The Pope Who Would Be King, page 16
Only on election eve did Cavaignac receive the unwelcome news that Pius had decided to stay in Gaeta. On that day, too, a letter by Louis Napoleon, addressed to the papal nuncio in Paris, appeared in the country’s newspapers. He wanted to reassure the Catholic world, he said, that he had nothing to do with Charles Bonaparte, his revolutionary cousin in Rome. “I deplore with all my soul,” wrote Louis Napoleon, “that he hasn’t recognized that the maintenance of temporal rule by the venerable Head of the Church is intimately linked to the splendor of Catholicism.” His letter seemed to have the desired effect. Unexpectedly, he won the election in a landslide.12
Louis Napoleon Bonaparte
Under five and a half feet tall, with a long body and short legs, Louis Napoleon had a large nose, pallid complexion, small dull gray eyes, an air of ennui, a thin mustache, and a pointed beard. Unlike his rabble-rousing Roman cousin, he bore no resemblance to his famous uncle. An acquaintance from his days in exile in London described the new French president vividly if not kindly: “At no time of his life could the Emperor have been handsome….The ornithological resemblance…was to a sick eagle: his head held slightly on one side; an abstracted look, his eyes small, and not at all prominent; his hair of a fine texture, not profuse; and lying flat on his head. Hands large and muscular.” Having been partly educated in Germany, he spoke French with a German accent, his voice thin and nasal, his words sparing and issued in a monotone. He did not rise before ten each morning and spent much time in the company of Miss Howard, his English lover, who had followed him to Paris, although his main passion in life was riding his horse, Lizzie. Not known for his intelligence, and with no previous experience with government, he was viewed with barely concealed disdain by the French elite. Karl Marx judged him “mediocre and grotesque.” Cavaignac refused to shake his hand when the election results were announced. Exactly where the new president stood politically was not clear, but he was able to rise to power by trading on French nostalgia for the glory days of Napoleonic rule.13
News that the pope was indeed not on his way to France had meanwhile prompted a new diplomatic push. In early December, Harcourt, the French ambassador to the Holy See, and Alphonse de Rayneval, French ambassador to Naples, were joined in Gaeta by the new French envoy, Corcelle. Pius led the Frenchmen to believe he was open to going to France but said that one concern held him back. He worried about Louis Napoleon, who as a young man had taken part in the rebellion that rocked the Papal States in 1831. Did the pope really want to put himself in the position of depending on such an unreliable patron? Meanwhile King Ferdinand, the Frenchmen realized, was doing all he could to fan the pope’s fears.14
Nor were others in the diplomatic corps sympathetic to the French proposal, least of all Count Spaur, who had taken the pope to Gaeta to escape their clutches. “Preoccupied with the idea that Duke Harcourt and the commander of the Ténare were resolved on kidnapping the pope,” observed the Belgian ambassador, himself one of the more reactionary influences in Gaeta, Spaur “always had his pistols loaded to defend him. A very tall man, he would have thrown his little colleague in the gulf of Gaeta without batting an eyelid, and if he had been allowed to do it, he would have slept every night outside Pius IX’s door, with a complete arsenal of deadly weapons.”15
The French diplomats believed that the pope’s stay in France would in any case not be long, for as they told him, it was important that he be able to return peacefully to Rome to continue his work bringing greater freedom to the people of his domain. Embracing the reactionary King Ferdinand, they warned, would be a grave mistake.
