by Mike Rapport
The frustration of the radicals over the setbacks and disappointments of the year now concentrated on Rossi, and they were strengthened by demobbed soldiers, the Reduci (‘the Returned’), and by Neapolitan refugees who had fled the reaction in the south. One attempt at raising the Roman populace against the Pope, led by the Neapolitan exile Vincenzo Carbonelli on 24-5 October, was foiled because among those involved were undercover police officers who kept the government informed. The news of the October revolution in Vienna and the Hungarian victory over Jelačić seemed to present a golden opportunity to renew the war against the Austrians in Italy - and King Charles Albert himself had rattled his sabre during Gioberti’s costituente. In the painful fortnight before the first session of the Roman parliament on 15 November, Rossi bore the slings and arrows of an outrageous radical press with remarkable stoicism and courage. He was likened to Guizot and Metternich, lambasted as a man who sought to restore the old despotism. His aims, claimed the radical leader Sterbini later, were to ‘tame democracy and to destroy, or indefinitely postpone, the conception of nationality’; he ‘sneered at the War of Independence; ridiculed the idea of a Costituente’.118 He received hate mail - all of it anonymous - but he brushed off these poisonous missives with contempt, although the comments must have hurt, for Rossi’s own son had fought against the Austrians in Lombardy.
Rossi struck back with a vengeance on 12 November, when he arrested some of the leading Neapolitan troublemakers, including Carbonelli (who had been preparing to raise the standard of insurrection at Trajan’s Column), and had them deported. Exactly what happened next is murky, but it appears that a radical cabal - possibly including Sterbini and Cicerruacchio’s son, Luigi Brunetti - met in a tavern near the Piazza del Popolo on 13 November and discussed ways of ridding themselves of Rossi once and for all. In what must have been a tense, seething but hushed debate, it was apparently agreed that Rossi should be assassinated at the opening of parliament in two days’ time. People across the city were, in any case, anticipating some great demonstration of radical force. The exile of the Neapolitans, who were conducted to the port at Civita Vecchia on 14 November, and Rossi’s show of strength - parading columns of carabinieri through the streets - increased the political temperature. Towards noon on 15 November, when Rossi arrived at the Chamber of Deputies, he had to alight from his carriage and walk through the great gate of the Cancelleria Palace and then some twenty yards along a passage that was lined with onlookers. The police had already noticed that clusters of Reduci, obvious in their grey tunics and blue trousers, had been ominously fingering their daggers and declaiming noisily against Rossi. Ten minutes before, they had cheered as Sterbini appeared to take his seat in parliament. When the prime minister’s carriage approached, the crowd fell silent in an expectant hush. Rossi, the pallor of his complexion striking against his dark blue overcoat, made his way into the passageway. The onlookers closed around behind him, but Rossi pressed on towards the staircase at the end, wearing a defiantly contemptuous smile. He had just started up the steps when a young man struck him lightly on one side. When Rossi turned, another assailant - allegedly Luigi Brunetti - plunged a dagger into his throat, severing his carotid artery. Blood spurted out in a jet and the assassins escaped when the other Reduci around them also raised their daggers. Rossi, bleeding profusely, was lifted up by his friends and carried into a nearby house, where he died. ‘Order had only one energetic and highly intelligent representative left at Rome,’ wrote the Belgian ambassador. ‘This representative was Monsieur Rossi, and that is exactly why he was killed.’119
