The Italian Revolutions of 1848–1849 and the First War of Independence

Italy under the Vienna settlement and Young Italy

After Napoleon fell, the Congress of Vienna of 1814–1815 restored the pre-Napoleonic patchwork of states on the Italian peninsula. The Austrian Empire ruled the Kingdom of Lombardy–Venetia in the north directly and the duchies of Parma, Modena and Tuscany indirectly through the Habsburgs. South of them the Papal States held the centre of the peninsula and the Bourbon Kingdom of the Two Sicilies held Naples and Sicily, while only the Kingdom of Sardinia (Piedmont) in the north-west formed an independent power under the House of Savoy. In Lombardy–Venetia heavy taxes and a standing army of 100,000 upheld Austrian rule. By a Venetian account, within fifty years Austria took 45 million Austrian lire more from the region than it spent there, and Venetian business, starved of credit, was stifled. 1 2 3

Three ideals of unification competed. The Piedmontese priest Vincenzo Gioberti proposed in his 1842 book Of the Moral and Civil Primacy of the Italians a confederation of Italian states under the Pope (Neo-Guelphism). Cesare Balbo offered a middle position, a confederation led by Piedmont. Giuseppe Mazzini and Carlo Cattaneo wanted a republic, which proved too extreme for most nationalists. From the 1820s the revolutionary movement was carried by the secret society of the Carbonari. Drawing middle-class professionals, businessmen and intellectuals, it was inspired by the liberty, equality and fraternity of the French Revolution and was strongly anticlerical; its risings of 1820–1821 and 1830–1831 were crushed. 1 4

Mazzini, a lawyer from Genoa, joined the Carbonari, was arrested in 1830 and, choosing exile, founded Young Italy at Marseille in July 1831. Every member swore to make Italy "one, free, independent, republican nation", under the motto "God and the People". The movement counted about 60,000 adherents in 1833, but when a plot for a rising in Piedmont was discovered that year King Charles Albert had twelve men shot and granted no pardons. Mazzini was sentenced to death in absentia, and his invasion of Savoy from Switzerland in February 1834 also failed. A young sailor who joined that rising, Giuseppe Garibaldi, was likewise sentenced to death and fled to South America, where he fought for fourteen years in the wars of Brazil and Uruguay. The red shirts of the Italian Legion he raised at Montevideo later became the emblem of his volunteers. 5 6 7 8

The risings of the 1840s failed one after another. In 1844 the Venetian brothers Attilio and Emilio Bandiera, members of Young Italy, landed in Calabria with about twenty men, were captured and shot with nine companions, and their martyrdom made an enormous impression throughout Italy. What broke the deadlock was the election of Pius IX on 16 June 1846. The new pope amnestied political prisoners, granted a free press, replaced foreign mercenaries with a civic guard and created a council of ministers. For two nights Romans with torches thronged to the Quirinal Palace to cheer him. When he protested against Austria's occupation of Ferrara, patriots hailed him as the coming redeemer of Italy. Mazzini wrote him an open letter from exile in 1847, Garibaldi wrote from Montevideo offering his legion to the Pope, and Charles Albert too offered him support. The Pope himself remarked, "They want to make a Napoleon of me who am only a poor country parson." 1 9 7 5 8

From Palermo to Turin: the wave of constitutions in early 1848

The first rising of the European revolutions of 1848 broke out in Palermo on 12 January. The date was deliberately chosen to coincide with the birthday of the Palermo-born Ferdinand II, and posters announcing it went up three days before. Sicilian hostility was rooted in the suppression of autonomy, the dominance of Neapolitans, the island's poverty and a harsh police regime, and was sharpened by the suspicion that the government had deliberately spread the cholera of 1837, which killed some 70,000 people. The revolt spread to Girgenti on 22 January and to Catania and Messina on the 29th, and within a month more than a hundred communes had joined the committee in Palermo. The Bourbon army withdrew from the island but held on to the citadel of Messina. The committee declared the Bourbon monarchy deposed on 23 January; the Sicilian parliament, convened again, revived the constitution of 1812, proclaimed the Kingdom of Sicily on 25 March and on 13 April deposed Ferdinand and his dynasty for ever. The effective head of state was Ruggero Settimo, and the revolutionary government flew the Italian tricolour defaced with the trinacria. 10 11 12

