On by the Borgo Santo Spirito, opposite the old church of the Penitentiaries, stands the Palazzo Serristori, memorable in the revolutionary movement of 1867. It was then the barracks of the Papal Zouaves—the brave foreign legion enlisted under Pius the Ninth, in which men of all nations were enrolled under officers of the best blood in Europe, hated more especially by the revolutionaries because they were foreigners, and because their existence, therefore, showed a foreign sympathy with the temporal power, which was a denial of the revolutionary theory which asserted the Papacy to be without friends in Europe. Wholesale murder by explosives was in its infancy then as a fine art; but the spirit was willing, and a plot was formed to blow up the castle of Sant' Angelo and the barracks of the Zouaves. The castle escaped because one of the conspirators lost heart and revealed the treachery; but the Palazzo Serristori was partially destroyed. The explosion shattered one corner of the building. It was said that the fuse burned faster than had been intended, so that the catastrophe came too soon. At all events, when it happened, about dark, only the musicians of the band were destroyed, and few of the regiment were in the building at all, so that about thirty lives were sacrificed, where the intention had been to destroy many hundreds. In the more sane condition of Europe today, it seems to us amazing that Pius the Ninth should have been generally blamed for signing the death warrant of the two atrocious villains who did the deed, and for allowing them to be executed. The fact that he was blamed, and very bitterly, gives some idea of the stupid and senseless prejudice against the popes which was the result of Antonelli's narrow and reactionary policy.
LEO THE THIRTEENTH
We commonly speak of the nineteenth century as an age of superior civilization. The truth of the assertion depends on what civilization means, but there is no denying that more blood has been shed by civilized nations during the last one hundred and twenty years than in any equal period of the world's history. Anyone may realize the fact by simply recalling the great wars which have devastated the world since the American Revolution.
But the carnage was not uninterrupted. The record of death is divided in the midst by the thirty years of comparative peace which followed the battle of Waterloo and preceded the general revolution of 1848. Napoleon had harried the world, from Moscow to Cairo, from Vienna to Madrid, pouring blood upon blood, draining the world's veins dry, exhausting the destroying power of mankind in perpetual destruction. When he was gone, Europe was utterly worn out by his terrible energy, and collapsed suddenly in a state of universal nervous prostration. Then came the long peace, from 1815 to 1848.
During that time the European nations, excepting England, were governed by more or less weak and timid sovereigns, and it was under their feeble rule that the great republican idea took root and grew, like a cutting from the stricken tree of the French Revolution, planted in the heart of Europe, nurtured in secret, and tended by devoted hands to a new maturity, but destined to ruin in the end, as surely as the parent stock.
Those thirty and odd years were a sort of dull season in Europe—an extraordinarily uneventful period, during which the republican idea was growing, and during which the monarchic idea was decaying. Halfway through that time—about 1830—Joseph Mazzini founded the Society of Young Italy, in connection with the other secret societies of Europe, and acquired that enormous influence which even now is associated with his name. Mazzini and Garibaldi meant to make a republic of Italy. The House of Savoy did not at that time dream of a united Italian Kingdom. The most they dared hope was the acquisition of territory on the north by the expulsion of the Austrians. England and circumstances helped the Savoy family in their sudden and astonishing rise of fortune; for at that time Austria was the great military nation of Europe, while France was the naval power second to England, and through the Bourbons, Italy was largely under the influence of Austria. England saw that the creation of an independent friendly power in the Mediterranean would both tend to diminish Austria's strength by land, and would check France in her continued efforts to make the shores of the Mediterranean hers.
She therefore encouraged Italy in revolution, and it is generally believed that she secretly furnished enormous sums of money, through Sir James Hudson, minister in Turin, to further the schemes of Mazzini. The profound hatred of Catholics which was so much more marked in England then than now, produced a strong popular feeling there in favour of the revolutionaries, who inveighed against all existing sovereignties in general, but were particularly bitter against the government of the Popes. The revolution thus supported by England, and guided by such men as Mazzini and Garibaldi, made progress. The legendary nature of Rome, as mistress of the world, appealed also to many Italians, and 'Rome' became the catchword of liberty. The situation was similar in other European countries; secret societies were as active, and to the revolutionaries the result seemed as certain.