The Pope Who Would Be King, page 29
That evening, when the delegation presented its proposal, Oudinot replied that he would need to consult with his colleagues and asked them to return the next morning. When, later that night, Corcelle arrived at the military headquarters, he found Oudinot preparing to sign the terms the Roman city council had proposed. Corcelle was dumbfounded. How could Oudinot countenance having the men who had deposed the pope retain any influence, much less permit a separate army created by the republic to continue to exist? The Roman Assembly had already declared all further resistance impossible. Why bargain with the Romans at all? After some hesitation, Oudinot agreed.
On the morning of July 2, with the French poised to enter the vanquished city, a haunting scene played out on Rome’s streets. Women and men sank to their knees as the funeral cortege for Luciano Manara, twenty-four-year-old leader of the Lombard volunteers, passed through the flower-strewn street. Those of his comrades who had survived, their uniforms ripped and filthy from their uninterrupted weeks at the front, their faces burned by the sun and still covered in dust, marched behind the funeral bier, some limping on crutches, many with bandages wrapped around their heads. Manara’s bloodstained tunic had been laid atop the coffin, but when it reached its destination, at the Church of San Lorenzo in Lucina, just off the Corso in the center of the city, the cover was removed, revealing Manara in his uniform, his sword still in his hand. “It was one of those scenes,” recalled one of those present, “which leaves a life-long impression and cannot be recalled without a thrill of horror.”27
With the French army poised to march into Rome at any time, Lewis Cass, the American chargé d’affaires, sought out Garibaldi and told him that the United States was putting a ship at his disposal at Civitavecchia. He, and those of his men who were most in danger with the arrival of the French, could escape. Garibaldi was not tempted. He summoned the republic’s remaining armed forces to St. Peter’s Square. There, on his white horse, amid a crowd of thousands in which military men were mixed in with women, the young, and the old, the Hero of Two Worlds made his way with difficulty to the obelisk at the center of the square, where he raised his hands, silencing the crowd. “To those who follow me,” he shouted, so as to be heard in the vast square, “I demand great love for the fatherland….I can promise no pay but only hardship, hunger, thirst, and all the dangers of war.” In response, the grizzled men raised their rifles. “We’ll all come! You are Italy! Long live Garibaldi!” they shouted. Where exactly he was headed, none of them knew; nor, it seemed, did he.28
By eight p.m. that evening, four thousand men had gathered in the piazza in front of St. John Lateran Basilica, on the eastern side of the city, ready to follow Garibaldi. For his own red-shirted legionnaires, it was not a difficult decision, but many others had agonized over what to do. They feared that once they were in the mountains, chased by enemy armies, and taking food from local peasants, they would be viewed as little more than brigands. But if they remained in Rome, they wondered, what would happen to them once the French army arrived?29
Among those in the crowd that evening was Margaret Fuller, who described the scene:
Never have I seen a sight so beautiful, so romantic, and so sad….The sun was setting, the crescent moon rising, the flower of the Italian youth were marshalling in that solemn place. They had been driven from every other spot where they had offered their hearts as bulwarks of Italian independence….They must now go or remain prisoners and slaves….I saw the wounded, all that could go, laden upon their baggage cars….I saw many youths, born to rich inheritance, carrying in a handkerchief all their worldly goods.
Her image of Garibaldi remained as heroic as ever: “The wife of Garibaldi followed him on horseback. He himself was distinguished by the white tunic; his look was entirely that of a hero of the Middle Ages….There is no fatigue upon his brow or cheek.”
The caravan set out, thirty-seven mules carrying their modest provisions. Ciceruacchio, the hero of Rome’s popolani, accompanied by his two young sons, helped guide them out of the city. The sight of Garibaldi’s South American wife, Anita, dark-complexioned and slight of build, caught many eyes as she rode on horseback, her gaze one of steely resolve. When Garibaldi reached the gate, he paused, got off his horse, and embraced the members of the Constituent Assembly who had come to salute him, recognizable by the tricolored sash they wore across their chests. “Hard was the heart, stony and seared the eye,” observed Margaret Fuller, “that had no tear for that moment.”30
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ROME’S CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY HAD little time left, but there was one thing its members were eager to do before the French troops flooded into the city. For several weeks, a committee had been working on a new, republican constitution, one that would spell out the rights of a free people, to serve as a model for all Italy. Its final details had been decided on only a few days earlier.
At noon on July 3, with the French army expected to arrive at any moment, the deputies gathered in the piazza designed by Michelangelo atop Capitoline Hill. As a few hundred supporters looked on, the Assembly president read the new constitution aloud. It felt like a sacred moment, and people reached up to remove their hats from their heads.
“The democratic government,” he read, “has as its basic rule equality, freedom, and fraternity. It does not recognize titles of nobility, nor privileges of birth or of caste.” The text went on to proclaim all equal before the law, regardless of religion. The pope would enjoy “all the guarantees necessary for the independent exercise of his spiritual power.” Capital punishment was abolished, freedom of speech and association assured, and privacy protected. An Assembly elected by universal male suffrage would make the laws.31
As the constitution was being read on Capitoline Hill, the first French troops moved into Piazza del Popolo. The main march into Rome began a few hours later when General Oudinot, followed by his senior officers and a division of French cavalry, led his men down the Corso. The shops were closed, the city in mourning. A French military marching band began to play, but unnerved by the hostile crowd, they soon gave up. The calls rang out: “Long live the Roman Republic!” “Death to Pius IX!” “Soldiers of the pope!” As the general rode by on horseback, he was showered with abuse: “Cardinal Oudinot!” “Liar!” “Butcher of Rome!” A handful of papal loyalists who imprudently greeted the French troops with shouts of welcome ended up dead, victims of the people’s wrath. Among them was at least one man of the cloth.32
That evening Oudinot had a message to the Romans pasted on the city walls, in both Italian and French. “The Army that the French Republic has sent to your land,” it began, “has as its goal the reestablishment of the order desired by the will of the people. A sectarian, or corrupt, minority has forced us to attack your walls. We now control the city and intend to accomplish our mission.” The Constituent Assembly was dissolved, clubs were banned, the barricades were being dismantled, and the flags of the Roman Republic torn down. Nothing could be published without prior permission of the military authorities.33
French soldiers
Although Garibaldi had led his men out of the city the previous day, more than ten thousand republican military veterans remained in Rome, and they were still armed. With no official surrender but instructed not to resist, the men who had until a few days earlier been battling the French now waited in their barracks, many in the massive Castel Sant’Angelo. That first night, while Rome’s soldiers slept in their barracks, the French were forced to sleep outside.
Reporting all this to Tocqueville on July 5, Corcelle did not conceal his anger. It was now several days since they had conquered Rome, yet large numbers of armed men remained in the city, and according to the Frenchman, they had already assassinated twenty people whose only crime was voicing their support for the pope. Tricolored flags kept appearing on the streets. “The surrender,” wrote Corcelle, “has been a veritable defeat for us after the victory.” He lashed into Oudinot. It would have been easy, he said, if, at the moment the French entered the city, they had simply surrounded the Roman forces and disarmed them, but the general had wanted to avoid a bloody confrontation.34
For Mazzini, the defeat was bitter. “Rome has given up,” he wrote to his mother the day the French troops entered the city. “Its position, from a military point of view, was bad, yet it could have mounted a defense at the barricades that would have astonished the world. But the Assembly did not want to, and in a moment of fear, all was lost.” He recounted how he had urged the Assembly to go with the army to continue the fight elsewhere, but this too it had opposed. “And so for now,” concluded Mazzini, “the magnificent drama ends in the saddest way.”
Margaret Fuller, who went to visit the defeated leader, was struck by how much he had changed. “In two short months he had grown old. All the vital juices seemed exhausted. His eyes were all blood-shot; his skin orange; flesh he had none.” Yet the man whom Fuller idolized remained. “Sweet and calm, but full of a more fiery purpose than ever, in him I revered the hero and owned myself not of that mold.”35
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ON JULY 4, THE DAY after the French entered Rome, Oudinot sent his personal envoy, Adolphe Niel, colonel of the French engineering corps, to Gaeta, bearing the keys to the gates through which the French troops had entered the city. “Pius IX’s face is very pleasing,” reported Niel, recounting his visit in a letter to his brother in France. “You can read the most touching goodness on it. His voice is sweet, his manner simple yet marked by great dignity.” Expressing his gratitude, Pius penned a letter to the French general. He wanted to congratulate Oudinot, he wrote, “not for the blood that has been shed, which is abhorrent to me, but for the triumph of order over anarchy, and for the restoration of freedom to the honest, Christian people.” He concluded, “The triumph of the French army came against the enemies of human society and for this reason ought to earn feelings of gratitude from all honest men in Europe.”36
At the same time as Pius received the keys to Rome, he got a letter from Cardinal Lambruschini, the Curia’s preeminent hard-liner, a response to the pope’s own letter of a week earlier. Praising Pius for rejecting the pleas of those who urged him to retain his reforms, Lambruschini expressed special pleasure with the pope’s decision not to grant a constitution, which he dismissed as “entirely incompatible with the political condition of the Holy See.” The cardinal also urged the pope to reject the demands that he replace clergy with laymen in the government and courts. To give ground, he warned, was to guarantee a repetition of their recent disaster. “The people must be treated with a brake,” he advised. “The brake can be somewhat gentle, but it must be a brake….The people must be made to know the enormous crime they have committed, and in some way they should be made to atone for it.”37
No one better appreciated the pressure the cardinals were putting on the pope than Harcourt, who had spent months in Gaeta urging Pius to spurn their advice. Writing from French military headquarters in Rome on the day the city was taken, he sent Tocqueville an urgent report. The French would obtain nothing, he told the foreign minister, by dealing benevolently with the Holy Father. Pio Nono would merely keep offering vague expressions of his goodwill. He would say everything except the one thing they actually needed, assurances that he would grant the people “real rights.” He and Rayneval had tried every possible argument to convince him but to no avail. When pressed, the pope simply repeated that his conscience would not permit him to act as the French wished. Pius even threatened that he might not return to Rome at all but could go elsewhere, “even to America,” reported Harcourt, “if we sought to do violence to his conscience.”
