CHAPTER X
THE REVIVAL OF PIEDMONT
1850-1856
Restoration of the Pope and Grand Duke of Tuscany—Misrule at Naples—The Struggle with the Church in Piedmont—The Crimean War.
The decade from 1849 to 1859 may seem, at first sight, to resemble an interregnum, but it was an evolution. There is no pause in the life of nations any more than in the life of individuals: they go forward or they go backward. In these ten years Piedmont went forward; the other Italian governments did not stand still, they went backward. The diseases from which they suffered gained daily upon the whole body-politic, and even those clever foreign doctors who had been the most convinced that this or that remedy would set them on their feet, were in the end persuaded that there was only one place for them—the Hospital for Incurables. After the fall of Rome, Pius IX. issued a sort of canticle from Gaeta, in which he thanked the Lord at whose bidding the stormy ocean had been arrested, but he did not even so much as say thank you to the French, without whom, nevertheless, the stormy ocean would have proceeded on its way. To all suggestions from Paris that now that victory had been won by force the time was come for the Sovereign to give some guarantee that it would not be abused, [ [Pg.184] the Pope turned a completely deaf ear. 'The Pope,' said M. Drouyn de Lhuys, 'prefers to return to Rome upon the dead bodies of his subjects rather than amidst the applause which would have greeted him had he taken our advice.' That advice referred in particular to the secularisation of the public administration, and this was exactly what the Pope and the ex-Liberal Cardinal Antonelli, now and henceforth his most influential counsellor, were determined not to concede. They had grown wise in their generation, for a priest whose ministers are laymen is as much an anomaly as a layman whose ministers are priests. The French government desired that the Statute should be maintained, and demanded judicial reforms and an amnesty for political offenders. None of these points was accepted except the last, and that only nominally, as the amnesty of the 18th of September did not put a stop to proscriptions and vindictive measures. Count Mamiani, whose stainless character was venerated in all Italy, and who had devoted all his energies to the attempt to save the Papal government after the Pope's flight, was ruthlessly excluded, and so were many other persons who, though liberal-minded, had shown signal devotion to the Holy See. All sorts of means were used to serve the ends of vengeance; for instance, Alessandro Calandrelli, a Roman of high reputation, who held office under the republic, was condemned to death for high treason, and to twenty years at the galleys, on a trumped-up charge of theft, which was palpably absurd; but the Pope, while quashing the first sentence, confirmed the second, and Calandrelli would have remained in prison till the year of grace 1870, as many others did, but for the chance circumstance that his father had been a friend of the King of Prussia, who took up his cause so warmly that after two years he was [Pg.185] let out and sent to Berlin, where the King and A. von Humboldt received him with open arms.
These were the auspices under which Pius IX. returned to Rome after seventeen months' absence. A four-fold invasion restored the Temporal Power, which Fénelon said was the root of all evil to the Church, but which, according to Pius IX., was necessary to the preservation of the Catholic religion. The re-established régime was characterised by Lord Clarendon at the Congress of Paris as 'the opprobrium of Europe.' The Pope tried to compensate for his real want of independence (for a prince who could not stand a day without foreign bayonets, whatever else he was, was not independent) by laughing at the entreaties of France to relieve that advanced nation from the annoyance of having set up a government fit for the Middle Ages. He rated at its correct value the support of Napoleon, and believing it to be purely interested, he believed in its permanence. The President had thought of nothing in the world but votes, and he thought of them still. The Roman Expedition secured him the services of M. de Falloux as minister, and won over to him the entire Clerical Party, including Montalembert and the so-called Liberal Catholics. Thus, and thus only, was the leap from the Presidential chair to the Imperial throne made possible. The result was flattering, but still there are reasons to think (apart from Prince Jérôme Napoleon's express statement to that effect) that Napoleon III. hated the whole business from the bottom of his soul, and that of his not few questionable acts, this was the only one of which he felt lastingly ashamed. Seeing that the communications of his ministers failed in their object, he tried the expedient of writing a private letter to his friend Edgar Ney, couched in the [Pg.186] strongest terms of disapproval of the recalcitrant attitude of the Papal Government. This letter was published as it was intended to be, but in the Roman States, except that its circulation was forbidden, no notice was taken of it. Though the incident may be regarded as a stroke of facing-both-ways policy, the anger expressed was probably as sincere as any of Napoleon's sentiments could be, and the letter had the effect of awakening the idea in many minds that something of the former Italian conspirator still existed in the ruler of France. The question arose, What sort of pressure would be needed to turn that germ to account for Italy?
