Pio Nono

Those prophetic words were written by the Austrian State Chancellor Prince Metternich in October 1847 to his ambassador in Paris. Their subject was Giovanni Maria Mastai-Ferretti, who in the previous year, at the age of only fifty-four and after a forty-eight-hour conclave, had been elected Pope Pius IX. He was as unlike his predecessor as it was possible to be; indeed, he was known to have been openly critical of Gregory’s rule in the Papal States, just as he was of the Austrian presence in Italy. Gregory had made him a cardinal but had never trusted him: even his cats, he maintained, were liberals.

But his reputation carried its own dangers. Every political demonstration, from the mildest to the most revolutionary, now claimed his support; his name appeared on a thousand banners, frequently proclaiming causes to which he was strongly opposed. With the outbreak of the revolutions of 1848—they occurred in Sicily, Paris, Vienna, Naples, Rome, Venice, Florence, Lucca, Parma, Modena, Milan, Berlin, Cracow, Warsaw, and Budapest—his position became more untenable still. “Pio Nono! Pio Nono! Pio Nono!”—the name became a battle cry, endlessly chanted by one mob after another as it surged through the streets of city after city. When the pope concluded one speech with the words “God bless Italy!” his words were immediately seen as an endorsement of the popular dream of a united peninsula, freed forever from Austrian rule. (Pius, it need hardly be said, had no desire to see Italy united; apart from anything else, what would then become of the Papal States?) In short, he now found himself on a runaway train; his only hope was to try to apply the brakes whenever he could.

Metternich’s resignation and flight left Austria in chaos. The government was rudderless, the army bewildered and uncertain in its loyalties. Here, unmistakably, was the signal to insurgents and revolutionaries throughout Italy. In Milan, the great insurrection known to all Italians as the cinque giornate—the five days of March 18 to 22—drove the Austrians from the city and instituted a republican government. On the last of those days, in Turin, a stirring front-page article appeared in the newspaper Il Risorgimento, written by its editor, Count Camillo Cavour. “The supreme hour has sounded,” he wrote. “One way alone is open for the nation, for the government, for the King. War!”

Two days later, King Charles Albert proclaimed the readiness of Piedmont to take up arms against the Austrian occupiers. Grand Duke Leopold II of Tuscany dispatched an army composed of both regular troops and volunteers. Rather more surprisingly, there was a similar response from King Ferdinand of Naples, who sent a force of 16,000 under a huge Calabrian general named Guglielmo Pepe. Strategically these contributions probably made little difference; they showed, however, beyond all possible doubt, that the cause was a national, Italian one. As they took their places beside the Piedmontese, Charles Albert’s fellow rulers saw themselves not as allies but as compatriots.

On March 24 General Giovanni Durando led the advance guard of a papal army out of Rome, to protect the northern frontier of the Papal States against any possible Austrian attack. This was conceived as a purely defensive measure, but the warmongers refused to accept it as such. Austria, they claimed, had declared war on Christian Italy. This was therefore a holy war, a Crusade, with the divine purpose of driving the invader from the sacred Italian soil. Pope Pius was horrified. Never for a moment would he have condoned such a policy of aggression, least of all against a Catholic nation. It was clearly essential for him to make his position clear once and for all. The result was the Allocution of April 29, 1848. Far from leading the campaign for a united Italy, he declared, he actively opposed it. God-fearing Italians should forget the whole idea of unification and once again pledge their loyalty to their individual princes.

For all the states of Italy, the quarantotto—the forty-eight—had been a momentous year. Strategically, the situation had changed remarkably little; in most places Austria remained in control. Politically, on the other hand, there had been a dramatic shift in popular opinion. When the year began, most patriotic Italians were thinking in terms of getting rid of the Austrian forces of occupation; when it ended, the overriding objective, everywhere except in Venice, was a united Italy. Change was in the air. At last, it seemed, the Italians were on the verge of realizing their long-cherished dream. The Risorgimento had begun.

THE HURRIED DEPARTURE of the pope had taken Rome by surprise. The chief minister of the papal government, Giuseppe Galletti, an old friend of Mazzini who had returned to Rome under the amnesty and had courageously succeeded the murdered Rossi, first sent a delegation to Gaeta to persuade Pius to return; only when this was refused an audience did Galletti call for the formation of a Roman Constituent Assembly of 200 elected members, which would meet in the city on February 5, 1849. Time was short, but the need was urgent, and 142 members duly presented themselves in the Palazzo della Cancelleria on the appointed date. Just four days later, at two in the morning, the Assembly voted, by 120 votes to 10, with 12 abstentions, to put an end to the temporal power of the pope and establish a Roman Republic. It was dominated by a forty-one-year-old adventurer named Giuseppe Garibaldi.

