An amnesty was appended to this decree, but as it excluded from its provisions whoever had taken any share in public affairs since the assassination of Count Rossi, numbers of the most temperate politicians in the State, who had given their support to Mamiani during his efforts at an accommodation with the Pope, fared no better than the Mazzinians who had set all constituted authority at defiance. All were equally proscribed. The Romans, jesting, as is their wont, whether in pleasure or in bitterness, compared it to a register of condemnation rather than an instrument of pardon.
In April, 1850, Pius re-entered his dominions. The Romans had looked anxiously for this, and trusting in the benevolence of his character, imagined that he would at least put a stop to the cruelty and injustice exercised in his name. But the Pope who came back from Gaeta had nothing of the Pio Nono of four years back. As if in expiation of his previous errors, and to screen the Church from being again jeopardized by his weakness, he withdrew all attention from secular affairs, and henceforth lived only for the glory of religion. So little did he inform himself of the state of the country, that the few who could obtain his ear unobserved, declare that they found him perfectly ignorant of passing occurrences. Nothing was suffered to reach him save through the medium of his detested minister, Cardinal Antonelli,—his subjects' murmurings and prayers had no other expositor; while the same channel conveyed to them nought save harshness, intolerance, and vindictiveness, as tokens of their sovereign's existence.
When the Romans once thoroughly realized this change, with the extinction of their hopes departed every vestige of affection. Never was there a prince who fell from such a height of love, reverence, and admiration, to be regarded with such utter indifference.
In 1856, the evils which affected the Roman States were brought before Europe by Count Cavour, the Sardinian plenipotentiary at the Congress of Paris. He sketched their history since the restoration in 1815, and demonstrated the pressure Austria had always exercised upon the Papal Government, to whom a loophole was thus given for throwing on its powerful ally the odium of its past and actual régime. As the first condition of the reforms the Pope should be invited to adopt, he insisted on the withdrawal of the two foreign armies in occupation of the country.
It being well understood that France only continued to garrison Rome as a check upon Austria, it was without any fear of opposition from the former that the Italian statesman dwelt on the crying necessity of this measure, and appealed to the deplorable situation of the Legations and Marche, where a state of siege and martial law had been subsisting for seven years, to evidence whether the system now in force was salutary in its results; while he wound up his representations by urging the constant danger which threatened the tranquillity of neighbouring States by the existence of such a focus of intrigue and discontent.
This movement on the part of the Sardinian Government was loudly protested against by the clerical party as pandering to the revolutionists; but it saved Italy from becoming once more the prey of socialists and red republicans. Convinced that their cause was in able hands, the people were induced to wait patiently a little longer, to desist from the plottings and insurrections which had only been fruitful in bloodshed and desolation, and give their infatuated rulers another and final chance of averting the day of reckoning which was rapidly approaching.
Even then, at the eleventh hour, a little judgment, a little generosity, might have propped the tottering edifice. In 1857, the announcement that the Pope was about to undertake a journey through his dominions awoke a hope of brighter days. The state of siege and martial law in Bologna and Ancona were removed; the beggars who peopled all the towns through which he passed were locked up; a good many buildings were whitewashed; and the municipal bodies (government nominees) presented congratulatory addresses. Other addresses, too, were prepared, couched in less flowery language, signed by many of the provincial nobility and landowners, in which an earnest appeal was made to their sovereign's justice and humanity. But these were not permitted to reach his hands. Cold and languid was the pontifical progress. Pius visited shrines and churches, but he unbarred no prisons, and left no thankful hearts behind him.
The memorable words of Victor Emmanuel on opening the Chambers at Turin in January, 1859,—“We are not insensible to the cry of anguish which reaches us from every part of Italy,”—were not spoken too soon. Without a public assurance of sympathy and protection to those suffering populations who, for three years, under increasing grievances, had waited for the result of Sardinia's interposition in their behalf, they could not any longer have been restrained from the wildest excesses of vengeance and despair. Without the firm trust in the Ré galantuomo generated by his faithful observance of the Constitution in Piedmont, under difficulties of no ordinary kind, Mazzini would never have lost his influence in the Peninsula.
In the Roman States, where republicanism had been as it were enthroned, this altered tone of public feeling was the more remarkable. The priests who rail at the constitutional king as the instigator of the revolution in the Legations, should rather thank the magic influence of his name, and the exhortations of the noble and enlightened men he has rallied around him, for restraining the fiery and vindictive Romagnuoli from abusing their hour of triumph. Not a Codino in the country but anticipated, whenever the Austrian troops should be withdrawn, a repetition of the horrors of the first French revolution.
As the excitement which pervaded all North Italy last winter extended itself to the Papal States, the Austrians redoubled in vigilance and severity. While the French general in command at Rome winked at the enthusiasm of the inhabitants, and offered no opposition to the departure of the volunteers who flocked to Victor Emmanuel's standard, the Pope's allies on the other side of the Apennines strengthened their garrisons, re-established martial law, intercepted the volunteers as they stole towards the frontiers, and threw up fresh fortifications round the citadel at Ancona.