Prisoner of the Vatican (14 page)

The king's visit could hardly have been briefer, less than thirteen hours in all, during part of which he slept. Nor does it seem that he was met by great popular acclamation, although his announcement that he was giving the municipal government 200,000 lire to alleviate the suffering of the people did win him favor. According to the Dutch ambassador to Rome, the government was forced to secretly hire a hundred shills to surround the royal carriage and provide a satisfying chorus of "Long live the king." Victor Emmanuel took care to do nothing to offend the pope, staying clear of the Leonine city. His reaction when he at last set foot in his new residence, the Quirinal Palace, that day depends on whose account can be believed. According to one report, he turned to La Marmora and said, whether triumphally or simply with relief we do not know: "Finally, I'm here!" But partisans of the pope told a different story. As the king first stepped into his new palace, they said, he felt a horrifying chill. In the distance he could see St. Peter's and the Vatican. "Oh, what a shadow those buildings cast!" he is said to have moaned.
²⁰

During his visit, the king sent the pope a brief letter. Dated Rome, December 31,1870, it read:

Most Blessed Father

I come to Rome at this time to aid, insofar as I can, those damaged by the extraordinary flooding. I stay only a few hours, and I seize this opportunity to offer my most obsequious respect to Your Holiness, for whom I have always had the greatest veneration and filial affection.

Your Most Devoted son,
Victor Emmanuel

On the back of the pope's copy in the Vatican archives is the note: "No reply made." In fact, although the king and the pope would subsequently live just a mile apart, the pope would never meet him.
²¹

Leaving the Rome train station after his whirlwind tour, the king felt great relief. He had accomplished what was expected of him—staking a royal claim to the Holy City—in a way much easier than he could have hoped. While some remarked that the king seemed to have remarkably good fortune, always in the right place at the right time, he now mulled over a less appetizing interpretation of recent events. Could it be a coincidence that within three months of his troops' assault on the pope the Tiber had risen up and torn through the Holy City, causing cadavers to glide through the streets and houses to crumble? Superstitious by nature, the king had difficulty dismissing the thought, as he would forgetting something else, the prediction of Catholics that if he should occupy the Quirinal, he would meet an untimely death there.
²²

Meanwhile, in Florence, the Italian parliament debated the final bill authorizing the transfer of the capital. Although a few voices denounced the prospect of two sovereigns in one city, neither recognizing the legitimacy of the other, the bill was passed in January 1871 by a huge majority in the House of Deputies but, revealingly, by a much more modest margin in the Senate, whose members were closely identified with the king.

The rush to move the capital was fueled by fears of what might happen when the Franco-Prussian War ended. What, Lanza and his colleagues wondered, would France do once it recovered from the Prussian assault? A London
Times
article in early January, datelined Florence, offered a frightening prospect: "A firm persuasion is ... gradually gaining ground day by day in this country that France will not fail to vent her resentment in a second Italian war as soon as she has sufficiently recovered her strength after peace has been signed to enable her to do so, and it will be her object this time to undo all that she did during the first war, and to restore the Papal Government."
²³
As it happened, on January 28, the day after the Italian parliament voted to move the capital, Paris capitulated to the Prussian army. The siege was over, but the truly fearful bloodbath was still months away.

The leaders of the precarious new republic in France were themselves children of the Enlightenment, with little enthusiasm for restoring the pope's lands to ecclesiastical rule. Yet they were under pressure from France's Catholic right, for whom the papal cause was sacrosanct, and they were also eager to restore France's influence in European affairs after their disastrous defeat. When the pope pleaded for their help in stopping the Italians from moving their capital, he found a willing audience.

In April, the French envoy to Florence met with Visconti, urging that he stop the transfer of the capital. But Visconti would not be swayed.
²⁴

The French foreign minister, Jules Favre, then offered a solution that echoed the one La Marmora had earlier suggested: "If [Italy] would consent to view Florence as the seat of government, it would solve the Papal question. It would show great sense, and the political credit that it would thereby garner, as well as the honor, would offer a considerable advantage." He added: "Focus all of M. Visconti-Venosta's attention on this difficult topic. Rome, under royal rule—an integral part of the Italian nation, but remaining Holy or, better yet, the Dominant center in the domain of the faith—would lose none of its prestige and would redound to Italy's credit. And conciliation would then come about naturally, because the pope would become accustomed to seeing himself as living in his own home, not having the king around."

The French envoy presented Visconti with this proposal the day he received it. But, as he reported back to the French foreign minister, he had little luck. "To give up transferring the capital, or even to delay it," Visconti told him, "would expose Italy to a dangerous crisis for which no minister would accept the responsibility." Italy's foreign minister then asked rhetorically, "And what would the pope gain?...Instead of finding himself in the presence of a strong government, which has the best intentions and would maintain perfect order, he would find himself in the presence of a prefect and a municipal council that lacked sufficient authority to put down the excesses of a population irritated to see itself deprived of a capital." In any case, Visconti added, even if they kept the capital in Florence, the pope would still demand that his kingdom be restored. It would take more than this gesture, far more, to satisfy the pope.
²⁵

With the capital's transfer just weeks away, foreign pressures on Italy to delay the move continued to grow. On June 4, in Vienna, the Austrian foreign minister, Beust, told Marco Minghetti, the Italian ambassador, of a meeting he had just had in Munich with the Bavarian foreign minister. Why not make Rome into the Moscow of Italy? the Bavarian minister asked, again echoing La Marmora's suggestion. Rome would then technically be the capital, but it would not be the seat of government. Minghetti replied that the idea had already been much discussed in Florence but that it was impossible for two reasons. First, if Rome were not the capital, which Italian city would be? If Florence were to be the permanent capital, the people in Naples and Turin would be up in arms, feeling that they had better claims; unlike Florence, they had both had long histories hosting royal courts. Second, without the government, Rome, instead of becoming a center of conservatism, would be the center of intrigue and popular agitation of all kinds.
²⁶

