The Pope Who Would Be King, page 27
All this came as no surprise to Harcourt and Rayneval, but what did take them aback was Tocqueville’s additional note: the new foreign minister informed them that he was sending his own personal envoy, Francisque de Corcelle, to work with Oudinot as the army entered Rome.18
Corcelle, a close friend of Tocqueville, had spent several weeks in Italy the previous year, immediately after the pope fled Rome, in an unsuccessful mission to persuade Pius to come to France. Having only a few days earlier celebrated Lesseps’s recall, Harcourt and Rayneval again felt slighted, their own roles reduced. In choosing Corcelle, Tocqueville selected not only someone he could trust but someone strongly identified as a Catholic, which he thought would help persuade a skeptical pope, and an even more skeptical papal entourage, to do what the French so badly needed them to do.19
To date, all France’s efforts to get the pope to embrace reform had, Tocqueville told his new envoy, been in vain. The answer they kept getting was that they should trust in the pope’s good nature. “But we also know,” Tocqueville wrote, “the force of the influences that can lead the papacy along truly deplorable paths.” The pope had to assure his subjects of his good intentions. “If the hatred that the anarchic regime inspires in the Roman people has not been expressed more actively up to now,” wrote Tocqueville, “it is above all because care has not been taken to reassure them against the possibility of the return of a past that is no less odious to them.” It was crucial for the pope to guarantee “seriously liberal institutions.” France otherwise risked disaster. “It is not possible,” observed the author of Democracy in America, “for us to accept, even in appearance, the role of restorers of an absolute power.”20
With the full force of the French army aimed at the aged walls of the city, many thought that Rome could not hold out for more than a few days. Yet somehow it did. Initial French attempts to blast through the wall produced few results. With his accustomed theatrical flourish, Charles Bonaparte presented the Constituent Assembly with an unexploded bomb that had rolled to a stop on the city’s streets. He proposed that they place it in the city’s archive with a plaque: “In perpetual memory of a Pope who ordered the bombing of the Capital of his faithful subjects and children.”
Bombs did explode in Trastevere, one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods, which stretched between Janiculum Hill and the Tiber River. On June 7 a plea was sent to church officials on behalf of the cloistered nuns of Trastevere’s Convent of Sant’Egidio, asking permission to move them to safety on the other side of the Tiber.21 Near the convent, the sight of children burned alive in homes set afire by exploding French bombs or buried beneath the rubble of roofs collapsed by French cannon fire further enraged the Romans. This was all, they said, the work of the priests.
The bombardment of Rome
“There goes another Pio Nono!” shouted those who could still keep some sense of humor, however sardonic, as they pointed to the incoming projectiles. In a similar attempt to buck up their spirits, the defenders atop the city walls had named their three cannons after a pope and two cardinals: Pio Nono, Antonelli, and Lambruschini. Women and children as young as eight years old rushed with pans of wet clay to extinguish the burning fuses of the unexploded bombs that fell to earth. On one defused bomb, someone had placed a piece of paper with a message written in simple block letters: “The Holy Father’s first little present to his beloved children in Trastevere.”22
Mazzini ordered all able-bodied men in Rome to join military units to defend the city, calling on all others—both men and women—to work on the fortifications. The government requisitioned carts and wagons and ordered that the aristocrats’ palaces on the far side of the city be opened to refugees from the neighborhoods where bombs were falling. Women and men piled mattresses behind the city gates, from which the faces of sculpted angels poked out here and there. Men carrying muskets ran through the streets, some wearing uniforms, some not. On June 8, in a sign of how low the defenders’ munitions were, the republic’s minister of war sent out a plea to the Romans, offering to pay them, by the pound, for all cannonballs and unexploded bombs that had fallen on the city. “Oh Citizens,” the minister concluded, “these projectiles would remain useless in your hands, while we, on the other hand, with our cannons and artillery would send them back to the enemy!”23
