by Mike Rapport
Let us paint our flags black and red
Because mourning and blood
Will be the fate of the Hungarian nation.133
At the other end of the political spectrum, Széchenyi had an apocalyptic vision of the future. On 18 July, while watching progress on his beloved chain bridge, a heavy steel cable broke free and lashed down on to the temporary pontoon bridge. No one was killed, but Széchneyi and many of the hundreds of other spectators were hurled into the Danube. The count (who was already struggling with depression) swam to shore but fell into black despair: ‘We are lost, sunk back into barbarism . . . We are being ruined not by Kossuth and his associates . . . but by a greater power, by Nemesis.’134
V
Liberal Hungary’s nemesis was certainly gathering strength. A week after the chain bridge accident, the reaction triumphed again, this time in Italy. In June Field Marshal Radetzky had at last convinced the Austrian government that the war was winnable. The cabinet had been rather stung by the old fox’s recent sharp remarks, such as, in a letter to Latour on 21 June, ‘I only wish . . . that the Minister [Pillersdorf ] could have as much success in battle against the intelligentsia of our time . . . as I am now having, despite being in the minority, in battles and skirmishes with the King of Sardinia.’ Six days later, Latour gave Radetzky the order he sought: to gamble Austrian power in Italy on one decisive battle.135 The omens were good. Charles Albert had divided his forces, with 28,000 in front of Verona and 42,000 laying siege to Mantua. Radetzky now had 74,000 troops. He planned to ram a wedge between the Piedmontese by driving those in front of Verona back on to Peschiera. The attack began on 22 July, and on the following day Radetzky smashed his way through the very centre of the Piedmontese line, which defended a series of hill-top villages north of the settlement that gave this epic encounter its name: Custozza. Charles Albert tried to counter-attack in the broiling heat of 24 July - and, at one stage, the King saw Italian tricolours being waved triumphantly on the heights - but in the small hours of the next day, Radetzky brought the full weight of his forces to bear on the parched, exhausted Italian units and swept them back off the slopes.136
Charles Albert’s forces fell back on Milan, which turned out to be a mere staging-post in a general Piedmontese withdrawal from the war. In the Lombard capital power now slipped out of the hands of discredited monarchists and into those of the republicans, who, advised by Mazzini, prepared to resist the Austrians by throwing up earthworks, building barricades and collecting what money, ammunition and provisions could be had at such short notice. Food and ammunition were scarce and most of the available artillery was in Piacenza. While Charles Albert assured the populace on 5 August that he intended to fight, he was already negotiating terms with Radetzky. It was agreed that the Piedmontese would march out of Milan on 6 August and then have a day in which to withdraw altogether from Lombardy, taking with them all those who had ‘compromised’ themselves in the revolution. Radetzky would enter the city the following day. When word of this deal leaked out in the night of 5-6 August, an enraged crowd surged around the Greppi Palace, where Charles Albert was staying. The King had to be extricated by his troops, who were already beginning their evacuation.137 ‘The city of Milan is ours’, wrote a triumphant Radetzky twenty-four hours later: ‘no enemy remains on Lombard soil’.138 On 9 August, the Piedmontese General Salasco signed an armistice.
