The Pope Who Would Be King, page 11
Ciceruacchio, the popular hero who had so long sung the pope’s praises, was among the many who now turned against him. He led his followers through the streets as they shouted their displeasure. Those members of the pope’s regular army and police remaining in the city—the best army units having left for the fight up north—were proving no match for the combination of Civic Guardsmen and an enraged public.
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ALTHOUGH HIS MINISTERS HAD warned him, Pius was surprised by the violent reaction to his allocution. On the morning of the thirtieth, he called them in to ask them to reconsider their resignations. “True, I rejected the war,” said the pope, “because I am pontiff, and as such I must look on all Catholic peoples with equal affection and as my children.” But this did not mean he was personally unsympathetic to the Italian cause. The pope, who had little understanding of constitutional government, could not understand why his ministers were resigning. “You are not responsible for my allocution,” he told them. “You did not sign it. And besides, if I am your sovereign, if I have confidence in my ministers, why would you want to disobey me?”20
Feeling some obligation to the pope and recognizing the danger of a complete breakdown in public order, the ministers agreed to stay in the Quirinal Palace while Pius put together a new government. Cardinal Antonelli was pleased to have them there, hoping that their presence would protect him from the angry crowd outside. In the hours they spent together, he regaled them with a description of his impressive collection of precious stones and minerals and complained that the pope had misled them all.
“You are the lucky ones, for you can leave,” said the cardinal, distinctive among the laymen in his black cassock. “Ah! Pius IX will never take me back into his service!” he added. “If he commands me as pontiff to do something, I will obey, because my ecclesiastical vow obligates me to, but as prince, no, I won’t stand with him again!” It seemed that there were no limits to the cardinal’s duplicity.21
In an effort to restore order, Pius issued a new proclamation, convinced that if his subjects knew that he personally sympathized with the Italian national cause, they would calm down. His message appeared on Rome’s walls on May 2. “We are opposed to a declaration of war,” explained the pope, “but at the same time we recognize that we are incapable of restraining the ardor of those of our subjects who are animated by the same spirit of nationality as other Italians.” Yet even on this occasion, Pius could not resist venting his frustration. After all the ways he had shown his benevolence toward his people, and all the times they had shown their love for him, how was it that they were now repaying him with bloodshed and threats? “Will this,” he asked, “be the reward that a sovereign pontiff should expect for the many acts of love he has shown to his people?”22
His new statement did nothing to quell the unrest. Seeing no alternative, Pius agreed to the clubs’ demand that he form a new lay ministry headed by someone of their choosing, and so on the afternoon of May 2 he called in Terenzio Mamiani and asked him to lead it. Mamiani had returned to Rome only a few months earlier following more than fifteen years in exile in France.23
The next day the pope decided to try another approach. He addressed a letter directly to the Austrian emperor, pleading with him to put an end to his bloody battle to retake Lombardy and Veneto and to let go of the empire’s Italian lands.24 Hoping to placate Charles Albert as well, he sent the king a copy of the letter and had Antonelli accompany it with a letter of explanation. “In his allocution,” wrote the cardinal, “the Holy Father did not in any way express himself against Italian nationality. He only said that as prince of peace and common father of all the faithful, he could not take part in war, but that he did not see how he could stop the ardor of his subjects.” His plea to the Austrians was of course doomed from the start, for it was folly to think that Vienna would abandon its claims to Lombardy and Veneto to extricate the pope from the impossible position in which he found himself.25
“It is clear that a war is being waged against the temporal dominion of the Church,” wrote the pope in a May 5 letter to a trusted young prelate, “but it is a great comfort to me to know that the Church itself was always at its most glorious in times of persecution.” Pius felt secure in his faith in God but much less so about whether he had made the right decision regarding the war against Austria. All the foreign ambassadors had complained of his tendency to waffle, which was nowhere more on display than in the aftermath of his allocution rejecting the war for Italian independence. On May 9, apparently in the hope of getting theological support for overturning his earlier decision, Pius contacted twelve prominent theologians. He was moved to write them, he explained, by the unrest that had swept the Papal States following his allocution. Anarchy and even civil war now threatened. “In order to avoid the above-described evils, which might easily occur,” he asked them, “could and should the Holy Father take an active part in the war being waged against Austria to win Italian independence?”26
From the way Pius phrased the question, his preference for a positive response seemed clear, but ten of the twelve theologians answered in the negative. If he was hoping for justification to join the patriotic cause, he would not find it there.
