The Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean

by John Julius Norwich

  The first moment of open defiance came on 30 December 1847, when the distinguished academic Niccolò Tommaseo gave a lecture. Its ostensible subject was ‘The State of Italian Literature’; in fact, it proved to be a direct attack on the Austrian censorship. At the end he circulated a petition, which was signed by over 600 leading names in Venice and the Veneto. As a further indication of their anger, the Venetians followed the example set a few weeks before by the Milanese and gave up smoking.238 They had always made a point of not applauding the concerts by the Austrian military band in the Piazza; henceforth, at the opening bars, they turned on their heels and left. A week later, Manin followed up with a sixteen-point charter, demanding, inter alia, vastly increased rights for all Italians under Austrian rule, a separate north Italian government answerable to the Emperor alone, and finally the complete abolition of censorship. This, for the imperial authorities, was the last straw. On 18 January 1848 Manin and Tommaseo were arrested and marched to the old prisons next to the Doge’s Palace. Once the Venetians had discovered where they were, crowds collected daily to stand in respect, bareheaded and silent, on the Riva below.

  In early March, to everyone’s surprise, the two were acquitted, but the Austrian chief of police insisted that they should remain in prison. It was a disastrous mistake. The annual Carnival was cancelled, and Manin’s fellow lawyers took over all his work without pay. The Venetians, however, aware that the Austrian army in Venetia–Lombardy under the eighty-one-year-old Marshal Josef Radetzky239 numbered no less than 75,000, still hesitated to take up arms. Then, on 17 March, the postal steamer from Trieste brought the news that Vienna itself was in revolt, that the rebels had triumphed and that, just four days before, the hated Prince Metternich had fled for his life. Overnight, the situation was transformed. As the word spread through the city, an immense crowd flocked to the governor’s residence on the south side of the Piazza shouting ‘Fuori Manin e Tommaseo!’240 The people, it was clear, would no longer be gainsaid.

  The Austrian governor, Count Pàlffy, eventually appeared at the window and protested that even if he had wished to release the prisoners, he had no power to do so. The crowd, led by Manin’s sixteen-year-old son Giorgio, then streamed across the Piazzetta to the prison and began hammering on the doors, which were finally opened. It was typical of Daniele Manin–always a lawyer–that he should have refused to leave the building until he had an official order to do so, an order which Pàlffy, at the urgings of his near-hysterical wife, hastily signed. Only then did he and Tommaseo emerge, to be carried shoulder-high to the governor’s residence. The crowds made as if to break down the doors, but Manin restrained them. ‘Do not forget,’ he told them, ‘that there can be no true liberty, and that liberty cannot last, where there is no order.’ Only when they had calmed down did he allow them to bear him off to his home.

  Metternich’s resignation and flight on 13 March had inspired Italy to action, but had left Austria in chaos. The government was rudderless, the army bewildered and uncertain of its loyalties. Here, unmistakably, was the signal to insurgents and revolutionaries throughout Italy. In Milan, the great insurrection known to all Italians as the cinque giornate–the five days of 18–22 March–drove the Austrians from the city and instituted a republican government. On the last of those days, in Turin, a stirring front-page article appeared in the newspaper Il Risorgimento, written by its editor, Count Camillo Cavour. ‘The supreme hour has sounded,’ he wrote. ‘One way alone is open for the nation, for the government, for the King. War!’

  Two days later, King Charles Albert of Savoy proclaimed from Piedmont his country’s readiness to give full support to Venetia– Lombardy in the forthcoming struggle, together with his own intention personally to lead his army into battle. Unfortunately, although able immediately to mobilise some 70,000 men, Piedmont was hopelessly unprepared for war; in her entire army, we are told, there was not a single map of Lombardy. Unfortunately, too, the King was to prove uninspired as a general–certainly no match for old Radetzky, who had been commanding armies since before Charles Albert was born.