Radetzky’s grit - he had, after all, bullishly refused to follow earlier government orders to negotiate - and his military skills had retrieved Austrian power in Italy. By significantly easing the pressure on the Viennese government, he also contributed immensely to the survival of the Habsburg Empire itself in 1848. For the Italians, Custozza was not just a military disaster but a political bombshell: faith in Charles Albert and in the monarchist leadership of the liberation of Italy was shattered. Republicans sensed that their moment had come. There were widespread cries for a costituente, an elected constitutional assembly for the whole of Italy that would forge a unitary state over the heads of the ruling monarchs. Carlo Cattaneo, always sceptical of Piedmontese motives, declared (no doubt with some bravado), ‘Now we are our own masters,’139 but he still fled Milan on 8 August for the safety of Paris, where he arrived on the 16th. There, he wrote and published L’Insurrection de Milan en 1848, aimed at countering the efforts of Charles Albert’s agents, who were trying to blame the republicans for the disasters of the summer. The book turned out to be a bestseller.140
Meanwhile, Mazzini had grabbed a musket and left Milan on 3 August, joining Garibaldi’s volunteers, who after being snubbed by the Piedmontese had placed themselves in Lombard service. They were not yet wearing their famous red shirts, but white linen jackets left behind by the retreating Austrians: one witness remarked that they looked ‘like an army of cooks’.141 With the news of Custozza, Garibaldi pulled back towards Milan to defend the city. While he was en route, he learned of the armistice. ‘Armistice, surrender, flight - the news struck us down like successive bolts of lightning, spreading, in its wake, fear and demoralisation among the people and among the troops.’142 Some of his men deserted, but the remnants of the force marched northwards to Como, from where Garibaldi hoped to wage a guerrilla war in the lakes and mountains. Mazzini, marching with his followers under the banner ‘For God and the People’, split off from Garibaldi at Como, entering Switzerland, from where he hoped to direct the resistance. With Cattaneo’s agreement, he created an Italian National Committee at Lugano, which proclaimed that ‘the royal war is over; the war of the people begins’.143
Ironically, Mazzini had fallen out with the one man who was continuing the fight - Garibaldi. ‘I had made the mistake,’ Garibaldi later explained, ‘for which Mazzini never forgave me, of suggesting to him that it was wrong to win and keep the support of young men by holding out the prospect of a republic to them, at a time when the army and the volunteers were engaged in fighting the Austrians.’144 When Italian unification was finally achieved in 1860, it was in no small part thanks to Garibaldi’s willingness to compromise his republican principles to the cause of unity. The two men who would become the great figureheads of Italian unification also fell out over tactics. Garibaldi, still taking orders from Mazzini despite their differences, moved on to the idyllic Lake Maggiore, where he and his men commandeered two steamers and, cheered on by women and children waving tricolours from the balconies of lakeside villas, took Luino, where they repulsed an Austrian attack.145 Mazzini had hoped that a small show of resistance would spark a wider insurrection in the mountains of Lombardy, but Garibaldi, seasoned from his guerrilla experience in South America, read the situation on the ground differently. ‘For the first time’, he wrote, disillusioned, ‘I saw how little the national cause inspired the local inhabitants of the countryside.’ Its strength sapped by desertion, his small band made its way by a night march over difficult mountain paths into Switzerland. By the time he crossed the border, Garibaldi had just thirty men left of the eight hundred who had taken Luino.146
Elsewhere in Italy, the republicans fared much better. The moderate, liberal governments which had cast their lot behind the monarchists’ war were now under intense pressure. In Piedmont the ministry, which since its appointment in early July had been selected from across the putative northern Italian kingdom and had been led by the former mayor of Milan, Casati, fell in the public outcry against the armistice. There would be no fewer than six different governments between Piedmont’s first loss at Custozza and its final defeat at Novara in 1849. Critics of the successive ministries, demanding that the war be rekindled, were supported by the clamouring of some 25,000 Lombard refugees. By the autumn, war fever was becoming almost irresistible, and democrats threatened a new revolution, particularly in the restive port of Genoa. To ease the pressure, in October the government increased the size of the army with a fresh levy of fifty thousand men.
