The Liberation of Italy, 1815-1870 Part 8

In the past year, Lord Palmerston, though he tried to localise the war, and to prevent the co-operation of the south, abounded in good advice to Austria. He repeated till he was tired of repeating, that she would do well to retire from her Italian possessions of her own accord. If the French did not come now, he said, they would come some day, and then her friends and allies would give her scanty support. As for Lombardy, it was notorious that a considerable Austrian party was in favour of giving it up, including the Archduke Ranieri, who was strongly attached to Italy, which was the land of his birth. As for Venice, Austria had against her both the principle of nationality, now the rallying cry of Germany, and the principle of ancient prescription which could be energetically invoked against her by a state to which her t.i.tle went back no farther than the transfer effected by Buonaparte in the treaty of Campo Formio. These were his arguments; but he was convinced, by this time, that arguments unsupported by big battalions might as well be bestowed on the winds as on the Cabinet of Vienna. From the moment that Radetsky recovered Lombardy for his master, the Italian policy of the Austrian Government was entirely inspired by him, and he was determined that while he lived, what Austria had got she should keep. It was thus that, in reply to Manin's appeal to Lord Palmerston, he only received the cold comfort of the recommendation that Venice should come to terms with her enemy.

The Venetian army of 20,000 men was reduced by casualties and sickness to 18,000 or less. It always did its duty. The defence of Fort Malghera, the great fort which commanded the road to Padua and the bridge of the Venice railway, would have done credit to the most experienced troops in the world. The garrison numbered 2500; the besiegers, under Haynau, 30,000. Radetsky, with three archdukes, came to see the siege, but, tired with waiting, they went away before it was ended. The bombardment began on the 4th of May; in the three days and nights ending with the 25th over 60,000 projectiles fell on the fort. During the night of the 25th the Commandant, Ulloa, by order of Government, quietly evacuated the place, and withdrew his troops; only the next morning the Austrians found out that Malghera was abandoned, and proceeded to take possession of the heap of ruins, which was all that remained.

After the beginning of July, an incessant bombardment was directed against the city itself. Women and children lived in the cellars; fever stalked through the place, but the war feeling was as strong as ever--nay, stronger. Moreover, the provisions became daily scarcer, the day came when hunger was already acutely felt, when the time might be reckoned by hours before the famished defenders must let drop their weapons, and Venice, her works of art and her population, must fall a prey to the savage vengeance of the Austrians, who would enter by force and without conditions.

And this is what Manin prevented. The cry was still for resistance; for the first time bitter words were spoken against the man who had served his country so well. But he, who had never sacrificed one iota to popularity, did not swerve. His great influence prevailed. The capitulation was arranged on the 22nd, and signed on the 24th of July.

Manin had calculated correctly; on that day there was literally nothing left to eat in Venice.

In the last sad hours that Manin spent in Venice all the love of his people, clouded for an instant, burst forth anew. Not, indeed, in shouts and acclamations, but in tears and sobs; 'Our poor father, how much he has suffered!' they were heard saying. He embarked on a French vessel bound for Ma.r.s.eilles, poor, worn out and exiled for ever from the city which he had guided for eighteen months; if, indeed, no spark of his spirit animated the dust which it was the first care of liberated Venice to welcome home. The Austrians broke up his doorstep on which, according to a Venetian custom, his name was engraved.

Another martyr, Ugo Ba.s.si, had kissed the stone, exclaiming:

'Next to G.o.d and Italy--before the Pope--Manin!' The people gathered up the broken fragments and kept them as relics, even as in their hearts they kept his memory, till the arrival of that day of redemption which, in the darkest hour, he foretold.

CHAPTER IX

'J'ATTENDS MON ASTRE'

1849-1850

The House of Savoy--A King who keeps his Word--Sufferings of the Lombards--Charles Albert's Death.

Circ.u.mstances more gloomy than those under which Victor Emmanuel II.

ascended the throne of his ancestors it would be hard to imagine.

