Prisoner of the Vatican
The Popes, the Kings, and Garibaldi's Rebels in the Struggle to Rule Modern Italy
David I. Kertzer
* * *
The Popes' Secret Plot to Capture Rome from the New Italian State
* * *
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
BOSTON • NEW YORK
2004
* * *
To little Sammy Bear
with hopes for the next generation
* * *
Copyright © 2004 by David I. Kertzer
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
For information about permission to reproduce selections from
this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Company,
215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.
Visit our Web site: www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kertzer, David I., date.
Prisoner of the Vatican : the popes' secret plot to capture
Rome from the new Italian state / David I. Kertzer.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index.
ISBN 0-618-22442-4
1. Pius IX, Pope, 1792–1878. 2. Leo XIII, Pope, 1810–1903. 3. Garibaldi,
Giuseppe, 1807–1882. 4. Roman question. 5. Popes—Temporal
power. 6. Church and state—Italy. 7. Rome (Italy)—Annexation
to Italy, 1870. 8. Rome (Italy)—History—1870–1945. I. Title.
DG798.7.K47 2005 945'.63084—dc22 2004054097
Printed in the United States of America
BOOK DESIGN BY ROBERT OVERHOLTZER
MAPS BY JACQUES CHAZAUD
QUM 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
* * *
Contents
LIST OF MAPS AND ILLUSTRATIONS [>]
PROLOGUE [>]
Introduction: Italy's Birth and Near Demise [>]
1. Destroying the Papal States [>]
2. The Pope Becomes Infallible [>]
3. The Last Days of Papal Rome [>]
4. Conquering the Holy City [>]
5. The Leonine City [>]
6. The Reluctant King [>]
7. Pius IX in Exile Again? [>]
8. The Papal Martyr [>]
9. Anticlericalism in Rome [>]
10. Two Deaths [>]
11. Picking a New Pope [>]
12. Keeping the Bishops in Line [>]
13. The Pope's Body [>]
14. Rumors of a French Conspiracy [>]
15. Preparing for Exile [>]
16. Hopes Dashed [>]
17. The Bishops' Lament [>]
18. Fears of a European War [>]
19. Giordano Bruno's Revenge [>]
20. The Pope's Secret Plan [>]
Epilogue: Italy and the Pope [>]
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS [>]
NOTES [>]
REFERENCES CITED [>]
ILLUSTRATION SOURCES [>]
INDEX [>]
* * *
Maps and Illustrations
MAPS
Italy on the Eve of Unification and Garibaldi's 1860 Expedition • [>]
The Taking of Rome, 1870 • [>]
Rome and the Leonine City, 1870 • [>]
Rome: Pius IX's Funeral Procession, 1881 • [>]
Europe, 1881 • [>]
ILLUSTRATIONS follow [>]
Pius IX with his court, 1850s
Cardinal Antonelli in the 1850s
Giuseppe Garibaldi, 1860
"Saint Giuseppe Garibaldi"
Victor Emmanuel II, proclaimed king of Italy
Cartoon: King Victor Emmanuel II rescues Rome from the grasp of Pope Pius IX
Cartoon: putting the papal tiara on a skeleton
Pius IX engraving, with signature
Cartoon: "The Sickly Temporal Power"
Cartoon: the Vatican Council, 1870
Cartoon: the Vatican Council proclaims papal infallibility
Giovanni Lanza, 1870 Napoleon III, ca. 1870
Giovanni Mazzini, imprisoned at Gaeta, 1870
Ferdinand Gregorovius
General Hermann Kanzler
Porta Pia after Italian troops' assault on Rome
Pius IX with foreign ambassadors as cannons fire on Rome, September 20,1870
General Nino Bixio
Harry von Arnim, Prussian ambassador to the Holy See St. Peter's Square as papal troops leave, September 21,1870
Catholic image: Pius IX prays in a boat in stormy seas
Catholic image: Imprisoned Pius IX, praying to the Madonna
Cartoon: Prime Minister Lanza moves to Rome as the pope is forced out
King Victor Emmanuel II on his deathbed, January 1878
The Pantheon, site of Victor Emmanuel II's funeral, January 1878
Pius IX's body on display in St. Peter's, February 1878
King Umberto I as a young man
Leo XIII at his writing desk, 1878