The news from Sicily set off a rising in the Cilento on 17 January and unrest in Naples, and on 29 January Ferdinand II promised a constitution modelled on the French Charter of 1830, promulgated on 10–11 February (an English account dates the grant to 23 January). The other princes followed: Leopold II of Tuscany on 11 February (17 February in other sources), Charles Albert of Piedmont with an edict of 8 February and the full text on 4 March, and Pius IX with the "Fundamental Statute for the Secular Government of the States of the Church" on 14 March. By the time revolution broke out in Paris on 23 February, three Italian states, four if Sicily is counted separately, had constitutions. In March Charles II of Parma was ousted, and Francis V of Modena, to avoid bloodshed, promised a constitution and amnesty and left for Bolzano on 21 March, leaving a provisional government behind. 12 13 14 15 1 2

Of all these only the Albertine Statute of the Kingdom of Sardinia survived. At a meeting of Turin journalists on 7 January, Count Cavour, editor of the newspaper Il Risorgimento, proposed petitioning for a constitution, and most ministers too thought it better to grant one before the people imposed it. Charles Albert, who even considered abdicating, approved it after an all-night Council of State on 7 February, on condition that the pre-eminence of the Catholic religion and the honour of the monarchy were secured. The Statute gave the executive power and command of the armed forces to the king and the legislative power to an elected chamber and a royally appointed senate, and guaranteed a free press and individual liberty. The vote went only to wealthy men over 25. The first constitutional government, under Cesare Balbo, took office on 16 March. The Statute became the fundamental law of the unified Kingdom of Italy in 1861 and stayed in force until 1948. 7 16 2

Austrian Lombardy–Venetia received no such concessions. From 1 January the Milanese boycotted tobacco and the lottery, state monopolies that brought in over 5 million lire a year. On 3 January, when a crowd insulted Austrian soldiers and pelted them with stones, the soldiers charged with swords and bayonets, killing five and wounding 59. Radetzky confined his troops to barracks for five days and the protests died down. On 8 February students rose in Padua as well and were put down after a day of fighting. Two months later, when news came of the rising in Vienna and the fall of Metternich, Milan and Venice took to the streets again. 17 13

The Five Days of Milan and the Republic of San Marco

When word of Metternich's resignation spread through Milan on 17 March, a peaceful demonstration was called for the next day outside the governor's palace to demand a free press, the dissolution of the police and a civic guard. It soon turned into an assault on the palace, and on 18 March street fighting broke out across the city. Radetzky, a veteran past eighty, shut himself in the Castello Sforzesco with at first 8,000 men (later 18,000–20,000) and held the walls and public buildings. By the 19th the citizens had raised some 1,700 barricades and were firing from windows and roofs, even taking rifles out of the museums. The archbishop backed the populace, at least a hundred priests joined the fighting and a bust of Pius IX was hoisted onto the barricades. On the 20th Luigi Torelli and Scipione Bagaggia raised the tricolour on the highest spire of the cathedral. The orphan boys of the Martinitt ran messages across the town. 18 17 2

On 20 March the young democrats Carlo Cattaneo, Enrico Cernuschi and others set up a council of war at the Palazzo Taverna to direct the fighting, and on the night of the 21st–22nd a provisional government formed under the podestà Gabrio Casati. When Radetzky offered a truce the council split. Casati and the nobles wanted to accept it and call on the King of Sardinia, partly to forestall revolutionary excesses with Piedmontese troops. Cattaneo insisted on the complete evacuation of Lombardy, arguing that "it is better to die of hunger than on the gallows", and prevailed. On the night of the 22nd citizens led by Luciano Manara took the Porta Tosa (later Porta Vittoria), and Radetzky, fearing encirclement, withdrew that night with his hostages to the Quadrilateral 120 km to the east. The Austrians lost the fight, but Cattaneo lost the politics: the council sent the petition asking Charles Albert to enter Lombardy. The plaques of 1861 bear the names of 352 fallen. 18 19 17

