The Pope Who Would Be King, page 19
In an act reminiscent of the French Revolution, when it was declared that each town needed only one church bell, the rest to be melted to make coins and weapons, Rome’s new rulers ordered all the city’s unused church bells melted down to forge cannons for the republic’s defense. Ecclesiastical control of all schools and universities was ended, excluding only religious seminaries. All horses found in the Vatican and Quirinal Palaces were confiscated, as were all those owned by the pope’s Noble Guard.36
No action in these first weeks was more fraught with symbolism than the liberation of the Inquisition’s prisoners. When the republican authorities arrived at the Inquisition Palace, a stone’s throw from St. Peter’s, they found the Dominican monk who held the keys to the cells playing cards with two unsavory-looking jailers. Chained in the small, dank cells were men and women who had been variously found guilty of swearing, witchcraft, defamation of the Catholic religion, or, in the case of two nuns, falling in love. Freed from their chains, they unsteadily made their way into the glow of Rome’s bright sun.
By the beginning of March, all special privileges for the clergy were eliminated, as well as all ecclesiastical tribunals having jurisdiction over laypeople. The church’s vast landholdings were declared state property, and censorship was abolished.37
These moves prompted furious denunciations from Gaeta. The newly proclaimed Roman Republic, Cardinal Antonelli told all who would hear, ruled only by fear, intimidation, and fraud. Other than a few fanatics, he declared, and a small number of the credulous seduced by their false promises, it lacked all popular support. As for the much-ballyhooed popular vote, he claimed that it, too, had been a farce. “In the capital,” the cardinal advised the nuncios shortly after the Assembly election, “they bought the votes of three thousand workers….They went through the hospitals, making the sick vote, they paid a huge number of people from the lower classes to vote multiple times at different polling places, they made various men don clerical garb to give the impression that the clergy were in favor.” The cardinal’s allegations could hardly have been more horrifying, albeit based for the most part on pure invention.38
*1 In these decades, Austrian diplomatic correspondence was written in French, not in German.
*2 The reference is to a small group of nefarious advisers.
Cardinal Antonelli kept up the drumbeat of denunciations, bemoaning the chaos and violence reigning in Christendom’s capital. The men ruling Rome, he told Europe’s diplomats, were seizing priceless works of art from the churches and selling them to pay their bills. Although this was untrue and his accounts of anarchy in Rome were greatly exaggerated, Catholics throughout Europe spread these tales.
The republic’s ministers denied the charges and plastered the city walls with pleas urging Romans to respect Catholic clergy and church property, but violence against men of the cloth was not uncommon. In one such incident, outrage at what had been found at the Dominican-run Inquisition prison inspired a mob to light the Dominican monastery afire. It took a large number of carabinieri to restore calm.1
Clerics brave—or foolish—enough to try to publicly defend the pope risked their lives. In early March, a group of men angered by a priest’s loud complaints about the new order chased after him. When they caught up with him, they made him stand on a table, where, to the crowd’s delight, they forced him to preach a sermon singing the praises of the Roman Republic. Outside Rome, an archbishop who had forbidden his parish priests to administer the sacraments to those who voted in the Assembly election was arrested and imprisoned, as was a bishop accused of trying to foment a counterrevolution. But for the most part, bishops and parish priests of the Papal States lay low, avoiding acts openly hostile to the new government.2
The foundations of church power in Rome were rapidly eroding. The government declared the Vatican palaces and the Quirinal to be public property. Hospitals, public charities, and orphanages, all previously run by the church, were now in the hands of the republic, as were their endowments.3
The sessions of the Constituent Assembly were raucous affairs. “There is neither discipline nor dignity,” observed the Tuscan envoy. “Disorder is frequent, the vain speeches and recriminations extremely frequent.” As for the more moderate delegates, he added, they have “more heart than brains.” “I must reluctantly tell you,” reported one sympathetic observer, “that this Assembly seems to me to be a bunch of insolent and jealous children.”4
Desperate for outside support, the Roman Republic sent secret emissaries to Paris to plead their case. After meeting with them in early March, the French minister of foreign affairs, Édouard Drouyn, was convinced that the men in power in Rome were willing to compromise. “Feeling themselves weak in the face of the storm that threatens them,” Drouyn observed, “the authors of the revolution would be open to accepting a deal that would give them…an honorable way of getting out of the terrible situation in which they find themselves.” If left to his own, thought Drouyn, the pope would certainly agree, judging a negotiated agreement preferable to “the cruel necessity of returning to Rome by directing the power of foreign arms against the Romans.” “The pope,” noted Drouyn, was, after all, “not only the head of government of a third-rate country. He is also, and above all, the head of the Catholic Church.”5
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IN VIENNA, LEARNING OF the pope’s plea for Austrian troops alone to restore him to Rome, Schwarzenberg could not help but smile. The same pope who had blessed his troops the previous year as they marched northward to drive the Austrians from Italy was now begging the Austrian army to come to his rescue.