Cartoon: reconciliation of dead king and pope in heaven
Cartoon: continued strife of new king and pope on earth
Cardinal Mariano Rampolla
Luigi Galimberti, as cardinal
Father Luigi Tosti
Mons. Giacomo Della Chiesa, ca. 1887
Alberto Mario, anticlerical firebrand
Giovanni Bovio
Chancellor Bismarck addressing the German Reichstag
Francesco Crispi as prime minister
Wilhelm II, German emperor
Bismarck and Wilhelm II, October 30,1888
The dedication of the statue to Giordano Bruno, Rome, 1889
* * *
Prologue
THE PRIME MINISTER could no longer deny the obvious: a political disaster was taking place in the streets of Rome. The small, private funeral procession carrying Pius IX's mortal remains to their final resting place was turning out to be neither small nor private. As midnight approached, he learned that 100,000 people had converged on St. Peter's Square, spilling into the surrounding streets. Agostino Depretis, who had come to power five years earlier in the historic victory of the left, had agreed to the late time, thinking that a procession at that hour would attract less public attention. He now saw how wrong he had been. How could he not have realized the potential for pandemonium in the dark? Outside the great basilica of St. Peter's, in the flickering light cast by their torches, stood the massive crowd of rosary-carrying, prayer-chanting devotees of the last pope-king. The prospect that thousands of loyal partisans of Rome's deposed pontifical ruler were about to try to march through the heart of the city made the elderly Depretis shudder.
For years now, the government had banned all Church processions in the Holy City, deeming them a threat to public order, a dangerous provocation to patriotic Italians. Yet, as the midnight bells rang, the coffin containing the pope's body emerged from St. Peter's, leading a procession such as Italy would never see again.
Scores of police surrounded the four official horse-drawn carriages as they began to move out. Two hundred carriages of the wealthiest Catholic faithful formed a line behind them, followed by three thousand candle-bearing marchers chanting Latin and Italian prayers and reciting the rosary. But the solemn mood did not last long. Scores of anticlerics—some screaming angrily, some playfully if maliciously—set upon the marchers and tried to drown out their prayers. Angered by the effrontery of the scabrous anticlerical songs and enraged by the cries of "Long Live the King!," "Long Live Garibaldi!," and "Long Live the Army!," some of the faithful, unable to restrain themselves, took up the defiant cry "Long live the pope!"
As the procession approached the SantAngelo bridge, which links Rome's right bank, home of the Vatican, to the main p
art of the city, on the left, policemen struggled haplessly to keep the anticlerics away from the processioners. Ominously, as the pontiff's body neared the ancient bridge, shouts of "Into the river with the pope!" and "Toss him in the river!" rose from the anticlerical ranks. "It was only through God's extraordinary protection," Turin's Catholic newspaper would later report, "that those venerated bones were not thrown into the Tiber."
The procession moved toward the heart of Rome, where windows displaying glowing lanterns in honor of the defunct pope were smashed by well-aimed stones. Squads of soldiers, held in reserve for just such an eventuality, found themselves unable to make their way to the scenes of violence because the narrow streets were so packed with the devout, the irreverent, and the simply curious. Before long, the anticlericals' rocks began to hit their first human targets, one finding a particularly exalted mark in the face of the nephew of Pius IX's successor, Leo XIII.
