The Pope Who Would Be King, page 6
The aristocratic assistant to the French ambassador in Rome offered a similar opinion: “The Pope is very pleased at having had such success, not seeing that the public is craftier than he is and extracts one concession from him after another by their compliments, exactly as in the fable about the fox and the crow.” When the crow took a piece of cheese up to a tree branch to eat, the fox, flattering the bird on its beautiful singing voice, got it to open its mouth in song. As the cheese fell from the crow’s mouth, the fox eagerly devoured it.29
The Papal States, observed Metternich, who had similarly come to doubt that the pope was up to the challenges he faced, were unique, a theocracy. But, he mused, “the world rises up against the very idea of such a government. The Catholic world is based on the principle of authority, while the world does not want such an authority. Religion dictates the equality of men before God and their submission to the authorities, because this is ordained by God. The world wants civil equality and authority based on the will of the people.”
Although Metternich was well aware that the long-held justifications for rule by the few were under attack, nothing would deter him from his path. His goal, which he shared with leaders of Europe’s other monarchies—from the Russian czar to the king of Naples—was to stop the ever-growing drive for self-government. Protecting the pope’s right to rule was crucial to his effort. How could rulers justify their own regimes as divinely ordained if the pope’s heavenly mandate were cast in doubt? “The Papal States exist,” Metternich told his ambassador, “and their existence is both a social and political necessity.” The new pope’s goodness had become a potent weapon exploited by those who sought to end the papal theocracy. The political prisoners and exiles whom the pope had freed were now returning to their homeland, intent on overthrowing the old order. The public demonstrations, the newspapers, and the new associations that were sprouting up around the Papal States were their tools. Rather than placating the people, it was becoming ever clearer that each reform the pope granted was simply increasing the popular appetite for more.30
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IN YET ANOTHER ATTEMPT to put an end to the popular demonstrations, on June 22, 1847, Cardinal Gizzi issued a new edict. While Pius was “firmly resolved to continue on the road of improvement in all those branches of the public administration which may have need of it,” the secretary of state announced, the pope was “equally decided on doing so only in a wise and well-considered course, and within the limits marked out by the very nature of the sovereignty and of the temporal government of the head of the Catholic Church.” God, in his infinite wisdom, proclaimed Gizzi, had willed the pontiff to exercise temporal power, and so it was his sacred duty “to preserve intact the trust that was placed in him.” The pope, he reported, was horrified to see people “taking advantage of the present state of things to put forth and enforce doctrines and thoughts totally opposed to his maxims.” While Pius appreciated all the signs of his people’s devotion, he now asked “for proof of these praiseworthy sentiments, and such proof should consist,” explained Gizzi, “in putting an end to all unusual popular meetings, and to extraordinary popular demonstrations.”31
Shortly after issuing his new edict, Gizzi met with the ambassador from Turin. The situation, the cardinal told him, was spiraling out of control. Although he would rather cut off his hand, he said, than sign a request to the Austrian emperor to send his army to restore order, he would nonetheless do so if, as he feared, it should prove necessary. Calling on Austrian troops to quell rebellions in the papal lands would, he knew, cause a huge wave of popular anger, but, said the cardinal, he saw no alternative.
The ambassador was taken aback. Such an act, he warned, might well engulf all Italy in a “general conflagration.”
“And so,” asked the secretary of state, “whom would you have me turn to? Would your king agree to send an armed force to intervene here if it was requested?”
The ambassador had no answer, but he knew the cardinal had no intention of calling on the Sardinian army. It was to Austria that he would turn.32
Pius felt trapped. He had reveled in his subjects’ love and adulation. He thought of himself as a father to the people and took seriously his role as Christ’s vicar on earth. But now it seemed that he could not carry out the responsibility that God entrusted in him as Supreme Pontiff—to protect the special divine nature of government in the Papal States—and at the same time satisfy his subjects’ ever-escalating demands for change.
