“June 22.—P.S.—Our servant has been to town to-day; he brings me a letter from the Perkins', and such news as is the general talk of the cafes. Our poor friends in the Hotel de France (Locanda Storti) suffered much. Deceived to the last, they had not even been told of the actual arrival of the troops, and had just sat quietly to dinner when the roar of the guns startled them. They strove to go to another hotel, but alas! the gates of their inn were fastened; they could not stir. The letter I got from them said that the troops were irritated on account of the firing from the roof. We knew beforehand how it would be there; and in fact they did shoot an officer and two men while passing the door. It was on this that the soldiers, infuriated, rushed and assailed the house.... I hear [pg 177] every one blames the imprudence of these people. They could not afford to be hostile; for the hotel, if you remember, commands the street from the base up the hill. No troops, therefore, could risk going up that hill with a hostile house in that position ready to take them in the rear. The escape of the poor Perkins' is a perfect miracle; they, I hear, lost everything. The innkeeper, waiter and stableman, they say, were killed in the fray. The number of deaths among the Swiss were 10, and 33 of the Perugians. Several prisoners were made. I went up on this same afternoon (June 22) with the two little boys to see the colonel of the regiment. The town is wonderfully little injured, only broken windows ... after a mob riot, with the exception of a few houses in the suburbs, between the outer and inner gates. One was burned by the accident of the falling of a bomb-shell. The other was cannonaded as being a resort of the rebels. There is great talk of how the heads of the revolution scampered off, betraying thus the tools and dupes of their faction.”
Extract from another letter to David Ross of Bladensburgh:
“There is great terror here among all the country people, who dread, sooner or later, vengeance being taken upon them by the revolutionary party, because they would have nothing to say to the movement.”
The peace of Villafranca.
It is well known how rapidly events succeeded one another, when Napoleon's friendly relations with Austria came to an end. On May 3rd he declared war. On the 12th he arrived at Genoa, commanded in person, on the 4th of June, at the battle of Magenta, where, but for the superior generalship of Marshal McMahon, he would have lost his life, together with his army, and on the 24th of the same month won the great victory of Solferino. He now gave out that he had enough of glory and would fight no more, whilst in reality he was constrained to yield to powerful pressure from without. Prussia, foreseeing that, if Austria experienced a few more defeats, she herself would suffer, deemed it wise to interfere. Prussia had, [pg 178] indeed, concerted matters beforehand with the Emperor of the French, and had undertaken to isolate Austria, her hereditary rival in Germany.
But at the first rumor of the Franco-Piedmontese aggression, the German States were moved. The Diet of Francfort insisted that the confederate nations should proceed to assist the Emperor, who was President of the German Confederation. It fell to Prussia to head the movement. But, as may be conceived, she was not hearty in the cause. Her statesmen hesitated, argued, equivocated, and made a show of preparing, but slowly, for war. Meanwhile, the news of the successive defeats of Austria roused still more the patriotism of the Germans. The Prussian monarch, finding that he was on the point of being overwhelmed, addressed to his Imperial accomplice, the day after the battle of Solferino, a most pressing telegram, informing him that he must make peace, cost what it would. Napoleon, it need hardly be said, obeyed, and so the peace of Villafranca was concluded. By this treaty was established an Italian Confederation, under the honorary presidency of the Pope, Lombardy given to Piedmont, Venice left to Austria, the rights of the Grand Duke of Tuscany and the other sovereigns, who were for the moment dispossessed, expressly reserved. Thus appeared to end the intrigues of the revolution. Pius IX. promptly invited the faithful of Rome to join with him in offering thanksgiving to God. His letter thus concludes: “What do we pray for? That all the enemies of Christ, of His Church and of the Holy See, may be converted and live.”
How the treaty was observed.
