The Pope Who Would Be King, page 2
OUDINOT, CHARLES (GENERAL) Born in 1791, Oudinot was the son of the highest-ranking general in Napoleon Bonaparte’s army. A career officer, he began his career fighting in some of Napoleon’s last campaigns. In April 1849 Louis Napoleon sent him to command France’s expeditionary army, charged with taking Rome. After a humiliating first attempt at the end of the month, he was eager to redeem his honor. Belittled by both Tocqueville, the foreign minister, and Corcelle, the French envoy in Rome, Oudinot was relieved of his command in Rome in August 1849.
RAYNEVAL, ALPHONSE DE Born in 1813, Rayneval became a career diplomat, beginning in 1833 as a French attaché in Madrid. He served as first secretary to the French embassy in Rome from 1839 to 1844, then spent the next four years at the French embassy in St. Petersburg. Named ambassador to the Kingdom of Naples in June 1848, Rayneval found himself dealing with the crisis created by the pope’s surprising move to the kingdom five months later. Tirelessly trying to persuade the pope to reach out to his people with promises of reform, Rayneval faced the ire of the cardinals and the opposition of his fellow ambassadors. In May 1850, he replaced General Baraguey as the French ambassador to Rome, a position he remained in until 1857.
ROSSI, PELLEGRINO Born in Carrara, in 1787, he was the son of a modest merchant. First a lawyer and a professor of law at the University of Bologna, he then spent thirteen years in Switzerland, writing books on political economy and serving in the Swiss legislature before moving to Paris to accept a professorship at the Sorbonne. In 1845 he came to Rome as French envoy to the Holy See, although he was known for his indifference to religious questions. In March 1848, following the French Revolution, he was dismissed from his ambassadorship, but six months later, in a move that shocked the French government and greatly displeased the Austrians, Pius IX appointed Rossi to head his own government. Rossi would soon meet a violent end.
ROSTOLAN, LOUIS DE (GENERAL) Born in 1791, a veteran of the French war in Algeria, Rostolan served under General Oudinot in the assault on Rome in 1849 and then in August was named to replace Oudinot as commander of the French army there. Rostolan soon found himself at odds with the hard line that the French president wanted to take with the pope.
TOCQUEVILLE, ALEXIS DE Born to a French aristocratic family in 1805, Tocqueville acquired international fame with his Democracy in America, based on the nine months he spent touring the United States in 1830–31. First elected to the French Chamber of Deputies in 1839, he helped write the constitution of the French Republic created in the wake of the revolution of 1848. Appointed foreign minister by Louis Napoleon in early June 1849, just as French troops were poised to attack Rome, he found himself in the exceedingly uncomfortable position of overseeing the destruction of constitutional rule and the restoration of the papal theocracy.
In his apartment high up in Rome’s massive Quirinal Palace, Pius IX worried that his plan to escape might end in disaster. Little more than a week earlier, thousands of Romans had besieged the Quirinal, calling for a government of their choosing and an end to priestly rule. Men had wheeled a cannon into the piazza and aimed it at the palace entrance. The pope’s Noble Guardsmen, Roman aristocrats normally eager to don their medieval uniforms and hobnob with the pope, had deserted him, fearing for their lives. The cardinals, too, fled the city, blaming the pope for their misfortune. When protesters that day set fire to a Quirinal gate, a small band of Swiss Guardsmen did their best to shield the papal attendants who battled the flames. Clutching their rifles, members of the Civic Guard—composed of Romans of the better classes—climbed onto the roofs of neighboring buildings and began shooting at the palace. As the pope’s scholarly secretary of Latin Letters, Monsignor Palma, looked out his window at the chaos below, a bullet punctured his chest, and he fell dead onto the marble floor. Rome had been under the pope’s control for well over a thousand years. Now, as a revolutionary spirit gripped much of Europe, time seemed to have run out on the pope’s kingdom on earth.1
The pontiff’s fall had been swift. Elected in 1846, Pius IX had initially been hailed as a popular hero in the Papal States, the swath of the Italian Peninsula under his control. In March 1848 he had given his subjects a constitution, offering them rights unimaginable under his predecessors. A huge crowd bellowing Viva il Papa! had poured into Quirinal Square. Unable to resist his flock’s pleas, the pope had stepped out onto his loggia to bask in the warmth of the people’s affection. As he raised his arms in blessing, the tens of thousands gathered below fell to their knees. That evening oil lanterns cast a holiday glow over the people who paraded through Rome’s cobblestone streets. Every piazza, it seemed, boasted a band, and thousands of Romans joined in hymns of praise to their beloved pontiff.2
Much had happened in the months since then, and now, at five p.m., on Friday, November 24, 1848, it was time for the pope to escape. Outside the Quirinal Palace, Duke Harcourt, the diminutive French ambassador to the Holy See, stepped out of his luxurious horse-drawn carriage and entered the Quirinal gate, ready to play his part.
