by Mike Rapport
His actions were driven by a sense that the republic almost certainly would not survive, but that it had to be remembered for posterity. ‘We must’, he told the Constituent Assembly, ‘act like men who have the enemy at their gates, and at the same time like men who are working for eternity.’29 These sentiments seemed to run through the triumvir’s actions during his hundred days in power. Religious belief and practice were protected in a republic which, in the circumstances, could have unleashed a wave of anti-clerical and anti-religious violence. There were certainly some horrifying murders, but they were not sponsored by the government - or even justified by it after the fact. When a particularly bloodthirsty extremist named Callimaco Zambianchi and his small gang of followers shot a friar and then slaughtered six residents of a convent in the slums of Trastevere, he was arrested by the authorities. In Ancona, where the violence was more widespread, the government’s commissioner, Felice Orsini (later to gain notoriety - and be guillotined - for trying to assassinate Napoleon III with a bomb in 1858), cracked down hard (ironically enough) on the ‘terrorists’. The Inquisition and censorship were abolished, the ecclesiastical courts were replaced by secular ones and the Church’s grip on education was loosened. Some church property was confiscated to shelter the homeless and taxation was structured to help fund poor relief. All this was desperately needed, since after Rossi’s murder many of Rome’s wealthier families had fled, so the tradesmen and artisans whom they usually patronised suddenly faced unemployment. Yet Mazzini worked hard to protect Catholic sensibilities, ostentatiously attending Easter Mass in Saint Peter’s, as the republic proclaimed religious toleration for all faiths.
For ordinary citizens, the streets of Rome felt safer now than they had been under the Pope - and this under a democratic regime that had just abolished the death penalty. None of this added up to the accusations of Mazzini being a ‘communist’ or (as Cavour put it) a latter-day Robespierre. ‘No war of classes, no hostility to existing wealth . . . but a constant disposition to ameliorate the material condition of the classes least favoured by fortune’ ran the triumvirate’s programme of 5 April.30 Those who met Mazzini in those days were impressed: the American consul, Lewis Cass, described him as ‘a man of great integrity of character and of extensive intellectual acquirements’.31 An astonished Ferdinand de Lesseps, the French envoy sent to Rome in May, noted that there were even plenty of devout Catholics who certainly wanted to see the Pope return to the Vatican, but only as a religious leader, not as an absolute monarch. Nevertheless, the republic would not last. It was destroyed not, as initially expected, by an Austrian invasion, but by a French assault on Rome. In a cruel twist, throughout 1848-9 the Italian republicans had yearned for French intervention to save them. Eventually it arrived, but it was not on the side of the revolution.
The idea of a foreign invasion to restore the Pope had been mooted almost from the moment when Pius had fled to Gaeta. In February Cardinal Antonelli had proposed that the Catholic powers of Naples, Spain and Austria, possibly joined by France, should jointly occupy the Papal States. King Ferdinand, enthusiastic reactionary that he was, had already assembled his forces on his northern frontier. The Austrians had retaken Ferrara and were contemplating another assault on Bologna. Spain was marshalling a seaborne expedition. The attitude of the French was uncertain. On learning of Novara, President Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte at first wanted to fight against the Austrians. Much as conservative opinion in France sympathised with the Pope, it was still patriotic enough to fear and despise Austrian power. At the end of March, the National Assembly approved a six-thousand-strong French force under General Nicolas Oudinot to occupy Rome’s port, Civita Vecchia, but not to march on the city itself unless he was certain that his approach would not be received by hot lead. Ostensibly, the mission was to protect Rome from an Austrian attack, but Bonaparte had issued Oudinot with secret orders for the Roman republic to be crushed. By doing this, the president was consolidating his conservative base by appealing to the sensibilities of the French Catholic right. The French troops disembarked on 24 April. Six days later, they marched on the Vatican, but assorted Italian democrats - with up to nine thousand men commanded by, among others, Garibaldi - beat them back, causing considerable carnage: the French lost five hundred dead and wounded.
