1848 (14 page)

With this act, the frustrated Radetzky, who had been watching events furiously from the sidelines, struck back. His troops double-quicked through the streets to protect such buildings as the police headquarters, the law courts and the army engineering depot. Tyrolean marksmen were posted high among the marble needles of Milan's great cathedral, from where they would snipe at all and sundry - be they insurgents or hapless citizens caught in the crossfire. The Milanese quickly threw up barricades in the narrow streets of the old city. Bells rang from the church towers to summon people to the defences. At first these fortifications were makeshift, comprised of overturned carriages, barrels and hastily chopped-down trees. Soon they were bolstered by paving stones, sofas, beds, pianos and church furniture. Among the first to stand on them were young democratic republicans like the twenty-seven-year-old Enrico Cernuschi, nicknamed ‘the little Robespierre', who had studied law before giving it up to work in a sugar refinery.
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They were joined rapidly by artisans and workers, who formed the backbone of this spontaneous uprising. The republican Carlo Osio sped home from the demonstration and gathered a pistol, a stiletto and an iron bar - making him look more like a street thug than the doctor he was - before running back to help his brother Enrico and others build the barricades. Carlo careered headlong into a police patrol, narrowly escaped their gunshots, then beat a hasty retreat home again, this time to gather the rifle, bayonet and ammunition that he had stowed there. He was a veritable human arsenal.
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The more conservative patricians implored the insurgents to stand down and avoid the ‘inevitable massacre'.
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Yet few listened - not the comfortable merchants who opened their warehouses to allow the revolutionaries to search for weapons and matériel, not the chemists who helped to make gunpowder, nor the students, workers, women and children who helped to build the barricades and then took part in the fighting. Crossing the piazza in front of the cathedral, Hübner was caught up in a crowd armed with batons, ‘among them sinister faces recalling Paris during a day of rioting'. The sky, echoing to a confusion of noise, ‘was the colour of lead, and a fine rain, turning later into a downpour, never stopped falling'.
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While the Milanese held the narrow streets of the historic heart, the Habsburg forces - largely Croats and Hungarians - were firmly installed in some of the major buildings and enveloped the city by holding the walls. In the first few days the fate of the insurrection - which had no plan and no overall leadership - was desperately uncertain:

 

From the Casa Vidiserti - which served as the first, impromptu headquarters of the uprising because that was where Casati, its reluctant figurehead, had taken refuge - a civic guard was hastily organised. Osio - who, like many of the insurgents, appeared at the house to receive instructions - was made a corporal in the new force. He would eventually be put under the command of the young, democratic nobleman Luciano Manara, whose platoon fought for the next four days almost without respite. For now, one of Osio's first duties was to guard the captive vice-governor O'Donnell, who had been transferred to the safer Casa Taverna in the Contrada de' Bigli.
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It was there that the republicans under Cattaneo tried to seize the political initiative on 19 March, creating a four-man council of war, including Cattaneo himself and Cernuschi. For now, its main purpose was to impose some firm leadership and military direction: Cattaneo had to deploy his great powers of persuasion to dissuade the younger, hotter heads from declaring a Milanese republic then and there. How, he asked, would Lombardy then gain the support of the other Italian states, which were still ranged under monarchist regimes and whose constitutions had barely begun to see the light of day? Instead of enjoying freedom, Italy would be engulfed in civil war. This analysis was perceptive, but the establishment of the Council of War still created a rival - and republican - seat of power against Casati's liberal, monarchist municipality.
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By dawn on 20 March it was clear that the imperial troops were struggling under the horrifying effects of street combat. Hübner, trapped by the fighting since 18 March in a tenement near the cathedral, occasionally peered over the balcony and witnessed the carnage. He saw two Hungarian horsemen cut down by rifle fire and Croatian infantry marching stoically into a hail of musketry. Among the insurgents, ‘no one could be seen: they were men armed with rifles, women armed with stones and jugs of boiling water, hidden behind closed blinds, seeing without being seen themselves. It was this invisible enemy, which seemed to murder rather than fight, which worked on a soldier's imagination, which upset his nerves and demoralised him.' The noise was deafening: ‘the infernal racket of shouting voices, the cries of
evviva
mixed with the irritating chiming of the bells and the
maestoso
of the great guns of Father Radetzky'. By the third day the shutters of the apartment had been shattered by bullets, while gunsmoke wafted in from the street. Insurgents were on the roof and upper floors, firing down on the Austrians below, while the troops returned fire upwards and stray bullets occasionally tore the air around the terrified residents, all women. For their safety, Hübner gathered them all in an internal room, where they huddled behind a shelter of mattresses (the young Austrian was especially impressed by the sang-froid of a Swiss woman ‘into whose profession I did not pry', who seemed to be used to the rough side of street life).
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On the Milanese side, witnesses were no less struck by the horrors of the battle. When the insurrection spread to the eastern districts, Cattaneo had himself rowed across a canal to investigate the situation in the district by the Porta Ticinese, which presented a desolate sight. Apart from the barricades, ‘the broad streets were empty and deserted, all the houses were shut up; the explosions from a battery . . . and the ceaseless rumbling of fusillades kept falling into this silence of the dead; a thick smoke cast a dismal pall over everything'. The Austrians had smashed holes through the adjoining walls of apartments, gardens and stables, so that they could advance without exposing themselves to gunfire in the streets. Women and children caught between the two forces huddled together fearfully in the houses, blocking the doors and windows to protect themselves from ricocheting bullets.
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Both sides would later claim that atrocities had been committed. The Milanese were said to have found an Austrian soldier carrying a severed woman's hand, cut off for the rings on her fingers. Whole families were said to have been trapped and then burned alive by the Habsburg forces. The Austrians, meanwhile, claimed that one of their soldiers had been crucified to a sentry box, while others, captured by the Milanese, had been blinded. The very nature of the fighting means that claims of brutality (if not the grisly details) cannot be dismissed lightly, while the stories themselves - and the readiness with which they were believed - show how inflamed both sides were.
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Ever more insurgents picked up weapons from fallen Austrian soldiers, or by swamping and disarming isolated detachments by sheer force of numbers. The want of munitions grew less acute as, one by one, the Austrian barracks fell.
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Radetzky was forced to abandon his home and take up residence in the castle. He concluded that he could no longer reduce the barricades, since the army would destroy one only to be confronted with another. He withdrew his troops to the walls, from where he would besiege the city. With the fighting now moving towards the periphery, Hübner and the company of women now picked their way through the streets to the safety of the home of a Tyrolean banker. Yet the only way out of Milan for Hübner, as an Austrian diplomat, was to negotiate with the municipality. In doing so, however, he effectively became a prisoner of the insurgents. He was arrested on 21 March and marched through streets fluttering with tricolours and echoing to cries of ‘Long live Italy! Long live Pius IX!'
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Yet the divisions between Milanese monarchists and republicans were already widening. When, that same day, Radetzky sent one of his officers to open negotiations for a truce, Casati hesitated, perhaps seeing in the proposal a chance to buy time for Charles Albert to make his long-awaited commitment to send in his army against the Austrians. Cattaneo, for precisely this reason, refused to entertain any talk of a pause in the fighting.
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The power struggle between liberal monarchists and republicans - a fault-line that would run right through the Italian revolutions of 1848-9 - was already taking shape.

