Prisoner of the Vatican (7 page)

On August 3, an Italian military attaché brought Napoleon a secret plan, offering Italian support in exchange for permitting the Italians to take Rome. But the French emperor rebuffed the proposal, fearing that it would enrage his Catholic supporters, who were about the only supporters he had left. The French Catholic right would, he said, rather see "the Prussians in Paris than the Italians in Rome."
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Amazingly, despite the first catastrophic French defeats and Napoleon's rejection of the Italians' proposal, Victor Emmanuel persisted in pressing for Italian military intervention on behalf of the French. He apparently went so far as to tell Napoleon that he would dismiss his prime minister and the entire cabinet if they refused to go along with him. Fortunately for the Italians, the king's ministers—and most notably his prime minister, Giovanni Lanza—were finally able to persuade him that siding with the French would be disastrous and likely to lead to a republican insurrection in Italy.
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In Rome, the pope and Church leaders watched developments with mounting alarm. Antonelli was certainly under no illusions: should the French be defeated, he knew there would be nothing to stop the Italians from seizing the Holy City.

In Antonelli's mind, the hopelessness of their position could be attributed in no small part to his own defeats in internal Church politics, including the vote for papal infallibility. What most angered him was the prospect that he would be held responsible for what was to come. "They want to have me take the blame for things that I not only didn't do, but that I opposed with all my might," said Antonelli on the day of the final infallibility vote. "You will see," he told one confidant, "that they will say that it is I who will have wrecked the papacy."
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With many convinced that the loss of Rome was only days or weeks away, the Holy City was filled with rumors of the pope's imminent departure. As Count Kulczycki reported, "The Jesuits and the other prelates of their party are pressing Pius IX to leave immediately ... They are advising him to ask the English for protection and move to Malta."

