Prisoner of the Vatican

The Popes, the Kings, and Garibaldi's Rebels in the Struggle to Rule Modern Italy

David I. Kertzer

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9780547347165
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Italian History
• Index: History

A Pulitzer Prize winner's "fascinating" account of the political battles that led to the end of the Papal States ( Entertainment Weekly ). From a National Book Award–nominated author, this absorbing history chronicles the birth of modern Italy and the clandestine politics behind the Vatican's last stand in the battle between the church and the newly created Italian state. When Italy's armies seized the Holy City and claimed it for the Italian capital, Pope Pius IX, outraged, retreated to the Vatican and declared himself a prisoner, calling on foreign powers to force the Italians out of Rome. The action set in motion decades of political intrigue that hinged on such fascinating characters as Garibaldi, King Viktor Emmanuel, Napoleon III, and Chancellor Bismarck. Drawing on a wealth of secret documents long buried in the Vatican archives, David I. Kertzer reveals a fascinating story of outrageous accusations, mutual denunciations, and secret dealings that will leave readers hard-pressed to ever think of Italy, or the Vatican, in the same way again. "A rousing tale of clerical skullduggery and topsy-turvy politics, laced with plenty of cross-border intrigue." — Kirkus Reviews, starred review

1. Destroying the Papal States

PIUS IX had not always been such a bitter enemy of progress, of things modern. When he ascended to St. Peter's throne in 1846, among his first acts was the introduction of gas streetlights and railways to the Papal States, an implicit rebuke to his predecessor, Gregory XVI, who had viewed them as dangerous departures from the way God meant things to be. The new pope also won popular favor in these first months by freeing political prisoners and calling for the reform of the Papal States' notoriously corrupt and inefficient bureaucracy.

But, caught up in the intoxicating spirit of revolt that swept Europe with shocking speed in 1848, people soon wanted—no, demanded—more, much more. In April of that year, Pius rejected pleas that he support efforts to drive the Austrians out of the Italian peninsula. In November, amid increasing disorder, calls for a constitution, and demands for an end to the papal dictatorship, his prime minister was stabbed to death in the middle of Rome in broad daylight.

Fearing for his life and by then practically a prisoner in his Quirinal Palace in central Rome, the pope decided to escape. Dressed as a simple priest, his face partially concealed by tinted glasses, he furtively boarded the carriage of the Bavarian ambassador and, with his help, made his way south to the seaside fortress of Gaeta, north of Naples in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.

The pope's earthly realm was slipping from his grasp as revolts from Bologna to Rome drove out the cardinal legates and ushered in local governing committees that proudly proclaimed the end of papal rule. In Rome, a Constituent Assembly elected by popular vote in January 1849 put power in the hands of a triumvirate that would soon include Giuseppe Mazzini, Italy's great theorist of nationalism, who was living in exile in London. Article 1 of the constitution of the new Roman Republic pronounced the pope's temporal power forever ended. The people were now free to say, think, write, and act as they liked; the Inquisition was no more. The Jews were freed from their ghettoes, and even Protestants could worship freely. From then on, the government was to be elected by the people.

The new Utopia did not last long before the French and Austrian troops marched in and restored the pope to power. Any sympathies that Pius had previously felt for offering more civil liberties or a measure of democracy were now gone. As he saw it, God had intended the pope to rule over the Papal States and, indeed, only by having such temporal power could the pontiff enjoy the freedom that he needed to perform his spiritual duties. The Inquisition was restored, as was the Index of prohibited books; the Jews were forced back into their ghettoes; all newspapers and books were again heavily censored. French troops patrolled the streets of Rome, propping up papal rule.

The Kingdom of Sardinia quickly emerged as the best hope for those who sought change. Despite its name, the kingdom's capital was Turin, in the northwestern region of Piedmont, and included the neighboring region of Liguria as well as the kingdom's namesake, the island of Sardinia. Under the Savoyard dynasty it alone had preserved the reforms introduced in 1848, which had turned an authoritarian state into a constitutional, parliamentary monarchy. Church control of schools was ended, freedom of religion proclaimed, and the Jesuit order, viewed as the subversive agent of papal power abroad, banished.