The moment Garibaldi heard of the revolutions of 1848, he gathered sixty of his Redshirts and took the next ship back to Italy. His initial offers to fight for the pope and then for Piedmont having both been rejected—Charles Albert, in particular, would not have forgotten that he was still under sentence of death—he headed for Milan, where Mazzini had already arrived, and immediately plunged into the fray. The armistice following Charles Albert’s defeat at Custozza he simply ignored, continuing his private war against the Austrians until at the end of August, heavily outnumbered, he was obliged to retreat to Switzerland. Three months later, however, on hearing of the pope’s flight, he hurried at once with his troop of volunteers to Rome. There he was elected a member of the new Assembly, and it was he who formally proposed that Rome should thenceforth be an independent republic.

He gave his orders accordingly, and on April 25, 1849, General Nicolas Oudinot, the son of one of Napoleon’s marshals, landed with a force of about 9,000 at Civitavecchia and set off on the forty-mile march to Rome. From the start he was under a misapprehension. He had been led to believe that the Roman Republic had been imposed by a small group of revolutionaries on an unwilling people and would soon be overturned; he and his men would consequently be welcomed as liberators. His orders were to grant the Assembly no formal recognition but to occupy the city peacefully, if possible without firing a shot.

He was in for a surprise. The Romans, although they had little hope of defending their city against a trained and well-equipped army, were busy preparing themselves for the fight. Their own forces, such as they were, consisted of the regular papal troops of the line; the carabinieri, a special corps of the Italian army normally entrusted with police duties; the thousand-strong Civic Guard; the volunteer regiments raised in the city, which amounted to some 1,400; and, by no means the least formidable, the populace itself, with every weapon it could lay its hands on. But their total numbers were still pathetically small, and great was their jubilation when, on the twenty-seventh, Garibaldi rode into the city at the head of 1,300 legionaries whom he had gathered in the Romagna. Two days later there followed a regiment of Lombard bersaglieri, with their distinctive broad-brimmed hats and swaying plumes of black-and-green cock’s feathers. The defenders were gathering in strength, but the odds were still heavily against them and they knew it.

That night all Rome was illuminated in celebration, but no one pretended that the invaders were not going to return. The French had learned that Rome was to be a tougher nut to crack than they had expected; nonetheless, they intended to crack it. Little more than a month later, during which time Garibaldi, at the head of his legionaries and the bersaglieri, marched south to meet an invading Neapolitan army and effortlessly expelled it from republican territory, Oudinot had received the reinforcements he had requested, and it was with 20,000 men behind him and vastly improved armaments that, on June 3, he marched on Rome for the second time.

HAD THE QUARANTOTTO been in vain? By early 1850 it certainly seemed so. Pius IX had returned to a French-occupied Rome; the Austrians were back in Venice and in Lombardy; in Naples, King Ferdinand II (“King Bomba”) had torn up the Constitution and once again wielded absolute power; Florence, Modena, and Parma, all under Austrian protection, were in much the same state. In the whole peninsula, only Piedmont remained free—but Piedmont too had changed. The tall, handsome, idealistic Charles Albert was dead. His son and successor, Victor Emmanuel II, was short, squat, and unusually ugly, principally interested—or so it seemed—in hunting and women. But he was a good deal more intelligent than he looked; despite his genuine shyness and awkwardness in public, he missed very few tricks. It is hard to imagine the Risorgimento without him.

Surprisingly enough, what seems finally to have decided Louis-Napoleon to take up arms on Italy’s behalf was a plot by Italian patriots to assassinate him. Their attempt took place on January 14, 1858, when bombs were thrown at his carriage as he and the empress were on their way to the opera. Neither was hurt, though there were several casualties among their escort and the surrounding bystanders. The leader of the conspirators, Felice Orsini, was a well-known republican who had been implicated in a number of former plots. While in prison awaiting trial he wrote the emperor a letter, which was later read aloud in open court and published in both the French and the Piedmontese press. It ended, “Remember that, so long as Italy is not independent, the peace of Europe and Your Majesty is but an empty dream.… Set my country free, and the blessings of twenty-five million people will follow you everywhere and forever.”

