A Box of Sand Read online

  These victories, though they were hardly decisive in the military sense, nevertheless meant that Austria was weakened and in danger of being pushed from northern Italy completely. But then, it appears, Napoleon got cold feet. Far from proceeding with the project to liberate Italy as far as the Adriatic, he resolved that the action would go no further than Lombardy.16 His motives for this have provoked much debate, but were probably manifold. The threat of Prussian mobilisation and revulsion at the butcher’s bill occasioned during the June battles are often cited, but in any event, he sent a French general under a flag of truce to the Austrian HQ on 10 July, with a request that the Austrian Emperor, Franz Joseph, meet him at Villafranca di Verona the next morning. This was acceded to, and over the heads of the Piedmontese, the two emperors met and concluded an armistice. Cavour resigned when he learned of it.17

  The agreements reached, (basically that Lombardy was to be united with Piedmont while Venice was left to Austria), were formalised in the Treaty of Zurich. This was signed by Austria, France and, in some disgust, Piedmont-Sardinia on 10 November 1859. There were three parts, or, more correctly, three treaties; one between France and Austria which ceded Lombardy to France and re-established peace between the two emperors. The second treaty, between France and Piedmont-Sardinia, passed Lombardy along to the latter power, whilst the third re-established a state of peace between Austria and Sardinia.18

  Even whilst it was being signed, the treaty was, in reality, a dead letter. Provisional governments had usurped power in the Austrian guaranteed statelets of Tuscany, Parma, Modena and the northern portions of the Papal States (also known as Romagna).19 They had gone on to elect representative assemblies, which, being dominated by Italian patriots, were vociferous about becoming Italian under the auspices of Piedmont-Sardinia. Certainly they were not about to put themselves back under the authority of Grand Duke Ferdinand IV, Duke Robert, Duke Francis V, and Pope Pius IX respectively.20 They formed a federation, generally known as the United Provinces of Central Italy, which was a short-lived affair. Plebiscites were held on 11-12 March 1860 on the question of independence or annexation to Piedmont-Sardinia.

  The outcome of these referenda was, in all cases, a massive vote in favour of annexation to Piedmont-Sardinia. The electorate consisted of males over the age of 21, and around seventy-five per cent of those eligible to vote did so. There were accusations that the votes had been rigged,21 and the one-sidedness of the result is of a magnitude that invites suspicion: Parma: For 53,782 - Against 165. Modena: For 52,499 - Against 56. The Papal Legations (Romagna): For 200,659 - Against 244. Tuscany: For 371,000 - Against 15,000.22 However, whilst there is evidence of irregularity in respect of the elections of the provisional governments, with, for example, the more conservative rural voters prevented from casting ballots, there seems little doubt that the results of the plebiscites reflected popular opinion.23 Despite having effectively reneged on his promise in respect of the amount of Italian territory he would liberate, Napoleon still wanted his share of the spoils as agreed at Colombiers in 1858. On 25 March 1860 a general election was held throughout the recently enlarged state, including Nice and Savoy, and on 2 April the deal regarding the territorial transfer, formalised by the Treaty of Turin signed on 24 March 1860, was revealed to the assembly.24 One of the newly elected members was Giuseppe Garibaldi, voted in as deputy for his birthplace – Nice.25

  Garibaldi was a unique figure. He was renowned internationally for his exploits in pursuit of liberation in South America, whilst similar feats in pursuit of a united Italy, particularly during the 1848 revolutions, had raised him to almost legendary status domestically.26 On 12 April he made his first address to Parliament. He read to the assembly the fifth article of the Constitution, which stipulated that no part of the state could be transferred without the consent of parliament.27 He referred to the pressure being exerted on the citizens of Nice, where no public meetings to discuss the matter were allowed, and no canvassing or leafleting arguing against the annexation was permitted. A new governor, Louis Lubonis, had been appointed, and he bent his whole efforts to securing a vote in favour. Garibaldi asked that the referendum in Nice be postponed from 15 April to 22 April.

