One of the king’s abettors in this matter was Massimo d’Azeglio, whose picaresque career was showing no sign of flagging. In 1845 he abandoned fiction and began his unexpected involvement in politics. Equally unforeseen was the energy he displayed during a surreptitious tour of the Romagna, where he spoke to a number of patriots hoping for an end to papal rule there. On informing Charles Albert of their hopes for Piedmontese assistance, the king replied with doubtful sincerity that, when the time was right, everything he had – even his life – would be dedicated to the Italian cause.
INSURGENT ITALY
Italian conspirators did not enjoy a good reputation. If ‘treacherous’ was the adjective most often applied to the archetypal plotter of the Renaissance, ‘incompetence’ and ‘fiasco’ are appropriate nouns to describe the actions and consequences of many nineteenth-century schemers. Conspirators came in several guises, including the bomb-thrower who missed his target, the youth who achieved nothing except his own death, and the carbonaro, the member of a secret society of masonic inspiration who moved in a shadowy world of passwords, secret cells, police informers and hidden weapons. Their conspiracies tended to have brief lives and dramatic endings: in some cases they were betrayed before anything happened; in others a group of young men reached a southern shore where, after shouting Viva Italia! at an astonished populace, they were arrested and taken before a firing squad, some of them singing as they died an operatic chorus about how wonderful it was to die for one’s country.
Not all conspiracies ended like that. If the plotters happened to be soldiers, they sometimes enjoyed a brief success. In 1820, inspired by the proclamation of a constitution in Spain, carbonari in the Bourbon army, allied with former followers of Murat, joined an uprising outside Naples. Although they persuaded the aged King Ferdinand to grant a constitution, they had little popular support and were soon suppressed by Austrian troops. A similar rising with a similar conclusion occurred the same year in Piedmont. Army officers rebelled, the Spanish constitution was proclaimed, and an Austrian force was called in to restore absolute rule.
Revolutions in other parts of Europe twice heralded rebellions in Italy. In 1820 the catalyst was Spain, but in 1830 it was France, where the July Revolution expelled the most reactionary of all Bourbon rulers. In the following year a spate of insurrections broke out in the Po Valley – in Modena, Parma and Bologna – which as usual the Austrians easily extinguished. None of these or the earlier revolts were inspired by the goal of Italian independence. Nor did they enjoy significant local support or indeed much sympathy from other parts of Italy.
After the failures of 1831, the carbonari began to fade from the revolutionary stage. Their place was occupied by Mazzini, who had been exiled from Italy in 1830 and had gone to live in Marseille. There the young Genoese patriot founded Giovine Italia (Young Italy), a society that later had as many as 50,000 members, becoming in effect the first Italian political party. Mazzini’s organization had the advantage over the carbonari of possessing a clear programme whose objectives for Italy included democracy, unification and, ideally, a republic, though this last was not essential and could be jettisoned if a decent monarchical candidate emerged. Politics, however, were only a part of Mazzini’s campaign. Other ingredients he regarded as crucial for success were education, insurrection and violence.†
From France Mazzini began plotting conspiracies, some of which were discovered by the authorities at the planning stage. In 1833 he helped organize a plot in Turin which the Piedmontese government quashed with public executions in a repression far harsher than Ferdinand’s in Naples or Austria’s in Lombardy in 1821–3 (when the Austrians had commuted all the death sentences). Mazzini was among those condemned to death in absentia. The following year another of his coups failed in Genoa, which resulted in a death sentence for another young revolutionary, Giuseppe Garibaldi, who fled to South America and did not return to Italy for fourteen years.
After the failed coups in Piedmont, Mazzini was expelled from France and took refuge in Switzerland, where he set up Young Europe, an organization that promoted self-determination, freedom for the oppressed and a Europe of cooperating nation-states. In 1837, after another expulsion, he emigrated to England, where he spent most of the rest of his life, safe from the threat of eviction. In London he lived frugally and alone, seeming to survive on coffee, working obsessively into the night, tirelessly writing letters, articles and propaganda. He liked the English, and they liked him, regarding this rather mournful man, with his gaunt face and large eyes, as the romantic figure he undoubtedly was, an aspiring liberator dedicated to his cause.
