1861-1864
Cavour’s Successors Aspromonte The
September Convention Garibaldi’s
Visit to England.
There were two possible successors
to Cavour, the Tuscan, Bettino Ricasoli, and Urban
Rattazzi, a Piedmontese barrister. The first
belonged to the right, the second to the left centre
in the Parliamentary combinations. Cavour had
no very close personal relations with either, but
he knew their characters. Rattazzi formerly held
ministerial office under him, and the long Tuscan crisis
of 1859, looked at, as he looked at it, from the inside,
gave him opportunities of judging the Iron Baron who
opposed even his own will on more than one occasion
in that great emergency. Ricasoli was rigid, frigid,
a frequenter of the straightest possible roads; Rattazzi,
supple, accommodating, with an incorrigible partiality
for umbrageous by-ways. He was already an ‘old
parliamentary hand,’ and in the future, through
a series of ministerial lapses, any one of which would
have condemned most men to seclusion, he preserved
his talent for manufacturing majorities and holding
his party together. Choosing between these two
candidates, Cavour before he died gave his preference
to Ricasoli, who was charged by the King with the
formation of a ministry in which he took the Treasury
and the Foreign Office.
Ricasoli was without ambition, and
he rather under than over-rated his abilities, but
he went to work with considerable confidence in his
power of setting everything right. A perfectly
open and honest statesman ought to be able, he imagined,
to solve the most difficult problems. Why not,
except that the world is not what it ought to be?
In home politics he offended the Party of Action by
telling them plainly that if they broke the law they
would have to pay the cost, and he offended his own
party by refusing to interfere with the right of meeting
or any other constitutional right of citizens, whether
they were followers of Mazzini or of anybody else,
as long as they kept within legal bounds. He wrote
an elaborate letter to Pius IX., in which he sought
to persuade the Pontiff of the sweet reasonableness
of renouncing claims which, for a very long spell,
had cast nothing but discredit on religion. Ricasoli’s
attitude towards the Temporal Power was unique in this
century. Like Dante’s, his hatred of it
was religious. He was a Catholic, not because
he had never thought or studied, but because, having
thought and studied, he assented, and from this standpoint
he ascribed most of the wounds of the Church to her
subordination of her spiritual mission to material
interests. He encouraged Padre Passaglia to collect
the signatures of priests for a petition praying the
Pope to cease opposing the desires of all Italy; 8943
names were affixed in a short time. The only
result of these transactions was that Cardinal Antonelli
remarked to the French Government that the Holy See
would never come to terms with robbers, and that,
although at war with the Turin Cabinet, ’the
Pope’s relations with Italy were excellent.’
More harmful to Ricasoli than the fulminations of
the Vatican was the veiled but determined hostility
of Napoleon III. Cavour succeeded in more or less
keeping the Emperor in ignorance of the degree to
which their long partnership resembled a duel.
He made him think that he was leading while he was
being led. With Ricasoli there could be no such
illusions. Napoleon understood him to be a man
whom he might break, not bend. He thought it
desirable to break him, and Imperial desires had many
channels, at that time, towards fulfilment.
The Ricasoli ministry fell in February
1862, and, as a matter of course, Rattazzi was called
to power. The new premier soon ingratiated himself
with the King, who found him easier to get on with
than the Florentine grand seigneur; with Garibaldi,
whom he persuaded that some great step in the national
redemption was on the eve of accomplishment; with
Napoleon, who divined in him an instrument. Meanwhile,
in his own mind, he proposed to eclipse Cavour, out-manoeuvre
all parties, and make his name immortal. This
remains the most probable, as it is the most lenient
interpretation to which his strange policy is open.
