The Pope Who Would Be King, page 7
Throughout the Papal States, seditious pamphlets were multiplying, while the shouts in the streets and the slogans scrawled on the walls mixed Viva il Papa! with “Death to Austria!” and Viva l’Italia! Of these, the last was the most significant. For decades the movement to drive foreigners out of Italy and unify all Italians—the Risorgimento—had been gaining force, fueled by the writings of intellectuals and the meetings of small bands of would-be conspirators, joined in an international network that stretched from Sicily to London. Metternich was unsympathetic. “Italy,” he declared, “is a geographic expression…devoid of any political meaning.” The pope risked becoming the rebels’ dupe. “The Revolution,” the Austrian chancellor observed in August, “has taken hold of the person of Pius IX like a flag.”15
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AMONG THE BEST-KNOWN—and most colorful—figures seen on Rome’s streets in these days was Charles Bonaparte, the forty-four-year-old nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte. His father, Lucien, younger brother of the French emperor, had combined a love of luxury with fierce adherence to the principles of the French Revolution. Notwithstanding his revolutionary proclivities, Lucien had had a good relationship with Pope Pius VII, who conferred on him an estate at Canino, north of Rome. Pope Leo XII later awarded him the title of prince. Both estate and title would pass down to his son Charles. Raised in Italy, Charles was bilingual in French and Italian, conversant in English, and able to read and write Latin. At age nineteen he married a first cousin, daughter of another of Napoleon Bonaparte’s brothers, herself endowed with a sizable fortune. He then moved to the United States to continue his scientific studies, as he was becoming an internationally known naturalist. Back in Italy during the 1831 revolt in the Papal States, he remained loyal to the papacy, judging the then new pope Gregory XVI to be “a good man, with good intentions.”
Charles shared with many of Napoleon’s heirs an outsize personality, a tendency to violence, and a hankering for the limelight. A year after Pius IX’s election, he could be seen proudly walking down the Corso in a Civic Guardsman uniform, short and rotund, with a thick neck and ruddy face. He had joined the Civic Guard shortly after the pope instituted it in July 1847. The tunic, modeled on that of ancient Rome, came down to his knees. Not a few thought his face bore a remarkable similarity to that of his famous uncle, although it was partially hidden under his huge guardsman helmet.
Charles Bonaparte
In early September, speaking to the excited crowd gathered at the Caffé delle Belle Arti—meeting place of the most fervent Italian patriots, a colored map of Italy on its wall topped by the motto “Long Live Italy!” and a portrait of Pius IX—Bonaparte gave a short speech hailing both the pope and the cause of a united Italy. He then led a group to Piazza del Popolo, where a large crowd had already gathered to protest Austria’s occupation of Ferrara. “Long Live Pius IX!” “Death to the Jesuits!” “Death to the Obscurantists!” the people shouted as the prince egged them on.16
Within days of the Austrian troops’ arrival in Ferrara, the pope’s denunciation of the move appeared on walls throughout the Papal States. Again patriots sang his praises, hailing him as their champion in the battle for Italian independence.17
Pius could not help but be pleased by all this praise, yet his pleasure was marred by a nagging doubt. “We know where these people want to lead us,” he confided to a Jesuit visitor. “We will satisfy them as far as conscience allows, but if things reach beyond that point as we already predict they will, they can cut me up into tiny pieces, but, with God’s aid, we will go not one step further.” For Pius there could be no doubt, his first duty was to the church. He must do nothing to weaken it.18
Although he sensed the danger of giving in to the crowds’ pleas, he seemed unable to stop himself. In early October, little more than a year since his election to the papacy, he announced the creation of a city council for Rome. It would be composed of a hundred members, the majority drawn from the upper classes, but with merchants and men of science represented as well. While the pope would appoint the first members, subsequent selections would be made by the councilors themselves. Metternich greeted news of the pope’s latest move with dismay. “Pius,” he snapped, “shows himself deprived of any practical mind.” The Austrian chancellor attributed the pope’s shortcomings to the fact that he had been raised by a family infected by the liberal ideas that Napoleon had brought to the Italian Peninsula. The pope, he thought, had a warm heart but no understanding of what it meant to govern. “If things follow their natural course,” Metternich predicted, “he will get himself chased out of Rome,” adding a question that before long would be asked throughout Europe: “What will happen then?”19
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PATRIOTS FROM THROUGHOUT THE peninsula flooded into Rome to see the reform-minded pope everyone was talking about. Among them, in late October 1847, was a thirty-four-year-old law professor from Pisa, then part of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. Giuseppe Montanelli was already making a name for himself as a champion of a federation of Italian states. He was as enthusiastic as anyone about the pope and eager, as he put it, “to hear the voice of the man whose magic name had so often caused the crowds to tremble and be overcome with emotion.”
