by Mike Rapport
By dawn on 20 March it was clear that the imperial troops were struggling under the horrifying effects of street combat. Hübner, trapped by the fighting since 18 March in a tenement near the cathedral, occasionally peered over the balcony and witnessed the carnage. He saw two Hungarian horsemen cut down by rifle fire and Croatian infantry marching stoically into a hail of musketry. Among the insurgents, ‘no one could be seen: they were men armed with rifles, women armed with stones and jugs of boiling water, hidden behind closed blinds, seeing without being seen themselves. It was this invisible enemy, which seemed to murder rather than fight, which worked on a soldier’s imagination, which upset his nerves and demoralised him.’ The noise was deafening: ‘the infernal racket of shouting voices, the cries of evviva mixed with the irritating chiming of the bells and the maestoso of the great guns of Father Radetzky’. By the third day the shutters of the apartment had been shattered by bullets, while gunsmoke wafted in from the street. Insurgents were on the roof and upper floors, firing down on the Austrians below, while the troops returned fire upwards and stray bullets occasionally tore the air around the terrified residents, all women. For their safety, Hübner gathered them all in an internal room, where they huddled behind a shelter of mattresses (the young Austrian was especially impressed by the sang-froid of a Swiss woman ‘into whose profession I did not pry’, who seemed to be used to the rough side of street life).105
On the Milanese side, witnesses were no less struck by the horrors of the battle. When the insurrection spread to the eastern districts, Cattaneo had himself rowed across a canal to investigate the situation in the district by the Porta Ticinese, which presented a desolate sight. Apart from the barricades, ‘the broad streets were empty and deserted, all the houses were shut up; the explosions from a battery . . . and the ceaseless rumbling of fusillades kept falling into this silence of the dead; a thick smoke cast a dismal pall over everything’. The Austrians had smashed holes through the adjoining walls of apartments, gardens and stables, so that they could advance without exposing themselves to gunfire in the streets. Women and children caught between the two forces huddled together fearfully in the houses, blocking the doors and windows to protect themselves from ricocheting bullets.106
Both sides would later claim that atrocities had been committed. The Milanese were said to have found an Austrian soldier carrying a severed woman’s hand, cut off for the rings on her fingers. Whole families were said to have been trapped and then burned alive by the Habsburg forces. The Austrians, meanwhile, claimed that one of their soldiers had been crucified to a sentry box, while others, captured by the Milanese, had been blinded. The very nature of the fighting means that claims of brutality (if not the grisly details) cannot be dismissed lightly, while the stories themselves - and the readiness with which they were believed - show how inflamed both sides were.107
Ever more insurgents picked up weapons from fallen Austrian soldiers, or by swamping and disarming isolated detachments by sheer force of numbers. The want of munitions grew less acute as, one by one, the Austrian barracks fell.108 Radetzky was forced to abandon his home and take up residence in the castle. He concluded that he could no longer reduce the barricades, since the army would destroy one only to be confronted with another. He withdrew his troops to the walls, from where he would besiege the city. With the fighting now moving towards the periphery, Hübner and the company of women now picked their way through the streets to the safety of the home of a Tyrolean banker. Yet the only way out of Milan for Hübner, as an Austrian diplomat, was to negotiate with the municipality. In doing so, however, he effectively became a prisoner of the insurgents. He was arrested on 21 March and marched through streets fluttering with tricolours and echoing to cries of ‘Long live Italy! Long live Pius IX!’109 Yet the divisions between Milanese monarchists and republicans were already widening. When, that same day, Radetzky sent one of his officers to open negotiations for a truce, Casati hesitated, perhaps seeing in the proposal a chance to buy time for Charles Albert to make his long-awaited commitment to send in his army against the Austrians. Cattaneo, for precisely this reason, refused to entertain any talk of a pause in the fighting.110 The power struggle between liberal monarchists and republicans - a fault-line that would run right through the Italian revolutions of 1848-9 - was already taking shape.
