The Pope Who Would Be King, page 33
Rayneval again went to see the pope, warning him that the number of his supporters in Rome was shrinking daily, and even the most moderate men there were despairing of the future. Only by leaving immediately for his capital, announcing a generous amnesty, and stating his intention to form an enlightened system of government could he avert disaster. How, asked Rayneval, would it look for the Supreme Pontiff to rule his people only by force of foreign arms? If the pope continued on such an ill-conceived path, the ambassador warned, he should not count on French arms to support him.9
The cardinals did not share the French ambassador’s concerns. “We don’t see people devoted to His Holiness’s government,” acknowledged Cardinal Della Genga, leader of the three-member governing commission, speaking to the Austrian consul in Rome in early September. “I have no illusions,” he added, “and I see that the number of those desiring the government of the priests is very limited.” The problem, he thought, lay not with ecclesiastical rule but with the heretical ideas that, thanks to the rabble-rousers, had spread among the unlettered population. The pope and the prelates ruled over the Papal States because it was what God intended. The disaster they had endured, charged Della Genga, was the pope’s fault, for it was his “excessive leniency” that had undermined the people’s affection for their rightful rulers.10
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RATHER THAN RETURN TO his capital, as the French were urging, the pope decided to move farther away from it, finding more comfortable quarters near Naples. After spending nine months, nine days, and nine hours in Gaeta—or so a fawning Neapolitan chronicler calculated it—on the morning of Tuesday, September 4, Pius IX, in the company of the king and queen, became the first pope ever to travel on a steamship.
As they sailed down the coast, Ferdinand pointed out each landmark and noted the cloud of smoke wafting from Mount Vesuvius as it prepared for a new eruption. Their destination, a large royal palace that Ferdinand had reserved for the pope, was in Portici, a few miles past Naples. How long the pope would remain there, no one knew.11
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IN ROME, DEBRIS FROM what remained of the barricades and rubble from the bombed-out buildings still littered the streets. At night, those nostalgic for the days of the Roman Republic gathered in local trattorie, where they held seditious banquets and distributed contraband written accounts of those heady days. Four of Rome’s theaters had reopened, although French authorities briefly shut one down when patrons hurled abuse at French officers in the audience.
Virtually all who had served in the Constituent Assembly were now gone. The French authorities had lured the last away on ships bound for Marseilles by leading them to believe they would be granted asylum in France. The French were eager to have them leave the Papal States rather than face the embarrassment of their imprisonment or execution at the hands of the restored papal government, but Louis Napoleon was not eager to have them settle in France. When their ships docked at French ports, they were kept aboard, to be sent on to America.12
In Rome, the mood remained fearful among the pope’s partisans and sullen among the rest. “This swarm of idle priests that one runs into at every step, and who exploit the country, is an evil that is difficult to destroy,” wrote Colonel Niel in a letter to his brother. “This is a population of sycophants and mendicants, who lack the habit of supporting themselves by their own work.” What the Romans most needed, thought the French officer, was an efficient lay government. “But,” he asked, “how could all this be reconciled with the authority of a pope who tends increasingly to give everything to the priests?”13
In Paris, Louis Napoleon was furious that his letter had still not been published, yet Rostolan threatened to resign rather than allow its publication, convinced that it would both undermine his troops’ morale and encourage popular resistance to the new papal government.14
Rostolan was not alone in opposing the request. Corcelle vowed that if the French government continued to insist on having Napoleon’s letter published, he, too, would resign. At the same time, Rayneval added a warning of his own. “Publishing it against the formal wishes of the papal government,” he advised, “would put the government under our feet. The humiliation would be cruel.”15
Among the reasons the French envoys gave for their reluctance to publish the letter was their wish that nothing happen to delay the pope’s long-awaited address to his subjects on his plans for his new government. For weeks they had been telling the pope how important it was that he let his subjects know that he planned a broad amnesty for those who had participated in the revolt against him, that he would staff his government with laymen rather than priests, and that he would keep many of the liberal reforms he had earlier embraced. Now they nervously waited to see if he would heed their advice.
Shortly after arriving in Portici, the pope convened the cardinals to ask their opinion. Hostility toward the French ran deep. Promising concessions to his subjects, the cardinals argued, would give the appearance of weakness. People would see an embattled pope bowing to French pressure. Were he to bring back the Consultative Council, as the French were urging, Cardinal Lambruschini warned, all would be lost. That had been the first step on the road to revolution. The cardinals were no more enthusiastic about having the pope move to a city under French control. It would be better for him to go to one of the Austrian-occupied towns of the Papal States, for there he could do as he liked.