Seeing the pope at a church ceremony on June 30, the Austrian ambassador reported that Pius had the look “of a man who was suffering. People who have not seen him for some time find him looking ten years older….His hair is now covered with gray.” There were reports, too, that the stress had triggered new epileptic seizures. Pius was, it seemed, now pondering the unthinkable, wondering whether it would not be better for him to renounce St. Peter’s throne and retire in prayer to a monastery.33
As the summer of 1847 wore on, a helpless, and hapless, Cardinal Gizzi watched while, notwithstanding all his attempts to stop them, demonstrators continued to parade through Rome’s streets. Their shouts were taking on an ever more threatening tone. Pio Nono wanted to push forward with his reforms, many Romans believed, but the reactionaries, traitors, and friends of the Austrians who surrounded him were doing all they could to thwart him. Calls of “Death to the pope’s evil advisers!” and “Death to Cardinal Lambruschini”—identified in the popular imagination as the ringleader of the conspiracy—were becoming ever more common, unsettling not only the cardinals but the aristocracy and other men of property.
“The law is respected,” reported Rossi in early summer, “but the blood is beginning to circulate rapidly in this body that, only a year ago, was as calm and cold as a cadaver.” The people and their leaders, he added, “have the ability and the know-how that the government lacks.” They could, it seemed, mobilize a crowd on a moment’s notice.1
In the view of his long-suffering secretary of state, Pius was deceiving himself if he thought he could ever satisfy those demanding change in the Papal States. The liberal party would keep pushing for the removal of priests from power, for a representative system of government, and for freedom of speech. None of these, in the view of Gizzi and his fellow cardinals, was compatible with the divinely ordained governance of the Papal States. “The time might well come,” he told the Austrian ambassador in an early July meeting, “when the Pope finds himself reduced to the painful necessity of calling for Austria’s intervention.” Lest the ambassador miss his meaning, Gizzi ended their conversation by telling him to be sure to send Metternich “advance notice of the possibility of the request in question.”2
Around the same time, a delegation of the more enlightened Roman aristocrats met with the pope to offer their advice. Fearful that the demonstrations might turn violent, they urged him to create a powerful Civic Guard, composed of the better classes of citizens. The move would have the additional benefit of satisfying one of the liberals’ long-standing demands, that the pope replace the foreign mercenary security forces. Pius promised to do so without delay.3
Gizzi was horrified. If the pope armed the people, he told Pius, he would regret it. The day would come when he would tire of the people’s never-ending demands. When it did, and he belatedly tried to resist, predicted Gizzi, “you will be chased out of Rome with those same rifles that you are now giving them for your defense.”
“Signor Cardinal,” replied the pope, taken aback, “I have no fear of my people!”
“Don’t rely too much on the goodness of your heart!” advised the cardinal. “The people are too fickle.” With this last warning, Gizzi resigned, this time for good.4
Feeling ever more isolated, and exhausted from his months of arguing with his secretary of state, Pius yearned to have a man at his side he could count on. He scribbled a short note to his cousin Cardinal Gabriele Ferretti:
Cardinal Gizzi’s state of health has led him for a second time to ask to be relieved of his duties. His Successor is Cardinal Ferretti. Come, begin, and doubt nothing, for God is with Us. I bless you.5
Ferretti was surely surprised by the news, but he sympathized with the pope’s desire to bring the Papal States into the modern era. “He is no great intellect,” observed Rossi, in reporting the new appointment to Paris, but, he added, Ferretti was not lacking in courage and was unquestionably devoted to the pope.6
When the new secretary of state arrived at the city gate at Piazza del Popolo late on the evening of July 15, a celebratory crowd surrounded his carriage. The despised Cardinal Gizzi was gone, and his replacement, many Romans believed, was a man much more sympathetic to their cause. As the new secretary of state made his way down the narrow Corso, residents emerged from the buildings carrying lanterns to light the way. “Long live Ferretti!” they shouted. “Justice! Throw the bastards out!”7
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FOREIGN OBSERVERS DIFFERED IN their view of what was happening in Rome, but they all agreed on one point. Amid the mass of the popolani—the little people of Rome—who crowded the city streets and took part in demonstrations of affection for the pope, one man stood out. Angelo Brunetti, known by his childhood nickname, Ciceruacchio,* was forty-five years old when Pius IX became pope. He was born in one of the city’s poorer neighborhoods, his father a blacksmith. Illiterate, he went to work at an early age as a carter, bringing wine from the surrounding hills down into Rome. Bright and ambitious and with an outsize personality, he soon saved up enough money to buy his own horse and wagon and began carrying hay, grains, and other goods into the city. Before long he had several horses and many wagons.
