The Roman Republic
1848-1849. AETAT 43-44
The collapse of the war--The People's War--At Florence--The
mission of Rome--The Roman Republic--The
Triumvirate--Attitude to the Church--The French attack.
Had he done this, he might have averted the catastrophe, which
quenched the nation's hopes in swift disaster. In one pitched fight
after another the Italians had won. But courage could not repair bad
generalship and growing inferiority of numbers, and Mazzini foretold
disaster only too accurately. At the end of July the collapse came,
and the army, still fighting doggedly, but starved and outmanoeuvred,
retreated on Milan. For some weeks past Mazzini had urged that a small
committee of defence should be appointed; and when disaster
threatened, he was allowed to nominate his men. He chose Fanti and two
others, who did their best in the short time to organize the defence
of the city. The Milanese rose again to something of the spirit of the
Five Days; but it was too late to turn the tide of victory. The army
made a gallant fight outside the city walls, but were driven back
within the gates. The unhappy king would fain have fought on still,
but he knew there was no hope of victory, and after long hesitation
he surrendered the city. The people, maddened by the desertion,
attacked the palace where he lodged, and it was with difficulty that
his life was saved. Sullenly he and his army withdrew, followed by
thousands of the citizens, intolerant of Austrian rule.
Mazzini left Milan, as soon as the army arrived, shouldering a rifle
that Mrs Ashurst had given him when he left England. He had persuaded
himself that a popular rising might have saved the city, but that the
army could not. He started to join Garibaldi, who was in command of
the volunteers at Bergamo, and met a detachment of them at Monza.
Their flag had "God and the People" for its legend, and the volunteers
chose Mazzini to carry it. Garibaldi's small force of three thousand
men made a difficult retreat, in terrible weather and ever harassed by
the Austrian cavalry. Mazzini, frail and exhausted, won their
admiration by his endurance and intrepidity. He was happy doubtless to
have a simple task, which only asked for physical courage, after the
tangled politics of the last four months.
The volunteers disbanded when they had passed the frontier, for the
national cause seemed desperate. The army had retreated into Piedmont,
and the King had signed an armistice. The Roman and Tuscan forces
hardly existed; Naples was at the mercy of King Ferdinand. The
Austrians had triumphed swiftly and conclusively. They dared not
indeed cross the Ticino for fear of French intervention, they were not
strong enough as yet to advance into Central Italy, and Venice defied
them in her lagunes; but Lombardy and the Venetian mainland seemed
lost past hope. Mazzini refused to own defeat. But he based his hopes
more on partisan illusions than on cool possibilities. The royal war
had ended; the people's war would begin. The Italians, betrayed by
their princes, would rise in their own strength, and crush the
Austrians by force of numbers and enthusiasm. He was working
feverishly at Lugano to create a national organization to this end,
and prepare for a popular rising in Lombardy. Again he wavered whether
or not to raise the republican flag. Providence, he thought, had by
the recent disasters pointed the Italians to a republic. But, at all
events after the fiasco of a mad rising near Como, he recognized the
hopelessness of an unsupported insurrection in the Austrian provinces.
He saw, as cooler heads saw all along, that the Piedmontese army was
indispensable; and, while urging the Romans to declare for a republic
there, he was willing to postpone the political question elsewhere,
and work with any, who would relegate it to the decision of a
Constituent Assembly after the war and throw their strength into a new
fight. He recognized at last that his own best field was in Central
Italy. Various motives drew him there. He could use his influence at
Florence and Rome to push on the military preparations; he could
perhaps secure a union of the two states, which would be a step
towards unity; he might, if circumstances favoured, help to plant the
republican flag. Both in Tuscany and at Rome democracy was triumphant.
The Pope had fled to Ferdinand's fortress at Gaeta, and the Romans,
finding every overture for compromise rejected, and left without a
stable government, were heading irresistibly for a republic. At
Florence the Grand Duke was at the mercy of the democrats, with no
alternative before him but flight or unconditional surrender. Mazzini
left Lugano, and sailing from Marseilles, arrived at Leghorn on
February 8, just when the news had come that the Grand Duke had fled
from Florence. He used his influence to prevent any attack on the
ducalists and dissuade the Livornese from secession. A week later he
was at Florence. Here he saw Giuditta Sidoli, at whose house he met
Gino Capponi, and paid a visit to Giusti. But he had little time for
the society of friends. Guerrazzi was now virtually dictator of
Tuscany. More practical in small things than Mazzini, but with none of
his inspiring confidence or simple loyalty to an idea, he was trying
to steer a middle course and keep clear of a republic. He and Mazzini
had hot words, and Mazzini, backed by a great republican meeting by
Orcagna's Loggia, forced him to a nominal and insincere acceptance of
its programme. After fruitless efforts to promote union with the Roman
states, and make the slow Tuscans prepare for war, Mazzini left for
Rome.