An army twice beaten, a bankrupt exchequer, a triumphant invader waiting to dictate terms; this was but the beginning of the inventory of the royal inheritance. The internal condition of the kingdom, even apart from the financial ruin which had succeeded to the handsome surplus of two years before, was full of embarra.s.sments of the gravest kind. There was a party representing the darkest-dyed clericalism and reaction whose machinations had not been absent in the disaster of Novara. Who was it that disseminated among the troops engaged in the battle broadsides printed with the words: 'Soldiers, for whom do you think you are fighting? The King is betrayed; at Turin they have proclaimed the republic'? There were other broadsides in which Austria was called the supporter of thrones and altars. The dreadful indiscipline witnessed towards the end of, and after the conflict was due more to the demoralising doctrines that had been introduced into the army than to the insubordination of panic. There was another party strengthened by the recent misfortunes and recruited by exiles from all parts of Italy, which was democratic to the verge of republicanism in Piedmont and over that verge at Genoa, where a revolution broke out before the new King's reign was a week old. Const.i.tutional government stood between the fires of these two parties, both fanned by Austrian bellows, the first openly, the second in secret.

Victor Emmanuel was not popular. The indifference to danger which he had shown conspicuously during the war would have awakened enthusiasm in most countries, but in Piedmont it was so thoroughly taken for granted that the Princes of the House of Savoy did not know fear, that it was looked on as an ordinary fact. The Austrian origin of the d.u.c.h.ess of Savoy formed a peg on which to hang unfriendly theories. It is impossible not to compa.s.sionate the poor young wife who now found herself Queen of a people which hated her race, after having lived since her marriage the most dreary of lives at the dismallest court in Europe. At first, as a bride, she seemed to have a desire to break through the frozen etiquette which surrounded her; it is told how she once begged and prayed her husband to take her for a walk under the Porticoes of Turin, which she had looked at only from the outside. The young couple enjoyed their airing, but when it reached Charles Albert's ears, he ordered his son to be immediately placed under military arrest. The chilling formalism which invaded even the private life of these royal personages, shutting the door to 'good comradeship' even between husband and wife, may have had much to do with driving Victor Emmanuel from the side of the Princess, whom, nevertheless, he loved and venerated, to unworthy pleasures, the habit of indulgence in which is far easier to contract than to cure.

[Ill.u.s.tration: VICTOR IMMANUEL]

The King's address at this time was not conciliatory, and, indeed, it never lost a bluntness which later harmonised well enough with the reputation he gained for soldierly integrity, but which then pa.s.sed for aristocratic haughtiness. His personal friends were said to belong to the aristocratic or even the reactionary party. In the perplexities which encompa.s.sed him, he could not reckon on the encouragement of any consensus of good opinion or confidence. He was simply an unknown man, against whom there was a good deal of prejudice.

Radetsky did not refuse to treat with Charles Albert, as has been sometimes said, but the intolerably onerous terms first proposed by him showed that he wished to force the abdication which Charles Albert had always contemplated in the event of new reverses of fortune.

Radetsky was favourably disposed to the young Duke of Savoy, as far as his personal feeling was concerned, a fact which was made out in certain quarters to be almost a crime to be marked to the account of Victor Emmanuel. The Field-Marshal did not forget that he was the son-in-law of the Austrian Archduke Ranieri; it is probable, if not proved, that he expected to find him pliable; but Radetsky, besides being a politician of the purest blood-and-iron type, was an old soldier with not a bad heart, and some of his sympathy is to be ascribed to a veteran's natural admiration for a daring young officer.

On the 24th of March, Victor Emmanuel, with the manliness that was born with him, decided to go and treat himself for the conditions of the armistice. It was the first act of his reign, and it was an act of abnegation; but of how much less humiliation than that performed by his father twenty-eight years before, when almost on the same day, by order of King Charles Felix, the Prince of Carignano betook himself to the Austrian camp at Novara, to be greeted with the derisive shout of: 'Behold the King of Italy!' Little did Radetsky think that the words, addressed then in scorn to the father, might to-day have been addressed in truthful antic.i.p.ation to the son.

