Revolutions of 1848 in Italy
By the year 1846 misrule had reached its climax in Rome, and the people were well-nigh maddened, when Gregory XVI died, and Pius IX. was elected in his stead. It seemed as though an age of gold had dawned; for the greatest of all miracles had happened. The new pope declared himself a liberal, proclaimed a general amnesty to political offenders, and in due course granted a national guard, and began to form a constitution. The Neo-Guelfic school of Gioberti believed that their master's Utopia was about to be realized. Italy went wild with joy and demonstrations. The pope's example proved contagious. Constitutions were granted in Tuscany, Piedmont, and Rome in 1847. The duke of Lucca fled, and his domain was joined to Tuscany. Only Austria and Naples declared that their states needed no reforms. Italy had her full share of revolutions in 1848. A secret league, called Young Italy, organized by Mazzini, had for its object the expulsion of all foreign rulers from the peninsula. The liberal measures adopted by Pope Pius IX at his accession, led to the hope that like Julius II, though in a happier spirit, he would become the champion of the unity and independence of Italy; and a step in this direction seemed actually to have been taken by the formation of a customs union between Sardinia, Tuscany, and the States of the Church.
On January 2, 1848, a liberal demonstration at Milan served the Austrians for pretext to massacre defenceless persons in the streets. These Milanese victims were hailed as martyrs all over Italy, and funeral ceremonies, partaking of the same patriotic character as the rejoicings of the previous year, kept up the popular agitation. On January 12th Palermo rose against King Ferdinand II., and Naples followed her example on the 27th. The king was forced in February to grant the constitution of 1812, to which his subjects were so ardently attached.
While Italy was engaged in making terms with her own sovereigns, the French revolution broke out. Louis Philippe fled to England, and the republic was declared. In almost all the Italian states, as in Germany, representative constitutions were granted, after more or less resistance, to the demands of the people. This altered affairs in Italy, and threw a temporary power into the hands of the Mazzinisti. Sicily pronounced herself independent of the Bourbons, and called the duke of Genoa to the throne, and for more than a year maintained a war for independence against the odious government of Ferdinand V of Naples. In Naples, the moderate liberal government, of which Poerio had been a member, yielded to a more radical administration. The patriots and the king's troops came to blows, ending in Ferdinand's victory and the remodeling of the constitution. Lombardi rose in insurrection. In Austrian Italy, the archduke Rainer was viceroy, and Marshal Radetzki, a veteran of eighty-two years, commanded the armies. In March, 1848, an insurrection broke out in Milan; barricades were erected, and a four days' fight resulted in the defeat of the Austrians, and the governor of Venice capitulated. Provisional republican governments were formed, at Milan under the presidency of Casati, at Venice under that of Danicle Manin. Impelled by the overwhelming enthusiasm which prevailed in Upper Italy, Carlo Alberto declared war on Austria in March 1848. Charles Albert of Sardinia marched with his whole army to the aid of the insurgents, occupied Milan, and pursued Radetzki to a strong position between the Mincio and the Adige, where he waited, hoping that the sovereignty of upper Italy might fall into his hands without a blow. On April 8th he pushed his troops beyond the Mincio; while Piacenza, Parma, Modena, and the Lumbardo-Venetian kingdom voted their union to Sardinia by universal suffrage. The Austrian garrisons of Brescia and several important places surrendered to the insurgents; Venice expelled her foreign rulers and proclaimed a restoration of the Republic. In June and July, both Lombardy and Venice declared themselves annexed to Sardinia.
The Austrian general, Radetzky, though he lost a battle at Goito, and was forced to witness the capitulation of Peschiera in May, had not given up the game. Radetzki, being reinforced, was able to resume the offensive. The pope's troops were established at Vicenza to support the Sardinians. These Radetzky compelled to surrender in June; he then attacked Carlo Alberto's army, who were engaged in the investment of Mantua. A complete victory upon July 25th at Custozza enabled Radetzky to reenter Milan. After a victory at Custozza he recovered Milan; and in spite of the brave resistance of Garibaldi and his volunteers, all Lombardy submitted before the middle of August to the Austrian rule. Venice was only reduced by a severe and disastrous siege of more than a year, during which the Austrians lost 20,000 men chiefly by the fevers occasioned by the malaria of the marshes.