Ever since the Pope's flight in November, he had been appealing to his
friends there to agitate for a republic. The road, he urged, was
plain. The Pope had virtually abdicated, and, without a blow, the
republic was in their grasp,--a republic, which might grow into a
republican Italy. "You have," he wrote, "in your hands the destinies
of Italy, and the destinies of Italy are the destinies of the world."
It was one of the master-ideas of his life, cherished through years of
meditation from the first days of Young Italy. The thought was a
fantastic one; a student's conceit, fed on his early classical
studies, on his later readings in medieval history, above all on
Dante's faith in Rome, the destined seat of Empire; a strange
historical survival, born of what Cesare Balbo called "the importunate
memory of Rome's past greatness," which translated into modern terms
the theories of the Holy Roman Empire. Many an Italian in those days
shared that faith,--a faith that fed their inextinguishable resolve
that Rome should be the capital of Italy. Mazzini and Gioberti went
beyond, and looked to Rome for some new word of truth for all
humanity. But while Gioberti's destined instrument was a reformed
Papacy, Mazzini watched for a Pope-less, republican, Italian Rome to
bring the dawn of that "religious transformation," Christian in spirit
and in origin but with another dogma, which would again unite mankind
in a living, universal faith. Indefinite as his conception was, the
thought of an all-embracing unity, the "word of universal
brotherhood"--the necessary mark of any great religion--runs through
it all. As Imperial Rome had united Europe by force of arms and
majesty of law, as Papal Rome had united it by thought and spiritual
authority, so "Rome of the People" would unite it once again in some
new gospel of social duty and progress, would harmonize the temporal
and the spiritual, the Roman law of justice and the Christian law of
sacrifice. When nationality had remodelled Europe, then would eternal
Rome, destined alone of cities to rise more mighty from each fall, be
hailed its moral centre, seat of a diet of the nations, to teach to
them their common duties to humanity.[17] Who will say that this last
more modest vision may not some day and in some sense be fulfilled?
Partly in consequence of Mazzini's incentives, more from force of
circumstances, the republic was proclaimed at Rome on the day after he
landed at Leghorn. The Assembly, a fairly level-headed body, elected
on manhood suffrage and drawing its members from the larger landed
proprietors and upper middle classes, had voted for it by a great
majority; and the republican Triumvirs had discoursed in true
Mazzinian phrases, and headed their acts with the rubric "God and the
People." On the fourth day of the republic the Assembly unanimously
made Mazzini citizen of Rome, and invited him to come. He started as
soon as he could leave Tuscany, and arrived on the evening of March 5,
slipping into the city unobserved, "awed and like a worshipper,"
feeling, as he passed under the Porta del Popolo, "a spurt of new
life," that for the moment swept away doubtings and disappointments.
His first thought was to organize for the impending war. Piedmont,
unreconciled to defeat and stung by Austrian brutalities in Lombardy,
was about to denounce the armistice; there were formidable
preparations for insurrection in the Lombard cities; Venice was
undaunted and threatening from her lagunes. Republican Rome must not
be behindhand. Mazzini made her anticipate the belated appeal from
Piedmont by offering ten thousand men, and they had started for the
North when the news of Novara came.
Piedmont lay crushed by one staggering blow, and the hope of freeing
Lombardy had gone. The moment's task was to save Central Italy, and in
the imminent danger the Romans turned to the man who had won their
reverence and lifted them to something of his own moral greatness.
Mazzini was made a Triumvir, and henceforth became little less than
dictator. He had probably at heart small hope of saving the Republic,
and to foreigners like Clough and Margaret Fuller did not conceal his
fears. But the cause was not yet desperate. He knew he could
contemptuously disregard the Neapolitans, who were hovering on the
Southern frontier; and at this time he could not foresee how base a
part France was soon to play. The Austrians were the only serious
enemy in sight; and with Hungary still untamed, with the chance that
Piedmont might brace itself to a third effort, a desperate defence
might yet keep them at bay. He intended to treble the Roman forces,
and concentrating them at Terni, swoop down on the long line of
Austrian communications, as they advanced along the Eastern coast.