An envoy from the Duchy of Modena, visiting Pius at the time, was struck by how distressed he seemed. His subjects, the pope complained, did not understand him. “But,” said the pope, “I am not any the less at peace in my mind as a result, nor do I love Italy any the less, Italy which, after religion itself, has always been what I care most about.” As he spoke these words, recalled the diplomat from Modena, Pius’s eyes moistened, and his voice thickened with emotion. After a moment, he regained his composure. “I hope that all will work out for the greater glory of God…and that the clouds that now darken the horizon will give way to the majesty of the sun.”27
To the foreign diplomats who visited him, Pius admitted that he had lost control of his kingdom. Among those who heard the pope’s litany of woes, the Dutch ambassador voiced a common sentiment in Rome’s diplomatic corps, predicting that Pius would prove unable to long resist popular pressure:
His heart is so good, and in the end so Italian, he has such great need of being surrounded by the love and confidence of his subjects, he attaches such a great value to being greeted by their applause, that I would not be surprised to see him, one of these days, act in ways that, little by little, will undermine the effect of his allocution of April 29.28
With the men of the papal army, shouting Viva Pio Nono, battling the Austrians in the northeast, the pope was in a ticklish position. Meeting with him on May 7, an envoy from the patriots in Venice put it this way: “We have from Your Holiness both a word”—the pope’s recent allocution—“and a fact”—the papal army’s entry into combat. “For what reason,” asked the envoy, “should we renounce the fact in order to hold to the word?”
“They wanted to go….I wasn’t able to hold them back,” protested the pope.
“We would believe such a thing of a prince who was not loved and not strong,” replied the Venetian. “If you had firmly ordered them not to go, they would not have gone, and so we believe that Your Holiness’s inaction is tantamount to an express command to fight for the Italian cause.”
To this, the pope could respond only with a nervous smile. Allowing the troops to go off in his name had been a mistake, but it had reflected not only his feeling that he could not stop them but his own ambivalence as an Italian not wholly immune to the national cause.29
Desperate to find a way out, Pio Nono sent an emissary to King Charles Albert to ask that he incorporate the men from Rome into his own army, giving them proper military status. This would offer them a way to fight for the national cause without directly implicating the pope; it would also give them official combatant status in case they should be captured. In a mid-May address to his troops, General Durando cited this papal request and chose to interpret it as a papal blessing for their prosecution of the war against Austria, simply the pope’s latest effort to cement his alliance with the Sardinian forces. “Long live Independence and Italian Union!” called the general. “Viva Pius Nono! Viva Charles Albert!”30
In the wake of the pope’s allocution, Milan’s provisional government sent an aristocrat as its envoy to Rome to implore him not to abandon the battle for Italian independence. Meeting with Pius on May 13, the envoy argued that joining the war against Austria was, in fact, the only way to preserve conservative rule in Italy. Should the efforts to create a strong constitutional monarchy uniting northern Italy under King Charles Albert fail, the result, he warned, would not be a return to the old status quo. Rather, people would turn to the only alternative available for a land free from foreign control, namely “a super-democratic, revolutionary republic that would turn all of Italy upside down.”31
Still, the pope’s allocution of late April had found favor among some. “It was as though it had been brought down to me by an angel for it could not have reached me at a more opportune moment,” observed the greatly relieved nuncio in Vienna. He rushed to have the pope’s text translated, then published in all of Austria’s important newspapers. It made, the nuncio reported, a “most excellent impression.”32
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THE ALLOCUTION MIGHT HAVE made an even greater impression in Austria had the government’s attention not been elsewhere. Huge student demonstrations in Vienna in mid-May led to new concessions from the emperor, including universal male suffrage and a single-chamber parliament. But the unrest only grew: fearing for their lives, the emperor and his court fled to Innsbruck. Thousands of workers joined the students in Vienna, building barricades and battling the imperial authorities for control. Over the next few months, while the battered Habsburg monarchy plotted its revenge from Innsbruck, the radicals ruled over the Austrian capital.33
In Naples, King Ferdinand likewise sat precariously on his throne. In mid-April the Sicilian rebels had named a provisional government, declared the end of the Bourbon dynasty, and announced their intention to create a constitutional government of their own. In an effort to win popular support, Ferdinand had earlier announced that he was sending some of his troops north to join the Italian national cause against the Austrians. His proclamation, affixed to the walls of Naples, had featured at the top the words Viva Pio IX. Having sent the troops in a moment of panic, Ferdinand leaped at the chance offered by the pope’s April 29 allocution to change course. He recalled his army from the north and dissolved the recently formed parliament and National Guard. Proclaiming a state of siege in mid-May, he unleashed a fierce wave of repression.34
While the Neapolitan king was dissolving his parliament, the Papal States held a vote for its Chamber of Deputies, one of the two chambers mandated by the pope’s new constitution. A moderate liberal sentiment pervaded the Upper Chamber, whose members, mainly rather modest aristocrats from the provinces, the pope had appointed. The deputies—aristocrats, large landowners, and a smattering of professionals—ranged from the liberal to the more radical. Pius viewed the chambers as advisory, their proposed laws and policies to be considered by the cardinals and by himself, but members of the two chambers saw their role very differently. In their view, they were at the heart of a new system of constitutional government meant to replace priestly rule. If some of the seeds of the coming disaster had been planted by Pius’s disavowal of the papal army as it entered northern Italy, others were sown by the convening of these two chambers.35
In a two-month period, the pope’s kingdom had been radically transformed. A constitution had been granted, an elected Chamber of Deputies established, and a papal army—against the pope’s wishes—was poised to do battle against the Austrian Empire. Reporting for the New York Tribune, Margaret Fuller, perhaps the first woman to serve as a foreign correspondent for a major American newspaper, captured the abrupt change in people’s view of the pope. While some in Rome cried “traitor” and others “imbecile,” she wrote, the Romans’ overriding feeling was of loss, of grief, not unlike the feeling of losing a father. The previous year she had portrayed Pio Nono in the warmest tones. Now she offered a very different image: “Italy was so happy in loving him….But it is all over. He is the modern Lot’s wife and now no more a living soul, but cold pillar of the Past.”36
The pope felt ill used. Eager to make life better for his subjects, he had agreed to the Consultative Council of talented laymen, yet he had never questioned the divinely ordained nature of his role as pope-king. His was an enlightened, paternalistic despotism, under the authority of the church hierarchy. As an Italian himself, he had clearly shown his people his sympathy for an Italy free of foreign armies, and he had hoped to find a way to persuade the Austrians to leave Lombardy and Veneto peacefully. Why could people not understand that as pope he was pastor of all the faithful and so could never lead his people into war against other loyal sons of the church?37
On May 17, the new provisional government of the Duchy of Modena—the duke having recently been overthrown—sent an envoy to see the pontiff. Pius quickly turned the conversation to what seemed to be becoming his favorite subject, his people’s ingratitude. His voice grew louder as he allowed himself a moment to vent his frustration.
