reality…the republican party declares to the house of Savoy: “If you create Italy, we are with you; if not, not.” ’ He died in Paris on 22 September 1857, aged fifty-three. Eleven years later his remains were brought back to Venice and placed in a specially designed tomb against the north wall of St Mark’s. Outside his house in the former Campo S. Paternian–now Campo Manin–there crouches a huge bronze lion, angrily lashing his tail.
Had the quarantotto been in vain? By the autumn of 1849 it certainly seemed so. The Austrians were back in Venice and in Lombardy; Pius IX had returned to a French-occupied Rome; in Naples, King Bomba had torn up the constitution and once more wielded absolute power; Florence, Modena and Parma, all under Austrian protection, were in much the same state. In the whole peninsula, only Piedmont remained free–but Piedmont too had changed. The tall, handsome, idealistic Charles Albert was dead. His son and successor, Victor Emmanuel II, was short, squat and unusually ugly, principally interested–or so it seemed–in hunting and women. But he was a good deal more intelligent than he looked; despite his genuine shyness and awkwardness in public, politically speaking he missed very few tricks. It is hard to imagine the Risorgimento without him.
Yet even Victor Emmanuel might have foundered had it not been for his Chief Minister, Camillo Cavour, who succeeded the strongly anticlerical Massimo d’Azeglio at the end of 1852 and remained in power, with very brief intermissions, for the next nine years–years which were crucial for Italy. Cavour’s appearance, like that of his master, was deceptive. Short and pot-bellied, with a blotchy complexion, thinning hair and spectacles that looked more like goggles, he was shabbily dressed and at first acquaintance distinctly unprepossessing. His mind, on the other hand, was like a rapier, and once he began to talk few were impervious to his charm. Domestically, he continued d’Azeglio’s programme of ecclesiastical reform–often in the teeth of opposition from a pious and conscientiously Catholic king–while doing everything he could to strengthen the economy; his foreign policy, meanwhile, was ever directed towards his dream of a united Italy, with Piedmont at its head.
But what, it may be asked, did the cause of a united Italy have to do with the Crimean War, in which Piedmont allied herself with the western powers in January 1855? Cavour had several reasons. He knew, first of all, that Britain and France were hoping to bring Austria into the war; this in turn might lead to a long-term Franco-Austrian alliance which would effectively destroy his chances of ending the Austrian presence in the peninsula. If, on the other hand, Italy could show the world her fighting spirit, those chances would be proportionately increased; the greater her military glory, the more likely it was that Britain and France would at last take her aspirations seriously. The experiment was not entirely successful: the Piedmontese were to fight in one battle only, and that a relatively insignificant one. Just twenty-eight of them were killed, few indeed compared with the 2,000 lost to cholera by the end of the year. Infuriatingly, too, it was Austria’s threat to enter the war which persuaded the Russians to sue for peace. But if Piedmont failed to impress on the field of battle, she at least earned invitations for Victor Emmanuel to pay state visits to Queen Victoria and Napoleon III248 in December 1855 and gained a seat at the Paris peace table two months later. It was, moreover, in the course of his conversations with the French at this time that Cavour began to entertain a new and exciting hope: that Napoleon III, after his distinctly unhelpful policies in the past, might now be prepared to assist in the long-awaited Austrian expulsion.
It is a curious fact that what seems finally to have decided the Emperor to take up arms on Italy’s behalf was a plot by Italian patriots to assassinate him. The attempt took place on 14 January 1858, when he and the Empress were on their way to the Opéra for a performance of William Tell and bombs were thrown at their carriage. Neither was hurt, though there were a number of casualties among their escort and surrounding bystanders. The leader of the conspirators, Felice Orsini, was a well-known republican who had been implicated in a number of former plots. While in prison awaiting trial he wrote the Emperor a letter, which was later read aloud in open court and published in both the French and the Piedmontese press. It ended: ‘Remember that, so long as Italy is not independent, the peace of Europe and Your Majesty is but an empty dream…Set my country free, and the blessings of twenty-five million people will follow you everywhere and forever.’
Although these noble words failed to save Orsini from the firing squad, they seem to have lingered in the mind of Napoleon III, who by midsummer 1858 had come round to the idea of a joint operation to drive the Austrians out of the Italian peninsula once and for all. His motives were not, however, entirely idealistic. True, he had a genuine love for Italy and would have been delighted to present himself to the world as her deliverer, but he was also aware that his prestige and popularity were fast declining. He desperately needed a war–and a victorious war at that–to regain them, and Austria was the only potential enemy available. The next step was clearly to discuss the possibilities with Cavour, and in July 1858 the two met secretly at the little health resort of Plombières-les-Bains in the Vosges. Agreement was quickly reached. Piedmont would engineer a quarrel with the Duke of Modena and send in troops, ostensibly at the request of the population. Austria would be bound to support the Duke and declare war; Piedmont would then appeal to France for aid. In return, she would cede to France the county of Savoy and the city of Nice. The latter, being the birthplace of Garibaldi, was a bitter pill for Cavour to swallow, but if it was the price of liberation, then swallowed it would have to be.