Meanwhile, among the cares of war, he began to build a government that
should be worthy of his ideal. "Here in Rome," he told the bickering
politicians in the Assembly, "we may not be moral mediocrities." He
hoped to inspire government and people with one great purpose, that
would leave no place for party-spirit or suspicion. He would have no
exclusiveness, no intolerance, no war of classes or attacks on
property or person. "Stiffness in principles, tolerance to
individuals" was the motto of his rule, and to this, through all the
troubled times that followed, he was nobly true. At a time when
national danger might have excused severe precautions, the press was
hardly interfered with; there were few arrests, fewer penalties, for
political offences; conspirators, with barely an exception, were left
in contemptuous tolerance, or merely warned not to let the people know
of their intrigues. It was this very leniency to the men who were
plotting the Republic's downfall, that led to the few outrages that
stained its name. The civil service and police, left full of enemies
and lukewarm friends, lacked vigour to repress the disorderly
elements; and here and there a fanatic or criminal took advantage of
the murmurings at Mazzini's tolerance to assassinate a Papalist. But
save in a few provincial towns, where political murder was endemic,
and for a few isolated outrages at Rome, there was absolute security
alike for friend and foe. Mazzini's mild authority stands out in
luminous contrast with the Papal terrorism, that scourged the unhappy
land before and after.
The Triumvir's attitude to the Catholic Church is a strange commentary
on the myth, that writes him down an anti-clerical fanatic. The man,
who believed Catholicism a spent force, whose whole soul yearned for a
new religion to issue forth from Rome, was yet superlatively careful
not to shake the people's one religious creed. It would have been easy
to do otherwise. There was fierce exasperation at the Pope's obduracy,
at the ferocious fanaticism of men, who would see Rome bombarded
rather than yield one tittle of their temporal power. Churches were
half empty, and, but for the government's precautions, many another
priest would have died the victim of the people's anger. But Mazzini
made it one of his first cares to protect the clergy in their
spiritual work. His deep religious instinct, old memories and
friendships, his respect for men who in their way were witnesses to
the spiritual, made him always tolerant towards them. "In Italy," he
once said, "the priest is powerless for harm but powerful to do good";
and before this time and after he made impassioned appeals to them to
take their part in the national work. He tried to win them now. It was
from no ill-will towards the Church that he did something to repair
the ecclesiastical misrule. Such reforms as he effected were bound to
go to the strengthening of a church, made hateful by clerical
domination; and many were the priests and monks who defied the
threatening cardinals at Gaeta, and gladly rallied to the republic.
The nationalization of church lands, which Mazzini took over from his
predecessors, aimed at improving the stipends of the poorer clergy.
Religious services and processions went on uninterrupted, and his one
act of severity towards the priests was to fine the canons of St
Peter's for refusing to celebrate the usual Easter services. "It is
the duty of the government," the Triumvirs said, "to preserve religion
uncontaminated." "Do not be afraid," he wrote to a nun, who feared the
suppression of her convent; "pray God for our country and for men of
good intentions." Once in the fear of imminent attack upon the city,
the crowd fetched a few confessional boxes from the churches to make
barricades. Mazzini reminded them that from those confessionals had
come at all events words of comfort to their mothers. It is perhaps
the most convincing proof of his grip on the people's hearts, that the
confessionals were taken back. With the Pope himself he was ever ready
to compromise. True, he had postulated his expulsion and the downfall
of his authority as the condition of the new faith, for which he
yearned. But whether it was that the statesman saw that the idealist
must wait, or from his deep respect for the institution round which
hung so much of Christian history, or that he wished to remove the
last pretext for the intervention of foreign Catholics, his attitude
went to the extreme of conciliatoriness. At its first outset the
Republic, while decreeing the fall of the Temporal Power, had promised
all necessary guarantees for the Pope's spiritual authority; and
Mazzini, anticipating Cavour, tried to persuade the Assembly to define
the guarantees, and offer to consider any suggestions for them that
the Catholic Powers chose to make. We must distinguish, he said, the
Pope from the Prince, and claim our rights without doing violence to
religious faith.