  Cavour, who had returned as Prime Minister on 20 January 1860, dismissed Garibaldi’s arguments by pointing out that to have refused to honour the Colombiers agreement would have destroyed all hope of advancing the cause of Italian nationalism. He advised Garibaldi to ‘turn your eyes beyond the Mincio and beyond the confines of Tuscany.’28 Garibaldi is supposed to have described Cavour as being a ‘low intriguer’ for his dealings,29 but whatever the status assigned to his secret diplomacy it was undoubtedly effective; large amounts of territory had been added to what was soon to become Italy.

  Garibaldi was, in the interim, to famously add even more. However, on the evening of his plea to the assembly he decided on a more parochial course of action; at the head of two hundred men he would sail for Nice and enter the town immediately after the referendum had taken place. His men would then appropriate the ballot boxes and scatter their contents, thus forcing a rerun prior to which Garibaldi and his followers would actively campaign against annexation.30 This project was abandoned the same evening however; as the Englishman Laurence Oliphant recorded it following his visit to Garibaldi, who was ensconced with a number of others:

  I am very sorry, but we must abandon all idea of carrying out our Nice Programme. Behold these gentlemen from Sicily. All from Sicily! All come here to meet me, to say that the moment is ripe, that delay would be fatal to their hopes; that if we are to relieve their country from the oppression of Bomba, we must act at once. I had hoped to be able to carry out this little Nice affair first, for it is only a matter of a few days; but much as I regret it, the general opinion is, that we shall lose all if we try too much; and fond as I am of my native province, I cannot sacrifice these greater hopes of Italy to it.31

  Nice and Savoy voted undisturbed on the given dates, with the result being, as expected, hugely in favour of union with France.32 Garibaldi’s quoted comment about the moment being ‘ripe’ as regards Sicily was prompted by unrest that had broken out there. It was also provoked, it has been argued, by his annoyance at Cavour and the Piedmontese government regarding the cession of Nice.33 In any event, it was the case that an insurrection had begun in Palermo on 4 May. This quickly spread, leading to it becoming known as the ‘April revolution’.34 In order to support this revolution Garibaldi assembled a force of around 1,000 nationalists (i Mille), and this contingent of redshirts (camicie rosse) embarked in two ‘requisitioned’ paddle-steamers, which they renamed Piemonte and Lombardo, from Quarto near Genoa on 5 May.35 Pursued by vessels of the Neapolitan Navy,36 the Thousand nevertheless landed safely at Marsala, Sicily, on 11 May where they were joined by local insurrectionist forces.37 The armed forces of Francis II, ruler of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, had been weakened somewhat shortly following that monarch’s accession on 22 May 1859. On 7 June some detachments of the Swiss Guard, considered to be the best troops available to the regime, had mutinied. The mutineers had then been massacred by order of General Alessandro Nunziante, Duke of Majano and an intimate of the king, and the rest of the guard then disbanded.38

  This perhaps goes some way to accounting for the victory of around 800 of the redshirts over the Neapolitan forces during the course of an apparently minor engagement near the village of Calatafimi on 15 May. Led by Garibaldi in person, some 1500 of the enemy were beaten, but the battle was decisive inasmuch as without this initial success the whole campaign might have failed. It also fed the Garibaldi legend; it was before this battle that he is supposed to have uttered the immortal phrase ‘here we make Italy or die’ (qui si fa l’Italia o si muore). Garibaldi survived the battle, declared himself dictator of Sicily in the name of King Victor Emmanuel, and went on with the quest to ‘make Italy.’ On 4 June he renamed his force the Southern Army (Esercito Meridionale); it was enlarged by volunteers from northern Italy, desert
ers from the Neapolitan forces, local volunteers, and foreigners (mainly Hungarian). Though there was a good deal of fighting Garibaldi’s progress seemed inexorable. Having successfully crossed the Straits of Messina he travelled to Naples on 7 September and, almost alone and seemingly without any resistance, took control of the capital. His arrival was greeted with popular approval:

  At the railway National Guards were stationed at all the entrances, and flags were coming down in rapid succession, for the arrival of the Dictator was sudden, like everything he does, and people were unprepared. […] At last 12 o’clock strikes, and a bell sounds, and from a distance a signal is made that Garibaldi is approaching. ‘Viva Garibaldi’ rises from a thousand voices, and the train stops; a few [redshirts] get out, and they are seized, hugged, and kissed with that most unmerciful violence which characterises Italian ardour. […] There was one poor elderly man who, by virtue of his white beard, was taken for Garibaldi, and was slobbered so that I thought he must have sunk under the operation; but the great man had gone round by another door, and so there was a rush in all directions to intercept him.39