The diplomat’s remark was prescient, for the shellshocked authorities seemed utterly disarmed against the tide of popular republicanism that seeped through the city over the next few hours. Parliament suspended its session, although the radical aristocrat Canino scathingly shouted, ‘What is all this fuss about? Is it the King of Rome who is dead?’120 The Pope, in the Quirinal Palace, received the news of his friend’s murder with stunned silence. Without Rossi’s firm hand, the discipline of the carabinieri and the loyalty of the civic guard wavered: the former were already beginning to fraternise with the people, while even the commander of the regular forces warned that his men would be deeply reluctant to fire on the crowd. To pacify the gathering storm, Pius would have to appoint a ministry that supported at least the renewal of the war against Austria and the costituente. The radicals demanded more: that the constitution be revised. The government resigned, unable to defend itself yet unwilling to yield to the opposition. The hour of the republicans had come - and Sterbini, backed by the force of the Roman crowd that was mobilised by the Circolo Populare, the club of which he was president, was ready to seize the initiative. That night, a procession of clubbists and Reduci marched up the Corso cheering triumphantly, hailing Rossi’s murderer as the new Brutus. With terrible cruelty, they stopped beneath the windows of Rossi’s house, hurling up taunts and jibes at his bereaved wife, chanting ‘Blessed be the hand that stabbed Rossi.’121 A ‘good many loathsome reptiles’ had indeed emerged on to the streets.122
In the afternoon of the following day a crowd gathered on the Piazza del Popolo and marched on the Quirinal to press the radical demands. The palace was protected by a thin cordon of a hundred troops: a company of Swiss Guards, some loyal carabinieri and members of the elite Noble Guard. At three o’clock, the masses surged up to the locked gates of the palace, where two hapless Swiss sentries just managed to escape, one having broken his halberd over the head of an insurgent, the other having had his torn from his hands. The Pope confronted this desperate situation with stubborn courage and, though he had appointed the popular Giuseppe Galletti to lead a new government, he refused to give way any further. Acting as if he were oblivious to the thundering crowd outside, he ignored Galletti’s entreaties to concede. Growing angry and impatient, the demonstrators started to chant, ‘A democratic ministry or a republic!’ By now, there were an estimated six thousand armed people in the piazza, including regular soldiers, civic guards and carabinieri who had gone over to the radicals. When some of the crowd tried to burn down a side entrance into the Quirinal, the first shots were fired: they were aimed into the air by the Swiss, but the tension now boiled over into violence. The insurgents climbed into nearby towers to fire back and one of the Pope’s secretaries was killed when a bullet shattered the window of his office. When a cannon was wheeled up to blast open the main gate, even Pius was persuaded that the time for concessions had at last come. Protesting to the foreign ambassadors (who had gathered around him throughout this ordeal) that he was yielding under duress, the Pope appointed a new government which included Sterbini, Galletti and Mamiani.
The constitutional regime was now rapidly unravelling. Parliament was in an uproar and unable to function effectively. Conservatives and moderates were screamed down from the public galleries. And in any case the murder of Rossi had caused such fear that the lower chamber was denuded by resignations and absences. The Pope’s friends and political allies visited him only furtively - one travelled to and from the Quirinal with a brace of pistols for his own protection. The last straw was the publication of the ministry’s programme, which included a declaration of war and the summoning of a costituente . In the evening of 24 November Pius disguised himself in the cassock of a humble parish priest and climbed into a carriage. After a twelve-hour journey through the night, he crossed into the Kingdom of Naples, where he took refuge in the coastal town and fortress of Gaeta.
His flight turned the revolution in Rome into an international affair: Catholic Europe was now thoroughly shaken. While the government of the secular French republic would do nothing unless the Austrians used the overthrow of the Pope as a pretext for an invasion of central Italy, in December Spain declared that Pius was under the protection of all Catholic states and called for an international congress to resolve the matter. Naples, which was protecting the Pope in more than just theory, agreed. Austria, seeing the opportunity to kill off the ideal of Papal