The Milanese, meanwhile, deployed all their ingenuity to break the siege:
To reconnoitre enemy movements on the bastions and outside the city, astronomers and opticians climbed into the observatories and the bell-towers; they sent down bulletins every hour. Instead of wasting time descending staircases . . . they attached their reports to a small ring which they lowered at the end of an iron wire. Cernuschi organised straight away a message system served by the pupils of the orphans’ schools . . . Recognisable by their uniform, they would slip rapidly through the crowds which gathered around the barricades, performing this service with as much intelligence as precision. Soon afterwards, someone thought of releasing small balloons carrying proclamations which would be spread across the countryside. The Croats, encamped on the bastions . . . fired their rifles at the balloons in vain . . . An attempt was made to make wooden cannon, held together by iron rings, which were capable of firing a small number of shots.111
Milan’s novel air-mail service carried appeals to the Lombards to support the insurrection. Some of them drifted into Piedmont while others were blown as far as Switzerland. The call had already been heeded, for the independent-minded peasantry of upper Lombardy had risen and marched into provincial towns like Como and Monza, forcing the small Austrian garrisons there to beat a hasty retreat. Meanwhile, Casati and the moderates received a fillip with the surprise appearance of Count Martini, who had crept into the besieged city. He and d’Adda had spoken with King Charles Albert on 19 March and asked for military aid against Austria. The Piedmontese monarch replied that his army would march provided that Milan’s municipality formally asked him for assistance, since he would need to justify his invasion to the other European powers. Charles Albert also faced a domestic challenge from Piedmontese radicals, who threatened a revolution of their own, unless the King served the cause of Italian unity and sent his army against the Austrians. His primary motive, however, was to satisfy his own dynastic ambition of annexing Lombardy and Venetia, thereby forging a northern Italian kingdom under the Savoyard dynasty. It was therefore also necessary to nip the republican movement in the bud since it would fight for a broader form of Italian unity on a democratic basis. So it was that Martini made his way back to Milan, bearing the King’s message. He stole into the city disguised as a worker delivering salt in the night of 21-2 March.112
After trying in vain to persuade the Milanese leadership to rebut Charles Albert’s offer, Cattaneo yielded to the municipality and agreed to a compromise, whereby the call for assistance was issued in the name of Milan to ‘all the peoples and all the princes of Italy and specifically those of Piedmont, its warlike neighbour’.113 Armed with this appeal, Martini made his way back to Turin. In the early hours of 22 March Casati at last formed a provisional government which unambiguously assumed leadership of the insurrection. Cattaneo immediately recognised it. He also subscribed to the provisional government’s proclamation declaring that political arguments were to be postponed until the fighting was over: ‘After the victory [A causa vinta], it will be for the nation to discuss and pronounce on its own destinies.’ ‘A causa vinta’ was Cattaneo’s great concession: it was, he said, ‘the only order which could delay the explosion of political passions’.114
Yet time was on the side of the monarchists, for it would not be long before the Piedmontese army would arrive and tip the political balance decisively in their favour. Not for the last time, an Italian republican had surrendered a chance of taking power. Why Cattaneo should have done so is an intriguing question. He himself later said that it was because the republicans were ready to shelve their sectional interests and their dogma for the sake of the wider stru
ggle for independence.115 It is almost certainly true that Cattaneo wanted to avoid civil war at all costs, and it seems he realised that the republican movement was in a minority against the monarchists. However, he may well have underestimated the amount of support and prestige that the radicals now enjoyed: the insurrection had popularised the republican movement, while there was even some evidence of republican sentiment in the small towns and villages of the surrounding countryside. Yet it was not easy to forge these inchoate sympathies into the hard steel of a single revolutionary movement. In the rural areas the handful of radical leaders could not prevail against the dominant, conservative influence of landlords and priests who supported the monarchists. In Milan itself, ‘a causa vinta’ allowed the provisional government to establish itself and reap the political fruits of the victory over the Austrians.116
That victory was assured when the Milanese made a determined effort against the Porta Tosa in a day-long battle on 22 March. It was at the Tosa that the Austrian-held bastions came closest to the heart of the city, and Milanese army officers advised strongly that it was here that the enemy should be driven back. The idea was not only to secure the city centre but to open the gate to the Lombard insurgents who had been spotted in their hundreds in the distance pouring down from the hills. The fight began - after reconnaissance from the rooftops by Carlo Osio - at 7 a.m., when the Italians started blasting cannon and fired from windows, rooftops and behind garden walls at the Austrian positions on the gate, in the customs post and at the nearby Casa Tragella. The imperial troops replied with Congreve rockets and one house burst into flames. The final assault took place under the ingenious protection of moving barricades. There was a bitter and murderous exchange of fire - Osio later said that he alone fired 150 cartridges.117 Manara and another aristocrat with democratic principles, Enrico Dandolo, were the first to make the final dash to the customs house, with the former waving a tricolour as the rest of the attackers surged on behind. They were cheered on by women watching from nearby balconies. The gate was beaten down and the triumphant Milanese, crossing the moat on the other side of the bastions, at last embraced the Lombard peasants and small-town artisans, led by local professionals and priests, who poured into the city. Radetzky’s siege had been broken.
