1848 (53 page)

Baden became the centre of democratic hopes in the early summer. The incompetent Sigel was replaced as commander of the ex-grand duchy forces by Ludwik Mierosławski, who had led the Polish insurgents against Prussia. The stubbornly persistent Gustav Struve, released from prison, re-emerged as well. He organised a rag-bag force of workers, students and returning republican exiles. Schurz later wrote that ‘the majority of our men not being uniformed, every soldier dressed more or less according to his fancy, and this gave tempting scope to individual taste. Many of the men evidently endeavoured to look very wild and terrible, which they would have done had their faces not been so strikingly good-natured.'
¹⁵
Among the battalions was a legion named after Robert Blum and led by his daughter, who rode in front of its ranks wearing a velvet riding habit and a broad-rimmed slouch hat plumed with a red feather, with a sabre and pistol clattering at her side and bearing a red banner emblazoned with the words ‘Revenge for Robert Blum'.
¹⁶
It was hoped that Baden would become the nucleus of a great German republic, but naturally no other German state, however liberal, would be willing to let this happen. So, while the Prussian army was the backbone of the counter-revolutionary forces, the governments of Hesse, Nassau and Württemberg provided contingents. These forces dealt with the Palatine first, which was invaded on 12 June. Schurz was with the republican forces that retreated into Baden, and he recalled ‘the dull rumble of the wheels on the road, the rustle of the marching columns, the low snorting of the horses, and the rattling of the sabers and scabbards in the darkness'.
¹⁷

The Prussians had reached Kaiserslautern on 14 June and, in hot pursuit of the retreating democrats, crossed the Rhine on the 19th to invade Baden. The population there was stirred by the sight of the hated Prussians and some twenty thousand people put up resistance, fighting bravely against overwhelming odds at Waghäusel on the 21st. Mierosławski manoeuvred his troops skilfully, scoring some minor successes until his forces inevitably disintegrated under the pressure; some two thousand of his men made their way to Switzerland.

The final resistance of the German revolution of 1848-9 was concentrated at Rastatt. This fortress held out for as long as its defenders expected that Mierosławski's army would appear. When they learned that it had evaporated, there was a fraught council of war, in which some hot-heads spoke of fighting to the last man. The majority, however, were determined to spare the town further Prussian shelling and the horrors of a protracted siege and this view prevailed. The six thousand defenders surrendered on 23 July. The supreme commander of the Prussian forces was Prince William, now known pejoratively as the ‘grapeshot prince' because he was rumoured to have given the order to fire on the Berliners on 18 March 1848. As if living up to this reputation, he overrode his subordinates' impulses in favour of clemency: one in every ten prisoners was shot and their bodies flung into mass graves. Others received heavy prison sentences. As a Prussian subject, Schurz was likely to be shot, but he escaped from the city through an underground drain, finding a hiding-place with two of his comrades in the loft of a shed. That building was soon taken over by Prussian cavalrymen, so that Schurz and his friends had to lie ‘still like corpses', watching the enemy through the chinks in the wooden floorboards. After a couple of agonising days, they slipped out when the hussars caroused noisily beneath them. A sympathetic labourer guided them in their dash for the Rhine and the safety of France, where they told two bemused customs officers that they had nothing to declare.
¹⁸
Risking his own life, Schurz courageously returned to Germany in 1850 to help rescue his friend and mentor, Gottfried Kinkel, who had been captured outside Rastatt and was now being held in Spandau Prison. Schurz then sailed to the United States, where he joined some eighty thousand Badensians who emigrated to North America in the revolution's aftermath. Schurz embarked on a Successful political career in the United States, standing up for progressive causes: he fought as an officer in the Union army in the civil war, after which he was elected to the US Senate, before becoming secretary of the Interior. He died, at the ripe old age of seventy-seven, in 1906. The Prussian army left a deep impression on Baden, and memories of the repression persisted in a grim lullaby:

When 1849 dawned in Italy, the radicals were already in power in Rome and Tuscany, while the Venetian republicans were still stubbornly resisting the Austrians. In the south, however, King Ferdinand II squeezed what life was left out of the liberal order in Naples while brutally throttling the separatist movement in Sicily. The monarch did not yet feel sufficiently secure to get rid of the Neapolitan parliament altogether, but he pointedly severed diplomatic relations with both Tuscany and Piedmont, while protecting Pius IX in Gaeta. When the war was rekindled between Piedmont and Austria in March, Ferdinand threw his lot in with the Habsburgs. He recalled the Austrian ambassador and dissolved parliament. The Piedmontese were routed at Novara, and with that the hopes of Italian patriots evaporated. Ferdinand now knew that he would have no more trouble from the national movement in Naples. The liberal parliamentary deputies were arrested and newspapers were closed down, their printing presses smashed. Sicily was then crushed under the same absolutist heel. When the armistice brokered by the French and British expired on 29 March, the Neapolitan forces sallied forth, faced only with a thinly spread army of seven thousand men under the ubiquitous Ludwik Mierosławski. It did not help that this Polish revolutionary could not speak Italian, but he was labouring against almost impossible odds anyway. His troops were green, disorganised and some were mutinous. Catania, on the east coast, fought desperately before it fell, but the sight of plumes of smoke rising from the city - and the fact that both sides executed prisoners - discouraged other towns from resisting, and Syracuse gave up without a fight. After Catania, Ferdinand's soldiers marched almost unopposed towards Palermo.

In the capital there was no great political will to resist: while Sicilian moderates loathed Ferdinand, they were also frightened by the war and by the instability that the revolution had brought. The
squadre
had temporarily suspended their criminal activities on the resumption of hostilities, but as the separatist movement collapsed they returned to type - looting and engaging in protection rackets. The Sicilian parliament was badly divided. In February Ferdinand had issued an ultimatum: in return for recognition of his dynasty, Sicily would have the constitution of 1812 restored, with its own parliament and government. The Sicilians had baulked at Ferdinand's demand for control of the armed forces and the right to dissolve parliament as he pleased. Now, to deflect the Neapolitan hammer blows, the Sicilian moderates were minded to accept these terms and sought French mediation in mid-April. Although the Sicilian forces were ordered to disengage from the enemy and the less compromising revolutionaries were expelled, this effort came too late. On 26 April the Neapolitan fleet appeared off Palermo. While the radicals wanted to resist, the bulk of the National Guard promised only to protect property from popular violence. Francesco Crispi, a radical determined to fight on, bitterly wrote that ‘the moderates feared the victory of the people more than that of the Bourbon troops'.
²⁰
Some barricades, draped with red flags, were built, but the fear of social revolution that this inspired merely spurred the moderates into negotiating with Ferdinand. Having agreed to surrender, some of the Sicilian liberal leadership helped to guide the royal troops into Palermo, although it should be added that this also gave them the opportunity to allow some of the more compromised revolutionaries to escape. By 11 May the Sicilian revolution was over. The island was once more under Bourbon rule after more than a year of independence.

While ‘Bomba' was restoring his absolute authority over Naples and Sicily, Rome was sliding inexorably towards a republic. This was the result of the political polarisation that followed the Pope's flight. On the left, the radicals in the political clubs, the
carabinieri
and some battalions of the civic guard grew ever more uncompromising when it became clear that Pius was determined not to budge from his refuge at Gaeta. On the news that the original parliament had been dissolved on 26 December, Pius excommunicated in advance all those who would participate in the elections to the new Roman constituent assembly. The position of more moderate souls, who had wanted to negotiate the Pope's return to the city - provided that Pius promised to uphold the constitution - was now untenable. The interim government in Rome, pressed by further radical demonstrations, proclaimed universal male suffrage. The moderate, liberal vote collapsed in the elections held on 21 January. There was no violence or intimidation at the polls, but conservatives and liberals simply stayed away in disgust (or from fear of eternal damnation), handing the radicals an overwhelming victory. While most deputies were still landowners or middle-class professionals, their sympathies were democratic and even republican. Among the seven outsiders elected were Garibaldi and Mazzini.