leadership of a united Italy once and for all, readily assented. For his part, Pius at first adamantly insisted from his refuge that he still honoured the statuto, the constitution that he had granted his subjects. Yet, increasingly, he fell under the conservative influence of both the Neapolitans and his own retinue, including the shadowy figure of Cardinal Antonelli. The latter spotted the conservatives’ opportunity in the collapse of the liberal, constitutional experiment in Rome. He calculated that a head-on collision between the conservatives and the radicals would finish with the triumph of the former, particularly if Pius secured international help. The Pope therefore disavowed the new government in Rome, and in December he appealed to the new emperor, Franz Joseph, ‘his very dear son’, for assistance.123
The revolution in Rome gave all Italian radicals a fresh focus for their activities. In Tuscany Guerrazzi and Montanelli saw the opportunity of realising their plan of a democratic costituente, which could now convene in Rome itself. Garibaldi and his followers were also drawn towards Rome. They had undertaken a veritable odyssey since their retreat into Switzerland that summer. From there, Garibaldi had made his way to Genoa, where he received a formal invitation from the Sicilians to help them fight against the Neapolitans. He duly embarked on a French steamer with seventy-two followers - mostly officers - and they chugged southwards, bound for Palermo. Yet one of the ports of call was Livorno, and there the radical leadership convinced him that he would discover in Tuscany a fertile recruiting ground for his republican army. Garibaldi therefore offered his services to Guerrazzi and Montanelli, sending a telegram suggesting that he lead an army of Tuscan volunteers against the Neapolitan King. The message finished rather curtly: ‘Yes or no - Garibaldi’.124
The answer, as it turned out, was a clear ‘no’. In the first place the great campaigner had been misled: rural Tuscany, in particular, was loyal to the Grand Duke and resisted the republicans’ blandishments. Second, Guerrazzi and Montanelli were not at all happy about Garibaldi’s sudden appearance. They may have been radicals, and Guerrazzi may have been a demagogue, but now that both men were in power, they wanted to prove that they could maintain law and order. Moreover, their plan for a costituente was to be democratic, but it was not necessarily to be exclusively republican. As Montanelli later explained, they wanted a constituent assembly to persuade ‘constitutionalists and republicans, federalists and unitarians to shake hands . . . in order to contribute jointly towards the task of enfranchising Italy’.125 This willingness to involve the liberal monarchists did not please the more uncompromising republicans like Mazzini and Garibaldi. Moreover, the latter’s force threatened to be a source of instability for a government which, while radical, was now trying to strengthen its position against the more hot-headed Tuscan democrats. ‘They are like a plague of locusts’, fretted Guerrazzi of Garibaldi’s men. ‘We must do all we can to get them away quickly.’126 Consequently, the Tuscan reply to Garibaldi’s proposal was ‘evasive’; and, while the small band of Garibaldini received a tumultuous welcome from the Florentines, the government itself kept a stony silence and did not provide them with provisions for the onward march.127 Garibaldi’s small regiment had crossed the icy Apennines and reached the frontier with the Papal States at Filigare on 9 November. At that point, Rossi still had six days to live and General Zucchi had advanced from Bologna to Ferrara with four hundred Swiss troops to block the Garibaldini, who now numbered no more than one hundred. The republican force was in a terrible state: ‘So we had left South America for this: to fight the snow in the Apennines,’ Garibaldi later commented bitterly. ‘It was distressing to see these worthy young lads in the mountains in such harsh weather: most were wearing only light clothes, some were in rags, all were hungry.’128 It was while the Garibaldini were spending ‘a few miserable days’ in Filigare that the people of Bologna came to their rescue. With Zucchi absent, Father Gavazzi led a huge demonstration, cramming into the street below the windows of Zucchi’s second-in-command: ‘Either our brothers come here’, they cried, ‘or you come down from that balcony.’129 Hearing of the protest, Zucchi, reluctant to provoke a full-blown uprising, agreed to a compromise: Garibaldi’s force would be allowed to cross the Romagna, but it had to march to Ravenna, where it would embark for Venice to support Manin’s defence of the city against the Austrians.
