Chapter XX (2)

Schwarzenberg's first act was the deposition of his sovereign. The imbecility of the Emperor Ferdinand had long suggested his abdication or dethronement, and the time for decisive action had now arrived. He gladly withdrew into private life: the crown, declined by his brother and heir, was passed on to his nephew, Francis Joseph, a youth of eighteen. This prince had at least not made in person, not uttered with his own lips, not signed with his own hand, those solemn engagements with the Hungarian nation which Austria was now about to annihilate with fire and sword. He had not moved in friendly intercourse with men who were henceforth doomed to the scaffold. He came to the throne as little implicated in the acts of his predecessor as any nominal chief of a State could be; as fitting an instrument in the hands of Court and army as any reactionary faction could desire. Helpless and well-meaning, Francis Joseph, while his troops poured into Hungary, played for a while in Austria the part of a loyal observer of his Parliament; then, when the moment had come for its destruction, he obeyed his soldier-minister as Ferdinand had in earlier days obeyed the students, and signed the decree for its dissolution (March 4, 1849). The Assembly, during its sittings at Vienna, had accomplished one important task: it had freed the peasantry from the burdens attaching to their land and converted them into independent proprietors. This part of its work survived it, and remained almost the sole gain that Austria derived from the struggle of 1848. After the removal to Kremsier, a Committee of the Assembly had been engaged with the formation of a Constitution for Austria, and the draft was now completed. In the course of debate something had been gained by the representatives of the German and the Slavic races in the way of respect for one another's interests and prejudices; some political knowledge had been acquired; some approach made to an adjustment between the claims of the central power and of provincial autonomy. If the Constitution sketched at Kremsier had come into being, it would at least have given to Western Austria and to Galicia, which belonged to this half of the Empire, a system of government based on popular desires and worthy, on the part of the Crown, of a fair trial. But, apart from its own defects from the monarchical point of view, this Constitution rested on the division of the Empire into two independent parts; it assumed the separation of Hungary from the other Hereditary States; and of a separate Hungarian Kingdom the Minister now in power would hear no longer. That Hungary had for centuries possessed and maintained its rights; that, with the single exception of the English, no nation in Europe had equalled the Magyars in the stubborn and unwearied defence of Constitutional law; that, in an age when national spirit was far less hotly inflamed, the Emperor Joseph had well-nigh lost his throne and wrecked his Empire in the attempt to subject this resolute race to a centralised administration, was nothing to Schwarzenberg and the soldiers who were now trampling upon revolution. Hungary was declared to have forfeited by rebellion alike its ancient rights and the contracts of 1848. The dissolution of the Parliament of Kremsier was followed by the publication of an edict affecting to bestow a uniform and centralised Constitution upon the entire Austrian Empire. All existing public rights were thereby extinguished; and, inasmuch as the new Constitution, in so far as it provided for a representative system, never came into existence, but remained in abeyance until it was formally abrogated in 1851, the real effect of the Unitary Edict of March, 1849, which professed to close the period of revolution by granting the same rights to all, was to establish absolute government and the rule of the sword throughout the Emperor's dominions. Provincial institutions giving to some of the German and Slavic districts a shadowy control of their own local affairs only marked the distinction between the favoured and the dreaded parts of the Empire. Ten years passed before freedom again came within sight of the Austrian peoples. [434]

[Hungary.]

[The Roumanians in Transylvania.]

The Hungarian Diet, on learning of the transfer of the crown from Ferdinand to Francis Joseph, had refused to acknowledge this act as valid, on the ground that it had taken place without the consent of the Legislature, and that Francis Joseph had not been crowned King of Hungary. Ferdinand was treated as still the reigning sovereign, and the war now became, according to the Hungarian view, more than ever a war in defence of established right, inasmuch as the assailants of Hungary were not only violators of a settled constitution but agents of a usurping prince. The whole nation was summoned to arms; and in order that there might be no faltering at headquarters, the command over the forces on the Danube was given by Kossuth to Görgei, a young officer of whom little was yet known to the world but that he had executed Count Eugène Zichy, a powerful noble, for holding communications with Jellacic. It was the design of the Austrian Government to attack Hungary at once by the line of the Danube and from the frontier of Galicia on the north-east. The Serbs were to be led forward from their border-provinces against the capital; and another race, which centuries of oppression had filled with bitter hatred of the Magyars, was to be thrown into the struggle. The mass of the population of Transylvania belonged to the Roumanian stock. The Magyars, here known by the name of Szeklers, and a community of Germans, descended from immigrants who settled in Transylvania about the twelfth century, formed a small but a privileged minority, in whose presence the Roumanian peasantry, poor, savage, and absolutely without political rights, felt themselves before 1848 scarcely removed from serfdom. In the Diet of Transylvania the Magyars held command, and in spite of the resistance of the Germans, they had succeeded in carrying an Act, in May, 1848, uniting the country with Hungary. This Act had been ratified by the Emperor Ferdinand, but it was followed by a widespread insurrection of the Roumanian peasantry, who were already asserting their claims as a separate nation and demanding equality with their oppressors. The rising of the Roumanians had indeed more of the character of an agrarian revolt than of a movement for national independence. It was marked by atrocious cruelty; and although the Hapsburg standard was raised, the Austrian commandant, General Puchner, hesitated long before lending the insurgents his countenance. At length, in October, he declared against the Hungarian Government. The union of the regular troops with the peasantry overpowered for a time all resistance. The towns fell under Austrian sway, and although the Szeklers were not yet disarmed, Transylvania seemed to be lost to Hungary. General Puchner received orders to lead his troops, with the newly formed Roumanian militia, westward into the Banat, in order to co-operate in the attack which was to overwhelm the Hungarians from every quarter of the kingdom. [435]

[The Austrians occupy Pesth, Jan. 5, 1849.]