To catch his first glimpse of the pontiff, Montanelli arrived outside the Quirinal Palace at the hour when Pius came out for his afternoon excursions. “How my heart beat!” he recalled. “Briskly, smiling, [the pope] came down the stairway, and with youthful ease climbed into the carriage. In the way he walked there was somehow something of a warrior, although his face was angelic.” Montanelli watched from a crowd of a few dozen people, most, like him, from out of town. When the pope’s carriage neared them, they sank to their knees. As he passed, Pius graced them with an affectionate look and raised his hand in blessing.
A few days later, eager to see the pope again, Montanelli attended a mass celebrated by the pontiff in the Quirinal chapel. His description offers some insight into why, among the chants that were now heard in Rome, one of the most frequent was Pio Nono solo!—“Pius IX alone!”
All the cardinals were there. I took a good look at them, one by one. I search in vain in those faces for a ray of intelligence, of love. Faces of either imbeciles or of the unhappy. What a face of a hyena Cardinal Lambruschini has! What a sinister figure Cardinal Marini cuts! What a sly fellow Antonelli.
“It was beyond me,” concluded Montanelli, “to think Pius IX could have come out of this College of Cardinals!”20
A few days later Montanelli was granted a private audience with the pope. The young Tuscan, full of enthusiasm for the Italian cause, told the pontiff that it was not religious devotion that was leading people to shout Viva Pio Nono! They were applauding, he said, because of their hopes that he would bring independence, unity, and freedom to Italy.
“This is true,” replied the pope. “Indeed, let me tell you that nothing pleases me more than when I hear people in Rome shouting not ‘Viva Pio Nono’ but ‘Viva il Santo Padre’ [Long live the Holy Father]. Because while the one is a political cry, the other is a religious one. They say ‘Viva Pio Nono’ to me. ‘Viva il Santo Padre’ they say to Saint Peter’s successor.”
What was important, responded the young Tuscan, was for the people to see the pope act justly, for in loving Pius IX, they would come to love the church that inspired him.
“This too is true,” said the pope, but then he added a discordant note. “Can you imagine that in one Calabrian city,” at the southern tip of the Italian boot, “they broke thieves out of jail to shouts of ‘Viva Pio Nono.’ Does that not seem,” he asked, “a little duplicitous to you?”
“It was this mixture of good humor with a touch of mischievousness, of grace and irony, that made Pius IX so seductive,” observed the pope’s visitor. He was not alone in falling under the pope’s spell. In contrast to the previous pope—an austere, elderly monk who never smiled—here was a warm human being, a vigorous pope who delighted in embracing old friends, a man aware of his own limitations.21
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AMONG THE GOVERNMENTS PLEASED by the pope’s attempts to bring the Papal States into the modern world, few were as enthusiastic as Britain’s. In early November, in an effort to encourage the pope on his reform path, the British government sent a special emissary, Lord Minto, the sixty-five-year-old father-in-law of Britain’s prime minister.22
As his British guest entered, on November 8, the pope stood up and met him in the middle of the room before inviting him to sit down at his table to talk. It would be the first of several conversations. “The Pope’s manner is most agreeable,” wrote Minto in his diary, “his conversation easy and unrestrained, sometimes almost playful.” Minto was impressed: “I never talked with any one who more completely invited familiar and unreserved communication, and inspired confidence and esteem.”