Venice was now completely isolated in an Austrian sea. The news of Custozza and the armistice ‘fell on Venice like
a thunderbolt from a serene sky’, as the American consul, Edmund Flagg, put it.147 The Venetian vote for ‘fusion’ was now redundant, and Daniele Manin emerged from the crisis with great credit. The small, bespectacled republican had refused to be part of the monarchist provisional government that had been appointed on 5 July: ‘I am and will remain a republican. In a monarchist state I can be nothing.’148 As if to ram the point home, Manin put on his civic guard uniform and, with the rank of private, took his turns doing sentry duty - a simple citizen doing his best for his city. The monarchist ‘July government’ certainly had its work cut out, for the Austrians, commanded by Marshal Franz von Welden, had isolated the city from the terra firma. His forces, numbering some nine thousand, were now extended in a cordon around the lagoon. Yet many of these troops were shivering with malaria, and there was no immediately obvious way of striking at the city itself, which was defended by no fewer than fifty-four forts, only three of which were on terra firma. Command of the 22,000-strong Venetian forces (of whom 12,000 were Italian volunteers and regular troops who had converged on the city from all over Italy) had been given on 15 June to General Pepe, who had reached the city on a steamer from Chiogga with the remnants of his Neapolitan regiments.149
The population’s hostility towards the monarchists was palpable: the provinces of the mainland had voted for fusion, not the great city itself. With news of Custozza, the anger in Venice boiled over. On 3 August, some 150 people, fired up with Mazzinian ideas, gathered in the Casino dei Cento and established the Italian Club, ostensibly to discuss the problems of the day, but in reality as an alternative, republican, centre of power. When the Piedmontese commissioners, who had been sent to Venice to assume authority in Charles Albert’s name, arrived four days later, they were greeted with a storm of hostility. On 10 August, the leading republicans, including Manin and Tommaseo, signed a protest and demanded a meeting of the Venetian assembly. The government made itself remarkably unpopular when it tactlessly cited the old Austrian laws to try to silence its critics in the press and in the Italian Club. The following day, it yielded, agreeing to the creation of a committee of defence to be elected by the assembly. The Piedmontese commissioners resigned their powers, but they were still hounded on Saint Mark’s Square, by a Venetian crowd baying for their blood.150
At this dangerous moment, Daniele Manin was busy browsing in a bookshop. This pleasant activity was interrupted when he was summoned to meet with the government and the commissioners. His very appearance on the balcony above the Piazza stilled the turbulence below. Manin promised them that the Venetian assembly would meet on 13 August and that, in the meantime, he would assume power. He called on all Venetians to defend their city. His audience, which moments before had been intent on murder, erupted into ecstatic cheering: ‘Viva Manin! To the forts!’ The mood of the city changed from one of anger and bewilderment to one of hope: the son of a leading republican later recalled ‘with what confidence in saving the motherland we stayed up to watch the dawn breaking over the railway bridge and the battered vessels of our fleet!’ Manin had carried off a coup, and not just against the monarchists: he had also stolen a march on the Mazzinians, who had hoped to seize power themselves. Manin had always feared the dangers of mob rule. To him, Mazzini’s ideas of revolution seemed to pose just such a threat, and one of his tasks, as he saw it, was to prevent ‘anarchy’. He viewed the June days in Paris as precisely the kind of bloody social chaos into which Venice could easily sink unless its leaders made law and order their priority.151
Nevertheless, the more urgent problem was the war against Austria, which Venice was now bearing virtually alone. When the assembly met on 13 August, Manin agreed to share power with two military commanders, one from the army, Colonel Giovanni Cavedalis, the other from the navy, Admiral Leone Graziani. In order to ensure that the greatest possible unity would prevail, Manin went so far as to declare that Venice would not, once again, be proclaimed a republic. The government, he said, was provisional ‘in every meaning of the term’. This was another slap in Mazzinian faces, who were capable of mounting a serious challenge to the new triumvirate, since they had a great deal of support among the non-Venetian volunteers and troops. But Manin’s popularity with the wider population was greater still, and he had the backing of the commander-in-chief, Pepe. So it was that, until the autumn, Manin successfully resisted the pressure from the Italian Club (and from Mazzini himself) to transform Venice into the hard kernel of Italian republicanism, from which the rest of the country could be revolutionised.152
