The Pope Who Would Be King, page 23
The French government’s duplicity had now been exposed. With new parliamentary elections scheduled to be held in France in two weeks, Mazzini had reason to think—or at least hope—that the left might win. If it did, the French army’s mission would certainly change. Rather than plot with the three Catholic monarchies to crush the Roman Republic, the French forces might well come to their sister republic’s aid.
Eager to win French sympathy in advance of the election, the Roman triumvirate ordered the release of the French prisoners. There was no basis for hostility between the two republics, said Mazzini, in announcing a festive send-off for the captured Frenchmen. “The Roman people,” he explained, “will salute the brave soldiers of our sister republic with applause and a fraternal demonstration at noon.” Preceded by a phalanx of National Guardsmen, the French soldiers marched down the Corso to the stirring sound of the Marseillaise. The Romans lining the way applauded, with some coming up to embrace and kiss the young Frenchmen, others handing them food. “Long live the French people!” they shouted. “Long live the two sister republics! Down with the government of the priests!”9
That same day, a week after the French defeat, Captain Key, the British naval officer, made his way to Rome. The city was a war zone, and he had heard that some of his compatriots were eager to escape. Villas outside Rome’s gates were being blown up and trees chopped down to leave a clear line of fire against any invading army. People filled their homes with paving stones, ready to hurl them from their roofs should hostile troops succeed in penetrating the city’s walls. Construction of the barricades continued at a frenetic pace. New rumors that Neapolitan troops were approaching from the south heightened the tension.
The captain went to see Mazzini, who spoke to him in his accented English. The past days had been trying for the Italian leader. He looked haggard, his beard grizzled. In exchange for a pledge that the horses they took would not end up in French hands, Mazzini granted Key’s request to allow any foreigner who wanted to do so to leave.
The next day the captain returned to talk to Mazzini again, hoping to help find a way to avoid bloodshed. It was clear that Rome must fall, Key told the republic’s leader, either to the French now or to the combined armies of the other Catholic powers later. Clearly it would be better to negotiate with the French than to have to deal with the Austrians and Neapolitans. Having suffered such a great stain on their honor as they had with their abortive initial attack, the French would never rest until they had taken Rome. “I used every argument,” recalled the British captain, “to convince him of the folly of resistance,” but Mazzini would not be moved. Soon, thought the Italian prophet, the French people would learn the news that, contrary to what they had been told, their troops had been sent to Italy to reconquer Rome for the pope. The storm of outrage this would provoke would, he hoped, transform France from enemy into ally.10
With the armies Pius had summoned on the move, popular anger at the pope and the Catholic clergy was running high. “The hatred that this population shows against the priests,” wrote a member of the Constituent Assembly to his wife in early May, “is unimaginable. They have burned the carriages of the cardinals in the public squares, and woe unto anyone who speaks out in favor of the pope. He would be the immediate victim of popular furor.” The destruction of the cardinals’ magnificently painted, gilded carriages had become an elaborate popular spectacle. In one of these pantomimes, to the onlookers’ delight, prostitutes dressed themselves in priests’ garb. In another, a man clothed in a cardinal’s rich red robe sat haughtily in a carriage, surrounded by others impersonating priests and servants. A faux supplicant then approached the cardinal, only to be contemptuously dismissed. Then the people went to work with their axes and clubs, amid a torrent of curses, smashing the carriage to pieces before setting it afire.
Republican officials visited each of Rome’s many monasteries and convents to inform the monks and nuns that they were now free to break their religious vows. Cloistered nuns opened their doors only a crack to receive the news, but it seems none availed themselves of their new freedom.11
General Oudinot sent a telegram reporting news of his defeat to Paris. He did so with remarkable economy: “Our troops, having met with resistance under Rome’s walls, have retreated to Castel di Guido where General Oudinot awaits reinforcements and heavy equipment for a siege.” At the same time, he wrote a longer report. “The sympathies for the old government,” he remarked, “are far from being as great as was supposed….Pius IX is loved, but people dread the return of the clerical government.” French honor was now at stake, but so was Oudinot’s own reputation. “Have no concern,” wrote the general. Once reinforcements arrived, he vowed, it would take him only a few days to conquer Rome.12
When he read Oudinot’s telegram with the shocking news of the army’s unexpected defeat at Rome, Odilon Barrot, the French prime minister, felt faint and collapsed into a chair. Members of the cabinet gathered around the stricken Louis Napoleon, all dreading the prospect of telling the Assembly the news. “A humiliation of our army that is not immediately remedied,” argued Falloux, the Catholic minister, “would be a double defeat for French influence and for the liberal spirit in Italy.” By the president’s look, Falloux—whose concern for advancing the liberal cause in Italy could hardly have been less sincere—knew that he had hit the right note. For Louis Napoleon, nothing was more important than casting himself as the defender of French honor. Not eager to face the attacks the news would provoke in the Assembly, the ministers decided to remain silent until they had more details. When, two days later, word began leaking out, the government put out a short—wholly misleading—statement:
It appears from a telegram received by the government that General Oudinot began to march on Rome where, following all available information, he was called by popular demand. But having encountered a more serious resistance than was expected from the foreigners who have occupied Rome, he took up a position a short distance from the city where he awaits the rest of the expeditionary corps.
