The Pope Who Would Be King, page 9
The pope’s mood at the time can be judged by a conversation he had with the man he had recently appointed minister of commerce, Giuseppe Pasolini, a thirty-three-year-old moderate. In his first conversations with the pope, Pasolini recalled, Pius kept returning to his chagrin at his subjects’ lack of appreciation for all the good he had already done for them. “What ingrates!” said the pope. Did people not appreciate how far he had already gone in bending church orthodoxy to please them? Another side to the naturally warm, generous, gregarious pope so beloved by his people had begun to emerge. This sense of indignation would only increase, as would the flashes of ill temper for which he would later become famous.17
* * *
—
ON FEBRUARY 22, DEMONSTRATIONS against King Louis Philippe erupted in Paris. Brought to power in 1830 by a revolt against the conservative reign of Charles X, Louis Philippe had cast himself as a more liberal king. His constitutional monarchy featured an elected assembly dominated by wealthy bourgeoisie. But economic crises, the growth of an industrial proletariat, rising prices for basic food, and the spread of new socialist and utopian ideas ate away at the French king’s popularity. Students organized the first protests. With encouragement from left-wing parliamentary deputies, and helped by sympathy from the National Guard, the demonstrations quickly grew and were joined by large numbers of workers. When initial efforts to quell the protests led to the massacre of scores of protesters, the demonstrations turned into a full-scale revolt. Within days the king fled the country, and a provisional government was formed.18
Pius IX initially saw the French revolt as a personal vindication. Had he followed the cardinals’ advice and rejected reform, he was convinced, he would have suffered the same fate as Louis Philippe. “That is what happens when you try to govern with force rather than with love,” the pope told various visitors over the next month. But Pius was unduly optimistic or perhaps simply obtuse. “As to the poor Pope,” observed the British foreign minister, “events have gone too fast for such a slow sailor as he is.”19
The news from Paris spread panic in Vienna, where the rich rushed to withdraw their money from the banks. On March 13, in the face of large antigovernment demonstrations in Vienna, Prince Metternich resigned. The man who had dominated the continent for so many decades was forced to flee in disguise, heading for refuge in England. Large crowds of protesters filled Vienna’s streets, demanding freedom of press and freedom of conscience. When a student leader, haranguing a crowd of supporters in the courtyard of the government palace, was arrested, his enraged compatriots pushed their way through the outnumbered defenders, smashing windows and wreaking havoc. On the other side of the city, protesters tried to seize the armory but were repulsed by the troops, leaving a trail of dead bodies in the streets.
As night fell in Vienna, demonstrators called on supporters to place candles outside their windows. As windows having no candles were being smashed by rocks, the papal nuncio judged it prudent to place candles on his own windowsills. Two days later, when the emperor agreed to provide the people with a constitution, thousands of demonstrators gathered outside the nuncio’s palace. His initial fear over the crowd’s intentions dissolved when, mixed with shouts of “Long live the emperor!” he heard “Long live Pius IX!”20
* * *
—
THE POPE DECIDED THAT, distasteful as it was to him, he had no choice now but to grant a constitution. Informed of the decision, Cardinal Bofondi, having become secretary of state only two months earlier, told the pope he would serve no longer. He refused to be party, he said, to the dismantling of church authority in Rome.
Needing to find yet another secretary of state, Pius decided to appoint Cardinal Giacomo Antonelli, a man he felt he could trust to stay with him regardless of what the future held. With his fourth secretary of state in less than two years, the pope formed a new government, composed of nine laymen and only three prelates.21
Pius entrusted the task of drafting his constitution entirely to clergymen. While it shared some features with constitutions promulgated in Naples, Turin, and elsewhere in Europe, it was unique in attempting to marry elective government and civil rights with continued theocracy. There would be an upper chamber, whose members would be appointed by the pope, and an elected lower house, or Chamber of Deputies, but there was a third, higher body as well. “The Sacred College of Cardinals, electors of the Supreme Pontiff,” the constitution declared, “is the pope’s indispensable Senate.” And, of course, since not even the cardinals could constrain the pope under the top-down ideology of the Catholic Church, no action could be taken without the pope’s approval.