Carlo Alberto had to retire beyond the Ticino and to beg for an armistice. News of this Austrian victory reached Naples, and gave Ferdinand the heart to quell the Sicilian revolt. On August 30th Messina was bombarded, and such atrocities were perpetrated in the miserable city that the admirals of the French and English fleets had to interfere and extort an armistice from the conquerors. In the meanwhile, affairs had begun to change in Rome. The pope, frightened at the revolution which had already outrun his control, pronounced against the Austrian war and Italian alliance. This roused republican hostility. His minister, the excellent Count Pellegrini Rossi, was murdered in November 1848, and anarchy seemed to threaten the city. Pius escaped in disguise to Gaeta, where he was received by Ferdinand, whom not long before he had denounced as a rogue. From Gaeta he opened the new year, 1849, with a threat of excommunication to his subjects. The Romans were so irritated that the moderate liberal party had to yield to the ultra-radicals; and on February 9th Rome was declared a republic. The government was intrusted to three dictators, of whom Mazzini was the head.
Tuscany, meanwhile, had lost her grand-duke. After opening parliament in January 1849 with a declaration that he intended to prosecute the war against Austria, he escaped in February on the English war-steamer Bulldog to Gaeta. A provisional government was established in Florence, and Mazzini did his best to render Tuscany a part of the new Roman republic. At this epoch two important personages appeared upon the scene - Gino Capponi, who led the moderate liberals, and Urbano Rattazzi, who headed the democratic party. The Florentines were not at bottom out of sympathy with their duke. Therefore they rejected Mazzini's overtures, and recalled Leopold upon the understanding that he would respect their free institutions. Still at Gaeta, the grand-duke mistrusted these advances, begged for Austrian troops, and, when they had arrived, reentered Tuscany and suppressed the constitution.
Such acts of perfidy as these, repeatedly committed by all the petty sovereigns of Italy with the exception of the house of Savoy, forced the people to abandon the theory of federation under existing governments, and to look lor their salvation to Piedmont. This growing confidence in the Sardinian monarchy was not shaken by the disastrous campaign of March 1849, which baptized the cause of Italian independence with the best blood of Piedmont, gave it a royal martyr, and pledged the dynasty of Savoy to a progressive policy from which it never afterward for a single moment deviated.
Pushed by the ultra-radicals, and burning with the purest zeal to liberate Italy, Carlo Alberto took the field again in March 1849, against the Austrians. On the 24th, after some preliminary movements, proving a want of good generalship and discipline in the Piedmontese army, Radetzky obtained a complete victory at Novara. The king of Sardinia abdicated on the field, in favor of his son, the duke of Savoy, Vittorio Kmmanuele II. Carlo Alberto, who had lived through times so troublous and perplexing, who had exposed himself to misunderstanding and misinterpretation, but in whom the devotion to Italy had become a religion, now took refuge at Oporto, where he died, broken-hearted, after a few months of illness. The pathos of this death checked the snarling of discordant parties; and, when the king's body was brought home to be buried on the heights of the Superga, the heart of Italy recognized his worth.
Carlo Alberto, though still anathematized by the republican faction, became the saint of Italy. Hundreds of pilgrims flocked to his tomb. The loyalty of his subjects redoubled; and it was felt that, by serving Italy, they would glorify his memory. More than ever, by the disasters ot Novara, were the dynasty and aristocracy and people of Sardinia pledged to that national policy which Carlo Alberto's son triumphantly accomplished. In the cottage homes of Piedmont and Lombardy travelers may still behold the old king's agony depicted side by side with the portraits of Cavour and Garibaldi and Vittorio Emmanuele.
