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.