Pius knew that constitutional government—and the civil rights that accompanied it—were incompatible with the doctrine of divinely ordained rule. Freedoms of speech, of assembly, and of the press went directly against centuries-old church teachings. In crafting his constitution, the pope had done his best to protect the prerogatives of the papacy and of the church hierarchy. But in granting it, he had nourished expectations among his people that their rights would be like those in other constitutional states. In granting a constitution, he was helping to feed a fire that he would not be able to contain.
The announcement of the constitution in mid-March produced a great outpouring of joy. As word spread, thousands filled every inch of vast, sun-drenched Quirinal Square, pleased, no doubt, after months of torrential rain in Rome, to be outside. When, preceded by a cleric bearing a large cross, Pius walked out onto his balcony, the thrill of the huge adulatory crowd was enough to sweep away his doubts, if only briefly. Every roof for as far as he could see was filled with excited spectators.
That night bands played in every corner of Rome and led festive marches through the brightly lit streets. Thousands of voices joined in odes of praise to the pope. Over the following days, more and more Romans appeared on the streets with tricolored Italian ribbons proudly displayed on their jackets. But the signs of the trouble ahead were not hard to see, as shouts of Viva Pio Nono! were increasingly accompanied by cries of “Death to the Austrians!” and “Death to the Jesuits!”22
Again fearing that he was losing control, the pope ordered a new message pasted on the city’s walls. For the first time, he directly raised the possibility of using force against his own people: “Romans, and all those who are children and subjects of the pope, listen one more time to the voice of a father who loves you,” he began. Rome, he reminded them, was the seat of the Church of Jesus Christ. “We invite and urge all of you to respect it, and never to provoke the terrible anathema of an outraged God, who would cast his holy revenge against those who would assault his Anointed ones.” Should the disturbances continue, Pius warned, “we intend to rely on the loyalty of the Civic Guard, and all the forces that we have provided to maintain public order.”23
* * *
—
AS ROMANS WERE CELEBRATING their new constitution, the northeast of Italy—the Kingdom of Lombardy-Veneto, part of the Austrian Empire—erupted in revolt. In Venice, insurgents drove out the Austrian troops and proclaimed the rebirth of the Venetian Republic. The uprising in Milan that month proved bloodier. The milanesi erected barricades and fought in the streets, facing fourteen thousand Austrian troops under the command of eighty-two-year-old General Joseph Radetzky. After five days of urban warfare—soon dubbed the Five Glorious Days—the Austrians retreated, and the rebels announced the formation of a provisional government. With the rest of Lombardy and Veneto also rising up, Radetsky withdrew his troops to a line of forts stretching from Mantua to Verona, midway between Milan and Venice.24
The vast Austrian Empire seemed on the verge of collapse. The first three months of 1848 had shaken Europe’s rulers: to the north, revolt in Vienna had sent Metternich into exile; to the east, the Hungarians were demanding their own representative government; and to the south, not only Venice and Lombardy but Tuscany, too, were in revolt. In France, the monarchy had been overthrown and a republic proclaimed; in Berlin and in the Rhineland, revolution had broken out; in Frankfurt, hundreds of delegates had gathered in assembly to call for universal male suffrage and the unification of the many German states and principalities into a single German nation. Sicily was in open revolt, and King Ferdinand had been forced to grant a constitution for the Kingdom of Naples, as had King Charles Albert in the Kingdom of Sardinia.
