1848 (50 page)

The revolution in Rome gave all Italian radicals a fresh focus for their activities. In Tuscany Guerrazzi and Montanelli saw the opportunity of realising their plan of a democratic
costituente
, which could now convene in Rome itself. Garibaldi and his followers were also drawn towards Rome. They had undertaken a veritable odyssey since their retreat into Switzerland that summer. From there, Garibaldi had made his way to Genoa, where he received a formal invitation from the Sicilians to help them fight against the Neapolitans. He duly embarked on a French steamer with seventy-two followers - mostly officers - and they chugged southwards, bound for Palermo. Yet one of the ports of call was Livorno, and there the radical leadership convinced him that he would discover in Tuscany a fertile recruiting ground for his republican army. Garibaldi therefore offered his services to Guerrazzi and Montanelli, sending a telegram suggesting that he lead an army of Tuscan volunteers against the Neapolitan King. The message finished rather curtly: ‘Yes or no - Garibaldi'.
¹²⁴

The answer, as it turned out, was a clear ‘no'. In the first place the great campaigner had been misled: rural Tuscany, in particular, was loyal to the Grand Duke and resisted the republicans' blandishments. Second, Guerrazzi and Montanelli were not at all happy about Garibaldi's sudden appearance. They may have been radicals, and Guerrazzi may have been a demagogue, but now that both men were in power, they wanted to prove that they could maintain law and order. Moreover, their plan for a
costituente
was to be democratic, but it was not necessarily to be exclusively republican. As Montanelli later explained, they wanted a constituent assembly to persuade ‘constitutionalists and republicans, federalists and unitarians to shake hands . . . in order to contribute jointly towards the task of enfranchising Italy'.
¹²⁵
This willingness to involve the liberal monarchists did not please the more uncompromising republicans like Mazzini and Garibaldi. Moreover, the latter's force threatened to be a source of instability for a government which, while radical, was now trying to strengthen its position against the more hot-headed Tuscan democrats. ‘They are like a plague of locusts', fretted Guerrazzi of Garibaldi's men. ‘We must do all we can to get them away quickly.'
¹²⁶
Consequently, the Tuscan reply to Garibaldi's proposal was ‘evasive'; and, while the small band of Garibaldini received a tumultuous welcome from the Florentines, the government itself kept a stony silence and did not provide them with provisions for the onward march.
¹²⁷
Garibaldi's small regiment had crossed the icy Apennines and reached the frontier with the Papal States at Filigare on 9 November. At that point, Rossi still had six days to live and General Zucchi had advanced from Bologna to Ferrara with four hundred Swiss troops to block the Garibaldini, who now numbered no more than one hundred. The republican force was in a terrible state: ‘So we had left South America for this: to fight the snow in the Apennines,' Garibaldi later commented bitterly. ‘It was distressing to see these worthy young lads in the mountains in such harsh weather: most were wearing only light clothes, some were in rags, all were hungry.'
¹²⁸
It was while the Garibaldini were spending ‘a few miserable days' in Filigare that the people of Bologna came to their rescue. With Zucchi absent, Father Gavazzi led a huge demonstration, cramming into the street below the windows of Zucchi's second-in-command: ‘Either our brothers come here', they cried, ‘or you come down from that balcony.'
¹²⁹
Hearing of the protest, Zucchi, reluctant to provoke a full-blown uprising, agreed to a compromise: Garibaldi's force would be allowed to cross the Romagna, but it had to march to Ravenna, where it would embark for Venice to support Manin's defence of the city against the Austrians.