Garibaldi was encouraged to visit
the principal towns of North Italy in order to institute
the Tiro Nazionale or Rifle Association, which
was said to be meant to form the basis of a permanent
volunteer force on the English pattern. For many
reasons, such a scheme was not likely to succeed in
Italy, but most people supposed the object to be different namely,
the preparation of the youth of the nation for an
immediate war. The idea was strengthened when
it was observed that Trescorre, in the province of
Bergamo, where Garibaldi stopped to take a course
of sulphur baths, became the centre of a gathering
which included the greater part of his old Sicilian
staff. There was no concealment in what was done,
and the Government manifested no alarm. The air
was full of rumours, and in particular much was said
about a Garibaldian expedition to Greece, for which,
it was stated and re-stated, Rattazzi had promised
L40,000. That Garibaldi meant to cast his lot
in any struggle not bearing directly on Italian affairs,
as long as the questions of Rome and Venice still
hung in the balance, is not to be believed. A
little earlier than this date, President Lincoln invited
him to take the supreme command of the Federal army
in the war for the Union, and he declined the offer,
attractive though it must have been to him, both as
a soldier and an abhorrer of slavery, because he did
not think that Italy could spare him. But the
’Greek Expedition,’ though a misleading
name, was not altogether a blind. Before Cavour’s
death, there had been frequent discussion of a project
for revolutionising the east of Europe on a grand scale;
Hungary and the southern provinces of the Austrian
Empire were to co-operate with the Slavs and other
populations under Turkey in a movement which, even
if only partially successful, would go far to facilitate
the liberation of Venice. It cannot be doubted
that Rattazzi’s brain was at work on something
of this sort, but the mobilisation, so to speak, of
the Garibaldians suggested proceedings nearer home.
Trescorre was very far from the sea, very near the
Austrian frontier.
In spite of contradictions, a plan
for invading the Trentino, or South Tyrol, almost
certainly did exist. Whether Garibaldi was alone
answerable for it cannot be determined. The Government
became suddenly alive to the enormous peril such an
attack would involve, and arrested several of the
Garibaldian officers at Sarnico. They were conveyed
to Brescia, where a popular attempt was made to liberate
them; the troops fired on the crowd, and some blood
was shed. Garibaldi wrote an indignant protest
and retired, first to the villa of Signora Cairoli
at Belgirate, and then to Caprera. He did not,
however, remain there long.
After this point, the thread of events
becomes tangled beyond the hope of unravelment.
What were the causes which led Garibaldi into the
desperate venture that ended at Aspromonte? Recollecting
his hesitation before assuming the leadership of the
Sicilian expedition, it seemed the more unintelligible
that he should now undertake an enterprise which,
unless he could rely on the complicity of Government,
had not a single possibility of success. His own
old comrades were opposed to it, and it was notorious
that Mazzini, to whom the counsels of despair were
generally either rightly or wrongly attributed, had
nothing to do with inspiring this attempt. In
justice to Rattazzi, it must be allowed that, after
the arrests at Sarnico, Garibaldi went into open opposition
to the ministry, which he denounced as subservient
to Napoleon. Nevertheless, with the remembrance
of past circumstances in his mind, he may have felt
convinced that the Prime Minister did not mean or that
he would not dare to oppose him by force. One
thing is certain; from beginning to end he never contemplated
civil war. His disobedience to the King of Italy
had only one purpose to give him Rome.
He was no more a rebel to Victor Emmanuel than when
he marched through Sicily in 1860.