Harcourt had lost all patience. There were only two ways, he believed, that the French could avoid catastrophe. Both meant issuing an ultimatum. If it were possible to persuade Austria to join with them, France and Austria could together demand that the pope publicly state his intention to retain a constitutional government. Should he refuse, they would withdraw their armies “and abandon him to his own forces, washing their hands of all responsibility for the future.” If, as seemed more likely, Austria would not agree to this plan, only one path remained. France would have to act alone and tell the pope that should he not “reestablish the institutions that he himself had previously given, including the constitution,” they would not allow him to return to his capital.38
The French army now occupied Rome but had yet to hoist the papal flag over the city. Pius remained in his modest room in Gaeta. A war of nerves was about to begin, pitting the celebrated author of Democracy in America against the exiled pope-king. It was not at all clear who would win.
Lacking any commitment from the pope to retain his reforms, the French seemed in no hurry to restore papal government. “So far,” observed the Austrian ambassador, “all I see is the occupation of Rome by the French,” the third, he noted, in the past half century. In 1798 Napoleon had seized Rome and driven Pope Pius VI into exile. A decade later his armies returned and forced his successor, Pius VII, to abandon the city. Now the French army had again taken Rome, and again the fate of a Pope Pius rested in their hands. Austrian troops meanwhile patrolled the streets of Bologna, Ancona, Ferrara, and the many other towns they had recently restored to pontifical rule.1
Two days after French troops entered Rome, the French appointed General Louis de Rostolan, a hard-bitten and not terribly well-lettered veteran of the French war in Algeria, to serve as governor of the city. He immediately announced that all gatherings were forbidden and no one would be allowed on the streets after nine-thirty p.m. Any violence or insult aimed at French soldiers would be punished severely. “Inhabitants of Rome!” warned Rostolan. “You want order. I know how to guarantee it. Those who dream of prolonging your oppression will find in me inflexible severity.”2
Among the new restrictions, it was the curfew that Romans most resented. By evening, the heat of the summer sun turned the windowless homes of the popolani into insufferable ovens. Outside, in the cooler evening air, twenty-three thousand French soldiers set up camp in the squares and marketplaces, hundreds of their horses tied up along the streets.3
Upset by his lack of official diplomatic standing, Corcelle, Tocqueville’s personal envoy, demanded that his status as France’s primary representative in Rome be made clear. In a letter to the foreign minister, Corcelle took aim at the three men who stood in his way. On Oudinot, he had been heaping abuse since his first reports in June. “I told you,” he advised Tocqueville, “that General Oudinot was capable of every possible kind of mistake and even some that are impossible. In administration, as in war, you will find him always uncertain, equivocating, lacking any sense of proportion, vague, passionate for the details, ingenious in complicating everything, a veritable font of false ideas expressed in a most refined way.” To allow Oudinot to remain at his post, he warned, would bring disaster.4
So much for the general in charge. As for Harcourt, Corcelle devoted few words to him, for bowing to Corcelle’s earlier pleas, Tocqueville had already let the ambassador to the Holy See know that he was soon to be recalled. And so, wrote Corcelle, the foreign minister had to choose: was it to be “Rayneval or me”?
Admittedly, wrote Corcelle, Rayneval, unlike him, spoke Italian, knew many of the key people in Italy, and was expert in Italian affairs. No one could deny that he was an able man with good judgment. But, Corcelle charged, there was a problem. Having been outside France the previous year when the monarchy was overthrown and the republic proclaimed, Rayneval had little understanding of the new order in his homeland. “His education,” observed Corcelle, “was formed at the court where ideas of freedom were not in favor.” While Corcelle had portrayed Harcourt as ineffective because he lacked the necessary finesse—the pope found his pushiness grating—he criticized Rayneval for not pressing the Holy Father hard enough.5
“No one is more convinced than I am of General Oudinot’s inadequacy,” replied Tocqueville in mid-July. “In my view, it was a crime to have confided such an affair to such a man, and from the second day since my entry into the cabinet, I have demanded he be replaced.” This would soon be done. “As for the multiplicity of negotiators,” the foreign minister assured his friend, “I have begun to put things in order by recalling Harcourt. It will not surprise you that my principal aim in doing so was to leave you in charge in Rome.”
Rayneval, observed the foreign minister, had to be handled more carefully, for he was clearly a man of great merit. If they were to remove him from Italy, they would first need to find a major post for him elsewhere in Europe. “I believe, as you do,” concluded Tocqueville, “that the best thing would be for you to remain alone. Harcourt’s departure already greatly simplifies matters.”6
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THE MOOD IN ROME was sullen, the future unclear. On July 11 a man hired by the French to paint over the tricolored decorations on Rome’s roofs was hit on the head with a cobblestone and killed. His would not be the last of the violent deaths in the city that month. Periodically a French soldier or a priest guilty of being too loud in his praise of the French occupation would also be attacked. But the French were living up to their word. The guilty parties were seized, stood up against a wall, and shot.7