The intrigues of which Gaeta had been a center provoked a crusade of the Catholic powers against republican and anti-papal Rome. A French expedition, under General Oudinot, landed at Civita Vecchia on April 25th, and on the 29th reached the walls of the city. The Neapolitan army took up a position at the base of the Alban hills. Spaniards arrived at Fiumicino, and Austrians entered the Ligations. The French professed to come as friends, but the triumvirs of the Roman republic refused them entrance, and General Oudinot established his camp on the Janiculan. Garibaldi, who was guarding the frontier of the Abruzzi, returned and defeated the Neapolitans at Palestrina on May 11th. Still his assistance did not suffice to avert the French attack, and on July 2 after a siege of four weeks, the city capitulated.
Mazzini and Garibaldi made good their escape. The French troops entered and held Rome for the pope. It was not until April 1850. however, that Pius IX ventured to return. When he arrived in his capital, he began the reactionary reign, supported by his French garrison and Jesuit advisers, which only ended with the semi-forcible entry of the Italians in 1870.
With the fall of Rome the hopes of the revolutionary party ended. Austrian troops replaced their ducal puppets in Parma, Modena and Tuscany. King Ferdinand, rightly now named Bomba, terrorized his subjects into silence by the aid of Swiss mercenaries, artillery and dungeons too loathsome to be described. Only Venice still held out, blockaded in the Adriatic and bombarded from the land, through all the horrors of famine, conflagration and cholera, until the month of August. Few episodes in the history of that noble city are more glorious than this last desperate and patient struggle; and few names upon her muster-roll of heroes are equally illustrious with that of the lion hearted and blameless Daniele Manin.
In the disastrous year 1849 it seemed as though the fate of Italy was sealed. The republicans had done their best and failed at Milan, Rome, and Venice. The power of Piedmont was broken at Novara. And yet with good cause it may be said that the miseries of this epoch wrought future salvation. The former vain trust in the Italian sentiment of petty courts, the Neo-Guelfic mysticism of Gioberti's party, the Utopian confidence in papal liberalism, the vague schemes of confederation which had assumed many visionary forms, were all dissipated forever. To rightly thinking men it became clear that the regeneration of Italy must be intrusted to Piedmont. When Vittorio Emmanuele entered Turin in silence after Novara, with a demoralized army and a ruined exchequer, the spirit of his people was cast down, but not extinguished. They had assumed responsibility, and were not going to abandon it.
Mazzini was no longer a power of the first magnitude. The work which he had done for Italy was solid and abiding. Still he had failed to carry the bulk of the nation with him. Men of more sober aspirations saw that to aim at national independence and European reconstruction at one leap was Utopian. Italy must first be made; and the only power capable of calling her into existence was Piedmont, still free and puissant among a crowd of feeble and anarchical despotisms. The experience of 1849 proved that the armies of Piedmont, in the hour of need, could rely on volunteers of pith and nerve, in cities so downtrodden even as were Rome and Venice; for it must not be forgotten that the republicans who sustained both sieges were members of the bourgeoisie and proletariate.
This consolidation of opinion after the events of 1849 was proved by Gioberti's recantation of his earlier mysticism. In 1851 he published a new treatise Rinnovamtnto, which distinctly indicated Piedmont as the substantial basis of Italian independence. Daniele Manin, now an exile in Paris, declared his adhesion to the same doctrine. The constitutional party was further strengthened by the adhesion of the leading republicans, Pallavicino and I^a Farina; and in 1857 the main point of unanimity was secured by the formation of the Societa Nazionaley which kept sectarian jealousies in the background. Garibaldi, at this time less republican than he afterward became, was himself a president of this political association. Henceforward the genuine Mazzinisti formed a permanent minority. They could do little more than to impede without perplexing or baffling the policy of the Piedmontese statesmen, who felt themselves to be supported by the instincts of the race at large.
|
NEWSLETTER
|
| Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list |
|
|
|