“The pope’s authority,” the ambassador had observed a week earlier, “exists in name only.” Pius was, in effect, a prisoner, his palace surrounded by hostile Civic Guardsmen. Should the pope succeed in his escape, the ambassador had told Paris, he would very likely head for Marseilles, and so the French government should lose no time making arrangements for a suitable welcome.3
The door closed behind the ambassador as he entered the study where Pius was waiting for him. The pope was known for his good humor and easy charm, but now he was tense. He had not left the Quirinal Palace since rebels had slit his prime minister’s throat nine days earlier. From a separate door, the papal steward, Count Benedetto Filippani, entered. Together the pope and the count hastened into the pope’s adjacent bedroom. There, with the nobleman’s help, Pius lifted his white robe over his head and pulled off his red shoes. Although Filippani urged him to change quickly, the pope lowered himself to his knees to say a final prayer, facing the crucifix on his table. “Have mercy on me, God, in your kindness….In your compassion blot out my offense.” To the steward’s pleas that there was no time to lose, the pontiff replied with a bit of Scripture: Spiritus quidem promptus est, caro autem infirma, “The spirit is indeed willing, but the flesh is weak.”4
He dressed in the clothes laid on his bed: a black clerical gown, black socks, and black shoes. Before donning the floppy black cleric’s hat, he rubbed white powder in his hair. Finally he placed thick dark glasses on the bridge of his nose. “I look like a country priest,” he remarked when he saw himself in a mirror.
Sitting alone in the pope’s receiving room, the French ambassador kept up a one-sided conversation, eager to leave the impression to anyone listening outside that the pope was still with him. Meanwhile Pius IX and Filippani carried a candle to light their way as they passed out a side door and through the papal throne room. At the other end of the hall, they expected to meet a servant with a key to a secret passage out of the building. The man was not there. “My God,” muttered the pope, “this begins badly.” Filippani ran off to find the key. As the pope stood in the dark, his lips moved in prayer.
Filippani returned, key in hand, and the two men passed through the door and down the corridor, which ended in a stairway. As they descended, they faced a new obstacle. The keys to the exterior doors of the Quirinal were all held by the Civic Guardsmen, but they had earlier discovered that this particular door had a faulty lock and could be opened if two people, standing on either side, lifted it together. One of the pope’s servants was waiting for them at the bottom of the stairway, while another stood outside the door. They knocked to alert the man outside. A response of three knocks meant the coast was clear, but only two knocks came in reply. Members of the Civic Guard were passing by. After a nervous wait, the pope was relieved to hear the three knocks. The two servants lifted the door as Filippani pushed. When it opened, the servants sank to their knees to receive the pope’s blessing.
In the courtyard, Filippani helped the pope into his carriage. In a loud voice, he instructed the coachman, “To my house!” As the covered coach approached the guards at the gate, the steward leaned out the window to greet them, making it difficult for them to see who was with him. “Good night, Filippani,” they called, waving him on. As a further precaution, the pope held a large handkerchief to his face, as if he were preparing to blow his nose.
When they were a safe distance from the Quirinal, they turned away from the road to Filippani’s home and instead headed for a church on the other side of the city. There, waiting for them in a small carriage, was the Bavarian ambassador to the Holy See, nervously fingering the pistol in his pocket.