News of the uprisings in Milan and Venice electrified Rome. The battle to drive the Austrians out of Italy had begun. People filled the piazzas and jammed the Corso. Church bells pealed, and Castel Sant’Angelo’s cannon boomed. Rioters converged on Palazzo Venezia, home of the Austrian embassy, where they leaned ladders against the massive front door and went to work tearing off the Reichsadler, the coat of arms bearing the image of the Austrian two-headed eagle. Perched atop a ladder, a burly worker with a bushy beard crawled behind it, ax in hand, chopping it free, as his companions below pulled on the chains they had thrown around it. The crest soon came clattering down. People kicked and swore at it. They embraced one another and cried: “A miracle!” “A godsend!” They attached the double-headed eagle to the tail of a donkey and dragged it down the Corso as onlookers jeered and little boys ran alongside, hurling mud. Arriving at the Piazza del Popolo, at the other end of the Corso, the crowd applauded as the revelers placed the Reichsadler on a makeshift funeral pyre, where the ever-present Ciceruacchio helped feed the flames.25
The next day, March 22, Cardinal Antonelli, newly appointed secretary of state, sent a circular to Rome’s entire diplomatic corps, expressing the pope’s “bitterness and indignation” at the violation of the Austrian embassy at the hands of “an insubordinate multitude.” Anarchy, or something close to it, now reigned in the capital of Christendom.26
All Italy seemed to be rising up. With the widespread clamor to drive the Austrians from the peninsula, King Charles Albert, the Sardinian monarch—who ruled over northwestern Italy—saw an opportunity to extend his kingdom to the northeast. He was, after all, the leader of the Italian state with the strongest army, and he shared a long border with Austrian-held Lombardy.
The king was a peculiar man, melancholy, reserved, austere, and ill at ease on social occasions. “There is no reckoning with certainty,” observed the British foreign minister the previous October, “upon the future conduct of a man so unstable in the mind as the King of Sardinia.” Rumors that the monarch spent his free time cutting out paper images of saints and playing with toy soldiers did not help.27
If there was one way for the king to inspire devotion in his subjects, it was to cast himself as military hero of Italian independence and champion in the battle against foreign armies. The time to fulfill Italy’s destiny, he declared, had come. On March 24 he led his troops into Lombardy, aiming, he said, to defend its recent liberation from the foreigners. In doing so, he added, he trusted “in the aid of that God, who is clearly with us, of that God who gave Pius IX to Italy, of that God who in His wisdom has put Italy in a position of creating itself.”28
As Charles Albert moved into Lombardy, invoking the pope to justify his cause, the Romans called for volunteers for an army to be sent north to aid their Italian brethren in expelling the Austrians from Lombardy and Veneto. Nearly forty thousand people flocked into the Colosseum on March 23, where the patriotic Barnabite monk Alessandro Gavazzi harangued them with calls for a “holy crusade,” describing the Austrians as “a thousand times more barbarous than the Muslims.” “Let us carry the cross on our chests,” the monk exhorted them, “just like the Crusaders!”29
King Charles Albert of Sardinia
Succumbing to popular pressure, Pius reluctantly agreed to allow the army and the new corps of volunteers to march north. He appointed Giovanni Durando as their head, giving him instructions to remain just north of Bologna, on the papal side of the border with Lombardy. Before they marched from the city, the soldiers gathered outside the pope’s window, where they received his blessing. As they headed north, they sang a hymn to Pio Nono:
The arms are ready
At Pius’s signal
Sent by God
To save Italy
Viva Pio Nono!
Viva l’Italia!
Viva l’unione!