As the British lord got to know Pius better and spent more time in Rome, he held to his belief in the pope’s goodness, but he also began to appreciate the difficult position in which he found himself. Neither Pius nor his secretary of state, noted Minto, was well versed in public affairs. “The ignorance of every thing beyond the walls of Rome,” he observed, “is almost incredible and they are therefore open to every species of intrigue.” While the pope’s manner inspired confidence, he added, “I doubt…if he is not wanting a little in the firmness which the present circumstances of his position require, and his fear of offending the Jesuits and others who are already his bitter enemies leads him occasionally to risk the loss of his friends and supporters.”23
Here Minto shared the widespread belief that the Jesuits exercised a pernicious influence on the pope. The religious order had long been accused of meddling in politics to advance their reactionary ends. The French government had initially sent Rossi to Rome, in 1845, to protest the Jesuits’ reappearance in France. In the first year of Pius IX’s reign, anti-Jesuit feeling got a boost with the publication of a five-volume work by Vincenzo Gioberti, a priest and one of the intellectual leaders of the movement to unify and modernize Italy. His 1843 book, On the Moral and Civil Primacy of Italians, calling for a confederation of Italian states presided over by the pope, became one of the most influential texts of the Italian unification movement. At the same time, Gioberti identified the Jesuits as Italy’s greatest enemies. His 1846 book, The Modern Jesuit, continued his merciless attack on the order, portraying it as the source of all evil, part of an unholy alliance with Austria. “If I had to choose,” Father Gioberti wrote in an 1847 letter, “between chasing out the Austrians and banishing the Jesuits, I would rather do the latter, because without the Jesuits the Austrians can do little harm and would not last long.”24
It was in November, too, that the Consultative Council, the pope’s concession to the principle of lay government, first met. Although its members were laymen from the upper classes, the pope named a prelate to be its president. That man, Cardinal Giacomo Antonelli, would come to play a fateful role in Pius’s papacy.
Although a cardinal, Antonelli was not a priest, for he had never been ordained and so could neither say mass nor take confession. Nor was he an aristocrat like most of the upper clergy. He came from a family of peasant origins that lived in the southern provinces of the Papal States. The Antonellis had grown wealthy, first by acting as agents for large landowners and then as merchants selling animals and agricultural goods. Although as a youth Giacomo showed no penchant for the religious life, his father saw advantages to having a younger son in the church and was willing to pay the fifteen hundred scudi per year required to have his son enter the prelature.
Giacomo’s career got an early boost thanks to his older brother, whose wife’s uncle was a cardinal, but his rapid rise through the papal government was largely thanks to his own talents. Among clergymen notorious for their administrative and financial ineptitude, he stood out as someone who knew how to get things done. He had absolutely no interest in religious questions, but when the conversation turned to financial matters, he became animated, full of enthusiasm for his work in putting the accounts of the Papal States in order. When Pope Gregory died in 1846, the forty-year-old Antonelli was already treasurer general of the Papal States. It was the following year that Pius, grateful to him for helping sort out the disastrous finances of his realm, made him a cardinal.25
Although Antonelli was successful, he was far from popular. One foreign observer likened the thin five-foot-nine-inch prelate, with his long yellow-complexioned face, to a bird of prey. “Cesare Borgia and Machiavelli,” he wrote, “are united in his disturbing, diabolical person.” His legs, observed a journalist, “are mere spindle shafts….His eyes, of a jet black, express intelligence and decision….The lips are very large….A range of large white teeth is at each instant disclosed, which taken in unison with the expression of the eye, does not render the general effect one of overflowing benevolence.”26 Father Pietro Pirri, a prominent church historian, described Antonelli as “cold and calculating, not one to harbor illusions or infatuations.” Nor did the other cardinals, put off by his low social origins, warm up to him. Although Antonelli would soon orchestrate the pope’s dealings with the world’s great powers, he himself had barely ever set foot outside the Papal States.