In Venice the lawyer Daniele Manin, arrested for high treason on 18 January, was freed under popular pressure on 17 March. The next day Croatian soldiers fired on demonstrators in St Mark's Square, killing eight. On 22 March Manin and his followers, helped by the Arsenal workers who detested their Austrian overseers, seized the naval Arsenal and raised the cry of the old republic, "Viva San Marco!". The Austrians withdrew from Venice on the 26th, and the cities of the Veneto except Verona, garrisoned as part of the Quadrilateral, among them Padua, Vicenza, Treviso and Udine, sided with the lagoon and made Manin president of the Republic of San Marco. The Republic of Venice, which had surrendered to Napoleon in 1797, was in effect revived after 51 years. Manin's leadership rested on the middle classes, and his care for the lower classes together with promises of law and order to the bourgeoisie made him popular. But the Venetian revolutionaries recruited few troops among the mainland peasants, and the Lombard and Venetian soldiers of the Austrian army mostly stayed loyal to the emperor. 20 3 21

The "royal war": from Sardinia's entry to the Salasco armistice

On 23 March, the day after the Five Days ended, Charles Albert declared war on Austria. The First Italian War of Independence had begun. His motives were to avoid a revolution in his own country and to use the risings in Lombardy–Venetia to enlarge his kingdom. He took as war flag the tricolour with the Savoy arms and proclaimed to the people of Lombardy and the Veneto that his troops came to bring "that help which a brother expects from a brother". The Piedmontese army numbered about 65,000. Pushed by public opinion, the other princes sent contingents too: 17,000–18,000 papal troops (Durando's regular division and Ferrari's volunteers) and about 6,400 Tuscans, while Naples promised 25,000 but sent only some 11,000 under Guglielmo Pepe. There were also Lombard and Neapolitan volunteers and the forces of the Republic of San Marco, but these armies were wholly uncoordinated and their political ideals ranged from union with Sardinia to an Italian republic. Cattaneo sneered: "Now that the enemy is in flight, the king wants to come with the whole army." 15 7

The coalition soon fell apart. In an allocution to the consistory on 29 April Pius IX disavowed his army's entry into the Veneto, since he could not fight a great Catholic power like Austria and feared a schism with the Austrian Catholics. The speech reached the Piedmontese staff on 2 May, and Charles Albert lamented that it would "do damage to the cause of Italian independence". The Neo-Guelph dream of an Italy led by the Pope ended there. In Naples, on 15 May, the day the new parliament was to meet for the first time, Ferdinand II used a dispute over the deputies' oath to dissolve it and had the barricades on the Via Toledo battered down by the cannon of his Swiss mercenaries, killing some 500 patriots. The same day he recalled the troops sent north, and the order reached Pepe on 21 May. Pepe and some officers refused it and went to Venice to defend the Republic of San Marco. 15 13 12 4

The fortunes of war turned as well. The Piedmontese won at Pastrengo on 30 April but fought an indecisive battle at Santa Lucia before Verona on 6 May, and on 25 May Austrian reinforcements that had marched through the Veneto joined Radetzky at Verona. On 29 May at Curtatone and Montanara 5,400 Tuscan and Neapolitan volunteers, among them a battalion of students, held off some 20,000 Austrians before retreating with 166 dead, 518 wounded and 1,178 captured. The time they bought let the Piedmontese win at Goito the next day and take the fortress of Peschiera, to cries of "Long live the King of Italy!". But rather than pursue the retreating Austrians, Charles Albert attended first to annexation votes in the occupied territories. Parma voted for union with Sardinia on 2 May and Lombardy by an overwhelming majority on 8 June, and the Venetian assembly approved Manin's proposal of union by 127 votes to 6 on 4 July. Meanwhile the Austrians took Vicenza on 10 June. 15 7 3

On 20 July the two sides were nearly equal: 75,000 Italians against 76,000 Austrians. On 23 July Radetzky struck the Piedmontese II Corps and drove it behind the Mincio, splitting the enemy in two, and on 24–25 July he beat the Piedmontese main body at Custoza (the battle as a whole is also dated 22–27 July, and the Austrians in fact lost more men). The Piedmontese withdrew in good order, but the line of the Adda gave way too and on 4 August they were driven inside the walls of Milan. Short of ammunition and food, the king agreed the next day to give up the city in return for the safe withdrawal of his army. Milanese crowds who wanted to fight on besieged the Palazzo Greppi and fired at the king on its balcony, and he slipped away with the army at night. About a third of the population left with it as exiles, and on the 6th the Austrians entered Milan. Under the armistice concluded by General Salasco on 9 August the Sardinian army withdrew from the whole of Lombardy–Venetia. In Vienna Johann Strauss I's Radetzky March celebrated the victory at its first performance on 31 August. 15 22 7

