The Pope Who Would Be King, page 35
General Achille Baraguey d’Hilliers
Rayneval was in bed in Naples with a painful case of gout when he received the unexpected news. The honor of an appointment to be foreign minister was great, the confidence shown by the president flattering. But the uncertainties over what path Louis Napoleon planned to follow, the risks of casting himself as the architect of a foreign policy whose outlines he did not know, and the fact that he personally knew none of the military men who would be his cabinet colleagues all made him uneasy. The courier returned to Paris not with Rayneval but with the ambassador’s note explaining why he could not accept the appointment. He gave as his excuse his lack of parliamentary experience and his unfamiliarity with the political situation in France, having been abroad for so long. Spurned by Rayneval, Louis Napoleon would turn to yet another general to replace Tocqueville. A new era was about to begin.31
The men around the pope continued to warn him against returning to Rome, reluctant to move to a city seething with hostility to the clergy and under French control. In November they had told him that Mazzini had dispatched twenty-four assassins to Rome from his hideout in Switzerland. That same month Roman police arrested eleven people planning a banquet to celebrate the first anniversary of Rossi’s assassination. “The return to Rome,” observed Rayneval, “is the object of great repugnance and great terror.”1
General Baraguey, the new French ambassador, had arrived in mid-November and moved into the imposing Colonna Palace in the center of Rome. He was eager to present his credentials to the pope but was delayed by a quarantine in effect in Naples, aimed at preventing the spread of France’s cholera epidemic. As he waited for clearance for his visit, he sent his first impressions to Paris. They were not encouraging:
The Holy Father ought not to ignore the fact…that people’s misery and disaffection are growing every day, not only in Rome but also in the provinces….The prolongation of the absence of the head of the state reinforces the opinion that has already spread among many people that his presence is not indispensable for the conduct of public affairs. The numerous arrests are everywhere making him enemies, because the three cardinals justify their actions as based on his orders. It seems that everything is being done to alienate people.2
Winning a reduction of quarantine to ten days, Baraguey was allowed to disembark at Naples on November 29. The next morning he met the pope for the first time. “I was well received, if a bit coolly,” he reported. Baraguey was a general, not a diplomat. What he lacked in tact, he made up for by a highly developed sense of French national honor. His failure to show deference either to cardinals or to aristocrats would lead both to regard him warily.
As Baraguey entered, the pope held in his hand a recent letter from Louis Napoleon. It made clear that Napoleon would no longer be pressing his earlier list of demands and so, in effect, repudiated his August letter. The French president had jettisoned Barrot, his prime minister, a longtime opponent of the temporal power of the papacy, and Tocqueville, his foreign minister, who had been so embarrassed to find himself overseeing the restoration of the papal theocracy. Given his own efforts to reduce the power of France’s National Assembly, Louis Napoleon no longer had much interest in trying to limit the pope’s authority over his subjects. Instead, his letter simply called on the pope to show mercy.
“The President urges me to show leniency,” said the pope, annoyed. “But he also speaks of justice.” Justice, Pius told Baraguey, required that those guilty of rebelling against him be punished.
“The pope now fears the Roman people,” concluded the general. He had tried to reassure the pontiff that the French had matters firmly in hand and that no harm would befall him should he return to his capital. But, reported the new French ambassador, rather than showing gratitude for all that the French had done for him, the pope—and Cardinal Antonelli with him—had only complaints.3
Returning two days later, Baraguey pressed the pontiff to set a date for his return. Again Pius gave voice to his fears. “He tells me of the stilettos, the daggers, of the large number of malicious subjects in the city, of the need to disarm them….In vain I tried to reassure him, saying ‘I accept all responsibility.’ ” Baraguey told the pope he would take “the most severe measures” to guarantee his safety, but, the general reported, “my pleas were useless. He is surrounded by bad advisors who take advantage of his terrors.”4
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IF THERE REMAINED ANY doubts that Pius was now committed to a path of reaction, he dispelled them early in December with his first encyclical since regaining control of Rome. Addressed to all Italy’s archbishops and bishops, its language could hardly have been harsher. His first sentences offer something of its flavor:
You know as We do, venerable brothers, the recent wrongdoing which has strengthened some wretched enemies of all truth, justice, and honor, who strive both openly and deceitfully with plots of every sort to spread their disorders everywhere among the faithful people of Italy. These disorders include the unbridled license of thinking, speaking and hearing every impious matter. They spread these like the foaming waves of a savage sea, and they exert themselves not only to shake the Catholic religion in Italy itself but if possible to utterly destroy it.
While, thanks to “God’s mercy and the arms of Catholic nations,” Rome and the Papal States had been restored, said the pope:
Nonetheless, those wicked enemies of God and men still continue their lawless work, if not by open force, at least in other deceitful ways….We cannot restrain Our tears, when We see that some Italians now are so wicked and so wretchedly deceived that they admire the vile teachings of impious men. In fact, they are not afraid to plot with them for this great destruction of Italy.