  On the other hand, although the eventual outcome of the hostilities between Austria and Piedmont might have been a foregone conclusion from the military point of view, the King must have been greatly encouraged by the reaction of the other Italian states. Grand Duke Leopold II of Tuscany at once despatched an army composed of both regular troops and volunteers. Rather more surprisingly, there was a similar response from King Ferdinand of Naples, who sent a force of 16,000 under a huge Calabrian general called Guglielmo Pepe. Strategically these contributions probably made little difference; they showed, however, beyond all possible doubt, that the cause was a national, Italian one. As they took their places beside the Piedmontese, Charles Albert’s fellow rulers saw themselves not as allies but as compatriots.

  Daniele Manin alone made no pretence of fighting for Italy; his cause was Venice. A few months before, he might have welcomed the news that arrived on the evening of his release from prison, to the effect that the Emperor had agreed to the principle of constitutional government for Venetia–Lombardy; but such an offer was now too little and too late. He was resolved to settle for nothing less than the expulsion of all Austrians from Venetian territory. On the morning of March 22–a date now commemorated in the name of Venice’s principal shopping street–he and his men occupied the Arsenal without a struggle and commandeered all the arms and ammunition that were stored there. He then led a triumphal procession to the Piazza, where he formally proclaimed a republic, ending his speech with a ringing cry of ‘Viva San Marco!’ It was the first time that the words had been heard in public for over half a century. Pàlffy, meanwhile, had signed a formal act of capitulation, leaving effective power in the hands of ‘the provisional government which is to be formed’ and undertaking that all Austrian troops would be evacuated–without their arms–to Trieste.

  Venice was once more a republic; but it was plain, from its earliest days, that that republic was in mortal danger. The Austrians had retreated, but they were by no means beaten; the revolution, after all, had been confined only to the major towns. Radetzky was still in control of most of the countryside, and after the fall of Vicenza on 10 June the whole of the Venetian terra firma was back in Austrian hands. Venice could not hope to stand alone. And so, on 4 July, the newly-elected Venetian Assembly reluctantly voted for fusion with Piedmont, where Cavour was calling ever more insistently for the unification of Italy. It was a tragic day for Daniele Manin, who at once handed over to an interim ministry and retired from public life. (A few days later he was spotted in the uniform of a private in the Civic Guard, on sentry-go in the Piazzetta.) Meanwhile, 3,000 Piedmontese troops were billeted in the city; for many Venetians, it was almost as bad as having the Austrians back again.

  Each day the Pope shows himself more lacking in any practical sense. Born and brought up in a liberal family, he has been formed in a bad school; a good priest, he has never turned his mind towards matters of government. Warm of heart and weak of intellect, he has allowed himself to be taken and ensnared, since assuming the tiara, in a net from which he no longer knows how to disentangle himself, and if matters follow their natural course, he will be driven out of Rome.

  These prophetic words were written by the Austrian State Chancellor Prince Metternich to his ambassador in Paris in October 1847. Their subject was Giovanni Maria Mastai-Ferretti, the former Bishop of Imola and Archbishop of Spoleto who, the previous year at the age of fifty-four, had been elected Pope Pius IX. By the liberals of Italy and indeed all western Europe, the news of his election had been greeted with excitement and delight. The new pontiff, it seemed, was one of themselves. In his first month of office he amnestied more than 1,000 political prisoners and exiles.241 A few weeks later he was giving garden parties–for both sexes–at the Quirinal. Meanwhile, he actively encouraged plans for railways (anathema to his predecessor, Gregory XVI, who called them chemins d’enfer) and for gas lighting in the streets of Rome.
He established a free–or very nearly free–press. He made a start on tariff reform, introduced laymen into the papal government and abolished the ridiculous law whereby Jews were obliged to listen to a Christian sermon once a week. Mobbed wherever he went, he was the most popular man in Italy.

