1848 (26 page)

The outrage so galvanised the Roman democrats that on 1 May Pius was forced to appoint a new cabinet led by the left-wing liberal Count Terenzio Mamiani, who was popular for his support of the war and his belief that the new constitution had to be ‘enlarged' - that is, parliament had to have more power vis-à-vis the Pope - and that the state had a role in guaranteeing the means of subsistence to its poorest citizens. But he was no Mazzinian: he feared the ‘extremists' as much as he disliked the ultra-conservatives among the clergy. Meanwhile, Durando's regular troops had already crossed the papal frontier and put themselves under Piedmontese orders. By contrast, few of Pepe's Neapolitans reached the battlefield. This was because, on 15 May, the revolution in Naples was crushed by King Ferdinand II.

The liberalised regime in the Kingdom of Naples had never managed to achieve the essential for its own survival: to restore order and social stability to both the city and the countryside. The collapse of royal power at the beginning of the year left a vacuum in which radicals and moderates jostled with each other. In Naples democratic political clubs called for the abolition of the upper house and for an extension of the suffrage, meaning that the liberals, who had initially focused their energies on simply ensuring that the King honoured his promises, were now fighting a war on two fronts for the defence of the constitution. To add to this political conflict, the liberals - whose backbone was provided by the non-noble landowners in the countryside and the merchants and manufacturers in the cities - also confronted social unrest. Urban artisans and apprentices, facing redundancy because of the introduction of new technology, rampaged through workshops in Naples and Salerno, smashing machinery. Far more serious was the uprising in the countryside: peasants occupied land that they claimed was theirs, particularly common land that had been enclosed by wealthier landowners. Radicals, including a ‘red' priest near Salerno, preached that the great landed estates should be broken up and the spoils shared among the people. The landlords found protection in the new National Guard, but the divisions between liberals and democrats formed a yawning chasm that weakened the revolution and gave King Ferdinand his opportunity. The moderate prime minister, Carlo Troya, a historian more at home with his books than with the storm-tossed world of revolutionary politics, was out of his depth. While his government and the National Guard were unequal to the task of keeping the spectre of social revolution at bay, his support for the war allowed conservatives at court, in the army officer corps and the clergy to spread the word that the liberals wanted to deliver Italy into the hands of the hated Piedmontese. Now, with Pius's allocution, priests and friars could add religion to the counter-revolutionary arsenal: the liberals, they claimed, were also defying the Pope.

Given this poisonous atmosphere, it is scarcely surprising that when the parliamentary elections were held, only a fifth of all eligible voters turned out. The opening of parliament was to take place on 15 May and the majority of deputies who arrived to take their seats in Naples were moderates, with a vocal minority of radicals and a rump of conservatives. Many of them suspected the King's sincerity as a constitutional monarch. Radical determination was steeled by the arrival in the city of provincial supporters, including democratic elements from the National Guard. When the King demanded an oath from parliament that it would maintain the existing constitution and concentrated some twelve thousand troops in the centre, barricades were thrown up in the city. Despairing moderates tried in vain to persuade the radicals to stand down, but by now the King was set on crushing the revolution by overwhelming force.
¹¹⁷

In the morning of 15 May, the first shots were fired, the red flag of martial law flew from Saint Elmo's Fortress and Ferdinand's troops - including Swiss Guards and artillery units - advanced down the Toledo. In grisly hand-to-hand fighting, with the Swiss leading the charge, the soldiers blew apart the barricades with cannon fire before killing or driving the insurgents back with bayonets. They broke into the houses on either side of the avenue and cleared the rooms and rooftops. At three o'clock, a committee of seventy deputies tried to organise resistance from the seat of the municipal government in the Monteoliveto District. The troops smashed their way through the barricades in this quarter, taking the city chambers by seven o'clock in the evening. Lord Napier, the British consul, witnessed the fighting and reported that some two hundred soldiers were killed and four hundred wounded, with the Swiss bearing the brunt of the casualties. No death toll was available on the insurgents' side, but some six or seven hundred were taken prisoner and, Napier wrote,

Some prisoners were summarily shot and, in the wake of the royal troops came the dreaded urban poor - the
lazzaroni
. Having stood aside as royal authority collapsed in January, they now took full advantage of the devastation to loot the bullet-riddled houses. They also reasserted their loyalty to the King, disarming the National Guards, parading in the streets waving the Bourbon white flag and crying, ‘Long live the King!' and - in an unambiguous rejection of Italian unity - ‘Death to the nation!' On 17 May, using the excuse that a number of deputies had formed a ‘committee of public safety' to throw the country into civil war, Ferdinand dissolved the parliament.
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The reaction in Naples had serious implications for the southern Italian contribution to the war of independence. General Pepe, his forces strung out on the road to the River Po, was in Bologna when he learned of the counter-revolution of 15 May. He received orders from the Neapolitan government to return to Naples. The squadron that had sailed into Venice obeyed, but Pepe, bristling at the obvious pleasure with which his superior, General Statella, delivered this message, resigned his command, leaving Statella to carry out the unpalatable orders. The patriots of Bologna soon got wind of the imminent Neapolitan withdrawal and the city's National Guard flocked around Pepe. Putting their hands on their hilts, they pledged: ‘This sword is for you, Italian General.' Moved, Pepe grasped his own sword and cried, ‘This one will be for Italy for as long as I am alive!' With Bologna in uproar, Pepe resumed his command; Statella, having yielded, felt honour bound to resign. The latter tried to return to Naples via Tuscany, but there an angry crowd stopped his coach and burned it to ash, with its hapless passenger still inside. Pepe countermanded the order to withdraw but, in the end, only two thousand of his original force were willing to disobey the King's orders. It was with this small force that, on 17 June, the intrepid general finally crossed the Po and began the march to relieve Venice.
¹¹⁹