Libertà!30
In authorizing the army to head north, the pontiff was simply acceding to what he felt powerless to prevent. Painfully aware that his hold on Rome was slipping away, he hurriedly prepared a secret document that offered instructions to the cardinals on holding a conclave in exile, should he die outside the Eternal City.31
The Roman Club, composed largely of professional men, along with some aristocrats, had become a center of anti-Austrian agitation in Rome. The members now sent the pope a plea. “The Italian peoples,” they declared, “are all children of the same family” and should be gathered into a single nation. They urged the pope to summon an all-Italian parliament to meet in Rome under his leadership. “Blessed Father,” they pleaded, “in this time in which all the powers of the earth are failing, in this sublime reordering of European nationalities, only one power survives.” The pope alone represented God on earth. He had the opportunity to add “new splendor to the papacy and to religion…giving back to Rome its moral and civil primacy not only in Italy, but in Europe and the world.”32
Awaiting a new attack from the powerful Austrian army, Milan’s defenders sent Pio Nono their own plea for support. “The great cause of Italian independence, which Your Holiness has blessed,” they wrote, “has triumphed in our city as well….In your Name, Most Blessed Father, we prepare to fight. We have written your Name on our flags and on our barricades.”33
The Sardinian king added his own request, asking Pius to publicly declare his support for the efforts to drive the foreigners from Italy. The pope demurred. “If I could still sign my name as ‘Mastai,’ ” he responded, “I would take a pen, and in a few minutes it would all be done, because I too am an Italian. But I must sign as Pius IX, and this name obliges me to bow down before God and beg for his infinite Divine wisdom to guide me.” Pius’s remarks mirrored a conversation he had had with the Austrian ambassador a year earlier. “As an Italian,” Pius told him, speaking of those clamoring to drive the foreigners from Italy, “I can’t blame them. As sovereign, I desire good neighborly relations with Austria. As pope, I ask God for peace between the nations. But,” he added, “above all I must do my duty.” Torn by the conflict between his feelings as an Italian and his deep sense of duty as pontiff, and between the pleas of the Italian patriots and the calls to his responsibility as pope from so many of the prelates around him, Pius was growing ever more miserable. Worse was yet to come.34
* * *
—
WHILE SOME CLERGYMEN WERE swept up in the patriotic fervor, the Jesuits, the popular symbol of reaction, widely identified with the Austrians, struggled to defend the old order against the movement that, ever since the French Revolution, had threatened to undermine the marriage of church and state. The pope himself had mixed feelings about Jesuits, fed in part by his lack of sympathy for Jan Roothaan, their austere, humorless, Dutch superior general. Aside from the personal contrast between the gregarious, emotional pope, quick to smile and even to joke, and the reserved, methodical, ever prudent Roothaan, Pius was annoyed by the Jesuit leader’s strident opposition to any hint of reform. In all his attempts to move his kingdom into modern times over the past months, he had faced the Jesuits’ hostility. Opponents of the idea of progress, their members drawn disproportionately from the families of the elite, they had become a thorn in his side.35
In February, mobs chased the Jesuits from the two major cities of the island of Sardinia. Similar scenes were soon repeated on the mainland. Rome had remained one of the order’s last refuges, but after earlier resisting the pressure to drive the Jesuits from the capital of Christendom, the pope, in late March, told their superior general he could no longer protect them. Their continued presence in Rome, he feared, would only provoke more public unrest. “The reins of the government,” complained Roothaan, the Jesuit leader, “have fallen into the mud.”36
Although he drew no small pleasure from being hailed from Sicily to the Alps as Italy’s great hero, Pius was well aware that the movement invoking his name was far from religious in inspiration or intent. What could he do? He was not one to spend much time reflecting on history or on questions of political philosophy. He had never had much of an intellectual inclination, and his seminary education—not in any case geared to critical examination of the church’s guiding assumptions—had been limited. It would not occur to him that there was a fundamental incompatibility between his role as spiritual leader and his role as king. For Pius, the pope-king was a position created by God, so such a question could not even be posed. That modern times would undermine rule from on high, that people would no longer be happy being told to leave government to the priests, were questions that he did not think deeply about. He had gone long past the point at which he thought the concessions he’d granted were wise. Fearful that bowing to the latest popular demands would only further undermine the church’s authority, he did his best to hold out against them, but he was fighting a losing battle.
In his defense, Pius confronted a problem his recent predecessors had not. For decades, the Austrian rulers had dominated the Italian Peninsula, serving as the bulwark of the old order, and the main guarantor of papal rule. But now Metternich was in exile, the Austrian army was in retreat in northern Italy, and Austria’s emperor, Ferdinand, was feeble-minded. France, that other great Catholic power, had become a republic, and its sympathy for a state viewed as a client of its archrival, Austria, far from certain. To many it seemed that a new era was dawning in Europe, requiring the church to adapt to the times. Casting the church’s lot with the Austrian Empire—as every pope since the Restoration in 1814 had done—was now not without risk. Pius was out of his depth. Only God, he thought, could save him.