Rossi's assassination and the radical uprising in Rome gave the Garibaldini a new opportunity to march southwards. Garibaldi's verdict on the murder was virulently bloodthirsty: ‘in getting rid of him the ancient metropolis of the world showed itself worthy of its illustrious past. A young Roman had wielded anew the sword of Brutus and drowned the marble steps of the Capitol with the tyrant's blood!'
¹³⁰
His recruiting efforts now bore fruit, so that when he left Ravenna at the end of November, he was riding at the head of five hundred men - mostly young middle-class townsmen, artisans, workers and students: ‘fine-looking, polite, almost all the sons of cultivated families from the country's urban centres'.
¹³¹
Garibaldi planned to winter in Umbria, but he also rode on to Rome in mid-December, in order, as he expressed it, to ‘put the legion's miserable and vagabond existence on a more organised footing' by getting the recognition of the new war minister, from whom he hoped to secure supplies.
¹³²

Garibaldi entered a turbulent city fractured by a confused and complex dispute between conflicting radical factions and the remnants of the moderates. Early in December, moderate arguments that the
costituente
should be along Vincenzo Gioberti's federal lines were fervently challenged by the democrats. The republican Mazzinians, having been defeated in Venice, had found in Rome a new theatre for their activities. Some, like Mazzini himself, believed pragmatically that it was too early to convene a full Italian
costituente
- it would never be accepted by the Piedmontese, among others - so the Papal States should be democratised first, becoming the nucleus of the future Italian republic. Other republicans disagreed and wanted to proceed immediately to all-Italian elections. Meanwhile, some members of the new government in Rome, like Mamiani, were not extremists and were well aware that much of the Roman population was reeling from both the moral and the economic effects of the Pope's sudden flight. There was a strong belief that, if Pius was willing to negotiate, he could return to Rome. While this possibility remained open, the ministers were reluctant to entertain any hard-line republicans - and once again Garibaldi found himself being snubbed. He spent the winter with his troops at Foligno in Umbria. Yet the pressure of the radical political clubs was soon too much to resist for the government, which faced the grim prospect of a fresh insurrection on the streets of Rome. In any case the Pope had repeatedly refused to return, so on 29 December there were few options left but to hold elections to a Roman Constituent Assembly, which was the obvious prelude to the proclamation of a republic. Under further pressure from the clubs, on 16 January the Roman government also declared that the hundred candidates who attracted the most votes to the Roman assembly would represent Rome in the all-Italian
costituente
, wherever it met.
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Having had their cake, it seemed that the republicans would be able to eat it as well.

While Italian republicanism was suddenly breathing in fresh oxygen, the French Second Republic was slowly being stifled to death, although it lingered on painfully until the end of 1851. The author of its agonising demise was an unlikely man who stood with a slouch, was less than five feet six inches tall, and had a pronounced hook nose, a long handlebar moustache and a pointed goatee beard. His name was Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte. Born in 1808, he was Napoleon Bonaparte's nephew, the son of Hortense de Beauharnais (Empress Joséphine's daughter from her first marriage) and Louis Bonaparte, Napoleon's brother, who was then King of Holland. Louis-Napoleon was an enigmatic, strange and at times comical figure. After the Napoleonic Empire unravelled in 1814, he and his mother, who doted on him, spent his childhood in exile, finally settling in the Swiss castle of Arenenberg on Lake Constance. There, Hortense immersed Louis-Napoleon in his Bonapartist heritage. At the time of the 1830 revolution, the immediate heir to Napoleon's imperial throne was Napoleon II, Duke of Reichstadt, the son of the Emperor and his second consort, Marie-Louise of Austria. He had spent his life in the ‘gilded cage' of the Habsburg palace of Schönbrunn, but he died of consumption in 1832. Louis-Napoleon regarded himself as the rightful heir. He envisaged Bonapartism as a combination of the principle of popular sovereignty and authoritarianism: the Emperor would be the executor of the people's will, which would be expressed by a parliament elected by universal, though indirect, suffrage. It was a hauntingly modern blend of political ideas - a dictatorship claiming its mandate from the ‘people'. Yet the government, he wrote in
Napoleonic Ideas
(1839), must work for the benefit of society: it was to use the ‘necessary means to open a smooth and easy road for advancing civilisation'.
¹³⁴
By uniting authoritarianism, popular sovereignty and social progress Louis-Napoleon appealed to a wide range of people and, by emphasising different facets of his ideas according to his audience, he succeeded in being all things to all people. Later, after he had become Emperor Napoleon III, he exclaimed, referring to his closest associates, ‘How do you expect the Empire to run smoothly? The Empress is a Legitimist, Morny is an Orléanist, my cousin Jérôme-Napoleon is a Republican; I am a socialist; only Persigny is a Bonapartist and he is mad.'
¹³⁵
His ideas possessed such emotive force because they were presented in Napoleonic packaging - and the empire was remembered by many people not for dictatorship, not for the horrors of war, but for its ‘glory' and its claim to the idealism of the 1789 revolution.