On the 15th of December, Windischgrätz, in command of the main Austrian army, crossed the river Leitha, the border between German and Magyar territory. Görgei, who was opposed to him, had from the first declared that Pesth must be abandoned and a war of defence carried on in Central Hungary. Kossuth, however, had scorned this counsel, and announced that he would defend Pesth to the last. The backwardness of the Hungarian preparations and the disorder of the new levies justified the young general, who from this time assumed the attitude of contempt and hostility towards the Committee of Defence. Kossuth had in fact been strangely served by fortune in his choice of Görgei. He had raised him to command on account of one irretrievable act of severity against an Austrian partisan, and without any proof of his military capacity. In the untried soldier he had found a general of unusual skill; in the supposed devotee to Magyar patriotism he had found a military politician as self-willed and as insubordinate as any who have ever distracted the councils of a falling State. Dissensions and misunderstandings aggravated the weakness of the Hungarians in the field. Position after position was lost, and it soon became evident that the Parliament and Government could remain no longer at Pesth. They withdrew to Debreczin beyond the Theiss, and on the 5th of January, 1849, Windischgrätz made his entry into the capital. [436]

[The Hungarian Government at Debreczin.]

[Kossuth and Görgei.]

The Austrians now supposed the war to be at an end. It was in fact but beginning. The fortress of Comorn, on the upper Danube, remained in the hands of the Magyars; and by conducting his retreat northwards into a mountainous country where the Austrians could not follow him Görgei gained the power either of operating against Windischgrätz's communications or of combining with the army of General Klapka, who was charged with the defence of Hungary against an enemy advancing from Galicia. While Windischgrätz remained inactive at Pesth, Klapka met and defeated an Austrian division under General Schlick which had crossed the Carpathians and was moving southwards towards Debreczin. Görgei now threw himself eastwards upon the line of retreat of the beaten enemy, and Schlick's army only escaped capture by abandoning its communications and seeking refuge with Windischgrätz at Pesth. A concentration of the Magyar forces was effected on the Theiss, and the command over the entire army was given by Kossuth to Dembinski, a Pole who had gained distinction in the wars of Napoleon and in the campaign of 1831. Görgei, acting as the representative of the officers who had been in the service before the Revolution, had published an address declaring that the army would fight for no cause but that of the Constitution as established by Ferdinand, the legitimate King, and that it would accept no commands but those of the Ministers whom Ferdinand had appointed. Interpreting this manifesto as a direct act of defiance, and as a warning that the army might under Görgei's command make terms on its own authority with the Austrian Government, Kossuth resorted to the dangerous experiment of superseding the national commanders by a Pole who was connected with the revolutionary party throughout Europe. The act was disastrous in its moral effects upon the army; and, as a general, Dembinski entirely failed to justify his reputation. After permitting Schlick's corps to escape him he moved forwards from the Theiss against Pesth. He was met by the Austrians and defeated at Kapolna (February 26). Both armies retired to their earlier positions, and, after a declaration from the Magyar generals that they would no longer obey his orders, Dembinski was removed from his command, though he remained in Hungary to interfere once more with evil effect before the end of the war.

[The Austrians driven out of Hungary, April.]

The struggle between Austria and Hungary had reached this stage when the Constitution merging all provincial rights in one centralised system was published by Schwarzenberg. The Croats, the Serbs, the Roumanians, who had so credulously flocked to the Emperor's banner under the belief that they were fighting for their own independence, at length discovered their delusion. Their enthusiasm sank; the bolder among them even attempted to detach their countrymen from the Austrian cause; but it was too late to undo what had already been done. Jellacic, now undistinguishable from any other Austrian general, mocked the politicians of Agram who still babbled of Croatian autonomy: Stratimirovic, the national leader of the Serbs, sank before his rival the Patriarch of Carlowitz, a Churchman who preferred ecclesiastical immunities granted by the Emperor of Austria to independence won on the field of battle by his countrymen. Had a wiser or more generous statesmanship controlled the Hungarian Government in the first months of its activity, a union between the Magyars and the subordinate races against Viennese centralisation might perhaps even now have been effected. But distrust and animosity had risen too high for the mediators between Slav and Magyar to attain any real success, nor was any distinct promise of self-government even now to be drawn from the offers of concession which were held out at Debreczin. An interval of dazzling triumph seemed indeed to justify the Hungarian Government in holding fast to its sovereign claims. In the hands of able leaders no task seemed too hard for Magyar troops to accomplish. Bem, arriving in Transylvania without a soldier, created a new army, and by a series of extraordinary marches and surprises not only overthrew the Austrian and Roumanian troops opposed to him, but expelled a corps of Russians whom General Puchner in his extremity had invited to garrison Hermannstadt. Görgei, resuming in the first week of April the movement in which Dembinski had failed, inflicted upon the Austrians a series of defeats that drove them back to the walls of Pesth; while Klapka, advancing on Comorn, effected the relief of this fortress, and planted in the rear of the Austrians a force which threatened to cut them off from Vienna. It was in vain that the Austrian Government removed Windischgrätz from his command. His successor found that a force superior to his own was gathering round him on every side. He saw that Hungary was lost; and leaving a garrison in the fortress of Buda, he led off his army in haste from the capital, and only paused in his retreat when he had reached the Austrian frontier.