By midcentury, most of the educated classes of central and northern Italy had become alienated from the Church—or at least from its center of power in Rome—and were hostile to the continued presence of foreign troops in the peninsula. Resentment in Lombardy and Veneto to the Austrians' rule kept tensions high, as did their troops, who patrolled much of the Papal States, and the French soldiers who guarded Rome.

The king of Sardinia, Victor Emmanuel II, whose penchant for military adventure—and incompetence—was notorious, began to glimpse his chance for greatness. What could be more glorious than putting himself at the head of an army that would conquer much of Italy and, in so doing, not only dramatically enlarge his realm but cast him as a great Italian patriot? Yet his advisers, Prime Minister Count Camillo Cavour chief among them, urged caution. To take on both the French and the Austrians would, he knew, be suicidal.

The king's big chance came in July 1858, when Napoleon III met secretly with Cavour in France and hatched a plan to drive the Austrians—their common enemy—from the Italian peninsula. The plan also involved removing three-quarters of the Papal States from the pope's control, leaving only Rome and the region around it for the pontiff, under French protection, a measure designed in part to placate French Catholic opinion. There was no discussion at the time of attacking the Kingdom of Naples in the South nor of unifying all of Italy under a single government. In fact, Napoleon III seems to have envisioned some kind of loose confederation of weak states taking shape in Italy, possibly under the titular presidency of the pope himself. This would have the virtue of weakening his chief rival, Austria, and creating an ally to his south in the Kingdom of Sardinia while ensuring that the fractionated Italian peninsula would never produce a state strong enough to compete with the French for European influence.

War broke out near the Piedmontese border with Lombardy in May 1859 and quickly spread to the Papal States as Italian nationalists fueled revolts that again sent the cardinal legates packing. Plebiscites demanding unification with the Kingdom of Sardinia quickly followed. Meanwhile, responding to a plea from the Sicilian proponents of unification, Garibaldi assembled a force of a thousand volunteers—wearing open-collared red shirts in place of regular uniforms—and set sail. Landing near Palermo in May 1860, these poorly trained irregulars dispatched the Bourbon army with embarrassing ease, so, after conquering Sicily, they headed north, up the Italian boot, on their way to Rome.

Alarmed yet excited, Victor Emmanuel II could no longer merely stand by. To do nothing while Garibaldi's red shirts, in the name of unifying Italy, marched into the Holy City would court disaster. Should Garibaldi succeed in taking Rome, he would put Victor Emmanuel to shame. In place of a large northern Italian state under the Savoyard monarchy, the frightening specter of all Italy unified under a revolutionary republic became all too real. And so the king sent his army south, intercepting Garibaldi north of Naples before he could attack

Rome. There, a curious military ceremony took place, with Garibaldi handing over control of the newly fallen Kingdom of Naples to the Savoyard king. Rome—at least for the moment—remained in papal hands.

A year later, the new Kingdom of Italy was officially inaugurated. Technically, it was simply the continuation of the old Kingdom of Sardinia, so no new constitution was thought necessary. Although the Italian state was much larger than the king or his ministers had imagined three years earlier, when they had hatched their plot with the French emperor, two big holes remained. Rome and the region around it were still in the pope's hands and, in the Northeast, Veneto and its capital, Venice, were still under Austrian control.

Faced with the demise of most of his earthly domain, Pius IX struck back as best he could. Rebuffing Victor Emmanuel's attempts to negotiate, the pope, in an encyclical in January 1860, demanded the "pure and simple restitution" of the Papal States, excommunicated all those guilty of usurping the papal lands, and voiced his belief that God would not long allow the outrage to stand. The days of a unified Italian state, he was sure, were numbered.¹

Yet the unification of Italy under the Savoyard king left many of Italy's most ardent nationalists unhappy. Mazzini, a principled opponent of monarchy and a committed republican, had been willing to hold his nose during the battle against the Austrians because he believed that the first priority should be driving the foreigners out of the peninsula. But the situation had changed. His already dim view of the monarchy got even dimmer when it became clear that the new government had no immediate plan to take Rome. For the nationalists, an Italian state without Rome as its capital was inconceivable.

