Aspromonte sent shock waves through the peninsula. Italy's greatest hero had been shot and crippled by the Italian army, acting on the king's orders, and all because he had had the courage to risk his life in an effort to claim Rome for Italy.
Meanwhile, in the Holy City, the pope tried hard to buck up his supporters' sagging spirits. In February 1864, Odo Russell, Britain's perceptive—if sometimes acerbic—envoy to Rome, reported that Pius was eager for the upcoming Carnival celebrations to be as successful as ever. The partisans of Italian unification responded by calling for a boycott. The Italianissimi, Russell wrote, "won't attend the Carnival and won't dance, whilst the Papalini or neri ["blacks"; the Roman aristocrats devoted to the pope were called the black nobility] dance frantically to show their devotion to the Pope because His Holiness told some old princesses that he wished the faithful to be gay and happy. In consequence we saw this winter at the balls given by the pious Papalini the oldest dowagers attempting to be frolicsome, and old Princess Borghese, who has scarcely been able to walk for the last half century, hobbled through a quadrille with Field Marshal Duke Saldanha who had not danced since the Congress of Vienna, and all this in the name of religion!"2
Desperate to get the French troops out of Rome—their presence in the middle of the peninsula an affront to Italian nationalist sentiment—the Italian government came up with a proposal that it hoped would take care of the problem, at least in the short run. The resulting agreement, signed on September 15, 1864, and subsequently dubbed the Convention of September, called for all the French troops to leave Rome within two years. In exchange, the Italian government made two major concessions. It agreed to transfer its capital from Turin to Florence—a move that in fact did take place the following year—thus apparently renouncing the nationalist dream of making Rome Italy's capital. 3 And it promised not only not to attack papal territory, but to prevent anyone else from threatening it. Napoleon III insisted on this pledge, for he had to convince the conservative French Catholics that, in withdrawing the French troops, he was not abandoning the pope.
The Italian government and the king clearly made the agreement in bad faith. If they could get the French troops out of Rome, they thought, they would eventually find some pretext to annex it.4
In all matters involving relations with other states, the pope relied heavily on his secretary of state, the powerful and controversial Giacomo Antonelli. Something of a lady's man despite being rather ugly, Antonelli was as arrogant and severe with his underlings as he was solicitous and charming with foreign diplomats and aristocratic visitors. One of Pius's biographers, Adolph Mundt, described him in typically unflattering terms: "Antonelli is a tall, thin man who wears on his dark, yellowish face, a savage expression but one that is, at the same time, demonically astute. His long head resting on his shoulders brings to mind that of a bird of prey." Antonelli's biographer, the American Frank Coppa, while painting a much more positive picture, stresses his lack of friends, his relentless self-control, and his insistence on formality, having even his parents and brothers address him as "Monsignor" and preferring them to refer to him as "His Eminence."5
Returning from a trip to London just after the Convention of September was signed, Odo Russell was surprised to find that Antonelli and others of the Curia remained optimistic about the future. The cardinals, wrote the British envoy, "laugh in anybody's face who mentions the departure of the French troops from Rome." When Russell reminded the prelates that they had, a few years earlier, been similarly convinced that the Austrians would never leave Lombardy, nor that Victor Emmanuel would ever dare seize any of the Papal States, they stood their ground. Napoleon III, they insisted, could never leave the pope "in a helpless condition to the Piedmontese and the tender mercies of his subjects, the Catholics of France and of the whole world will not stand it."6
Antonelli, it turned out, had some reason for his optimism, as Russell discovered a week later when he again met the secretary of state. As was often his custom, Antonelli took the British envoy by his arm for a walk as they chatted. The French emperor, Antonelli told him, had recently conveyed a message through the papal nuncio in Paris.
"Tell the Pope," Napoleon had said, "to be calm, to trust in me and to judge me by my deeds and not by my words."