The earlier stages of the affair were
not calculated to weaken a belief in the effective
non-intervention of Government. Garibaldi went
to Palermo, where he arrived in the evening of the
28th of June. The young Princes Umberto and Amedeo
were on a visit to the Prefect, the Marquis Pallavicini,
and happened to be that night at the opera. All
at once they perceived the spectators leave the house
in a body, and they were left alone; on asking the
reason, they heard that Garibaldi had just landed all
were gone to greet him! Before the departure of
the Princes next day, the chief and his future King
had an affectionate meeting, while the population
renewed the scenes of wild enthusiasm of two years
ago. Some of Garibaldi’s intimate friends
assert that when he reached Palermo he had still no
intention of taking up arms. He soon began, however,
to speak in a warlike tone, and at a review of the
National Guard in presence of the Prefect, the Syndic,
and all the authorities, he told the ‘People
of the Vespers’ that if another Vespers were
wanted to do it, Napoleon III., head of the brigands,
must be ejected from Rome. The epithet was not
bestowed at random; Lord Palmerston confirmed it when
he said from his place in the House of Commons:
’In Rome there is a French garrison; under its
shelter there exists a committee of 200, whose practice
is to organise a band of murderers, the scum and dross
of every nation, and send them into the Neapolitan
territory to commit every atrocity!’ As a criticism
the words are not less strong; but the public defiance
of Napoleon, and the threat with which it was accompanied,
dictated one plain duty to the Italian Government
if they meant to keep the peace the arrest
of Garibaldi and his embarkation for Caprera.
This they did not do; confining themselves
to the recall of the Marquis Pallavicini. Garibaldi
went over the ground made glorious by his former exploits past
Calatafimi to Marsala. It was at Marsala that,
while he harangued his followers in a church, a voice
in the crowd raised a cry of ‘Rome or death!’
‘Yes; Rome or death!’ repeated Garibaldi;
and thus the watchword originated which will endure
written in blood on the Bitter Mount and on the Plain
of Nomentum. Who raised it first? Perhaps
some humble Sicilian fisherman. Its haunting
music coming he knew not whence, sounding in his ear
like an omen, was what wedded Garibaldi irrevocably
to the undertaking. It was the casting interposition
of chance, or, shall it be said, of Providence?
Like all men of his mould, Garibaldi was governed by
poetry, by romance. Besides the general patriotic
sentiment, he had a peculiar personal feeling about
Rome, ‘which for me,’ he once wrote, ‘is
Italy.’ In 1849, the Assembly in its last
moments invested him with plenary powers for the defence
of the Eternal City, and this vote, never revoked,
imposed on his imagination a permanent mandate.
‘Rome or death’ suggested an idea to him
which he had never before entertained, prodigal though
he had been of his person in a hundred fights:
What if his own death were the one thing needful to
precipitate the solution of the problem?
From Marsala he returned to Palermo,
where, in the broad light of day, he summoned the
Faithful, who came, as usual, at his bidding, without
asking why or where? the happy few who followed
him in 1859 and 1860; who would follow him in 1867,
and even in 1870, when they gave their lives for a
people that did not thank them, because he willed it
so. He sent out also a call to the Sicilian Picciotti,
the Squadre of last year; and it is much to
their credit that they too who cared possibly remarkably
little for Roma Capitale, obeyed the man who
had freed them. And Rattazzi knew of all this,
and did nothing.
On the 1st of August, Garibaldi took
command of 3000 volunteers in the woods of Ficuzza.
Then, indeed, the Government wasted much paper on
proclamations, and closed the door of the stable when
the horse was gone. General Cugia was sent to
Palermo to repress the movement. Nevertheless
Garibaldi, with his constantly increasing band, made
a triumphant progress across the island, and a more
than royal entry into Catania. At Mezzojuso he
was present at a Te Deum chanted in his honour.
On the 22nd, when the royal troops were, it seems,
really ordered to march on Catania, Garibaldi took
possession of a couple of merchant vessels that had
just reached the port, and sailed away by night for
the Calabrian coast with about 1000 of his men.
By this time the Italian Government,
whether by spontaneous conviction or by pressure from
without, had resolved that the band should never get
as far as the Papal frontier. If Garibaldi knew
or realised their resolution, it is a mystery why
he did not attempt to effect a landing nearer that
frontier, if not actually within it. The deserted
shore of the Pontine marshes would, one would think,
have offered attractions to men who were as little
afraid of fever as of bullets. A sort of superstition
may have ruled the choice of the path, which was that
which led to victory in 1860. It was not practicable,
however, to follow it exactly. The tactics were
different. Then the desire was to meet the enemy
anywhere and everywhere; now the pursuer had to be
eluded, because Garibaldi was determined not to fight
him. Thus, instead of marching straight on Reggio,
the volunteers sought concealment in the great mountain
mass which forms the southernmost bulwark of the Apennines.