Thus noble and thus gentle was the Triumvir's rule, and finely the
people responded to it. At first there had been small enthusiasm for
the Republic. The Romans had accepted it calmly, as the one
alternative to the intolerable rule of priests. But Mazzini touched
them with his own great faith. He appealed to no selfish interests. He
promised social legislation, but it went into the background behind
the national question; and except for a land scheme to create a
peasant proprietary on the church lands, there was no time to project
much for their material well-being. His was a pure spiritual
ascendancy, that made a populace, demoralized by bad government and
charity, rise to something of his own moral height and dare to bear
and die. There were some at all events, to whom Rome, hallowed by a
great ideal and noble rule, had become as the city of God. Greatly
their leader merited their love. The equivocations of the past few
months had gone, and in a clear position of command, untrammelled by
the need to compromise with alien forces, he stood in all the majesty
of his translucent soul. It shone in his face; worn and emaciated, he
seemed to Margaret Fuller "more divine than ever." His personal life,
of which we have grievously few records, was one of democratic
simplicity. Lodged in the Quirinal, he hunted for a room "small enough
to feel at home in." Here he sat unguarded and serene, "sadly [Greek:
adoryphoros] for a [Greek: tyrannos]," wrote Clough (for it was a
country where political assassination was a tradition on both sides),
as accessible to working men and women as to his own officials, with
the same smile and warm hand-shake for all; dining for two francs at a
cheap restaurant, afterwards, during the siege, living on bread and
raisins, his only luxury the flowers that an unknown hand sent every
day, his one relaxation to sing to his guitar when left alone at
night. The Triumvir's slender stipend of £32 a month he spent entirely
on others. As an administrator, he was too gentle to be sufficiently
prompt and stern. He even refused to sign the death-warrant of a
soldier condemned by court-martial. But he made amends by his
unbending energy and the quick and fertile intellect, that helped in
every military detail of the defence and made his diplomatic notes, so
Palmerston is said to have called them, "models of reasoning and
argument." Through all the tangled cares of government he kept his
calmness and serenity, the statesman's right to lift his people to new
visions and new powers.
His hope was to leave a great republican example. Probably he dared
expect no more. Sanguine no doubt he was, but in his cooler moments
he seems to have realized from the first that the powers of evil were
too strong for the noble little republic. The blow came from an
unexpected quarter. This is not the place to dissect the causes, that
led France to the meanest of modern political crimes, that impelled a
state, pledged by its own constitution "never to employ its forces
against the liberties of another people," to destroy an unoffending
sister-republic. France paid at Sedan for the carelessness of honour,
that allowed the Catholics and Louis Napoleon to do a great crime in
her name. When Oudinot's expedition started, and, in spite of falsity
on falsity, it was plain that the French government intended to crush
the Romans, Mazzini's policy was clear. He would not yield to brute,
unrighteous force; Rome, he told the Assembly, must "do its duty and
give a high example to every people and every part of Italy." But to
him the enemy was not France but the French government. The true
republicans at Paris were striving courageously to save the Romans and
their own national honour; and on their efforts depended the one hope
of safety. He would do nothing that would weaken their hands or
unnecessarily hurt French pride. When the Assembly resolved without a
dissentient voice to resist at all cost, and Oudinot's troops were
ingloriously driven back, defeated by the raw Italian levies, he
refused to let Garibaldi make the rout complete. The French prisoners
were released after generous and diplomatic hospitality. A monster
gift of cigars was sent to the enemy's quarters, wrapped in handbills
that appealed to republican fraternity. Perhaps someone remembered
that eighty years before the American Congress had sent the same
ingenuous present to the Hessian mercenaries.
Fraud and force alike had failed to open the gates of Rome, and the
long chapter of deceit went on,--deceit hard to parallel even in the
diplomacy of great nations. Ferdinand de Lesseps, then a budding
attaché, was sent to parley with the Romans, till Oudinot's
reinforcements arrived, and the new elections in France gave a
Catholic majority in the Chamber. It was a mere ruse, but de Lesseps
was Napoleon's dupe and negotiated in all good faith, giving ample
credit to Mazzini's "moderation and loyalty and courage." Had they
been left alone, they would have concluded peace on terms honourable
to both sides, and Mazzini seems to have hoped that the danger from
France was passing. Garibaldi was sent to meet the Neapolitans, who
had advanced as far as Albano, and drove them back in rout across the
frontier. King Ferdinand brevetted Ignatius Loyola field-marshal of
his army, but the very posthumous honour could not exorcise the
superstitious terror, with which the great guerilla-chieftain's name
inspired his men. Had the Triumvirs been free to let Garibaldi
advance, the Bourbon power would perhaps have crumbled, as it crumbled
eleven years later.
