1848 (15 page)

That victory was assured when the Milanese made a determined effort against the Porta Tosa in a day-long battle on 22 March. It was at the Tosa that the Austrian-held bastions came closest to the heart of the city, and Milanese army officers advised strongly that it was here that the enemy should be driven back. The idea was not only to secure the city centre but to open the gate to the Lombard insurgents who had been spotted in their hundreds in the distance pouring down from the hills. The fight began - after reconnaissance from the rooftops by Carlo Osio - at 7 a.m., when the Italians started blasting cannon and fired from windows, rooftops and behind garden walls at the Austrian positions on the gate, in the customs post and at the nearby Casa Tragella. The imperial troops replied with Congreve rockets and one house burst into flames. The final assault took place under the ingenious protection of moving barricades. There was a bitter and murderous exchange of fire - Osio later said that he alone fired 150 cartridges.
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Manara and another aristocrat with democratic principles, Enrico Dandolo, were the first to make the final dash to the customs house, with the former waving a tricolour as the rest of the attackers surged on behind. They were cheered on by women watching from nearby balconies. The gate was beaten down and the triumphant Milanese, crossing the moat on the other side of the bastions, at last embraced the Lombard peasants and small-town artisans, led by local professionals and priests, who poured into the city. Radetzky's siege had been broken.

He now had to contend with the imminent Piedmontese invasion and peasant insurrections in the mountains to the north. His exhausted troops, though still in good order, could not attempt to retake Milan and at the same time contend with the rural uprising and the crushing weight of Charles Albert's army. To avoid being pinned against the walls of the city by this combination of hostile forces, he ordered his troops to withdraw, but only once his artillery had rained down a vengeful barrage on the city. Hübner, sheltering with his captors in a cellar, spent an uncomfortable night listening to the muffled roar of the guns, followed by ‘a fitful noise like someone running up or down a spiral staircase in clogs' - the sound of tumbling masonry. The bombardment continued until one o'clock in the morning and the worst of the damage was done closest to the castle, where most of the Austrian guns were emplaced. The cathedral, churches and public buildings were not scarred, because Radetzky had told the gunners to spare them: he had little doubt that the Austrians would be occupying them again soon.
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Nevertheless, the city centre was now strewn with debris, walls riddled with bullets, tiles scattered across the streets and charred houses still smoking. On 23 March Radetzky's troops pulled northwards to the so-called Quadrilateral of fortresses at Verona, Peschiera, Mantua and Legnano that barred the way into Austria itself. That same day Charles Albert declared war on Austria and sent his army across the River Ticino, his personal Rubicon, which separated him from his dynastic ambitions. Milan's ‘Five Glorious Days' were over. Among those who celebrated was the composer Giuseppe Verdi, who was in Paris when he heard the news. He dashed off to the city, but did not arrive until early April. Once there, he wrote to a friend: ‘Yes, yes, a few more years, perhaps only a few more months, and Italy will be free, united and a republic. What else should she be?'
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He was not alone, for another great Italian had also arrived in Milan: the republican revolutionary Giuseppe Mazzini. The uprising was over, but the tough politics of the Italian revolution had only just begun.