A united Italy was achieved in Mazzini’s lifetime not by his team but by opponents of theirs led by Cavour, who had not believed in unification until just before it happened. Subsequently the winners wrote the history, or most of it, and they edited Mazzini out of the glory, maligning him personally and denying his contribution to the great epic of unity. For them Mazzini was simply a terrorist and a revolutionary, an enemy of Italy, although actually he was in many ways an admirable person, a generous and uncorrupt individual, an internationalist rather than a chauvinist, a man who condemned the death penalty and held progressive views on women’s rights and social justice. Undeniably he possessed an unfeeling and unappealing side, for he schemed from the safety of London to send young idealists on fatal expeditions in Italy because, as he all too bluntly put it, ‘ideas ripen quickly when they are nourished by the blood of martyrs’. He was sure that Italians had to fight and be killed in order to win their nation: it was ‘better to act and fail than do absolutely nothing’.7
These sentiments were shared by two followers of Mazzini from Venice, the brothers Bandiera, who in 1844 embarked upon the most foolish, futile and unorganized insurrection of all. They were officers in the Austrian navy (in which their father was a vice-admiral) but also anti-Habsburg plotters who, on becoming aware they were under suspicion, managed to evade arrest and flee to the Ionian Islands. There they learned that a revolt had broken out in Calabria and decided to assist it, prompting their mother to track them down in Corfu and tell them they were madmen. ‘What kind of foolishness is yours,’ she asked her elder son, ‘on a mere frenzied impulse to cast aside your parents, your wife, your rank, name and family, for the sake of nothing at all?’8
Ignoring their wretched mother, the Bandieras set off with a handful of companions and in midsummer landed on the coast of Calabria, where they kissed the sand and were surprised to find the weather too hot to march about in the daytime. Disappointingly, they attracted no local support and soon discovered that the revolt they had read about in the newspapers had been a small one extinguished some weeks earlier. Eventually they took refuge in an inn, where they were caught off-guard by local militiamen, who captured them and carried them off for trial in Cosenza. The brothers’ subsequent executions – and those of seven of their companions – were blamed on Mazzini, whose exhortations incited many such escapades but who on this occasion had discouraged the expedition. Yet predictably the London plotter found consolation in their ‘martyrdom’. It did not matter, he wrote, that the Bandieras had not succeeded because they were ‘apostles’ and ‘martyrs’: ‘the Appeal of Martyrdom is brother to the Angel of Victory.’9
1848 was the year of European revolutions and the year of the fall of Prince Metternich, who a year before had made his celebrated description of Italy as ‘a geographical expression’. Yet this time it was Italy that set the continental pace, ahead of Orleanist France, the German Confederation and the Habsburg Empire. A popular uprising broke out in Sicily in early January and forced Ferdinand II to grant his kingdom a constitution three weeks later. Within two months, constitutions had also been proclaimed in Tuscany, Piedmont and Rome, and further insurrections had erupted in Venice, Milan, Parma and Modena.
In Italy these outbursts had a multiplicity of causes, motives and objectives. They were not coordinated and they were seldom inspired by similar grievances or even simi
lar ideologies. The Sicilian revolt owed little to Mazzini: it was a popular movement driven by hostility to the government in Naples and supported by local aristocrats who wanted autonomy for their island. Encouraged by its early success to aim for detachment from the Bourbons, the new parliament soon declared Sicilian independence. Yet only a small number of islanders were eager to exchange the partnership with Naples for membership of an Italian federation.
The citizens of some Italian states had little desire to change their rulers. A constitution in Rome seemed merely a logical step after the 1846 election of a charismatic and apparently liberal pope, Pius IX, who had relaxed censorship and declared an amnesty, and who seemed to be demonstrating that Gioberti’s programme might have a future after all. In Tuscany there was equally scant zeal to change the regime except in that most untypical Tuscan town, the port of Livorno. There was little patriotic inclination to rise against Grand Duke Leopold II, a moderate and enlightened leader who had encouraged an Italian customs union and was even prepared to join a federation of Italian princes.