[Declaration of Hungarian Independence, April 19.]

The Magyars, rallying from their first defeats, had brilliantly achieved the liberation of their land. The Court of Vienna, attempting in right of superior force to overthrow an established constitution, had proved itself the inferior power; and in mingled exaltation and resentment it was natural that the party and the leaders who had been foremost in the national struggle of Hungary should deem a renewed union with Austria impossible, and submission to the Hapsburg crown an indignity. On the 19th of April, after the defeat of Windischgrätz but before the evacuation of Pesth, the Diet declared that the House of Hapsburg had forfeited its throne, and proclaimed Hungary an independent State. No statement was made as to the future form of government, but everything indicated that Hungary, if successful in maintaining its independence, would become a Republic, with Kossuth, who was now appointed Governor, for its chief. Even in the revolutionary severance of ancient ties homage was paid to the legal and constitutional bent of the Hungarian mind. Nothing was said in the Declaration of April 19th of the rights of man; there was no Parisian commonplace on the sovereignty of the people. The necessity of Hungarian independence was deduced from the offences which the Austrian House had committed against the written and unwritten law of the land, offences continued through centuries and crowned by the invasion under Windischgrätz, by the destruction of the Hungarian Constitution in the edict of March 9th, and by the introduction of the Russians into Transylvania. Though coloured and exaggerated by Magyar patriotism, the charges made against the Hapsburg dynasty were on the whole in accordance with historical fact; and if the affairs of States were to be guided by no other considerations than those relating to the performance of contracts, Hungary had certainly established its right to be quit of partnership with Austria and of its Austrian sovereign. But the judgment of history has condemned Kossuth's declaration of Hungarian independence in the midst of the struggle of 1849 as a great political error. It served no useful purpose; it deepened the antagonism already existing between the Government and a large part of the army; and while it added to the sources of internal discord, it gave colour to the intervention of Russia as against a revolutionary cause. Apart from its disastrous effect upon the immediate course of events, it was based upon a narrow and inadequate view both of the needs and of the possibilities of the future. Even in the interests of the Magyar nation itself as a European power, it may well be doubted whether in severance from Austria such influence and such weight could possibly have been won by a race numerically weak and surrounded by hostile nationalities, as the ability and the political energy of the Magyars have since won for them in the direction of the accumulated forces of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

[Russian intervention against Hungary.]

It has generally been considered a fatal error on the part of the Hungarian commanders that, after expelling the Austrian army, they did not at once march upon Vienna, but returned to lay siege to the fortress of Buda, which resisted long enough to enable the Austrian Government to reorganise and to multiply its forces. But the intervention of Russia would probably have been fatal to Hungarian independence, even if Vienna had been captured and a democratic government established there for a while in opposition to the Court at Olmütz. The plan of a Russian intervention, though this intervention was now explained by the community of interest between Polish and Hungarian rebels, was no new thing. Soon after the outbreak of the March Revolution the Czar had desired to send his troops both into Prussia and into Austria as the restorers of monarchical authority. His help was declined on behalf of the King of Prussia; in Austria the project had been discussed at successive moments of danger, and after the overthrow of the Imperial troops in Transylvania by Bem the proffered aid was accepted. The Russians who then occupied Hermannstadt did not, however, enter the country as combatants; their task was to garrison certain positions still held by the Austrians, and so to set free the Emperor's troops for service in the field. On the declaration of Hungarian independence, it became necessary for Francis Joseph to accept his protector's help without qualification or disguise. An army of eighty thousand Russians marched across Galicia to assist the Austrians in grappling with an enemy before whom, when single-handed, they had succumbed. Other Russian divisions, while Austria massed its troops on the Upper Danube, entered Transylvania from the south and east, and the Magyars in the summer of 1849 found themselves compelled to defend their country against forces three times more numerous than their own. [437]

[The summer campaign in Hungary, July-August, 1849.]

[Capitulation of Vilagos, August 13.]

[Vengeance of Austria.]