Armed with his usefully nebulous concept of Bonapartism, Louis-Napoleon made two botched attempts to provoke an uprising against the July Monarchy among French army garrisons - in 1836 at Strasbourg and in 1840 at Boulogne. After the first attempt, he was exiled to the United States but he soon returned to Europe. The second effort was the stuff of farce. Louis-Napoleon appeared in Boulogne with a paddle-steamer named (of all things)
The Edinburgh Castle
. Since the insurgents had no imperial eagle as a symbol, they made do with a tame vulture: the bemused bird was chained to the mast. As a result of Boulogne, Louis-Napoleon was sentenced to life imprisonment, serving his sentence in the fortress of Ham in northern France. There, he penned
The Extinction of Poverty
in 1844, in which he confronted the ‘social question'. He criticised the free market economy, proposing instead a radical programme of state intervention to ease the plight of the poor. His ideas were far from socialist, but they allowed him later to appeal to the workers as their friend - and certainly some Parisian artisans had paid notice. Two years after writing this tract, he escaped from the prison when, during some restoration work, he dressed as a builder, nonchalantly picked up a plank of wood and walked out through the gates. In less than a day he had reached London.
¹³⁶

With the revolution in 1848, Louis-Napoleon travelled to Paris, but the provisional government, suspicious if not a little alarmed, rejected the offer of his services, and by early March he was back in London. There, he enrolled as a special constable against the Chartists on 10 April. In France this marked him out as a friend of order against the ‘red' menace.
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However, he remained inscrutably mysterious in the precise direction of his politics, although his name helped.

While he was still in London, Louis-Napoleon was entered as a candidate for the French by-elections that were held on 4 June. He was returned in four separate constituencies, including Paris. This success unleashed a political storm. On the one hand, groups of Parisians cheered the election of the man with the electrifying name: ‘Bonaparte'. Workers gathered on the boulevards mixing democratic-socialist slogans with cries of ‘Long live Poleon! We'll have Poleon!' They conflated in Louis-Napoleon the patriotic pride in the glorious days of his uncle with their aspirations for social reform. This magnetic appeal was precisely what alarmed the republicans. Proudhon warned in his newspaper that, ‘eight days ago, Citizen Bonaparte was nothing but a black dot in a fiery sky; the day before yesterday, he was still only a smoke-filled ball; today he is a cloud carrying storm and tempest in its flanks'.
¹³⁸
When the alarmed
démoc-soc
Club of the Revolution of 1793 debated its response to Louis-Napoleon's success, one speaker argued that it could be explained by their own failure not to have ‘carried the banner of democracy widely enough'.
¹³⁹
On 12 June in the National Assembly, Lamartine and Ledru-Rollin presented a bill barring Bonaparte from his seat, arguing that a ‘pretender' who had twice tried to seize power illegally could not be a deputy. ‘We will never allow . . . the republic to be sold, under any name, into the hands of a few fanatics!' proclaimed Lamartine.
¹⁴⁰
Louis-Napoleon's supporters gathered on the Place de la Concorde, among them unemployed workers from the National Workshops. The cry ‘
Vive l'Empereur!
' resounded across the great square and carried over the river to the National Assembly, which, though protected by troops and National Guards, rejected the bill: ‘one of its rare weaknesses', wrote Lamartine. D'Agoult explained this strange decision by the fact that, frightening though Bonaparte was, the republicans were more worried by their Legitimist and Orléanist opponents, who had a powerful presence in the Assembly.
¹⁴¹
None the less, Bonaparte himself defused the situation by resigning his seat on 16 June, insisting that he now stood for legality: ‘I desire order and support a Republic which is wise, great and intelligent, but since I have been involuntarily the cause of disorder, I place my resignation in your hands, with my deep regrets.'
¹⁴²

It was a shrewd move. D'Agoult's judgement was as perceptive as ever: