The Pope Who Would Be King, page 24
At a chilly meeting with Vienna’s ambassador in Paris, Drouyn, the French foreign minister, pleaded for Austria’s help in getting the pope to break free of what he termed the “occult” influences surrounding him in Gaeta who were turning him against his earlier reform path. Otherwise, Drouyn warned, a war between Austria and France might erupt, one that might well turn into a Europe-wide conflagration. For more than an hour, the French foreign minister droned on, recalled the disapproving Austrian, “in a manner as verbose as it was confused.”
Unable to contain himself any further, the Austrian ambassador broke in. “You speak of an occult influence in Gaeta. If you are referring to the Imperial Cabinet you are in error. Austria’s agents have everywhere used the same language.” It was rather the French government that was acting deceitfully. “In Paris,” the Austrian diplomat pointed out, the French government “said that it was sending an expedition to Rome to safeguard the Romans’ freedoms, and in Gaeta it said that the expedition’s goal was to return the Holy Father to his throne.” Paris had claimed that it was acting to stop Austria, but, said the Austrian, this had fooled no one. “You blame us for the pope’s mistrust….Do not fool yourselves. It is you yourselves who have caused it. The Holy Father believes the aims that you have offered to the National Assembly, and the National Assembly believes the aims that you have given the pope.” The French government, complained the Austrian ambassador, was now trying to make the pope pay the price for its own incompetence, intimidating him in order to quiet the left opposition in the French Assembly. “You risk setting yourselves against the church and, in doing so,” warned the Austrian, “forgetting the maxim that one must never have for enemies either women or priests.”27
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ON MAY 9, RAYNEVAL arrived at French military headquarters outside Rome for a meeting with General Oudinot. With reinforcements already arriving, the general was in a surprisingly good mood, confident that he would soon be able to redeem himself. Yet he realized that the task ahead was a delicate one. Taking Rome for the pope, he explained to the ambassador, was a far more complicated task than conquering any other city. To bombard it into submission would mean to destroy its churches and monuments, the pride of the civilized world. Nor could the French wage war through the city’s barricaded streets, for the resulting bloodshed would hardly endear the pope to his people. Instead, Oudinot explained, he planned to bring an overwhelming force to the walls of Rome, use his heavy cannons to blast a hole in it, build bridges over the Tiber, and so force the renegade government to surrender. Rayneval agreed that this was a good plan. In the end, he thought, resistance would be limited.
This was a view shared by Captain Key, following his visit to Rome and his inspection of the French troops camped outside the city. The new attack, he told London on May 12, would likely come in a few days’ time. “As there are many parts of the walls where half an hour’s cannonading would completely demolish them,” he predicted, “the French will enter the town with ease.” The question for the British naval officer was not whether the French would succeed in taking Rome but what they would do once they took it. In the towns they had occupied, the French had hoisted their own flag alongside that of the Roman Republic. Nowhere had they put up the white papal flag.28
The next night Ferdinand de Lesseps, the new French envoy, landed in Civitavecchia and made his way south to French military headquarters. On arrival, he handed General Oudinot a letter from the French foreign minister explaining his mission. The letter said nothing about the uproar in the Assembly that had led to Lesseps’s appointment. Rather, Drouyn simply explained that, given the unexpected resistance Oudinot had encountered, the government had decided to place a diplomat alongside him to be entirely dedicated to negotiations with the authorities in Rome.29
The general was not happy to be saddled with a diplomat whose authority risked putting his in question and whose mission of crafting a negotiated settlement seemed to conflict with his own. Nor was it clear that the French government in fact did seek a peaceful settlement, for Lesseps handed the general a second letter, this one written by the French president, Louis Napoleon.