But at the moment when Mazzini and de Lesseps had agreed on terms, the
French government threw off the mask, and Oudinot made a treacherous
attack. Then came the memorable siege, when for nearly a month the
badly-armed and badly-generalled Romans kept at bay an army twice
their number and a powerful siege artillery. Heroically they
struggled on against the overwhelming odds. The great majority of the
soldiers were natives of the state; but some had gathered from all
Italy, drawn by the spell of Rome to fight once more for country. It
was a band of heroes, such as never came again together in the Italian
struggle; generals of the future like Medici and Bixio; Manara, the
Lombard leader in the Five Days; Mameli, the war-poet of Italy, son of
the woman who had been Mazzini's boyish love; Ugo Bassi, the
priest-patriot, greatest Italian preacher of his day, nearest of
spiritual kin to Mazzini's self; Bertani, the future organizer of the
Sicilian Thousand and Pisacane their precursor; and the great
protagonists themselves, Mazzini and Garibaldi;--a diverse band,
patricians and plebeians, saints and sinners, royalists and
republicans, all moved by one supreme redeeming love of Italy and
Rome. Within, the city showed a passive heroism as fine. Calmly and
patiently the people bore the destruction of their homes, the growing
scarcity, the hopelessness of victory as the toils drew ever closer
round the fated city. Six thousand women came forward to offer their
service in the hospitals. When the women of the poor Trastevere were
driven from their homes by the French shells, the government lodged
them in the palaces of the fugitive nobles, on their simple promise
that there should be neither theft nor injury, and the promise given
in the name of "God and the People" was scrupulously kept.
To their leader those weeks must have been a time of fearful strain.
Garibaldi's bad generalship and bad temper shortened a resistance,
that was hopeless from the first. The losses were heavy, and Mameli
and Manara fell with many another of Mazzini's friends. After the
ill-fated revolt of the Mountain on June 13, there was no hope of
diversion from the republicans at Paris. At home, though the Assembly
loyally supported him, he had to meet the petulant criticism of
Garibaldi and the intriguers who made him their tool. To him it was a
matter of clear duty that the Republic should fight on to the end.
"Monarchies may capitulate, republics die and bear their testimony
even to martyrdom." When the last defences broke down, he wished to
make a desperate fight from street to street, or retire with the
Assembly and the army to the Apennines, throw themselves on the
Austrian lines, and keep the republican flag flying in Romagna. The
army was prepared for either course; but the Assembly had no stomach
for the sacrifice, and Mazzini, bitterly reproaching them, resigned
his office on the eve of the city's fall. Sullenly Rome surrendered,
and the victors, as they entered the city, hung back before the
threatening populace. Garibaldi, with three thousand who disdained
surrender, began his great retreat. "Hunger and thirst and vigil," he
promised them, "but never terms with the enemy." Mazzini would have
been more consistent, had he gone out with them. Perhaps he had no
liking for a desperate fragment of his rejected scheme; perhaps the
personal tension with Garibaldi was too great. For some days he stayed
on in Rome. He was worn out and overstrung; he had not slept on a bed
since the siege began, he had fed on coarse and insufficient food. In
two short months he had grown old; his beard was grey, his face
cadaverous, his manner, so Margaret Fuller noted, "sweet and calm,
but full of a more fiery purpose than ever." He wandered defiantly
about the streets. It was partly that he wanted, by offering himself
to any assassin's knife, to kill the lie of the Catholic press that he
had forced a hated tyranny upon the Romans. Besides, he had a
desperate hope that he might rouse the people and the remaining troops
to one more struggle. His whole soul was possessed by the passion to
protest on to the end against the triumph of brute force. It is
strange that the French did not arrest him; perhaps they knew too well
the temper of the people. At last Gustavo Modena's wife and Margaret
Fuller persuaded him to withdraw. He had no passport, but he found the
means of sailing to Marseilles; there he succeeded in eluding the
French police and travelled on to Geneva.
FOOTNOTE:
[17] See below, c. xvii.