The Pope Who Would Be King, page 12
Harcourt’s initial reports received little attention in Paris, for its streets were then soaked in blood. On June 23 rebellious workers, protesting the government’s recent moderate turn, had erected barricades, and three days of savage fighting had followed. While pleading for peace with the rebels at the barricades at the Place de la Bastille, the archbishop of Paris was shot dead. Five thousand insurgents died, as did fifteen hundred policemen and soldiers. In crushing the revolt, the government arrested fifteen thousand men and deported thousands to the new French colony of Algeria.5
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THE MEMBERS OF ROME’S newly elected Chamber of Deputies were, for the most part, men of means who hoped to drive the Austrians out of Italy and forge some kind of Italian unity. To them, the radicals—who threatened to undermine the social hierarchy along with the political order—were just as distasteful as those who opposed any reform. “A reactionary party definitely exists,” observed one of the moderate deputies in early July. “On the other side is a party of anarchists and fanatics.” The problem the pope faced was that these men, to whom he had previously turned for support and advice, now felt that he was abandoning them.6
Among the “fanatics,” none was more vocal than Charles Bonaparte, Napoleon’s nephew. In relentless pursuit of the limelight, Bonaparte rarely let a session of the chamber pass without offering his opinions, and no one was more bellicose in calling for military action against the Austrians. Bonaparte, wrote one of its members, “has become the buffoon of the chamber.” Or as another member put it, telegraphically, “Inexhaustible loudmouth, incredibly opinionated, lacking in principles.”7
The standoff could not last much longer. Pius had repeatedly made clear his opposition to joining the war against Austria, but the government ministers favored war, and the two legislative chambers had voted to fund it. Fearful that more forceful action would trigger open revolt, Pius dared not act more aggressively. The result, observed the Dutch ambassador, was that “everyone is acting as if the temporal Sovereign, absolutely shorn of his authority, exists in form only.”8
Tensions in Rome ratcheted up further in mid-July, when someone intercepted a letter the secretary of state had sent to the nuncio in Vienna and posted copies of it on the walls of Rome. While partly written in numeric code, it spoke clearly of the pope’s lack of confidence in his own ministers and told the Austrians to ignore what they said. Indignant, Mamiani rushed to see the pope and demanded that he publicly deny the authenticity of the letter, but Pius refused. The cabinet members handed in their resignations, but lacking other options, the pope refused to accept them.9
The pressure Pius felt to join the war against Austria soon grew even greater. On July 14 seven thousand Austrian troops had crossed south into the Papal States and marched into Ferrara, demanding provisions from the papal government to resupply them before they returned north to confront Charles Albert’s army. Patriotic passions in Rome now reached a fever pitch. “These words, ‘Italian independence,’ ‘Italian nationality,’ ” reported the Dutch ambassador, “are on everyone’s lips here.” Furious with the Austrians for putting him in an impossible position, and with his Italian patriotic sentiments provoked, the pope lashed out. “In the end,” he warned, “they are going to force me to have to do something myself.” Here, it seemed, was the invasion of papal territory that Pio Nono had cited as a pope’s only grounds for waging war, but after his initial fit of temper passed, Pius confined himself to sending a letter of protest to all of Europe’s governments. The Austrians ignored it.10
In the north, Charles Albert was proving to be an inept military commander, and his army suffered a humiliating defeat at Custoza, midway between Milan and Venice. Much to the consternation and outrage of Italian patriots in Lombardy and Veneto, the king sued for peace. In early August he agreed to the restoration of Austrian rule over northeastern Italy. Only Venice still held out.11
Rome remained rudderless. “A conspiracy has been hatched,” began the remarkable message the cardinal secretary of state sent to the nuncios across Europe in late July. It was a plot aimed at stripping the pope of his sovereignty. “The force of the current government has entirely disappeared….Everyone in the world knows that the current minister is entirely in disagreement with the pope.” Pius wanted to form a new ministry, but the radicals were organizing public protests to hamper his efforts. Papal rule hung by a thread.12
With emotions running high, both the upper and lower chambers voted to mobilize military forces to fight the Austrians for Italian independence, even though, without Charles Albert, the pope’s army alone stood little chance of success. When Pius refused to give his approval, Mamiani resigned, this time for good. The pope posted copies of a motu proprio—a “letter in his own hand”—on the walls of Rome urging calm, but angry protesters tore them down. The rumor spread that if the pope would not back the war effort, the Civic Guardsmen would remove him from the Quirinal Palace and take him to the St. John Lateran Basilica. There he could fulfill his duties as bishop of Rome and spiritual leader of the world’s Roman Catholics and leave the governance of the Papal States to others. The pope, remarked the Sardinian ambassador, was now “everywhere being treated with contempt.”13
The Austrian military presence in the Legations—the northernmost portion of the Papal States—was a fuse waiting to be lit. In early August, the people of Bologna drove Austrian troops out of the walled city. When the news reached Rome, thousands of people poured into the streets to celebrate. “One would truly think,” observed the French ambassador, “that one was taking part in a comedy, and I truly fear that in this country people are incapable of doing anything else.”14
If Harcourt thought it a farce, Jules Bastide, the French foreign minister, was taking recent events very seriously. He was most worried by the prospect that Austria, France’s archrival, would take advantage of the chaos to spread its influence in Italy. When he learned of the fighting in Bologna, Bastide informed both the pope and the Austrian government that any attempt by Austrian troops to occupy the rest of the Papal States would be regarded as a casus belli, grounds for war. The French would not tolerate Austria extending its hold on the Italian Peninsula.15
Meeting in mid-August with a French diplomat who was passing through Rome, the pope again lashed out at his ungrateful subjects. “The people whom God has entrusted to me have only an indirect interest in the current war,” he explained. “I allowed the enrollments, the sending of volunteers, I authorized the defense of our territory. But here,” complained the pontiff, “people only know how to shout, how to hurl slanders in the street, in the newspapers, in the clubs, in the assemblies. The people pay me back only with their ingratitude….
