ROME OR DEATH
1861-1864
Cavour's Successors--Aspromonte--The September Convention--Garibaldi's
Visit to England.
There were two possible successors to Cavour, the Tuscan, Bettino
Ricasoli, and Urban Rattazzi, a Piedmontese barrister. The first
belonged to the right, the second to the left centre in the
Parliamentary combinations. Cavour had no very close personal
relations with either, but he knew their characters. Rattazzi formerly
held ministerial office under him, and the long Tuscan crisis of 1859,
looked at, as he looked at it, from the inside, gave him opportunities
of judging the Iron Baron who opposed even his own will on more than
one occasion in that great emergency. Ricasoli was rigid, frigid, a
frequenter of the straightest possible roads; Rattazzi, supple,
accommodating, with an incorrigible partiality for umbrageous by-ways.
He was already an 'old parliamentary hand,' and in the future, through
a series of ministerial lapses, any one of which would have condemned
most men to seclusion, he preserved his talent for manufacturing
majorities and holding his party together. Choosing between these two
candidates, Cavour before he died gave his preference to Ricasoli, who
was charged by the King with the formation of a ministry in which he
took the Treasury and the Foreign Office.
Ricasoli was without ambition, and he rather under than over-rated his
abilities, but he went to work with considerable confidence in his power
of setting everything right. A perfectly open and honest statesman
ought to be able, he imagined, to solve the most difficult problems. Why
not, except that the world is not what it ought to be? In home politics
he offended the Party of Action by telling them plainly that if they
broke the law they would have to pay the cost, and he offended his own
party by refusing to interfere with the right of meeting or any other
constitutional right of citizens, whether they were followers of Mazzini
or of anybody else, as long as they kept within legal bounds. He wrote
an elaborate letter to Pius IX., in which he sought to persuade the
Pontiff of the sweet reasonableness of renouncing claims which, for a
very long spell, had cast nothing but discredit on religion. Ricasoli's
attitude towards the Temporal Power was unique in this century. Like
Dante's, his hatred of it was religious. He was a Catholic, not because
he had never thought or studied, but because, having thought and
studied, he assented, and from this standpoint he ascribed most of the
wounds of the Church to her subordination of her spiritual mission to
material interests. He encouraged Padre Passaglia to collect the
signatures of priests for a petition praying the Pope to cease opposing
the desires of all Italy; 8943 names were affixed in a short time. The
only result of these transactions was that Cardinal Antonelli remarked
to the French Government that the Holy See would never come to terms
with robbers, and that, although at war with the Turin Cabinet, 'the
Pope's relations with Italy were excellent.' More harmful to Ricasoli
than the fulminations of the Vatican was the veiled but determined
hostility of Napoleon III. Cavour succeeded in more or less keeping the
Emperor in ignorance of the degree to which their long partnership
resembled a duel. He made him think that he was leading while he was
being led. With Ricasoli there could be no such illusions. Napoleon
understood him to be a man whom he might break, not bend. He thought it
desirable to break him, and Imperial desires had many channels, at that
time, towards fulfilment.
The Ricasoli ministry fell in February 1862, and, as a matter of
course, Rattazzi was called to power. The new premier soon
ingratiated himself with the King, who found him easier to get on with
than the Florentine _grand seigneur_; with Garibaldi, whom he
persuaded that some great step in the national redemption was on the
eve of accomplishment; with Napoleon, who divined in him an
instrument. Meanwhile, in his own mind, he proposed to eclipse Cavour,
out-manoeuvre all parties, and make his name immortal. This remains
the most probable, as it is the most lenient interpretation to which
his strange policy is open.