The "war of the people": the Pope's flight and the Roman Republic

When the royal war stopped, the democrats called for a "war of the people". Garibaldi, rebuffed by the Piedmontese government, had raised 5,000 volunteers under the provisional government of Milan; ignoring the armistice he drove off an Austrian column at Luino on 15 August, but after the fight at Morazzone on the 26th he escaped to Switzerland. In Venice, when the Sardinian commissioners left on news of the armistice, Manin took back the government at the head of a triumvirate, with Pepe commanding the troops. In October Mazzini came down from Switzerland into the Val d'Intelvi towards Lake Como with 850 men, but found no support among the population and failed. In Tuscany Leopold II had to appoint the democrat Giuseppe Montanelli prime minister on 27 October. 15 8 20

In Rome, on 15 November, the day parliament reopened, the papal minister Pellegrino Rossi was stabbed to death. A moderate liberal and a supporter of Neo-Guelphism, he was probably killed by a son of the popular leader Ciceruacchio. The next day crowds marched on the Quirinal demanding a democratic government, social reforms and war against Austria; the palace came under cannon fire with several deaths, and the Pope accepted the list of ministers put to him. The Swiss Guards were disarmed and the Pope became a prisoner in his own palace. On the night of 24 November Pius IX left Rome disguised as an ordinary priest and went to Gaeta, a fortress of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, where Ferdinand II received him. From Gaeta the Pope declared the new government in Rome sacrilegious and refused to receive the delegation led by the mayor of Rome that came to ask him back. Leopold II of Tuscany also left Florence on 30 January 1849 and joined him at Gaeta, and on 15 February a Tuscan Republic was proclaimed under the triumvirate of Guerrazzi, Montanelli and Mazzoni. 23 14 9 4 15 13

The provisional junta in Rome set elections for a constituent assembly for 21 January 1849, with every male citizen over 21 entitled to vote. Since the Pope forbade Catholics to vote, turnout was below 50% everywhere in the Papal States, and the result was a republican-leaning "Assembly of the Damned". Its members were mostly bourgeois and professional men, including 53 jurists and lawyers, 27 owners, 21 doctors, 19 officers and 12 professors, with 25 nobles. Convening on 8 February, the assembly proclaimed the Roman Republic after midnight on the 9th. Carlo Luciano Bonaparte, member for Viterbo, answered the roll-call with "Long live the Republic!". The republic guaranteed the Pope's right to remain head of the Catholic Church but abolished his temporal power. Mazzini, acclaimed a Roman citizen in his absence, reached Rome in early March (another account has him arrive on the day the republic was proclaimed). 23 1 15

On 29 March Mazzini joined Carlo Armellini and Aurelio Saffi in the triumvirate and soon became the real head of the government. The republic eliminated burdensome taxes, gave work to the unemployed, and confiscated some of the Church's large landholdings to distribute them to poor peasants. It reformed prisons and insane asylums and introduced freedom of the press and secular education, but Mazzini shied away from the "right to work", having seen Louis Blanc's National Workshops fail in France. Lower taxes and higher spending were financed by printing money, and as the currency lost value prices soared. The constitution, promulgated on the eve of the republic's fall, provided for freedom of religion (officially limited to Catholicism and Judaism for citizens), a secular state, the abolition of capital punishment and torture, the end of censorship, universal male suffrage, and land reform and a right to housing through the requisition of church property. The English Wikipedia calls it the first constitution in the world to abolish capital punishment; the Italian, the second after Tuscany. 23 2 14 5

From Novara to Palermo: the counter-revolution of spring 1849

Charles Albert sought to wipe out the defeat of the first campaign. On 1 March 1849 the Chamber of Deputies voted 94 to 24 to resume the war, and on the 12th he denounced the armistice; under its terms hostilities began eight days later, on 20 March. He handed effective command to the Polish general Wojciech Chrzanowski. The Piedmontese army, 150,000 strong on paper, came to 115,000 without the sick and those on leave, of whom only 62,000 were front-line troops, while Radetzky had massed 73,000 men around Pavia and crossed the Ticino at once. In the battle at Bicocca south-east of Novara on 23 March, 45,000 Piedmontese infantry were broken by 70,000 Austrian infantry (estimates of the whole armies vary from 45,000 to 59,000 Piedmontese and 41,000 to 70,000 Austrians). The Piedmontese lost 578 dead, 1,405 wounded and 409 fled or captured, the Austrians 410 dead, 1,850 wounded and 963 captured or fled. That night the king abdicated: "From this moment, I am no longer the king; the king is Victor, my son." Victor Emmanuel II agreed an armistice with Radetzky at Vignale on the 24th, and by the Peace of Milan on 6 August Sardinia paid an indemnity of 65 million francs. Charles Albert went into exile at Porto in Portugal and died there on 28 July. 15 24 7

