The Liberation of Italy, 1815-1870

CHAPTER I. Resurgam

RESURGAM

Italy from the Battle of Lodi to the Congress of Vienna.

The unity of Italy, which the statesmen of Europe and all save a small number of the Italians themselves still regarded as an utopia when it was on the verge of accomplishment, was, nevertheless, desired and foreseen by the two greatest intellects produced by the Italian race. Dante conceived an Italy united under the Empire, which returning from a shameful because self-imposed exile would assume its natural seat in Rome. To him it was a point of secondary interest that the Imperial Lord happened to be bred beyond the Alps, that he was of Teutonic, not of Latin blood. If the Emperor brought the talisman of his authority to the banks of the Tiber, Italy would overcome the factions which rent her, and would not only rule herself, but lead mankind. Vast as the vision was, Dante cannot be called presumptuous for having entertained it. The Rome of the Cæsars, the Rome of the Popes, had each transformed the world: Italy was transforming it for a third time at that moment by the spiritual awakening which, beginning with the Renaissance, led by inevitable steps to the Reformation. The great Florentine poet had the right to dream that his country was invested with a providential mission, that his people was a chosen people, which, by its own fault and by the fault of others, had lost its way, but would find it again. Such was Dante's so-called Ghibelline programme--less Ghibelline than intensely and magnificently Italian. His was a mind too mighty to be caged within the limits of partisan ambitions. The same may be said of Machiavelli. He also imagined, or rather discerned in the future, a regenerate Italy under a single head, and this, not the advancement of any particular man, was the grand event he endeavoured to hasten. With the impatience of a heart consumed by the single passion of patriotism, he conjured his fellow-countrymen to seize the first chance that presented itself, promising or unpromising, of reaching the goal. The concluding passage in the Principe was meant as an exhortation; it reads as a prophecy. 'We ought not therefore,' writes Machiavelli, 'to let this occasion pass whereby, after so long waiting, Italy may behold the coming of a saviour. Nor can I express with what love he would be received in all those provinces which have suffered from the foreign inundations; with what thirst of vengeance, with what obstinate faith, with what worship, with what tears! What doors would be closed against him? What people would deny him obedience? What jealousy would oppose him? What Italian would not do him honour? The barbarous dominion of the stranger stinks in the nostrils of all.'

Another man of genius, an Italian whom a fortuitous circumstance made the citizen and the master of a country not his own, grasped both the vital necessity of unity from an Italian point of view, and the certainty of its ultimate achievement. Napoleon's notes on the subject, written at St Helena, sum up the whole question without rhetoric but with unanswerable logic:--'Italy is surrounded by the Alps and the sea. Her natural limits are defined with as much exactitude as if she were an island. Italy is only united to the Continent by 150 leagues of frontier, and these 150 leagues are fortified by the highest barrier that can be opposed to man. Italy, isolated between her natural limits, is destined to form a great and powerful nation. Italy is one nation; unity of customs, language and literature must, within a period more or less distant, unite her inhabitants under one sole government. And Rome will, without the slightest doubt, be chosen by the Italians as their capital.'

Unlike Dante and Machiavelli, who could only sow the seed, not gather the fruit, the man who wrote these lines might have made them a reality. Had Napoleon wished to unite Italy--had he had the greatness of mind to proclaim Rome the capital of a free and independent state instead of turning it into the chief town of a French department--there was a time when he could plainly have done it. Whether redemption too easily won would have proved a gain or a loss in the long run to the populations welded together, not after their own long and laborious efforts, but by the sudden exercise of the will of a conqueror, is, of course, a different matter. The experiment was not tried. Napoleon, whom the simple splendour of such a scheme ought to have fascinated, did a very poor thing instead of a very great one: he divided Italy among his relations, keeping the lion's share for himself.

Napoleon's policy in Italy was permanently compromised by the abominable sale of Venice, with her two thousand years of freedom, to the empire which, as no one knew better than he did, was the pivot of European despotism. After that transaction he could never again come before the Italians with clean hands; they might for a season make him their idol, carried away by the intoxication of his fame; they could never trust him in their inmost conscience. The ruinous consequences of the Treaty of Campo Formio only; ceased in 1866. The Venetians have been severely blamed, most of all by Italian historians, for making Campo Formio possible by opening the door to the French six months before. Napoleon could not have bartered away Venice if it had not belonged to him. The reason that it belonged to him was that, on the 12th of May 1797, the Grand Council committed political suicide by dissolving the old aristocratic form of government, in compliance with a mere rumour, conveyed to them through the ignoble medium of a petty shopkeeper, that such was the wish of General Buonaparte. In extenuation of their fatal supineness, it may be urged that they felt the inherent weakness of an oligarchy out of date; and in the second place, that the victor of Lodi, the deliverer of Lombardy, then in the first flush of his scarcely tarnished glory, was a dazzling figure, calculated indeed to turn men's heads. But, after all, the only really valid excuse for them would have been that Venice lacked the means of defence, and this was not the case. She had 14,000 regular troops, 8000 marines, a good stock of guns--how well she might have resisted the French, had they, which was probable, attacked her, was to be proved in 1849. Her people, moreover, that basso popolo which nowhere in the world is more free from crime, more patient in suffering, more intelligent and public-spirited than in Venice, was anxious and ready to resist; when the nobles offered themselves a sacrifice on the Gallic altar by welcoming the proposed democratic institutions, the populace, neither hoodwinked nor scared into hysterics, rose to the old cry of San Marco, and attempted a righteous reaction, which was only smothered when the treacherous introduction of French troops by night on board Venetian vessels settled the doom of Venice's independence.