Although these noble words failed to save Orsini from the firing squad, they seem to have lingered in the mind of Louis-Napoleon, who by midsummer had come around to the idea of a joint operation to drive the Austrians from the Italian Peninsula once and for all. His motives were not, it need hardly be said, wholly idealistic. True, he had a genuine love for Italy and would have been delighted to present himself to the world as her deliverer, but he was also aware that his prestige and popularity at home were fast declining. He desperately needed a war—and a victorious war at that—to regain them, and Austria was the only potential enemy available. The next step was to discuss the possibilities with Cavour, and in July 1858 the two met secretly at the little health resort of Plombières-les-Bains in the Vosges. Agreement was quickly reached. Piedmont would engineer a quarrel with the Duke of Modena and send in troops, ostensibly at the request of the population. Austria would be bound to support the duke and declare war; Piedmont would then appeal to France for aid, and France would help her to expel the Austrians from Italy and to annex Venetia-Lombardy. In return, she would cede to France the county of Savoy and the city of Nice. The latter, being the birthplace of Garibaldi, was a bitter pill for Cavour to swallow; but if it was the price of liberation, then swallowed it would have to be.

After Magenta the Franco-Piedmontese army was joined by Garibaldi, who had been invited by Victor Emmanuel to assemble a brigade of Cacciatori delle Alpi—Alpine hunters—and had won another battle against the Austrians some ten days before at Varese. They then all advanced together and met the full Austrian army on June 24 at Solferino, just south of Lake Garda. The ensuing battle, in which well over a quarter of a million men were engaged, was fought on a grander scale than any since Leipzig in 1813. The French were able now to reveal a secret weapon: rifled artillery, which dramatically increased both the accuracy and range of their guns. Much of the fighting, however, was hand to hand, beginning early in the morning and continuing throughout most of the day. Only toward evening, after losing some 20,000 of his men in heavy rain, did the twenty-eight-year-old Emperor Franz Josef order a withdrawal across the Mincio. But it was a Pyrrhic victory; the French and Piedmontese lost almost as many men as the Austrians, and the outbreak of fever—probably typhus—that followed the battle accounted for thousands more on both sides. The scenes of carnage made a deep impression on a young Swiss named Henri Dunant, who chanced to be present and organized emergency aid services for the wounded. Five years later, as a direct result of his experience, he was to found the Red Cross.

And so, on July 11, 1859, the emperors of France and Austria met at Villafranca near Verona, and the future of North and Central Italy was decided in less than an hour. Austria would keep Venetia, as well as Mantua and Peschiera, the great fortress on Lake Garda; the rest of Lombardy she would surrender to France, which would pass it on to Piedmont. The former rulers of Tuscany and Modena would be restored to their thrones, and an Italian confederacy would be established under the honorary presidency of the pope. Venetia, including Venice itself, would be a member of this confederacy, while remaining under Austrian sovereignty.

The fury of Cavour when he read the details of the Villafranca Agreement can well be imagined. Without Venice, Peschiera, or Mantua, not even Venetia-Lombardy would be entirely Italian; as for Central Italy, that was lost even before it had been properly gained. After a long and acrimonious interview with Victor Emmanuel, he submitted his resignation. “We shall return,” he wrote to a friend, “to conspiracy.” Gradually, however, he recovered himself. There had at least been no mention in the agreement of the French annexation of Savoy and Nice, which he had reluctantly agreed to at Plombières; the present situation, if not all that he had hoped, was certainly a good deal better than it had been the year before.

Over the next few months it improved still further, as several of the smaller states categorically refused to accept the fate prescribed for them; nothing, they made it clear, would induce them to take back their former rulers. In Florence, Bologna, Parma, and Modena dictators had sprung up, all of them determined on fusion with Piedmont. The only obstacle was presented by Piedmont itself; the terms agreed on at Villafranca were now incorporated in a formal treaty signed at Zurich, and General Alfonso La Marmora, who had succeeded Cavour as chief minister, was unwilling to take any action in defiance of it. But the dictators were quite prepared to bide their time. Florence, meanwhile, kept her independence; Romagna (which included Bologna), Parma, and Modena joined together to form a new state, which—since the Roman Via Aemilia ran through all three of them—they called Emilia.

ON APRIL 4, 1860, there was a popular insurrection in Palermo. It was not a success—the Neapolitan authorities had been secretly informed in advance—but it provided a spark for others throughout northern Sicily, and the authorities could not cope with them all. When Garibaldi heard the news, he acted at once. Cavour refused his request for a Piedmontese brigade, but within less than a month he had assembled a band of volunteers, who sailed from the little port of Quarto (now part of Genoa) on the night of May 5, landing unopposed at Marsala in western Sicily on the eleventh. They represented a broad cross section of Italian society, about half consisting of men from the professions—lawyers, doctors, and university lecturers—the other half drawn from the working class. Some were still technically republicans, but their leader made it clear to them that they were fighting not just for Italy but also for King Victor Emmanuel—and this was no time to argue.