Engels read the abdication this way: "that, after this defeat, a revolution and proclamation of a republic in Turin is expected, arises from the fact that the attempt is being made to prevent it by the abdication of Charles Albert in favour of his eldest son." No Piedmontese republic came. On 1 April Genoa rose on rumours that the Statute would be abolished and the city ceded to Austria, but Alfonso La Marmora had it bombarded and sacked and took its surrender on the 6th, and 450 Genoese left for exile on an American ship. Even so, unlike the other Italian princes, the new king did not withdraw the Albertine Statute, and Sardinia remained the only constitutional state on the peninsula, keeping the tricolour and representative institutions. 24 15 13

On 23 March, the day the battle of Novara ended, Brescia, not yet aware of the defeat, rose under Tito Speri. Nugent's Austrians withdrew into the castle and shelled the town; once reinforcements had encircled it, General Julius von Haynau demanded unconditional surrender. The citizens refused and the fighting went on late into the night, and on 1 April, before the surrender could be signed, the Austrian troops sacked the city and massacred inhabitants. Some 1,000 citizens died in the ten days; Haynau earned the name "the Hyena of Brescia" and the city that of "the Lioness of Italy". Restoration followed in central Italy as well. In Tuscany the moderates recalled the Grand Duke, but d'Aspre's 18,000 Austrians marched in and on 10–11 May bombarded and took Livorno (contemporary sources speak of 317 executions and 800 dead). Openly invited by the Pope, the Austrians occupied Ferrara on 18 February and then besieged and took Bologna (8–16 May) and Ancona (25 May – 21 June), and at Bologna on 8 August they shot the priest Ugo Bassi. 25 26 15 14

Sicily fell too. In September 1848 Ferdinand II sent Carlo Filangieri against Messina; on 6–7 September the city fell after a bombardment and was sacked, the fleet kept shelling it for eight hours after its defenders had surrendered, and the British admiral Parker condemned the ferocity. It earned Ferdinand the nickname re bomba, "the Bomb King". At the Sicilians' request a truce was granted on 18 September. On 28 February 1849 Ferdinand offered a statute of autonomy modelled on the constitution of 1812, which the Palermo government rejected, and the war resumed in late March. The Polish émigré general Ludwik Mierosławski, chief of staff of the Sicilian army since December 1848, faced Filangieri (13,500 men in the English account, 24,000 in the Italian) with some 6,000, but Catania fell on 7 April. Parliament accepted the king's offer on 14 April, and the Bourbon troops entered Palermo on 15 May. The 43 leaders excluded from the amnesty, Ruggero Settimo among them, fled to Malta. In Naples, too, the king dissolved parliament on 13 March 1849, and some 2,000 suspected revolutionaries were jailed by 1851. 11 10 12 15 14 27

The siege of Rome: the French expedition and Garibaldi

From Gaeta the Pope asked the Catholic countries for military help. Austria, tied down in Hungary, could not afford to occupy Rome as well. The decisive intervention came, unexpectedly, from republican France. President Louis Napoleon had himself taken part in a rising against the Pope in 1831, but he was under heavy pressure from the ultramontane Catholics who had voted for him overwhelmingly, and he wanted to weaken Habsburg influence in Italy and extend France's. On 24–25 April General Oudinot landed at Civitavecchia, north-west of Rome, with 7,000–10,000 French troops. Spain sent a force under Fernández de Córdova to Gaeta (4,000 men in the English account, 9,000 in the Italian), and 8,500 Neapolitans invaded the republic from the south. Told that the Pope would be restored, the Roman assembly, amid shouts of "War! War!", resolved to resist by force. 23 15 14