The pope climbed into the Bavarian’s carriage, which then rumbled through the cobblestone streets, headed for the city gate.
Devout and good-hearted, the pope had never been comfortable with the world of politics. Now, as he contemplated what lay ahead, he could not imagine how he would ever be able to return to Rome. Where he was going, few people knew. The French ambassador was convinced the pope was on his way to France. The Spanish ambassador had been told that he was going to Spain. But their Bavarian colleague, who now had Pius in his carriage, had a very different destination in mind.5
It would have been a great surprise to the cardinals who elected the rather unassuming Giovanni Mastai Ferretti to be pope in 1846 to learn that he would become the most important pontiff of modern times. In the revolutionary fervor that swept mid-nineteenth-century Europe, he was first hailed in Italy as a national hero, a savior, praised in thousands of hymns and poems. But with sickening speed, the cries of joy turned into shouts of “traitor” and even calls for the pope’s death. These were times of transformation in Europe, the old order unhinged by industrialization, revolutionary advances in transportation, and increasing doubts about the divinely ordained social order. Pius IX would face these dizzying changes with a sense of alarm and, increasingly, with a frightening feeling of losing control. He was a man with benevolent instincts and deep faith but woefully limited ability to understand the larger forces that were transforming the world. Out of Pio Nono’s*1 desperation, the modern Roman Catholic Church was formed.
He would be the last of the pope-kings, a dual role central to church doctrine and a pillar of Europe’s political order for a thousand years. The demise of the pope’s kingdom on earth would mark a pivotal moment in the transformation of Europe, a revolution begun more than a century earlier with the spread of radical notions of consent of the governed and separation of church and state. Such a fateful change would not come easily, nor without the shedding of much blood.
The revolutions that swept Europe in 1848 marked the beginning of the end for the aristocratic regimes that had ruled much of the continent for centuries. While many would survive the year, and their rattled rulers would be able to return to their capitals, they would never be the same. The days of divine rule and imperial dynasty were numbered, for the people from Palermo to Venice, from Paris to Vienna, had briefly, intoxicatingly, glimpsed a very different kind of life—the life not of subjects but of empowered citizens.
Nowhere were these epochal changes more dramatic than in Rome, the Eternal City, capital of the Papal States. Nowhere was the divine right to rule more firmly established. And nowhere did local events have greater international resonance, as millions of Catholics on both sides of the Atlantic anxiously followed reports of the fall of the pope and his flight to precarious exile. Not a few predicted that the end of the papacy was near.
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PIUS IX’S PREDECESSOR, GREGORY XVI, had not been an attractive man. An ascetic monk, born to a family of local nobility in Lombardy, in northern Italy, he had a colossal nose, and his mouth turned downward in a permanent frown. The removal of a malignant tumor from his face had made things worse, leaving an ugly scar. Gregory had a well-earned reputation as a foe of all that was new. Opposed to allowing railroads in his kingdom, he had also forbidden his subjects from taking part in the scientific congresses that were multiplying throughout Europe at the time. Ruling as he saw fit over the corrupt and ill-governed Papal States, the pope did not seem unduly bothered by the hostility of his three million subjects.1
Poverty engulfed the countryside, but the sumptuous sixteenth- and seventeenth-century palaces of aristocrats and cardinals provided work for many of the people of Rome. Romans made little distinction between the two, for cardinals were typically younger sons of the nobility, the older inheriting the father’s title and property. For centuries, the popes themselves had often been drawn from these same families.