From Marsala the Thousand—as they came to be called, though there were actually 1,089 of them—headed inland. There was a degree of somewhat halfhearted resistance from the Bourbon troops, but by the end of May Garibaldi was master of Palermo and two months later of all Sicily. In mid-August he and his men crossed the Strait of Messina; on September 7 he entered Naples in an open carriage, King Francis II having fled on the previous day.

Suddenly Garibaldi found two formidable armies ranged against him: the Neapolitan and the Piedmontese. King Francis had managed to raise a new army, and not long after the Redshirts left Naples on the first stage of their journey north they found a force of some 50,000 drawn up along the bank of the Volturno River. It was there that they suffered their first defeat since landing in Sicily; outside the little town of Caiazzo, in their leader’s temporary absence, one of his generals tried and failed to cross the river, losing 250 men in the attempt. But on October 1 Garibaldi had his revenge. It was an expensive victory, with some 1,400 killed or wounded in and around the little village of Sant’Angelo in Formis, but it may well have saved Italy.

But now, by a stroke of good fortune, there appeared a deus ex machina, who was effectively to drop both the coveted territories into Italy’s lap. This took the unexpected shape of the Prussian chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, who was now well on the way to uniting all the German states into a single empire. The one stumbling block was Austria. He therefore proposed to Victor Emmanuel a military alliance: Austria would be attacked simultaneously on two fronts, by Prussia from the north and by Italy from the west. In the event of victory, Italy’s reward would be the Veneto. The king agreed, and Napoleon III had no objection. The treaty was signed on April 8, 1866, and on June 15 the war began. Six weeks later, it was over. A single battle did the trick. It was fought at Sadowa, some sixty-five miles northeast of Prague, and it engaged the largest number of troops—a third of a million—ever assembled on a European battlefield. The Prussian victory was total, and the armistice that followed duly provided for the cession of the Veneto. This was confirmed by a plebiscite, the result of which was a foregone conclusion. Venice was an Italian city at last, and Italy could boast a new and invaluable port on the northern Adriatic.

Only Rome remained.

Pius IX never lost his easygoing charm, his ready smile, his ever-present sense of humor; yet here was proof—if proof were needed—that he now identified himself with one of the most reactionary, intolerant, and aggressive movements of modern Church history. For the Ultramontanists, as they had come to be called, the pope was absolute ruler, unquestioned leader, infallible guide. No discussion was permitted, no suggestion that there might be two sides to an argument. Roman Catholicism was in danger of becoming something akin to a police state, illiberal and bigoted. As the Anglican convert John Henry Newman disgustedly wrote, “We are shrinking into ourselves, narrowing the lines of communication, trembling at freedom of thought, and using the language of dismay and despair at the prospect before us.” No wonder that Britain’s representative in Rome, Odo Russell, reporting back to his government, wrote of the pope’s “unbounded pretensions to absolute control over the souls and bodies of mankind” and his position “at the head of a vast ecclesiastical conspiracy against the principles which govern modern society.” “Liberal Catholics,” he wrote, “can no longer speak in her [the Church’s] defence without being convicted of heresy.”

It was by far the largest Council in history, attended by nearly 700 bishops from all five continents, 120 of them English-speaking. (There would have been more still if Russia had allowed its Catholic priests to attend.) The proceedings, it was agreed, should take place under two heads, the Faith and the Church. The Constitution on the Faith formally deplored the pantheism, materialism, and atheism of the time and caused few problems. That on the Church proved a good deal trickier. It had not originally been intended that the main issue should be that of papal infallibility, but as the Council continued its work this gradually assumed overriding importance. The debate was long and spirited, and the wording as finally accepted—by a majority of 533 to 2, but with many abstentions—disappointed the extremists on both sides. The Roman pontiff, it declared, was indeed infallible, his definitions “being irreformable of themselves, and not from the consent of the Church”; his infallibility was, however, restricted only to those occasions “when he speaks ex cathedra, that is when, in discharge of the office of Pastor and Doctor of all Christians, by virtue of his supreme Apostolic authority he defines a doctrine regarding faith or morals to be held by the Universal Church.”

This decree was promulgated on July 18, 1870—not a moment too soon. The very next day saw the declaration of the Franco-Prussian War, and the instant withdrawal of French troops from Rome, followed by the Italian occupation of the city, brought the Council to a somewhat abrupt finish.

