Two years later, Cavour suggested to the British that they might like one of his navy’s frigates to help their ‘heroic soldiers’ overcome the Indian Mutiny. This was another bizarre offer – especially as those heroes were fighting at Delhi, Kanpur and Lucknow, all of them more than 500 miles from the sea – and an interesting illustration of the anglophilia of the Risorgimento leaders. Garibaldi too supported the British against the ‘mutineers’ and together with both Cavour and Mazzini he also opposed independence for the Irish. In addition, he flattered the British by comparing them to the ancient Romans and telling them their country was the ‘foremost in human progress, [the] enemy of despotism, the only safe refuge of the exile [and the] friend of the oppressed’, adding theatrically that his sword was ever ready if England should need it. Azeglio was another gusher, judging ‘the organization of English civilization’ to be ‘the finest that man [had] so far managed to evolve’. In return, the English loved Garibaldi, admired Azeglio and both liked and respected Mazzini. Those who had to deal with Cavour appreciated his abilities but found him untrustworthy and unscrupulous: in the words of the foreign secretary, Lord John Russell, he was just ‘too French & too tricky’.3
Cavour’s foreign policy of gestures co-existed with a wiser and more practical guidance of internal matters. The 1850s were the great decade of Piedmontese history, a time when tariffs went down, prosperity went up, railways multiplied and the textile industry became competitive. Much of this was owed to Cavour, who understood business and the economy. So was a healthy gust of liberalism. Piedmont became a freer and more relaxed place in which even Mazzini’s works could be found in bookshops (though not Mazzini himself, who was back in exile in England). Censorship was not, however, abolished, and anomalies survived. The Sicilian setting of Verdi’s I vespri siciliani, an opera which had had its première in Paris, needed to be changed to Portugal before it could be performed in Turin. Doubtless its subject matter was deemed too exciting for patriots absorbed by the possibilities of a Franco-Piedmontese alliance. The resulting Giovanna de Guzman appalled the critic of the Gazzetta Piemontese, who ridiculed the drama, a bad translation of a French libretto so poor that Verdi had even tried to cancel his contract with the Paris Opéra.4
The improvement in Piedmont’s image led to a striking reversal of roles. Instead of Piedmontese dissidents scurrying across the border to the freer cities of Florence or Milan, Turin now attracted patriots from Lombardy, Venetia and the duchies of the Po Valley. Azeglio had welcomed thousands of immigrants on condition they renounced politics, and the state had benefited as a result; Piedmont received a new intelligentsia and became more Italian in its outlook. This hospitality was not, however, extended to Garibaldi until 1854; Mazzini remained out in the cold for ever.
Most patriot exiles came to believe that Italian independence could be achieved only under the Savoyard banner, and other options were gradually disregarded. Gioberti’s hope of a federation under the pope was extinguished by political repression in Rome, while Mazzini discredited his own cause with a further series of futile plots and hopeless expeditions. Many republican supporters, who found their leader increasingly unrealistic and inflexible, moved over to the Piedmontese camp. Garibaldi was one of those who understood that in any war of independence Piedmont and its army would be essential. On refusing to become the leader of a Mazzinian insurrection, he explained that he would ‘not risk making Italians a laughing stock by supporting an utterly useless rebellion’.5
Another convert was Daniele Manin who by 1856 was prepared to abandon republicanism and accept conditionally the House of Savoy as the monarchy of Italy. In a declaration in the London Times, he clarified his conditions.
Convinced that above all Italy must be made, that this is the first and most important question, we say to the Monarchy of Savoy: ‘Make Italy and we are with you. – If not, not.’
And to the constitutionalists we say: ‘Think about making Italy and not of enlarging Piedmont; be Italians and not municipalists, and we are with you. – If not, not.’6
Manin died the following year, but these late ideas of his inspired the new National Society, an organization dedicated to the goal of Italian independence. Garibaldi joined it and brought a number of Mazzinians with him, but the society never generated much popular enthusiasm. In fact it ended up as little more than a tool for Cavour and a propagandist for Piedmont. During the conflicts of 1859–60 it promised to organize insurrections in various parts of Italy, but these never quite came off. Its members were incapable of grasping how few people really shared their aspirations.