Despite the wealth of its aristocrats, the splendor of their frescoed palaces, and the magnificence of many of the city’s churches, the capital of Christendom was a rather shabby sight. Nearly half the land inside the city’s wall consisted of abandoned fields. Scattered amid the occasional cluster of umbrella pine trees and modest vineyards lay the sun-bleached ruins of ancient thermal baths, aqueducts, and churches. Snaking through the city, the Tiber River divided the smaller right side—consisting of the Vatican’s palaces to the north and Trastevere’s humble dwellings to the south—from the larger left side, site of the city’s major monuments and ancient ruins. Along the riverbanks, green-cloaked shepherds looked on as their goats chewed the grass and drank from the river’s fetid yellow waters. When it rained, mud oozed over the city’s broken cobblestone streets and made walking, and even travel in carriages, hazardous. “You have to get used to Rome,” observed the visiting Russian writer and social reformer Alexander Herzen, adding, “its good sides are not obvious. There is something senile, obsolete, deserted and dilapidated in the city’s exterior; its melancholy streets, its gloomy palaces.”2
The cramped, dank apartments of the poor had no stoves, so people made their cooking fires outside, sending the pungent odor of boiled broccoli wafting through the streets. “The cat is here esteemed a delicacy among the lower classes,” recalled the American sculptor William Wetmore Story, “and if you happen to own a particularly large and fat one, you must keep a sharp look out, or you will lose it.”3
An open-air meat market radiated from the ancient Pantheon through a tangle of winding narrow streets that bustled with activity. Wires hung down from the buildings, allowing women to lift buckets of fresh water from the street up into their apartments. Meats hung from the awnings of the butchers’ booths, and a hodgepodge of goods was displayed atop their counters. Detracting from what might otherwise have been an appetizing scene was the stench from the refuse, dust, feathers, and foul waters that covered the ground. Forcing their way through the crowded streets, butchers in blood-spattered smocks drove carts weighed down by cattle slaughtered at the city’s edge. The butchers dispatched the smaller animals—goats, sheep, and pigs—outside their shops. Chickens, turkeys, ducks, and geese cackled in their pens, while men and women sat nearby, plucking the fowl and cramming their feathers into large baskets. As they finished each bird, they blew into its beak, inflating the creature’s body to grotesque size before hanging it on a hook for sale.
On Wednesdays and Saturdays, the huge, oblong Piazza Navona hosted Rome’s main fruit and vegetable market, where customers elbowed their way through the crowds, inspecting whatever was in season. Mushrooms received special attention, for over the years poisonous varieties had caused the death of more than one cardinal, along with many lesser Romans. Now, before any bag of mushrooms could be sold, a Roman official had to give it his stamp of approval.
Barbers, too, were found everywhere in Rome, plying their trade in the open air. When a customer sat down for a shave, the barber sharpened his blade with a great flourish, using the leather strap that hung from the back of the chair, and then accomplished his task with surprising speed. The next customer, suffering from a toothache, might have her tooth pulled or, if feeling unwell, be bled.4
But what most struck the visitor to the Eternal City was neither the markets nor the swarms of beggars—both common enough in other cities of Europe—but the omnipresence of churches and priests. Rome, a city of 170,000, had almost four hundred churches, most richly adorned. It could claim thirty-five hundred priests and monks, along with fifteen hundred mostly cloistered nuns. The clergy could not have been a more varied lot. Many members of the mendicant religious orders were almost indistinguishable from the other foul-smelling, poorly clad men who accosted passersby for handouts. By contrast, the upper clergy were the princes of the church. Living in splendor, they held all the highest government positions and controlled the best farmland, producing half of all the agricultural wealth of the Papal States, yet paying no taxes. The prelates administered the public treasury, which they regarded as the property not of the public but of the church. They were also in charge of all the schools, the courts, and the police. “A cardinal,” observed the French ambassador, “is a prince in Rome, and a lord in the provinces.”
The lower clergy—priests, monks, friars, and nuns—were another matter. For the most part, they were from humble families, were poorly educated, and—especially in rural areas—lived in poverty themselves. The parish priests in the capital were an exception, for they enjoyed some of the power that came from the marriage of religious and civil authority. When they encountered a parish priest in the streets of Rome, men doffed their hats, women and children kissed his hand. These priests felt free to enter any home in their parish at any hour to see if church precepts were being obeyed. They employed spies and ordered police to search homes, make arrests, and haul offenders to the city’s dungeons. When those jailed were brought to court, often after some months, they came before judges who themselves were priests. There the parish priest’s testimony was treated as gospel. Romans could be charged with having adulterous relations or practicing sodomy, or for swearing, or for failing to observe the ban on eating meat during Lent. All this, of course, did not endear the clergy to the people nor make them eager to support the continuation of what they called “priestly rule.”5