For the faithful, the sacrilege could hardly have been greater, and accounts of the outrages en route would fuel Catholics' anger worldwide. This was, after all, a funeral procession for the beloved pope who had reigned longer than any of his predecessors, longer than even St. Peter himself. The stories were horrifying: "Among the assailants," we learn from a typical Catholic report, "was one who, to add some sort of bizarre bravado to their cruel deeds, tore a torch from a pious citizen without warning and then rammed it into the face of a noble maiden who was so engrossed in reciting her prayers that she had been oblivious to the outside world."1
With the violence mounting and multitudinous missiles now raining down on the wagon bearing the pope's body and on the ecclesiastical escort in the carriages behind, the police begged the lead carriages to abandon their funereal pace. Speeding up to a half trot, they finally succeeded in outpacing their assailants and, at 3 A.M., reached their destination, the Church of San Lorenzo. The prayer-chanting processioners, some bloodied, all enraged, were left long behind in streets swarming with police, soldiers, and assorted troublemakers.
It was the morning of June 13,1881, three years after Pius IX's death and almost eleven years after he had become a prisoner of the Vatican.
* * *
Introduction: Italy's Birth and Near Demise
MODERN ITALY, it could be said, was founded over the body of Pope Pius IX. Although Italy had been a geographical label since Roman times, the idea that a distinctive Italian people inhabited the boot-shaped peninsula and its islands was more recent, and the notion that they should have an independent state of their own more recent still. Only with the French Revolution's attack on the principles of absolutism and divinely ordained hierarchy could such an idea gain ground, and only with the rise of nationalism as the political creed of the nineteenth century could "Italy for the Italians" become the new watchword. But creating a sense of common Italian identity among the people of the peninsula was no easy matter. Not only were they not accustomed to being part of the same country, few of them spoke Italian, 97 percent speaking a kaleidoscope of dialects and languages that were in good part mutually unintelligible.
In the aftermath of Napoleon's defeat in 1814, the Italian nationalist movement faced a peninsula that was divided into a patchwork of states and duchies propped up by foreign forces, the Austrian empire foremost among them. But the nationalists were not entirely discouraged, for they knew that autocratic mini-states were vulnerable to the wrath of their subjects from within and to armies from without. Assorted dukes and kings had painfully learned the latter lesson when Napoleon's armies had, not many years earlier, swept through the peninsula and deposed them all. For Italy's nationalists, then, the most daunting obstacle was not the Austrian occupation of northeastern Italy, nor the tottering Bourbon monarchy that ruled all of the South and Sicily, nor the assorted dukes and their duchies. No, there was a far greater power, a far more imposing foe, one that cut the peninsula in two, blocking North from South, its capital the legendary city of Romulus and Remus, the symbol of Italy's ancient greatness.
For more than a thousand years the popes had ruled over these Papal States, a swath of territory that extended from Rome northward through Umbria and the Marches to Ferrara and Bologna. Deposing the duke of Modena or the grandduke of Tuscany, or even driving the Austrians out of Lombardy and Veneto, was one thing. Deposing the pope from his thousand-year earthly reign was something very different, for the pope, though having little in the way of military might, had weapons that no other ruler could ever hope to wield.
What the pope had was the belief—enshrined in official Church dogma and pronounced by parish priests throughout the land—that he ruled over a divinely ordained kingdom as God's representative on earth. The creation of a unified Italian state, the pope insisted—and in this he had centuries of Church teachings to back him up—was contrary to God's wishes. It could only be accomplished by force, and anyone taking part in such an assault would be throwing in his lot with the Devil himself. There could be no place in the Church, or in Heaven above, for such agents of evil.
In some ways, the task that the pope faced in battling the Italian nationalists was nothing new. True, modern nationalism was a recent development. But ever since popes became kings in the early Middle Ages, they had to fend off challenges from civil rulers who sought to reduce their authority, if not to seize their land. In such cases, the pontiffs inevitably cast their battle as a struggle pitting the forces of God against those of the Devil, the forces of darkness against those of light. But rarely did they limit themselves to such otherworldly arguments, recognizing the benefits of marshaling more terrestrial forces to their side as well. If the popes held on to their Italian lands over centuries in which other regimes and other states rose and fell and other borders shifted, it was also because they became masters of playing on the rivalries of Europe's secular rulers.