Garibaldi was encouraged to visit the principal towns of North Italy
in order to institute the _Tiro Nazionale_ or Rifle Association, which
was said to be meant to form the basis of a permanent volunteer force
on the English pattern. For many reasons, such a scheme was not likely
to succeed in Italy, but most people supposed the object to be
different--namely, the preparation of the youth of the nation for an
immediate war. The idea was strengthened when it was observed that
Trescorre, in the province of Bergamo, where Garibaldi stopped to take
a course of sulphur baths, became the centre of a gathering which
included the greater part of his old Sicilian staff. There was no
concealment in what was done, and the Government manifested no alarm.
The air was full of rumours, and in particular much was said about a
Garibaldian expedition to Greece, for which, it was stated and
re-stated, Rattazzi had promised £40,000. That Garibaldi meant to cast
his lot in any struggle not bearing directly on Italian affairs, as
long as the questions of Rome and Venice still hung in the balance, is
not to be believed. A little earlier than this date, President Lincoln
invited him to take the supreme command of the Federal army in the war
for the Union, and he declined the offer, attractive though it must
have been to him, both as a soldier and an abhorrer of slavery,
because he did not think that Italy could spare him. But the 'Greek
Expedition,' though a misleading name, was not altogether a blind.
Before Cavour's death, there had been frequent discussion of a project
for revolutionising the east of Europe on a grand scale; Hungary and
the southern provinces of the Austrian Empire were to co-operate with
the Slavs and other populations under Turkey in a movement which, even
if only partially successful, would go far to facilitate the
liberation of Venice. It cannot be doubted that Rattazzi's brain was
at work on something of this sort, but the mobilisation, so to speak,
of the Garibaldians suggested proceedings nearer home. Trescorre was
very far from the sea, very near the Austrian frontier.
In spite of contradictions, a plan for invading the Trentino, or South
Tyrol, almost certainly did exist. Whether Garibaldi was alone
answerable for it cannot be determined. The Government became suddenly
alive to the enormous peril such an attack would involve, and arrested
several of the Garibaldian officers at Sarnico. They were conveyed to
Brescia, where a popular attempt was made to liberate them; the troops
fired on the crowd, and some blood was shed. Garibaldi wrote an
indignant protest and retired, first to the villa of Signora Cairoli
at Belgirate, and then to Caprera. He did not, however, remain there
long.
After this point, the thread of events becomes tangled beyond the hope
of unravelment. What were the causes which led Garibaldi into the
desperate venture that ended at Aspromonte? Recollecting his
hesitation before assuming the leadership of the Sicilian expedition,
it seemed the more unintelligible that he should now undertake an
enterprise which, unless he could rely on the complicity of
Government, had not a single possibility of success. His own old
comrades were opposed to it, and it was notorious that Mazzini, to
whom the counsels of despair were generally either rightly or wrongly
attributed, had nothing to do with inspiring this attempt. In justice
to Rattazzi, it must be allowed that, after the arrests at Sarnico,
Garibaldi went into open opposition to the ministry, which he
denounced as subservient to Napoleon. Nevertheless, with the
remembrance of past circumstances in his mind, he may have felt
convinced that the Prime Minister did not mean or that he would not
dare to oppose him by force. One thing is certain; from beginning to
end he never contemplated civil war. His disobedience to the King of
Italy had only one purpose--to give him Rome. He was no more a rebel
to Victor Emmanuel than when he marched through Sicily in 1860.