To set the seal on this agreement, the two men agreed on a dynastic marriage: Victor Emmanuel’s eldest daughter, the Princess Clotilde, should be espoused to the Emperor’s cousin, Prince Napoleon. When this engagement was announced there were many–especially in Piedmont–who threw up their hands in horror. The princess was a highly intelligent, pious and attractive girl of fifteen; her fiancé–universally known as Plon-Plon–a well-known and slightly ridiculous roué of thirty-seven. Victor Emmanuel, who had apparently not been consulted in advance, made no secret of his displeasure and left the final decision to Clotilde herself. It says much for her sense of duty that she agreed to go through with the marriage–which, to everyone’s surprise, proved to be a not unhappy one.
The wedding ceremony took place at the end of January 1859, while France and Piedmont were actively–and openly–preparing for war. Soon afterwards Napoleon III began to have second thoughts about the whole affair–to the dismay of Cavour, who was well aware that his country could not possibly tackle Austria alone. Worse still, Britain, Prussia and Russia were now talking of a possible international congress, which would almost certainly involve the voluntary disarmament of Piedmont. Cavour, in short, was staring disaster in the face. He was saved in the nick of time by Austria herself, which sent an ultimatum to Turin on 23 April demanding that very disarmament within three days. Austria had now declared herself the aggressor; Napoleon could no longer hope to wriggle out of his commitments and did not attempt to do so. He ordered the immediate mobilisation of the French army. Of its 120,000 men, one section would enter Italy across the Alps while the rest went by sea to Genoa.
Cavour was well aware that all this would take time; meanwhile, the Austrians were already on the march. For at least a fortnight, the Piedmontese would have to face the Austrians alone. It was a daunting prospect; fortunately he was saved again–this time by torrential rains and dissension over strategy within the Austrian staff. The consequent delay gave time for the French to arrive, led by the Emperor himself who, landing at Genoa on 12 May, for the first time in his life took personal command of his army. It was on 4 June that the first decisive battle took place–at Magenta, a small village some fourteen miles west of Milan, where the French army, fighting alone under General Marie-Patrice de MacMahon–whom Napoleon subsequently promoted to marshal and made Duke of Magenta–defeated an Austrian army of 50,000. Casualties were high on both sides, and would have been higher if the Piedmontese, delayed by the indecision of their own commander, had not arrived some time after the battle was over. This misfortune did not, however, prevent Napoleon and Victor Emmanuel from making a joint triumphal entry into Milan four days later.
After Magenta the Franco-Piedmontese army was joined by Garibaldi, who had returned from America in 1854 full of all his old ardour and enthusiasm. He had now been invited by Victor Emmanuel to assemble a brigade of cacciatori delle Alpi,249 and he had won a signal victory over the Austrians some ten days before at Varese. Army and cacciatori then advanced together and met the full Austrian army on 24 June at Solferino, just south of Lake Garda. The ensuing battle–in which well over 250,000 men were engaged–was fought on a grander scale than any since Leipzig in 1813. This time Napoleon III was not the only monarch to assume personal command: Victor Emmanuel did the same, as did the twenty-nine-year-old Emperor Franz Josef of Austria, who had succeeded his uncle Ferdinand in 1848. Only the French, however, were able to reveal a secret weapon: rifled artillery, which dramatically increased both the accuracy and the range of their guns.
The fighting, much of it hand-to-hand, began early in the morning and continued for most of the day. Only towards evening, after losing some 20,000 of his men in heavy rain, did Franz Josef order a withdrawal across the Mincio river. But it was a Pyrrhic victory; the French and Piedmontese lost almost as many men as the Austrians, and the outbreak of fever–probably typhus–that followed the battle accounted for thousands more on both sides. The scenes of carnage made a deep impression on a young Swiss named Henri Dunant, who chanced to be present and organised emergency aid services for the wounded. Five years later, as a direct result of his experience, he was to found the Red Cross.