But it was not clear to the Austrian prime minister how he was to do what the pope asked. Pius had publicly called on all four Catholic powers to send their armies, and the French had warned Vienna against acting independently. With new signs of unrest in Austrian-controlled northern Italy, the last thing Austria needed was to give France a reason to support the northern Italians in the continuing conflict there.
It would be better, thought Schwarzenberg, to leave the taking of Rome to the French. It would undoubtedly be a messy business, and Austria had no interest in occupying Rome itself. What mattered to Austria was maintaining free rein over the Papal States’ northern provinces and the eastern coast. The north helped protect Austria’s southern boundary, while the coast allowed it to maintain control of the Adriatic.6
Although he knew it would anger the pope, Schwarzenberg decided to inform the French government of the pope’s secret request to have Austria alone send its army. He knew that this would vindicate those in France who already suspected the pope of double-dealing, but by betraying the pope’s trust, the Austrian prime minister hoped to win France’s. He proposed a secret plan to the French foreign minister: Austrian troops would put down the revolt in the northern and eastern provinces of the Papal States. The French would land at Civitavecchia and march on Rome.
Not surprisingly, when Vienna’s ambassador in Paris told Drouyn of Pius’s proposed secret pact with Austria, he was outraged. In light of the pope’s duplicity, said Drouyn, France would need to reconsider its commitment to helping him. As for the plan Austria was suggesting, he rejected it out of hand. Foreign armies, he was convinced, could never provide a durable solution to the problems the pope faced.7
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IF THERE WAS ONE MAN WHO, for Pius, most incarnated the malevolence of the church’s enemies, it was Giuseppe Mazzini. From his quarters in London, Mazzini had long championed a united Italy free from priestly and autocratic rule. Since 1831 he had had a hand in virtually every attempted uprising on the Italian Peninsula.8
Although unloved by the prelates, Mazzini had many admirers. William Lloyd Garrison, a leader of the American antislavery movement, had met Mazzini two years earlier on a visit to London and was immediately struck, as he put it, by “the brilliancy of his mind, the modesty of his deportment, the urbanity of his spirit, and the fascination of his conversational powers.” I “felt drawn to him,” recalled the American, “by an irresistible magnetism; in him there was not discoverable one spark of self-inflation, one atom of worldly ambition.” He was, added Garrison, “a sublime idealist, but never transcending the bounds of reason,” a man of “immense physical and moral courage.”9
Thomas Carlyle, one of Britain’s great literary figures of the time, befriended Mazzini in London, where, Carlyle observed, he lived “almost in squalor.” He drank coffee with bread crumbled in it, smoked constantly, and preferred to speak in French, although he spoke English well, albeit with a strong Italian accent. “A more beautiful person,” recalled Carlyle, “I never beheld, with his soft flashing eyes, and face full of intelligence.”10
A sympathetic British biographer of a century ago captured his contradictions well. Mazzini, he wrote, “had a supreme confidence in his own thought. It was difficult for him to own an error, and hence he never learnt from his mistakes….That very rigidity, that lifelong iteration of a few dominant ideas, carry force and conviction that a more agile intellect were powerless to give.” But, he added, “absolute confidence in his own beliefs was joined to truest personal humility, and made the prophet. Humblest and least ambitious of men, he felt his call from God; and in God’s name he was assertive, dogmatic….Compromise in small or great seemed cowardice.”11
Mazzini cast a special spell on women, and the American journalist Margaret Fuller proved an eloquent recruit, bombarding her American readers with adulatory accounts of the republican hero. Mazzini, she enthused, was a man of genius, yet one’s first impression on seeing him “must always be of the religion of his soul, of his virtue.” In mind he was a “great poetic statesman, in heart a lover.” In her correspondence she confessed, “Dearly I love Mazzini, who also loves me….His soft radiant look makes melancholy music in my soul.”12