The earlier stages of the affair were not calculated to weaken a
belief in the effective non-intervention of Government. Garibaldi went
to Palermo, where he arrived in the evening of the 28th of June. The
young Princes Umberto and Amedeo were on a visit to the Prefect, the
Marquis Pallavicini, and happened to be that night at the opera. All
at once they perceived the spectators leave the house in a body, and
they were left alone; on asking the reason, they heard that Garibaldi
had just landed--all were gone to greet him! Before the departure of
the Princes next day, the chief and his future King had an
affectionate meeting, while the population renewed the scenes of wild
enthusiasm of two years ago. Some of Garibaldi's intimate friends
assert that when he reached Palermo he had still no intention of
taking up arms. He soon began, however, to speak in a warlike tone,
and at a review of the National Guard in presence of the Prefect, the
Syndic, and all the authorities, he told the 'People of the Vespers'
that if another Vespers were wanted to do it, Napoleon III., head of
the brigands, must be ejected from Rome. The epithet was not bestowed
at random; Lord Palmerston confirmed it when he said from his place in
the House of Commons: 'In Rome there is a French garrison; under its
shelter there exists a committee of 200, whose practice is to organise
a band of murderers, the scum and dross of every nation, and send them
into the Neapolitan territory to commit every atrocity!' As a
criticism the words are not less strong; but the public defiance of
Napoleon, and the threat with which it was accompanied, dictated one
plain duty to the Italian Government if they meant to keep the
peace--the arrest of Garibaldi and his embarkation for Caprera.
This they did not do; confining themselves to the recall of the
Marquis Pallavicini. Garibaldi went over the ground made glorious by
his former exploits--past Calatafimi to Marsala. It was at Marsala
that, while he harangued his followers in a church, a voice in the
crowd raised a cry of '_Rome or death!_' 'Yes; Rome or death!'
repeated Garibaldi; and thus the watchword originated which will
endure written in blood on the Bitter Mount and on the Plain of
Nomentum. Who raised it first? Perhaps some humble Sicilian fisherman.
Its haunting music coming he knew not whence, sounding in his ear like
an omen, was what wedded Garibaldi irrevocably to the undertaking. It
was the casting interposition of chance, or, shall it be said, of
Providence? Like all men of his mould, Garibaldi was governed by
poetry, by romance. Besides the general patriotic sentiment, he had a
peculiar personal feeling about Rome, 'which for me,' he once wrote,
'is Italy.' In 1849, the Assembly in its last moments invested him
with plenary powers for the defence of the Eternal City, and this
vote, never revoked, imposed on his imagination a permanent mandate.
'Rome or death' suggested an idea to him which he had never before
entertained, prodigal though he had been of his person in a hundred
fights: What if his own death were the one thing needful to
precipitate the solution of the problem?
From Marsala he returned to Palermo, where, in the broad light of day,
he summoned the Faithful, who came, as usual, at his bidding, without
asking why or where?--the happy few who followed him in 1859 and 1860;
who would follow him in 1867, and even in 1870, when they gave their
lives for a people that did not thank them, because he willed it so.
He sent out also a call to the Sicilian _Picciotti_, the _Squadre_ of
last year; and it is much to their credit that they too who cared
possibly remarkably little for _Roma Capitale_, obeyed the man who had
freed them. And Rattazzi knew of all this, and did nothing.
On the 1st of August, Garibaldi took command of 3000 volunteers in the
woods of Ficuzza. Then, indeed, the Government wasted much paper on
proclamations, and closed the door of the stable when the horse was
gone. General Cugia was sent to Palermo to repress the movement.
Nevertheless Garibaldi, with his constantly increasing band, made a
triumphant progress across the island, and a more than royal entry
into Catania. At Mezzojuso he was present at a _Te Deum_ chanted in
his honour. On the 22nd, when the royal troops were, it seems, really
ordered to march on Catania, Garibaldi took possession of a couple of
merchant vessels that had just reached the port, and sailed away by
night for the Calabrian coast with about 1000 of his men.