When it became known that the Czar had determined to throw all his strength into the scale, Kossuth saw that no ordinary operations of war could possibly avert defeat, and called upon his countrymen to destroy their homes and property at the approach of the enemy, and to leave to the invader a flaming and devastated solitude. But the area of warfare was too vast for the execution of this design, even if the nation had been prepared for so desperate a course. The defence of Hungary was left to its armies, and Görgei became the leading figure in the calamitous epoch that followed. While the Government prepared to retire to Szegedin, far in the south-east, Görgei took post on the Upper Danube, to meet the powerful force which the Emperor of Austria had placed under the orders of General Haynau, a soldier whose mingled energy and ferocity in Italy had marked him out as a fitting scourge for the Hungarians, and had won for him supreme civil as well as military powers. Görgei naturally believed that the first object of the Austrian commander would be to effect a junction with the Russians, who, under Paskiewitsch, the conqueror of Kars in 1829, were now crossing the Carpathians; and he therefore directed all his efforts against the left of the Austrian line. While he was unsuccessfully attacking the enemy on the river Waag north of Comorn, Haynau with the mass of his forces advanced on the right bank of the Danube, and captured Raab (June 28th). Görgei threw himself southwards, but his efforts to stop Haynau were in vain, and the Austrians occupied Pesth (July 11th). The Russians meanwhile were advancing southwards by an independent line of march. Their vanguard reached the Danube and the Upper Theiss, and Görgei seemed to be enveloped by the enemy. The Hungarian Government adjured him to hasten towards Szegedin and Arad, where Kossuth was concentrating all the other divisions for a final struggle; but Görgei held on to his position about Comorn until his retreat could only be effected by means of a vast detour northwards, and before he could reach Arad all was lost. Dembinski was again in command. Charged with the defence of the passage of the Theiss about Szegedin, he failed to prevent the Austrians from crossing the river, and on the 5th of August was defeated at Czoreg with heavy loss. Kossuth now gave the command to Bern, who had hurried from Transylvania, where overpowering forces had at length wrested victory from his grasp. Bern fought the last battle of the campaign at Temesvar. He was overthrown and driven eastwards, but succeeded in leading a remnant of his army across the Moldavian frontier and so escaped capture. Görgei, who was now close to Arad, had some strange fancy that it would dishonour his army to seek refuge on neutral soil. He turned northwards so as to encounter Russian and not Austrian regiments, and without striking a blow, without stipulating even for the lives of the civilians in his camp, he led his army within the Russian lines at Vilagos, and surrendered unconditionally to the generals of the Czar. His own life was spared; no mercy was shown to those who were handed over as his fellow-prisoners by the Russian to the Austrian Government, or who were seized by Haynau as his troops advanced. Tribunals more resembling those of the French Reign of Terror than the Courts of a civilised Government sent the noblest patriots and soldiers of Hungary to the scaffold. To the deep disgrace of the Austrian Crown, Count Batthyány, the Minister of Ferdinand, was included among those whose lives were sacrificed. The vengeance of the conqueror seemed the more frenzied and the more insatiable because it had only been rendered possible by foreign aid. Crushed under an iron rule, exhausted by war, the prey of a Government which knew only how to employ its subject-races as gaolers over one another, Hungary passed for some years into silence and almost into despair. Every vestige of its old constitutional rights was extinguished. Its territory was curtailed by the separation of Transylvania and Croatia; its administration was handed over to Germans from Vienna. A conscription, enforced not for the ends of military service but as the surest means of breaking the national spirit, enrolled its youth in Austrian regiments, and banished them to the extremities of the empire. No darker period was known in the history of Hungary since the wars of the seventeenth century than that which followed the catastrophe of 1849. [438]

[Italian affairs, August, 1848-March, 1849.]

[Murder of Rossi, Nov. 15. Flight of Pius IX.]

[Roman Republic, Feb. 9, 1849.]

[Tuscany.]

The gloom which followed Austrian victory was now descending not on Hungary alone but on Italy also. The armistice made between Radetzky and the King of Piedmont at Vigevano in August, 1848, lasted for seven months, during which the British and French Governments endeavoured, but in vain, to arrange terms of peace between the combatants. With military tyranny in its most brutal form crushing down Lombardy, it was impossible that Charles Albert should renounce the work of deliverance to which he had pledged himself. Austria, on the other hand, had now sufficiently recovered its strength to repudiate the concessions which it had offered at an earlier time, and Schwarzenberg on assuming power announced that the Emperor would maintain Lombardy at every cost. The prospects of Sardinia as regarded help from the rest of the Peninsula were far worse than when it took up arms in the spring of 1848. Projects of a general Italian federation, of a military union between the central States and Piedmont, of an Italian Constituent Assembly, had succeeded one another and left no result. Naples had fallen back into absolutism; Rome and Tuscany, from which aid might still have been expected, were distracted by internal contentions, and hastening as it seemed towards anarchy. After the defeat of Charles Albert at Custozza, Pius IX., who was still uneasily playing his part as a constitutional sovereign, had called to office Pellegrino Rossi, an Italian patriot of an earlier time, who had since been ambassador of Louis Philippe at Rome, and by his connection with the Orleanist Monarchy had incurred the hatred of the Republican party throughout Italy. Rossi, as a vigorous and independent reformer, was as much detested in clerical and reactionary circles as he was by the demagogues and their followers. This, however, profited him nothing; and on the 15th of November, as he was proceeding to the opening of the Chambers, he was assassinated by an unknown hand. Terrified by this crime, and by an attack upon his own palace by which it was followed, Pius fled to Gaeta and placed himself under the protection of the King of Naples. A Constituent Assembly was summoned and a Republic proclaimed at Rome, between which and the Sardinian Government there was so little community of feeling that Charles Albert would, if the Pope had accepted his protection, have sent his troops to restore him to a position of security. In Tuscany affairs were in a similar condition. The Grand Duke had for some months been regarded as a sincere, though reserved, friend of the Italian cause, and he had even spoken of surrendering his crown if this should be for the good of the Italian nation. When, however, the Pope had fled to Gaeta, and the project was openly avowed of uniting Tuscany with the Roman States in a Republic, the Grand Duke, moved more by the fulminations of Pius against his despoilers than by care for his own crown, fled in his turn, leaving the Republicans masters of Florence. A miserable exhibition of vanity, riot, and braggadocio was given to the world by the politicians of the Tuscan State. Alike in Florence and in Rome all sense of the true needs of the moment, of the absolute uselessness of internal changes of Government if Austria was to maintain its dominion, seemed to have vanished from men's minds. Republican phantoms distracted the heart and the understanding; no soldier, no military administrator arose till too late by the side of the rhetoricians and mob-leaders who filled the stage; and when, on the 19th of March, the armistice was brought to a close in Upper Italy, Piedmont took the field alone. [439]

[The Match campaign, 1849.]