“Ah!” said the pontiff, as he brought the audience to an end, “forgive me for my emotion. I can’t hide it. Never has a pope or a sovereign been more miserable than me.”16
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THE PREVIOUS DECEMBER, in a sign of the widespread enthusiasm generated by the new pope, President James K. Polk had asked the U.S. Congress to establish diplomatic relations with Rome. The United States had had a consul there since the late eighteenth century, but any moves to appoint an ambassador had been blocked by the Protestant majority. Sharing the president’s enthusiasm for the reform-minded pope, Congress voted the necessary funds to send a chargé d’affaires, an envoy only a step below full ambassadorial rank.
Jacob Martin, the man selected for the post, reached Rome in early August, when news of the Austrian victory over King Charles Albert was still fresh. “Rome,” he reported, is “in the greatest agitation, and threatened with riot if not revolution.” Noting that he had endured a long and stormy transoceanic crossing, he added that he had arrived “at a season when even the most acclimated think it hazardous to encounter the scourge of the malaria.” The pope soon agreed to meet him, taking him by the hand and telling him how pleased he was that the United States had agreed to establish diplomatic relations with the Holy See. Martin expressed his government’s pleasure at the reforms the pope had initiated. “The interview was to me,” the American reported, “a very pleasant one, and impressed me vividly with that benevolence of character and gentleness of demeanour for which Pius IX is proverbial.”17
Martin’s fears for Rome’s malarial season proved tragically justified. His first report to the American secretary of state turned out to be his last. The next report Washington received arrived a week later and came not from Martin but from his assistant. “Sir,” it began, “it becomes my painful duty to inform you of the death of J. L. Martin.” The new ambassador had died that morning. He had been in Rome less than a month.18
In mid-August, casting about for support, Pius wrote to General Louis-Eugène Cavaignac, president of the new French Republic, asking for a few thousand French soldiers to help him. Cavaignac refused. If, the general explained, the pope was asking for help in driving the Austrian army out of Italy, he was asking too much. France did not intend to get involved in the Italian war. If, as seemed more likely, the pope wanted the troops to help repress outbreaks of violent protest in the Papal States, such a task—more suitable for a police force—was beneath the dignity of the French army. In any case, Cavaignac added, it went against France’s policy of not interfering in the internal affairs of other countries. The pope was on his own.19
While the pope was desperately trying to attract foreign aid, Charles Albert, the Sardinian king, was looking to the pope to help him. A proud, reserved man, the king was already dreaming of revenge for the humiliating defeat he had suffered at the hands of the Austrian army. In late July he turned to Antonio Rosmini, a fifty-one-year-old abbot and highly respected church intellectual, to be his special envoy to the pope. Rosmini came from a noble family in Austrian-ruled northeastern Italy, and in his many publications he had urged the church to come to terms with modern times. A few months earlier the pope himself had begged Rosmini to come to Rome. The abbot had refused, citing the anarchy in Rome and his feeling that he would be of little use to the pope.