Meanwhile, the Venetians had rallied around the
causes célèbres
of Daniele Manin and Nicolò Tommaseo after their arrest in January. Little could hold back the gathering tide once the news of Metternich's fall reached Venice, brought by the Lloyd Line steamer from Trieste on 17 March. A crowd swept across Saint Mark's Square, calling for the release of the two political prisoners. They stormed the governor's residence on the piazza, where they confronted its trembling occupants, Aloys Palffy and his shaken wife, on the main staircase. A posse of Manin's friends rushed to the nearby prison to release the two men. The jailers prudently calculated that surrender was safer than resistance and yielded the two captives. Manin was convinced that times were now sufficiently propitious to free Venice of Austrian rule. The stakes were raised on 18 March, when Croatian and Hungarian troops tried to haul down the Italian tricolours that had been fluttering over Saint Mark's Square since the day before. The crowd jeered at the soldiers, whereupon an enraged officer gave the order to fire. After the smoke cleared from two volleys, nine Venetians lay dead or wounded. With the mood of the crowd boiling over into blind fury, Manin approached Palffy with the proposal to create a civic guard that would keep order and defend property. A moderate republican, Manin genuinely wanted to avoid social revolution, but of course he also hoped that the new civic guard could be used against the Austrians when the time came. Palffy, trusting that Radetzky would soon be able to send troops to his aid, tried to stall Manin with a promise that he would consult the viceroy, Archduke Rainer, who was now in Verona. Seeing through this ruse, Manin defiantly organised a two-thousand-strong militia regardless. That night the streets of the city were being patrolled by men wearing white sashes.
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The Austrian authorities could have been forgiven for believing that they had weathered the storm by 19 March, when word arrived from Trieste of the promised imperial constitution. To cries of ‘Long live Italy! Long live the Emperor!', Palffy read out the Emperor's proclamation to the ecstatic crowd. That night he and his wife were cheered by the audience at a concert at La Fenice. Yet all was not well. No one could quite believe that a Habsburg emperor would grant a constitution freely. The garrison was still strong and there were rumours that the army would try to bombard the city into submission from the arsenal. This fear mingled with hope: stories about the insurrection in Milan were now circulating and keeping Venetian enthusiasm aflame. Manin decided that now was the time to act, especially when he received word that the Croatian troops in the arsenal were soon to be reinforced. He held a meeting with other Venetian revolutionaries that night and they explored their subversive contacts in the imperial navy, including an officer named Antonio Paolucci, who would try to mobilise the Italian sailors in support of an assault on the arsenal. Key, however, were the fifteen hundred workers - the
arsenalotti -
who bore plenty of grievances against their Austrian employers, particularly the military commander, Captain Marinovich, who had refused pay increases and banned the workers from supplementing their income by their traditional practices of repairing gondolas and helping themselves to ‘spare' naval supplies. The date for the insurrection was set for 22 March, when the civic guard would converge on the arsenal gates at midday and, with the help of the workers, force it to surrender.

That day the
arsenalotti
made the first move spontaneously, when they angrily confronted Marinovich with their own demands. The captain was left virtually defenceless when the naval commander in Venice, Admiral Martini, ordered the Croatian guard to stand down for fear of provoking the crowd. Paolucci tried to help Marinovich escape the
arsenalotti
in a covered gondola, but the luckless captain was spotted and chased on to the roof. He was dragged downstairs, beaten to a pulp and left to die in a boatshed. Manin was horrified by this brutality and sent forward an advance company of militia to prevent any more violence. When he himself arrived with the rest of the civic guard, he summoned the workers by ringing the arsenal's great bell and took over formal control of the works from a chastened Martini. An Austrian attempt to retake the arsenal failed when their mostly Italian troops refused to follow orders. Instead, they trained their rifles on their Hungarian officer, and he was saved from certain death only by the intercession of one of Manin's associates. With this mutiny, the rest of the Italians in the garrison succumbed. They joined the revolution, tearing the Austrian eagle from their caps and replacing it with the Italian tricolour: the black and gold Habsburg emblems were later seen floating in their hundreds in the city's canals.

A detachment of civic guards then easily took the cannon which were lined up in front of Saint Mark's Cathedral. The guns were wheeled about to face the governor's palace, where Palffy desperately summoned Venice's municipal government, mostly noblemen anxious to prevent the city falling into grubbily bourgeois and republican hands like Manin's. Yet, as the councillors and the governor debated the best course of action, a mounting clamour intruded from outside. Manin's followers had unfurled a huge tricolour topped with a red Jacobin cap, while Manin stood on a table outside the Café Florian and hailed: ‘Long live the republic! Long live Saint Mark!' The only republican among the city councillors, the outspoken lawyer Gian Francisco Avesani, demanded that all non-Italian troops be withdrawn from Venice and that all forts be surrendered, along with the ordnance, weaponry and pay chests. The infuriated Palffy resigned as governor, handing over control to the Austrian garrison commander, Count Ferdinand Zichy. The latter, fortunately, did not share Radetzky's unbending nature: he recoiled from the idea of bombarding Venice into rubble, since he loved the city, and at 6.30 p.m. surrendered control to the municipality, leadership of which fell to Avesani. It was clear, however, that a government without Manin, the hero of the day, would have little legitimacy for the Venetians, so in the early hours of 23 March Avesani resigned and Daniele Manin was proclaimed president of the new provisional government of the Venetian Republic. The imperial army abandoned the city. The official report to Vienna opened with the words, ‘Venice has really fallen'.