Although Oudinot brazenly claimed that this disastrous operation had merely been a ‘reconnaissance’ and a ‘gloriously executed’ one at that,32 the defeat was deeply embarrassing to Louis-Napoleon, whose fundamental resonance with the French electorate was associated with the military glories of his uncle. He was now under political pressure, facing a National Assembly that was overtly hostile to Oudinot’s ‘new’ mission. On 7 May, in a republican charge led by the lawyer Jules Favre, the government’s policy was rejected by the Assembly. Yet fresh elections gave Bonaparte the conservative majority he desired. Moreover, it was becoming clear that, unless he moved quickly, he would be denied his victory because the Austrians, Spanish and Neapolitans were on the move. The Austrians threw themselves against Bologna on 8 May and, after eight days of fighting, broke the city’s resistance under the weight of a bombardment. They then marched down to Ancona, laying siege to the port. The French were anxious that the hated Austrians would soon grab the jewel of Rome: Thiers later remarked that ‘to know that the Austrian flag was flying on the Castle of Saint Angelo is a humiliation under which no Frenchman could bear to exist’. Among those who agreed was the new French foreign minister, none other than Alexis de Tocqueville, who had taken office on 2 June and for whom it was essential to assert France’s presence as a great power.33 Action appeared to be all the more urgent because the Spanish had embarked some five thousand men bound for Fiumicino. The Neapolitans had also struck, occupying the countryside around Palestrina, but they were routed by Garibaldi at Velletri on 19 May. As Ferdinand’s broken troops tumbled back across the frontier, those who had seen Garibaldi in his distinctive shirt described him as a bullet-proof ‘red devil’. It was time for the French to make their move, so their peace envoy, de Lesseps, was recalled. Oudinot was furnished with new and ominous hardware: heavy siege guns were seen being hauled ashore at Civita Vecchia.
The coming fight would be hopelessly unequal: Oudinot now had thirty thousand men ranged against Rome’s determined but motley force of sixteen thousand loyal regulars, carabinieri, civic guards, citizen volunteers and, of course, Garibaldi’s men, some of whom had been with him since South America. Having been badly burned in April, Oudinot changed the focus of his assault to the Janiculum Hill, a long ridge along which ran the city’s western defences. From there, he could mount artillery and rain shells on to Rome with impunity, which was precisely why Garibaldi’s defence of this position was so determined and desperate. In the early hours of 3 June French troops swooped on the Italian outposts, the Pamfili and Corsini villas. The former was taken easily, but the Corsini, whose position on a knoll gave it a commanding view of the San Pancrazio city gate, was shattered by cannon fire and musketry after some sixteen hours of relentless combat. By the end of the fighting on 4 June the Italians had lost at least 550 killed and wounded, many in the narrow hornets’ nest of the road between the Porta San Pancrazio and the Corsini, which had fallen to the French. Only the Vascello, a building on that same road, held out, supported by the Italian guns mounted on the city walls.
‘The third of June’, wrote Garibaldi dramatically, ‘sealed the fate of Rome.’34 Yet the French had sustained at least 264 casualties themselves and had lost the opportunity to storm the city by surprise. Mazzini also proved to be an inspiring leader (though Garibaldi, whom the troublesome Sterbini wanted to make dictator, was loath to admit it). Ordinary citizens, men and women, rallied to the city’s defence. The French shells that were fired - particularly those falling on to the narrow streets and houses of the Trastevere, huddling immediately below the Janiculum - failed to break popular morale. Some six thousand women offered to help, and Princess Belgiojoso led a team of volunteer nurses. M
eanwhile, the French were suffering from malaria. Rome might just have held out for long enough to provoke British diplomatic intervention, and for the French to be sufficiently weary to accept it. Eventually it was the Romans who were worn down. By sheer weight of numbers, in the night of 21-2 June, Oudinot’s siege works finally came to within rushing distance of the bastions to the south of the Porta San Pancrazio. When they were breached, the French were at last on the city walls. Remarkably, the Vascello held on for another eight days until, blasted relentlessly by cannon, the building was nothing more than a smouldering heap of rubble. Garibaldi’s men fell back to a second line of defence, pivoting at the Villa Spada (nowadays the Irish Embassy to the Vatican), which was blasted apart by gunfire over several days. (It was at this point that Garibaldi’s indomitable and pregnant wife, Anita, chose to rejoin her husband.) The Italians held out desperately until the night of 29-30 June, when, fighting tooth and nail, the French took the shattered ruins of the Spada. The defenders wore the famous red shirts, which had been issued to Garibaldi’s rank-and-file legionaries for the first time the previous day. On 30 June, after hearing Garibaldi’s assessment of the military situation, and overriding Mazzini, the Constituent Assembly voted to capitulate. As one last monument of defiance, however, the deputies ratified the constitution of the Roman republic, which, though it was being framed while French shells burst around the parliament, stated that ‘the Republic declares all nations as sisters: it respects every nationality: it supports the Italian’.35