At the same time, others in the Vatican were pleading with the pope to find a way to come to terms with Italy and perhaps save Rome from occupation. Among them was Cardinal Antonelli himself. He had no luck.
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Meanwhile, the Holy See was trying to calm the people of Rome, who found themselves locked inside the city gates.
L'Osservatore Romano,
closely identified with the pope, ran a series of articles offering French assurances that—appearances notwithstanding—the Convention of September remained fully in effect.
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The pressure on the king and his prime minister to seize Rome could no longer be stopped. On August 13, while attempting to pass himself off as an Englishman named John Brown, Giuseppe Mazzini was recognized on a ship in Palermo, where he had gone to promote a republican uprising against the Italian king. Seized by the Italian police, he was taken to Gaeta, the same fourteenth-century castle north of Naples where the pope had himself taken refuge from the Roman revolution of 1848. The government needed the prophet of Italian nationalism out of the way. On September 8, Lanza sent a telegram to the prefeet who oversaw Gaeta: "Recommend maximum vigilance custody Mazzini. His escape at this moment would create serious embarrassment for the government."
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The same day Lanza sent a similar telegram to the prefect of Sassari, in Sardinia, where Garibaldi was being kept under government surveillance in Caprera, with the order to arrest him should he attempt any move to the mainland.
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The irony could scarcely have been greater: the two heroes of the Risorgimento, its theorist, Mazzini, and its general, Garibaldi, were both under Italian police control as Rome was about to be taken.
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The pope, however, remained convinced that the Italians would never conquer the Holy City. For one thing, he was not yet persuaded that the French—whose Convention of September offered him a guarantee against Italian invasion—were going to lose. By August 20, when the Swiss general Hermann Kanzler, head of the papal army, went to see Pius, news of the massing of Italian troops on the border of the Roman territories had already reached them, yet the pope told him to remain calm. "The Holy Father, whom I saw this morning," Kanzler reported, "does not believe all the rumors about an imminent violation of his territory by Italian troops. He believes such an attack is only possible by revolutionary bands."
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The pope explained this confidence in an article that, it appears, he ordered to be written for
L'Osservatore Romano
in mid-August. It stressed the promises received from both Bismarck and the king of Prussia that the pope's territory would remain intact and also told of the assurances given by the Italians to the French diplomats that they had no intention of taking Rome by force. In another story in the newspaper, on August 16, datelined Florence, the correspondent could not have been more confident: "I repeat, this government has no intention of occupying any part of the Pontifical State."
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Not all shared this optimism, and Pius was growing irritated by the ever more insistent pleas he was getting from his military officers, asking what to do should the Italian troops cross into papal territory. When, on Wednesday, August 17, Monsignor Randi, the pope's police commissioner, came to see him and asked for such instructions, the pope jumped out of his seat angrily and shouted: "Can't you understand that I have formal assurances that the Italians will not set foot in Rome? How many times must I keep repeating myself?"
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On August 20, Italy's House of Deputies passed a motion of confidence in the government on the condition that it commit itself "to resolve the Roman question in a manner in keeping with national aspirations."
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Alarmed by the lightly veiled threat, Cardinal Manning, the archbishop of Westminster and the leader of the Catholic Church in England, met with William Gladstone to call for British assistance in defending the pope. Within days, a British envoy informed Antonelli that the British warship
Defence
had arrived at Civitavecchia with instructions to take the pope aboard should he wish to flee.
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The pope can perhaps be forgiven for his misreading of the situation in these days, for he was getting very mixed signals from his diplomatic corps. On the afternoon of August 23, for example, he received a telegram from a high Church source in Vienna telling him that the Austrian emperor had just offered assurances that Italian troops would not enter papal territory.
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Pius had also read a dispatch from the Florence correspondent of
L'Osservatore Romano
the previous day, saying that it was "impossible that the government could now be thinking of violating its treaties." The paper reprinted a story from a Florence newspaper close to the Italian government which had branded the idea of taking advantage of France's misfortunes by marching on Rome as "neither honest, nor loyal ... a policy unworthy of a great nation."
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But, at the same time, the pope received a long report from his nuncio in Vienna that painted a very different picture. Prussia, he wrote, was secretly urging the Italian government to occupy all of the pontifical state, including Rome. Under the Prussian plan, an honorific position would be reserved for the pope and perhaps also a small patch of land, the Leonine city in Rome being one possibility. The Austrians, for their part, had no difficulty with this plan, the nuncio wrote, although Count Beust, the Austrian foreign minister, thought that the arrival of Italian troops in Rome might well lead the pope to abandon the city. "Should the Holy Father seek asylum," the nuncio learned, "Austria will offer him an Italian city within the Empire, either Trent, Gorizia, or Zara, or another city of Dalmatia."
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Although the situation looked bleak, it was not yet hopeless. Italy's ambassador to France had again assured the French foreign minister that there was to be no attack on Rome, news that the papal nuncio in Paris hastened to pass on to the Holy See. In a second long note on the same day, the nuncio described the chaotic situation in France, which, he thought, also offered some hope. The military disasters, he wrote, were sparking a widespread return to the Church. "Not only the good people but also the [religiously] indifferent have been struck by the coincidence of its being the very day that the troops were withdrawn from Rome that the French army's catastrophe on the Rhine began, and the conviction is spreading and deepening that the French government's sins toward the Holy See have provoked God's wrath on France."
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Despite all its public disclaimers, the Italian government was then frantically casting about for an excuse to take Rome. On August 25, Prime Minister Lanza described some of these shadowy efforts. He had met a few days earlier with a representative of a group of parliamentary conspirators who were planning to create chaos in Rome. They were funneling funds to operatives in Rome who were supposed to organize armed assaults on military barracks, aimed at provoking a popular uprising. The prime minister was skeptical. "These are all very nice and easy things to say, but impossible to put into practice in Rome," he wrote, "which lacks both courageous youths and men energetic enough to lead them."