LOMBARDY AND THE DUCHIES 1859
The great international hope of the Italian patriots was Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, Emperor of the French. Known as Napoleon III (though Napoleon II, like the boy Louis XVII, had never been crowned), his credentials were promising. His paternal uncle (Napoleon) had been King of Italy, his maternal uncle (Eugène) had been Viceroy of Italy, and he himself had spent childhood winters in Rome, where his mother had taken her sons after separating from their father, the former King of Holland. Italy thus became a second homeland to him. As a youth he considered himself an Italian patriot, planning an insane plot in Rome in 1830 and participating a year later in insurrections further north. Thereafter he turned his conspiratorial attentions to France, where, following a couple of farcical attempted coups, he became President of the Second Republic and four years later, in 1852, Emperor of the French. Although in 1848 France had for once stayed out of a conflict in Lombardy, the prospect of one day fighting on the soil of the first napoleonic triumphs remained a temptation difficult to discard.
Cavour was desperate for Napoleon’s help, convinced that the emperor was the one sovereign in Europe prepared to assist the project he persistently referred to as ‘the aggrandizement of Piedmont’. Since his fruitless adventure in the Crimea, the prime minister had become increasingly bellicose, talking repeatedly about expelling the Austrians from Italy and marching on Vienna. By the late 1850s, Napoleon was eager to promote the first part of this scheme, though he made various annoying demands of his putative ally. After Felice Orsini, a former Mazzinian, had tried to blow him up in Paris in early 1858, he insisted that Piedmont impose a censorship stricter than Cavour wanted, and as a result a small and harmless republican journal in Genoa was closed down. Earlier he had tried unsuccessfully to persuade the British to expel Mazzini from London although he, who had himself once been a refugee in England plotting conspiracies for the continent, might have felt some empathy with the Italian revolutionary.
Napoleon had a number of motives for bringing a French army back to the plains of northern Italy. One of them may have been atavistic: warfare in the Po Valley between the great Catholic powers of Europe was a tradition going back so far that it seemed almost a normal form of international behaviour. A more important one was national and political. France’s military prestige after Waterloo had not been sufficiently restored by its campaign in the Crimea, and it required a more solid victory on a more traditional battleground to regain pre-eminence in Europe. Such an outcome might bring a further bonus in the shape of territory, in particular Nice and Savoy, which Cavour was prepared to concede if he obtained Lombardy and Venetia. A third motive, also important, was the emperor’s own need for prestige. Determined like his uncle to establish the Bonaparte dynasty among European royalty, he insisted that Victor Emanuel’s young and high-minded daughter Clotilde should marry his middle-aged and dissolute cousin Prince Napoleon. Although not nearly as military or militarist as the first Napoleon, he also felt the need for a little personal gloire to increase his popularity at home. In this particular quest he succeeded, his victories against the Austrians in 1859 and the subsequent peace being celebrated with bonfires across his empire.
Yet there was another, more altruistic motive. Remembering his youth in Italy, he came to share some of the country’s patriotic aspirations, even if he hoped that a future north Italian state would depend on France as
an ally. Unusually for anyone, especially a sovereign, his attempted assassination made him feel more sympathetic to the cause of the aspiring assassin. He tried hard to save Orsini from the guillotine and, when this proved politically impossible – Orsini’s bombs had missed their target but killed eight bystanders – he asked the Italian to appeal to him in a public letter to support the patriotic cause. Thereafter Napoleon was willing to fight for that cause so long as Cavour could make it appear that Austria was the aggressor.