Nor was Dunant the only one to be sickened by what he had seen at Solferino. Napoleon III had also been profoundly shocked, and his disgust for war and all the horrors it brought in its train was certainly one of the reasons why, little more than a fortnight after the battle, he made a separate peace with Austria. There were others too. Things had gone badly for the Austrians, but they remained secure in what was known as the Quadrilateral–the four great fortresses of Peschiera, Verona, Legnago and Mantua–from which the Emperor had no realistic hope of removing them. He was worried, too, about German reactions. The German Confederation was mobilising some 350,000 men; were they to attack, the 50,000 French soldiers remaining in France would be slaughtered.
Finally, there was the situation in Italy itself. Recent events had persuaded several of the smaller states–notably Tuscany, Romagna and the duchies of Modena and Parma–to think about overthrowing their former rulers and seeking annexation to Piedmont. The result would be a formidable state, immediately over the French border, covering virtually all north and central Italy: a state which in time might well absorb some or all of the Papal States and even the Two Sicilies. Was it really for this that those who fell at Solferino had given their lives?
And so on 11 July 1859 the Emperors of France and of Austria met at Villafranca, near Verona, and the future of north and central Italy was decided in under an hour. Austria would keep two of the fortresses of the Quadrilateral, Mantua and Peschiera; the rest of Lombardy she would surrender to France, who would pass it on to Piedmont. The former rulers of Tuscany and Modena would be restored to their thrones,250 and an Italian confederacy would be established under the honorary presidency of the Pope. Venice and Venetia would be a member of this confederacy, but would remain under Austrian sovereignty.
The fury of Cavour when he read the details of the Villafranca Agreement can well be imagined. Without Peschiera and Mantua, not even Lombardy would be entirely Italian; as for central Italy, that was lost even before it had been properly gained. He himself would have nothing to do with the agreement; after a long and acrimonious interview with Victor Emmanuel, he submitted his resignation. ‘We shall return,’ he wrote to a friend, ‘to conspiracy.’ Gradually, however, he recovered himself. There had at least been no mention in the agreement of the French annexation of Savoy and Nice, which he had reluctantly offered at Plombières; the present situation, if not all that he had hoped, was certainly a good deal better than it had been the year before.
Over the next few months that situation improved still further, as it gradually became clear that Tuscany and Modena refused to accept the fate prescribed for them; nothing, they made it clear, would induce them to take back their former rulers. In Florence, Bologna, Parma and Modena virtual dictators had sprung up, all of them determined on fusion with Piedmont. The only obstacle was presented by Piedmont itself. The terms agreed at Villafranca were now incorporated in a formal treaty signed at Zurich, and General Alfonso La Marmora, who had succeeded Cavour as Chief Minister, was unwilling to take any action in defiance of it. But the dictators were quite prepared to bide their time. Florence, meanwhile, kept her independence; Romagna (which included Bologna), Parma and Modena joined together into a new state which–since the Roman Via Aemilia ran through all three of them–they called Emilia.
Camillo Cavour, who had withdrawn after his resignation to his estate at Leri near Vercelli, followed these developments with satisfaction; the Villafranca Agreement had not turned out so badly after all. When, therefore, in January 1860 Victor Emmanuel–not without some personal reluctance251 –recalled him to take over a new government, he was happy to return to Turin. Scarcely was he back in office before he found himself swept up in negotiations with Napoleon III, and it was not long before the two reached agreement: Piedmont would annex Tuscany and Emilia; in return, Savoy and Nice would be ceded to France. Plebiscites were held in all these states, and in every one the majority in favour of the arrangement was overwhelming. In Emilia, for example, the voting was 426,000 against 1,500; in Savoy, 130,500 to 235. There was a predictable explosion of wrath from Garibaldi, but against such majorities there was little that he could do. But in fact, of the powers principally concerned, only the annexed territories were entirely happy. Piedmont hated losing Savoy and Nice; France opposed the annexation of Tuscany, which the Emperor feared would give too much strength to Piedmont at the expense of the central Italian kingdom that he would greatly have preferred; Austria, quite apart from the loss of Lombardy, mourned the departure of the Grand Duke of Tuscany and the Duke of Modena, both of whom she had effectively controlled.
One of Garibaldi’s closest political colleagues was a Sicilian lawyer named Francesco Crispi. In 1855, during a period of exile in London, this man had also been a friend of Mazzini’s, and Mazzini had long dreamed of an invasion of Sicily. Four years later Crispi had visited Sicily in disguise and under a false name, and returned to London convinced that it was once again ripe for revolution. A small armed expedition was all that was required, and the whole island would be up in arms. The only question was, who was to lead it? The name of Garibaldi immediately sprang to mind, but Garibaldi was hesitant. He was still seething over Villafranca, and he himself had a rather different dream: the capture of Nice and its return to Piedmont.