For all the enthusiasm of Italian patriots, however, the war had been going badly. The Piedmontese drove the Austrians back in the first battle at Goito on 8 April, crossing the River Mincio and penetrating the region held by the Quadrilateral. This victory was soured a little when the Austrian garrison downstream in nearby Mantua refused to capitulate, but Charles Albert laid siege to one of the other fortresses, Peschiera, on 29 April, while the rest of his troops drove on to dislodge Radetzky from Verona. A further victory followed at Pastrengo at the end of the month, but then the Piedmontese finally hit the rocks of Austrian resistance. Falsely informed that the population of Verona was ready to rise up, Charles Albert sent his troops to take that fortress, where Radetzky himself had his headquarters. They attacked on 6 May but were driven back by determined Austrian counter-attacks. The King settled down for the siege of Peschiera, but this was probably a mistake, for the war would now be decided by whether Nugent could join forces with Radetzky: blocking the former's way may have been a more judicious use of Piedmontese energies.

The only forces that could now stop Nugent were the papal divisions marching from the south under Durando and Ferrari. These soldiers did move quickly, reaching the River Piave in the nick of time, burning a bridge just before Nugent's vanguard arrived on 30 April. Nugent, however, cunningly left his baggage and one division as a decoy and then force-marched with the rest of his men northwards, moving around the Roman forces. His grittily determined Austrians then fell on Ferrari's volunteers at Cornuda on 9 May: the amateurs fought stubbornly all day, with the promise that Durando was on his way ‘at the double', but the reinforcements never arrived. The dispirited volunteers began to melt away, but Durando's professionals, including the Swiss, embarked by train to Vicenza in an effort to catch Nugent again. This south-westwards manoeuvre left nothing between the Austrians and Venice. By 25 May Nugent's forces, some 18,000 strong, had reinforced Radetzky's 51,000 in Verona. Durando's determination to hold on to Vicenza threatened to harass the Austrian communications, but Radetzky resolved to ignore the problem and strike directly at Charles Albert. He fell first on the King's brave Tuscan allies, who fought bitterly at Curtatone and Montanara on 29 May: one volunteer was Giuseppe Montanelli, a bearded, diminutive but fiercely patriotic professor at Pisa University who stood alongside his students. He battled on until shot through the shoulder by Croats, who mockingly yelled, ‘
Viva Pio Nono!
' (‘Long live Pius IX!'). These two engagements knocked the Tuscans out of the war.

Radetzky was held off by the Piedmontese at the second battle of Goito on the following day, whereupon the exhausted garrison at Peschiera surrendered. None the less, Radetzky simply pulled his troops back to Mantua, rested them for a few days and then turned some of his forces eastwards to eliminate Durando at Vicenza. On 10 June the Austrians stormed the city and, after hours of fierce fighting (in which Massimo d'Azeglio was wounded in the leg), Durando capitulated. His men were allowed to march out of Vicenza with full military honours, but they had to withdraw south of the Po and promise not to fight for another three months. The Austrians could now concentrate on reducing Venice and defeating the Piedmontese.
¹²⁰
The tide seemed to be turning Austria's way.

Then a figure who would soon become talismanic arrived on the scene: Giuseppe Garibaldi, who had been fighting in the service of republican causes in South America. On hearing the news of the revolutions in Italy, he and sixty-three other Italian revolutionaries set sail from the River Plate on 15 April, arriving in Nice (then part of the Kingdom of Sardinia and Garibaldi's birthplace) on 23 June, where he joined his Uruguayan wife, Anita Ribeiro da Silva, and their children. Moving on to Genoa, Garibaldi's plans were to join the forces of Charles Albert - the very man who had condemned him to death in 1834 - and to fight for what the republican sailor-turned-soldier saw as the common national cause. However,

 

The King certainly had his faults as a commander, but Garibaldi's judgement here is too harsh. The campaign was also undone by the skill and determination of the Austrian counter-attack, for which the old fox Radetzky could claim much of the credit. He was hampered early on by the lack of clear direction coming from Vienna. The political crisis in the imperial capital and uncertainty over the future of the rest of the empire initially made the government reluctant to commit itself to a full-scale campaign in Italy. There were also some ministers who believed that the Habsburgs should abandon Italy altogether, as they regarded the region as a strategic weak-point. Count Ficquelmont and the majority, however, were less keen on such a retreat. In April Vienna therefore chose to pursue a dual policy: diplomacy with Lombardy, with offers of autonomy in return for recognition of the Habsburg crown, while reconquering Venice. By early summer, Radetzky was still labouring under the burden of political uncertainty in Vienna. On 11 June Baron Johann Wessenberg, the Austrian foreign minister, sent orders to Radetzky to ‘end the costly war in Italy' by negotiating a ceasefire on the basis of independence for Lombardy, though not Venetia, most of which had been recaptured. Radetzky, though, was now more confident that the situation on the ground was shifting in his favour: Nugent had arrived at Verona and Piedmont's allies had received severe maulings. He admitted that the position was still bad, but stressed that it was not so desperate that they had to concede to Italian rebels: ‘We have sunk low, but by God, not yet so low that we should take orders from Casati.'
¹²²
Thus, Radetzky disobeyed orders: he stubbornly refused to negotiate and eventually gained the support of some ‘hawks' in Vienna, including Latour, the minister of war. Radetzky's arguments and Latour's backing swung the government, which at the end of June ordered the field marshal to move rapidly, expel Charles Albert from Lombardy and force their rebellious northern Italian subjects to submit.