In July 1858 the French emperor and the Piedmontese prime minister met secretly at Plombières, a spa town in Lorraine, where they broadly agreed on how a future Italy might be organized. After their war with Austria they envisaged that the peninsula would have three sizable states: Piedmont, expanded to include Parma, Modena, Lombardy-Venetia and the Romagna; Tuscany, enlarged by the addition of Umbria and the Papal Marches; and the Two Sicilies, where the Bourbons might be removed and replaced by the emperor’s cousin, Lucien Murat, a son of King Joachim. It was not an impossible plan though it was naive to expect the Marches, with few historic links to Tuscany, to submit to Florence on the other side of the Apennines. Apart from Austria, the chief loser in the scheme would be the papacy, which would be deprived of most of its territories, but the pope, as a compensatory gesture, might become president of an Italian confederation.
Yet none of this plan could be implemented if a pretext could not be found for starting a war. And how, wondered Cavour, could you provoke a conflict that your enemy didn’t want while pretending it was you yourself who was reluctant to fight? Another difficulty was that public opinion in France and Piedmont was opposed to a war. There was little enthusiasm even among the patriots of Lombardy, where, after a repressive period in the early 1850s, Austrian rule had become more tolerant under the new viceroy, the Archduke Maximilian, later to be the ill-fated and short-reigned Emperor of Mexico. In England as well people were opposed to the idea of a conflict that was looking increasingly like a simple land-grab. When in January 1859 Victor Emanuel told the parliament in Turin about ‘the cry of anguish’ he was hearing from all over Italy – a phrase inserted at the request of Napoleon – the British were not impressed, suspecting rightly that the cries, if they existed, were extremely muffled. The leading figures of the Whig government that came to power in 1859 – Palmerston, Russell and Gladstone – were indeed supporters of Italian independence: Gladstone found it outrageous that the Austrians, ‘glaringly inferior in refinement’, were arbitrarily ruling ‘a race much more advanced’, while Palmerston, the prime minister, remarked that the Austrians had ‘no business in Italy’ and were ‘a public nuisance there’.7 Yet they did not think Vienna’s occupation of Lombardy merited a European war, and they were concerned that Cavour seemed interested less in Italian freedom than in the expansion of Piedmont.
Alarmed by international opposition, Napoleon lost his nerve and suggested delaying the campaign for a year. Cavour was enraged, especially with the British, whom he accused of egotism and pettiness. When in March the Powers suggested a conference to discuss the situation, he rushed to Paris, harangued the French and threatened as revenge to ally Piedmont with England. He also declared himself ready to start a wider conflagration, to ‘set Europe alight’ to get his own way. One scheme was to encourage an uprising against the Austrians in Hungary, but the 20,000 rifles he sent the rebels by boat up the Danube arrived after the revolt was over.
International pressure persuaded Victor Emanuel and most of his cabinet to accept disarmament, but the prime minister held out until mid-April when France forced him to back down too. Although Cavour’s dreams seemed to have dissolved, they were revived the following week when the Austrians lost their heads and delivered an ultimatum insisting that Piedmont reduce its army and disband its volunteers. On hearing of this blunder, Cavour was so euphoric that, unmusical though he was, he apparently flung open his study window and sang an aria from Il trovatore. In the eyes of a Europe astonished by the Austrian provocation, he had suddenly become the beleaguered statesman rather than the calculating aggressor. Furthermore, the much-desired war could now be fought against an enemy that had forfeited international sympathy and support.
The Habsburg government made a more honourable blunder by waiting three days for its ultimatum to expire and thus missing the chance to capture Turin before the French army arrived. The outcome of the campaign was decided by two battles in Lombardy in June, which ended in victories for France but in which its Italian allies played undistinguished parts. One of them, Magenta, was so sanguinary that it gave its name to the artists’ colour magenta, but little Piedmontese blood helped inspire the name since the army did not arrive at the battlefield until nightfall, after the struggle was over. At the other, Solferino, the sight of wounded soldiers left to die was so horrifying to one Swiss witness that he went home and founded the International Red Cross.
At Solferino the Piedmontese did take part, fighting on the French flank near the village of San Martino. Yet this second contest was also a victory won by Napoleon’s divisions; the Battle of San Martino was at best a draw between Victor Emanuel’s army and a much smaller Habsburg force. For all their country’s martial traditions, the Piedmontese commanders seemed to have no idea how to fight a battle. An artillery barrage and a concerted infantry assault might have compelled the Austrians to retreat. Yet much of the artillery was stationed too far away to be of use, and the infantry brigades, instead of combining in a massed attack, took it in turns to advance, charging with the bayonet and failing to break through.