He now had to contend with the imminent Piedmontese invasion and peasant insurrections in the mountains to the north. His exhausted troops, though still in good order, could not attempt to retake Milan and at the same time contend with the rural uprising and the crushing weight of Charles Albert’s army. To avoid being pinned against the walls of the city by this combination of hostile forces, he ordered his troops to withdraw, but only once his artillery had rained down a vengeful barrage on the city. Hübner, sheltering with his captors in a cellar, spent an uncomfortable night listening to the muffled roar of the guns, followed by ‘a fitful noise like someone running up or down a spiral staircase in clogs’ - the sound of tumbling masonry. The bombardment continued until one o’clock in the morning and the worst of the damage was done closest to the castle, where most of the Austrian guns were emplaced. The cathedral, churches and public buildings were not scarred, because Radetzky had told the gunners to spare them: he had little doubt that the Austrians would be occupying them again soon.118 Nevertheless, the city centre was now strewn with debris, walls riddled with bullets, tiles scattered across the streets and charred houses still smoking. On 23 March Radetzky’s troops pulled northwards to the so-called Quadrilateral of fortresses at Verona, Peschiera, Mantua and Legnano that barred the way into Austria itself. That same day Charles Albert declared war on Austria and sent his army across the River Ticino, his personal Rubicon, which separated him from his dynastic ambitions. Milan’s ‘Five Glorious Days’ were over. Among those who celebrated was the composer Giuseppe Verdi, who was in Paris when he heard the news. He dashed off to the city, but did not arrive until early April. Once there, he wrote to a friend: ‘Yes, yes, a few more years, perhaps only a few more months, and Italy will be free, united and a republic. What else should she be?’119 He was not alone, for another great Italian had also arrived in Milan: the republican revolutionary Giuseppe Mazzini. The uprising was over, but the tough politics of the Italian revolution had only just begun.
Meanwhile, the Venetians had rallied around the causes célèbres of Daniele Manin and Nicolò Tommaseo after their arrest in January. Little could hold back the gathering tide once the news of Metternich’s fall reached Venice, brought by the Lloyd Line steamer from Trieste on 17 March. A crowd swept across Saint Mark’s Square, calling for the release of the two political prisoners. They stormed the governor’s residence on the piazza, where they confronted its trembling occupants, Aloys Palffy and his shaken wife, on the main staircase. A posse of Manin’s friends rushed to the nearby prison to release the two men. The jailers prudently calculated that surrender was safer than resistance and yielded the two captives. Manin was convinced that times were now sufficiently propitious to free Venice of Austrian rule. The stakes were raised on 18 March, when Croatian and Hungarian troops tried to haul down the Italian tricolours that had been fluttering over Saint Mark’s Square since the day before. The crowd jeered at the soldiers, whereupon an enraged officer gave the order to fire. After the smoke cleared from two volleys, nine Venetians lay dead or wounded. With the mood of the crowd boiling over into blind fury, Manin approached Palffy with the proposal to create a civic guard that would keep order and defend property. A moderate republican, Manin genuinely wanted to avoid social revolution, but of course he also hoped that the new civic guard could be used against the Austrians when the time came. Palffy, trusting that Radetzky would soon be able to send troops to his aid, tried to stall Manin with a promise that he would consult the viceroy, Archduke Rainer, who was now in Verona. Seeing through this ruse, Manin defiantly organised a two-thousand-strong militia regardless. That night the streets of the city were being patrolled by men wearing white sashes.120
