The Pope Who Would Be King, page 22
Rayneval went to see Cardinal Antonelli, who was far from pleased to learn of the French landing. The French ambassador stressed the importance of a papal pledge to keep to a reform path, but Antonelli was not encouraging. The decision, said the cardinal, would be up to the pope, but he doubted that any such statement would be made. “The clergy and the great majority of the people,” explained Antonelli, “blame the reforms that Pius IX introduced for all their misfortunes.”
Hoping that he would get a more sympathetic hearing from the pope himself, Rayneval then went to see him. In contrast to Antonelli’s unhappiness on learning of the arrival of French troops, the pope initially greeted the news warmly. Encouraged, Rayneval explained that the French were eager to restore the pope, but to be successful, they would need him to do his part by pledging to maintain a liberal regime. Seeing the pope’s dubious expression, Rayneval tried to reassure him. All that would be required, he insisted, was for “Pius IX to remain Pius IX, nothing more.” He had to free himself from the reactionary influences that surrounded him.
“I know very well,” replied Pius,
what you have to say on this subject. The Pope is Austrian, the cardinals are Austrians and reactionaries, the Pope’s entourage is pushing him to return to the old ways, and the poor pope doesn’t know enough to listen….Don’t worry, Pius IX will remain Pius IX. But haven’t I gone through an unpleasant, sad experience? Should this experience count for nothing? Can I learn nothing from all the evils that I have suffered? Are there not a thousand precautions I should take? Should I not moderate the press? Close the clubs? Disarm most of the National Guard?12
For Rayneval, this was bad news indeed. If they could not change the pope’s mind, the justification the French had given for their military mission—ensuring freedom for the Roman people—would be revealed to the world to have been a cruel hoax.
Harcourt was similarly discouraged. “We don’t have much to be happy about from what is going on here,” he reported from Gaeta. “We had barely landed in the Papal States when the recriminations against us began.” With the French military expedition’s success depending on the pope’s cooperation, Harcourt offered a picture that could not have been more unwelcome in Paris. “As the Holy Father is much gentler and more moderate than those around him, I had wanted to learn from him directly whether he would listen to us at least on some points. I have to tell you frankly and with great sadness that I now have little hope in this regard.”13
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GENERAL CHARLES OUDINOT, son of one of Napoleon Bonaparte’s most famous generals, had recently inherited his father’s title of duke. A conservative man, he had a well-developed sense of pride, both in his own exalted name and in the name of France. Urged to move quickly on Rome, and encouraged to believe that he would find little resistance in doing so, he was not inclined to delay.
* * *
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General Charles Oudinot
“The resistance that Mazzini and his party can attempt,” the French chargé d’affaires, still in Rome, informed the general, “is based on only three or four hundred foreigners and the fanatics of the Popular Club.” Romans, he assured him, were “timid by nature” and would give in at the first sight of the powerful French army. All the defensive efforts in Rome—the barricades, the cannons—were, he reported, purely for show, and Garibaldi’s legionnaires were merely a bunch of undisciplined rabble. It was a view shared by many other foreign observers in Rome. “Barricades are erecting and the people preparing as for defence,” the British artist, William Story, who lived in Rome, recorded telegraphically in his diary. “Scores of labourers and contadini standing round and sometimes pitching a shovelful of gravel into a wheelbarrow, but taking about three days to do what an hour did in Berlin.”14
On April 26, only a day after Oudinot’s troops disembarked at Civitavecchia, Rayneval and Harcourt wrote him with much the same message. “Onward, general!” urged Harcourt. “It is crucial that you hasten your march on Rome. Your sudden arrival has surprised and terrified. It is a situation you should take advantage of. If you leave enough time for the bad characters in Rome to recover from their initial shock, they will prepare the means of resistance and they will make blood flow, which it would be preferable to avoid.”
“I do not think the idea of resistance is seriously entertained for a single moment, either by the authorities or the people,” the recently arrived American chargé d’affaires advised Washington on April 27. “The hopelessness of a contest with France is apparent to all.”15
Encouraged by these reports, Oudinot led his troops out of Civitavecchia on April 28 and marched south along the sea down Via Aurelia. He took fifty-eight hundred of his men and brought no heavy artillery. His soldiers carried only three days of provisions in their backpacks.