From this conversation and from other sources in Paris, Antonelli assured Russell, "it has become evident that the Convention of 15 September has several meanings, one put upon it at Turin and the other at Paris publicly and officially, whilst a third interpretation, and the only correct one, exists in the Emperor Napoleon's mind. Much as I have thought about it, I know not what His Majesty's ultimate plans may be.... But one thing becomes clearer than it ever was before to my mind, namely that he does not intend Italy to unite."
Russell remained skeptical. Was it really the French emperor's intention to see the new Italian state dismantled?
Antonelli tried to explain: "First of all the Convention contains in itself the destruction of the unity of Italy, for it reserves the Temporal Power to the Pope and deprives Italy of Rome, and Italy can never be a united nation without Rome. Secondly, the Convention declares Florence to be the future capital of Italy, that is, it forms the great political center of Italy in the north. Now the North did not require any other capital than Turin while it waited for Rome. The danger to unity is in the south."7 Had Naples been declared the capital, Antonelli explained, the South might have been placated. But by making Florence the new capital, he argued, "the Convention leaves the South free to fall off, separate and constitute a southern Kingdom." Clearly, said Antonelli, "Napoleon imposed Florence on the Italians as their capital so that Naples might be free to act for herself and Italy become a Confederation divided into three, namely a northern and southern Kingdom and the Holy See in the center." To make the plan palatable to Victor Emmanuel, Antonelli added, Napoleon was willing to allow a Savoyard prince, perhaps even one of the king's own sons, to become king of Naples.
Antonelli then surveyed the hazards ahead. Napoleon's true intentions, he admitted, could not fully be known. But whatever Napoleon had in mind, the pope would pursue the same path, for he could follow no other. He would denounce those who sought to take the papal lands from him, and he would insist on the return of the Papal States.
"In the coming struggle, we may be beaten and submerged," said Antonelli. "I am the first to admit that it is possible, nay, I will say even probable, but we will do our duty towards the Holy Church like honest men knowing that when God in his mercy allows these trials to pass His Church will rise again as she has ever done before and her enemies will be dispersed and confounded."
On his way home, Russell ran into Prince Altomonte, a former minister in the court of the deposed king of Naples. Asking the prince what he thought of the new Italian treaty with France, Russell was surprised to hear him parrot Antonelli's view. Napoleon did not want Italy to unite, he said, and the Convention, by securing the pope's temporal rule over Rome and imposing Florence, the capital of northern Italy, on the Italians, had left Naples free to secede as long as its Bourbon throne was occupied by a prince of the House of Savoy."8
Such optimism sprang from another source as well, for tensions in Europe were high, pitting Prussia against Austria and both against France. The one thing that all of these antagonists shared was an opposition to the rise of a strong, united Italy that could compete with them for influence. War seemed imminent, and for those in the Vatican there was reason to believe—or, at least, to hope—that the belligerents would see to it that the Italian kingdom was soon cut down to size.
In mid-January 1865, Antonelli discussed just such a prospect in a conversation with the British envoy. "Like the Pope," Russell reported in his dispatch to London, "Antonelli hopes in a European war to set matters right again in the Holy See!"9
Yet, by the time of Russell's New Year's audience with the pope the following year, he found the pontiff—known for his rapid mood changes—despondent and frustrated.
"How is it," Pius asked him, "that the British can hang two thousand Negroes to put down an uprising in Jamaica, and receive only universal praise for it, while I cannot hang a single man in the Papal States without provoking worldwide condemnation?"
"His Holiness," Russell recounted, "here burst out laughing and repeated his last sentence several times holding up one finger as he alluded to hanging one man, so as to render the idea still more impressive."
This and other aspects of their encounter left the British envoy uneasy. While the seventy-three-year-old pope appeared to be in excellent health, his conversation, Russell reported, "bore the unmistakable signs of the approach of second childhood." The pontiff's ministers feared his growing irritability and were loath to say anything that might upset him. And so, Russell concluded, "notwithstanding the proverbial goodness and benevolence of Pius IX, he seems to inspire them with unreasonable apprehension and inexplicable terror." 10
A few months later the pope was in a better mood, having new reason to believe that a European war would soon lead to the restoration of the Papal States. Fighting had begun in June 1866, pitting Austrian forces against Prussia and Italy. The Italians had joined Prussia in an attempt to seize the disputed lands held by Austria on the northeast of the Italian peninsula. But the war was not going well for them, and on June 24 the Austrians pulverized the Italian army at Custoza, near Verona.