This time, although far from enthusiastic, Rosmini agreed to see if he could do some good. In early August he went to Turin to meet with Vincenzo Gioberti, the patriot-priest turned government minister whose books calling for an Italian federation under the pope and denouncing the Jesuits had been so influential. The goal, Gioberti explained, was to persuade the pope to help form a league of Italian states aimed at driving the Austrians from the peninsula. Rosmini met with Pius on August 17 and spent the next two months in Rome trying to sway him. To liberal champions of Italian independence, Rosmini was a hero, the patriotic abbot who had the pontiff’s ear.20
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WITHOUT A FUNCTIONING GOVERNMENT, Pius badly needed to find someone who could help him steer his chaotic Papal States out of the morass into which they had fallen, someone who could stand up to the fanatics who now seemed to own the streets, someone who could help bring the deputies into line. One name kept coming up: Pellegrino Rossi. Although Rossi had lost his position as ambassador with the fall of the French monarchy several months earlier, he had remained in Rome. In many ways, he would be an odd choice. The former ambassador was distrusted, if not despised, by the cardinals for his liberal politics and his earlier writings, some of which had been put on the Index of Forbidden Books. It did not help that Rossi’s initial mission in Rome, in 1845, was to negotiate the banishing of the Jesuits from France, or that his wife was a Protestant.21
Antonio Rosmini
Nor was the French government pleased by the rumors of Rossi’s possible appointment. This was, after all, the man who had until recently been the ambassador of the now-deposed French king. Harcourt, who had replaced Rossi, asked indignantly how he could be expected to deal with a head of papal government who was “a Frenchman whom my government fired, and all this without ever consulting me?” But if Rossi was a “Frenchman,” he was an unusual one, having been born and lived in Italy well into adulthood, then serving in the Swiss legislature, before moving to Paris and accepting a university chair in political economy.22
The pope announced his new government in mid-September. While it was in theory presided over by the secretary of state, it was in fact led by Pellegrino Rossi, who was named both minister of internal affairs—in charge of the police—and minister of finance. “You need a body made of iron,” remarked Rossi, “not to fall sick in these unhappy times.” He vowed to do all he could to strengthen the papal government.23
Rossi went to see Harcourt and assured him that, far from being hostile to France’s new republican government, he had expressed his support for it from the beginning. Harcourt remained skeptical but advised Paris that under the circumstances it might be best not to oppose Rossi’s appointment. “Not only the cabinet,” wrote Harcourt, “but the whole country is in a state of dissolution.” There had been no government ministers for the previous six weeks, and what government there was seemed powerless to deal with the crisis it faced. Neither the pope nor the deputies seemed to have the least notion of what was involved in representative government. The police chief had thrown up his hands, saying he lacked the means to do his job. “More complete anarchy,” remarked the French ambassador, “would be impossible to see.” Under such conditions, he asked Paris, did they really want to tell the pope that France would oppose the appointment of the only man he thought could save him?24
Given the state of anarchy enveloping the country, Rossi’s task was immense, made all the more so by the lack of men of stature for him to rely on. As Harcourt, the French ambassador, reporting on the members of the new papal cabinet, put it, “All these individuals are but satellites circling around the planet Rossi and have been chosen with this in mind.”25
While Rossi began his work, Rosmini, the abbot representing King Charles Albert, met with various foreign envoys in Rome in an effort to generate support for an Italian league. Rosmini initially conceived of the league as being led, at least in name, by the pope, but new instructions from Turin insisted that Charles Albert himself must be its head. It was he, after all, who had led the battle to drive the foreigners from the peninsula, he who had the strongest Italian army, and he who ruled the most modern Italian state and the only one free from Austrian influence. But the idea had little appeal. Ferdinand, Bourbon king of Naples, certainly had no interest in placing himself under the Savoyard king of Sardinia; nor did he have any interest in the unification of Italy. In Venice, the provisional government that was still holding out against the Austrians prized its own independence, while nostalgia for the thousand-year-long independent Venetian Republic still ran strong. Nor would Rossi recommend such a plan on behalf of the pope’s government, it being unthinkable that the pontiff would subordinate himself to the Sardinian monarch.26
Indeed, Rosmini himself found the idea distasteful. “I believe I would be lacking in my duties,” he informed the Sardinian foreign minister in early October, “if I did not advise Your Excellency to send some other diplomat to Rome who is more expert and more able than I am, and who has the belief—which I do not share—in the wisdom and likely success of the new project.” With this note, the abbot resigned.27
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ON AN OCTOBER AFTERNOON, in one of the Roman Jewish ghetto’s narrow streets, Angelo Moscati got into an argument with another man. As heated words gave way to blows, Moscati pulled out a knife and slashed at the man’s head, opening up a gash. Two members of the Civic Guard arrived and tried to seize the blade, but Moscati wounded one of them before they succeeded in subduing him. The whole episode would not have attracted much attention—knife fights being common on the streets of Rome—but Moscati was a Jew, and his victims Christian.28
The news raced through the city. Soon a large, angry crowd, led by the cousin of one the injured men, and apparently encouraged by neighboring Catholic clergy, descended on the ghetto seeking revenge, members of the Civic Guard among them. The invaders waved clubs and knives and began raining cobblestones and sticks on the heads of the ghetto dwellers. Shouts of “Long live religion!” “Send the Jews to the flames!” “Down with the friends of the Jews!” and “Down with the enemies of the Holy Religion!” rang out, as rocks shattered windows. Some of the more enterprising among the intruders carried sacks, hoping for plunder.
The captain of the nearby Civic Guard station, alerted to the violence, rushed to the scene with a number of guardsmen and pleaded with his marauding comrades to obey their oath to preserve the peace. In response, the captain recalled, the rioting guardsmen “treated us as pigs and cowards, saying that it was absolutely necessary to defend our uniform and burn down the Ghetto.” Rossi released a statement, plastered on the city walls, denouncing the violence as “unworthy of a cultured and generous people.” In the nights to follow, dozens of guardsmen were sent to patrol the ghetto, although many sympathized more with the rioters than with the terrified Jews.29
In many ways, the Jews were the city’s bellwether, the living indicator of the struggle to move Rome from its medieval theocratic ways to modern times. The Enlightenment ideals that had been spreading in Europe for the past decades called for treating all subjects, all citizens alike. A modern society had no place for a ghetto, no grounds for forbidding professions or education to people based on their religion.