In Tuscany the reaction to Custozza was maybe even more dramatic than it was in Venice. Cosimo Ridolfi’s government, a coalition of conservatives and moderates, had long been castigated by the centre-left liberal opposition under Bettino Ricasoli for its lukewarm support for the war. Ridolfi’s cabinet resigned when the news of the battle provoked rioting: Florence jostled with the unemployed, with deserters, with demoralised soldiers and volunteers still keen to fight, while radical political clubs shrilly demanded a Mazzinian war of the people. Eventually, the moderate liberal Gino Capponi stepped up to take the poisoned chalice and became prime minister. He promised to continue Tuscany’s war effort if the armistice between Austria and Piedmont were to collapse. The real drama occurred in Livorno, which was always prickly about Florentine pre-eminence and where the dockers, in particular, were stricken by unemployment in the economic downturn. The Livornese democrats were roused by Father Gavazzi, the fire-breathing friar and preacher of holy war, who, ignoring a ban imposed by the government, had stepped ashore in the port. When he was arrested, Livorno rose up on 23 August: the crowd tore up the railway lines and occupied the arsenal. With the port threatening to become virtually an independent city-state, Capponi, in desperation, sent the popular radical Francesco Guerrazzi to try to calm Livornese spirits. Guerrazzi had himself been arrested in January for leading an insurrection in the city, but now he was afraid of the prospect of social upheaval. He had to exercise all his moral authority - and some physical force - to prevent the radicals from proclaiming a republic. But despite his work in restoring some semblance of order, Capponi disliked him and replaced him with a democrat and fervent advocate of a costituente, Professor Giuseppe Montanelli, who had been lionised as a hero for his valour at the battle of Curtatone. Yet even he struggled to master the situation in the city. Ultimately, the only way for the Grand Duke to prevent more violence was to yield to the democrats and appoint a radical ministry. In October he chose Montanelli, who refused to serve without Guerrazzi, so the two radicials assumed power together.153
In Rome, Prime Minister Mamiani had tried ease the Pope into the role of constitutional monarch, but it was a part which Pius IX filled only with difficulty. Mamiani swallowed his own radical liberalism after the newly elected parliament opened on 5 June, expressing support for the Italian national cause, but insisting that it must take the form of an Italian league, with the Pope acting as peacemaker. For this, he was blasted by the radical minority in parliament, led by the Prince of Canino, a member of the Bonaparte clan, and Doctor Pietro Sterbini. Outside parliament, Ciceruacchio could raise the working-class quarter of Trastevere and the teeming, impoverished districts immediately surrounding it. When the Austrians counter-attacked in northern Italy in July and spilled over into the Papal States, briefly reoccupying Ferrara on 14 July, the radicals mobilised the Roman crowd through the clubs, or circoli, which followed Canino’s lead in demanding that the government declare both a state of emergency and war. Mamiani refused to budge, but when the crowd invaded the lower house of parliament, howling for arms to defend the city, it was clear that the government could do little to control the democrats. Custozza was the political coup de grâce and Mamiani resigned on 3 August. The Pope wanted to appoint the gifted and shrewd Pellegrino Rossi, but there was too much popular opposition to that, because Rossi was a very moderate breed of liberal, so for now Pius had to make do with a six-week caretaker ministry. Meanwhile, to stem the flow of determine
d Italian volunteers from making their way to help defend Venice, Austrian troops tried to occupy Bologna. The white-coated forces reached the gates of the city on 8 August, but the citizens put up a determined resistance: the urban poor, students, shopkeepers, artisans and bourgeois stood their ground under bombardment by field-guns and managed to cut off a company that had penetrated the town’s defences. Within three hours, the Austrians withdrew, leaving behind a city feverish with revolution and patriotic fervour. 154
In southern Italy the nascent liberal order in the Kingdom of Naples had been slowly strangled in its cradle since King Ferdinand had reasserted royal authority with cannon, musket-ball and bayonet on 15 May. Yet, for as long as the Piedmontese continued to challenge Austria in the north, the Neapolitan reactionaries did not feel strong enough to tighten the screws: no Italian government would dare to betray constitutionalism as long as there was the possibility that the liberal cause would triumph by force of arms. Moreover, Sicily was still fighting for its independence and much of the countryside on the mainland was in open revolt, with an uprising in the Abruzzo and a major insurrection in Calabria. Times were not yet propitious for Ferdinand to destroy all that he had promised his subjects in January: there was therefore no full-blooded censorship; and fresh elections, which were held on 15 June (albeit on an even narrower franchise than before), returned a parliament with a strong liberal showing. The old order none the less began to reassert itself in significant ways: the Jesuits were let back into the kingdom; the old royal police reappeared on the streets; and there was a ban on public meetings. The political currents were slowly beginning to run back in Ferdinand’s favour, while the radicals failed to channel the peasant uprisings towards political objectives. A force of six hundred Sicilians sent to support the Calabrian uprising fractiously refused to have much to do with the peasants. The insurrection was brought to heel by the end of July, when the eight thousand troops sent by the King made their presence felt. In any case many of the insurgents were more than happy to turn their scythes back to their original use, for the harvest had to be brought in. Even parliament, though the lower house was still dominated by the liberals, had little in the way of teeth. The upper house was full of conservative peers and the King’s prime minister Bozzelli pointedly and repeatedly failed to show up to parliamentary debates.