Early on that hot morning, in St. Peter’s Square, Garibaldi, together with the recently installed minister of war, General Giuseppe Avezzana, reviewed their forces. In addition to Garibaldi’s legionnaires, they included what remained of the regular papal army. The fifty-two-year-old Avezzana had had a swashbuckling career of his own. As a young man in Piedmont, he had taken part in the revolts that swept Italy in 1821 and, in the face a death sentence, had boarded a ship bound for America, where he had become a U.S. citizen. On learning of the revolts that were multiplying through his homeland a year earlier, Avezzana had rushed back to join in.16
On the other side of the Tiber from St. Peter’s, several thousand National Guardsmen assembled in Piazza Santi Apostoli, not far from the Trevi Fountain. There Pietro Sterbini, the poet-physician who was now one of the Constituent Assembly’s most vocal radicals, addressed them.
“Will you allow the clerical government to be reestablished?” bellowed Sterbini, as he gripped the railing of the balcony overlooking the piazza.
“No!” the men shouted, thrusting their rifles over their heads.
“Do you want to defend the freedom you have won with all your might?”
“Viva la Repubblica!” the men bellowed in an impressive roar.17
* * *
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MARCHING SOUTH TOWARD ROME, the French soldiers could not help but notice the hand-lettered signs, written in French, affixed to trees and poles, that lined the roadway. Their large block letters spelled out article five of the French constitution: “The French Republic respects foreign nations, as it expects others to respect its own, not initiating any war of conquest, and never employing its forces against the freedom of any people.”
The walls of Rome bore a different message:
Brothers! Rise up! The foreigners, the enemies of the Roman people, are advancing. They want to treat us, free men, as beasts at a market. They want to sell us. They insult us saying there will be no battle in Rome because the Romans don’t have the guts to fight….They come to destroy the government that you have created….They want to trample our freedom and honor….In the name of God and of the people, then, rise up o brothers!18
The next evening Oudinot ordered his army to make camp on the western outskirts of Rome. The men, thought the general, were an impressive sight. The soldiers wore tall, cylindrical hats on their heads, gold epaulettes at their shoulders, and a ring of metal armor around their necks. Their long tunics, belted tight around their waists, went down almost to their knees, partially covering their red pants. The handles of their sabers protruded from the leather sheaths that hung from their belts. They carried their sleeping bags over their shoulders and their ammunition in a cartridge pouch hanging around their waist. Despite the intense heat, their spirits were good, not least because they expected to receive a warm welcome from the Romans. They had marched two days without encountering any unpleasantness and were now camped in sight of the city’s walls.
A delegation of deputies from the Roman Assembly arrived at the French camp and urged Oudinot to call off his assault. If he were to attack, they warned, he would be met by fierce resistance.
“Nonsense,” replied the general. “The Italians do not fight. I have ordered dinner at the Hôtel de Minerve, and I shall be there to eat it.”19
Oudinot was not overly concerned about the thick twenty-six-foot-high seventeenth-century wall that now loomed ahead. The Romans’ unhappiness with their new government, together with the fear inspired by the sight of his army, he thought, would lead them to open the city gates without too much unpleasantness. He had brought with him neither large siege cannons nor ladders to scale the walls. At five a.m. on April 30, he ordered his men to break camp and march on Rome, heading for the northwestern corner of the city, near the Vatican palaces. As they approached the wall, in midmorning, the men, wearing heavy greatcoats, were sweating profusely in the growing heat of the day.
A mile from the wall they reached a fork in the road. To the right, a narrower path followed the ancient Acqua Paola aqueduct to the top of Janiculum Hill and the Porta San Pancrazio gate. To the left, the larger road led to a summit overlooking the Vatican before descending to end at Porta Cavalleggieri, not far from St. Peter’s Square. Oudinot ordered the bulk of his troops to the left, toward the Vatican, sending a smaller detachment, of perhaps a thousand men, to the right to guard his flank.