My dear general,
The news by telegram announcing the unexpected resistance that you encountered beneath Rome’s walls has pained me greatly. I would have hoped, as you know, that the residents of Rome, opening their eyes to the evidence, would eagerly receive a friendly and selfless mission. But it was otherwise. As our soldiers were greeted as enemies, our military honor is now at stake. I will not abide by it suffering such a blow. You will not lack for reinforcements. Tell your soldiers that I appreciate their bravery, that I share their pain, and that they will always be able to count on my support and on my appreciation.30
The next day Oudinot sent a telegram to Drouyn: “I will enter Rome with the agreement of the inhabitants and without firing a shot. At least, I have good reason to count on it.”31
As his superiors would later complain, the French general appeared to have great difficulty learning from experience.
*1 With the advent of the Roman Republic, the Civic Guard was transformed into the National Guard.
*2 Lucretia, wife of a Roman consul in the late sixth century B.C., committed suicide after being raped by an Etruscan king’s son, leading, it was believed, to the overthrow of the monarchy and the advent of ancient Rome’s republic.
*3 This is a play on words in Roman dialect: Ce semo magnate li Galli, mo ce magneremo li maccheroni. The word Galli has the double meaning of “Gauls”—or Frenchmen—and “roosters.” Romans condescendingly viewed southern Italians as macaroni eaters.
*4 “Long live the king.”
In mid-May, General Oudinot moved into his new headquarters in a villa only two miles from Rome’s gates. Thousands of reinforcements had arrived, and more were on the way, as French officers planned for the siege that would begin should negotiations fail. What worried Oudinot most was not the military might of the Roman Republic, for which he had little regard, but the approaching Roman summer. A reporter at the French camp captured the sense of dread: “Already the heat is great….Even within the walls of Rome, sickness and fever fall to the lot of every stranger, but without, the effects of malaria are so severe that no one can sleep abroad with impunity. What, then, is to become of the 20,000 men now encamped within a mile of Rome?” In a report later in May, the correspondent added, “One hundred men swollen with the malaria fever came in here yesterday, and in another week the hospitals will not contain the number of sick who will claim admittance. Will the General-in-Chief, under such circumstances, hesitate any longer? For my part, I think not.”1
While the French were building up their forces west of the city, King Ferdinand and his army were back in the Papal States, at Albano, only a few miles south of Rome. The king was emboldened by the news from Sicily, where, on May 15, his army had captured Palermo, ending the yearlong revolt. Eager to cast himself as the pope’s savior, he stood at the head of ten thousand troops.
With Lesseps, the new French envoy, beginning negotiations with Rome’s triumvirate, the danger of an immediate French assault was much reduced. It was time, thought Mazzini, to again address the threat to the south. In mid-May, both Garibaldi’s irregular forces and the regular army under General Pietro Roselli marched out of the city. Coordination of the two forces left much to be desired. Roselli had formal military training and deep knowledge of the history of warfare and strategy. He planned carefully and closely monitored troop movements. By contrast, Garibaldi had no formal military training, nor any use for it. He fought by intuition, guided in no small part by emotion. At Roselli’s headquarters, Garibaldi was referred to as “the pirate,” but once the battle was joined, it was Roselli who would prove slow to adapt to new developments, while Garibaldi was nothing if not agile on the battlefield. It was Garibaldi whom King Ferdinand most feared. At word that he was on his way, the Bourbon monarch moved his army south to take up a defensive position at Velletri, where the rumor quickly spread among Ferdinand’s troops that the “red devil,” as they called Garibaldi, was invincible. When Garibaldi’s men attacked, the terrified Neapolitan soldiers once again quickly melted away, heading south across the border. The subsequent return of the humiliated king to Gaeta on May 21 would further dampen the pope’s spirits.2
Ferdinand’s setback reinforced the pope’s belief that his salvation lay with the Austrian army alone, but Prince Schwarzenberg had other ideas. “All our efforts,” he told Esterházy on May 19, “must be directed to prevent the Italian complications from provoking a conflict between us and France.” The best way to do this, he wrote, was through the four-power Gaeta conference.