Meanwhile the casualties mounted. “Many of these young men, students from Pisa, Pavia, Padua and the Roman University,” wrote Margaret Fuller, who spent her days at their bedsides, “lie wounded in the hospitals, for naturally they rushed first in the combat. One kissed an arm which was cut off, another preserves pieces of bone which are being painfully extracted from his wound, as reliques of the best days of his life.” In a letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson, she explained:
though I have suffered—for I had no idea before, how terrible gunshot-wounds and wound-fever are—yet I have taken pleasure, and great pleasure, in being with the men; there is scarcely one who is not moved by a noble spirit. Many, especially among the Lombards, are the flower of Italian youth. When they begin to get better, I carry them books, and flowers, they read, and we talk.24
For Mazzini, only one hope remained: news of the French attack, he thought, might trigger a popular revolt in Paris. He had reason to think that the assault on Rome had little public support in France. “Here,” reported Austria’s ambassador in Paris at the time, “the Catholic party is weak. The masses, the bourgeoisie of the towns, and above all, the National Guard in Paris are entirely indifferent in matters of religion or essentially hostile to what they refer to as the ‘regime of the priests.’ ” It follows, he concluded, that “the French expedition aimed at reestablishing the Pope is unpopular in France.”25
The French government had concealed news of the assault from the Assembly as long as it could. On June 11, when the deputies finally learned what was happening, outrage exploded on the Assembly floor. With his enormous, hoarse voice, the forty-two-year-old leader of the left, Alexandre Ledru-Rollin, a tall, big, broad-shouldered man, led the attack. Over the past months, he had been corresponding with Mazzini, assuring him that his French allies would not let him down.26
“Citizens,” boomed Ledru-Rollin, “there are supreme moments when speech becomes completely useless. I believe that we are in one of those times.” After the initial French assault, he observed, Rome’s walls remained intact, its courageous defenders having so far held their ground. “But,” he added as he gesticulated dramatically, his ruddy cheeks turning a shade of purple, “French blood and Roman blood have been flowing in torrents.
It is certain that we promised Rome, as an Assembly, to protect its independence….It is certain that by our vote of May 7 the Constituent Assembly decided that the Italian expedition could no longer stray from the mission it had been assigned….Barrot and the other ministers have kept endlessly repeating the same thing: the goal of the expedition was not to put an end to the Roman Republic….Its goal was to protect Rome, to ensure its liberal institutions against the prospect that the Austrians would try to seize Rome and try to impose an absolutist government on it.
The time to act had come, concluded Ledru-Rollin. It was time to remove the president and his ministers, guilty of the most egregious crime—violation of the constitution.27
When their motion of impeachment was defeated by the Assembly’s conservative majority, leaders of the left called for a public demonstration to protest the government’s treachery in sending France’s army against Rome. When Ledru-Rollin later led demonstrators in their march through Paris, policemen and soldiers on horseback emerged from the side streets and charged the crowd. Ledru-Rollin found refuge with some of his colleagues in the Palais National, where they nervously debated what to do. Outside, bloodied, enraged demonstrators regrouped, some calling for armed revolt. Amid the chaos, Prime Minister Barrot told the members of the National Assembly that a conspiracy to overthrow the republic was in progress. He read a message from Louis Napoleon calling on the deputies to authorize a state of siege. In the absence of most of the deputies of the left, the motion passed overwhelmingly. Meanwhile, a contingent of army troops had cornered Ledru-Rollin and his colleagues. The redoubtable leader of the left later described the scene:
We saw death very close, my friends and I. Lined up against a wall…we were placed six paces from the muskets of a half-company which had already taken aim and awaited only the final command. The officer, drunk with passion and with wine…lifted his sword to give the death order when a superior officer galloped up and had barely time to order the guns to be lowered.28
Summoned elsewhere, the soldiers left their prisoners, and Ledru-Rollin and his companions fled. After finding a safe hiding place to spend the night, the famed orator succeeded in escaping the city and making his way to London. There he would spend the next two decades in exile.29
* * *
—