The dense and trackless forests could have given cover
for a long while to a native brigand troop, with intimate
knowledge of the country and ways and means of obtaining
provisions not to a band like this of Garibaldi.
They wandered about for three days, suffering from
almost total want of food, and from the great fatigue
of climbing the dried-up watercourses which serve as
paths. On the 28th of August they reached the
heights of Aspromonte a strong position,
from which only a large force could have dislodged
them had they defended it.
General La Marmora, then Prefect of
Naples, and commander-in-chief of the army in the
south, reinforced the troops in Calabria to prevent
Garibaldi’s advance, but the direction of the
decisive operation fell by accident to Cialdini, whom
the Government despatched to Sicily when they tardily
made up their minds to take energetic measures.
On his voyage to Messina, Cialdini heard that the
volunteers had already crossed the Straits; he therefore
changed his course, and hastening to Reggio, invested
himself with the command on the mainland. At Reggio
he met Colonel Pallavicini, whom he ordered in terms
that might have been more suitable had he been engaged
in hunting brigands, ’to crush Garibaldi completely,
and only accept from him unconditional surrender.’
Pallavicini started with six or seven battalions of
Bersaglieri. It was the 29th of August. Garibaldi
saw them coming when they were still three miles off.
He could have dispersed his men in the forest and
himself escaped, for the time, and perhaps altogether,
for the sea which had so often befriended him was not
far off. But although he did not mean to resist,
a dogged instinct drove away the thought of flight.
In the official account it was stated that an officer
was sent in advance of the royal troops to demand surrender.
No such officer was seen in the Garibaldian encampment
till after the attack. The troops rapidly ascended
an eminence, facing that on which the Garibaldians
were posted, and opened a violent fusillade, which,
to Garibaldi’s dismay, was returned for a few
minutes by his right, consisting of young Sicilians
who were not sufficiently disciplined to stand being
made targets of without replying. The contention,
however, that they were the first to fire, has the
testimony of every eye-witness on the side of the
volunteers against it. All the Garibaldian bugles
sounded ‘Cease firing,’ and Garibaldi walked
down in front of the ranks conjuring the men to obey.
While he was thus employed, a spent ball struck his
thigh, and a bullet entered his right foot. At
first he remained standing, and repeated, ’Do
not fire,’ but he was obliged to sit down, and
some of his officers carried him under a tree.
The whole ‘feat of arms,’ as General Cialdini
described it, did not last more than a quarter of an
hour.
Pallavicini approached the wounded
hero bareheaded, and said that he made his acquaintance
on the most unfortunate day of his own life. He
was received with nothing but kind praise for doing
his duty. The first night was passed by the prisoner
in a shepherd’s hut. The few devoted followers
who were with him were strangely impressed by that
midnight watch; the moon shining on the forest, the
shepherds’ dogs howling in the mountain silence,
and their chief lying wounded, it might be to death,
in the name of the King to whom he had given this
land.
Next day, in a litter sheltered from
the sun with branches of wild laurel, Garibaldi was
carried down the steep rocks to Scilla, whence he
was conveyed by sea to the fort of Varignano.
It was not till after months of acute suffering, borne
with a gentleness that made the doctors say:
‘This man is not a soldier, but a saint,’
that, through the skill of the French surgeon, Nelaton,
the position of the ball was determined, and its extraction
rendered possible.
A general amnesty issued on the occasion
of the marriage of the King’s second daughter
with the King of Portugal relieved the Government of
having to decide whether Garibaldi was to be tried,
and if so, what for; but the unpopularity into which
the ministry had fallen could not be so easily dissipated.
The Minister of Foreign Affairs (Durando) published
a note in which it was stated that Garibaldi had only
attempted to realise, in an irregular way, the desire
of the whole nation, and that, although he had been
checked, the tension of the situation was such that
it could not be indefinitely prolonged. This
was true, but it hardly improved the case for the Government.
In Latin countries, ministers do not cling to power;
as soon as the wind blows against them, they resign
to give the public time to forget their faults, and
to become dissatisfied with their political rivals.
Usually a very short time is required. Therefore,
forestalling a vote of censure in the Chambers, where
he had never yet had a real majority, Rattazzi resigned
office with a parting homily in which he claimed to
have saved the national institutions.
The administration which followed
contained the well-known names of Farini, Minghetti,
Pasolini, Peruzzi, Delia Rovere, Menabrea. When
Farini’s fatal illness set in, Minghetti replaced
him as Prime Minister, and Visconti Venosta took the
Foreign Office. They found the country in a lamentable
state, embittered by Aspromonte, still infected with
brigandage, and suffering from an increasing deficit,
coupled with a diminishing revenue. The administrative
and financial unification of Italy, still far from
complete, presented the gravest difficulties.
The political aspect of affairs, and especially the
presence of the French in Rome, provoked a general
sense of instability which was contrary to the organisation
of the new state and the development of its resources.
The ministers sought remedies or palliatives for these
several evils, and to meet the last they opened negotiations
with France, which resulted in the compromise known
as the September Convention. It was long before
the treaty was concluded, as for more than a year
the French Government refused to remove the garrison
on any terms; but in the autumn of 1864 the following
arrangement was signed by both parties: that Italy
should protect the Papal frontier from all attack
from the outside; that France should gradually withdraw
her troops, the complete evacuation to take place
within two years; that Italy should waive the right
of protest against the internal organisation of the
Papal army unless its proportions became such as to
be a manifest threat to the Italian kingdom; that
the Italian capital should be moved to Florence within
six months of the approval of the Convention by Parliament.
These terms were in part the same
as those proposed by Prince Napoleon to Cavour shortly
before the death of that statesman, who had promised
to support them as a temporary makeshift, and in order
to get the French out of Italy. But they were
in part different, and they contained two new provisions
which it is morally certain that Cavour would never
have agreed to the prolongation of the French
occupation for two years (Cavour had insisted that
it should cease in a fortnight), and the transfer
of the capital, which was now made a sine qua non
by Napoleon, for evident reasons. While it was
clear that Turin could not be the permanent capital
of a kingdom that stretched to AEtna, if once the
seat of government were removed to Florence a thousand
arguments and interests would spring up in favour
of keeping it there. So, at least, it was sure
to seem to a foreigner. As a matter of fact,
the solution was no solution; the Italians could not
be reconciled to the loss of Rome either by the beauty
and historic splendour of the city on the Arno, or
by its immunity from malaria, which was then feared
as a serious drawback, though Rome has become, under
its present rulers, the healthiest capital in Europe.
But Napoleon thought that he was playing a trump card
when he dictated the sacrifice of Turin.
The patriotic Turinese were unprepared
for the blow. They had been told again and again
that till the seat of government was established on
the Tiber, it should abide under the shadow of the
Alps white guardian angels of Italy in
the custody of the hardy population which had shown
itself so well worthy of the trust. The ministry
foresaw the effect which the convention would have
on the minds of the Turinese, and they resorted to
the weak subterfuge of keeping its terms secret as
long as they could. Rumours, however, leaked out,
and these, as usual, exaggerated the evil. It
was said that Rome was categorically abandoned.
On the 20th of September crowds began to fill the streets,
crying: ‘Rome or Turin!’ and on the
two following days there were encounters between the
populace and the military, in which the latter resorted
to unnecessary and almost provocative violence.
Amidst the chorus of censure aroused by these events,
the Minghetti cabinet resigned, and General La Marmora,
who, as a Piedmontese, was fitted to soothe the excited
feelings of his fellow-citizens, was called upon to
form a ministry.
The change of capital received the
sanction of Parliament on the 19th of November.