The main French force was within a quarter mile of the wall when, to their surprise, two cannon blasts from a bastion along the wall sent a hail of grapeshot onto their advance guard. Having received a telegram earlier that morning telling him that the troops were on their way, General Avezzana, head of the republican forces, had sent a captain to climb atop the great cupola over St. Peter’s Basilica to look out for them. For his part, Mazzini had made sure that the city was prepared religiously as well as militarily. Ever eager to identify the defenders’ cause with the Romans’ religion, he ordered a “Decree of the Triumvirs for Public Prayer” posted on walls throughout the city. At the pealing of the church bells, sounding the alarm at the time of attack, the decree declared, “The Holy Sacrament will be exposed in all of the principal churches to pray for Rome’s safety and victory of its good cause.”1
Once it was clear that the Romans planned to fight, prudence might have led Oudinot to order a retreat to await reinforcements and the heavy artillery required for a siege. But the general still nourished the belief that once the Romans saw the full force of his army, their resistance would quickly fade. In any case, the prospect of having his army turn tail at the first sound of gunfire was too humiliating to consider.
When, in responding to the cannon blasts, the French marksmen’s first shots produced a moment of confusion among the defenders atop the wall, Oudinot ordered his men to advance. His plan was to enter the city through Porta Pertusa, at the northwestern point of the wall, bordering the Vatican gardens, and he had brought bags of gunpowder to blow it up if necessary. But when the troops neared the wall, they discovered that there was no longer any gate there. Porta Pertusa had been walled over decades earlier, a fact that had not yet found its way onto French military maps.
By the time they discovered their error, the French were coming under heavy fire, as the city’s defenders rained cannon shot and musket balls down on the exposed troops. The French hastily wheeled two small field cannons into position and began firing, but they could not long survive the return fire from the bastions. A few of the braver Frenchmen tried to scale the wall with spike nails, but the task was hopeless.
With the Porta Pertusa plan foiled, the French command ordered a brigade to move to the right along the wall to attack Porta Cavalleggieri. To reach it, the soldiers would have to go at least half a mile, passing down a steep hill through open vineyards within shooting range of the defenders perched atop the wall. The task, they soon realized, was impossible. A second brigade was directed to go left around the Vatican in an attempt to penetrate Porta Angelica. Needing a path wide enough for their horse-drawn artillery, the soldiers had to follow a ridge going north before then turning down into a valley approaching the gate. Five hundred feet from Porta Angelica, they came under heavy fire. The French artillery captain leading the assault was among the first to be killed, felled along with the four horses that pulled the lead cannon.
The French brigades that had earlier separated from the main force, following the aqueduct toward Porta San Pancrazio atop Janiculum Hill, never made it to the wall. Not wanting to allow the French to gain the protection offered by the aristocrats’ villas outside the gate, Garibaldi had already led his men into the area. The Janiculum’s relatively cool temperatures, and its dense, verdant gardens, had attracted noble families for centuries. Among the most prominent of these were the Corsinis and Pamfilis, and it was on the grounds of their estates that the day’s bloodiest battle was fought. As a volunteer battalion of highly motivated, but only hastily trained, university students and artists moved through the Pamfili gardens, they ran straight into the oncoming force of French infantry. As the young men fell before the French assault, Garibaldi, wielding his saber and riding his white horse, led his bearded legionnaires into the fray. Garibaldi’s officers, easily spotted in their long red blouses, led their men through the flowering rosebushes, using their bayonets to skewer the French troops as the attackers paused to reload their rifles. Along the way, a French bullet pierced Garibaldi’s stomach, a wound that would nag him for months. Ugo Bassi, the revolutionary monk, never far from his hero, was nearby, tending to the wounded, until he had his horse shot out from under him.