Thoughts of Nice, however, were soon to be indefinitely postponed. On 4 April 1860 there was a popular insurrection in Palermo. If all had proceeded according to plan it would have been accompanied by a simultaneous rising among the aristocracy, but something went badly wrong. The Neapolitan authorities had been secretly informed, and the insurgents found themselves surrounded almost before they had left their homes. All who were not killed instantly were executed later. The operation, like virtually every other inspired by Mazzini, had been a disastrous failure, but it provided a spark for many others throughout northern Sicily, and the authorities could not cope with them all. Nor could they suppress the rumour that ran like wildfire across the island, adding fuel to the revolutionary flames that Garibaldi was on his way.
At the time it was wishful thinking, but when Garibaldi heard the news he acted at once. Cavour refused his request for a brigade from the Piedmontese army, but within less than a month he had assembled a band of volunteers, who sailed from the little port of Quarto (now part of Genoa) on the night of 5 May 1860, landing unopposed at Marsala in western Sicily on the 11th. They represented a broad cross-section of Italian society, about half consisting of professional men such as lawyers, doctors and university lecturers, the other half drawn from the working classes. Some were still technically republicans, but their leader made it clear to them that they were fighting not just for Italy but also for King Victor Emmanuel–and this was no time to argue.
From Marsala, the Thousand–as they came to be called, though there were actually 1,089 of them–headed inland, where their numbers were soon doubled by Sicilian volunteers. At Calatafimi, some thirty miles to the northeast, they found Bourbon troops awaiting them. The battle was fought on 11 May and lasted several hours, most of the fighting being hand-to-hand, with bayonets rather than rifles. Garibaldi’s men were massively outnumbered; on the other hand, he could count on a huge psychological advantage. To every Italian this army of Redshirts–with its whole string of victories in South America as well as in Italy–was by now of almost legendary fame, its members often credited by the simple with a magic invulnerability to bullets. The Neapolitan soldiers were frightened and had little stomach for the fight; the Thousand were fighting for an ideal in which they all passionately believed, under a leader whose swashbuckling charisma was a constant inspiration. If they could win this first battle, Garibaldi told them, there was a strong probability that the opposition would melt away; then, in just a week or two, they would be masters of Sicily.
And they won it. And Garibaldi was proved right. There was no more obstruction before Palermo; on the contrary, thousands of Sicilians rallied to his colours, and when he arrived on 26 May it was to find that the citizens had already risen against the Bourbon government. There was a little desultory fighting, but it was not long before the Neapolitan commander gave the order to evacuate Palermo. By the end of the month Garibaldi was master of the city. There followed a brief period of consolidation, during which substantial reinforcements arrived from north Italy; then in early July he continued his advance. His last Sicilian battle was fought at Milazzo, a fortified seaport some fifteen miles west of Messina. It was harder fought than the others, but it opened the way to Messina itself, which surrendered without a struggle, apart from a small but courageous Bourbon garrison which held out for a little longer in the citadel.
The Neapolitans had withdrawn their forces from every other town and city, so with this negligible exception Sicily was free. Cavour sought its immediate formal annexation to Victor Emmanuel’s rapidly-growing kingdom–an idea hotly opposed by Garibaldi and Francesco Crispi, now his right-hand man. To all intents and purposes, they argued, Sicily was already part of the kingdom. The Sicilians certainly assumed as much, and the long legal formalities could surely wait until the rest of the fighting was over. They were worried, too–though they took care not to say so–that if the island were annexed Cavour might use his new authority to refuse to allow them to make it a springboard from which to advance on Naples, Rome and Venice.
These fears were by no means groundless. On 1 August Cavour wrote in desperation to his chef de cabinet and close friend Costantino Nigra:
If Garibaldi can pass to the mainland and take possession of Naples as he has of Sicily and Palermo, he becomes the absolute master of the situation…King Victor Emmanuel loses almost all his prestige; to most Italians he is simply the friend of Garibaldi. He will probably keep his crown, but that crown will shine only with the reflected light that a heroic adventurer chooses to throw on it…The King cannot take the crown of Italy from the hands of Garibaldi; it would lie too unsteadily on his head…
We must ensure that the government of Naples falls before Garibaldi sets foot on the mainland…The moment the King is gone, we must take the government into our own hands in the name of order and humanity, while snatching from Garibaldi’s hands the supreme direction of the Italian movement.
This brave, you may say audacious, measure will provoke cries of horror from Europe, will cause serious diplomatic complications, may even involve us at a somewhat later stage into a war with Austria. But it saves our revolution, and it preserves for the Italian movement that quality which is at once its glory and its strength; the quality of nationhood, and of monarchy.