It had only been a small number of people, the pope assured them, who had caused his problems in Rome. Most of his subjects, he insisted, remained devoted to him. As for continuing his work of reform, he told the Frenchmen, he still believed that religion was not incompatible with freedom.16
Yet the longer the pope was away from Rome, the weaker the voices around him recommending compromise would become. With few exceptions, the cardinals and the foreign ambassadors urged a hard line. It was compromise, they argued, that had led to the current crisis.17
Like the French, the British despaired of the pontiff’s ever greater identification with the despotic king of Naples. “He could not have found a worse adviser in Europe!” observed Astley Key, captain of the Bulldog. Key wished the pope well but thought his prospects poor. “Poor Pio Nono!” he wrote a friend at the beginning of December. “His sun is clouded, I think not set; but it will never shine brilliantly. His case shows clearly that good intentions with public men avail nothing. A line of conduct is required, not a benevolent wish. A better-hearted man—and a weaker—does not exist.”18
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RUMORS OF ALL KINDS raced through the Eternal City. Austrian troops were said to be massing on the northern border of the Papal States, ready to march on Rome to restore the pope. The king of Naples was said to be readying his army to attack from the south. A republic, some predicted, would soon be declared in Rome, with Prince Charles Bonaparte as its head. But what people most wondered about was the pope himself. What would he do next?19
While some in Rome were calling for an end to the pope’s temporal powers, what remained of the government urged caution. The radicals, the moderates feared, had driven things too far. After the pope’s flight in late November, the two chambers addressed a message to the Romans, linking their authority to the pope’s: “If the pontiff has decided to leave his residence, no one less than he would want to abandon you to the evils of social dissolution. He himself, at the time of his departure, assigned the ministry the task of ensuring order and peace….Even in the absence of the person of the Sovereign, his spirit, his name and his authority are not far from us.”20
Made uneasy by the ambassadors’ decision to follow Pius to Gaeta, and aware that calls for foreign military intervention were in the air, Terenzio Mamiani, newly appointed minister of foreign affairs, sent a plea to all of Rome’s embassies. Rossi’s murder, he told them, was an outrage and the government would quickly punish those found guilty. The pope himself, the minister stressed, had never been in danger. During the violence that broke out on the sixteenth, the men who were now government ministers had done all they could to calm the protesters’ fury and bring about a peaceful resolution. The underlying problem, Mamiani argued, was the difficulty of combining the pope’s role as spiritual leader with his role as temporal ruler. The only solution was to find a way to safeguard the pope’s spiritual powers while transforming the priest-run government into one run by laymen in the pope’s name. The foreign minister ended his message by invoking the love that Italians bore for the pope, praising Pius as the “August initiator of National regeneration.”21
Pius was in no mood for compromise. Within two days of his arrival in Gaeta, he had prepared a proclamation of his own, penning several drafts, each more uncompromising than the last. The abbot Rosmini, who had rushed to Gaeta to be at the pope’s side, urged him to soften his tone, but to no avail. With the pope were both his brother and his nephew, moderate men who, along with Rosmini, pleaded with Pius to be more conciliatory. Some blamed Antonelli for pushing the pope to take a more confrontational stance than was in his nature, and there is little doubt that Antonelli was feeding the pope’s sense of outrage. But with memories of his humiliating escape from Rome still fresh, Pius was not inclined to extend an olive branch to the men he held responsible for betraying him.22
“The violence used against Us in the past days,” said the pope in his address to his subjects, “and the clear wish for further such outbursts…have forced Us to temporarily separate from Our subjects and children, whom We have always loved and love still.” He then introduced what would become a major theme as Catholics tried to explain how a pope could be driven from Rome: it was God’s punishment: “In the ingratitude of the children We recognize the hand of the Lord that strikes Us, wanting satisfaction for Our sins and those of the peoples.” Pius recalled that on November 16 and 17 he had protested to the diplomatic corps the “unheard of violence and sacrilege.” “We therefore declare,” he concluded, “that all the acts that derived from that violence are of no effect and no legality.” The men who now ruled Rome, declared the pope, men whom he himself had appointed in the wake of Rossi’s assassination, had no legitimate authority.23
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STUNG BY THE POPE’S condemnation, Rome’s government ministers submitted their resignations, but the Chamber of Deputies persuaded them to stay on. Mamiani and the other moderate members of the government then proposed that they send a delegation to urge Pius to return. Opposing them were the radicals, including Charles Bonaparte and Pietro Sterbini, a former political exile and leader of the influential Popular Club. Sitting on the extreme left of the Chamber of Deputies, Bonaparte and Sterbini argued that, rather than pleading with the pope to come back to Rome, the deputies should proclaim the end of papal rule and create a republic in its place.