The battle had begun in late morning. By five p.m., it was over. Instead of enjoying a fine dinner at the Hôtel de Minerve, General Oudinot found himself setting up camp back on the road to Civitavecchia, ministering to his many wounded men and, perhaps most painfully of all, preparing a report to send to Paris. Garibaldi meanwhile returned to Rome with three hundred captured French soldiers in tow. “Long live the republic,” “Down with Pius IX!” cried the Romans as the French troops trod down the street. When a woman passed by carrying a rifle, the men of the National Guard*1 broke into applause. Everywhere people clamored to get weapons of their own.2
The Romans’ support for the new regime was no longer in doubt. Their victory over the French, reported the otherwise unsympathetic consul of Württemberg a few days after the battle, “had a wholly unexpected result….Since the other day a huge enthusiasm has suddenly appeared among a people who until then had seemed entirely apathetic….All of a sudden there is a spirit of war among the people that seems incomprehensible and that must have entirely altered the expectations of the French army.” The U.S. chargé d’affaires was similarly surprised by the swift transformation. “The appearance of a foreign enemy has accomplished for the republic what its own measures, papal abuses and the cause of liberty have hitherto failed to effect. It has converted thousands, who were indifferent as to its existence, into warm and strong supporters.”3
In preparing for the battle, Mazzini had appointed a special medical force, naming as its head Cristina Belgiojoso, a woman who would become a legendary figure in the Italian struggle for independence. She organized twelve military hospitals in Rome and recruited women from the upper classes to staff them. From one of Milan’s wealthiest noble families, the forty-year-old Belgiojoso had married a much older prince when she was sixteen but separated from him by the time she was twenty. Known for her beauty, her intelligence, her distinguished manner, and her dramatic dress, she was thin, her skin almost pallid, with large black eyes and black hair, and a narrow aquiline nose. She normally dressed all in white, set off by a necklace of black coral. A lifelong supporter of Italian independence, she had been exiled from Milan by the Austrians in 1831 and had made her Paris home into a meeting place for other Italian exiles, intellectuals, and artists. Like many Italian patriots exhilarated by the toppling of the papal government, she had rushed to the Eternal City to take part in the momentous events under way there.4
On the day of the French assault, Belgiojoso wrote to Margaret Fuller, placing the American journalist in charge of the women volunteers to tend to the wounded at one of Rome’s major hospitals, Fate Bene Fratelli. “Go there at twelve,” wrote the princess, “if the alarm bell has not rung before.” She concluded her note simply, “May God help us.”5
Women would play an important role in Rome’s defense. As the battle raged on the thirtieth, they stood at the city’s barricades, armed with muskets and knives. In the days that followed, piles of stones could be found along Rome’s streets, bearing the inscription “Arms for women.” On May 6 the barricades commission issued a call: “Women of Rome! Gather deadly rocks, relentless stones….Lucretia*2 stabbed herself to defend your honor. You, beautiful Roman women, win to defend your honor.”6
In the wake of their unexpected victory, the Romans showed new pride. “Yesterday,” began a proclamation placed on the walls of the city, “the entry of the French in Rome began. They entered through Porta San Pancrazio…as our prisoners.” Mazzini had notarized copies of the testimony of captured French troops posted through the city. They had been misled, the soldiers said, told that the Romans yearned for the pope’s return, but as one put it, once they had arrived, “we heard everywhere: ‘We don’t want any more of the government of the priests. The pope can return for all we care, but only for religious matters.’ We came as friends, we are brothers, because we are true republicans, and we fought only because we were betrayed.”7
Mazzini himself had few illusions. Unless the French changed sides, he knew, the Roman Republic was doomed. King Ferdinand and his Neapolitan army were threatening from the south, and the Austrians were preparing to invade from the north. Nothing Mazzini could do would stop them, but the French were a different matter. Two months earlier, fifty-seven members of France’s Assembly had sent the Roman Republic a letter of support. “The old tyrants,” they wrote, “will think twice before attacking Romans and overturning their independence. If they ever dare to do it….Citizens of Italy, the French democracy’s sympathies are with you. Should you call for aid, its volunteers would come to help you chase the barbarians out.” Back then, the French left could not imagine that it would be French and not Austrian “barbarians” who would attempt to crush Rome’s new republic.8