'Under all circumstances,' Napoleon wrote to the Venetian Municipality, 'I shall do what lies in my power to prove to you my desire to see your liberty consolidated, and miserable Italy assume, at last, a glorious place, free and independent of strangers.' On the 10th of the following October he made over Venice to Austria, sending as a parting word the cynical message to the Venetians 'that they were little fitted for liberty: if they were capable of appreciating it, and had the virtue necessary for acquiring it well and good; existing circumstances gave them an excellent opportunity of proving it.' At the time, the act of betrayal was generally regarded as part of a well-considered plot laid by the French Directory, but it seems certain that it was not made known to that body before it was carried out, and that with Napoleon himself it was a sort of after-thought, sprung from the desire to patch up an immediate peace with Austria on account of the appointment of Hoche to the chief command of the army in Germany. The god to which he immolated Venice was the selfish fear lest another general should reap his German laurels.

Venice remained for eight years under the Austrians, who thereby obtained what, in flagrant perversion of the principles on which the Congress of Vienna professed to act, was accepted in 1815 as their title-deeds to its possession. Meanwhile, after the battle of Austerlitz, the city of the sea was tossed back to Napoleon, who incorporated it in the newly-created kingdom of Italy, which no more corresponded to its name than did the Gothic kingdom of which he arrogated to himself the heirship, when, placing the Iron Crown of Theodolinda upon his brow, he uttered the celebrated phrase: 'Dieu me l'a donnée, gare à qui la touche.'

This is not the place to write a history of French supremacy in Italy, but several points connected with it must be glanced at, because, without bearing them in mind, it is impossible to understand the events which followed. The viceroyalty of Eugène Beauharnais in North Italy, and the government of Joseph Buonaparte, and afterwards of Joachim Murat, in the South, brought much that was an improvement on what had gone before: there were better laws, a better administration, a quickening of intelligence. 'The French have done much for the regeneration of Italy,' wrote an English observer in 1810; 'they have destroyed the prejudices of the inhabitants of the small states of Upper Italy by uniting them; they have done away with the Pope; they have made them soldiers.' But there was the reverse side of the medal: the absence everywhere of the national spirit which alone could have consolidated the new régime on a firm basis; the danger which the language ran of losing its purity by the introduction of Gallicisms; the shameless robbery of pictures, statues, and national heirlooms of every kind for the replenishment of French museums; the bad impression left in the country districts by the abuses committed by the French soldiery on their first descent, and kept alive by the blood-tax levied in the persons of thousands of Italian conscripts sent to die, nobody knew where or why; the fields untilled, and Rachel weeping for her children: all these elements combined in rendering it difficult for the governments established under French auspices to survive the downfall of the man to whose sword they owed their existence. Their dissolution was precipitated, however, by the discordant action of Murat and Eugène Beauharnais. Had these two pulled together, whatever the issue was it would have differed in much from what actually happened. Murat was jealous of Eugène, and did not love his brother-in-law, who had annoyed and thwarted him through his whole reign; he was uneasy about his Neapolitan throne, and, in all likelihood, was already dreaming of acquiring the crown of an independent Italy. Throwing off his allegiance to Napoleon, he imagined the vain thing that he might gain his object by taking sides with the Austrians. It must be remembered that there was a time when the Allied Powers had distinctly contemplated Italian independence as a dyke to France, and there were people foolish enough to think that Austria, now she felt herself as strong as she had then felt weak, would consent to such a plan. Liberators, self-called, were absolutely swarming in Italy; Lord William Bentinck was promising entire emancipation from Leghorn; the Austrian and English allies in Romagna ransacked the dictionary for expressions in praise of liberty; an English officer was made the mouthpiece for the lying assurance of the Austrian Emperor Francis, that he had no intention of re-asserting any claims to the possession of Lombardy or Venetia.

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