As a young man, Sterbini had trained in medicine in Rome, but his two great passions in life were literature and politics. Having fled the Papal States after unsuccessfully trying to get the Romans to join in the revolts of 1831, he had spent years in exile in Corsica and Marseilles, writing plays and practicing medicine, before returning to Rome in 1846, a beneficiary of the papal amnesty. Like others of the time, he had literally written songs of praise to Pio Nono, joining the chorus calling for the pope to head a great confederation of Italian states. But following the pope’s announcement that he could never take part in a war against Catholic Austria, Sterbini had become one of the fiercest voices calling for the end of priestly rule.
The moderates despised Sterbini. “I have known few men with greater intelligence or more horrible appearance,” recalled Marco Minghetti. “There was no infamy of which he was not accused. He was not loved or esteemed, but feared.” Luigi Carlo Farini, future prime minister of Italy, was even more caustic: “Boss or servant of the Popular Club…he did not tolerate contrary opinions. Sinister by nature, an odd fellow, lacking both courage and good sense, he had all the characteristics of the plebeian despot.”24
Much to the radicals’ displeasure, the deputies voted to send a delegation to plead with the pope to return. They chose men for the mission they thought most likely to be able to persuade him. Among them was the octogenarian Prince Corsini, not known for his democratic sentiments, along with another moderate aristocrat, and two priests.25
Pietro Sterbini
As the delegation made its way south, Pius’s attention was elsewhere. He had convoked the cardinals for a meeting whose subject reveals a good deal about him. Pius wanted to discuss not the unfolding political crisis but rather the need for an encyclical proclaiming the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, the belief that the Virgin Mary was born free from original sin. Two years earlier, when Rossi had sent the French foreign minister news of Mastai’s election as pope, he had begun his description of the cardinal by saying that he was “very pious” although little schooled in the world of politics. That observation now seemed more apt than ever. Pius was a pastoral, not a political, pope. He was more at home in the spiritual realm than in the harsh and messy world of politics, and he would rather confront the theological question of the circumstances of Mary’s birth two millennia earlier than the question of what to do now about his rebellious kingdom. Pius ordered the Roman delegation that the Chamber of Deputies had sent turned back at the border.26
Around the same time, another of Rome’s leading citizens received a cold shoulder from the pope. Before he left Rome, the pope had charged Marquis Giralomo Sacchetti, a nobleman who had served as steward of the papal palaces since 1840, with ensuring the sanctity of the papal palaces in his absence. Sacchetti now arrived in Gaeta carrying a variety of religious ornaments that he thought Pius would want to have with him. The pope, in a surprisingly foul mood, told the marquis that if he had wanted anything, he would have asked for it. Taken aback, Sacchetti then handed Pius a letter that Rome’s city council had asked him to convey, urging the pope to return to Rome. It seems that it was knowledge of the letter that Sacchetti was carrying that had led the pope to greet him so coldly. On being given the letter, the pope lost his temper and ordered the nobleman out of his room. Late in the day a low-ranking aide came out to tell Sacchetti that the pontiff wanted him to leave Gaeta within the hour. Finding that the gates to the fortress were already locked, the humiliated marquis was obliged to pass the night in the guardhouse, able to leave only when the gate opened the next morning.27
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IF THE POPE HAD any consolation, it was King Ferdinand’s extraordinary devotion. The monarch had liked to boast that his kingdom was safe, for it was defended on three sides by salt water and on one side by holy water. With the pope no longer in Rome, his northern border had lost its divine protection, a situation he aimed to correct. Ferdinand practically moved into Gaeta to be at the pope’s side. He and his family would spend more time in the next month in that small fortress than in their own vast royal palace, glad for the excuse to be far from Naples.