Each of Rome’s fourteen neighborhoods—called rioni—had its own capopopolo, the leader determined not by any formal process but by popular designation rooted in the nightly discussions in local taverns where men gathered. The most valued traits were generosity, good judgment, and the ability to mediate local disputes. Ciceruacchio had all these qualities and more, so that he became, in effect, the capopopolo of all Rome. Of average height, he had broad shoulders, a powerful chest, a large neck, and thick, muscular legs. He was always the first to pitch in when heavy lifting was needed. His bright blue eyes sparkled with life, and he had a large nose, long curly brown hair that gathered above his ears, a bushy moustache, and a goatee. He spoke not Italian but the Roman dialect, romanesco, as did all the long-established families of the city’s poorer classes. Good-humored and compassionate, he was quick to anger but just as quick to forgive and forget. After his rise to prominence, he dressed with a certain elegance. He was known for his courage, yet he was not immune to the sense of inferiority that plagued Rome’s little people. In the presence of members of the educated elite, the larger-than-life Ciceruacchio seemed to shrink a little. Of the wider world he knew very little.
The popular hero Ciceruacchio
The man, it seemed, was everywhere. In December 1846, when the streets of the city were flooded, he was on a boat handing out food to the hungry, and then in May he organized a huge popular celebration of the pope’s birthday, arranging with all of Rome’s flower vendors to reduce the price of bouquets so that, on the pope’s appearance at his Quirinal balcony, a blizzard of flowers would swirl through the air. The next month, for the first anniversary of Pius’s election as pope, Ciceruacchio masterminded yet another outpouring of popular affection, before defusing a dangerous conflict between Rome’s carters and the men from the hills who drove their own carts into the city.
On a visit to Rome, Massimo d’Azeglio, the Piedmontese nobleman and fervent Italian patriot, was among those struck by Rome’s man of the people. “These days,” he wrote, Ciceruacchio “is Rome’s first citizen. He exhorts, pontificates, he keeps the peace.” In the unrest that surrounded Cardinal Gizzi’s last days as secretary of state, Turin’s ambassador in Rome chronicled the key role played by the capopopolo: “It was he, one must confess, who contributed more than anyone in damping down the threats of death that were being shouted by the crowd, and likewise it was he who must be credited for maintaining public order.”8
A visiting Britisher, the twenty-seven-year-old Florence Nightingale, later to achieve fame as the founder of modern nursing, was also impressed by the ubiquitous capopopolo. “I dare say you know who Ciceruacchio is,” she wrote her family. “He can hardly read or write, sells wood to all the English, has not genius, but a commonsense almost amounting to genius, and can turn the whole Roman people round his fingers. He is a sincere, good man, and means well both by the people and the pope.” She was impressed as well by his modesty: “The princes send for him, court him and invite him, but he will not go.”9
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IN THE SUMMER OF 1847, just a few months before Nightingale’s visit, Ciceruacchio was responsible for an unprecedented sight in Rome involving the city’s Jews. Rome’s Jews had long been packed into narrow, dark, and unhealthy streets, the eight gates of their ghetto locked each night by a Christian guard whose salary they were required to pay. Prohibited from owning land or exercising professions, excluded from the city’s schools and hospitals, they practiced the most modest occupations. Few sights were more common in Rome than the shabbily dressed, long-bearded Jew, carrying a gray sack over his shoulder, shuffling along the road, looking up at the windows of the buildings as he passed, calling out Roba vecchia? “Old clothes for sale?”10
When, in the wake of the December flood, the pope first allowed a limited number of Jews to move out of the ghetto, tensions with Christian neighbors grew. For centuries the church had vilified the Jews as Christ-killers who should not be allowed to have contact with Christians. The sudden appearance of Jewish-owned stores and homes outside the ghetto provoked insults and threats of violence, not least from the Christian merchants who resented the new competition.