"The war absorbs every other interest," Russell reported from Rome, "and the success of the Austrians at Custoza fills the Papal party with unbounded joy."11
But the cardinals' delight was short-lived, for farther north the Prussians soon overwhelmed Austria's army. And, embarrassingly for the Italian king, while Italy's regular army and navy were both being routed by the Austrians, Garibaldi, again leading his own army of irregulars, was scoring a series of impressive victories against them.
On July 10 Russell chronicled the change of mood: Austria's losses, he wrote, have "destroyed the hopes entertained, but a few days ago, by the Papal Government and the Legitimists in Rome. They had prayed for and hailed the war as their only salvation and had never doubted that Austrian troops would again occupy the lost provinces of the Pope and would re-establish Francis II on the throne of Naples."
"I called again on Cardinal Antonelli this morning," Russell reported, "and found His Eminence looking painfully ill and unusually excited. 'Good God,' he exclaimed and struck his forehead with the palms of his hands, 'what is to become of us?'"12
With the Convention's deadline for the departure of the French troops from Rome rapidly approaching, some of Pius's advisers were urging that he escape from Rome while he could and take refuge in Austria or Spain.
This was the situation in December 1866 as the French flag was taken down from Rome's Sant'Angelo Castle and the last French soldiers boarded their ships in the papal port of Civitavecchia, bound for home.13
With Rome no longer protected by foreign troops, Victor Emmanuel and his ministers found themselves in an awkward position. The nationalist movement had long insisted that Italian unification would be complete only when Rome was made capital of Italy, and the lack of popular support for papal rule inside the city was well known. Yet, in signing the Convention of September, the Italian government had made itself the guarantor of papal rule in Rome, the king's honor at stake.
The trick, from the king's as well as his ministers' point of view, was to find a way to provoke a "spontaneous" revolt in Rome, which they could use as a pretext for sending in troops to restore order. To this end, they were secretly financing a number of subversive groups in the Holy City. Yet this tactic was proving to be not only frustrating but also dangerous. It was frustrating because the Romans, disgruntled though they may have been, seemed none too eager to put their lives at risk by revolting against papal rule. The pope, after all, still had thousands of his own military recruits—almost all foreigners—as well as a disreputable, and greatly feared, force of irregulars that patrolled the streets. But the government's plotting was also dangerous, for plans could easily go wrong. After all, the most likely candidates for the secret subsidies were revolutionaries who would be pleased to see the Italian monarchy fall along with the papacy.
In the government's campaign of deceit and plotting, Garibaldi came to play a central role. In some ways this was odd, for Garibaldi despised dissimulation. Undeterred by the disastrous fate of his march on Rome in 1862, he again deemed the time right for forcing the government's hand by leading his army on Rome. While careful to keep a safe public distance, the king secretly encouraged him, for such an expedition was exactly the excuse that he needed to justify sending in his own troops.
Leaving his island retreat of Caprera, off the Sardinian coast, early in 1867, wearing his trademark red shirt and embroidered cap, the sixty-year-old Garibaldi set off on a European tour to drum up support for his crusade. He put one of his sons in charge of collecting funds from wealthy donors while urging patriotic women to sew red shirts for his men.
In early September, speaking at an international conference in Geneva, Garibaldi called on the Italian state, on taking Rome, to declare the papacy "the most noxious of all sects," to end it, and to replace the Catholic priesthood—an engine of ignorance in his view—"with the priesthood of science and intelligence." 14
Believing, with good reason, that he had the Italian government's tacit approval for his assault, Garibaldi returned to Italy and readied his forces. But early on the morning of September 24, as he was about to cross into papal territory, Italian troops seized him and escorted him back to Caprera, where he was effectively placed under house arrest. Italy's leaders wanted to use Garibaldi's capture to show other governments their good faith in upholding the treaty with France while hoping that Garibaldi's bold call for an uprising would prompt a revolt in Rome. They could then argue that, despite their best efforts, the pope was not safe in Rome and so justify sending their troops into the Holy City.
