The Pope Who Would Be King, page 26
Despite the high state of alert in Rome, the republic’s leader remained shockingly exposed. A British visitor, who had dropped in unannounced on Mazzini several times, quipped, “I wonder no spirited Jesuit has yet looked in with a pistol.” With his latest counteroffer to the French rebuffed, the Austrian army gobbling up the northern portion of the Roman Republic, and thousands of Spanish troops landing to the south, bolstering King Ferdinand’s army, Mazzini felt painfully alone. “I found him haggard and worn in appearance,” reported another British visitor. “Like almost all Italians,” he added in a not entirely complimentary way, “he is a visionary.”36
On June 2, as the overwhelming French force moved into position for its assault, Mazzini gave vent to his frustration in a letter to Garibaldi:
I am going mad and I feel like ending the defense of the City and everything else, and going off to Fuligno* or to the home of the devil and finishing it all with a rifle in hand. In these crucial moments I thought I would find men in whom I could entrust the fate of the country….Instead I find diffidence, reaction, individualism.
With the future of Rome and Italy itself resting on his shoulders, Mazzini found relief only when, alone in his room at the Palace of the Consulta, often well past midnight, he picked up his guitar. An accomplished musician, he sang in a soft voice as he played. His threat that he might abandon his post was an idle one. After years in exile, years of pleas, years of dreams, and thousands of pages of correspondence, his moment had come. But whether he would live to see the next month, or even the next week, remained very much in doubt.37
* A town in the Umbrian hills.
In one of the great ironies of European history, as French troops launched their attack on Rome, Louis Napoleon appointed the forty-four-year-old Alexis de Tocqueville to replace Édouard Drouyn as his foreign minister. Tocqueville, one of Europe’s most celebrated theorists of constitutional rights, suddenly found himself charged with crushing the Roman Republic and restoring priestly rule.
Tocqueville came from an aristocratic family. His great-grandfather, grandfather, grandmother, aunt, and uncle had all been guillotined during the French Revolution, and his parents had been imprisoned until the end of the Terror in 1794. In the decades following Napoleon’s demise, Tocqueville’s father served as prefect for several French regions. In 1831–32, Tocqueville spent a year in the United States. The trip was designed to study America’s prison system, but along the way he filled his notebooks with observations about the young republic and accounts of his many conversations. Three years after his return to France, he published the first volume of his celebrated Democracy in America. Proclaiming himself a “liberal of a new kind,” he chronicled how democracy worked in practice, and he warned of the threats that majority rule posed to personal liberty. Elected to the French Constituent Assembly following the 1848 revolution, Tocqueville praised America as a model for the new French government. In May 1849 he was elected to the National Assembly, the product of the republican constitution that he had helped write. Although known for championing a new, more democratic age, he struck his compatriots as a perfect example of the gentilhomme de l’ancien régime, a gentleman of the old stripe. He dressed elegantly, a small, delicate man with soft and somewhat dreamy but brilliant dark eyes and long black hair.1
Alexis de Tocqueville
Tocqueville entered the government, he explained to a friend, despite himself. “They came to take me from my bed, where I lay sick, and they overcame my resistance by assuring me that they were acting to prevent an imminent crisis…and that my friends and I were in a better position than anyone else to avert the storm.” He accepted on one condition: he would not be expected to defend the government’s previous behavior toward Rome in the National Assembly. Odilon Barrot, who remained prime minister, agreed. “I do not know how long I will remain in power,” confessed Tocqueville in mid-June, then added, “Undoubtedly, not long.”2
At the time of his appointment, Tocqueville barely knew Louis Napoleon. Over the next months, he would get to know him well, concluding that people underestimated the president. Most of the men who had pushed Napoleon’s candidacy, he thought, had done so not because they believed he was especially worthy but to the contrary, because of “his presumed mediocrity.” He was a man who appeared to have no firm principles of his own. They were confident they could bend him to their will.
