French expedition to Rome (1849)
프랑스의 로마 원정 (1849)
The expedition of 1849 in which the French Second Republic sent troops to Italy, overthrew the Roman Republic and restored the rule of Pope Pius IX. General Oudinot's expeditionary force was beaten back by Garibaldi on 30 April, attacked again with reinforcements on 3 June and entered Rome on 3 July. The charge that it violated the constitution, which forbade the use of force against the liberty of any people, led to the Paris demonstration of 13 June 1849.
In depth
After the papal minister Rossi was assassinated in November 1848 and Pius IX fled to Gaeta, a republic was proclaimed in Rome in February 1849. In France the newly elected President Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte and the Party of Order leader Odilon Barrot backed an expedition, both to reward the Catholics led by Montalembert who had helped elect Bonaparte and to keep French influence in Italy against Austria. The force was at first presented as coming "as a friend", to keep Austria out and respect the wishes of the Roman people.
An expeditionary force of about 7,000 men under General Oudinot landed at Civitavecchia on 25 April 1849. On 30 April it attacked the walls of Rome and was soundly beaten back by the republican army under Garibaldi. Bonaparte wrote to Oudinot on 7 May promising reinforcements, and kept sending troops even while his envoy Ferdinand de Lesseps negotiated a truce with Mazzini. Once the May elections had produced an Assembly dominated by the Party of Order, the president recalled Lesseps and ordered a siege. The force, now 30,000 strong, renewed its attack on 3 June and began bombarding the city on 13 June. On 2 July Garibaldi withdrew with some 4,000 men, and on 3 July the French entered Rome.
On 31 July three cardinals named by the pope, the "red triumvirate", took over the government and abolished all laws passed since November 1848. In a letter of 18 August to Edgar Ney, Bonaparte demanded a general amnesty, a secularised administration, the Napoleonic Code and liberal government, but the pope answered in September with a motu proprio promising only consultative bodies. Pius IX did not return to Rome until April 1850, and French troops propped up papal rule until the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870.
At home the expedition set off a major political battle. The Constituent Assembly resolved on 8 May that the expedition be brought back to its declared purpose, and the Mountain, holding that the attack of 3 June violated Article 5 of the constitution, demanded the president's impeachment and was crushed in the demonstration of 13 June. In The Eighteenth Brumaire Marx wrote that "the very first meeting of the council of ministers resolved on the expedition to Rome, which, it was agreed, should be undertaken behind the back of the National Assembly and the means for which were to be wrested from it under false pretenses", and that Bonaparte prepared his coup of 2 December in the same manner and with the same manoeuvres.