The Austrian authorities could have been forgiven for believing that they had weathered the storm by 19 March, when word arrived from Trieste of the promised imperial constitution. To cries of ‘Long live Italy! Long live the Emperor!’, Palffy read out the Emperor’s proclamation to the ecstatic crowd. That night he and his wife were cheered by the audience at a concert at La Fenice. Yet all was not well. No one could quite believe that a Habsburg emperor would grant a constitution freely. The garrison was still strong and there were rumours that the army would try to bombard the city into submission from the arsenal. This fear mingled with hope: stories about the insurrection in Milan were now circulating and keeping Venetian enthusiasm aflame. Manin decided that now was the time to act, especially when he received word that the Croatian troops in the arsenal were soon to be reinforced. He held a meeting with other Venetian revolutionaries that night and they explored their subversive contacts in the imperial navy, including an officer named Antonio Paolucci, who would try to mobilise the Italian sailors in support of an assault on the arsenal. Key, however, were the fifteen hundred workers - the arsenalotti - who bore plenty of grievances against their Austrian employers, particularly the military commander, Captain Marinovich, who had refused pay increases and banned the workers from supplementing their income by their traditional practices of repairing gondolas and helping themselves to ‘spare’ naval supplies. The date for the insurrection was set for 22 March, when the civic guard would converge on the arsenal gates at midday and, with the help of the workers, force it to surrender.
That day the arsenalotti made the first move spontaneously, when they angrily confronted Marinovich with their own demands. The captain was left virtually defenceless when the naval commander in Venice, Admiral Martini, ordered the Croatian guard to stand down for fear of provoking the crowd. Paolucci tried to help Marinovich escape the arsenalotti in a covered gondola, but the luckless captain was spotted and chased on to the roof. He was dragged downstairs, beaten to a pulp and left to die in a boatshed. Manin was horrified by this
brutality and sent forward an advance company of militia to prevent any more violence. When he himself arrived with the rest of the civic guard, he summoned the workers by ringing the arsenal’s great bell and took over formal control of the works from a chastened Martini. An Austrian attempt to retake the arsenal failed when their mostly Italian troops refused to follow orders. Instead, they trained their rifles on their Hungarian officer, and he was saved from certain death only by the intercession of one of Manin’s associates. With this mutiny, the rest of the Italians in the garrison succumbed. They joined the revolution, tearing the Austrian eagle from their caps and replacing it with the Italian tricolour: the black and gold Habsburg emblems were later seen floating in their hundreds in the city’s canals.
A detachment of civic guards then easily took the cannon which were lined up in front of Saint Mark’s Cathedral. The guns were wheeled about to face the governor’s palace, where Palffy desperately summoned Venice’s municipal government, mostly noblemen anxious to prevent the city falling into grubbily bourgeois and republican hands like Manin’s. Yet, as the councillors and the governor debated the best course of action, a mounting clamour intruded from outside. Manin’s followers had unfurled a huge tricolour topped with a red Jacobin cap, while Manin stood on a table outside the Café Florian and hailed: ‘Long live the republic! Long live Saint Mark!’ The only republican among the city councillors, the outspoken lawyer Gian Francisco Avesani, demanded that all non-Italian troops be withdrawn from Venice and that all forts be surrendered, along with the ordnance, weaponry and pay chests. The infuriated Palffy resigned as governor, handing over control to the Austrian garrison commander, Count Ferdinand Zichy. The latter, fortunately, did not share Radetzky’s unbending nature: he recoiled from the idea of bombarding Venice into rubble, since he loved the city, and at 6.30 p.m. surrendered control to the municipality, leadership of which fell to Avesani. It was clear, however, that a government without Manin, the hero of the day, would have little legitimacy for the Venetians, so in the early hours of 23 March Avesani resigned and Daniele Manin was proclaimed president of the new provisional government of the Venetian Republic. The imperial army abandoned the city. The official report to Vienna opened with the words, ‘Venice has really fallen’.