He had reckoned without the French. Napoleon III, who had withdrawn his troops in 1866 in conformity with the September Convention, now sent a fresh army, equipped with the deadly new chassepot rifles, which landed at Civitavecchia in late October. The volunteers, outnumbered and outclassed, stood no chance. Garibaldi himself managed to slip back across the frontier into Italy—and into the arms of the authorities. Back he was sent to Caprera, where he remained, this time heavily guarded under house arrest. Of his men, no fewer than 1,600 were taken prisoner.

Yet again, by his swift reaction, the Emperor Napoleon had saved the temporal power of the Papacy; no one could have guessed that less than three years later he would be instrumental in bringing about its downfall. The prime mover, once again, was Bismarck, who had cunningly drawn France into a war by his threat to place a prince of the ruling Prussian House of Hohenzollern on the throne of Spain. That war was declared—by France, not Prussia—on July 19, 1870. It was to prove a bitter struggle: Napoleon would need every soldier he had for the fighting that lay ahead. By the end of August there was not a uniformed Frenchman left in Rome.

Over the next few hours Italian troops swarmed through Rome, leaving only the Vatican and the Castel Sant’Angelo, from which there now flew the white flag of surrender. There was no more resistance. In May 1871, by the new Law of Guarantees, the government assured the pope of his personal inviolability and of his continued exclusive occupation of the Vatican, the Lateran, and his country residence at Castel Gandolfo. All three, however, would henceforth be the property of the Italian state, which would pay him 3.5 million lire a year in compensation. The papal court would remain as it had always been, as would the Papal Guard; the Supreme Pontiff would continue to maintain his own diplomatic service; and a diplomatic corps would continue to be accredited to the Holy See. Papal communications with the outside world were assured by the Vatican post and telegraph office, which issued its own stamps. But Pius doggedly refused to recognize what was obviously a fait accompli or to accept the compensation money. As “Vicar of a Crucified God,” he declared, he was perfectly prepared to suffer; but voluntarily to surrender the Patrimony of Peter, “the seamless robe of Jesus Christ”—that he could never contemplate.

It was not until July 2, 1871, that Victor Emmanuel made his official entry into his new capital. The streets were already being decorated for the occasion when he sent a telegram to the mayor forbidding all signs of festivity. As a pious Catholic, he had been not only saddened but terrified when sentence of excommunication had been passed upon him. Ferdinand Gregorovius, the Prussian historian of medieval Rome, wrote in his diary that the procession was “without pomp, vivacity, grandeur or majesty; and that was as it should have been, for this day signals the end of the millenary rule of the Popes over Rome.” In the afternoon the king was urged to cross the river to Trastevere, where some small ceremony had been prepared by the largely working-class population. He flatly refused, adding, in the Piedmontese dialect of which few of those about him would have understood a word, “The Pope is only two steps away and would feel hurt. I have done enough already to that poor old man.”

Pius died on the morning of February 8. According to custom, Cardinal Pecci, the camerlengo—soon to succeed him as Leo XIII—tapped his forehead three times with a little silver hammer, calling him by his baptismal name, Giovanni Maria. When there was no reply, he turned to the other cardinals present with the traditional words “The Pope is truly dead.” The body lay in state in the Chapel of the Blessed Sacrament, behind a grille which the feet touched so that they could be kissed by the faithful. A vast crowd filed by to do so, day and night, for three days.

It had been the longest pontificate—thirty-one years—in papal history. Politically it had been, from Pius’s point of view, a disaster; but Pius did not spend all his life trying to maintain his temporal power. His first concern was always for the health and well-being of the Church itself, and for this no pope had ever worked harder or with greater effect. He founded more than two hundred new dioceses, particularly in the United States and the British Empire; he reestablished the Catholic hierarchies in Britain and the Netherlands; and he concluded concordats with an impressive number of states, Catholic and otherwise.

There were other achievements, too, still more lasting though not perhaps in every case universally acclaimed. Already in 1854 the pope had proclaimed the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, according to which the Blessed Virgin—not, as many people assume, Jesus Christ—was born without original sin. The manner of the proclamation was as significant, if not more so, as the doctrine itself; though Pius had consulted several bishops in advance, he dared, as no pope had ever dared before, to put forward the dogma on his own sole authority. In doing so he gave an enormous boost to the burgeoning cult of Mary, which continued to gather momentum as the century advanced. (Only four years later came the stamp of divine approval: in Lourdes, the Virgin appeared to young Bernadette Soubirous and introduced herself with the words “I am the Immaculate Conception.”) Another cult to which the pope gave great encouragement was that of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Eighteenth-century Jansenists had dismissed it as “cardiolatry,” but Pius placed its feast day firmly on the Church calendar. It is no coincidence that the Basilica of the Sacré-Coeur in Paris was built during his pontificate on the Butte Montmartre—the highest point of Paris.