The pope seemed no longer the same man he was before. His subjects’ rejection had stung him deeply. He never wanted to repeat that terrifying sense of helplessness he had felt amid the chaos in Rome in the days following Rossi’s murder. He now clung to the one path in which he could comfortably place his faith, that of the eternal verities that his predecessors on St. Peter’s throne had followed. Listening to those who told him he had to adapt to modern times had produced only heartache for him and disaster for the church he loved. Parliamentary government and individual freedoms, thought Pius, were not only incompatible with the divinely ordained nature of his own states but inherently evil. It was a belief that he would hold for the rest of his life.16
On September 17 the text of Pio Nono’s long-awaited address to his subjects finally appeared on Rome’s walls. Following a preface praising the “valorous armies of the Catholic Powers” for saving Rome from “tyranny” and restoring him to the plenitude of his powers, the pope described the features he intended to give the new papal government. There would be an advisory state council, whose membership and responsibilities he would announce at a later date. He would institute a financial council, whose members he would select. It would review state finances and offer its recommendations on taxes. He would also institute provincial councils, choosing their members from among names put forth by the town councils. Members of the town councils would be elected from local property owners. As for the judiciary, he would choose its heads and also appoint a commission to consider reforms.17
The last matter the pope addressed was the question of amnesty, stating simply that its terms would soon be published. The three cardinals announced the details the next day. Far from the broad, generous amnesty urged by the French, this one was limited at best. Among those excluded were the members of the republican government, the members of the Constituent Assembly, the heads of the various military units, and all those political prisoners and exiles who had previously been pardoned in the amnesty the pope had issued shortly after assuming the papacy in 1846.18
“In the whole history of amnesties,” remarked Luigi Carlo Farini, a physician who had been in charge of public health in Pellegrino Rossi’s government, and who had fled Rome during the republic, “one does not find a document like this, which can only jokingly be called by that name. Consider its terms, and you will see no one is amnestied.”19
Writing to his nuncio in Vienna about the pope’s amnesty, Cardinal Antonelli lashed out at the French, whom he knew would be displeased. The limits the pope placed on it, explained the secretary of state, were those demanded by justice and by the requirements of both morality and religion. He would have hoped, he told his nuncio, that now that the pope had announced his planned course for the restored government, the French would put an end to their constant demands. But, he added, “I cannot…hide from Your Reverence that each day such demands take on the nature of a violation of the rights of the temporal sovereignty of the Holy Father guaranteed by the Catholic Powers.”20
In the battle of wills pitting Tocqueville and Louis Napoleon against the pope, the French had their army and their national pride at stake, but the pope had, in Antonelli, a man who well understood the political power of the church. Italy’s more perceptive observers had little doubt who would prevail. Massimo d’Azeglio, the liberal Bolognese aristocrat whom the pope had originally wanted to head his government following Rossi’s assassination, and who since May had become prime minister of the Kingdom of Sardinia, was among those who saw a bleak future ahead. “I continue to doubt,” he confided in a letter to a friend, “that French influence will prove a match against priestly cunning.”21
The pope’s long-awaited address and amnesty served only to further fuel what the Dutch ambassador called the “sentiment of aversion against the ecclesiastical government that exists here so generally.” Grumbling among the French troops about serving as the wardens of the restored theocracy was growing as well.1
In reporting the pope’s decree to Paris, Rayneval tried to give it the best face he could. The French had long ago abandoned their demands for a constitution. Even their modest request for a lay council to set tax policy had been rejected. But there were some positive elements, especially in municipal government, and the French could take credit for them, as they were due to French pressure alone. Modest as they were, the reforms upset the cardinals, who, the ambassador reported, “claim to see in them the germs of new misfortunes, the gateway to yet another exile. They regard (I do not exaggerate) the old Gregorian system as the only reasonable one.
“In the eyes of the Sacred College,” the ambassador added, “Pius IX is a blind man who is bringing the temporal power to its ruin.” The cardinals had employed every means they could—“intrigues, obsessions, expressions of bitterness, even threats”—to achieve their ends. “Who knows,” asked Rayneval, “if, weak of character as he is, shaken beyond measure by the cruel experience that he has had, the Holy Father would not have yielded without the fear that France’s attitude inspired in him? What he has done, he has done above all to please us. What he gives us costs him an enormous price, there is no doubt of it.”
Aware that Tocqueville and his cabinet colleagues would be dismayed at how little ground the pope had given, Rayneval cautioned against any hasty action. “If we show that we are too unhappy,” warned the French ambassador, “we would offend beyond measure the prodigiously sensitive nature of Pius IX, and it is in him alone that we can place any hope.”2
Meanwhile in Paris, a new report had Tocqueville fuming. British and French newspapers were carrying a disturbing accusation made by the exiled Mazzini. “Rome’s prisons,” the Italian prophet charged,
are packed full with people who, for the most part, are guilty of nothing more than having obeyed the existing government and having been singled out by some spies for the priests’ vengeance. More than fifty ecclesiastics are imprisoned in Castle Sant’Angelo, guilty only of having offered their services to the hospitals of the Republic. Nor have the junior officers of the police been spared, and they have the cruelty to condemn them to life in prison.