By this time the Italian Government, whether by spontaneous conviction
or by pressure from without, had resolved that the band should never
get as far as the Papal frontier. If Garibaldi knew or realised their
resolution, it is a mystery why he did not attempt to effect a landing
nearer that frontier, if not actually within it. The deserted shore of
the Pontine marshes would, one would think, have offered attractions
to men who were as little afraid of fever as of bullets. A sort of
superstition may have ruled the choice of the path, which was that
which led to victory in 1860. It was not practicable, however, to
follow it exactly. The tactics were different. Then the desire was to
meet the enemy anywhere and everywhere; now the pursuer had to be
eluded, because Garibaldi was determined not to fight him. Thus,
instead of marching straight on Reggio, the volunteers sought
concealment in the great mountain mass which forms the southernmost
bulwark of the Apennines. The dense and trackless forests could have
given cover for a long while to a native brigand troop, with intimate
knowledge of the country and ways and means of obtaining
provisions--not to a band like this of Garibaldi. They wandered about
for three days, suffering from almost total want of food, and from the
great fatigue of climbing the dried-up watercourses which serve as
paths. On the 28th of August they reached the heights of Aspromonte--a
strong position, from which only a large force could have dislodged
them had they defended it.
General La Marmora, then Prefect of Naples, and commander-in-chief of
the army in the south, reinforced the troops in Calabria to prevent
Garibaldi's advance, but the direction of the decisive operation fell
by accident to Cialdini, whom the Government despatched to Sicily
when they tardily made up their minds to take energetic measures. On
his voyage to Messina, Cialdini heard that the volunteers had already
crossed the Straits; he therefore changed his course, and hastening to
Reggio, invested himself with the command on the mainland. At Reggio
he met Colonel Pallavicini, whom he ordered in terms that might have
been more suitable had he been engaged in hunting brigands, 'to crush
Garibaldi completely, and only accept from him unconditional
surrender.' Pallavicini started with six or seven battalions of
Bersaglieri. It was the 29th of August. Garibaldi saw them coming when
they were still three miles off. He could have dispersed his men in
the forest and himself escaped, for the time, and perhaps altogether,
for the sea which had so often befriended him was not far off. But
although he did not mean to resist, a dogged instinct drove away the
thought of flight. In the official account it was stated that an
officer was sent in advance of the royal troops to demand surrender.
No such officer was seen in the Garibaldian encampment till after the
attack. The troops rapidly ascended an eminence, facing that on which
the Garibaldians were posted, and opened a violent fusillade, which,
to Garibaldi's dismay, was returned for a few minutes by his right,
consisting of young Sicilians who were not sufficiently disciplined to
stand being made targets of without replying. The contention, however,
that they were the first to fire, has the testimony of every
eye-witness on the side of the volunteers against it. All the
Garibaldian bugles sounded 'Cease firing,' and Garibaldi walked down
in front of the ranks conjuring the men to obey. While he was thus
employed, a spent ball struck his thigh, and a bullet entered his
right foot. At first he remained standing, and repeated, 'Do not
fire,' but he was obliged to sit down, and some of his officers
carried him under a tree. The whole 'feat of arms,' as General
Cialdini described it, did not last more than a quarter of an hour.
Pallavicini approached the wounded hero bareheaded, and said that he
made his acquaintance on the most unfortunate day of his own life. He
was received with nothing but kind praise for doing his duty. The
first night was passed by the prisoner in a shepherd's hut. The few
devoted followers who were with him were strangely impressed by that
midnight watch; the moon shining on the forest, the shepherds' dogs
howling in the mountain silence, and their chief lying wounded, it
might be to death, in the name of the King to whom he had given this
land.
Next day, in a litter sheltered from the sun with branches of wild
laurel, Garibaldi was carried down the steep rocks to Scilla, whence
he was conveyed by sea to the fort of Varignano. It was not till after
months of acute suffering, borne with a gentleness that made the
doctors say: 'This man is not a soldier, but a saint,' that, through
the skill of the French surgeon, Nélaton, the position of the ball was
determined, and its extraction rendered possible.
A general amnesty issued on the occasion of the marriage of the King's
second daughter with the King of Portugal relieved the Government of
having to decide whether Garibaldi was to be tried, and if so, what
for; but the unpopularity into which the ministry had fallen could not
be so easily dissipated. The Minister of Foreign Affairs (Durando)
published a note in which it was stated that Garibaldi had only
attempted to realise, in an irregular way, the desire of the whole
nation, and that, although he had been checked, the tension of the
situation was such that it could not be indefinitely prolonged. This
was true, but it hardly improved the case for the Government. In Latin
countries, ministers do not cling to power; as soon as the wind blows
against them, they resign to give the public time to forget their
faults, and to become dissatisfied with their political rivals.