The government’s attempts to minimize the import of the disaster did little to head off what would be an exceedingly painful session of the Assembly that same day. Had they not been told the previous month, asked Jules Favre, one of France’s most influential moderate republicans, that they were voting to send the army to help protect Rome from the Austrians? Had the prime minister not assured the Assembly that the goal of the military mission was, in Barrot’s own words, to guarantee a good government to the Roman people, founded on liberal institutions? “The blood of our officers,” Favre charged, “the blood of our generous soldiers has been shed for the Pope. It has been shed for despotism.” To the ministers’ denials, Favre replied:
You say: no. You will offer a justification for your behavior, I think, and the Assembly will assess it. I hope the Assembly will take this deplorable affair in hand, and will no longer continue to give you its confidence, because it knows what you have done, whether through incompetence or treason I do not know.
“It’s treason!” shouted the deputies from the left.
Favre demanded that an envoy be sent to Rome to represent the Assembly. “It is important,” he said, “that France’s position be clearly separated from that of the men who have so disastrously conducted this mission. The Assembly must intervene to impose its will and its authority.” The body then approved a motion demanding that the French troops’ mission in Italy be limited to the one that the Assembly had authorized.13
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WHILE THE FRENCH WERE licking their wounds, King Ferdinand and his Neapolitan army were marching through several towns in the south of the Papal States, headed toward Rome. On May 2 the triumvirate alerted the Romans to the threat. “His intent,” they proclaimed, “is to reestablish the pope as absolute temporal ruler. His arms are persecution, brutality, plunder.” In a letter to his mother the next day, Aurelio Saffi, Mazzini’s fellow triumvir, put up a brave front. “Twelve thousand Neapolitans are now at Velletri, with the king…but they don’t scare anyone….The popolani of Rome are saying: ‘We’ve eaten the Gauls,*3 now we’ll eat the macaroni.’ ”14
On May 5, the Neapolitans entered Albano, fifteen miles southeast of Rome. From his new outpost, King Ferdinand wrote to the pope, reporting that people there were greeting him as a hero. Captain Key met with the king in Albano three days later but painted a very different picture for his navy superiors in London. “The people at Albano, though not republican,” wrote Key, “are much dissatisfied with the Neapolitans, who have enforced a cry of ‘Viva il re’*4 everywhere, and imprisoned many who were suspected of being averse to the intervention.”15
Having beaten back the French, Garibaldi and his legion were now free to take on the Neapolitans. On paper, it would seem no match. The sixteen thousand finely uniformed men of King Ferdinand’s army, with their large cavalry and well-equipped artillery, faced a ragamuffin force that, to the eyes of many, resembled nothing so much as an unusually large band of brigands. Garibaldi’s men wore no uniform, aside from the scarlet shirts of their officers. Chosen by the men based on their courage in battle, the officers wore no other sign of their rank. When they stopped to rest, the legionnaires left their horses free to wander, then mounted them without saddle or bit. For food, they chased down sheep, which they dispatched with their bayonets, returning to camp to roast the carcass and share the meat. Garibaldi himself gave the impression of being more of an Indian chief than a general. He sat on his horse, said one observer, as if he had been born in the saddle. When not resting in the tiny tent that he made out of his rifle and his coat, he could be seen atop a hill with his looking glass, scouring the countryside for enemy positions. His troops were a collection of young men bursting with enthusiasm for the Italian cause, old soldiers loyal to the bold captain they had followed from continent to continent, and some, less scrupulous, eager for adventure and hoping for plunder.
Ferdinand nervously followed Garibaldi’s movements. On May 9 he sent some of his units to try to cut off the legionnaires’ escape route, but in a three-hour battle, it was the outnumbered garibaldini who sent the Neapolitan army in embarrassing flight, leaving their cannons behind them in their haste. Having heard horrifying tales of the savage Garibaldi, the Neapolitan soldiers who were taken prisoner begged for mercy, colorfully cursing the pope in Neapolitan dialect. Enjoying a cigar in celebration of a good day’s work, Garibaldi was eager to pursue his advantage, but he received word from Rome that the French might soon launch their second assault. He was told to bring his legionnaires back.16
The Spanish had meanwhile landed at the coastal town of Fiumicino, at the mouth of the Tiber, eighteen miles west of Rome. It was not the most propitious of sites, for its few hundred inhabitants abandoned it during the malaria season each summer, but it was there, with much fanfare, that the Spanish planted a papal flag. “And so the chorus is complete,” the triumvirate proclaimed on posters all over Rome. “Austria, France and Spain make yet another attempt at the old story, responding to a pope’s call.”17
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IN EARLY MAY, IN YET another attempt to get the pope to publicly pronounce his willingness to keep his reforms, Harcourt and Rayneval sent Cardinal Antonelli a formal document spelling out the French position. France had decided to send its army to Rome, they wrote, “full of confidence in the generous intentions that must be expected from the Holy Father concerning the maintenance of the liberal institutions in his states….The thinking of the Government of the Republic is not to impose on the Roman population a regime that they would not accept of their own free will.”