What stiffened the republic's resolve was the arrival of Garibaldi, who at last entered Rome on 27 April, and of Manara's Lombard Bersaglieri on the 29th. On 30 April Oudinot, whose out-of-date maps led him to a walled-up gate, was beaten back before the Porta San Pancrazio by the Romans of Trastevere, Garibaldi's legionaries and citizen-soldiers and driven back towards the sea. The prisoners were sent home with tracts citing Article V of the French constitution: France "will never employ her might against the liberty of any people". But Mazzini, who hoped to befriend the French Republic, refused Garibaldi's urging to follow up the victory. Garibaldi drove off the Neapolitans at Palestrina on 9 May and Velletri on the 19th, while France sent Ferdinand de Lesseps to negotiate a truce and bought time. 23 8 15

With reinforcements bringing him to 30,000 men and a powerful siege train, Oudinot, who had sworn to keep a truce until 4 June, launched a surprise attack on the Villa Pamphili at dawn on the 3rd. After sixteen hours of fighting the Romans had lost at least 700 men (500 of Garibaldi's legion and 200 of Manara's), the French between 250 and 400. Goffredo Mameli, poet of the Canto degli Italiani, was wounded in the leg in these days and died on 6 July. After a siege of nearly a month the French prevailed on 29 June. On the 30th Garibaldi, entering the assembly covered in blood, urged retreat to the Apennines to carry on the fight: "Wherever we may be, there will be Rome!" A truce was agreed on 1 July, and Mazzini and the triumvirate resigned rather than sign a surrender. On the 2nd Garibaldi left Rome with some 4,000 men, and on the 3rd the French entered and restored the Pope's temporal power. The assembly did not dissolve: it passed the republic's constitution as its last act and had it read from the balcony of the Campidoglio, and on the evening of 4 July, when French troops ordered it to disperse, it left a protest "before Italy, France and the civilised world". 28 14 23 8 15

Hunted by Austrian, French, Spanish and Neapolitan troops, Garibaldi tried to reach Venice. After an epic march he found refuge in neutral San Marino with the 250 men who still followed him, and his wife Anita, carrying their fifth child, died near Comacchio. Reaching Sardinian territory, he was expelled on 16 September and began his second exile. Mazzini too left on 12 July for Marseille and then Switzerland. In August Louis Napoleon asked the Pope for a general amnesty, a secularised administration, the Code Napoléon and liberal government, but Pius IX left Rome to three cardinals known as the "Red Triumvirate" and returned only on 12 April 1850. He effectively cancelled the constitution of 1848, restored the death penalty and confined the Jews to the ghetto again. French troops stayed in Rome, propping up the papal government, until the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. 8 15 5 23 9 14

The end of Venice and the reaction

After Novara the Sardinian fleet had to leave Venetian waters, but on 2 April the Venetian assembly, after hearing Manin, voted to fight on despite the blockade. Haynau came on from Brescia with 30,000 men. The mainland fort of Marghera, held by some 2,000–2,500 men under the Neapolitan Girolamo Ulloa, was besieged from 28 April and bombarded from 4 May, and in the first three weeks alone 60,000 projectiles were fired towards Venice. The fort held for twenty-two days and was evacuated on 26 May. In June Haynau left to suppress the revolution in Hungary. On 12 July the Austrians launched balloons carrying bombs from a frigate in the lagoon; the wind kept any from hitting the city, but some historians count it as the first attempt at aerial bombardment in history. From 28 July the city itself was shelled. 3 15

Food ran out and cholera broke out. By 22 August 2,788 Venetians had died of it. Manin proposed surrender to the assembly, threatening to resign if it voted to fight to the last, and the assembly gave him authority to seek terms. These were agreed on 22 August (other sources date the surrender to the 24th), and Radetzky entered Venice on the 27th (other sources date the Austrian entry to the 24th or the 28th). The seventeen-month Republic of San Marco was over. Manin went into exile on a French ship with his family and 39 fellow revolutionaries, and his wife died of cholera within hours of their departure. With the last Italian flag on the peninsula struck, the Italian revolutions of 1848–1849 were wholly crushed. 3 15 20 1

The reaction was long. As governor of Lombardy–Venetia from 1848 to 1857 Radetzky introduced public caning, the death penalty for armed uprising and life sentences for revolutionary plotting. Executions followed under the name of "repression of banditry", and the martyrs of Belfiore at Mantua in 1852 became their symbol. In the south Ferdinand II's policies drove many into exile between 1848 and 1851, and after visiting Naples in 1850 the British politician Gladstone denounced the Bourbon government as "the negation of God erected into a system of government". The exiles scattered: Cattaneo settled at Lugano in Switzerland, Mazzini in London and Settimo in Malta, while Garibaldi worked in Antonio Meucci's candle factory in New York. 29 13 12 8