Not all European countries experienced violent revolution in 1848. There was some impact from the shockwaves of the revolution in France across the Pyrenees: there were some stirrings in Catalonia, a blundered uprising in Madrid and a military mutiny in Seville, but (except in Madrid) the extent to which the republican movement was involved is unclear. And in Catalonia, the main threat to the government came from a ‘Carlist', or ultra-royalist, revolt. The government of the day, led by General Ramón María Narváez, reacted to the European revolutions in March by pushing through the Cortes the suspension of civil rights, extra funds to meet any insurrection and the temporary dissolution of parliament (which in the event lasted for nine months).
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Narváez sometimes appeared to be the epitome of Spanish militarist reaction: on his deathbed, when asked to forgive his enemies, he replied, ‘I don't have to, because I've shot them all.' Yet, while certainly not above authoritarian methods, he had some liberal credentials: he tried to steer a middle, constitutional way between Catholic royalism and republican revolution, but it was a constitutionalism that, he was determined, would give power to the propertied elites. Backed, for now, by Queen Isabella and seemingly the guarantor of political and social stability, Narváez managed to navigate Spain through the revolutionary storms of 1848. Neighbouring Portugal since 1846 had been (with British, French and Spanish backing) under General Saldhanha, who, like Narváez, defended a conservative constitutional order against both reactionaries and radicals with a rod of iron.
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Britain - while facing down a small insurrection in Ireland - relied primarily on the robust nature of its constitutional structures and the broad acquiescence of civil society to weather the radical challenge of the Chartists, who demanded the six points of their ‘People's Charter' of 1838: universal male suffrage, annual elections, equal electoral constituencies, the payment of Members of Parliament, the abolition of property qualifications for MPs and the secret ballot. They drew strength from the political radicalism of British artisans and skilled workers, and the movement included various, sometimes conflicting tendencies. A radical wing, personified by the likes of Bronterre O'Brien and Feargus O'Connor, considered strikes and violence - or the threat of violence - as necessary tactics, while a more moderate face, exemplified by the London cabinet-maker William Lovett (one of the authors of the People's Charter), sought to exert pressure through education, self-improvement and rational persuasion. On the left the movement certainly had a pink, socialistic tinge, and it was associated with the nationalist opposition in Ireland. In the economic distress of the 1840s O'Connor, with his strident rhetoric and the thirty-thousand-strong circulation of his newspaper, the
Northern Star
, gained ground.
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Although much of his rhetoric of revolution was just that, the news of the February revolution in Paris caused some anxiety in official circles that the Chartist agitation might turn into something more aggressive than propaganda and patient petitioning for parliamentary reform. The alarm grew shriller when, on 6 March, there was rioting in Glasgow and London, initially in response to a government proposal (which was in fact withdrawn) to increase income tax. In Glasgow the violence was more serious: most of the demonstrators were unemployed workers, and they looted bakeries and tore up railings as weapons before the authorities called out the troops and read the Riot Act. In the ensuing shooting, one demonstrator was killed and two mortally wounded. ‘The alarm', reported
The Times
, ‘flew over the city like wildfire, and coupled with the late events in Paris, gave rise to a general dread of some political disturbance.'
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The London disturbances took place on Trafalgar Square, where a meeting, although banned by the police, attracted up to ten thousand people, who listened to Chartist orators speaking about the glories of the French Republic and finishing with cheers for the People's Charter and the new regime in France. There were some scuffles with the police and a small group of about two hundred protesters smashed shop windows and street lamps. A lady's carriage was stopped by the crowd, who berated her for being an ‘aristocrat', but since her husband had only recently been ennobled, she took this as praise. All in all, the day showed that the ‘London mob, though neither heroic, nor poetical, nor patriotic, nor enlightened, nor clean, is a comparatively good-natured body,' reported
The Times
with patronising aloofness.
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