Outside Piedmont it was not unpopular; people felt
that, after all, it rested with themselves to make
Florence no final halting-place, but a step towards
Rome. The Papal Government, which had been a
stranger to the late negotiations, expressed a supreme
indifference to the whole affair, even to the contemplated
departure of the French troops, ’which concerned
the Imperial Government, not the Pope,’ said
Cardinal Antonelli, ’since the occupation had
been determined by French interests.’ It
cannot be asserted that the Pope ever assumed a gratitude
which he did not feel towards the monarch who kept
him on his throne for twenty years.
This year, 1864, was marked by an
incident which, though not a political event, should
never be forgotten in the history of Italian liberation Garibaldis visit to
England. He came, the prisoner of Aspromonte, not the conqueror of Sicily:
a distinction that might have made a difference elsewhere, but the English
sometimes worship misfortune as other peoples worship success. No
sovereign from oversea was ever received by them as they received the Italian
hero; a reception showing the sympathies of a century rather than the caprice or
curiosity of an hour. Half a million throats shouted Londons welcome; the
soldier of two worlds knew the roar of battle, and the roar of the sea was
familiar to the Nizzard sailor, but it is said that when Garibaldi heard the
stupendous and almost awful British roar which greeted him as he came out of the
Nine Elms station, and took his seat in the carriage that was to convey him to
Stafford House, he looked completely disconcerted. From the heir to the
throne to the crossing-sweeper, all combined to do him honour; where Garibaldi
was not, through the breadth of the land the very poor bought his portrait and
pasted it on their whitewashed cottage walls. London made him its citizen.
The greatest living English poet invited him to plant a tree in his garden:
a memory he recalled nearly at the close of his own honoured life:
Or watch the waving pine which here
The warrior of Caprera set,
A name that earth shall not
forget
Till earth has rolled her latest year.
Garibaldi showed himself mindful of
old friends; at the opera he recognised Admiral Mundy
in a box, and immediately rose and went to offer him
his respects. At Portsmouth, he not only went
to see the mother of Signora White-Mario (the providence
of his wounded in many a campaign), but also paid
an unrecorded visit to two maiden sisters in humble
circumstances, who had shown him kindness when he was
an exile in England; they related ever afterwards
the sensation caused by his appearance in their narrow
courtyard, where it was difficult to turn the big
carriage which the authorities had placed at his disposal.
He twice met the great Italian whom he addressed as
Master: transferring, as it were, to Mazzini’s
brows the crown of glory that surrounded his own.
Another exile, Louis Blanc, used to tell how, when
he went to call on Garibaldi, he found him seated
on a sofa, receiving the homage of the fairest and
most illustrious members of the English aristocracy;
when the Friend of the People was announced (a title
deserved by Louis Blanc, if not for his possibly fallacious
theories, still for the rare sincerity of his life),
the hero started to his feet and most earnestly begged
him to sit beside him. ’Which I could not
do!’ the narrator of the scene would add with
a look of comical alarm for his threatened modesty.
These friendly passages with the proscripts
in London, as well as the stirring appeal spoken by
Garibaldi on behalf of the Poles, did not please foreign
Powers. The Austrian ambassador shut himself up
in his house; it was remarked that the only members
of the diplomatic body who were seen at the Garibaldi
fêtes were the representatives of the United
States and of the Sublime Porte. The Emperor Napoleon
was said to be angry. Lord Palmerston assured
the House of Commons that no remonstrance had been
received from France or from any foreign government,
and that if it had been received, it would not have
been heeded. Yet the English Government took
the course of hinting to the guest of England that
his visit had lasted long enough. In some quarters
it was reported that they feared disturbances among
the Irish operatives in the manufacturing towns, had
he gone, as he intended, to the north. Whatever
were the motives that inspired it, their action in
the matter cannot be remembered with complacency, but
it was powerless to undo the significance of the great
current of enthusiasm which had passed through the
English land.