France’s aim, explained the French ambassadors, was “to bring about a rapprochement, ensuring that the Holy Father, in entering Rome, finds himself once again in a situation that is satisfactory both for him and for his people, for only this will guarantee both Italy and Europe against new unrest.” The ambassadors concluded by renewing the plea that the pope had heard so many times:
In order to facilitate the difficult task that it has undertaken, France is counting heavily on the assistance of the Pontifical Government. It would therefore hope that, without any further delay, His Holiness would deign to publish a manifesto that, in guaranteeing liberal institutions…as required by the times, would ensure that all resistance would crumble.18
If the French ambassadors had any hopes that this latest appeal would be any more successful than their earlier ones, they were quickly disappointed. It would be folly, Pius told Rayneval, for him to embark on the same road that had already once led him to the “edge of the abyss.”
“So don’t imagine,” said the pope, “that the return to the old order of things is possible. I would never permit it.”
Pius went on to explain that Italians were different from the French. It was not simply a question of the incompatibility of constitutional rule with church authority in the Papal States. “When France gets to see things close up,” he said, “it will understand that the Italian peoples are not suited for representative institutions. They are not yet sufficiently educated….They must first pass through an intermediate stage. The time will come when they will be capable of having, like others, a regime that offers freedoms. But they are not ready for it today.”19
Rayneval was frustrated, but Harcourt was even more upset. If it were not for the unpalatable alternative of having the Austrians occupy Rome, he advised Paris, he would recommend having the French wash their hands of the matter. What loomed ahead was frightening: French soldiers would shed their blood to restore a government of priests despised by the Romans, and as thanks they would gain only the hatred of the people they had come to help.
“The pope,” reported Harcourt, “is very good, but he has the disadvantages of his goodness: he is fickle, irresolute, and as a consequence not by his nature able to escape the influences that surround him, which are all obscurantist and reactionary. The whole clique around him are Austrian-lovers down to the marrow of their bones.”20
In Paris, as the left continued to denounce the government’s duplicity, the French foreign minister bombarded his ambassadors in Gaeta with ever more frantic pleas to get the pope to announce his plans for reforms. On May 10, he sent instructions to General Oudinot: “Tell the Romans that we do not want to join with the Neapolitans against them. Pursue negotiations….Reinforcements are being sent. Wait for them. Try to enter Rome through an agreement with its inhabitants, or if you are forced to attack Rome, be sure it is with the greatest possible chance of success.”21
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DISTRUSTFUL OF THE FRENCH and having little confidence in the fighting capacity of either the Neapolitans or the Spaniards, Cardinal Antonelli continued to place his hopes in Austria. “It is a true scandal,” he complained to his nuncio in Vienna, “to further postpone coming to the aid of the Center and seat of Christianity, which is in the grip of the fiercest enemies of religion and of humanity. I hope that Austria will not want to delay the time of its much desired liberation.”22
Although Antonelli did not yet know it, good news was on its way. Prince Schwarzenberg had already sent fifteen thousand troops to retake Tuscany for the grand duke and to march on the walled city of Bologna in the Papal States as well.23 On May 8 a division of the Austrian army, with seven thousand men and a dozen cannons, took up positions in the hills overlooking Bologna. Accompanying the Austrian army was Monsignor Gaetano Bedini, Pius’s choice to reestablish papal government there. When the bolognesi refused to yield, the Austrians launched their attack, assaulting two of the city’s gates before being driven away by musket fire from atop the wall. From their positions in the nearby hills, the Austrians then rained their deadly artillery on the town below. After eight days of bombardment, as fires ravaged the city, their situation hopeless, the people of Bologna surrendered.24
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WHILE THE AUSTRIAN ARMY was bombing the bolognesi into submission, a new French envoy was on his way to the Papal States in an effort to avoid the need for the French army to do the same in Rome. The French Assembly had demanded that someone be sent to ensure that the French army not exceed its charge. The man chosen for what would prove to be a thankless task was forty-three-year-old Ferdinand de Lesseps, a second-generation diplomat who had most recently served as the French ambassador to Madrid. Lesseps had previously kept his distance from the hothouse of French politics. He now entered a minefield of double-dealing and treachery from which he would not emerge unscathed.25
Ferdinand de Lesseps
The French government’s embarrassment over its plight in Rome could scarcely have been greater. “A more remarkable series of blunders and failures both political and military,” huffed a May 11 London Times editorial, “it has seldom been our duty to record.” The government’s mendacity had not gone unnoticed: “The root of the mischief seems to be the extraordinary equivocation practiced by the French government to conceal their real object in this expedition. They had the courage to undertake it, but not to avow the reason….[They] continued to assume the credit of a demonstration against Austria for what was in reality a demonstration approved by Austria for the restoration of the Pope.” As a result of the government’s duplicity, added the Times Paris correspondent, a coup in Paris might be imminent.26