“But we must have patience,” said Pius, as he calmed down. “I am not letting this leave me with less peace of mind, nor allowing this to make me wish any the less for Italy’s well-being.” As he said these words, his eyes moistened and his voice thickened with emotion. Composing himself after a few moments, the pontiff assured the envoy that all would work to the greater glory of God. The sun would soon return. Or so, he said, he hoped.38
* In the Papal States, Austrians and Germans were both indifferently referred to as “Germans.” The German nation-state would be founded only some time later.
The future was anything but clear. Despite all the pope had done to try to stop them, the men of the papal army had now joined the battle against the Austrians. Throughout Europe, the old monarchies had either fallen or faced widespread revolt. Pius himself had, grudgingly, granted a constitution. But far from calming the public, his concession had only triggered further demands.
Romans followed the news from northern Italy with great excitement. The people of Lombardy and Veneto had held plebiscites, voting to join Charles Albert’s Kingdom of Sardinia. In early June, news reached the Eternal City that papal forces, in alliance with the Sardinian army, had defeated the Austrians at Vicenza. The bell atop Capitoline Hill woke Romans from their sleep, the cannon of Sant’Angelo boomed, and the bell towers of Rome’s many churches joined in, creating such a din that several of the city’s infirm died from fright, and forty-two women miscarried, or so it was reported. But the celebration was short-lived, the news of military victory tragically mistaken. In fact, on June 9, the Austrians had massed forty thousand men and 150 heavy guns around Vicenza and attacked Durando’s lightly equipped and poorly trained papal army of ten thousand. After taking heavy losses, Durando had surrendered.1
In Rome, Pio Nono’s hold over his government was growing ever weaker. When Terenzio Mamiani, the new prime minister, brought the pope the text of his planned opening address to the Chamber of Deputies, Pius crossed out many objectionable passages but at the chamber’s opening session, Mamiani gave the address as he had originally written it. When the newspapers reported that the pontiff had reviewed the speech in advance and approved it, Pius informed the nuncios what had really happened.2
Terenzio Mamiani
The battle of wills continued as both the upper and lower chambers passed resolutions backing the war against Austria. Then in late June, when the pope refused to recognize the authority of the new lay minister of foreign affairs, insisting that all such matters be in the hands of the cardinal secretary of state and the nuncios, Mamiani handed in his resignation. Pius could not have been more eager to rid himself of his irksome prime minister, but his efforts to find someone more to his liking, without triggering popular revulsion, proved fruitless, and so Mamiani continued in office. Making matters worse, his fifth secretary of state, Cardinal Anton Orioli—who had been appointed less than a month earlier, resigned, saying that he was not up to the job. Only after two other cardinals turned the pope down did the sixty-eight-year-old Giovanni Soglia agree to fill the post. He would not last much longer than Orioli.3
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IN MID-JUNE THE NEW FRENCH ambassador arrived in Rome. The sixty-one-year-old scion of one of the oldest houses of the French nobility, Duke François Harcourt seemed an odd fit for the new French Republic. Unusually short, his voice harsh, his disposition restless and prickly, he was not especially popular among his colleagues. “Everything is against him,” the papal nuncio in Madrid had reported when Harcourt was posted there, “not excluding his face.”4
The duke soon began sending Paris alarming accounts of the pope’s tenuous hold on power. The prelates who surrounded the pontiff, he wrote, were a narrow-minded lot, devoted to the Austrians, and enemies of reform. The great majority of Romans, the illiterate popolani, had long been emotionally attached to the pope and had taken little interest in matters of state. The pressure for reform and for Italian independence came mainly from Rome’s small middle class. For the most part, these were moderates who, while pressing for long-overdue reforms, sought to leave the pope in place as head of state. But they were being pushed to an extreme by the demands being made through the city’s clubs, many of whose most active members, charged Harcourt, were not from the Papal States at all but were refugees from other parts of Italy. Rome’s aristocracy, noted the French ambassador, was weak, and while it was for the most part open to moderate reform, it had little influence.