  But his reputation carried its own dangers. Every political demonstration, from the mildest to the most revolutionary, now claimed his support; his name appeared on a thousand banners, frequently proclaiming causes which he violently opposed. With the outbreak of the revolutions of 1848, his position became more untenable still. ‘Pio Nono! Pio Nono! Pio Nono!’ – the name became a battle-cry, endlessly chanted by one mob after another as it surged through the streets of city after city. When the Pope concluded one speech with the words ‘God bless Italy’, his words were immediately seen as an endorsement of the popular dream of a united Italy, freed forever from Austrian rule. (Pius, it need hardly be said, had no desire to see Italy united; apart from anything else, what then would become of the Papal States?) In short, the Pope now found himself on a runaway train; his only hope was to try to apply the brakes in whatever way he could.

  Already by the end of January of that fateful year, the spate of new constitutions had begun. Ferdinand had given one to Naples on the 29th; in Florence, just a week later, the Grand Duke had offered another. On March 5, after the Paris revolution and the flight of Louis-Philippe, King Charles Albert of Savoy had granted one in Turin. Then on 13 March it had been the turn of Vienna, and Metternich himself had taken to his heels. This was the most important news of all; new hope surged in the breast of every Italian patriot–who, as always, looked to the Vatican for a lead. There was nothing for it: on the 15th, Pope Pius granted a constitution to Rome. It was not exaggeratedly liberal–his Chief Minister, Cardinal Antonelli,242 had seen to that–nor, as things turned out, did it last very long; but it served its purpose. Pius, unwilling as he was to spearhead European revolution, could hardly be seen to be lagging behind.

  On 24 March–the very day that Charles Albert declared war on Austria–General Giovanni Durando led the advance guard of a papal army out of Rome, to protect the northern frontier of the Papal States against any possible Austrian attack. This was conceived as a purely defensive measure, but the warmongers refused to accept it as such. Austria, they claimed, had declared war on Christian Italy. This was therefore a holy war, a Crusade, with the divine purpose of driving the invader from the sacred Italian soil. Pope Pius was predictably furious. Never for a moment would he have condoned such a policy of aggression, least of all against a Catholic nation. It was clearly essential for him to make his position clear once and for all. The result was the so-called Allocution of 29 April 1848. Far from leading the campaign for a united Italy, he declared, he actively opposed it. God-fearing Italians should forget the whole idea of unification and once again pledge their loyalty to their individual princes.

  The Allocution was welcomed by King Ferdinand, who saw it as a perfect excuse to recall the army he had sent north under General Pepe. (Pepe, to his eternal credit, was to disobey him and lead 2,000 of his men to the defence of Venice.) By true Italian patriots up and down the country, on the other hand, the news was received with horror; yet, as things turned out, the cause of unification was almost unaffected. The movement was now so widespread as to be unstoppable. The only real damage done was to the reputation of Pius himself. Until now he had been a hero; henceforth, he was a traitor. Moreover, the Allocution had shown, as perhaps nothing else could have shown, just how powerless the Pope was to influence events. All his fantastic popularity disappeared overnight; now it was his turn to look revolution in the face. For the next seven months he struggled to hold the situation, but when his Chief Minister, Count Pellegrino Rossi, was hacked to death as he was about to enter the Chancellery, he realised that Rome was no longer safe for him. On 24 November, disguised as a simple priest, he slipped secretly out of the Quirinal Palace by a side door and fled to Gaeta, where King Ferdinand gave him a warm welcome.

  At first the Piedmontese army enjoyed a measure of success. All too soon, however, on 24 July, Charles Albert was routed at Custoza, a few miles southwest of Verona. He fell back on Milan, with Radetzky in hot pursuit; and on 4 August he was obliged to ask for an armistice, by the terms of which he and his army withdrew behind their own frontiers. Two days later the Milanese also surrendered, and the indomitable old marshal led his army back into the city.

  The first phase of the war was over, and Austria was plainly the victor. It was not only that she was back in undisputed control of Venetia–Lombardy. Naples had made a separate peace; Rome had capitulated; France, in the person of her Foreign Secretary, the poet Alphonse de Lamartine, had published a republican Manifesto which had made encouraging noises but had offered no active or material help. Less than five months after the proclamation of the new Venetian Republic, the forces of the counter-revolution were triumphant across mainland Italy.