There was one other piece of advice that Schwarzenberg felt compelled to give. He had been shocked by word that the French envoys were urging the pope to visit France to win popular support for his cause. The proposal, he declared, “seems to me to prove yet once more that there is no idea so bizarre that it does not find some adherents in France, if it in some way flatters the nation’s self-regard.” When he had been in Rome years earlier, recalled the Austrian chancellor, the pope, amid the majesty of his monumental basilicas, had been an awe-inspiring figure. By contrast, remarked Schwarzenberg, “a tourist pope, traveling up and down a part of Europe by rail and stopping at each station to bless the crowds of the curious eager to enjoy this new spectacle would simply be…futile food thrown out to the frivolity and skepticism of the false spirits who abound everywhere.”3
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WHEN LESSEPS MOVED INTO a hotel in the center of Rome to begin negotiations, he saw firsthand how determined the Romans were to resist invasion and urged Oudinot to hold off his attack. There was still a chance, the envoy thought, that a peaceful solution could be found. Reluctantly, on May 17, Oudinot agreed to a cease-fire.4
Two days later the Roman government rejected Lesseps’s first proposal, which reflected his understanding of what the French parliament had authorized in sending the army to Rome. The text called on the Romans to ask for the French Republic’s “fraternal protection” and to welcome the French soldiers as brothers. It guaranteed the Romans’ right to decide freely on their own form of government. Military action inside Rome was to be jointly coordinated by Roman and French forces, and Rome’s civil authorities were to continue to function. What the proposal lacked, Mazzini pointed out, was any recognition that a legitimate government, the Roman Republic, freely elected by the people, already existed in Rome.5
The French elections for a new National Assembly had meanwhile taken place, giving a boost to Oudinot, who was fast losing patience with Lesseps. The conservatives had won a big victory, crushing Mazzini’s hopes for greater French support for his republican cause. Continued negotiations, thought the general, were now useless. “If one sincerely wants peace,” he told Lesseps on May 21, “let’s enter Rome. The army’s discipline and our government’s generosity are the most powerful guarantees of order and freedom that the Romans could want.” That same day, aboard the Bulldog at Civitavecchia, Captain Key sent the latest news to London. “The French,” he predicted, “will undoubtedly have possession of Rome either by treaty or assault before the end of this week.”6
The Eternal City was a portrait of contrasts. Shops remained open, and life went on, but the city gates were shut and people could leave only with the military’s permission. The threat of foreign invasion had united the Romans, who were furious at the pope for trying to reestablish his rule by military conquest. Reports of the bombardment and fall of Bologna, the second city of the Roman Republic, had only made things worse.7
On the afternoon of May 20, Ciceruacchio—who the previous year had led marches through Rome’s streets vowing loyalty to the pope—brought a hundred of his followers to Piazza del Popolo. There they tore down the papal crests that hung over the doors of the piazza’s four churches before entering the sanctuaries and ripping out their wooden confessionals, to be added to the city’s barricades. For the people of Rome, nothing symbolized the intrusion of the priestly gaze into their lives more than the confessionals, where they were pressured to reveal their illicit thoughts and deeds under threat of excommunication.8
Ciceruacchio and his men then made their way down the Corso, pulling confessionals from other churches along the way. Piling some of these back in the middle of Piazza del Popolo, the men planned to hold a celebratory bonfire after dark.
On learning of all this, Mazzini was dismayed. After ordering the National Guard to put a stop to it, he had a proclamation posted on the city walls the next day. “Romans,” it read, “yesterday, in a moment of thoughtlessness, produced by the imminence of new dangers, some of you removed several confessionals from churches in order to find new materials for the barricades.” Given the dangers they faced, their imprudent action could be forgiven, but, the triumvirs warned, “the enemies of our holy Republic are watching from all corners of Europe, looking for the chance to put our noble efforts in a bad light, and to accuse the people of irreverence and irreligion.” It was important, the notice concluded, “that you yourselves replace the confessionals in the churches from which you took them yesterday.”9
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WHEN PIUS LEARNED THAT the French had sent a new envoy to negotiate with the men who ruled Rome, he was furious. Adding to his irritation were Harcourt and Rayneval’s incessant pleas for him to commit to keeping his reforms. No matter how many times he rebuffed them, they kept pressing. Although he had earlier felt a closer emotional bond with France, it was becoming ever clearer to him that it was on Austria that he must depend.