[Battle of Novara, March 23.]

The campaign which now began lasted but for five days. While Charles Albert scattered his forces from Lago Maggiore to Stradella on the south of the Po, hoping to move by the northern road upon Milan, Radetzky concentrated his troops near Pavia, where he intended to cross the Ticino. In an evil moment Charles Albert had given the command of his army to Chrzanowski, a Pole, and had entrusted its southern division, composed chiefly of Lombard volunteers, to another Pole, Ramorino, who had been engaged in Mazzini's incursion into Savoy in 1833. Ramorino had then, rightly or wrongly, incurred the charge of treachery. His relations with Chrzanowski were of the worst character, and the habit of military obedience was as much wanting to him as the sentiment of loyalty to the sovereign from whom he had now accepted a command. The wilfulness of this adventurer made the Piedmontese army an easy prey. Ramorino was posted on the south of the Po, near its junction with the Ticino, but received orders on the commencement of hostilities to move northwards and defend the passage of the Ticino at Pavia, breaking up the bridges behind him. Instead of obeying this order he kept his division lingering about Stradella. Radetzky, approaching the Ticino at Pavia, found the passage unguarded. He crossed the river with the mass of his army, and, cutting off Ramorino's division, threw himself upon the flank of the scattered Piedmontese. Charles Albert, whose headquarters were at Novara, hurried southwards. Before he could concentrate his troops, he was attacked at Mortara by the Austrians and driven back. The line of retreat upon Turin and Alessandria was already lost; an attempt was made to hold Novara against the advancing Austrians. The battle which was fought in front of this town on the 23rd of March ended with the utter overthrow of the Sardinian army. So complete was the demoralisation of the troops that the cavalry were compelled to attack bodies of half-maddened infantry in the streets of Novara in order to save the town from pillage. [440]

[Abdication of Charles Albert.]

Charles Albert had throughout the battle of the 23rd appeared to seek death. The reproaches levelled against him for the abandonment of Milan in the previous year, the charges of treachery which awoke to new life the miserable record of his waverings in 1821, had sunk into the very depths of his being. Weak and irresolute in his earlier political career, harsh and illiberal towards the pioneers of Italian freedom during a great part of his reign, Charles had thrown his whole heart and soul into the final struggle of his country against Austria. This struggle lost, life had nothing more for him. The personal hatred borne towards him by the rulers of Austria caused him to believe that easier terms of peace might be granted to Piedmont if another sovereign were on its throne, and his resolution, in case of defeat, was fixed and settled. When night fell after the battle of Novara he called together his generals, and in their presence abdicated his crown. Bidding an eternal farewell to his son Victor Emmanuel, who knelt weeping before him, he quitted the army accompanied by but one attendant, and passed unrecognised through the enemy's guards. He left his queen, his capital, unvisited as he journeyed into exile. The brief residue of his life was spent in solitude near Oporto. Six months after the battle of Novara he was carried to the grave.

[Beginning of Victor Emmanuel's reign.]

It may be truly said of Charles Albert that nothing in his reign became him like the ending of it. Hopeless as the conflict of 1849 might well appear, it proved that there was one sovereign in Italy who was willing to stake his throne, his life, the whole sum of his personal interests, for the national cause; one dynasty whose sons knew no fear save that others should encounter death before them on Italy's behalf. Had the profoundest statesmanship, the keenest political genius, governed the counsels of Piedmont in 1849, it would, with full prescience of the ruin of Novara, have bidden the sovereign and the army strike in self-sacrifice their last unaided blow. From this time there was but one possible head for Italy. The faults of the Government of Turin during Charles Albert's years of peace had ceased to have any bearing on Italian affairs; the sharpest tongues no longer repeated, the most credulous ear no longer harboured the slanders of 1848; the man who, beaten and outnumbered, had for hours sat immovable in front of the Austrian cannon at Novara had, in the depth of his misfortune, given to his son not the crown of Piedmont only but the crown of Italy. Honour, patriotism, had made the young Victor Emmanuel the hope of the Sardinian army; the same honour and patriotism carried him safely past the lures which Austria set for the inheritor of a ruined kingdom, and gave in the first hours of his reign an earnest of the policy which was to end in Italian union. It was necessary for him to visit Radetzky in his camp in order to arrange the preliminaries of peace. There, amid flatteries offered to him at his father's expense, it was notified to him that if he would annul the Constitution that his father had made, he might reckon not only on an easy quittance with the conqueror, but on the friendship and support of Austria. This demand, though strenuously pressed in later negotiations, Victor Emmanuel unconditionally refused. He had to endure for a while the presence of Austrian troops in his kingdom, and to furnish an indemnity which fell heavily on so small a State; but the liberties of his people remained intact, and the pledge given by his father inviolate. Amid the ruin of all hopes and the bankruptcy of all other royal reputations throughout Italy, there proved to be one man, one government, in which the Italian people could trust. This compensation at least was given in the disasters of 1849, that the traitors to the cause of Italy and of freedom could not again deceive, nor the dream of a federation of princes again obscure the necessity of a single national government. In the fidelity of Victor Emmanuel to the Piedmontese Constitution lay the pledge that when Italy's next opportunity should arrive, the chief would be there who would meet the nation's need.