The Milanese, meanwhile, deployed all their ingenuity to break the siege:

Milan's novel air-mail service carried appeals to the Lombards to support the insurrection. Some of them drifted into Piedmont while others were blown as far as Switzerland. The call had already been heeded, for the independent-minded peasantry of upper Lombardy had risen and marched into provincial towns like Como and Monza, forcing the small Austrian garrisons there to beat a hasty retreat. Meanwhile, Casati and the moderates received a fillip with the surprise appearance of Count Martini, who had crept into the besieged city. He and d'Adda had spoken with King Charles Albert on 19 March and asked for military aid against Austria. The Piedmontese monarch replied that his army would march provided that Milan's municipality formally asked him for assistance, since he would need to justify his invasion to the other European powers. Charles Albert also faced a domestic challenge from Piedmontese radicals, who threatened a revolution of their own, unless the King served the cause of Italian unity and sent his army against the Austrians. His primary motive, however, was to satisfy his own dynastic ambition of annexing Lombardy and Venetia, thereby forging a northern Italian kingdom under the Savoyard dynasty. It was therefore also necessary to nip the republican movement in the bud since it would fight for a broader form of Italian unity on a democratic basis. So it was that Martini made his way back to Milan, bearing the King's message. He stole into the city disguised as a worker delivering salt in the night of 21-2 March.
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After trying in vain to persuade the Milanese leadership to rebut Charles Albert's offer, Cattaneo yielded to the municipality and agreed to a compromise, whereby the call for assistance was issued in the name of Milan to ‘
all
the peoples and
all
the princes of Italy and specifically those of Piedmont, its warlike neighbour'.
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Armed with this appeal, Martini made his way back to Turin. In the early hours of 22 March Casati at last formed a provisional government which unambiguously assumed leadership of the insurrection. Cattaneo immediately recognised it. He also subscribed to the provisional government's proclamation declaring that political arguments were to be postponed until the fighting was over: ‘After the victory [
A causa vinta
], it will be for the nation to discuss and pronounce on its own destinies.' ‘
A causa vinta
' was Cattaneo's great concession: it was, he said, ‘the only order which could delay the explosion of political passions'.
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Yet time was on the side of the monarchists, for it would not be long before the Piedmontese army would arrive and tip the political balance decisively in their favour. Not for the last time, an Italian republican had surrendered a chance of taking power. Why Cattaneo should have done so is an intriguing question. He himself later said that it was because the republicans were ready to shelve their sectional interests and their dogma for the sake of the wider struggle for independence.
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It is almost certainly true that Cattaneo wanted to avoid civil war at all costs, and it seems he realised that the republican movement was in a minority against the monarchists. However, he may well have underestimated the amount of support and prestige that the radicals now enjoyed: the insurrection had popularised the republican movement, while there was even some evidence of republican sentiment in the small towns and villages of the surrounding countryside. Yet it was not easy to forge these inchoate sympathies into the hard steel of a single revolutionary movement. In the rural areas the handful of radical leaders could not prevail against the dominant, conservative influence of landlords and priests who supported the monarchists. In Milan itself, ‘
a causa vinta
' allowed the provisional government to establish itself and reap the political fruits of the victory over the Austrians.
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