In 1862 Garibaldi, the peripatetic Hero of Two Worlds—so called because of his exploits in South America—again tried to force the king's hand by summoning his motley army of red shirts for a march on Rome. Gathering his forces in Sicily, the scene of his triumphs two years earlier, he prepared for the march north into the Holy City, leaving the Savoyard king and his ministers in a painful quandary. They could hardly allow a private army to march across the country, nor were they prepared to turn against the French, whose troops were guarding the pope. Yet, realizing that Garibaldi was far more popular than anyone in the government—more popular than the king himself—they feared sending the army against him.

After much hand-wringing, the Italian leaders decided that they had no choice. Garibaldi had to be stopped. A contingent of Italian troops caught up with the red shirts at the edge of a mountain forest in southern Calabria, at Aspromonte. Thinking that the approaching Italian colonel had come to talk, Garibaldi told his men not to shoot. But the Italian troops opened fire. In the resulting carnage, a bullet shattered Garibaldi's foot, a wound that plagued him for the rest of his life. Some of his red shirts were killed, others injured, and not a few were seized and then summarily executed, charged with having deserted the regular army.

Aspromonte sent shock waves through the peninsula. Italy's greatest hero had been shot and crippled by the Italian army, acting on the king's orders, and all because he had had the courage to risk his life in an effort to claim Rome for Italy.

Meanwhile, in the Holy City, the pope tried hard to buck up his supporters' sagging spirits. In February 1864, Odo Russell, Britain's perceptive—if sometimes acerbic—envoy to Rome, reported that Pius was eager for the upcoming Carnival celebrations to be as successful as ever. The partisans of Italian unification responded by calling for a boycott. The Italianissimi, Russell wrote, "won't attend the Carnival and won't dance, whilst the Papalini or neri ["blacks"; the Roman aristocrats devoted to the pope were called the black nobility] dance frantically to show their devotion to the Pope because His Holiness told some old princesses that he wished the faithful to be gay and happy. In consequence we saw this winter at the balls given by the pious Papalini the oldest dowagers attempting to be frolicsome, and old Princess Borghese, who has scarcely been able to walk for the last half century, hobbled through a quadrille with Field Marshal Duke Saldanha who had not danced since the Congress of Vienna, and all this in the name of religion!"²

Desperate to get the French troops out of Rome—their presence in the middle of the peninsula an affront to Italian nationalist sentiment—the Italian government came up with a proposal that it hoped would take care of the problem, at least in the short run. The resulting agreement, signed on September 15, 1864, and subsequently dubbed the Convention of September, called for all the French troops to leave Rome within two years. In exchange, the Italian government made two major concessions. It agreed to transfer its capital from Turin to Florence—a move that in fact did take place the following year—thus apparently renouncing the nationalist dream of making Rome Italy's capital. ³ And it promised not only not to attack papal territory, but to prevent anyone else from threatening it. Napoleon III insisted on this pledge, for he had to convince the conservative French Catholics that, in withdrawing the French troops, he was not abandoning the pope.

The Italian government and the king clearly made the agreement in bad faith. If they could get the French troops out of Rome, they thought, they would eventually find some pretext to annex it.⁴

In all matters involving relations with other states, the pope relied heavily on his secretary of state, the powerful and controversial Giacomo Antonelli. Something of a lady's man despite being rather ugly, Antonelli was as arrogant and severe with his underlings as he was solicitous and charming with foreign diplomats and aristocratic visitors. One of Pius's biographers, Adolph Mundt, described him in typically unflattering terms: "Antonelli is a tall, thin man who wears on his dark, yellowish face, a savage expression but one that is, at the same time, demonically astute. His long head resting on his shoulders brings to mind that of a bird of prey." Antonelli's biographer, the American Frank Coppa, while painting a much more positive picture, stresses his lack of friends, his relentless self-control, and his insistence on formality, having even his parents and brothers address him as "Monsignor" and preferring them to refer to him as "His Eminence."⁵

Returning from a trip to London just after the Convention of September was signed, Odo Russell was surprised to find that Antonelli and others of the Curia remained optimistic about the future. The cardinals, wrote the British envoy, "laugh in anybody's face who mentions the departure of the French troops from Rome." When Russell reminded the prelates that they had, a few years earlier, been similarly convinced that the Austrians would never leave Lombardy, nor that Victor Emmanuel would ever dare seize any of the Papal States, they stood their ground. Napoleon III, they insisted, could never leave the pope "in a helpless condition to the Piedmontese and the tender mercies of his subjects, the Catholics of France and of the whole world will not stand it."⁶

Antonelli, it turned out, had some reason for his optimism, as Russell discovered a week later when he again met the secretary of state. As was often his custom, Antonelli took the British envoy by his arm for a walk as they chatted. The French emperor, Antonelli told him, had recently conveyed a message through the papal nuncio in Paris.