Assessment

In territorial terms the Italian revolutions of 1848–1849 changed nothing. Austria recovered Lombardy–Venetia, and the expelled princes came back behind Austrian, French, Spanish and Neapolitan bayonets and withdrew their constitutions. Yet the political landscape had changed. Neo-Guelphism, the idea of an Italian federation under the Pope, collapsed with the allocution of 29 April and the flight to Gaeta, and the anticlerical left took this as proof that the papacy was inherently reactionary. Mazzini's republic was briefly realised in Rome and Florence and then trampled by foreign armies. What remained was the Kingdom of Sardinia, which kept its Statute and the tricolour, and the initiative passed to the House of Savoy and Cavour. As the Italian Wikipedia sums it up, Italy would be made not by the virtue of the people but by diplomacy, French military aid and annexation to the Kingdom of Sardinia. Even Manin, in exile in Paris, abandoned republicanism and founded the Italian National Society for unity under the Savoy monarchy. 1 4 13 20

At the centre of the debate over the defeat stand the peasants. The historian Franco Della Peruta notes that the absence of the peasant masses was already recognised as a problem by contemporaries in the immediate aftermath of 1848. In 1849 an anonymous writer in the Mazzinian paper L'Italia del Popolo wrote that "the class policy adopted by the Milanese provisional government caused the coldness of the Lombard peasants towards the national war", and Cattaneo too reproached "the friends of liberty" for "not having called the people of the suburbs and the countryside to bear arms". In 1851 Carlo Pisacane argued that the peasants must be made to understand "that it is in their interest to exchange the spade for the rifle", and Giuseppe Ferrari wrote that "it is no use talking of a Republic if the sovereign people die of hunger". Indeed, in the countryside round Milan the withdrawal of the Piedmontese was greeted with the cry "Down with the lords, down with the townsmen, long live Radetzky". Austria courted the peasants by threatening the liberal landowners with an agrarian reform in their favour. 13

The man who raised the problem to theory was Antonio Gramsci, a founding member and one-time leader of the Italian Communist Party. In the Prison Notebooks, written in the 1930s but published only in 1948–1951, he saw the Risorgimento as a failed agrarian revolution and unification as the consolidation of the supremacy of a mainly bourgeois ruling class over the popular masses. Borrowing the phrase "passive revolution" that the Neapolitan liberal Vincenzo Cuoco had used of the Neapolitan Revolution of 1799, he argued that, unlike the active revolution from below in France, Italy took a path on which elites reformed little by little, keeping the masses out of political experience and preserving the positions of the old ruling class. It was a way to "avoid the popular masses going through a period of political experience such as occurred in France in the years of Jacobinism". Against this stand the account of Nicomede Bianchi and Carlo Tivaroni, in which democrats, the people, moderates and liberal politicians met almost providentially through the mediation of the House of Savoy; Croce and Omodeo, who praised the work of a liberal minority; and Volpe, who celebrated the Risorgimento as a dynastic war and a forerunner of fascism. After the war Denis Mack Smith, Lucy Riall and others re-examined the unification. 13 30 31 1 32

Little of what Marx and Engels wrote on the Italian 1848 is attested in the sources of this section. Engels read the abdication after Novara as a move to forestall a republican revolution. Relations between Mazzini and Marxism hardened into hostility. Mazzini rejected Marxism for its insistence on class struggle and condemned the Paris Commune of 1871, while Marx held that Mazzini's ideas were "nothing better than the old idea of a middle-class republic" and had become reactionary after 1848. Garibaldi, the defender of Rome in 1849, by contrast backed the Commune and called the International "the sun of the future", and many of his disciples moved on to Bakunin's ideas. The Roman Republic's abolition of the death penalty, its secular state and universal male suffrage were swept away by the papal reaction, and the Italian Wikipedia remarks that it took more than a century for such reforms to become reality throughout Europe. Since Austria had to deal with Rome, Venice and Hungary at once in the summer of 1849, Italy's defeat was bound up with the fate of the revolutions of 1848 as a whole. 24 5 8 14 15