Garibaldi - who, like Mazzini, wanted to continue the fight - gathered those among the remnants of his forces who were willing to follow him on Saint Peter’s Square. He left Rome with some three thousand people - among them Cicerruacchio, Ugo Bassi (who since the spring had been chaplain to Garibaldi’s force) and Anita, who cut her hair short and wore a green military uniform until her pregnancy was more advanced.36 During the arduous march across the Apennines, pursued by the French and shunned by the fearful peasantry, Garibaldi’s force gradually melted away through exhaustion, illness and desertion until, by the time he reached the Adriatic, he was left with no more than two hundred loyal followers. They commandeered boats to sail for Venice but were caught at sea by the Austrians. Making land, Garibaldi and his now tiny party hid in the Comacchio Forest, with Garibaldi carrying the now seriously ill Anita in his arms (she had caught a fever, probably malaria, on the long march). When she - and her unborn child - died, Garibaldi wept bitterly and had to be coaxed away from her lifeless body.37 The Austrians captured Bassi and, with barbaric vengeance, tore the skin off his hands and forehead (where he had been anointed as a friar) before shooting him. Garibaldi recrossed the mountains, reaching the Tuscan coast, from where he sailed for Genoa, where the Piedmontese authorities threw him into prison before sending him into exile. He travelled the world doing various jobs for ten years before returning to Italy, this time triumphantly.
Mazzini remained in Rome for a week after the French troops marched in. The French, having accomplished their mission, were now keen to ensure that there were no reprisals. He eventually boarded a French ship bound for Marseille from where he made his way back to Switzerland and exile.
Back in Rome, Oudinot declared papal rule restored in mid-July and handed over power to the ‘Red Triumvirate’, so called because it consisted of three cardinals who dressed in scarlet cassocks. French soldiers, with bayonets fixed, prevented the republican Constituent Assembly from reassembling and censorship was restored, but Louis-Napoleon did try to cajole Pius into retaining some of the reforms of 1848: ‘the French Republic’, he told the Pope in true Bonapartist style, ‘has not sent an army to Rome to crush Italian liberty, but to regulate it, and save it from its own excesses’.38 Pius responded by refusing to return to Rome and withdrawing in high dudgeon to King Ferdinand’s palace at Portici. There, he issued a declaration on 12 September which, while offering some mild concessions, effectively restored absolute rule. He offered amnesty only to a small group of people, but because this left such a large number liable to prosecution, it significantly blunted the effectiveness of the repression: witnesses refused to give evidence and in the end only thirty-eight of those targeted were punished. Meanwhile, the Red Triumvirate reintroduced the Inquisition; furthermore, capital punishment (by the guillotine) was restored, as were public floggings. Even moderate liberals were exiled and the Jews, who had been given full rights under the republic, were forced back into the ghetto. When the Pope eventually returned to Rome in April 1850, it was to a noticeably sullen reception.
Only Venice remained as the last pocket of Italian resistance. Despite his republicanism, Manin was pragmatic enough to realise that, as 1849 opened, the city’s fate lay in a Piedmontese victory, since Franco-British mediation seemed to be getting nowhere. He also tried - as far as he could without angering the Piedmontese government - to enter into diplomatic relations with Tuscany and Rome. For recognising the Roman republic, however, he was bitterly denounced by Tommaseo, who as a devout Catholic resented the revolution against the Pope. Yet Manin’s popularity did not suffer with the voters in the January elections for the new Venetian assembly. There was some opposition - from the Mazzinians trying to regain the initiative after the government crackdown in October, and from conservatives who wanted to end the war by coming to terms with Austria. These left- and right-wing opponents formed an unlikely alliance in the assembly, but Manin retained the support of most working people in Venice - including the gondoliers (the elite of the working class), whose leader had given the triumvirs a ringing endorsement. On 5 March, an overzealous crowd of Venetians, abetted by the benign neutrality of the civic guard, stormed the assembly in the Doge’s Palace to demand that Manin be made dictator. Only the diminutive man himself, sword drawn, stood in their way and persuaded them to disperse. Two days later, however, the assembly voted to give Manin full powers anyway, including the right to dissolve the assembly itself for fifteen days and, in its absence, to issue emergency decrees. Hopes were revived when Piedmont once again went to war with Austria, and Charles Albert’s ships reappeared in the lagoon,39 but on 2 April came the devastating news of Novara.