The Field-Marshal took good care, however, that nothing but respect should be paid to his visitor, whom he received half-way, surrounded by his superb staff, all mounted on fine horses and clad in splendid accoutrements. As soon as the King saw him coming, he sprang from his saddle, and Radetsky would have done the same had not he required, owing to his great age, the aid of two officers to help him to the ground. After he had laboriously dismounted, he made a military salute, and then embraced Victor Emmanuel with the greatest cordiality. The King was accompanied by very few officers, but the presence of one of these was significant, namely, of the Lombard Count Vimercati, whom he particularly pointed out to Radetsky.

While observing the most courteous forms, the Field-Marshal was not long in coming to the point. The negotiations would be greatly facilitated, nay, more, instead of beginning his reign with a large slice of territory occupied by a foreign enemy for an indefinite period, the King might open it with an actual enlargement of his frontier, if he would only give the easy a.s.surance of ruling on the good old system, and of re-hoisting the blue banner of Piedmont instead of the revolutionary tricolor. The moment was opportune; Victor Emmanuel had not yet sworn to maintain the Const.i.tution. But he replied, without hesitation, that though he was ready, if needs be, to accept the full penalties of defeat, he was determined to observe the engagements entered into by his father towards the people over whom he was called to reign.

One person had already received from his lips the same declaration, with another of wider meaning. During the previous night, speaking to the Lombard officer above mentioned, the King said: 'I shall preserve intact the inst.i.tutions given by my father; I shall uphold the tricolor flag, symbol of Italian nationality, which is vanquished to-day, but which one day will triumph. This triumph will be, henceforth, the aim of all my efforts.' In 1874, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of Novara, Count Vimercati wrote to the King of Italy from Paris to remind him of the words he had then spoken.

When the King started for his capital, Radetsky offered to draw up his troops as a guard of honour over the whole extent of occupied territory between Novara and Turin. The offer was declined, and Victor Emmanuel took a circuitous route to avoid observation. His journey was marked throughout by a complete absence of state. Before he arrived, a trusty hand consigned to him a note written in haste and in much anguish by the Queen, in which she warned him to enter by night, as he was likely to have a very bad reception. On the 27th of March he reviewed the National Guard in the Piazza Castello on the occasion of its taking the oath of allegiance. The ceremony was attended by Queen Maria Adelaide in a carriage with her two little boys, the Princes Umberto and Amedeo. There was no hostile demonstration, but there was a most general and icy coldness.

That evening, the terms of the armistice were communicated to the Chamber. As was natural, they evoked the wildest indignation, a part of which fell undeservedly on the King. Twenty thousand Austrians were to occupy the district between the Po, Sesia and Ticino and half the citadel of Alessandria. The excitement rose to its height when it was announced that the Sardinian Fleet must be recalled from Venetian waters, depriving that struggling city of the last visible sign of support from without. The Chamber sent a deputation to the King, who succeeded in persuading its members that, hard though the terms were, there was no avoiding their acceptance, and that the original stipulations were harder still.

On the 29th, Victor Emmanuel took the oath to observe the Statute, to exercise the royal authority only in virtue of the laws, to cause justice to be fairly and fearlessly administered, and to conduct himself in all things with the sole view to the interest, honour and prosperity of the nation.

A trifling accident occurred which might have been far from trifling; one of the ornaments of the ceiling of the Palazzo Madama, where the Parliament a.s.sembled, fell close to the King. As it was of great weight, it would have killed anyone on whom it had fallen. 'Never mind that,' said the King in Piedmontese dialect to Colonel Menabrea, who was near him, 'it will not be the last!'