Cavour had already persuaded Victor Emmanuel to write officially to Garibaldi asking him not to invade the mainland. The King had done so, but had followed up his letter with another, private note to the effect that these official instructions could perhaps be ignored. It now appears that this second note may never have been delivered–when it was found the seal was still unbroken–but it hardly mattered: Garibaldi’s mind was already made up. Cavour then sent agents provocateurs to stir up trouble in Naples in the hope of sparking off a liberal revolution. Naples, however–in striking contrast to Palermo–proved numb and apathetic. There was nothing to do but allow events to take their course.
On 18 and 19 August 1860, Garibaldi and his men crossed the Straits of Messina on the first step of their march on Naples. If Cavour had been alarmed, the twenty-four-year-old King Francis II,252 who had succeeded his father Ferdinand the previous year, was panic-stricken. The British diplomat Odo Russell, at that time serving on a mission to Naples, had reported that when Garibaldi entered Palermo the King ‘telegraphed five times in twenty-four hours for the Pope’s blessing’, and ‘Cardinal Antonelli…sent the last three blessings without reference to His Holiness, saying that he was duly authorised to do so.’ Francis knew that his army was incapable of further resistance to the seemingly invincible Redshirts, and that he himself was equally incapable of breathing further life into it; the only alternative was flight. On 6 September he took ship for Gaeta. Less than twenty-four hours later, Garibaldi entered Naples.
His journey through Calabria had been ridiculously easy. As against the 16,000 Neapolitan soldiers in the province, his vanguard consisted of only 3,500, but after a token resistance at Reggio there was no more opposition. For his men there were still 300 miles to cover in the broiling summer heat, but with Bourbon troops instantly surrendering their arms as they approached he had no fear for their safety. On the other hand, he was anxious to get to Naples as soon as possible–he did not trust Cavour an inch, and feared a preemptive strike. Fortunately for him, the late King Ferdinand had recently built a railway; Garibaldi now requisitioned all the rolling stock he could find and filled it with his army. He himself, with six companions, climbed into an open carriage and trundled into Naples on the afternoon of 7 September. That evening he addressed a cheering populace from the balcony of the royal palace, thanking the Neapolitans ‘in the name of all Italy which, thanks to their cooperation, had at last become a nation’. It was a shameless lie–they had not lifted a finger–but, he doubtless felt, a little flattery at this stage would do no harm.
Naples was the largest city in Italy, and the third largest in Europe. For the next two months Garibaldi ruled it–with Sicily–as a dictator. Meanwhile, he was planning his next step, which was to be an immediate march on the Papal States and Rome. But this step was never taken. Cavour, who had been unable to prevent his invasion of the mainland, was now determined to stop him in his tracks–knowing full well that to allow him to continue might well mean war with France. The Redshirts would have found the well-trained French a very different proposition to anything they had encountered so far, and Italy might well have lost everything she had gained in the past two years. There were other considerations too: as he had feared, Garibaldi was now far more popular than Victor Emmanuel himself; the Piedmontese army was deeply jealous of his recent successes; and there was always the lurking danger that Mazzini–who arrived in Naples on the 17th September–and his followers might persuade Garibaldi to desert the King of Piedmont and espouse the republican cause.
Garibaldi was well aware of Cavour’s hostility, just as he believed in the King’s tacit support, and soon after his arrival in Naples he had even gone so far as publicly to demand the Chief Minister’s resignation. In doing so he badly overplayed his hand. Victor Emmanuel, realising that he could no longer continue to play off the two men against each other, found it safer to accept the policy of his government. None of this, however, nor any number of letters (inspired by Cavour) from distinguished foreigners ranging from the Hungarian patriot Lajos Kossuth to the British social reformer Lord Shaftesbury, weakened Garibaldi’s resolve to march on Rome. The only argument that could have had an effect was the one that eventually did so: force majeure.
Suddenly he found two formidable armies ranged against him: the Neapolitan and the Piedmontese. King Francis in Gaeta had managed to raise a new army, and not long after Garibaldi and his men left Naples on the first stage of their advance to the north they found a force of some 50,000 ranged along the bank of the Volturno river. It was here that they suffered their first defeat since their landing in Sicily; outside the little town of Caiazzo, in the leader’s temporary absence, one of his generals tried and failed to cross the river and lost 250 men in the attempt. On the first day of October, however, Garibaldi had his revenge. The battle was fought just outside Capua, in and around the little village of S. Angelo in Formis.253 It was an expensive victory–some 1,400 killed or wounded–but it saved Italy.