As a private person, thought Tocqueville, Louis Napoleon had much to recommend him. He was good-natured, a pleasant, even tender man. But one never knew what he was thinking, for after decades spent hatching plots in exile, he had learned to disguise his true thoughts. He spoke few words, and when he did speak, he said little of significance. His dull, opaque eyes offered no window into his mind. Heedless of danger, the great Napoleon’s nephew showed courage during times of crisis, yet at the same time he veered recklessly from one position to another. “His intelligence,” Tocqueville observed, “was incoherent, confused, filled with great thoughts poorly applied.” While he was capable of perceptive insights, he was “always ready to place a bizarre idea beside a good one.” What Louis Napoleon did have was a knack for political theater. He knew how to play his part.3
On June 7, in one of its last acts before being replaced by the newly elected National Assembly, the French Constituent Assembly voted to forbid the government from attacking Rome. The deputies did not know that Louis Napoleon had already ordered Oudinot to do just that.4
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AS THE MOMENT OF the French assault neared, Romans ricocheted from cockiness to despair. Hadn’t they already defeated the French? Hadn’t Garibaldi twice sent King Ferdinand and his Neapolitan army into humiliating retreat? But it was hard to ignore the Austrian army’s relentless recent march through the Papal States. Ferrara had fallen, Bologna had fallen, Perugia had fallen. The vise around Rome was tightening.5
Mazzini had summoned all the republic’s remaining fighting forces to come to defend Rome. On June 1 Garibaldi and his legionnaires returned from their latest foray south. For Mazzini, the presence of the Hero of Two Worlds was a mixed blessing. “Here I cannot avail anything for the good of the Republic, save in two ways,” Garibaldi informed Mazzini that day, “as dictator with unlimited plenary powers, or as a simple soldier. Choose.” Mazzini was certainly not about to appoint him dictator, a certain disaster, but he recognized Garibaldi’s military genius and knew that he would stand his ground as the French army prepared to attack. His ultimatum rebuffed, Garibaldi fell in line, although his relations with Mazzini remained tense.6
Among the others returning from battling King Ferdinand’s troops in the south were six hundred young men from Lombardy. They followed their twenty-four-year-old leader, Luciano Manara, who had won fame the previous year in the five glorious days of fighting that had briefly driven the Austrian army from Milan. From a wealthy milanese family, a handsome man of average height with a thick beard, he inspired fierce loyalty in his followers. “Every feature of his face exuded nobility,” observed one of his compatriots. “His every glance won people’s allegiance.” As the battle against the Austrians had moved out of Milan, Manara found himself at the head of a growing group of young volunteers who joined with the Sardinian king Charles Albert in an effort to drive the foreigners from Italy. Following the king’s defeat in March and the return of Lombardy to Austrian control, they had sailed south to join in Rome’s defense.7
“It is impossible for me to describe how true, how great, how deep is the hatred that all these people have shown against the priests and also in part against Pius IX,” observed one of the moderate members of Rome’s Constituent Assembly as the French invasion loomed. Few Romans were committed followers of Mazzini, he remarked, but they were united with the republicans in one respect—their “hatred for the government of the priests.”