Yet Rome remained embarrassingly quiet. Its people did not revolt. True to form, Garibaldi soon made a dramatic escape from Caprera, leaving a friend on his terrace dressed in his clothes and walking with crutches to imitate him while he ran the naval blockade of his island in a small boat, his gray beard stained black to help avoid detection. He made his way to Florence, where, given his immense popularity—only increased by his latest exploits—the government dared not arrest him again. Garibaldi prepared his army for the final attack on Rome.
But, in Paris, Napoleon could take no more. Angered by the Italians' double-dealing, he ordered French troops back into the Italian peninsula and, on November 3,1867, they caught up with Garibaldi's irregulars at Mentana, a few miles north of Rome. There the red shirts were routed, 1,600 of them taken prisoner. Although Garibaldi escaped, he was once again arrested by Italian police. Still afraid to put him on trial, the government sent him back to Caprera, where he was kept as a virtual prisoner for the next three years.15
The situation was now anything but stable. French troops were again patrolling Rome's streets. They had been gone less than a year.
In early 1868, Odo Russell described the new mood in Rome. The presence of the French forces, he wrote, "tends to make of Rome a fortified city and of the Pope a military despot." According to the British envoy, "the clerical party who rejoice with great joy in their present turn of fortune and believe in their future triumph, pray devoutly that general European war may soon divide and break up Italy." The pope, Russell reported, had himself become almost giddy at the turn of events.
On March 26 the British envoy had an audience with the pope. With the return of the French troops, along with his own expanded papal army, Pius told him, he now had, in proportion to his population, the largest army in the world. He chuckled at the thought: "If the interests of the Church ever required it," Russell recalled the elderly pontiff telling him, "he would even buckle on a sword, mount a horse, and take command of his army himself like Julius II."16
From the pope's perspective, the si
tuation was now looking better, much better. But Pius was by nature an optimist, a disposition that would be sorely challenged by the events to follow.
2. The Pope Becomes Infallible
THE POPE HAD WATCHED helplessly in 1859–1860 as most of his states were taken from him, but he vowed to hold on to what remained. The enemy, as he saw it, were the forces of the Devil and all those who wittingly or unwittingly did his work. These were the foes of the Church, the pope, and so of God Himself. With the Church besieged, the Lord demanded that His vicar on earth stand firm.
What most drew Pius IX's ire was not the Italian king, nor his ministers, nor even the generals who led the battles against him. What most enraged him were those Catholics who thought it possible to reconcile their religion with such blasphemies of modern times as the belief that church and state should be separate or that the papacy could survive and even flourish without ruling its own land.
The principle that non-Catholics should have the same rights as Catholics was, for the pope, one of the greatest outrages of all. At an audience in 1863, a French cleric asked the pontiff how he could call on the rulers of non-Catholic countries to give Catholics equal rights when he denied such rights to non-Catholics in his own states. For Pius, the question was preposterous. How could God's vicar on earth support the right to preach error and heresy to Catholics? "The pope certainly wants liberty of conscience in Sweden, as he does in Russia, but he does not want it in principle," reported the French visitor. "He wants it as a means provided by Providence to spread the truth in these regions."1 Early the next year, in a letter to Emperor Franz Josef in Vienna, the pope again rejected the suggestion that he offer his subjects religious freedom. "If by equality of rights for all religions," he wrote, "you mean recognizing all religions and treating them equally, this would be the greatest insult imaginable to the one true Catholic religion." The pope explained: "It contains the absurdity of confusing truth with error and light with darkness, thus encouraging the monstrous and horrid principle of religious relativism, which ... inevitably leads to atheism." 2
Prisoner of the Vatican Page 3