The most Mazzinian insurrection took place in Milan, where the populace rose in March and, after five days of street-fighting, forced the Austrian commander, Marshal Radetzky, to withdraw his troops from the city. The revolt spread to other Lombard towns, which were all captured by revolutionary insurgents except for the fortress city of Mantua, and also to the countryside among peasants distressed by the recent agricultural crisis and the consequent fall in living standards. Yet in Milan’s sister capital of Venice, where Mazzini had found it difficult to recruit members for Young Italy, Italian nationalist fervour was almost non-existent. When Venetians rose in March, they did so not as aspirant Italians but as Venetian patriots eager to regain their independence fifty years after Bonaparte had destroyed it. Almost alone among Italians, they were proud of their pre-napoleonic past and wished to return to it. After forcing the Austrian garrison into an unexpectedly rapid surrender, they set up their own government and, to great enthusiasm, proclaimed the restoration of their republic.
In any Italian conflict with Austria the protagonist had to be Piedmont, a state with a strong army and a long military tradition. Seizing his opportunity to take control of the situation, King Charles Albert thus moved quickly to support the Milanese insurgents, and in late March he declared war on the Austrian Empire. His troops then advanced and won a number of small engagements, while his government set out to annex Parma and Modena, whose ducal rulers had fled. The patriotic cause in the north rapidly acquired so much momentum that even the pope and the king in Naples dispatched forces in support. Much has been made of popular participation in the struggle, of the thousands of volunteers joining up, of the titled lady who raised her own battalion, of the city women who fought on the barricades in Brescia and Milan. Yet the great majority of volunteers came not from the south or the countryside but from the educated middle classes of the north. In any case, there were not very many even of these. Azeglio observed that an Italian population of 25 million could muster fewer than 50,000 volunteers – an unimpressive figure for a struggle of national liberation.
Things began to go wrong when the pope decided they were going too quickly. Azeglio, who had written an excoriating criticism of the previous pope, was now such an admirer of Pius IX that at the age of forty-nine he volunteered as a staff officer in the papal army marching north under the command of General Durando. Pius intended his troops to play a defensive role, stationed on the northern borders of his dominions to deter an Austrian attack, but Durando and his staff officer were set on a more ambitious strategy. Placed in charge of the army’s proclamations, which were published in the press, Azeglio tried to push Pius into pursuing an aggressive war of independence in alliance with Piedmont. Thus he told the world that the pope would fight a crusade for God and Italy and would, together with Charles Albert, expel the Austrians from the peninsula. This proclamation inflamed the pope who, when forced to choose between his mildly patriotic feelings for Italy and his international obligations as leader of the Catholic Church, found no difficulty in selecting the latter. In late April, in a document known as the Allocution, he therefore declared that he had been misrepresented, that fighting a war against Catholic Austria was far from his thoughts and that, even if Italy were one day united, he never wished to be its president. By then, however, Durando had crossed without orders into Habsburg territory and was now in Venetia, where Austria twice defeated his troops: in the second battle, outside Vicenza, Azeglio received a bullet in his knee, an injury that caused him trouble for many years to come.
After their early victories in the spring, the Piedmontese had been busy organizing plebiscites, persuading voters in Milan, Parma and Modena to vote for annexation to their kingdom. The task was not a difficult one because everybody knew that getting military assistance from the Piedmontese against Austria was dependent on an affirmative vote. Even Venice, which had no desire to be annexed, submitted as approaching Habsburg armies began the reconquest of the terraferma. Yet Piedmont’s behaviour antagonized many people. King Ferdinand II quickly withdrew his Neapolitan force when he realized that Turin was aiming for expansion. Carlo Cattaneo, a leader of the revolution in Milan, concluded sadly that his Lombard suspicion of Piedmont had proved to be accurate. And in England Queen Victoria wrote a cross letter to her foreign secretary, Lord Palmerston: ‘Why Charles Albert ought to get any additional territory, the Queen cannot in the least see.’10
Unfortunately for the Piedmontese king, annexation was quickly followed by military defeat. At the head of his army, Charles Albert was beaten in July by Radetzky’s Austrians at Custoza near Verona, a small reverse which he turned into a big one by retreating all the way to Milan in case the Lombards exploited his discomfiture by proclaiming a republic. Although he had promised to defend the city, he decided to discard his pledge as soon as he reached Lombardy. Then, abandoning his newly acquired territories, he accepted an armistice with Austria and publicly put the blame for his defeat on the Milanese. The Venetians refused to accept the armistice and carried on fighting.