Meanwhile, the army of Piedmont was also on the march. Cavour, determined to recapture the initiative from Garibaldi, had launched an invasion of his own into the papal territories of Umbria and the Marches. Leaving Rome untouched, he had neatly avoided antagonising France and, quite possibly, Austria; he had also opened the way into the south, where–since Garibaldi was now dictator–he could claim that the Piedmontese army was urgently needed to save Naples from the forces of revolution. Most important of all, he had removed the geographical barrier which, so long as it lasted, would always divide Italy into two separate parts and make unification impossible. The campaign itself was unspectacular but effective. The Piedmontese army overcame a spirited resistance at Perugia, scored a small victory over a papal army near the little village of Castelfidardo near Loreto and a rather larger one when, after five days’ fighting, they captured Ancona, taking 154 guns and 7,000 prisoners–including the commander of the papal forces, the French General Christophe de Lamoricière. That was the end of the papal army; henceforth there was no further trouble.
Victor Emmanuel himself, accompanied by his long-term mistress, Rosina Vercellana–dressed, we are told, to kill–now came to take titular command of his army. From that moment Garibaldi’s star began to set. The battle of the Volturno had already persuaded him that a march on Rome was no longer a possibility, and now, with the King himself on his way, he saw that his rule in the south must come to an end. This was confirmed in late October, when plebiscites were held in the Kingdom of Naples and in Sicily, in Umbria and in the Marches, on whether voters wished their land to form an integral part of Italy under Victor Emmanuel. The votes in favour were overwhelming: in Sicily–to take but one example–432,053 voted in favour, 667 against.
Garibaldi gave in gracefully. He rode north with a large escort to meet the King, and on 7 November the two of them entered Naples side by side in the royal carriage. He asked one favour only: to be allowed to govern Naples and Sicily for a year as viceroy. But this was refused. He was after all a dangerous radical and anticlerical, who still dreamed of capturing Rome from the Pope and making it the capital of Italy. In an attempt to sugar the pill, Victor Emmanuel offered him the rank of full general together with a splendid estate, but Garibaldi would have none of it. He remained a revolutionary, and for as long as Austria still occupied the Veneto–and the Pope continued as temporal ruler in Rome–he was determined to preserve his freedom of action. On 9 November he sailed for his farm on the little island of Caprera off the Sardinian coast. He took with him only a little money–borrowed, since he had made none during his months of power–and a bag of seed for his garden.
On Passion Sunday, 17 March 1861, Victor Emmanuel II was proclaimed King of Italy. Old Massimo d’Azeglio, Cavour’s predecessor as Chief Minister, is reported to have said when he heard the news: ‘L’Italia è fatta; restano a fare gli italiani.’254 But although the first half of the statement was true–an Italian nation had indeed come into existence, even if it was not yet complete–the second half was truer still. Francis II kept up his resistance; the country had been divided since the end of the Roman Empire, and few indeed of Italy’s twenty-two million people thought of themselves as Italians. North and south had virtually nothing in common, with radically different standards of living (as indeed they still have today). New roads and railways had to be built as a matter of urgency. A national army and navy had somehow to be created, together with a single legal system, civil administration and common currency. In the meantime, there was no alternative to the adoption of Piedmontese institutions; but this forcible ‘Piedmontisation’ was widely resented and did little to help the cause of unity. Even the King’s decision to keep his designation ‘the Second’ caused offence. As King of Italy he was surely Victor Emmanuel I; was the Risorgimento really the rebirth of Italy, or was it simply the conquest of Italy by the house of Savoy?
Less than three months after the royal proclamation Cavour was dead. He had spent his last weeks in furious debate over the future of Rome–in which, it should be recorded, he had never once set foot. All the other major Italian cities, he argued, had been independent municipalities, each fighting its own corner; only Rome, as the seat of the Church, had remained above such rivalries. But though the Pope must be asked to surrender his temporal power, papal independence must at all costs be guaranteed–‘a free church in a free state’. He encountered a good deal of opposition–the most vitriolic from Garibaldi, who emerged from Caprera in April, strode into the Assembly in his red shirt and grey South American poncho, and let loose a stream of abuse at the man who, he thundered, had sold off half his country to the French and done his best to prevent the invasion of the Two Sicilies. But he succeeded only in confirming the general view that however brilliant a general he might be, he was certainly no statesman; Cavour easily won the vote of confidence that followed. It was his last political victory. He died suddenly on 6 June, of a massive stroke. He was just fifty years old.