In contrast to the tense resolve among Rome’s defenders, the mood of the pope’s supporters was bright. “Sadness changes to joy,” observed Father Vaure, Pope Gregory’s old confessor, describing the impact made by news of the French order to attack. “One thanks God for having delivered us from the abyss.”8
Oudinot now had more than 30,000 well-armed men, many battle-hardened veterans of the French colonial war in Algeria, and sixty cannons. He also enjoyed a steady stream of new supplies from France. Against them stood 18,000 defenders, a patchwork of hastily assembled Roman forces, including Garibaldi’s 1,200 legionnaires, 600 Lombard volunteers, 700 carabinieri, a battalion of 350 Roman university students, and a smattering of other foreign recruits. They lacked an effective unified command and had few cannons, limited ammunition, and a supply route that the French could easily cut.9
Oudinot’s high command finalized their plan. They would try to breach Rome’s massive twenty-five-foot wall at its highest point, on Janiculum Hill, at Porta San Pancrazio, on the west of the city, where they had been repelled on their first assault in late April. In some respects, this seemed an odd choice, for they were attacking where the wall was most imposing, but by breaking through there, they would enjoy a commanding position looking over Rome. In explaining this rationale to the French minister of war on June 2, the general who had designed the plan added another consideration. “It is on this side that we run the least risk of damaging the public monuments, a powerful consideration when it is a matter of using cannons to attack a city like Rome, on which the entire history of the world’s civilization is inscribed.”10
At two-thirty a.m. on June 3, only some 650 feet outside Porta San Pancrazio, a French brigade raced into action, blasting its way through the thirteen-foot-high wall that surrounded the Villa Pamfili. After a fierce four-hour battle with its Roman defenders, they seized the villa and took two hundred prisoners. French troops also attacked Roman outposts at two other villas nearby, but there, after much bloodshed on both sides, they were beaten back.
Garibaldi, unmistakable in his white poncho, red shirt, and ostrich-feathered cap, led his men in battle, his faithful, slave-born aide-de-camp, Andrea Aguyar, alongside him. Miraculously, amid all the hand-to-hand fighting, Garibaldi, who had taken a bullet to his stomach a month earlier, escaped further injury, but many of Rome’s defenders were killed or wounded in a space that was no more than six hundred paces long by three hundred wide.11
That night, after an eighteen-hour battle, a seemingly endless line of stretchers snaked through Rome’s barricaded roads, carrying back the wounded and the dead. In a city that had seen so many raucous processions through those same streets, the silence was overpowering, as the tears of onlookers flowed freely. Only by watching the pitiful procession did many mothers first see the pallid faces and lifeless bodies of their sons. As the Romans considered how little chance they stood against the might of the French army, more bad news arrived. Neapolitan troops had retaken Velletri. Spanish troops, now nine thousand strong, were also moving north, planting the papal flag in towns along the coast.
On the bridge that spanned the Tiber in the shadow of Castel Sant’Angelo, a gaggle of Rome’s defenders gathered around Ugo Bassi, Garibaldi’s Barnabite monk, as he stood precariously atop a pillar, leading them in prayer. At great cost they had held off the French attack, but the enemy was now digging into positions only 650 feet from the wall, and the battle had only begun.12
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IF FOR THE ROMANS it was a day of death and misery, for France’s two ambassadors in Gaeta it was a good day. Harcourt and Rayneval had been anxiously awaiting word from Paris, worried that their government might reject their advice and embrace Lesseps’s negotiated settlement. Earlier that morning they had learned that Lesseps had been recalled and the order to attack given. Harcourt rushed to see the pope. Having won the battle with Lesseps, he now needed to show Paris that he had been right in arguing that, by occupying Rome, they would finally be able to extract concessions from the pontiff.13
Harcourt began his report to Paris the next day by recounting the latest news of the Austrian, Neapolitan, and Spanish troops. “All these different movements,” he wrote, “are done less to help us in taking Rome than to neutralize our influence and our demands once we have taken it.” In this, he added, the three Catholic powers had the strong backing of the papal court.
In his long conversation that day with the pope, Harcourt, feeling his position greatly strengthened, pressed the case for reform, but Pius gave little ground. He was willing to place more laymen in government administration, he said, and would bring back his Consultative Council. But as for allowing a constitution—“real rights,” as Harcourt put it—his rejection could not have been any clearer. He would grant no rights that he could not easily withdraw.