On July 1, 1871, the Italian government moved to Rome. Victor Emmanuel came the next day. Although he had sent instructions that popular celebrations be minimized in order not to unduly offend the pope, the city was excited nonetheless. The king arrived from Naples shortly after noon in a long line of carriages filled with an assortment of government ministers and generals decked out in their most colorful uniforms. Flowers rained down from the balconies, but Gregorovius, who was there, observed that the king appeared "stiff, and gloomy and ugly." The European powers, bowing to the pleadings of the Holy See, kept their emissaries away. "Today," Gregorovius wrote in his diary, "is the close of the thousand years' dominion of the Papacy in Rome." In the shadow of the Vatican, the cannon of Sant'Angelo Castle thundered. "How the Pope's heart must have quailed at every shot!" wrote Gregorovius. "A tragedy without a parallel is being enacted here."
²⁷

For the faithful abroad, the king's occupation of the pope's Quirinal Palace was a horrifying sight. In early July,
Le Monde
expressed a widespread sentiment: "The simultaneous existence at Rome of two independent sovereigns is impossible." No one was more conscious of this fact than Victor Emmanuel, who would spend as little time as possible in his new capital and, indeed, could not be convinced to stay more than a day and a half after his triumphal arrival on July 2. In the years that followed, he stayed in Rome only when he had no alternative, such as for the opening ceremonies of parliament.
²⁸

The king explained this discomfort one day when talking to the queen of Holland: "I would really love to see the pope leave Rome, because I can't look out the window of the Quirinal without seeing the Vatican, and it seems to me that Pius IX and I are both prisoners." Or, as he was reported to have said another time: "Over there a prisoner who is free, here a free man who is a prisoner."
²⁹

L
ONG BEFORE THE KING
ever set foot in the Holy City, the pope had already excommunicated him and all those guilty of despoiling the Papal States. The founders of the modern Italian nation were again excommunicated in
Respicientes ea omnis,
the encyclical released on November 1,1870, which declared the Italian state's occupation of the Papal States null and void. The Holy See, the pope pronounced, would never reconcile itself with those who had stolen its lands. "Despite our advanced age," Pius wrote, "we prefer ... with divine aid, to drink the cup to the dregs rather than accept the iniquitous proposals which have been made to us.
¹

The proposals that the pope had in mind—aside from the offer of the Leonine city—were part of the Italian government's effort to calm international opinion by enacting what came to be dubbed "the law of guarantees." Lanza and his colleagues needed to show Europe's other powers that the Italian occupation of Rome had done nothing to prevent the pope's fulfilling his spiritual role as head of the Church. Before September 20, when they were trying to convince foreign governments not to oppose their march into the Holy City, Lanza, the king, and the foreign minister pledged that once they took Rome, they would submit to an international conference aimed at crafting the protections offered to the Holy See. But once they controlled Rome, they were just as eager to prevent such a conference. These were internal Italian matters, Lanza insisted. No foreign government could tell the Italians what to do within their own borders. Yet, as Lanza was well aware, their only hope of getting other governments to go along with them was to prove that they had already provided for the pope's security and freedom.

The Italians had another aim in trumpeting their law of guarantees. They wanted to allay fears that the pope, now in some sense a subject of the king of Italy, would become a court chaplain to the monarch who had usurped him. A pope controlled by Italy—a prospect made all the more credible because all the popes for the past three hundred years had been Italian—risked turning Catholics abroad into agents of a foreign power. Ironically, from this perspective, the more loudly Pius denounced the Italian leaders the better they liked it, for it offered proof of his independence.
²

Agreeing on just what guarantees should be offered proved to be difficult. Cavour's famous doctrine of "a free Church in a free State," implying the complete separation of church and state, was championed by some conservatives, including Lanza and Visconti. But others followed the long European tradition that viewed government oversight as necessary, not least in the appointment of bishops, a prerogative that secular rulers enjoyed elsewhere. For the many anticlerics, allowing the Church full freedom was a prescription for national suicide; the Church was the sworn enemy of the state, dedicated to its destruction. The vast network of parishes, monasteries, and schools—if left alone—would, in this view, prove to be the new state's downfall. As a result, fierce debate raged in parliament for the first months of 1871, and the final legislation, signed by the king in Turin on May 13, was full of compromises.

The law began with a pledge that the pope's person was to be considered "sacred and inviolable." Any attack on him was to be treated in the same way as an attack on the king. The Italian government would render the pope all honors due a sovereign, and he was to be paid the huge sum of 3,225,000 lire per year, free of taxation, from the public treasury to cover his own expenses and those of the Holy See. The Vatican palaces, with their museums, works of art, libraries, and surrounding gardens, as well as the Lateran Palace and Castel Gandolfo, the summer estate outside Rome, would all be reserved for the pope and considered inalienable and exempt from taxes. No public official or police would be allowed to enter any of these buildings unless explicitly invited. Foreign emissaries to the Holy See would enjoy the same rights accorded foreign diplomats to Italy, and the pope was assured of the ability to correspond freely with the Episcopate and the whole Catholic world.

The law of guarantees further specified that Italian bishops would not be required to pledge their loyalty to the king, and no government authorization would be needed for the Church to publish its own official acts. However—and here came a clause that caused much anguish in the Church—government approval would still be necessary for new appointees to be allowed to take control of Church property outside Rome. This provision thus required new bishops to receive government permission before taking up residence in their new bishopric, a requirement long followed in other Catholic countries, but it created special problems here because the Church refused to recognize the legitimacy of the state.
³