NEWS OF THE EVENTS in Paris brought an abrupt end to Mazzini’s dreams of salvation from France. The Roman Republic, it seemed, now faced certain defeat, but still the Romans fought on. In increasingly desperate attempts to keep the heavy French artillery from the city gates, the defenders staged nighttime forays outside the wall. Demonstrating “more bravery than military skill,” in the words of Rome’s British consul, they were repeatedly beaten back, forced to retreat inside the wall. On the evening of June 12, General Oudinot had sent a message to the Romans. “We have not come to bring war to you,” he told them. “Our Government’s intentions are misunderstood.” Predicting “terrible calamities” if the gates of the city were not opened to his troops, he warned that he could restrain his forces no longer. “If you persist in resisting us,” he said, “you alone will bear the responsibility for the irreparable disasters.” He gave them twelve hours to surrender.30
Rebuffed, the French had renewed their assault. The American chargé d’affaires painted a dramatic picture from his position inside the besieged city. The Romans’ initial success in repelling the French troops, he wrote, had led to ever-greater support for the republican cause:
From dawn to the close of the day, the domes, cathedrals and parapets, are crowded with spectators, whose acclamation at every gallant action incites to deeds of most extraordinary daring….The roads leading from the gates are planted with iron spears, rendering the movements of cavalry impossible….The gates themselves are mined….Every house in the streets through which the enemy must pass, after having forced the outworks, is provided with oil and stones, the former of which is directed to be kept boiling hot, to be cast from the windows.
Yet food was growing short, and the French had cut off the ancient Roman aqueducts, so fresh water had become scarce. Amid the deprivation and fear, many Romans were beginning to question their faith in the church, a faith that had nurtured Rome for so many centuries. “The contest,” observed the American diplomat,
is no longer between one army and another…but it is a struggle that embraces a whole moral world of ideas, hopes and faith, that may have an echo in the most distant generations. The actual object of the intervention is shaking the edifice of the Catholic religion to its very foundations, crushing that faith in thousands of hearts….The consequence, naturally, is that many are now asking themselves whether he who represents a religion of peace has a right to reassert temporal power by force of arms; and…not a few begin to doubt of the truth of the Catholic religion, in consequence of the acts of its head. They cannot conceive how a religion…is now changed into a weapon intended to transform free men into slaves.31
Although faith in their cause may never have burned more brightly among Rome’s defenders, the inevitability of their defeat now seemed hard to deny. There was no one left to come to their aid, and the wall that stood between them and the powerful French army had not been built to withstand the endless pounding of large modern cannons. The only question that remained, it seemed, was whether their fall would come at the hands of the French alone or whether Austria, Naples, and Spain might join in. Despite it all, Mazzini would not hear of surrender. “There are defeats that bring honor,” he later observed, “and victories that bring shame.”
In a final attempt to avoid further bloodshed, Oudinot summoned Enrico Cernuschi, the young head of Rome’s barricades, and urged him to allow the French troops to enter peacefully. “In Rome,” Cernuschi replied, “we produce tragedies, we do not produce comedies….If we cannot save Italy, we at least want to save the memory of Italy. Italy is not going to end as a vaudeville show.”32
In mid-June, with French artillery raining down on Chancellery Palace, home of the Constituent Assembly, the deputies moved to the relative safety of city hall, atop Capitoline Hill. Each day hundreds of French cannon blasts sounded. Rushing through the streets amid men in arms, women handed out rocks and ammunition and carried messages and materials to build up the barricades. An eerie calm hung over the city center. In the evenings the Corso was still crowded with people escaping the heat of their homes, the streetlamps were lit, and stores were open, although counters normally piled high with vegetables and meats were largely bare, the few remaining chickens selling for astronomical prices. In the piazzas, musical bands still played, their festive dance tunes forming a strange counterpoint to the cannons’ distant rumble. But this attempt at normality could not hide the pall of dread. As a poor laundress headed to St. Peter’s to pray, making her way through a group of young soldiers, one of them touched her on the shoulder. “Mamma,” he said, “say three Ave Marias for me so that the Madonna sees that this all ends soon, because we can’t go on like this anymore.”
One of the young Lombard volunteers, posted near the center of fighting at Porta San Pancrazio, recalled what these days were like:
You get used to anything with time. So that now we see the transport of the wounded, immersed in blood, almost with indifference, and we eat bread and salami without being bothered by the stench of over twenty cadavers that for the past sixteen days lie in the garden of Villa Corsini, unburied and unbandaged, as black as coal, and swollen as if they had been drowned.33
The vise around Rome continued to tighten. On June 19, after weeks of bombardment by land and sea, the Adriatic port city of Ancona surrendered to the Austrians. As in Bologna and the other cities the Austrians had seized, they immediately turned local administration over to a monsignor sent by the pope to restore his rule.34
By June 20, the French had positioned their large siege cannons within 350 yards of the wall. Under constant bombardment by a dozen twenty-four-pound cannons, it quickly began to crumble, opening up three breaches that would soon be wide enough for the final assault.35
French troops fire on Rome’s wall, June 20, 1849
In Paris, Tocqueville viewed the prospect of a bloodbath in the Eternal City with dread. The French had cast themselves as champions of freedom. “We attach the highest price,” Tocqueville told General Oudinot, “to having the pope’s banner hoisted up by Roman hands following a local demonstration. That is necessary to preserve for our expedition the character that the National Assembly gave it and the government wants to maintain.” That same day he wrote to his personal envoy, Corcelle, expressing his unhappiness on learning that no moderate party could be found in Rome, only supporters of the republican government on the one side and a small band of reactionaries favoring the return of the old ecclesiastical order on the other. The French, Tocqueville insisted, had to enter Rome to the cheers of demonstrators clamoring for the pope’s return. “If we can’t have the reality,” he advised Corcelle, “it is absolutely necessary, at least, to produce the appearance.”36
Near midnight on June 21, the French intensified their assault. “The bombardment and the cannon fire,” recalled one of the defenders, “could not have been more terrible than it was that night.” As bombs fell on some of the city’s most famous piazzas, French troops climbed through a breach in the wall and began digging in. Mazzini urged Garibaldi to organize a counterattack, but unwilling to be ordered around by someone who knew nothing of military matters, the Hero of Two Worlds held back. Furious, Mazzini dashed off a letter to Luciano Manara, head of the Lombard volunteers, venting his anger:
The assault had to be launched this past night, half an hour after they climbed through the breach….Tomorrow the attack will be impossible, the enemy artillery will be in place. The system is now entirely changed; let me say it, ruined….I consider Rome as fallen. God willing the enemy will dare to attack us soon, while the people will mount a good defense at the barricades. Everyone will take part. Later, we will not even have that.
“The sole satisfaction that remains for me,” concluded the beleaguered prophet of Italian independence, “is not putting my name to the act of surrender that I predict is soon to come. But what importance is it to me?” he asked. “It matters for Rome and for Italy.”37
The cardinals were now in a better mood, increasingly confident that the Roman Republic’s blasphemous reign was nearing its end. Most, shunning the modest accommodations available near Gaeta, had set up households in Naples. There they nursed their grievances, blaming their reduced circumstances on Pio Nono’s ill-advised quest to curry popular favor and unhappy that he rarely sought their advice.
In late June, aware of the cardinals’ murmurings, Pius wrote to their most influential member, his predecessor’s notoriously hard-line secretary of state, Luigi Lambruschini. “From the news that reaches me from Naples,” began the pontiff, “I hear, to my great displeasure, that some cardinals are complaining that they have been abandoned by Gaeta and left in the dark….These complaints,” warned Pius, “might prove prejudicial to those who repeat them.”