  The accomplishments of the Southern Army led to concerns in the camp of Garibaldi’s ostensible allies, the Piedmontese regime. Indeed, Victor Emanuel and Cavour, despite having winked at his exploits whilst officially disapproving of them, had become troubled by the rapidity and extent of his success. Garibaldi, though he was well known for his republican views, had of course, in the middle of May, announced that his assumption of the role of dictator was in the name of Victor Emanuel. His subsequent achievements, and there is no denying that they had been remarkable, had propelled him not only to the forefront of the struggle for Italian unity, but also to international fame, or indeed notoriety dependant upon point of view. The Piedmontese regime had, in short, rather lost the initiative, but yet it was they that had to contend with the foreign policy implications that Garibaldi’s advance raised. These devolved essentially upon the position of the Pope and the extent of the territory he ruled. Garibaldi had made little secret of his intention to lead the Southern Army into the Papal States and indeed Rome itself, a course of action that would have caused French intervention.

  Accordingly, and in order to forestall such an eventuality, Cavour played off Napoleon III and Garibaldi against each other, by, in the words of Mack Smith, threatening, ‘with exquisite tact […] Napoleon with Garibaldi, and Garibaldi with Napoleon.’40 This diplomatic strategy was backed by direct action, and on the pretext of using force to quell unrest and disturbances in the Marches and Umbria, which he had arranged for, and to protect Papal authority, Cavour sent a Piedmontese army into those territories on 10 September 1860 of some 50,000 men under the command of General Enrico Cialdini. Pius IX had forces of his own, a cosmopolitan army of some 8,000 men formed in April 1860 under the command of the anti-Napoleonic French general Christophe Leon Louis Juchault de Lamoricière. This heterogeneous force fought with the invaders at the Battle of Castelfidardo on 18 September, and was heavily defeated. Forced to retreat, Lamoriciére concentrated his remaining troops at the fortress of Ancona, but was forced to capitulate on 29 September 1860. Meanwhile other Piedmontese troops had advanced to the south, fighting and winning battles at Perugia and Spoleto. The latter was defended by a contingent of Irishmen, the Brigade of Saint Patrick, under the command of Major Myles O’Reilly. This force held out for two days against a more numerous and better-armed detachment commanded by General Filippo Brignone, but was forced to terms on 18 September.41 Napoleon III had done nothing to prevent the conquest of most of the Papal States.

  Upon Garibaldi’s entry into their capital, the Neapolitan regime had decamped to the city fortress of Gaeta, some 80 kilometres north of Naples. Here the now effectively deposed Francis II attempted to reform his army and seek, a hope looking increasingly forlorn, assistance from another power that would intervene on behalf of those who opposed Italian unification under Piedmont Sardinia. The Neapolitan army was put under the command of 66-year-old War Minister, Field Marshal Giosuè Ritucci, who regrouped and reorganised it at Capua, some 25 kilometres north of Naples. His strategy involved purging his command of unreliable elements, and then utilising this reinvigorated force to fight a battle based on the line of the Volturno river, whereby they hoped to defeat and scatter the Southern Army.

  There were initial signs that the Neapolitan military strategy at least was sound when elements of the Southern Army, advancing from Naples under the leadership of the Hungarian Stefano Türr (Türr István), suffered a repulse at Caiazzo (Cajazzo) on 19 September. Ritucci’s force, numbering over 40,000 men in total according to some sources, also had some success in the recapture of the difficult position of Castel Morrone on 1 October during its advance to the south. This exploit, part of the larger action of the Battle of Volturno, was however to be the last of its kind. Over two days, 1-2 October, Garibaldi, who had returned to lead his forces in person, fought to prevent around 30,000 Neapolitan troops from moving to retake Naples. Despite his 20,000 strong force being outnumbered, they were successful in stopping the enemy advance and driving them back to Capua. In fact the game was almost up for Francis II and his government, who were now being assailed from both north and south as the Piedmontese army, under the personal command of Victor Emanuel II, advanced across the Neapolitan frontier on 13 October. Ritucci was thus forced to leave Capua garrisoned against an attack by the Southern Army, whilst redeploying the majority of his force northwards to the line of the Garigliano some 60 kilometres miles to the north-west. Garibaldi followed, leaving a detachment to contain Capua, which eventually surrendered on 2 November, and on the 26 October 1860 he and Victor Emanuel met at Teano. This meeting later became immortalised in Italian culture because of the supposed ‘Handshake of Teano,’ whereby Garibaldi is depicted shaking the hand with Victor Emanuel and acknowledging him as the (future) King of Italy.