"Tell the Pope," Napoleon had said, "to be calm, to trust in me and to judge me by my deeds and not by my words."

From this conversation and from other sources in Paris, Antonelli assured Russell, "it has become evident that the Convention of 15 September has several meanings, one put upon it at Turin and the other at Paris publicly and officially, whilst a third interpretation, and the only correct one, exists in the Emperor Napoleon's mind. Much as I have thought about it, I know not what His Majesty's ultimate plans may be.... But one thing becomes clearer than it ever was before to my mind, namely that he does not intend Italy to unite."

Russell remained skeptical. Was it really the French emperor's intention to see the new Italian state dismantled?

Antonelli tried to explain: "First of all the Convention contains in itself the destruction of the unity of Italy, for it reserves the Temporal Power to the Pope and deprives Italy of Rome, and Italy can never be a united nation without Rome. Secondly, the Convention declares Florence to be the future capital of Italy, that is, it forms the great political center of Italy in the north. Now the North did not require any other capital than Turin while it waited for Rome. The danger to unity is in the south."⁷ Had Naples been declared the capital, Antonelli explained, the South might have been placated. But by making Florence the new capital, he argued, "the Convention leaves the South free to fall off, separate and constitute a southern Kingdom." Clearly, said Antonelli, "Napoleon imposed Florence on the Italians as their capital so that Naples might be free to act for herself and Italy become a Confederation divided into three, namely a northern and southern Kingdom and the Holy See in the center." To make the plan palatable to Victor Emmanuel, Antonelli added, Napoleon was willing to allow a Savoyard prince, perhaps even one of the king's own sons, to become king of Naples.

Antonelli then surveyed the hazards ahead. Napoleon's true intentions, he admitted, could not fully be known. But whatever Napoleon had in mind, the pope would pursue the same path, for he could follow no other. He would denounce those who sought to take the papal lands from him, and he would insist on the return of the Papal States.

"In the coming struggle, we may be beaten and submerged," said Antonelli. "I am the first to admit that it is possible, nay, I will say even probable, but we will do our duty towards the Holy Church like honest men knowing that when God in his mercy allows these trials to pass His Church will rise again as she has ever done before and her enemies will be dispersed and confounded."

On his way home, Russell ran into Prince Altomonte, a former minister in the court of the deposed king of Naples. Asking the prince what he thought of the new Italian treaty with France, Russell was surprised to hear him parrot Antonelli's view. Napoleon did not want Italy to unite, he said, and the Convention, by securing the pope's temporal rule over Rome and imposing Florence, the capital of northern Italy, on the Italians, had left Naples free to secede as long as its Bourbon throne was occupied by a prince of the House of Savoy."⁸

Such optimism sprang from another source as well, for tensions in Europe were high, pitting Prussia against Austria and both against France. The one thing that all of these antagonists shared was an opposition to the rise of a strong, united Italy that could compete with them for influence. War seemed imminent, and for those in the Vatican there was reason to believe—or, at least, to hope—that the belligerents would see to it that the Italian kingdom was soon cut down to size.

In mid-January 1865, Antonelli discussed just such a prospect in a conversation with the British envoy. "Like the Pope," Russell reported in his...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Front
• 1. Destroying the Papal States
• 2. The Pope Becomes Infallible
• 3. The Last Days of Papal Rome
• 4. Conquering the Holy City
• 5. The Leonine City
• 6. The Reluctant King
• 7. Pius IX in Exile Again?
• 8. The Papal Martyr
• 9. Anticlericalism in Rome
• 10. Two Deaths
• 11. Picking a New Pope
• 12. Keeping the Bishops in Line
• 13. The Pope's Body
• 14. Rumors of a French Conspiracy
• 15. Preparing for Exile
• 16. Hopes Dashed
• 17. The Bishops' Lament
• 18. Fears of a European War
• 19. Giordano Bruno's Revenge
• 20. The Pope's Secret Plan
• Epilogue: Italy and the Pope
• Back