Although Ferdinand had recently acquired the nickname of “Bomb King,” in Rome he was more commonly called “the Boor,” a reputation nourished by the king’s own boast of never having held a book in his hands. Thirty-eight years old, the king was tall but poorly proportioned, with a short torso and unusually elongated loins. His beard formed a crescent around the bottom half of his face, in an unsuccessful attempt to hide chubby cheeks and an oddly long face. His voice was nasal, some said feminine, although when he gave orders, which was often, he had the ability to raise his volume to a level that none could ignore. He came from royalty on both sides, his mother a Spanish Bourbon. Educated by priests, as had long been the royal practice, he had been named commanding general of the Neapolitan army at age seventeen. He loved to wear his military uniform, his chest covered with self-awarded medals, golden braids hanging from the elaborate epaulets on his shoulders. Born in exile in Sicily at a time when Napoleon’s troops had seized the Neapolitan mainland, Ferdinand had good reason to feel nervous about the precariousness of his reign.28
The king was uncharacteristically happy while in Gaeta, where he delighted in parading his troops and casting himself as papal champion. Dining nightly with the pope, who otherwise normally followed the papal custom of dining alone, he had given up his own rooms in Gaeta to Pius and Antonelli and made his wife and children share a single room in the fortress.29
While comforted by Ferdinand’s attentions, Pius realized that if he were to regain his lands, he could not rely on the king alone. Ferdinand’s army, not known for its effectiveness, was in any case busy fighting the insurgency in Sicily. In fact, Pius had no clear plan, nor was he sure he needed one. The Lord, he thought, would not allow Rome to fall to the Godless. After all, only four decades earlier a much more powerful force had driven a pope from Rome, but Pius VII had returned in triumph, while his nemesis, Napoleon, had died in lonely exile.30
What most pained him, though, was that not a single Roman had lifted a finger in defense of his rule. In the place of the paternal love he had felt for his subjects in the first months of his papacy, a burning sense of betrayal now took root, fed by Antonelli and the other cardinals.31
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WITH THE POPE IN EXILE, Rome was leaderless. To fill the void, on December 11 the Chamber of Deputies created a three-member executive to serve until the pope returned. Outside the Palace of the Chancellery, where the chamber met, the Popular Club organized a demonstration to show the people’s support for the government. Ciceruacchio, the popular hero, gesticulating and declaiming from his perch on the palace steps, whipped the crowd into a frenzy. Along with the patriotic cries of “Long live the Provisional Government! Long live Italy! Long live Unification!” came more chilling calls: “Down with the rich! Down with the priests!” The people began singing the Marseillaise.
Ciceruacchio speaks to the people
To add to the excitement, Giuseppe Garibaldi—veteran of the wars of independence in South America and, more recently, of the battle to drive the Austrians from Lombardy—rode into Rome on his white horse, having left his legionnaires back in Tuscany. “Long live the republican general!” shouted the people gathered at the Popular Club. But many Romans were relieved when, a week after his arrival, Garibaldi—dubbed a “foreign adventurer” by his detractors—left the city.
For the most part, calm prevailed. Most Romans still hoped they could keep a constitutional government with the pope at its head. What they worried about were their jobs, many of which had been lost with the departure of Rome’s noble families. Astley Key, the British naval commander, visited Rome in mid-December and praised the people for showing such moderation. They had preserved the existing form of government and had urged the pope to return. “However,” he added in a private letter, “it is impossible for this state of things to continue. Either the Pope must return to a part of his own dominions”—Key suggested—“or the form of government must be changed.” Should the pope refuse to return, the Romans would have little choice, thought the naval officer, but to proclaim a republic.32
In Gaeta, the abbot Rosmini urged Pio Nono to find a peaceful solution to the crisis. The pope, who was fond of him, and whose moods lurched between stubborn intransigence born of a feeling of betrayal and an eagerness to regain the affection of his subjects, seemed finally to have softened. He asked Rosmini to prepare a message that he could use.