The pope’s embrace of a medieval vision of society could not have been clearer. Quoting the New Testament (Romans 13:1–2), he told Italy’s bishops: “There is no authority except from God….Therefore he who resists authority resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur their own condemnation.” He turned as well to Saint Augustine, reminding the bishops of Augustine’s admonition that the Catholic Church
teaches slaves to remain true to their masters, not as much from the compulsion of their state as from delight in duty, and makes masters kind to their slaves by the thought that the supreme God is their common Lord….It teaches kings to take care of their people, and people to submit to their kings.5
Although the pope mentioned men many times in his encyclical, he made only one reference to women, and that in his opening paragraph. “In their wicked recklessness,” said the pope, the rebels in Rome had pushed aside the loyal clergy. “Consequently, when some of their own number fell sick and struggled with death, they were deprived of all the help of religion and compelled to breathe their last in the arms of a wanton prostitute.” The pope appeared to refer here to the women who had served as nurses to the wounded and dying in Rome. In the lands ruled by the popes, nuns served as nurses but only for female patients. Those few orders that allowed their nuns to minister to sick men did so only when they could act through a male intermediary.6
The following month, the former head of the Roman Republic’s nursing corps, Princess Cristina Belgiojoso, stung by the pope’s words, responded in a letter. “Holy Father,” she wrote:
I read in a French newspaper part of Your Holiness’s encyclical to the bishops of Italy in which…Your Holiness adds that those victims were forced to die in the arms of prostitutes. As the introduction of women into Rome’s hospitals was my work…I believe it my duty to respond to Your Holiness’s accusations….The hospitals were all always provided with priests, and…not one of the many victims, so rightly lamented by Your Holiness, died without the assistance of a priest and the comfort of the sacraments. If Your Holiness is unaware of this fact, your representatives certainly are not because, no sooner had the Cardinals assumed the powers that Your Holiness conferred on them, than all the priests who had exercised their sacred ministry in the hospitals were thrown into the prisons of the Holy Office of the Inquisition.7
The arrests and imprisonments continued. “The accounts I receive from Rome,” reported the British ambassador to Turin, “are deplorable. ‘La vendetta Pretina’ [the priests’ revenge] is in full operation, and the French are there, tranquil spectators of all that occurs. I hear nothing about the Pope’s return and indeed, how can he shew his face at Rome, when such excesses are committed with his sanction, and such an insane course of policy is followed by those acting in his name.”
The patriot princess Cristina Belgiojoso
For his part, Cardinal Antonelli, mastermind of the repression, was frustrated by the continuing interference of French authorities. When Baraguey attempted to prevent the arrest of papal army officers compromised by their participation in the Roman Republic, Antonelli complained to Rayneval. Had French officers acted as these men had, he told the ambassador, you “would have simply taken them out to be shot.”8
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THE POPE DECIDED TO spend the Christmas holidays with King Ferdinand in his palace at Caserta, twenty-two miles north of Naples. As Pius prepared to leave on December 24, he met with Rayneval, who again asked when he would return to Rome. Again the pope cited the need for the loan from the Rothschilds, but it was something else that most worried him. “The hatred of the priests,” confided the pope, “is still very much alive.”9 The cardinal deacon of the Sacred College had himself recently cautioned Pius against returning. Rome, warned the cardinal, was still filled with many
demagogues and not a few individuals capable of committing any crime, with the police not free to do their work. People speak publicly in the cafés against the pope, against the cardinals, and against the clergy, and the revolutionaries are still bold and threatening. I know that they want Your Holiness’s prompt return to Rome to remedy so many evils. But will You have the means to put an end to so much discord, and to reestablish good religious, moral and political order, lacking the material force sufficient to ensure that You are obeyed?10
In their efforts to prevent the pope from returning to Rome, the cardinals got strong support from King Ferdinand, eager to continue to benefit from his status as the pope’s royal protector. “There is a powerful party, with the King as its head,” reported Rayneval on the last day of 1849, “that is trying to keep the Pope far from his States.” They were using all sorts of pretexts, but, the French ambassador observed, their true motivation was one they would not admit. “They do not trust the Pope, his instincts, his tendencies….They fear, in a word, that he may pass from one camp to the other.”11
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TO MARK NEW YEAR’S Eve, Rome’s new city government ordered the Corso festively decorated and papal banners hung. But people were not in a festive mood, and well-aimed rocks smashed the lanterns bearing the papal coat of arms that the pope’s supporters had placed in their windows.