The poor Piedmontese performance can be partly attributed to Victor Emanuel who, despite his lack of military experience, insisted on his constitutional right to be commander-in-chief. The king possessed courage and exposed himself to the enemy but he demonstrated no qualities relevant to generalship. Officers at the battle found him confused, indecisive and lacking any understanding of the geography of the battlefield. He galloped across the terrain, pursued by his staff, so that his field commanders could not tell where he was when they needed reinforcements. When one of them suggested he position himself on a height so that he could both see the battle and be seen by his troops, he seemed astonished by the idea.8
The Piedmontese could claim success, however, because in the evening the Austrians, after repulsing attacks all day, were obliged to fall back in line with their comrades whom the French had defeated; the villages the Italians had failed to capture in combat were thus occupied as the enemy withdrew, and a mighty victory was soon proclaimed. The battle acquired the status of a sort of Italian Austerlitz and was duly consecrated in textbooks and commemorated on site by a Risorgimento museum and a huge tower with a spiral staircase and frescoes of episodes from the ‘wars of independence’. As in most memorials of the era, Victor Emanuel dominates both the frescoes and the sculptures: one painting depicts him being ushered into the Forum by a Roman legionary, as if he were about to join a pantheon with Caesar and Scipio Africanus. Close by is an ossuary containing on one wall of its nave the names of all Italian soldiers killed in 1859; at the east end their skulls are piled high on shelves above layers of human bones.
A fortnight after the battle, Napoleon suggested a truce and a meeting with his opposite number, the Habsburg Franz Josef. The two emperors met at Villafranca near Verona and, without consulting Victor Emanuel, agreed on the terms of a peace. Austria would retain Venetia; Piedmont would acquire Lombardy except for the fortified towns of Mantua and Peschiera; the Habsburg rulers of Tuscany and Modena would return to the thrones from which they had recently been deposed; and an Italian confederation would be established which would include Austria in its role as a ruler of Italian territory.
After his two victories Napoleon might have carried on the war with the expectation of conquering Venetia. Yet he lacked his uncle’s imperviousness to the sight of casualties and he was sickened by the carnage of Magenta and Solferino. He was also alarmed by signs that Prussia might enter the war on Austria’s side
if the conflict continued. A third factor in his decision was disillusionment with his Piedmontese allies. Led to believe that he would be fighting a war of liberation, he was disappointed to find that the Lombards seemed unanxious to be liberated. He was also disgruntled with the military performance of the Piedmontese. After Solferino he had planned to continue eastwards to the four Austrian fortresses known as the Quadrilateral, and he had allotted the task of capturing the north-western one, Peschiera, to his Italian allies. The Piedmontese should have been well equipped for the job because they had recently bought a siege train from Sweden, but unfortunately they had forgotten to bring it with them on campaign. After Napoleon learned of the oversight and was informed the artillery would not arrive for another three weeks, he decided to end the war.9
The fiasco over the siege train was not the only error for which Cavour, acting as minister for war as well as prime minister, was partly responsible. Perhaps his most egregious mistake was his failure to prevent his unseasoned and incompetent monarch from commanding the army. Other shortcomings were apparent in his handling of supplies and administration. The Piedmontese did not possess enough horses, and those they did have often went lame because there were not enough horseshoes. The army had neither reserves nor enough uniforms nor even proper maps of Lombardy; its soldiers were shod in boots that baked in the summer heat, making them feel they were wearing wooden clogs. At Plombières Cavour had offered Napoleon an army of 100,000 but in the event he could provide only half that number. The Piedmontese had also boasted that the cause would attract 200,000 volunteers, but only a tenth of that figure turned up – and there were not nearly enough weapons even for them. Those 20,000 rifles sent to the Hungarians would have been more useful at home.
The Pursuit of Italy Page 23