The assembly rose to the challenge. Manin told the delegates of the city’s now dire situation, finishing with a call to fight to the bitter end: ‘Does the assembly wish to resist the enemy?’ ‘Yes,’ the delegates shouted back. ‘At every cost?’ To a man the delegates rose and roared, ‘Yes!’ It would not be long before the Austrians would bring up crushing numbers against Venice. The siege trenches dug by the Austrian sappers threaded their way ever closer to the walls of Fort Marghera, the focal point for their assault.40 From 4 May that fortress was blasted by an estimated sixty thousand shells and rockets - a quarter of them on 25 May alone, the climax of this rain of fire. The Venetians had 130 cannon and mortars with which they replied, but they ran low on munitions, and by the time the fort (now in heaps of rubble) fell, one in three gunners had been killed. In addition to the utter carnage, the defenders were racked by cholera and malaria. On 26 May, seeing the Austrians cramming their trenches with men - the ominous sign of an impending assault - the survivors beat a retreat across the railway bridge, back into the city, or were rowed across the lagoon in boats. Five arches of the bridge were blown up to cut off the obvious route for an Austrian assault. The occasional railway platforms on the bridge were fortified with artillery; to be assigned to the front battery was to receive an order of almost certain death. Raked by Austrian gunnery every day, the Venetian dead and wounded in the front positions were carried back into the city at night while the shattered defences were shored up.
As the Austrian siege intensified, there were calls to replace Pepe, who was accused of being too old and phlegmatic to continue as Venetian commander. The Italian Club invited all soldiers to attend their meetings and to voice their opinions. Recognising the threat to discipline and the challenge to his authority, Manin closed down the club on 3 June, but he did make a major concession to the p
ressure for change: a new three-member military commission, which included General Ulloa, hero of the stubborn resistance of Fort Marghera, would take control of the armed forces. Pepe resigned, but Ulloa tactfully made him the president of the commission. This body was one of the reforms for which the Italian Club had been campaigning - and Manin bowed to the vote of the assembly when it accepted the change.41 Meanwhile, Venice had acquired a new ally: Hungary. In May Kossuth had sent an envoy to negotiate with Manin at a time when he believed that the Magyars might successfully send an army through Croatia and occupy Trieste, the home of the imperial fleet. The alliance between Venice and Hungary was sealed on 20 May, with the Hungarians promising the Venetians financial support in return for a diversionary sortie from Venice when the Magyars reached the sea.42
This alliance gave false hope to the Venetians. The Austrian noose was slowly but surely tightening around them. Radetzky called for the city’s surrender, but when Manin demanded autonomy within the empire as a condition, the field marshal offered nothing more than an amnesty for soldiers and free passage for anyone who wished to go into exile. True to its promise to resist, the assembly overwhelmingly rejected these uncompromising terms at the end of June. It was a display of defiance that cost the brave city dear. While soldiers killed each other on the lagoon, the Venetian civilians were subjected to a prolonged artillery bombardment. The guns, with their barrels removed from their carriages and slipped into specially constructed wooden slides propped up at a forty-five-degree angle, aimed into the night sky and sent twenty-four-pound shells high over the lagoon and tumbling on to the city, travelling a distance of three and a half miles.43 The shelling began in the night of 29-30 July and lasted for three weeks. The loss of life from the bombardment and the fires that it caused was far lower than one might have expected, though, partly because of the fire-fighting efforts of the Venetians, but also because the cannonballs, while red hot, had covered such a distance that their force was often spent. They made gaping holes in roofs, but they did not always explode on impact and frequently did not even penetrate down to the lower floors. The Venetian festivals and processions continued and the theatres still put on performances. The Austrians fired a thousand projectiles a day at the city, but the Venetians defiantly dubbed the burning shells ‘Viennese oranges’.44