In early July, eager to keep the peace and inspired by the talk of fraternity and equality, Ciceruacchio organized a picnic on a large field. Two thousand people streamed in to share the food and wine. Speakers told of the dawn of a new era, ushered in by the goodly Pius IX, who wanted all Romans to live in harmony. The time for the old superstitions had passed, announced one speaker. Jesus on the cross had urged forgiveness, so even the Jews should be forgiven their sins.
The next day five men from Trastevere, the neighborhood just across the river from the ghetto, made their way into the Jewish quarter. They invited the men they met there to join them at a tavern outside the ghetto walls. Some of the more intrepid Jews went along and shared in the wine. The following day several Roman tanners, in festive mood, ventured into the ghetto. Worried about their intentions, the Jews asked them what they wanted. To this their leader replied, “We’ve come to show you that we are friends…and pay no heed to those who want to harm you!” The scene of the previous night was repeated, the more adventurous young men of the ghetto joining their fellow Romans in a tavern, then walking together along the Tiber back toward the ghetto, singing praises to Pius IX. It seemed as if a new era had indeed arrived.11
Prince Metternich had no objection to the liberation of the Jews from Rome’s ghetto, but he was increasingly alarmed by the pope’s loosening grip over his kingdom. It would be foolhardy, he decided, to wait until revolution exploded in the Papal States before sending troops. It was time, he thought, for a show of force.12
In the early morning hours of July 17, 1847, a contingent of the Austrian imperial army, consisting of eight hundred Croatian infantrymen and sixty Hungarian cavalrymen, crossed the Po River at the northeastern border of the Papal States and marched into the old walled city of Ferrara. In full battle gear, with flags flying and bayonets affixed to their rifles, they paraded through the streets to the beat of their drummer. While an Austrian garrison had been located in Ferrara since 1815, the unexpected and belligerent arrival of the reinforcements led some to speculate that this was Austria’s first step in a planned military sweep through the Papal States. The fact that the Austrians had arrived on the very day people were planning to celebrate the first anniversary of Pio Nono’s amnesty reinforced the darkest views of a reactionary plot against the pope. Anti-Austrian slogans began to cover the walls of the Papal States. Clandestinely published pamphlets linked the Austrians to the Jesuits in seeking to bring back the old order. There was, in fact, no conspiracy, but the people were right in one respect. Worried that the feckless pope was playing with fire, Metternich had put Austrian forces in a position to quell what increasingly looked like a revolutionary movement throughout the papal kingdom.13
Pius was not pleased. The Austrians had not bothered to warn him of their plans to march into Ferrara. Already under pressure to support Italian independence and to denounce the Austrians’ military presence in Italy, he found himself in an increasingly uncomfortable spot.
Count Lützow, Austria’s ambassador in Rome, was himself growing ever more alarmed. The local press, he reported to Metternich later in July, was filled with anti-Austrian screeds, and the pope seemed helpless as his authority slowly slipped away. Although Pius had announced that he would not make any further concessions to popular demands, he kept giving ground. The Vicar of Christ, the Austrian charged, displayed “an apathy, an indefensible blindness, pushing away his selfless friends and abandoning himself to the treacherous insinuations of those who…seek the loss of his Government, the destitution from Rome of the See of Our Most Holy Religion.”14