Usually a very short time is required. Therefore, forestalling a vote
of censure in the Chambers, where he had never yet had a real
majority, Rattazzi resigned office with a parting homily in which he
claimed to have saved the national institutions.
The administration which followed contained the well-known names of
Farini, Minghetti, Pasolini, Peruzzi, Delia Rovere, Menabrea. When
Farini's fatal illness set in, Minghetti replaced him as Prime
Minister, and Visconti Venosta took the Foreign Office. They found the
country in a lamentable state, embittered by Aspromonte, still
infected with brigandage, and suffering from an increasing deficit,
coupled with a diminishing revenue. The administrative and financial
unification of Italy, still far from complete, presented the gravest
difficulties. The political aspect of affairs, and especially the
presence of the French in Rome, provoked a general sense of
instability which was contrary to the organisation of the new state
and the development of its resources. The ministers sought remedies or
palliatives for these several evils, and to meet the last they opened
negotiations with France, which resulted in the compromise known as
the September Convention. It was long before the treaty was concluded,
as for more than a year the French Government refused to remove the
garrison on any terms; but in the autumn of 1864 the following
arrangement was signed by both parties: that Italy should protect the
Papal frontier from all attack from the outside; that France should
gradually withdraw her troops, the complete evacuation to take place
within two years; that Italy should waive the right of protest against
the internal organisation of the Papal army unless its proportions
became such as to be a manifest threat to the Italian kingdom; that
the Italian capital should be moved to Florence within six months of
the approval of the Convention by Parliament.
These terms were in part the same as those proposed by Prince Napoleon
to Cavour shortly before the death of that statesman, who had promised
to support them as a temporary makeshift, and in order to get the
French out of Italy. But they were in part different, and they
contained two new provisions which it is morally certain that Cavour
would never have agreed to--the prolongation of the French occupation
for two years (Cavour had insisted that it should cease in a
fortnight), and the transfer of the capital, which was now made a
_sine quâ non_ by Napoleon, for evident reasons. While it was clear
that Turin could not be the permanent capital of a kingdom that
stretched to Ætna, if once the seat of government were removed to
Florence a thousand arguments and interests would spring up in favour
of keeping it there. So, at least, it was sure to seem to a foreigner.
As a matter of fact, the solution was no solution; the Italians could
not be reconciled to the loss of Rome either by the beauty and
historic splendour of the city on the Arno, or by its immunity from
malaria, which was then feared as a serious drawback, though Rome has
become, under its present rulers, the healthiest capital in Europe.
But Napoleon thought that he was playing a trump card when he dictated
the sacrifice of Turin.
The patriotic Turinese were unprepared for the blow. They had been
told again and again that till the seat of government was established
on the Tiber, it should abide under the shadow of the Alps--white
guardian angels of Italy--in the custody of the hardy population which
had shown itself so well worthy of the trust. The ministry foresaw the
effect which the convention would have on the minds of the Turinese,
and they resorted to the weak subterfuge of keeping its terms secret
as long as they could. Rumours, however, leaked out, and these, as
usual, exaggerated the evil. It was said that Rome was categorically
abandoned. On the 20th of September crowds began to fill the streets,
crying: 'Rome or Turin!' and on the two following days there were
encounters between the populace and the military, in which the latter
resorted to unnecessary and almost provocative violence. Amidst the
chorus of censure aroused by these events, the Minghetti cabinet
resigned, and General La Marmora, who, as a Piedmontese, was fitted to
soothe the excited feelings of his fellow-citizens, was called upon to
form a ministry.