The ministry which held office under the late King resigned; a new one was formed, in which General Delaunay was President of the Council, and Gioberti minister without a portfolio. The King was advised to dissolve the Chamber, which had been elected as a war parliament, and was ill-const.i.tuted to perform the work now required.

General La Marmora had orders to quell the insurrection at Genoa, the motive of which was not nominally a change of government, but the continuance of the war at all costs. Its deeper cause lay in the old irreconcilability of republican Genoa with her Piedmontese masters, breaking out now afresh under the strain of patriotic disappointment.

Like the 15th of May at Naples, the Genoese revolution was a folly which can hardly be otherwise described than as a crime; it happened, however, that in Piedmont there was a King who had not the slightest intention of turning it into an excuse for a royal hark-back. Austria and France offered Victor Emmanuel their arms to put down the revolution, but, declining the not exactly disinterested attention, he made a wise choice in La Marmora, who accomplished the ungrateful task with expedition and humanity. An amnesty was granted to all but a very few partic.i.p.ators in the revolt. On the brief black list when it was submitted to the King was the name of the Marquis Lorenzo Pareto, who at one time had held the Foreign Office under Charles Albert. As Colonel of the Genoese National Guard, his responsibility in joining the insurrection was judged to be particularly heavy; but the King refused to confirm his exclusion from the amnesty. 'I would not have it said,' he objected, 'that I was harsh to one of my father's old ministers.'

The conception of Victor Emmanuel as a bluff, easy-going monarch is mistaken. Very few princes have had a keener sense of the royal dignity, or a more deeply-rooted family pride, or, when he thought fit to resort to it, a more decisive method of preventing people from taking liberties with him. But he knew that, in nearly all cases, pardon is the best of a king's prerogatives.

An instance to the point happened when he came to the throne. Two officers of the royal household had caused him annoyance while he was Duke of Savoy by telling tales of his unconventionality to his easily-scandalised father. To them, perhaps, he owed the condign punishment he had undergone for the famous promenade under the Porticoes. At anyrate, they had procured for the Duke many bad quarters-of-an-hour, but the King, when he became King, chose to be completely oblivious of their conduct, and they remained undisturbed at their posts. To those who pointed to King Leopold of the Belgians, or to any other foreign example of a loyal sovereign who understood the needs of his people as a model for Victor Emmanuel to imitate, he was in the habit of replying: 'I remember the history of my fathers, and it is enough.'

'The Persians,' says the Greek historian, 'taught their children to ride and to speak the truth.' In a land that had seen as much of enthroned effeminacy and mendacity as Italy had seen, a prince fond of manly exercise and observant of his word was more valuable than a heaven-sent genius, and more welcome than a calendar saint. Piedmont only could give such a prince to Italy. Its kings were not Spaniards who, by way of improvement, became lazzaroni, nor were they Austrians condemned by a fatal law to revert to their original type; they were children of the ice and snow, the fellow-countrymen of their subjects.

All their traditions told of obstinacy and hardihood. They brought their useful if scarcely amiable moral qualities from Maurienne in the eleventh century. The second Count of Savoy, known as Amadeus with the Tail, son of Humbert of the White Hands, founder of the House, went to the Holy Roman Emperor with such a body of retainers that the guards refused them entrance to the Council Chamber. 'Either I shall go in with my Tail or not at all,' said Humbert, and with his Tail he went in. This was the metal of the race. Even at the time when they were va.s.sals of the Empire, they expected to dictate rather than to obey.

They studiously married into all the great royal houses of Europe.