If Camillo Cavour had lived just one more decade he would have seen the last two pieces of the Italian jigsaw fitted into place. Where Rome was concerned, the situation was not helped by Garibaldi, who in 1862 made a faintly ridiculous attempt to repeat his triumph of two years before. Adopting the slogan ‘Rome or death!’, he raised 3,000 volunteers at Palermo, with whom he took possession of a complaisant Catania; then in August, having commandeered a couple of local steamers, he crossed with his men to Calabria and began another march on Rome. This time, however, government troops were ready for him. He had got no further than the Aspromonte massif in the extreme south of Calabria–the toe of Italy–when they attacked. Fearing a civil war, Garibaldi ordered his men not to return the fire, but there were a few casualties nonetheless, he himself having his right ankle shattered. He was arrested and sent in a gunboat to Naples, where he was promptly freed; he remained a hero, and the government did not dare take action against him.
Meanwhile, quiet diplomacy was proving rather more successful. Pope Pius himself was refusing to yield an inch; so far as he was concerned, he held the Papal States for the Catholic world and was obliged by his coronation oath to pass them on to his successor. Napoleon III, by contrast, was becoming steadily more amenable to negotiation, and by what was known as the September Convention, signed on 15 September 1864, he agreed to withdraw his troops from Rome within two years. Italy in return pledged herself to guarantee papal territory against any attack, and agreed to transfer her capital within six months from Turin to Florence.
The Convention, which was to remain in force for six years, did not directly improve the prospects of incorporating Rome into the new Italian state; indeed, it seemed at least temporarily to guarantee the status quo. On the other hand, by putting an end to the fifteen years of French occupation it cleared the ground for the next steps, whatever these might be, and by freezing the situation in Rome it enabled the government to turn its mind to the other overriding necessity in those early years of Italian nationhood: the recovery of the Veneto. For some time past King Victor Emmanuel had been toying with the idea of an invasion of the Balkans–led, it need hardly be said, by Garibaldi–to stir up revolt among the Austrian subject peoples; with Austria fully engaged in restoring order, it would be a simple matter to occupy the Italian lands. Unfortunately Napoleon III–whose support would have been vital–had pooh-poohed the idea and the King had reluctantly put it to one side.
But now, by a stroke of quite unexpected good fortune, there appeared a deus ex machina who was effectively to drop both the coveted territories into Italy’s lap. This was the Prussian Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, who was now well on the way to realising his dream of uniting all the German states into a single empire. The one stumbling-block was Austria, whose influence in Germany he was determined to eliminate. He therefore approached General La Marmora–now once again Victor Emmanuel’s Chief Minister–with a proposal for a military alliance: Austria would be attacked simultaneously on two fronts, by Prussia from the north and by Italy from the west. Italy’s reward, in the event of victory, would be Venetia. La Marmora readily agreed, and Napoleon III signalled that he had no objection. The treaty was signed on 8 April 1866, and on 15 June the war began.
Six weeks later it was over. For the Prussians, a single battle was enough. It was fought at Sadowa, some sixty-five miles northeast of Prague, and it engaged the largest number of troops–some 330,000–ever assembled on a European battlefield. (It was also the first in which railways and the telegraph were used on a considerable scale.) The Prussian victory was total. It bankrupted the military resources of the Austrian Emperor Franz Josef I and opened the way to Vienna. Bismarck had achieved exactly what he wanted, and was glad to accede to Austria’s request for an armistice.
Italy, unfortunately, did less well. Her main army, under the King, La Marmora and General Enrico Cialdini, Duke of Gaeta, was defeated several times in and around Custoza–always unlucky for the house of Savoy–and at sea her navy was largely destroyed off Lissa (now the Croatian island of Vis). The only good news was provided by Garibaldi, who had delightedly obeyed a summons to lead a force of 35,000 into the Tyrol. While scoring no major victory, he certainly caused the Austrians a good deal of discomfiture. The Italian government, now settled in Florence, though mildly aggrieved that it had not been consulted over its terms, nevertheless welcomed the armistice–not least because it provided for the cession of the Veneto. Since Austria had not yet granted recognition to the new kingdom of Italy, the same procedure was followed as for Lombardy five years before: the province was ceded to Napoleon III, who instantly passed it on to Victor Emmanuel.
The cession was confirmed by a plebiscite, the result of which was a foregone conclusion. There was a measure of disappointment in that the area ceded did not include the South Tyrol–what the Italians called the Trentino–or Venezia Giulia, which included Trieste, Pola and Fiume (the modern Rijeka); for those Italy would have to wait until after the First World War. But Venice was an Italian city at last, and Italy could boast a new and invaluable port on the northern Adriatic.