[Restoration in Tuscany.]

[Rome and France.]

[French intervention determined on.]

The battle of Novara had not long been fought when the Grand Duke of Tuscany was restored to his throne under an Austrian garrison, and his late democratic Minister, Guerazzi, who had endeavoured by submission to the Court-party to avert an Austrian occupation, was sent into imprisonment. At Rome a far bolder spirit was shown. Mazzini had arrived in the first week of March, and, though his exhortation to the Roman Assembly to forget the offences of Charles Albert and to unite against the Austrians in Lombardy came too late, he was able, as one of a Triumvirate with dictatorial powers, to throw much of his own ardour into the Roman populace in defence of their own city and State. The enemy against whom Rome had to be defended proved indeed to be other than that against whom preparations were being made. The victories of Austria had aroused the apprehension of the French Government; and though the fall of Piedmont and Lombardy could not now be undone, it was determined by Louis Napoleon and his Ministers to anticipate Austria's restoration of the Papal power by the despatch of French troops to Rome. All the traditions of French national policy pointed indeed to such an intervention. Austria had already invaded the Roman States from the north, and the political conditions which in 1832 had led so pacific a minister as Casimir Perier to occupy Ancona were now present in much greater force. Louis Napoleon could not, without abandoning a recognised interest and surrendering something of the due influence of France, have permitted Austrian generals to conduct the Pope back to his capital and to assume the government of Central Italy. If the first impulses of the Revolution of 1848 had still been active in France, its intervention would probably have taken the form of a direct alliance with the Roman Republic; but public opinion had travelled far in the opposite direction since the Four Days of June; and the new President, if he had not forgotten his own youthful relations with the Carbonari, was now a suitor for the solid favours of French conservative and religious sentiment. His Ministers had not recognised the Roman Republic. They were friends, no doubt, to liberty; but when it was certain that the Austrians, the Spaniards, the Neapolitans, were determined to restore the Pope, it might be assumed that the continuance of the Roman Republic was an impossibility. France, as a Catholic and at the same time a Liberal Power, might well, under these circumstances, address itself to the task of reconciling Roman liberty with the inevitable return of the Holy Father to his temporal throne. Events were moving too fast for diplomacy; troops must be at once despatched, or the next French envoy would find Radetzky on the Tiber. The misgivings of the Republican part of the Assembly at Paris were stilled by French assurances of the generous intentions of the Government towards the Roman populations, and of its anxiety to shelter them from Austrian domination, President, Ministers, and generals resolutely shut their eyes to the possibility that a French occupation of Rome might be resisted by force by the Romans themselves; and on the 22nd of April an armament of about ten thousand men set sail for Civita Vecchia under the command of General Oudinot, a son of the Marshal of that name.

[The French at Civita Vecchia, April 25, 1849.]

[Oudinot attacks Rome and is repelled, April 30.]

Before landing on the Italian coast, the French general sent envoys to the authorities at Civita Vecchia, stating that his troops came as friends, and demanding that they should be admitted into the town. The Municipal Council determined not to offer resistance, and the French thus gained a footing on Italian soil and a basis for their operations. Messages came from French diplomatists in Rome encouraging the general to advance without delay. The mass of the population, it was said, would welcome his appearance; the democratic faction, if reckless, was too small to offer any serious resistance, and would disappear as soon as the French should enter the city. On this point, however, Oudinot was speedily undeceived. In reply to a military envoy who was sent to assure the Triumvirs of the benevolent designs of the French, Mazzini bluntly answered that no reconciliation with the Pope was possible; and on the 26th of April the Roman Assembly called upon the Executive to repel force by force. Oudinot now proclaimed a state of siege at Civita Vecchia, seized the citadel, and disarmed the garrison. On the 28th he began his march on Rome. As he approached, energetic preparations were made for resistance. Garibaldi, who had fought at the head of a free corps against the Austrians in Upper Italy in 1848, had now brought some hundreds of his followers to Rome. A regiment of Lombard volunteers, under their young leader Manara, had escaped after the catastrophe of Novara, and had come to fight for liberty in its last stronghold on Italian soil. Heroes, exiles, desperadoes from all parts of the Peninsula, met in the streets of Rome, and imparted to its people a vigour and resolution of which the world had long deemed them incapable. Even the remnant of the Pontifical Guard took part in the work of defence. Oudinot, advancing with his little corps of seven thousand men, found himself, without heavy artillery, in front of a city still sheltered by its ancient fortifications, and in the presence of a body of combatants more resolute than his own troops and twice as numerous. He attacked on the 30th, was checked at every point, and compelled to retreat towards Civita Vecchia, leaving two hundred and fifty prisoners in the hands of the enemy. [441]

[French policy, April-May.]

