The Radicals now concentrated the people on the cry of war with Austria, and on that issue the Pope fell. The Papal troops had crossed the frontier in support of the Sardinians, and, as Pius refused to declare war, the Austrians treated them as brigands. The meetings in Rome became more and more violent, the new ministry resigned, and, as Pius still refused to declare war, a second ministry handed in its resignation. The summer and autumn of 1848 passed in this struggle. Pius insisted that war was not consistent with his religious character, and all Rome united in opposing him. In November, at the suggestion of Rosmini, the Pope ordered Pellegrino Rossi to form a new ministry. Rossi, a friend of Napoleon III., was hated by the Radicals, and his dream of a union of Italian princes under the Pope's direction conflicted with their plan of a united and free Italy. He was assassinated on November 15th, and on the following day a vast crowd, partly armed, marched to the Quirinal and peremptorily laid down their claims. In the confusion a prelate at one of the windows was shot, and the Pope, seeing the Roman Guard mingling with the crowd, abjectly surrendered, and retired to disavow his concession and prepare for flight. The situation was very grave, and the action of the Pope was far from heroic. It is not a maxim of the higher morality that you may evade an angry crowd by making promises that you do not intend to fulfil, or that you may afterwards discover that such promises were void.
The sequel is well-known. With the assistance of the foreign ambassadors the Pope, disguised as a simple priest, fled to Gaeta. So great was his concern that when the King of Naples, warned of his flight, came the next day and inquired for the Pope, the officials at Gaeta were quite unaware that Pius had been amongst them for twenty-four hours. The cardinals gathered about him, and he appealed to the Catholic Powers to restore his authority and suppress the rebels. It is not an entirely accurate analysis to say that the Pope's "Liberalism" now ended, and he became a reactionary. He had been duped by the Radicals and had never understood his subjects. A feeble and carefully controlled lay representation, with neither legislative nor executive power, was not a part of the Liberal creed. Pius IX. was never a Liberal. He was from the first unwilling to surrender the absolute authority of the clergy, to grant freedom of discussion, to abolish the monstrous growth of clerical officialdom, or to apply a fitting proportion of the income of the Papal States to their effective military defence. When he saw that even moderate Liberals demanded these things, he recognized that he had never been in agreement with them, and that his own half-measures were of no value. He now further recognized that the advanced Liberals had captured his people, and he turned, quite logically, to a policy of oppression. There was no material change of his political faith.
From Gaeta he appointed a "governing commission" (under a cardinal) for Rome, and, when the people refused it and set up a Republic, he placidly entrusted his case to France, Spain, Naples, and Sardinia, and devoted himself to the preparation of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of Mary. Rosmini was still with him, urging compromise with the democrats, but the somewhat unscrupulous Cardinal Antonelli, who now became Secretary of State, astutely destroyed the influence of the reformer, and confirmed Pius in his attitude of defiance and repression. Even when the French troops—apparently thinking that they could seduce the Romans to admit them in peace and could then compel the Pope to adopt a conciliatory policy—crushed the Roman Republic, and re-opened the gates to the Pope, Pius did not hasten to return. On September 4th he left Gaeta for Portici, and it was not until April 12, 1850, that he returned to the Quirinal. The crowd ironically applauded Pio Nono Secondo.
The Pope had replied to the French appeals for a promise of reform that it was not consistent with his dignity to make promises under apparent pressure, but he had consented to the creation of new political institutions. From Portici he promised a new Consiglio di Stato, a Consiglio dei Ministri, and a Consulta di Stato. These were wholly under clerical control, and the elections for the District Councils, the only bodies which were to have free popular representatives, were soon suppressed. But there is little need to dwell on the second phase of Papal government under Pius IX. Cardinal Antonelli and the Jesuits had a paramount influence, and the dream of enlightenment and self-government was roughly dissipated. Between 1850 and 1855 the Roman Council alone passed ninety sentences of death, and the prisons were again thickly populated; while the disorders of finance and administration, and the appalling illiteracy of the people in an age of advancing education, were scrupulously maintained. The scandal which in later years followed the death of Antonelli—the spectacle of his natural daughter struggling for his vast fortune, though he was a son of the people—sufficiently disclosed the character of that able and indelicate minister, while the Jesuits were not unmindful that the first act of the revolution had been to expel them. They had sent some of their abler representatives to Gaeta, and from that time they had a deep influence on the ecclesiastical policy of the Pope, while Antonelli ruled the Papal States and offered what Lord Clarendon called a "scandal to Europe." Within little over a year of the Pope's return there were more than 8000 political prisoners in the Papal jails, while the ignorant people were oppressed by heavy taxes and an army of clerical officials.
