From the encyclical may be dated the beginning of the end. The warnings, the threatenings, so long bravely resisted, all appeared suddenly to take effect. As if aroused to the conviction that the innovations he had sanctioned clashed with the independence of the Church, his mind now bent itself solely to repair the evil into which he had been led by the sympathies and weakness of the man usurping the higher duties of the priest. The Constitution especially clashed with the hierarchical polity; and hence the summer of 1848 was passed in unseemly contentions between the Pope and his lay-ministers, zealous on their side to maintain inviolate the power and attributes of the Chambers. These dissensions were no secret in the country, and unhappily opened a door to Mazzini, the chief of the republican party in Italy, and his adherents, who previously, in the enthusiastic confidence inspired by Pius IX., had found no hearing. Side by side with these revolutionists were agents of the Austrian police, and the reactionary party, seeking, under the disguise of the most fanatical democracy, to urge the population into excesses which should speedily justify an Austrian intervention. “We can all remember,” writes Massimo d'Azeglio to the inhabitants of the Legations, cautioning them against being this time the dupes of similar intrigues, “we can all remember, in 1848-9, certain journalists and street orators, who were only too successful in dragging the most ignorant and inflammable of the population into extravagant lengths; and whom afterwards, on the return of the Austrian army, we saw impudently walking about arm-in-arm with the officers, and sneering in the face of those they had led into error.”[13]
Still the catastrophe would not have been so immediate, but for the total defeat of the Sardinian army in Lombardy, in the month of August. The misfortunes of Charles Albert extended their influence to the furthest parts of the Peninsula. The Constitutionalists lost heart; the Republicans grew more overbearing. In the Roman States the dagger of an assassin took the life of the only man who yet stood between the Pope and the Revolution.
The prime minister, Count Rossi, was murdered in open daylight as he was entering the Capitol, where the parliament held its sittings. The upper and middle classes were paralyzed by this calamity; and the Roman populace, headed by a handful of furious demagogues, were suffered to assail the Pope in his own palace, and forced him to sanction the nomination of a democratic ministry.
What followed is well known. Indignant at this coercion, Pius fled from his capital, but unhappily, instead of accepting either of the asylums offered by France and Spain, he was induced to claim the protection of the King of Naples, which was tantamount to throwing himself into the hands of Austria. From the moment he became the guest of the unrelenting Ferdinand, his policy bore the impress of the influences surrounding him.
Great as had been the errors and ingratitude of the Romans, they did not abandon themselves to anarchy and licence. Count Terenzio Mamiani, recognised as the leader of the Constitutionalists, and all the local authorities, were strenuous in their efforts to avert the crisis which was equally desired by the two extreme parties. The Sardinian cabinet also laboured to save the constitution, and bring back the Pope to Rome, without having recourse to foreign Powers. It was not till the 8th of February, 1849, nearly three months after his departure, that the Republic was proclaimed—not till after the Pontiff had rejected every overture for an accommodation.
The scenes of bloodshed and excess ascribed to Rome at this time are almost entirely without foundation. Seven priests fell victims to popular fury on the discovery of some reactionary plot of which, they were the promoters; but beyond this crime, there is nothing to lay to the charge of a population to whom murder is more familiar than to any other in Christendom. On the contrary, fewer vendette, assassinations from personal motives, and fewer robberies, took place that winter in the Eternal City than in previous years.
But this moderation was not followed in Ancona, which has acquired a fatal notoriety from the atrocities perpetrated by its “Infernal Association” in the name of liberty and the people. In a previous chapter, I have related the fear and prostration occasioned by this secret tribunal. The gross culpability of Mazzini, when Chief Triumvir at Rome, in not immediately commanding the arrest of the assassins,—the inexplicable supineness of Mattioli, the governor or Preside—have left an indelible stain on the short-lived republic. The pusillanimity of the Anconitans in submitting to this reign of terror has also not contributed to raise them in the estimation of Europe. It was too evident they had degenerated since the days of Barbarossa.
The only other city in which these crimes were at all emulated was Senigallia, the birthplace of the Pope, about twenty miles distant from Ancona. Several members of the Mastai family were threatened, and had to escape for their lives; and in a population of eleven or twelve thousand, upwards of twenty persons, marked out for vengeance, were either killed or wounded by the self-styled patriots. Amongst the assassins, both here and in Ancona, were men zealous as Sanfedisti under Gregory. A band of the vilest rabble were about to commence similar proceedings at Imola, a town between Bologna and Ravenna, when they were summarily dealt with by Count Laderchi, the Preside. He did at once what Mattioli only did after months; or rather what it required a Commissioner from Rome to compel him to do at all. He collected the national guard by night, surrounded the haunts of the assassins, and arrested every one on whom a suspicion rested.
Bologna throughout these agitated times held a firm yet temperate attitude. The long continuance of their free institutions—for their distinct autonomy was respected till the end of the eighteenth century—had given this people a resoluteness of purpose, and intellectual development, not shared by their brethren in the more southern provinces, whom they had long ago nick-named the “Somari of the Marche.”[14] The city, which contained 75,000 inhabitants, ranked next in importance to Rome, and had long been celebrated for its university, the fame of which in the Middle Ages attracted students from all parts of Europe;[15] and its schools of painting and music. But since the Restoration it had participated in the general decline. Political restrictions and religious bigotry scared away the votaries of science and art.
In August, 1848, before any disturbances had taken place in Rome, an unjustifiable attempt of the Austrian general, Welden, to possess himself of Bologna, was repulsed with great bravery by the inhabitants, and the invading force compelled to recross the Po. This outrage on the rights of nations having been protested against by the Pope's ministers, Austria was obliged to wait for her revenge until officially summoned to invade the Legations. The long-desired moment, brought about by the madness of the Republicans, the weakness of the Constitutionalists, and the far-spreading intrigues of the Austro-Jesuits, came at last. In the spring of 1849, the Pontiff formally invoked the armed intervention of the Catholic Powers. France undertook to reinstate him in Rome; Austria was to deal with Romagna and the Marche.