“This would be very serious,” Tocqueville told Corcelle, “if it is true, even in part.” He asked him to determine how many people had been jailed for political crimes since the French had entered Rome, and how many were still being held. France, he declared, could not permit such imprisonments. If the cardinals complained that the French were encroaching on the pope’s sovereignty, said the French foreign minister, “So be it.” Tocqueville told his envoy,
The only consolation that remains for us, the only excuse that we can present to the world amidst the ruin of the hopes for freedom that our expedition had aroused, is at least having saved some people. On these grounds we win universal sympathy. I repeat. Rather than let them defeat us, break off relations. This is not a suggestion. It is an order.3
It was while he was writing these words that the French foreign minister finally received a copy of the pope’s message to his people on the form of government he was planning. Tocqueville had already resigned himself to the fact that the pope would not embrace the constitutional guarantees the French had been pressing on him, but now he was newly angered. Compared with the vindictive pope, he fumed, the Austrian emperor and the Neapolitan king were fonts of mercy. “I have said that France could not allow its expedition to bring about a blind, implacable restoration. It is even more blind than I had thought, and more implacable than I would have dared to imagine.” The author of Democracy in America could take the embarrassment no longer. “I will have to reflect,” he told Corcelle, “on whether I can, even in the interest of my country, remain in my position when the program that I have given to our policy has been so poorly fulfilled.”4
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AT THE POPE’S MAGNIFICENT new quarters in Portici, Rayneval told him how disappointed his government was with his recent address.
“Perhaps in France one can find some people who will take my defense, who recognize the innumerable difficulties that surround me,” replied the pope. “I know very well that politically the institutions that I have given are very incomplete. The sovereign power remains intact. It is not shared. But I could not do anything more. Nor,” he added, “is one convinced by many examples that Italy is made for, or at least is now ready for, democracy.”
Pursuing this last point, Pius asked Rayneval how many of all the constitutions recently granted in Italy were still in effect. The king of Naples had jettisoned his, as had the grand duke of Tuscany. Only the Kingdom of Sardinia had kept its constitution, and it had proven disastrous for the monarchy, said the pope. In the past year and a half, the king had gone through eight different prime ministers. “If the purely temporal sovereigns have to suffer so much pain, given the difficulties of a regime that allows free speech in Italy,” he asked, “how do you think the pope, who has so many interests to look after, could overcome it?”
As a proud Italian, Pius had once shared the dream of an Italy free of foreign rule, but he had never thought very deeply about how this might happen, much less pondered its implications for the papacy and the church. If he had, he would have realized that his beliefs in the prerogatives of the papacy clashed with the liberal ideals fueling the move for Italian independence. In his first encyclical, in 1846, he had spoken of the divine right of Europe’s monarchs. “We hope,” he had said in Qui pluribus, “that Our political leaders will keep in mind in accordance with their piety and religion, that ‘the kingly power has been conferred on them not only for ruling the world but especially for the protection of the Church.’ ” It was God who had entrusted the kings with the right to rule and, in granting them this great power, demanded that they protect the rights of the church and its pope-king. This was the world that Pius knew, the world that God had willed, and the only one in which the church would be safe. Should the forces propelling an independent Italy prevail, he now realized, the Papal States would not long survive.5 Pius told Rayneval:
Don’t fool yourselves. The Italian liberals, the advanced liberals, those who would most quickly come to power, have only one idea in their heads: unification. An impractical idea, an idea that will lead only to heartbreak here and perhaps in the end to foreign domination. Just because France succeeded in establishing its unity, should it be assumed that Italy can do the same? Is it in its nature? Is it something it needs?…You French, you have your faults, most certainly, but you have a prodigious instinct for nationality. You are always ready to sacrifice yourselves for your country. Have you seen anything similar in Italy? Unification is a wild dream, but a dream that the advanced party pursues relentlessly….And the sovereigns among whom Italy is divided are obstacles that they must remove….But among these obstacles the greatest of all is the Pope. Putting an end to the Pope’s sovereignty is, for them, to accomplish three-quarters of their goal.6
As he often did after visiting with the pope, Rayneval went to see Antonelli. Again, Rayneval tried to persuade the cardinal not to delay the pope’s return to Rome. Now that those whom the pope had been so worried about were in exile or in prison, what reason could there be to wait any longer?
The problem, the cardinal replied, was that their treasury was bare. The pope could not return empty-handed. He had to be able to pay government employees, fund rebuilding projects, and distribute charity. In short, he needed a large loan. During Gregory’s papacy, the Holy See had taken out several such loans, most from the Rothschild banking family, lenders to governments throughout Europe. Antonelli had again turned to the Rothschilds, and until those talks were concluded, he said, Pius could not return. So it was that, in another of history’s ironies, at the same time that he was forcing the Jews back into the ghetto, the pope was counting on Europe’s most prominent Jews to come to his rescue.7