  The same day, Ritucci was relieved of his command and replaced by Giovanni Salzano, but no amount of tinkering could now alter the facts on the ground. A series of fairly minor battles were fought and won by the Piedmontese between 29 October and 4 November, including that of Mola di Gaeta on 2 November, which cut off the Neapolitan regime at Gaeta along with some 10-16,000 troops. These were supported by the, thus far, passive presence of a French squadron of warships, and all that was left for them to hope for was the military intervention of Austria. That this was not to be forthcoming has been attributed to the actions of Prussia under Bismarck, which refused to back Austria and thus left her isolated. Whether this was part of Bismarck’s plan for the unification of Germany is the subject of scholarly disputation, but the effect was to support Italian unification under the auspices of Piedmont-Sardinia.

  Unification was however very much incomplete when Victor Emmanuel II was crowned King of Italy on 17 March 1861. Indeed, Italian society as a whole had immense problems. These included the alienation of the Catholic Church, always likely to be a problem in an overwhelmingly observant population, which believed that a unified nation was against its own interests and argued that Italy, as a state, was illegitimate. Such was Pius IX’s detestation of the concept of an Italian State, or perhaps the removal of the temporal powers of the Papacy that such a polity not only implied but was instrumental in causing, that he:

  […] had recourse to the most formidable weapon at his command: the greater Excommunication, which, with all mediaeval pomp, was pronounced on April 23, 1860 […] No particular individuals were named, but all, beginning with the King of Sardinia, who had taken part or should take part […] or in any way, even outside of Italy, should assist by work or will in the accomplishment of the new order of things, or in any way profit by it, were included.42

  Indeed, the future capital of Italy remained outside the control of that state for nearly a decade following reunification. The Pope, as King, ruled Rome and its environs including Civita Veccchia, Velletri, Frosinoni and Viterbo. These formed the final remnant of the Papal States most of the
rest of which had joined the Kingdom of Italy in 1861.

  Bismarck certainly played a part in the next acquisition of territory considered to be ‘unredeemed’ (Italia irredenta) or incorporated into the Italian state. The Austro-Prussian War, also known as the Third War of Independence to Italians, began with Prussia declaring war on Austria on 16 June 1866 followed by Italy three days later. Italy had agreed to assist Prussia on the condition that Venetia was ceded to it after the conflict, which it obviously expected Prussia to win. Italy hoped to conquer the territory single-handedly and moved two armies against Austria for that purpose. One of them, under General Alfonso Ferrero la Marmora, met with disaster at the Battle of Custoza on 24 June 1866 when it was soundly beaten by an inferior Austrian force under Field Marshal Archduke Albrecht and driven out of Venetia. The defeat was caused by a badly defective supreme command, which divided its forces and had no clear conception of what it wanted to do. Accordingly a series of uncoordinated attacks were made and the Austrians, who kept their forces concentrated, were able to defeat the attackers in a series of isolated encounters. It was hardly a hard-fought battle, (according to Whittam the Austrian casualties far outweighed the Italian), but it destroyed Italian self belief in the military value of their army.43 As a future Chief of Staff put it in his study of the battle published in 1903; ‘the defeat of Custoza still weighs down our army like a cloak of lead (cappa di piombo) 36 years later’44 However, if the Battle of Custoza was perceived as a huge, if indecisive, defeat for the army, the outcome of the Battle of Lissa (Vis) on 20 July was as bad, if not worse, for the navy.45