“You can be sure,” Pius told Rayneval on May 18, “that Austria does not push me one way versus another….Austria is content to protect my independence and does not go beyond that.”10
Rayneval found himself in an increasingly uncomfortable position. He had repeatedly told Drouyn that there was no way they could persuade the pope to embrace representative government in Rome, yet each letter of instructions from Paris carried the same refrain. Rayneval also resented his government’s decision to send Lesseps to Rome, undercutting his own authority. “The question, my dear count,” confided Rayneval to the Dutch ambassador in Gaeta, “is now so overloaded with complications that I admit that I no longer understand anything, and I leave the task of untangling it all to those more skilled than I, or to the natural course of events.”11
Meeting in Cardinal Antonelli’s room on Sunday, May 20, for the latest session of the Gaeta conference, the two French envoys again found themselves under attack. Why had France sent an envoy to negotiate with the criminal band who had taken Rome? Their claim that Lesseps had come simply to negotiate the city’s surrender met unconcealed disbelief. As the meeting then turned to other recent developments, the Neapolitan ambassador had the unenviable task of explaining how Ferdinand’s army had been so ignominiously routed by Garibaldi’s irregulars. The debacle, Count Ludolf tried to convince his colleagues, was all the fault of the French. Not only had they refused to coordinate their actions with Ferdinand, but by negotiating with Mazzini, they had left Rome’s military free to move south.
At least, remarked Ludolf, wherever Ferdinand had gone in the Papal States, he had raised the papal flag and immediately handed the local administration over to papal authorities. By contrast, wherever the French had gone, they had left the Roman Republic’s flag up alongside their own and refused to allow Pius’s emissaries to reestablish papal rule.
The Austrian ambassador then took his turn lambasting the French, accusing them of undermining the four-power Catholic conference. Rather than coordinating their efforts with the others, the French had sent its army to Rome without any warning and were now preventing the other powers from intervening.
Following the meeting, Rayneval went to see the pope, whom he found in a bleak mood. What, asked Pius, would now happen to all those who had rallied to his cause in the southern towns of the Papal States that Ferdinand had abandoned? They were now at Garibaldi’s mercy. That evening the Belgian ambassador tried to comfort him. “The Holy Father,” recalled the diplomat, “shed his tears and told me…‘My dear prince, one can endure anything for oneself, but when others are suffering because of you, that makes the pain all the more bitter.’ ” At that moment, bellicose military music from the street outside came through the pope’s window. “This contrast sickened him,” reported the ambassador, “and he raised his eyes to the heavens. One has to have been with Pius IX often,” observed the Belgian, “to know all the delicacies of his heart.”12
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FROM HIS HOTEL ON ROME’S fashionable Via Condotti, Lesseps shuttled back and forth to French military headquarters to discuss the latest developments with General Oudinot. His first meeting with Mazzini could not have been more informal. The French envoy had made his way to the Palace of the Consulta, Mazzini’s quarters, arriving there at one a.m. and asking where he could find the Italian prophet. He was directed to the far side of the second floor. Taking off his shoes so that he would make no noise, he walked down the long hall, peeking into rooms until he came upon Mazzini’s modest quarters. There, on a simple iron bed, lay Mazzini, asleep. Pulling the room’s only chair aside the bed, Lesseps sat down. He spoke Mazzini’s name softly, but Europe’s great theorist of nationalism did not stir. The Frenchman kept repeating his name in ever increasing volume until the exhausted triumvir finally awoke.