It is probable that Pius IX. had no clearer perception of the state of Europe and Italy after the revolution of 1849 than he had had in the earlier years. He devoted his attention to spiritual matters and listened, in temporal concerns, to the suave assurances of Antonelli. This pacified Europe was to be weaned from its bad dreams by a cult of the Sacred Heart, devotion to the Immaculate Conception of Mary, and so on. His first important act (September 29, 1850) was to re-establish the hierarchy in England, to the great alarm and anger of the English Protestants. England had quickly lost its passing sympathy with the Papacy, and English travellers took home dreadful accounts of the condition of the Papal States. The Pope does not seem to have been acquainted either with the disgust of the English at the state of his dominion or with the fact that the apparent restoration of the old faith in England meant little more than a vast immigration from famine-stricken Ireland.
He then applied himself to securing the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of Mary. From Gaeta in 1849, while Mazzini and his colleagues ruled Rome and Antonelli struggled with the representatives of the rival Catholic Powers for his restoration, Pius had sent out some five hundred letters to the bishops of the world, inviting their opinion on the doctrine. It had long passed the stage of being a disputed academic thesis, and most of the replies were favourable. The Jesuits, who had become the special protagonists of the doctrine, fostered the native piety of the Pope, and on December 8, 1854, it became a dogma of the Church.[356]
In 1857 made a tour of the Italian provinces. His chief purpose was to visit the Holy House of Loretto, but the intriguers of the Quirinal used the opportunity to enhance the Pope's illusion that only a few negligible fanatics quarrelled with the Papal government. In the previous year the diplomatists assembled at the Congress of Paris had censured that government in the most violent terms and demanded reform. It is hardly likely that their comments were put before the Pope, and care was taken that his reception in the provinces should flatter his genial love of popularity. Inconvenient petitioners were refused access to him, and the clergy and more devout laity greeted him with applause. Gregorovius, who was then in Rome, notes in his Diary that Pius returned to the Quirinal full of joy; and a few years later the inhabitants of these provinces would vote, by an overwhelming majority, for the abolition of the Papal government.
In the following year the graver development of Italian politics began. Napoleon III., whose protection of the corrupt Papal system had infuriated the Liberals, met Cavour secretly at Plombières and agreed, in case of attack by Austria, to help the King of Sardinia in his ambition; his reward would be the provinces of Nice and Savoy. The attempt by Orsini in the following January to assassinate Napoleon did not help the diplomatists of the Vatican, as Cavour plausibly urged that the tyranny of the Papal States was responsible for the rebels who were scattered over Europe, and the struggle for the unity of Italy went on from year to year. The war between Sardinia and Austria broke out in the spring of 1859, and Austria was defeated at Magenta and retired from the Legations. These provinces were resolutely opposed to a return of clerical government, and Cavour, whose monarch was not yet prepared for war on the Papacy, sent one representative after another to persuade the Pope to permit the appointment of lay rulers of Parma, Modena, Tuscany, and Romagna, under his suzerainty. Antonelli and Pius refused to make the least concession to the rebels, nor were the provincials disposed to assent to such a settlement. After some months of insurgence and bloody repression, a plebiscite was organized in the Legations (March 11, 1860) and an overwhelming majority voted for incorporation in the kingdom of Sardinia. In spite of the Pope's fulminations, Sardinia accepted the vote, and Napoleon received Nice and Savoy as the price of his acquiescence.
Dismayed and perplexed by the futility of his appeals to the Catholic Powers and of the spiritual censures at his disposal, the Pope now invited volunteers, and crowds of undisciplined Irish and French Catholics came to swell the little Papal army and fall with truculent piety on the rebellious districts. Garibaldi, on the other hand, forced the halting designs of Cavour, and, with the cry of "Rome or Death," flung his irregular troops into the struggle. After a vain effort at peaceful settlement, Cavour, "in the interest of humanity," sent the Sardinian regulars into the Papal States, and the Pope's forces were destroyed in September at Castel Fidardo (in sight of the Holy House of Loretto) and Ancona. A plebiscite was organized in Umbria and the Marches, and there is no serious ground to question that the figures published express the sentiment of the provinces. In Umbria 99,075 voted for Victor Emmanuel and 380 for the Pope: in the Marches 133,783 voted for Sardinia and 1212 for Rome. A large allowance for abstentions does not alter the significance of these figures.