  Venice was not sorry to say goodbye to the Piedmontese, but once again she stood alone. Her only hope was Manin, who now cast aside his private’s uniform and on 13 August was invited by the Assembly to assume dictatorial powers. He declined, on the grounds that he knew nothing of military matters, but he was eventually persuaded to accept the leadership of a triumvirate. Such was his reputation that his two colleagues allowed themselves to fade into the background: Manin was in fact a dictator in all but name. It was under his sole guidance that the Venetian Republic was to fight on throughout the following winter, courageously but with increasing desperation.

  For all the states of Italy, the quarantotto had been a momentous year. Strategically, the situation had changed remarkably little; in most places Austria remained master. Politically, on the other hand, there had been a dramatic shift in popular opinion. When the year began, most patriotic Italians were thinking in terms of getting rid of the Austrian forces of occupation; when it ended, the overriding objective–everywhere except in Venice–was a united Italy. Change was in the air. At last, it seemed, the Italians were on the verge of realising their long-cherished dream. The Risorgimento had begun.

  CHAPTER XXVIII

  Risorgimento

  ‘Italy,’ declared Metternich, ‘is a geographical expression.’ He spoke no more than the truth. Never in all its history had the Italian peninsula constituted a single nation; even in the days of imperial Rome it had been merely a part–and usually quite a small part–of the Roman state. Since the early Middle Ages, however–and perhaps even earlier–the concept of Italian nationhood had existed as a distant ideal: Dante and Petrarch had both dreamed of it, as later had Machiavelli. Geographically and linguistically, it obviously made sense; but the land was so deeply divided against itself, the medieval rifts and rivalries so bitter between city and city, Guelf and Ghibelline, Emperor and Pope, that the nineteenth century was already half-way through its course before unification was seen even as a possibility.

  But then came the quarantotto, and all was changed. The distant dream had suddenly become an attainable objective. Count Camillo Cavour had no good reason to call his newspaper Il Risorgimento–there could be no question of resurgence towards an objective that had never existed before–but the word had a fine ring to it and was soon generally adopted. What was now needed was leadership.

  As 1849 opened, there was only one serious contender on the national level. Venetia-Lombardy was still under Austrian rule. Rome was obviously excluded since, although Pope Pius had been for some weeks in voluntary exile, the problem of the Papacy–and therefore of the Papal States, which effectively divided the peninsula into two–remained unsolved. Naples under the sadly unreconstructed King Bomba was scarcely worth considering, and the other states of Italy were too small and weak to qualify. Piedmont was the obvious choice. Though still smarting from its defeat the previous year, it was energetic, ambitious and steadily increasing in size.243 Its King, Charles Albert, had been on the throne since 1831 and was uncompromisingly anti-Austria
n.

  But Charles Albert, as a reigning monarch, could not give the movement–which was, after all, largely republican–the charismatic personal leadership that it so obviously required. This, in the early years at least, was to be the task of Giuseppe Mazzini. Mazzini had been born in Genoa in 1805, but ten years later the dispensations of the Congress of Vienna had automatically made him a Piedmontese citizen; though he somewhat desultorily studied both medicine and law, from his university days onward he was obsessed by the idea of Italian regeneration–to the point where his subversive activities resulted in a brief sentence of internment, followed in February 1831 by exile in Marseille. Living principally there and in London, he was to remain essentially an exile for the rest of his life.

  It was on his arrival in Marseille that Mazzini founded the movement that he called la giovine Italia–Young Italy. As its name implied, it was directed exclusively at the under-forties, in an attempt to develop their national consciousness; it would be a ‘great Italian national association’, which had as its avowed object the liberation of Italy, by revolution if necessary. It had an immediate success: within two years of its foundation it could boast some 60,000 members. It also ran a periodical–bearing the same name as the society–of which six copies were produced in the first two years: no mean achievement, considering that each number contained some 200 pages, many of them written by Mazzini himself.