And here we get to one of the embarrassing facts of Italian unification: it first came about, in 1859–1860, only through the assistance of a foreign army, the French, who helped drive the Austrians from the peninsula. It was completed, with the taking of Rome in 1870, only when Pope Pius IX's former foreign protectors—Europe's two major Catholic powers, the French and the Austrians—decided, for different reasons, to abandon him to his fate. But still the newly unified Italy was a tenuous creature, born not of a mass nationalist movement—for relatively few Italians were involved, or even seemed to care 1—but of a fortunate coincidence of a small nationalist elite, an opportunistic Savoyard monarchy based in Turin in the northwest of the peninsula, a microscopic ragtag army under the command of a popular hero deeply distrusted by the emerging Italian government, and a series of European rivalries that prevented any of the continent's powers from heeding the pope's desperate pleas.
Italians—but also others who learn about Italian history today—are led to believe that the nation was securely established once Rome was taken in 1870. But it is an illusion, the product of a natural tendency to view history backward. In fact, in the first two decades of Rome's new position as capital of Italy, there was no certainty that the end of the Papal States was any less fleeting than it had been several decades earlier, when, in the course of ten years, Napoleon deposed two popes and chased them from Rome. Nor did Catholics have to look back even that far to find grounds for hope; little more than two decades earlier, in 1848, popular revolts had driven Pius IX, then in the first years of his papacy, into exile. Then, too, the usurpers had triumphantly pronounced the permanent end of papal rule. Yet, once again, the pope had shown how fleeting were the victories of the Church's enemies, returning to power behind the French and Austrian armies. Why, loyal Catholics asked, should God's cause not triumph once more? Was He not still on the pope's side?
When, on September 20, 1870, Italian troops finally broke through Rome's walls and claimed the city as part of the new Italian state, Pius proclaimed himself a "prisoner of the Vatican." Denouncing the "usurper" state, he retreated into the Vatican complex and, spurning the government's entreaties, refused to come
out. Confident that God would not long abandon His Church, Pius did all he could to help the divine cause, from excommunicating Italy's founders—the king, his ministers, and his generals—to calling on Europe's Catholic rulers to come once again to his aid. Following the pope's lead, the Catholic press assured its readers that Rome's sacrilegious conquerors would, like their predecessors, soon meet an ignominious end. The Papal States would return.
A dramatic battle unfolded, the drama punctuated by the death of its two protagonists—Pius IX and Victor Emmanuel II—within a month of each other in 1878. Yet, even with a new pope, Leo XIII, and a new king, Umberto I, both dramatically different from their predecessors, the battle continued, the stakes high, the outcome uncertain.
This is the story told in the pages that follow, a story of outrageous accusations, mutual denunciations, terrible fears, and raucous public demonstrations, a chronicle of frenetic diplomacy and secret dealings. While the struggle was partly fought through symbols, ritual, and rhetoric, rocks were hurled along with epithets. War throughout Europe was prophesied, at the end of which, many in the Vatican hoped and believed, Italy would once again be carved up by foreign powers into a series of weak, dependent states and the pope returned to power in Rome. This battle—almost entirely unknown today outside scholarly circles—still leaves a deep mark on the Italian soul. Without understanding this history, there is no way to understand the peculiarities of Italy today.
The protagonists of this fateful conflict live on in statues of granite and marble that dot town squares from Venice and Turin to Naples and Palermo, in elaborate tombs, famous paintings, and obscure popular art. Rome itself is filled with outsized monuments, statues big and small, and a panoply of plaques commemorating the battles of unification. But, oddly, the story that they tell, together with the sanitized accounts found in the textbooks of every Italian schoolchild, has rather little to do with what happened. The actual history is, today, too dangerous, too embarrassing, still too raw for public view. The most basic fact of the creation of modern Italy—that its greatest foe was the pope himself—is one that cannot easily be mentioned, and certainly not to children, whose understanding of how their country was founded contains a hole at its center. The Italian or the foreigner visiting Rome today can scarcely grasp what the battles for Italian unification were about.
Prisoner of the Vatican Page 1