CHAPTER XII
Francis Joseph’s snub to Napoleon III.—Proposal to address him as “Sir” instead of “Brother”—The consequences—Napoleon asks: “What can one do for Italy?”—Austria at war with France and Italy—The crimes committed by Austria in Italy—Battles of Magenta and Solferino—Francis Joseph compelled to surrender Lombardy, but allowed to retain Venetia.
Other things besides his wife’s secret sorrows—or even his own—claimed Francis Joseph’s attention through the ’fifties, ’sixties, and ’seventies. The hour for the fulfilment of Countess Karolyi’s curse had not yet sounded; but it did seem as if that “break-up” of Austria which statesmen think about when they lie awake at night was imminent. Hungary was sullen; Prussia was ambitious and jealous; the Italian subjects of the Habsburgs hated them. It was the Italians who were destined to speak first.
They had already spoken in 1848; but then they had been silenced, because Radetzky had been a good general, and Charles Albert a bad one. But Victor Emmanuel was a greater man than Charles Albert, and he had Cavour to guide him. Italia fara da se—Italy will work out her own destiny—had been Charles Albert’s motto. Victor Emmanuel and Cavour played a more subtle game, and looked out for allies; and in Napoleon III. they found an ally who was quite willing to help them; a sympathetic man who had once been involved in the Carbonari movement; a sensitive man whom the head of the House of Habsburg had snubbed as a parvenu by proposing to address him as “Sir” instead of “Brother.”
So Napoleon’s sympathies were worked upon, and the wires were pulled. It is said that the beautiful Countess Castiglioni helped to pull them, adding the influence of her charms to that of her arguments; and the statement is probable enough, for the Emperor of the French was susceptible. At any rate, he presently asked Cavour the point-blank question: “What can one do for Italy?” and a little later, in July, 1858, he had a quiet talk with Cavour at the Baths of Plombières, and arranged what should be done, and what should be his own share of the plunder.
Francis Joseph may have guessed what was coming when he read the reports of Victor Emmanuel’s speech at the opening of his Parliament, in January, 1859, containing the pregnant declaration that, “while respecting treaties, we cannot disregard the cry of grief which rises to us from so many parts of Italy.” His guesses must have become certainties when, at the New Year’s reception of the corps diplomatique, Napoleon remarked, with chilly politeness, to Hübner, now Austrian Ambassador, in the hearing of all the other Ambassadors:—
“I regret that our relations with your Government are not so good as they have been; but I beg you to assure your Emperor that my personal sentiments towards him have undergone no change.”
A double-edged saying; for his feelings were hardly likely to be friendly towards the originator of the scheme for snubbing him as “Sir” instead of saluting him as “Brother.” In any case it was a saying which meant war; and war was not long delayed. Francis Joseph, in fact, anticipated the inevitable by summoning Sardinia to disarm within three days; but Sardinia refused to disarm, and the French came over the Alps, beat Francis Joseph at Magenta and Solferino, and turned him out of Lombardy, though allowing him to retain Venetia.
That was the beginning of the end; and the event contains an important moral,—the moral that the one permanent peril to European peace arises out of the hatred invariably felt for persons of German nationality by the races subjected to their rule.
The trouble with the German, whether of the North or of the South, is always this: that he regards himself as a heaven-sent ruler of men, but can, as a matter of fact, only govern in a state of siege. He can win battles, and organise a civil service; but he can neither conciliate nor assimilate his subjects. The German Empire is sometimes compared (by Germans) to the Roman Empire; but the difference between the two things is wide. The Romans, when they conquered the world, made it contentedly Roman. The French, similarly, when they took over Savoy from Italy, made it contentedly French. But no German dependency is ever contentedly German. Alsace is not; nor is Schleswig-Holstein, or Prussian Poland. In all these places, the German, in his jack-boots, strides about among a people who find his language barbarous, his culture ridiculous, and himself an odious interloper. And it has been the same thing in Austrian Italy, where, even to this day, the few Italians who remain “unredeemed” refuse so much as to join the Austrian Alpine Club, but have preferred to form a smaller Alpine Club of their own.
In the days of which we are speaking, Austria ruled Lombardy and Venetia as subject provinces. At the same time, other Habsburgs reigned in Modena and Tuscany, while the abominable Bomba of Naples was the Empress Elizabeth’s brother-in-law. Not in his own provinces only, but throughout Italy, popular representation was roughly refused. Italy, it was held, was “a geographical expression,” and must behave as such. If it did not, then leading Italian citizens must be hanged; and, if there were any difficulty in getting evidence to hang them on, it must be obtained by torture.
It is a fact, incredible as it may seem, that the Austrians used, in the ‘fifties, to torture their Italian subjects in prison. It is a fact that they flogged, and sometimes executed, Italian civilians for “failing in outward respect” towards the Austrian soldiery. It is a fact that they flogged women for the comments which they passed on such proceedings. It is a fact that they shot a butcher, found in possession of a butcher’s knife, for carrying forbidden arms, and a lunatic for going through the motions of drill in a public thoroughfare. It is a fact, finally, that, exasperated at the manner in which every official Austrian institution was boycotted, they notified the public that “if anybody by criminal political obstinacy persisted in not frequenting the theatre, such conduct would be regarded as the silent demonstration of a criminal disposition, which merited to be sought out and punished.” The policy was as childish as it was savage, and as savage as it was childish. Gladstone had it in mind when he made his famous remark that nowhere on the map of Europe could one lay one’s finger and say: “Here Austria has done good.” His mistake lay not in offering that criticism, but in afterwards apologising for having offered it. What the Italians themselves thought of the matter is best shown by the written declaration which one of their victims handed in to his judges after his condemnation to death:—
“I declare” (he said) “that, rather than deny the sacred principles on which the cause of Italian liberty and independence repose, rather than adhere to the rapacious policy of Austria, rather than sanction its claims by any act which might seem to concede them, or by any submission to its authority, I, Pietro Fortunato Calvi, once officer of the Austrian Army, and late Colonel of the Italian Army during the War of Independence, now condemned to death for the crime of high treason, go joyfully to this death, declaring from the scaffold that what I have done I have done knowingly, and that I would be ready to do it again in order to drive the Austrians out of the States which they have infamously usurped.”