Though they persecuted their Vaudois subjects, who were only in 1848 rewarded by emanc.i.p.ation for centuries of unmerited sufferings and splendid fidelity, yet the Princes of Savoy had from the first, from the White-Handed Humbert himself, held their heads high in all transactions with the Holy See, between which and them there was an ever-returning antagonism. Not to the early part of the nineteenth century, when the rebound from revolutionary chaos did not suffice to denationalise the Kings of Sardinia, but sufficed to ally them with reaction, ought we to turn if we would seize the true bearings of the development of the Counts of Maurienne into Kings of Italy. At that moment the mission of Piedmont, though not lost, was obscured. What has rather to be contemplated is the historic tendency, viewed as a whole, of both reigning house and people. No one has pointed out that tendency more clearly than the anonymous author of a pamphlet ent.i.tled _Le Testament politique du Chevalier Walpole_ (published at Amsterdam in 1769), who was able to draw the horoscope of the House of Savoy with a correctness which seems almost startling. He was not helped by either sympathy or poetic imagination, but simply by political logic.

Sardinia, he said, was the best governed state in Europe. Instead of yielding to the indolent apathy in which other reigning families were sunk, its princes sought to improve its laws and develop its resources according to the wants of the population and the exigences of the climate. Finance, police, the administration of justice, military discipline, presented the picture of order. From the nature of the situation, a King of Sardinia must be ambitious, and to satisfy his ambition he had only to bide his time. Placed between two great Powers he could choose for his ally whichever would give him the most, and by playing this mute _role_, it was impossible that he would not hereafter be called upon to play one of the most important parts in Europe. Italy was the oyster disputed by Austria and France; might it not happen that the King of Sardinia, becoming judge and party, would devour the oyster and leave the sh.e.l.ls to the rival aspirants? It was unlikely, added this far-seeing observer, that the Italian populations should have got so innured to their chains as to prefer the harsh, vexatious government of Austria to the happy lot which Sardinian domination would secure to them, but even if they had become demoralised to this extent, they could not resist the providential advance of a temperate, robust and warlike nation like Piedmont, led by a prince as enlightened as the King (Charles Emmanuel) who then reigned over it.

The metaphor of the oyster recalls another, that of Italy being an artichoke which the House of Savoy was to devour, a leaf at a time.

Whether or not a Duke of Savoy really invented this often-quoted comparison, it is certain that power was what the rulers of Piedmont cared for. They were no more a race of scholars and art patrons than their people was a people of artists and poets. There is a story to the effect that one Duke of Savoy could never make out what poetry was, except that it was written in half lines, which caused a great waste of paper. The only poet born in Piedmont found the country unlivable. Recent research among the archives at Turin revealed facts which were thought to be not creditable to certain princely persons, and a gleaning was therefore made of doc.u.ments to which the historical student will no longer have access. The step was ill advised; what can doc.u.ments tell us on the subject that we do not know? Did anyone suppose that the Savoy princes were commonly saints? Sainthood has been the privilege of the women of the family, and they have kept it mostly to themselves. But peccable and rough though the members of this royal house may have been, very few of them were without the governing faculty. 'C'est bien le souverain le plus fin que j'ai connu en Europe,' said Thiers of Victor Emmanuel, whose acquaintance he made in 1870, and in whom he found an able politician instead of the common soldier he had expected. The remark might be extended back to all the race. They understood the business of kings. A word not unlike the 'Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento' of Virgil was breathed over the cradle at Maurienne. If it did not send forth sons to rule the world, its children were, at least, to be enthroned in the capital of the Caesars, and to make Italy one for the first time since Augustus.

From April to August 1849, the peace negotiations dragged on. The pretensions of Austria were still exorbitant, and she resisted the demand which Piedmont, weak and reduced though she was, did not fear to make, that she should amnesty her Italian subjects who had taken part in the revolution. Unequal to cope with the difficulties of the situation, the Delaunay ministry fell, and Ma.s.simo d'Azeglio was appointed President of the Council. This was a good augury for Piedmont; D'Azeglio's patriotism had received a seal in the wound which he carried away from the defence of Vicenza. Honour was safe in his hands, whatever were the sacrifices to which he might be obliged to consent.