Revolution was also defeated in the south. In May Ferdinand was able to dispense with the constitution he had granted in February and turn his attention to Sicily, whose government spurned the offer of autonomy under the Bourbon crown and even invited a surprised Piedmontese prince to become its sovereign. In July Ferdinand invaded the island, bombarding the fortifications of Messina and angering Britain and France so much that they stepped in and forced him to accept an armistice for six months. The Sicilian government failed to take advantage of the respite to prepare a defensive plan or even procure weapons for its soldiers, yet at the same time it rejected a fresh offer from Ferdinand of a separate parliament and a viceroy. The combination of arrogance and incompetence led, predictably, to a swift and humiliating collapse. Neapolitan forces recaptured Palermo without a fight.
In other parts of Italy revolutionary sentiment was still alive. Pope Pius found it so strong in Rome that in November, following the assassination of his chief minister, he fled in disguise across the Neapolitan border to the fortress port of Gaeta. In Tuscany Grand Duke Leopold stayed longer, presiding nervously over an increasingly radical government until February 1849, when, with the assembly in newly constitutional Florence debating the possibility of his removal, he also left for Gaeta.
The following month, the Piedmontese government returned to the offensive, repudiating the armistice and ordering its army to attack the Austrians. The campaign was short and catastrophic: the commander-in-chief never received the government’s order to attack, and his army was routed by the formidable Radetzky. On the day of the defeat the king abdicated and commenced a sorrowful journey to Portuguese exile and death. Although the Piedmontese had again been the aggressors, Austria was again generous with its armistice, demanding little beyond a modest indemnity. In the same period its troops captured the city of Brescia, which had risen in support of Piedmont, and shortly afterwards brought the
grand duke back to Tuscany. Such an outcome was naturally humiliating for Piedmont, which had fought two embarrassingly inept campaigns. Especially galling for the monarchy in Turin was the knowledge that, while a royalist army had twice been defeated by an octogenarian field marshal, the republican revolutions in Venice and Rome were still being defended with valour.
The Venetian president, Daniele Manin, was not a romantic hero of the type that Risorgimento propaganda liked to extol. A middle-aged lawyer, he was short and bespectacled, rational and pragmatic, an undashing and even accidental leader of a revolt. Nor were his priorities congenial to later ideologues. He put Venice before Italy, regarding the restoration of the republic as more desirable for Venetians than unification with Piedmont and other parts of Italy. Aware that they had something solid to fight for – a land rather than a set of ideas – the Venetians supported Manin from the initial insurrection at the Arsenale in March 1848 through the establishment of the republic and its military defiance to the last grinding weeks of an inexorable siege. Decimated by cholera, bombarded by the Austrians and abandoned by the Piedmontese, they resisted until August 1849. If they did not quite fulfil their pledge to resist until the last slice of polenta – and watch their city smashed to pieces – we can all be grateful for that.
The Venetians have been largely neglected in nationalist mythology because, however heroically they resisted the Habsburg Empire, they never – either then or later – showed much desire to join the rest of Italy. Besides, the memory of Mazzini and Garibaldi fighting in Rome for a future nation made more inspiring propaganda than the memory of Manin’s efforts to re-establish an ancient republic.
In February 1849, after the pope had fled and refused to come back, a constituent assembly in Rome proclaimed a republic and invited Mazzini, who had been in exile for seventeen years, to join its government, effectively as its leader. During the only three months of his life when he exercised political power, this much-traduced revolutionary proved to be a wise and tolerant statesman. He abolished clerical censorship but did not attack religion; he repealed the death penalty and refused to countenance political repression. Having always insisted that Rome should become the capital of a united Italy, Mazzini briefly had the chance to demonstrate how it might be governed.
The Pursuit of Italy Page 20