In the kingdom of Naples, where the laws, to look at them on paper, were incomparably better than those in force in the Roman States, the administration was such as would have disgraced a remote province of the Turkish Empire. The King's naturally suspicious temperament was worked upon by his courtiers and priests till he came to detect in every Liberal a personal antagonist, whose immunity from harm was incompatible with his own, and in Liberalism a plague dangerous to society, which must be stamped out at all costs. Over 800 Liberals were sent to the galleys. The convictions were obtained, in a great proportion of cases, by false testimony. Bribes and secret protection in high quarters were the only means by which an innocent man could hope to escape; 50,000 persons were under police supervision, to be imprisoned at will. The police often refused to set at liberty those whom the judges had acquitted. The government had a Turkish or Russian fear of printed matter. A wretched barber was fined 1000 ducats for having in his possession a volume of Leopardi's poems, which was described as 'contrary to religion and morals.'
[ [Pg.187] What was meant by being an inmate of a Neapolitan prison was told by Mr Gladstone in his two 'Letters to the Earl of Aberdeen,' which the latter sent to Prince Schwarzenberg, the Austrian Prime Minister, with a strong appeal to him to make known their contents to the King of the Two Sicilies, and to use his influence in procuring a mitigation of the abuses complained of. Prince Schwarzenberg did nothing, and it was then that the 'Letters' were published. The impression created on public opinion was almost without a parallel. The celebrated phrase, 'The negation of God erected into a system of government,' passing into currency as a short history of Bourbon rule at Naples, kept alive the wrathful feelings which the 'Letters' aroused, even when these ceased to be read. Some small errors of fact (such as that of stating that all the prisoners were chained, whereas an exception was made of those undergoing life sentences) were magnified by the partisans of Ferdinand II.; but the truth of the picture as a whole was amply confirmed from independent sources. Baron Carlo Poerio (condemned to nineteen years' imprisonment) was chained to a common malefactor, the chain never being undone, and producing in the end a disease of the bone from which he never recovered. His case was that of all the political prisoners in the same category with himself. Luigi Settembrini and the others on whom sentence of death had been passed, but commuted into one of life imprisonment, were not chained, but they were put to associate with the worst thieves and assassins, while their material surroundings accorded with the moral atmosphere they were forced to breathe.
The Neapolitan prisoners did more than suffer for freedom; they delivered the name of their country from being a reproach among the nations. They showed what men the South of Italy can produce. Those [Pg.188] who wish to know what types of probity, honour and ideal patriotism may grow out of that soil, which is sometimes charged with yielding only the rank weeds planted by despotism, may read the letters and memoirs of the noble Poerios, of Settembrini, gentlest but most fearless of human souls, of the Calabrian Morellis, all patriots and martyrs; of the Duke of Castromediano, who lately, in his old age, has set down a few recollections of the years he spent at the Neapolitan galleys. He records in these notes what he calls the most perilous moment in his life. It was when he was summoned, with six fellow-prisoners who had asked for and obtained freedom, to hear, as he feared, his own pardon pronounced. For pardon was equivalent to dishonour; it was granted either in consequence of real submission and retraction, or in order to be able to blacken the character of the pardoned man by falsely asserting that such submission had been made. His fear was groundless. He had been led out, perhaps, in the hope that the example of the others would prove contagious. He was not pardoned. As he returned to his prison, he thanked Divine Providence for the chains which left him pure.