So clear, apparently, was now the political atmosphere, that men could not avoid accusing themselves of having judged rashly the mighty conqueror, who, by a word, could restore serenity as easily as he had disturbed it. It was not yet known by what power he was restrained. In compliance with the requirements of the treaty of Villafranca, Piedmont, indeed, withdrew her commissioners from Central Italy. The public, [pg 179] however, soon learned, to its great astonishment, what, at first, it could not believe, that provisional governments took the place of the Piedmontese Commissioners, and that Baron Ricasoli, at Florence, Signor Farini, at Modena and Parma, and Cipriani, at Bologna, all agents of Count de Cavour and the revolution, dismissed everywhere such officials as were suspected of looking seriously to the return of the legitimate sovereigns, and had recourse to popular suffrage. This, it is no exaggeration to say, was a mere mockery. The voting directed, expurgated by these parties, never extended to the landward districts, but, confined entirely to the towns, was necessarily calculated to produce the result at which they aimed—a plebiscitum in favor of annexation to Piedmont. In Romagna, for instance, where there were about two hundred thousand electors, only 18,000 were registered, and of these only one-third presented their votes. By such means was a national assembly constituted. This assembly met at Bologna on the 6th of September, and at its first sitting voted the abolition of the Pontifical government, and invited Victor Emmanuel. This potentate dared not, at first, to accept, but appointed Signor Buoncompagni, governor-general of the league of Central Italy. It did not appear from the state of the polls, if, indeed, the polling of votes was even made a fashion of, that the people of the Papal States were at all anxious to do away with the government under which they and their forefathers had enjoyed so many blessings, together with the surpassing honor of possessing, as their capital, the metropolis of the Christian world. They were too happy in being ruled over by the elective monarch whom they themselves had chosen, to desire, in preference to him, the mere shadow of a king—the satrap of an Imperial despot. It was not they who, in a pretended patriotic endeavor to shake off the Pontifical yoke, raised the standard of rebellion in so many cities and provinces of the Papal States. This was wholly the work of foreigners. A Bonaparte, attended by a numerous and well-disciplined army, invaded Italy. His arms were, to a certain extent, successful; [pg 180] and so rebellion was encouraged. Another Bonaparte excited to revolt the city of Perugia. The disturbance was speedily settled by a handful of troops whom the sovereign had despatched from Rome, to the great satisfaction of the citizens of Perugia. In other cities, by the like instrumentalities, were like movements occasioned. They were invariably suppressed by the loyal and devoted people. So much was this the case that the Pontifical government warmly thanked the mayors and municipalities of no fewer than seven or eight cities for their good services in putting down the nascent revolution. At Bologna, the capital of the Romagnol or Æmilian provinces, a cousin of the Bonapartes, the Marquis Pepoli, whom the benevolence of Pius IX. had restored to his country, stirred up rebellion, and caused the Pontifical government to give place to revolutionary misrule. The abettors of Pepoli, in this most base and ungrateful proceeding, were his associates of the secret societies; others who were foreigners at Bologna, and a few malcontents of that city itself. But all these were far from being the citizens of Bologna, far from being the people of the Bolognese provinces. Whilst such things were done, where was the peace of Villafranca? It had become, or rather, never was anything better than, waste paper. The head of the Bonapartes was the offender, and he contrived to make France the partner of his guilt.
“It is France,” the illustrious M. de Montalembert affirms, “that has allowed the temporal power of the Pope to be shaken. This is the fact, which blind men only can deny. France is not engaged alone in this path, but her overwhelming ascendancy places her at the head of the movement, and throws the great and supreme responsibility of it upon her. We know all the legitimate and crushing reproaches that are due to England and Piedmont; but if France had so willed it, Piedmont would not have dared to undertake anything against the Holy See, and England would have been condemned to her impotent hatred.... The Congress of Paris, in 1856—having solemnly declared, ‘that none of the contracting powers [pg 181] had the right of interfering, either collectively or individually, between a sovereign and his subjects’[4]—after having proclaimed the principle of the absolute independence of sovereigns in favor of the Turkish Sultan against his Christian subjects, thought itself justified by its protocol of April 8th, and in the absence of any representative of the august accused, in proclaiming that the situation of the Papal States was abnormal and irregular. This accusation, developed, aggravated and exaggerated in parliament and elsewhere, by Lord Palmerston and Count Cavour, was, nevertheless, formally put forward under the presidency and on the initiative of the French minister for foreign affairs. Consequently, France must be held accountable for it to the Church, and to the rest of Europe.” The war which “the skilful but guilty perseverance of Piedmontese policy” succeeded in occasioning between France and Austria facilitated not a little the work of revolution in the States of the Church. In order to dispel the fears that prevailed, the following words were addressed to the Bishops of France by the minister of the Emperor: “The prince who restored the Holy Father to his throne in the Vatican wills that the Head of the Church should be respected in all his rights as a temporal sovereign.” A little later, the Emperor of the French, elated with his military success, issued a proclamation which renewed the apprehensions that had been so happily allayed. “Italians!—Providence sometimes favors nations and individuals by giving them the opportunity of suddenly springing into their full growth. Avail yourselves, then, of the fortune that is offered you! Your desire of independence, so long expressed, so often deceived, will be realized, if you show yourselves worthy of it. Unite then for one sole object, the liberation of your country. Fly to the standards of King Victor Emmanuel, who has already so nobly shown you the way to honor. Remember that without discipline there can be no army, and animated with the sacred fire of patriotism, be soldiers only to-day, and you will be to-morrow free citizens of a great country.”