Insignificant as was this misfortune of the French arms, it occasioned no small stir in Paris and in the Assembly. The Government, which had declared that the armament was intended only to protect Rome against Austria, was vehemently reproached for its duplicity, and a vote was passed demanding that the expedition should not be permanently diverted from the end assigned to it. Had the Assembly not been on the verge of dissolution it would probably have forced upon the Government a real change of policy. A general election, however, was but a few days distant, and until the result of this election should be known the Ministry determined to temporise. M. Lesseps, since famous as the creator of the Suez Canal, was sent to Rome with instructions to negotiate for some peaceable settlement. More honest than his employers, Lesseps sought with heart and soul to fulfil his task. While he laboured in city and camp, the French elections for which the President and Ministers were waiting took place, resulting in the return of a Conservative and reactionary majority. The new Assembly met on the 28th of May. In the course of the next few days Lesseps accepted terms proposed by the Roman Government, which would have precluded the French from entering Rome. Oudinot, who had been in open conflict with the envoy throughout his mission, refused his sanction to the treaty, and the altercations between the general and the diplomatist were still at their height when despatches arrived from Paris announcing that the powers given to Lesseps were at an end, and ordering Oudinot to recommence hostilities. The pretence of further negotiation would have been out of place with the new Parliament. On the 4th of June the French general, now strongly reinforced, occupied the positions necessary for a regular siege of Rome.

[Attempted insurrection in France, June 13.]

[The French enter Rome, July 3.]

Against the forces now brought into action it was impossible that the Roman Republic could long defend itself. One hope remained, and that was in a revolution within France itself. The recent elections had united on the one side all Conservative interests, on the other the Socialists and all the more extreme factions of the Republican party. It was determined that a trial of strength should first be made within the Assembly itself upon the Roman question, and that, if the majority there should stand firm, an appeal should be made to insurrection. Accordingly on the 11th of June, after the renewal of hostilities had been announced in Paris, Ledru Rollin demanded the impeachment of the Ministry. His motion was rejected, and the signal was given for an outbreak not only in the capital but in Lyons and other cities. But the Government were on their guard, and it was in vain that the resources of revolution were once more brought into play. General Changarnier suppressed without bloodshed a tumult in Paris on June 13th; and though fighting took place at Lyons, the insurrection proved feeble in comparison with the movements of the previous year. Louis Napoleon and his Ministry remained unshaken, and the siege of Rome was accordingly pressed to its conclusion. Oudinot, who at the beginning of the month had carried the positions held by the Roman troops outside the walls, opened fire with heavy artillery on the 14th. The defence was gallantly sustained by Garibaldi and his companions until the end of the month, when the breaches made in the walls were stormed by the enemy, and further resistance became impossible. The French made their entry into Rome on the 3rd of July, Garibaldi leading his troops northwards in order to prolong the struggle with the Austrians who were now in possession of Bologna, and, if possible, to reach Venice, which was still uncaptured. Driven to the eastern coast and surrounded by the enemy, he was forced to put to sea. He landed again, but only to be hunted over mountain and forest. His wife died by his side. Rescued by the devotion of Italian patriots, he made his escape to Piedmont and thence to America, to reappear in all the fame of his heroic deeds and sufferings at the next great crisis in the history of his country.

[The restored Pontifical Government.]

It had been an easy task for a French army to conquer Rome; it was not so easy for the French Government to escape from the embarrassments of its victory. Liberalism was still the official creed of the Republic, and the protection of the Roman population from a reaction under Austrian auspices had been one of the alleged objects of the Italian expedition. No stipulation had, however, been made with the Pope during the siege as to the future institutions of Rome; and when, on the 14th of July, the restorations of Papal authority was formally announced by Oudinot, Pius and his Minister Antonelli still remained unfettered by any binding engagement. Nor did the Pontiff show the least inclination to place himself in the power of his protectors. He remained at Gaeta, sending a Commission of three Cardinals to assume the government of Rome. The first acts of the Cardinals dispelled any illusion that the French might have formed as to the docility of the Holy See. In the presence of a French Republican army they restored the Inquisition, and appointed a Board to bring to trial all officials compromised in the events that had taken place since the murder of Rossi in November, 1848. So great was the impression made on public opinion by the action of the Cardinals that Louis Napoleon considered it well to enter the lists in person on behalf of Roman liberty; and in a letter to Colonel Ney, a son of the Marshal, he denounced in language of great violence the efforts that were being made by a party antagonistic to France to base the Pope's return upon proscription and tyranny. Strong in the support of Austria and the other Catholic Powers, the Papal Government at Gaeta received this menace with indifference, and even made the discourtesy of the President a ground for withholding concessions. Of the re-establishment of the Constitution granted by Pius in 1848 there was now no question; all that the French Ministry could hope was to save some fragments in the general shipwreck of representative government, and to avert the vengeance that seemed likely to fall upon the defeated party. A Pontifical edict, known as the Motu Proprio, ultimately bestowed upon the municipalities certain local powers, and gave to a Council, nominated by the Pope from among the persons chosen by the municipalities, the right of consultation on matters of finance. More than this Pius refused to grant, and when he returned to Rome it was as an absolute sovereign. In its efforts on behalf of the large body of persons threatened with prosecution the French Government was more successful. The so-called amnesty which was published by Antonelli with the Motu Proprio seemed indeed to have for its object the classification of victims rather than the announcement of pardon; but under pressure from the French the excepted persons were gradually diminished in number, and all were finally allowed to escape other penalties by going into exile. To those who were so driven from their homes Piedmont offered a refuge.