Giacomo Antonelli
The cardinal’s personality could not have been more different from the pope’s. While Pius was emotional, quick to pour his heart out, and often overcome with doubts about whose advice to take, Antonelli had great self-assurance. And while the pope was incorruptible, rumors swirled both about Antonelli’s efforts to enrich his family and his clandestine liaisons with women. A popular anecdote recounted how the pope once lit up a cigarette and then offered one to Antonelli.
“You know, Holiness, that I do not have that vice,” Antonelli told him.
“You know, Eminence,” replied the pope, “that if it were a vice, you would have it.”27
On November 15, the pope welcomed the twenty-four newly selected members of the Consultative Council to the Quirinal Palace for their opening session. Four of the men had been chosen from Rome, two from Bologna, and one each from the other provinces. Following the pope’s remarks, the deputies lined up to kiss his foot and receive his blessing. They then climbed into their carriages and rode to the Vatican for a mass in St. Peter’s Basilica. It would take two hours for the carriages to travel the short distance, for the streets, strewn with yellow flowers, and adorned with festive tapestries hung from the windows, were mobbed with well-wishers. Every balcony was packed with spectators, eager to witness the historic event.
Like many of Britain’s upper class, the twenty-seven-year-old Florence Nightingale had come to spend the winter in Rome to enjoy the mild climate and see the sights. Nothing she saw in her time there struck her more strongly than the explosion of joy that greeted the opening of the council. “If we live for 200 years,” she wrote the next day to her father, “we never can see such another, such an occasion in such a place….It is a day taken out of heaven and put down upon earth.” Swept up in the crowd’s enthusiasm, Nightingale thought there “was not the slightest doubt” that the new council would “ultimately become a House of Commons, as powerful, as effective as ours.” Even the sophisticated French ambassador agreed. The day, Rossi observed in his report to Paris, marked “the funeral of the clergy’s political power in Rome. The form will remain, more or less, but the content…will be different. There will still be some cardinals, some prelates employed in the Roman government, but the real power will lie elsewhere.”28
Pius viewed the council differently, seeing it as a way of better learning his people’s needs and getting advice from a body of distinguished subjects. The deputies were to advise him on a wide variety of questions, from legal and financial, to economic and military, but it was to be advice only. He would still make all decisions himself. In his remarks at the council’s first meeting he did his best to get this message across. “Those who would see in the council that I have created the realization of their own utopias and the seed of an institution incompatible with papal sovereignty,” he warned, “are greatly mistaken.” Unfortunately, he added, some people, “having nothing to lose, love disorder and revolt, and abuse any concessions.” Pius’s remarks did not auger well for his relations with the council members. “Clearly,” recalled Marco Minghetti, one of Bologna’s two deputies to the council, “the pope repudiated any semblance of a constitutional government.”29
Although Pius thought that he had matters in hand, this view was not widely shared by the high clergy or by the foreign ambassadors in Rome. Censorship remained in place, but the old controls were breaking down. All kinds of publications were flooding Rome’s streets, expressing hopes for reform and for the end of clerical abuses. In the place of political parties—which were not so much illegal as inconceivable in the Papal States—clubs were springing up. The previous spring a group of young men, enthusiastic about ending priestly rule in Rome and dreaming of a unified Italian nation, founded the Roman Club. Although they elected a young prince as their president, most of their 350 members were lawyers, merchants, small landowners, and the like. The following year another club, the Popular Club, would be founded, having a less elite, more radical cast. Clubs like these, headquartered in the cafés where men gathered each night, became the first models of open, popular participation in the papal kingdom.30