Having returned to Portici, Pius hosted the members of the diplomatic corps on New Year’s Day, as was his custom. His tone was uncharacteristically chastened. “We must have confidence in Providence,” he said, “but it is wise not to have any illusions….Many difficulties and many dangers remain.”12
As 1850 began, Luigi Carlo Farini—medical doctor, historian of Italian unification, and, in the early 1860s, one of the Kingdom of Italy’s first prime ministers—captured the sense of repression felt in the newly restored Papal States:
Both education and charity governed and administered by the clergy. Clerical police and French police in Rome, clerical police and Austrian police in the provinces. Censorship of the press administered…not by any law, but by the whim of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, the bishops, the police….All the old civil, communal, ecclesiastical, mixed, and exceptional tribunals restored….All the old immunities and privileges of the clergy restored….The Jesuits resurgent and more powerful….The prisons full.13
If the pope worried about his subjects’ hostility to papal rule as the New Year dawned, he also remained nervous about his financial situation. Discussions with the Rothschilds had begun almost a year earlier and had continued in Paris, where James Rothschild, head of the banking family in France, met frequently with the papal nuncio.14
“It seems more and more clear to us,” the new French foreign minister, General Jean-Ernest de la Hitte, wrote to Baraguey on the first of the year, “that the question of the Holy Father’s return to his states is tied to the conclusion of a loan. So we continue to do all that we can to facilitate it and speed it.” A few days later he sent an update from Paris: “I have just learned that Monsieur Rothschild is motivated by the best intentions for the conclusion of the loan negotiated with the Holy See. He has received a very favorable impression of the news that he received about the Pope’s intentions with regard to his fellow Jews.”15
The pope, who had ordered the Jews of the Papal States back into their ghettos, now depended on the goodwill of Europe’s most prominent Jews to be able to return to his capital. The Rothschilds, for their part, found themselves under great pressure from their coreligionists. It was not a new position for them. Ever since the Rothschilds had become bankers to the popes, Jewish communities of the Papal States had begged them to use their influence to relieve their suffering. In the first year of Pius’s reign, the officers of Rome’s Jewish community had sent the pope a petition asking for modest improvement in the condition of the ghetto. Having gotten no reply, they had sent a copy of the petition to Salomon Rothschild, director of the bank in Vienna, pleading for his aid. In response, Rothschild met with the papal nuncio and urged him to persuade the pontiff to help Rome’s Jews. Perhaps it was this request that prompted the pope to take the modest actions he did in the first two years of his reign, allowing some Jews to leave the ghetto and tearing down the ghetto gates.16
“The pope’s return to Rome is decidedly dependent on the conclusion of the loan,” wrote the French foreign minister to Rayneval on January 10, 1849. “The discussions [in Paris] with Monsieur [James] Rothschild continue. His pretentions are a little much. Cardinal Antonelli has urged me to see him and convince him to be more moderate.” Rothschild’s “pretentions” were aimed at the pope’s treatment of the Jews. Before making the loan, he wanted Pius to agree to abolish Rome’s ghetto and allow Jews to own real estate, practice commerce freely, and attend the university.17
In trying to get Rothschild to drop these demands, the papal nuncio in Paris, acting as an intermediary in the negotiations, rehearsed arguments long used by the Holy See to justify its treatment of the Jews. The popes, the nuncio argued, were acting only in the Jews’ own best interests. If the popes closed the Jews in the ghetto, it was only to protect them from the hostility of their Christian neighbors.18
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AS A MAN FOR WHOM French pride loomed larger than Catholic devotion, General Baraguey was quickly becoming disenchanted with the pope. The papal court, he thought, was using the loan negotiations merely as a pretext to keep Pius from Rome. The French had expected him to return to his capital as soon as they reestablished papal rule there. It was a great embarrassment that he seemed so reluctant to leave the embrace of the king of Naples, a disinclination that could only be seen as a vote of no confidence in the French. Now, months after Harcourt had argued that they could persuade the pontiff to do what was needed only by giving him an ultimatum, Baraguey reached the same conclusion: “The only means to get [the pope] to follow a policy in keeping with our dignity and our interests would be, I believe,…to set a date beyond which our troops would be withdrawn to Civitavecchia. At the same time we would warn the courts of Vienna and Portici of our firm intention not to allow any foreign force to replace us here.”
On issuing such a declaration, Baraguey realized, France would have to be prepared to wage war should the other powers not heed their warning. He acknowledged that France might well not want to take this risk but argued that there was no honorable alternative.
There was another reason, suggested Baraguey, why France should follow this course. The pope and a number of the foreign ambassadors had made clear their desire to have some combination of the armed forces of Austria, Naples, and Spain replace the French in safeguarding papal rule in Rome. The offense to French national honor of withdrawing from Rome, only to see their rivals’ armies occupy the city, would certainly be too great to bear.
“Naples,” added Baraguey, “seems to me to have become a center of evil designs against us. They work to spread rumors of the instability of the French government. Each day they spread word of a new revolution, and everyone is united in urging the Holy Father to put off his return.” He concluded his letter to the French foreign minister, a fellow general, with a rousing call to arms:
If France does not take a vigorous stance, if, despite the fact that it is able to, it does not speak loudly and firmly, if it does not say that it is ready to support its will by the force of arms, but instead goes from one concession to another, I do not know where it will all lead us.
You ask me to have patience and perseverance. I believe, thank God, I possess both these qualities. But when this patience takes on the appearance of self-deception, I do not believe in giving it new opportunities, because in this case, patience and forbearance greatly resemble weakness.19
“It is a heart-rending spectacle,” observed Rayneval in early February, “to see the Holy Father’s never-ending uncertainties….To see such great matters entrusted to a person so unsure of himself, so influenced by the least incidents, one feels that doubts and fears for the future are all too well founded.” Having heard from Antonelli that the Rothschild loan now seemed likely, he had held two long meetings with the pope, trying to get him to commit to a date to return to Rome.