Rossi’s assassination and the radical uprising in Rome gave the Garibaldini a new opportunity to march southwards. Garibaldi’s verdict on the murder was virulently bloodthirsty: ‘in getting rid of him the ancient metropolis of the world showed itself worthy of its illustrious past. A young Roman had wielded anew the sword of Brutus and drowned the marble steps of the Capitol with the tyrant’s blood!’130 His recruiting efforts now bore fruit, so that when he left Ravenna at the end of November, he was riding at the head of five hundred men - mostly young middle-class townsmen, artisans, workers and students: ‘fine-looking, polite, almost all the sons of cultivated families from the country’s urban centres’.131 Garibaldi planned to winter in Umbria, but he also rode on to Rome in mid-December, in order, as he expressed it, to ‘put the legion’s miserable and vagabond existence on a more organised footing’ by getting the recognition of the new war minister, from whom he hoped to secure supplies.132
Garibaldi entered a turbulent city fractured by a confused and complex dispute between conflicting radical factions and the remnants of the moderates. Early in December, moderate arguments that the costituente should be along Vincenzo Gioberti’s federal lines were fervently challenged by the democrats. The republican Mazzinians, having been defeated in Venice, had found in Rome a new theatre for their activities. Some, like Mazzini himself, believed pragmatically that it was too early to convene a full Italian costituente - it would never be accepted by the Piedmontese, among others - so the Papal States should be democratised first, becoming the nucleus of the future Italian republic. Other republicans disagreed and wanted to proceed immediately to all-Italian elections. Meanwhile, some members of the new government in Rome, like Mamiani, were not extremists and were well aware that much of the Roman population was reeling from both the moral and the economic effects of the Pope’s sudden flight. There was a strong belief that, if Pius was willing to negotiate, he could return to Rome. While this possibility remained open, the ministers were reluctant to entertain any hard-line republicans - and once again Garibaldi found himself being snubbed. He spent the winter with his troops at Foligno in Umbria. Yet the pressure of the radical political clubs was soon too much to resist for the government, which faced the grim prospect of a fresh insurrection on the streets of Rome. In any case the Pope had repeatedly refused to return, so on 29 December there were few options left but to hold elections to a Roman Constituent Assembly, which was the obvious prelude to the proclamation of a republic. Under further pressure from the clubs, on 16 January the Roman government also declared that the hundred candidates who attracted the most votes to the Roman assembly would represent Rome in the all-Italian costituente, wherever it met.133 Having had their cake, it seemed that the republicans would be able to eat it as well.
VI
While Italian republicanism was suddenly breathing in fresh oxygen, the French Second Republic was slowly being stifled to death, although it lingered on painfully until the end of 1851. The author of its agonising demise was an unlikely man who stood with a slouch, was less than five feet six inches tall, and had a pronounced hook nose, a long handlebar moustache and a pointed goatee beard. His name was Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte. Born in 1808, he was Napoleon Bonaparte’s nephew, the son of Hortense de Beauharnais (Empress Joséphine’s daughter from her first marriage) and Louis Bonaparte, Napoleon’s brother, who was then King of Holland. Louis-Napoleon was an enigmatic, strange and at times comical figure. After the Napoleonic Empire unravelled in 1814, he and his mother, who doted on him, spent his childhood in exile, finally settling in the Swiss castle of Arenenberg on Lake Constance. There, Hortense immersed Louis-Napoleon in his Bonapartist heritage. At the time
of the 1830 revolution, the immediate heir to Napoleon’s imperial throne was Napoleon II, Duke of Reichstadt, the son of the Emperor and his second consort, Marie-Louise of Austria. He had spent his life in the ‘gilded cage’ of the Habsburg palace of Schönbrunn, but he died of consumption in 1832. Louis-Napoleon regarded himself as the rightful heir. He envisaged Bonapartism as a combination of the principle of popular sovereignty and authoritarianism: the Emperor would be the executor of the people’s will, which would be expressed by a parliament elected by universal, though indirect, suffrage. It was a hauntingly modern blend of political ideas - a dictatorship claiming its mandate from the ‘people’. Yet the government, he wrote in Napoleonic Ideas (1839), must work for the benefit of society: it was to use the ‘necessary means to open a smooth and easy road for advancing civilisation’.134 By uniting authoritarianism, popular sovereignty and social progress Louis-Napoleon appealed to a wide range of people and, by emphasising different facets of his ideas according to his audience, he succeeded in being all things to all people. Later, after he had become Emperor Napoleon III, he exclaimed, referring to his closest associates, ‘How do you expect the Empire to run smoothly? The Empress is a Legitimist, Morny is an Orléanist, my cousin Jérôme-Napoleon is a Republican; I am a socialist; only Persigny is a Bonapartist and he is mad.’135 His ideas possessed such emotive force because they were presented in Napoleonic packaging - and the empire was remembered by many people not for dictatorship, not for the horrors of war, but for its ‘glory’ and its claim to the idealism of the 1789 revolution.