Although Lanza thought their plan impractical, he did not want to discourage them entirely. "I gave them a little hope," he recalled, adding that he would consider helping them "when they begin to think seriously about taking direct action to push the Papal Government into complete anarchy, and so give the Italian Government a rationale for intervening to restore order and protect the Holy Father." He then described how it might best be done, supported by secret funds that he would provide. "Above all," wrote Lanza, "it is necessary to bribe the [papal] troops, and this will be done. This will produce constant, loud arguments among the soldiers, who are from different countries and so are already suspicious of one another, and then it will only take a little breeze to fan the conflagration." Other steps would follow: "With the money spent judiciously and with caution, the soldiers' brawls will then spread to the lower classes, through provocations in the taverns, on the streets, and wherever else it is possible." Should all go according to plan, Lanza wrote, "at night the city would be continuously disturbed by the sounds of gunfire. We would arrange for Italian flags to be raised, here one time, there another. In short," he pledged, he would do everything "to show the whole world that Rome was in the throes of total anarchy, and that the pope's Government could no longer control the situation with its own forces." But, the prime minister warned, the matter had to be handled with care: "See that as many disorders as you like break out in Rome, and of any kind, but not revolution, nor even assaults on the barracks. We will provide the money, and then we will see."
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Prime minister since the previous year, the sixty-year-old Lanza was from Piedmont, like many of Italy's major government figures of the time, having served as Cavour's minister of education in the government of the Kingdom of Sardinia in 1855 and in a series of ever more powerful posts thereafter. A bit taller than average, with a big head and large, dark brown eyes and bushy eyebrows, he had a rather severe air about him, although when he laughed, his face softened. He had a prominent, somewhat curved nose and broad cheeks, with a droopy mustache that hung over his well-trimmed beard. His voice was distinctive, robust, but somewhat nasal. Although his accent seemed to betoken an aristocratic origin, he was in fact the son of a blacksmith who had become a modest property owner.
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Lanza had gone far, and he was about to play a central role in mediating among the king, the conservatives, and the left in guiding Italy into Rome and in making Rome the new capital.

The other major protagonist of the Italian government in 1870 was the minister of foreign affairs, Emilio Visconti Venosta. The first-born son of a noble family of vast landholdings, based in Milan, Visconti was swept up in the revolutionary movement of 1848. Nineteen years old at the time, he joined Garibaldi's forces in the battle to eject the Austrians and became enamored of Mazzini. But a few years later he repudiated the republican champion, believing that the Savoyard monarchy offered the best hope for unifying Italy. In 1863 Visconti was appointed minister of foreign affairs for the first of what would turn out to be seven times, the last of which would take him into the twentieth century.
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Made foreign affairs minister again in 1869, Visconti entered into a peculiar relation with Lanza. They were very different characters: Lanza was energetic, decisive, and outgoing; Visconti, brooding and cautious, carefully measuring every word. While Lanza led the effort to convince his colleagues in the government to take Rome and had no great sympathy for the papacy, Visconti was consumed by the desire to preserve good relations with the Holy See, fearful that brash action by the government might lead the pope to seek refuge abroad. The Vatican's demonization of Visconti pained him deeply, while Lanza sloughed off such attacks. Until the very day that the Italian forces rushed into Rome, Visconti nourished the hope that, despite all the pope's protests, he would in the end agree to a compromise with the Italian state.
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On August 29, Visconti sent a confidential dispatch to Italian ambassadors throughout Europe, arguing that the upheavals that were now unsettling Europe had rendered the Convention of September null and void. Italy sought to reconcile two fundamental aims, he told them, guaranteeing its national aspirations and the right of the Romans to determine their own future while ensuring "the pope's independence, freedom, and religious authority."

Yet, Visconti complained, the Holy See had refused to discuss any solution to the problem and had instead become "an enemy Government established as an enclave within the Kingdom, seeking in the confusions sweeping Europe to trigger new military intervention." As a result, Italy now faced a mortal threat, for, Visconti charged, "the Roman territory is the nerve center for the party that plots foreign intervention aimed at restoring another political order on the peninsula."