When this legendary prophet of Italian unity arrived in Rome on the evening of March 5, there to take up the Assembly seat he had recently won in a supplementary election, many in Rome greeted him as their savior. “He has the nature more of a priest than a statesman….He is pontiff, prince, apostle, priest,” observed Luigi Carlo Farini, who had served in Rome’s Chamber of Deputies but then, along with Minghetti and other liberal dignitaries, left the city following Rossi’s murder. Threatened by some of Europe’s most powerful armies, its leaders under threat of excommunication, its government running badly, its treasury bare, its army small and ill equipped, Rome was in need of a hero. “It is to Mazzini alone that all eyes turn,” observed the Swiss scholar Johann Bachofen, who was then living in Rome, “to him, the apostle of the revolution.”13
Members of the Assembly were debating a banking bill on March 6 when a deputy’s shout drew all eyes to the small, thin figure entering the hall. “Viva Mazzini!” he yelled, the cry becoming a chorus as a wave of applause from the deputies brought the debate to a halt. “I believe I speak for the sense of the Assembly,” said Charles Bonaparte, sitting in the chair of the Assembly president, “inviting the deputy Mazzini to sit by the President’s side.” As the famed exile took his seat, a new round of applause greeted him. No one wanted to return to the banking bill. Mazzini needed little urging to come to the lectern to speak.
All the applause, the signs of affection that you give me, o colleagues, should instead be directed by me to you, for what little good I have not done, but tried to do, has come to me from Rome. Rome was always a kind of good luck charm for me. As a youth I studied the history of Italy, and I found that…only one city was favored by God in being able to die and then rise up even greater than before in fulfilling its mission in the world….I saw that there first arose the Rome of the Emperors….I saw Rome perish at the hands of the barbarians…and I saw it rise to even greater heights by conquering not by arms, but with words, rising in the name of the Popes to continue on its grand missions. I felt in my heart that it is impossible that a city that alone in the world has had two great lives, one greater than the other, does not have a third….After the Rome of the Emperors, after the Rome of the Popes, will come the Rome of the People….I cannot promise you anything from me, except my participation in all that you are doing for the good of Italy, for Rome, and for the good of Humanity. We may have to weather great crises. We may have to wage a holy battle against the only enemy that threatens us, Austria. We will fight it, and we will win.14
Mazzini, though a small man, spoke in a commanding voice, but when he finished, he looked exhausted, and despite the personal triumph of the moment, he seemed melancholy. “I am extremely nervous,” he confided the next day. “Intentions here are good, but the capacity very little. Up until the day of my arrival, nothing was done to prepare for war. We have no arms, and virtually all of Europe’s governments are working against us.” Making matters worse, he added, the men with whom he had to work were strangers to him.15
Events from the north were about to produce another shock. Ever since his defeat at the hands of the Austrians the previous year, King Charles Albert had been biding his time, waiting for the moment to redeem himself. He now decided he could wait no longer. On March 17 word reached Rome that the king was again leading his army into Lombardy, but the king’s attempt at redemption turned quickly to disaster. The 85,000 Sardinian troops had barely begun their attack, when they were outmaneuvered by a force of 59,000 Austrians. Soon it was the Austrians who were advancing into Sardinian territory. On March 23 Charles Albert surrendered to the triumphant eighty-three-year-old General Radetzky. Newly disgraced, the king quit his throne, ceding it to his son, Victor Emmanuel II. Accompanied by only a single aide, the fallen king departed at midnight, headed for France. He would die in exile, brokenhearted, before the year was out. He was fifty years old.16
When the news reached the Roman Assembly, its stricken members erupted in defiant shouts of Viva l’Italia! Viva l’indipendenza! The struggle for Italian independence, they vowed, would go on. But their future looked grim. Having crushed the Sardinian army, nothing now held the Austrians back from marching south into the Papal States.