[Fall of Venice, Aug. 25.]

[Sicily conquered by Ferdinand, April, May.]

Thus the pall of priestly absolutism and misrule fell once more over the Roman States, and the deeper the hostility of the educated classes to the restored power the more active became the system of repression. For liberty of person there was no security whatever, and, though the offences of 1848 were now professedly amnestied, the prisons were soon thronged with persons arrested on indefinite charges and detained for an unlimited time without trial. Nor was Rome more unfortunate in its condition than Italy generally. The restoration of Austrian authority in the north was completed by the fall of Venice. For months after the subjugation of the mainland, Venice, where the Republic had again been proclaimed and Manin had been recalled to power, had withstood all the efforts of the Emperor's forces. Its hopes had been raised by the victories of the Hungarians, which for a moment seemed almost to undo the catastrophe of Novara. But with the extinction of all possibility of Hungarian aid the inevitable end came in view. Cholera and famine worked with the enemy; and a fortnight after Görgei had laid down his arms at Vilagos the long and honourable resistance of Venice ended with the entry of the Austrians (August 25th). In the south, Ferdinand of Naples was again ruling as despot throughout the full extent of his dominions. Palermo, which had struck the first blow for freedom in 1848, had soon afterwards become the seat of a Sicilian Parliament, which deposed the Bourbon dynasty and offered the throne of Sicily to the younger brother of Victor Emmanuel. To this Ferdinand replied by a fleet to Messina, which bombarded that city for five days and laid a great part of it in ashes. His violence caused the British and French fleets to interpose, and hostilities were suspended until the spring of 1849, the Western Powers ineffectually seeking to frame some compromise acceptable at once to the Sicilians and to the Bourbon dynasty. After the triumph of Radetzky at Novara and the rejection by the Sicilian Parliament of the offer of a separate constitution and administration for the island, Ferdinand refused to remain any longer inactive. His fleet and army moved southwards from Messina, and a victory won at the foot of Mount Etna over the Sicilian forces, followed by the capture of Catania, brought the struggle to a close. The Assembly at Palermo dispersed, and the Neapolitan troops made their entry into the capital without resistance on the 15th of May. It was in vain that Great Britain now urged Ferdinand to grant to Sicily the liberties which he had hitherto professed himself willing to bestow. Autocrat he was, and autocrat he intended to remain. On the mainland the iniquities practised by his agents seem to have been even worse than in Sicily, where at least some attempt was made to use the powers of the State for the purposes of material improvement. For those who had incurred the enmity of Ferdinand's Government there was no law and no mercy. Ten years of violence and oppression, denounced by the voice of freer lands, had still to be borne by the subjects of this obstinate tyrant ere the reckoning-day arrived, and the deeply rooted jealousy between Sicily and Naples, which had wrought so much ill to the cause of Italian freedom, was appeased by the fall of the Bourbon throne. [442]

[Germany from May, 1848.]

[The National Assembly at Frankfort.]

[Archduke John chosen Administrator, June 29.]

We have thus far traced the stages of conflict between the old monarchical order and the forces of revolution in the Austrian empire and in that Mediterranean land whose destiny was so closely interwoven with that of Austria. We have now to pass back into Germany, and to resume the history of the German revolution at the point where the national movement seemed to concentrate itself in visible form, the opening of the Parliament of Frankfort on the 18th of May, 1848. That an Assembly representing the entire German people, elected in unbounded enthusiasm and comprising within it nearly every man of political or intellectual eminence who sympathised with the national cause, should be able to impose its will upon the tottering Governments of the individual German States, was not an unnatural belief in the circumstances of the moment. No second Chamber represented the interests of the ruling Houses, nor had they within the Assembly itself the organs for the expression of their own real or unreal claims. With all the freedom of a debating club or of a sovereign authority like the French Convention, the Parliament of Frankfort entered upon its work of moulding Germany afresh, limited only by its own discretion as to what it should make matter of consultation with any other power. There were thirty-six Governments in Germany, and to negotiate with each of these on the future Constitution might well seem a harder task than to enforce a Constitution on all alike. In the creation of a provisional executive authority there was something of the same difficulty. Each of the larger States might, if consulted, resist the selection of a provisional chief from one of its rivals; and though the risk of bold action was not denied, the Assembly, on the instance of its President, Von Gagern, a former Minister of Hesse-Darmstadt, resolved to appoint an Administrator of the Empire by a direct vote of its own. The Archduke John of Austria, long known as an enemy of Metternich's system of repression and as a patron of the idea of German union, was chosen Administrator, and he accepted the office. Prussia and the other States acquiesced in the nomination, though the choice of a Hapsburg prince was unpopular with the Prussian nation and army, and did not improve the relations between the Frankfort Assembly and the Court of Berlin. [443] Schmerling, an Austrian, was placed at the head of the Archduke's Ministry.

[The National Assembly. May-Sept.]