The change of capital received the sanction of Parliament on the 19th
of November. Outside Piedmont it was not unpopular; people felt that,
after all, it rested with themselves to make Florence no final
halting-place, but a step towards Rome. The Papal Government, which
had been a stranger to the late negotiations, expressed a supreme
indifference to the whole affair, even to the contemplated departure
of the French troops, 'which concerned the Imperial Government, not
the Pope,' said Cardinal Antonelli, 'since the occupation had been
determined by French interests.' It cannot be asserted that the Pope
ever assumed a gratitude which he did not feel towards the monarch who
kept him on his throne for twenty years.
This year, 1864, was marked by an incident which, though not a
political event, should never be forgotten in the history of Italian
liberation--Garibaldi's visit to England. He came, the prisoner of
Aspromonte, not the conqueror of Sicily: a distinction that might have
made a difference elsewhere, but the English sometimes worship
misfortune as other peoples worship success. No sovereign from oversea
was ever received by them as they received the Italian hero; a
reception showing the sympathies of a century rather than the caprice
or curiosity of an hour. Half a million throats shouted London's
welcome; the soldier of two worlds knew the roar of battle, and the
roar of the sea was familiar to the Nizzard sailor, but it is said
that when Garibaldi heard the stupendous and almost awful British roar
which greeted him as he came out of the Nine Elms station, and took
his seat in the carriage that was to convey him to Stafford House, he
looked completely disconcerted. From the heir to the throne to the
crossing-sweeper, all combined to do him honour; where Garibaldi was
not, through the breadth of the land the very poor bought his portrait
and pasted it on their whitewashed cottage walls. London made him its
citizen. The greatest living English poet invited him to plant a tree
in his garden: a memory he recalled nearly at the close of his own
honoured life:--
Or watch the waving pine which here
The warrior of Caprera set,
A name that earth shall not forget
Till earth has rolled her latest year.
Garibaldi showed himself mindful of old friends; at the opera he
recognised Admiral Mundy in a box, and immediately rose and went to
offer him his respects. At Portsmouth, he not only went to see the
mother of Signora White-Mario (the providence of his wounded in many a
campaign), but also paid an unrecorded visit to two maiden sisters in
humble circumstances, who had shown him kindness when he was an exile
in England; they related ever afterwards the sensation caused by his
appearance in their narrow courtyard, where it was difficult to turn
the big carriage which the authorities had placed at his disposal. He
twice met the great Italian whom he addressed as Master: transferring,
as it were, to Mazzini's brows the crown of glory that surrounded his
own. Another exile, Louis Blanc, used to tell how, when he went to
call on Garibaldi, he found him seated on a sofa, receiving the homage
of the fairest and most illustrious members of the English
aristocracy; when the Friend of the People was announced (a title
deserved by Louis Blanc, if not for his possibly fallacious theories,
still for the rare sincerity of his life), the hero started to his
feet and most earnestly begged him to sit beside him. 'Which I could
not do!' the narrator of the scene would add with a look of comical
alarm for his threatened modesty.
These friendly passages with the proscripts in London, as well as the
stirring appeal spoken by Garibaldi on behalf of the Poles, did not
please foreign Powers. The Austrian ambassador shut himself up in his
house; it was remarked that the only members of the diplomatic body
who were seen at the Garibaldi _fêtes_ were the representatives of the
United States and of the Sublime Porte. The Emperor Napoleon was said
to be angry. Lord Palmerston assured the House of Commons that no
remonstrance had been received from France or from any foreign
government, and that if it had been received, it would not have been
heeded. Yet the English Government took the course of hinting to the
guest of England that his visit had lasted long enough. In some
quarters it was reported that they feared disturbances among the Irish
operatives in the manufacturing towns, had he gone, as he intended,
to the north. Whatever were the motives that inspired it, their action
in the matter cannot be remembered with complacency, but it was
powerless to undo the significance of the great current of enthusiasm
which had passed through the English land.