Recognizing the need for stronger leadership in the face of this threat, the Roman Assembly voted to create a triumvirate and gave it unlimited powers to defend the republic. That Mazzini should be one of its members was never in doubt. The moderate, upright lawyer Carlo Armellini—whose brother and son were both Jesuits—was chosen as well. It was Armellini who had given the stirring opening address to the Assembly the previous month. The other triumvir, chosen to represent the north of the Papal States, was also a lawyer, Aurelio Saffi. A good man, well liked, from a noble family, he was only twenty-nine years old and still wrote a letter to his mother in Forlì every day. Although all three men would rule in name, only one would rule in fact. Mazzini alone had the drive, the intelligence, the fearlessness, the vast international network of contacts, and the credibility to lead a battle that would pit the largely defenseless republic against the combined armies of the continent’s major powers.17
The abdication of King Charles Albert
Although Mazzini had the reputation of a dreamer, once he had power in his hands he showed himself to be remarkably clear-eyed. He knew that his only hope lay with France. France was, after all, a sister republic, and France had long viewed Austrian military designs with suspicion. Reports from Paris offered Mazzini some encouragement. “The news that is coming from France,” wrote one Assembly member in his diary in early April, “is comforting. That government finally seems disposed not only not to take part with the other Powers in an intervention against our state, but on the contrary to oppose it so that Austria is not tempted. May God will that it be so!”18
Triumvirate of the Roman Republic: Carlo Armellini, Giuseppe Mazzini, and Aurelio Saffi
From Gaeta, Cardinal Antonelli was predicting a calamity of epic proportions should foreign armies not quickly come to the pope’s rescue. “If the armed intervention we have requested is the only anchor against shipwreck,” Antonelli wrote his nuncio in Madrid in mid-March, “let me add that without rapid action all is lost, while each moment that passes brings with it an abyss of irreparable harm.” Later in March he issued similar warnings in letters to his nuncios in Vienna and Madrid: “Can it be possible,” asked Antonelli,
for the Catholic powers to endure so many outrages against religion and its august Head without doing anything?…If the Catholic powers do not rush to our aid, they will be returning the Pontiff not to his dominions, but rather to weep over a pile of rubble and abominations, and no longer to reside in Rome, the center of Christianity, but in a new Geneva.*
Over the course of the next month, Antonelli kept up his apocalyptic lament:
Rome’s situation and that of the rest of the Papal States could not be worse. The impieties keep growing, the devastations, the plundering, the horrors. The seat of Christianity is being turned into theaters of crime and schools of irreligion. Thanks to their lethargy, the powers will have the Glory of restoring a Pontiff not to a State but to a mass of horrifying ruins.19
Although Antonelli adopted this dire tone for the benefit of his nuncios, he was in fact growing ever more confident. Austria, he was convinced, would not let the Roman Republic last long, now that its army was no longer held down by the Sardinian king in northern Italy. He knew Vienna had informed the French government of the pope’s confidential request for Austrian aid, and he had let Esterházy know how disappointed he was at this violation of the pope’s trust. But the French response to the news—threatening to rethink their pledge of support for the pope—had only confirmed his conviction that the pope should rely on Austria alone.20