His judges asked him, in their arrogance, whether he would ask the pardon of the Austrians for his disloyalty to them. His reply was that he desired neither their pardon nor any other favour:
“I hate, and will always hate, the Austrians, until the end of my life, for all the ill they have done to Italy.”
The Austrians, that is to say, behaved as shamefully in Italy as in Hungary; and this time Francis Joseph was held responsible. When he took his bride to pay his Italian dominions a ceremonial visit, the Italians made it clear to him, as they subsequently made it clear to the Archduke Maximilian and the Archduchess Charlotte, that what was desired was not his condescension, or that of any member of his family, but both his and their ejection.
They made it clear in various ingeniously offensive ways. When the Archduke Maximilian appeared, with the Archduchess, in the Piazza at Venice, the whole population withdrew, leaving them alone there, as if they were lepers who might spread contamination. When Francis Joseph, accompanied by the Empress Elizabeth, drove through the streets of Milan, not a head was uncovered, and not a cheer was heard; all the acclamations being pointedly reserved for the Italian Syndic, who was compelled, as an official, to follow in the procession. The Italian ladies, at the same time, dressed so as to display, by a cunning arrangement of stuffs, the colours of the Italian flag; and, when the “Guerra, guerra” chorus, from Norma, was sung in the Scala, the audience applauded it as if they would never stop.
It seemed, therefore, to be Victor Emmanuel’s clear mission to help the Italians to fulfil an obvious destiny; and Victor Emmanuel’s mission was Napoleon’s opportunity to show Francis Joseph, as he had already shown the Tsar, that Emperors who treated him as a parvenu did so at their peril. So he and Victor Emmanuel fought shoulder to shoulder, and made a typical little bit of Austrian history: typical because, as we shall see when we proceed, Italia Irredenta is only one of many districts whose inhabitants regard themselves as “unredeemed,” and desire to work out their salvation with the help of their “nationals” over the border. There is also, as we shall note presently, a Servia Irredenta and a Roumania Irredenta, of which we are likely to hear a good deal in the immediate future, though this is not the place for speaking of them. Here we will merely note that Francis Joseph himself took part in the Italian campaign, heading a charge with the cry: “Forward, my lads! I, too, am a married man with a family!”—an exclamation not without its irony for those, if there were any, among his hearers who knew the particulars of his married life.
Though a brave soldier, however, he was by no means a soldier of genius. Apparently, indeed, it is only as a linguist and a figure-head—the sublime figure-head of the Habsburgs who need a figure-head so badly—that he possesses genius; in other respects he seems to have been, as Herr Wulfling was, at a later date, to the Princess Louisa of Tuscany, “a very ordinary man.” In any case, he proved himself a very ordinary general, whom very ordinary generals were able to defeat—partly, perhaps, because his Hungarian soldiers showed great alacrity in deserting him; but he sulked, with characteristic Habsburg sullenness, over the terms of peace. In particular, he sulked over the following article:—
“The Emperor of Austria cedes his rights over Lombardy to the Emperor of the French, who, in accordance with the wishes of the population, will hand them over to the King of Sardinia.”
What, he asked Prince Napoleon, who was charged with the negotiations, was the meaning of that odd expression—“the wishes of the population”? Prince Napoleon replied that it meant just what it seemed to mean—that there was not an Italian in Lombardy who was not eager to see the Austrians turned out of that province. Whereupon Francis Joseph smote the table and raised his voice:
“For my own part” (he said) “I recognise no rights except those which are incorporated in treaties. According to the treaties, Lombardy belongs to me. My arms having been unfortunate, I am quite willing to cede the territory to the Emperor Napoleon; but I cannot recognise the wishes of the population, for that is only another phrase for the right of revolution. Use the phrase if you must in your treaty with the King of Sardinia, and in your proclamations to the Italian people—that is no business of mine; but you must clearly understand that I, the Emperor of Austria, emphatically refuse to put my signature to such a form of words.”
It did not matter; so Napoleon did not insist. The Head of the Habsburgs was quite welcome to make the gestures of pride while munching the pie of humility—a way of keeping up their dignity in depressing circumstances in which the Habsburgs are the worthy rivals of the Bourbons, and Francis Joseph in particular is the worthy rival of Louis XVIII., who treated the allied sovereigns as his lackeys when they restored him to his throne. A more important matter was that, though Francis Joseph had been given his lesson, he had not learnt it, and that Napoleon, owing to dangers near home, had not been able to make the lesson as complete as he would have liked.
Napoleon had promised that Italy should be free “from the Alps to the Adriatic”; but he heard that Prussia was mobilising on the Rhine, and left his work unfinished. Not only was Venetia left to Austria; but Habsburg Dukes of Tuscany and Modena were also restored to the States from which their subjects had expelled them, though the latter had actually shot his political prisoners, after first flogging them, before taking to flight. Whence, of course, two consequences followed. In the first place Francis Joseph was confirmed in his stubborn view that he did really possess the right of ruling over Italians who loathed him. In the second place, the Italians continued to loathe him; and it was as certain as anything could be that, when his struggle with Prussia for the German hegemony came to a head, he would have to face a second day of reckoning with Victor Emmanuel.