Only Rome remained.
By the end of 1866 the last of the French army had left Rome. The motley array of mercenaries that Pope Pius had managed to recruit seemed to constitute little enough threat to anyone; by the beginning of 1867 the old conspirators were once again out in force. Mazzini, playing on Bismarck’s fears of a Franco-Italian alliance, was demanding money and munitions with which to overthrow the government in Florence; Garibaldi, not for the first time, was preparing for a march on Rome and actually went so far as to issue a proclamation calling on all freedom-loving Romans to rise in rebellion. Since the September Convention still had four years to run, the government had little choice but to arrest him and send him back to Caprera, but he soon escaped–he was now in his sixtieth year–reassembled his volunteers and began his promised march.
He had reckoned without the French. Napoleon III, having realised that he had withdrawn his troops too soon, sent a fresh army equipped with the deadly new chassepot rifles, which landed at Civitavecchia in the last week of October. The volunteers, outnumbered and outclassed, stood no chance. A day or two later, at Mentana, they met their fate. Garibaldi himself managed to slip back across the frontier into Italy–and into the arms of the authorities. Back he was sent to Caprera, where he remained–this time heavily guarded–under house arrest. His men were less lucky. No less than 1,600 of them were taken prisoner.
Yet again, by his swift reaction, the Emperor Napoleon had saved the temporal power of the Papacy; none could have expected that less than three years later he would be instrumental in bringing about its downfall. The prime mover, once again, was Bismarck, who had cunningly drawn France into a war by his threat to place a prince of the ruling Prussian house of Hohenzollern on the throne of Spain. That war was declared–by France, not Prussia–on 15 July 1870. It was to prove a bitter struggle; Napoleon was going to need every soldier he had for the fighting that lay ahead. By the end of August there was not one French soldier left in Rome.
Pope Pius was fully aware of the danger. Only his little mercenary army remained to protect him. Just three days after the declaration of war, during the First Vatican Council255 and at the height of the most violent thunderstorm that any Roman could remember, he sought to bolster his position by proclaiming the doctrine of Papal Infallibility. It was a step that arguably did his cause more harm than good,256 but there was little point in arguing it: Napoleon’s defeat at Sedan on 1 September spelled the end of the Second Empire and the destruction of Pius’s last hopes. In the minds of the Italian government, the only question still to be decided was one of timing: should their army occupy Rome immediately–the September Convention was on the point of expiry, and with the elimination of one of the signatories was anyway a dead letter–or should they wait for a popular rising or mutiny?
Meanwhile, Victor Emmanuel addressed a last appeal to the Pope, writing (as he put it) ‘with the affection of a son, the faith of a Catholic, the loyalty of a king and the soul of an Italian’. The security of Italy and of the Holy See itself, he continued, depended on the presence of Italian troops in Rome. Would His Holiness not accept this unalterable fact and show his benevolent cooperation? Alas, His Holiness would do no such thing. He would yield, he declared, only to violence, and even then he would put up at least a formal resistance. He was as good as his word. When Italian troops entered Rome on the morning of 20 September 1870 by the Porta Pia, they found a papal detachment waiting for them. The fighting was soon over, but not before it had left nineteen papalists and forty-nine Italians dead in the street.
Over the next few hours Italian troops swarmed through Rome, leaving only the Vatican and the Castel Sant’ Angelo, from which there now flew the white flag of surrender. There was no more resistance. Pope Pius withdrew inside the walls of the Vatican, where he remained for the last eight years of his life. The plebiscite that was held shortly afterwards registered 133,681 votes in favour of the incorporation of Rome into the Kingdom of Italy, and 1,507 against. Rome was now part of Italy not by right of conquest but by the will of its people. Only the Vatican city now remained an independent sovereign state.
It was not until 2 July 1871 that Victor Emmanuel made his official entry into his new capital. The streets were already being decorated for the occasion when he sent a telegram to the mayor, Prince Francesco Pallavicini, forbidding all signs of festivity. As a pious Catholic, he had been not only saddened but terrified when sentence of excommunication had been passed upon him. Ferdinand Gregorovius, the Prussian historian of medieval Rome, wrote in his diary that the procession was ‘without pomp, vivacity, grandeur or majesty; and that was as it should have been, for this day signals the end of the millenary rule of the Popes over Rome’. In the afternoon the King was urged to cross the river to Trastevere, where some ceremony had been prepared by the largely working-class population. He flatly refused, adding in the Piedmontese dialect of which few of those about him would have understood a word, ‘The Pope is only two steps away, and would feel hurt. I have done enough already to that poor old man.’