Some pressure having been put on Austria by France and England, she agreed in July to evacuate Alessandria, and to reduce the war indemnity from 230,000,000 francs to 75,000,000, which Piedmont undertook to pay, onerous though the charge was in her deplorable financial condition. But the amnesty question was the last to be settled, and in this Piedmont stood alone. France and her. The Piedmontese special envoy at Milan, Count Pralormo, wrote to Prince Schwarzenberg on the 2nd of July that his Government could not give up this point. It was a conscientious duty so universally and strongly felt, that they were readier to submit to the consequences, whatever they might be, than to dishonour themselves by renouncing it. In other words, they were ready to face a new war, abandoned to their fate by all Europe, to undergo a new invasion, which meant the utter destruction of their country, rather than leave their Lombard and Venetian fellow-countrymen to the revenge of Austria. Count Pralormo added that he was speaking not only in the name of the ministry, but of the King and the whole nation. The risk was no imaginary one; there were many in Austria who desired an excuse for crushing the life out of the small state which was the eternal thorn in the side of that great Empire. Few remember now the sufferings of Piedmont for Italy, or the perils, only too real, which she braved again and again, not from selfish motives--for the Piedmontese of the old, narrow school, who said that their orderly little country had nothing to gain from being merged in a state of 25,000,000 were by no means in error--but from genuine Italian fellow-feeling for their less happy compatriots beyond their confines.

At last, when the armistice concluded on the morrow of Novara had been prolonged for five months, the treaty of peace was signed. Prince Schwarzenberg offered to further reduce the indemnity, 75,000,000 to 71,000,000, but D'Azeglio having agreed to the former figure, preferred to abide by his agreement. He thought, probably, that he would thus gain some concession as to the amnesty, and, in fact, Austria finally consented to pardon all but a small number of the persons compromised in the late events. D'Azeglio still stood out, but finding that there was no shadow of a chance of obtaining more than this, he reluctantly accepted it. The great ma.s.s, the hundred thousand and more fugitives who had left their homes in Lombardy and Venetia, were, at any rate, promised a safe return. The city of Venice, as yet undominated, though on the brink of her fall, was totally excluded.

The list of those whose banishment from Lombardy was confirmed, comprises the n.o.blest names in the province; with the exception of a few who were excluded from the amnesty on the score that, before the revolution, they were Austrian functionaries, nearly every unpardoned Lombard was n.o.ble: Casati, Arese, Borromeo, Litta, Greppi, Pallavicini, and the Princess Cristina Belgiojoso of Milan, the two Camozzis of Bergamo, and G. Martinengo Cesaresco of Brescia.

It must not be imagined that this amnesty ushered in a reign of oblivion and mildness. It seemed, rather, that Austria, afraid of the moral consequences of the return of so many unloving subjects, redoubled her severity. The day following the promulgation of the amnesty was the 18th of August, the Emperor of Austria's birthday. In the morning, placards dissuading the citizens from taking part in the official rejoicings were to be seen on the walls of Milan. The persons who put these up were not caught, but in the course of the day a crowd, consisting of all cla.s.ses, made what the official report called 'a scandalous and anti-politic demonstration,' raising revolutionary cries, and even saying uncomplimentary things of His Majesty, and worse still, of the Austrian soldiers. During this 'shameful scene,'

of which the above is the Austrian and hence the most highly-coloured description, the military arrested at hazard some of the crowd, who, by a 'superior order,' were condemned to the following pains and penalties:--

1. Angelo Negroni, of Padua, aged thirty, proprietor, forty strokes;

2. Carlo Bossi, watchmaker, aged twenty-two, forty strokes;

3. Paolo Lodi, of Monza, student, aged twenty-one, thirty strokes;

4. Giovanni Mazzuchetti, Milanese, barrister, aged twenty-four, thirty strokes;

5. Bonnetti, Milanese, lithographer, aged thirty-one, fifty strokes;

6. Moretti, Milanese, domestic servant, aged twenty-six, fifty strokes;

7. Cesana, artist, aged thirty-two, forty strokes;