In Gaeta, observed the French ambassador, “there is such a cardinal-heavy atmosphere of purely mundane interests, dissimulation, petty intrigues, and absence of any higher sentiments that one cannot hope that the pope can pierce it, even should he wish to.” Men such as the abbot Rosmini had been “swept aside, forced to leave Gaeta, powerless against this self-interested, corrupt, unenlightened entourage who surround the pope.” All that mattered to these high prelates, reported Harcourt, were “their worldly privileges and so, consequently, the only political program consists of trying to get people to believe that in attacking their privileges one is attacking the true interests of the church and of the religion that they themselves do so little to honor.”14
If the French ambassador despaired over the cardinals’ baleful influence, he would certainly have to include the most influential of them all. On the day of the French invasion, before news of the long-delayed assault reached him, Antonelli wrote his nuncio in Madrid to express his gratitude for the thousands of troops sent by the Spanish queen. “Their arrival,” he wrote, “could not have come at a more opportune time, because, based on the French troops’ behavior up to now, the Holy Father’s retaking of his See, which could have already been accomplished, has been considerably delayed, and even now does not seem to be near.” Nor was Antonelli simply upset by the fact that the French were moving so slowly, for he had strong doubts as to whose side they were on. The cardinal suggested that it might be better to have the pope, when he finally did return to his states, avoid Rome altogether and go instead to one of the small towns that the more congenial Spanish had occupied.15
Antonelli was doing all he could to keep the voices of compromise far from the pontiff. Months earlier the abbot Rosmini had left Gaeta, certain that Antonelli had poisoned Pius against him. On June 9, hoping that there might still be a chance to persuade the pope to find a peaceful means of returning to Rome, Rosmini came back to Gaeta. The abbot had barely greeted the pope when Pius warned him, “You now find me anti-constitutional.” Rosmini tried to change the pope’s mind. True, said the abbot, not all the people’s rights could be restored immediately, but it was crucial to give them some hope.
Pius was unmoved. “Even if they were to cut me into pieces,” he replied, “I would never again give them a constitution.”
The abbot was not easily discouraged. The rulers of virtually all the other civilized countries, he argued, had granted constitutions, even the Austrians. How could the Papal States alone maintain absolutist rule? To this, Pius replied that the Papal States were unlike any other land. A constitution, he had come to realize, was incompatible with government by the church. He had concluded as well, he said, that freedom of the press, freedom of association, and the like were all inherently evil. These were propositions that in the past popes had barely felt the need to express, for they were part of the air they breathed. The notion that government should be by the people was completely foreign to them. Pius now realized that in allowing himself to be swept along with the changing times, he had strayed from the basic tenets of the church. He vowed he would not make that mistake again.
Although Rosmini was making little headway, Cardinal Antonelli, knowing how fond the pope was of the abbot, did not want to take any chances. On the evening of June 11, a Gaeta policeman came to Rosmini’s room and demanded to see his passport. After examining it, the officer told him he lacked a proper Neapolitan visa and would have to leave Gaeta immediately. Rosmini expressed surprise that there was anything out of order with his documents. He had come at the pope’s invitation, he insisted, and would not go unless asked by the pope himself. The officer left but then, near midnight, returned. Protesting that he was in his nightclothes and about to go to bed, Rosmini at first refused to open the door, but when the officer threatened to break it down, he relented. A ship, said the officer, would be waiting for him early in the morning. He would face dire consequences if he failed to board. Before leaving him, the officer let it be known that the orders had come from Cardinal Antonelli.16
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FROM PARIS, TOCQUEVILLE FOLLOWED events in Rome with a mixture of desperation and dread. He was less worried about the French army’s ability to subdue the city than about what would happen once they conquered it. For the French government to be seen as reinstalling a medieval theocracy and assisting its archenemy, Austria, in doing so would be a disaster. He also had to consider his own reputation as a man who had often urged the importance of constitutional guarantees of personal liberty.
On June 6 he wrote to his two ambassadors in Gaeta to inform them of his appointment as foreign minister and spell out the government’s aims. “I find France already engaged,” he wrote, “in a path that I would not myself have chosen.” They would have to make the best of it. They had four goals, he explained. France must exercise appropriate influence in Italy. The papacy had to regain its independence and ability to freely exercise its religious mission. They had to prevent the return of the old absolutist regime in the Papal States. Finally, they needed to support the majority of the people of the Papal States in putting an end to the abuses that plagued past papal governments.17