The Constituent Assembly first met on 5 February. The question immediately arose as to what to do now that the Pope was clearly in the reactionary camp. The proclamation of a republic was not a foregone conclusion. The Assembly was regarded by enthusiastic Italian patriots as the lawgiving parliament not just for the Papal States but for all Italy: it was to be the long-awaited
costituente
itself. From Tuscany, Montanelli urged the Romans not to alienate Italian voters by deposing the Pope. Cooler heads in the Assembly, like Mamiani, worried that a Roman republic stood little chance of survival, since neither reactionary Naples nor monarchist Piedmont would tolerate it for long. Yet there seemed to be no alternative to a republic, since Pius would brook no compromise and the political uncertainty seemed to be pushing parts of the country into civil war: in the Romagna, violence was brewing between moderates and democrats. On 9 February, the Constituent Assembly therefore overwhelmingly proclaimed that Rome was now a ‘pure democracy, and it will take the glorious name of The Roman Republic'. While ‘the temporal government of the papacy in Rome is now at an end, in fact and in law', the Pope would have ‘every guarantee needed for the independent exercise of his spiritual power'.
²¹
The wider, Italian role of the Assembly was yet to be determined. While Montanelli had wanted it to be a democratically elected assembly for all Italy, Mazzini was more realistic. He was still in his Swiss exile when he heard the electrifying news from Rome, and he travelled as fast as he could to the great city. On his arrival, he argued that neither Piedmont nor Naples would be persuaded to participate in a republican parliament. Instead, he argued, the Roman republic should be consolidated as the nucleus of the unified, democratic Italy of the future. And the first step should be the union of the Tuscan and Roman republics.

By suggesting this in Rome, Mazzini was ignoring what he had been told in Florence a few days earlier. There, his onetime friend, Guerrazzi, was fearful of Mazzini's popularity and saw him as a disruptive influence.
²²
Guerrazzi worried that by taking a great leap into an uncertain republican future, the Italians would compromise social stability - and he saw stability as a vital precondition for the resumption of the war against Austria. He also feared that a democratic Tuscany would provoke Piedmontese intervention, so he had consistently stood firmly against universal male suffrage. One consequence of this had been rioting by the democrats during the Tuscan elections of 20 November 1848. Guerrazzi was now branded an opponent of the radical cause, and in Florence the ballot boxes were smashed and splintered by the rioters. When the Tuscan parliament met on 10 January, it was dominated by liberal moderates, but the news that a constituent assembly had been summoned in Rome gave new impetus to the democratic opposition. A demonstration of thirty thousand people in Florence forced the government to agree to the election of thirty-seven delegates to the Constituent Assembly in Rome on the basis of universal male suffrage. On 31 January, the day after voting finished, a fearful Grand Duke Leopold fled, first to Siena and then to the small port of Santo Stefano. As a Habsburg, he received a promise of military aid from Radetzky ‘as soon as I have put down the demagogues of Piedmont'.
²³
Within three weeks, Leopold would accept the warm invitation of King Ferdinand of Naples to join Pope Pius in exile in Gaeta.

Meanwhile, in Florence, the emblems of the Grand Duke were hacked down from buildings; and in radical Livorno, only the arrival of Mazzini -
en route
to Rome - prevented the city from proclaiming itself an independent city-republic there and then. In Florence, pressed by a massive crowd surging outside its meeting chamber in the Palazzo Vecchio, the Tuscan parliament vested power in a triumvirate: Guerrazzi, Montanelli and the democrat Giuseppe Mazzoni. Once these three had met Mazzini and assessed the continuing popular pressure, they took the next logical step on 18 February and proclaimed Tuscany a republic. Mazzini's suggestion of a union of between Tuscany and Rome now seemed viable, but Guerrazzi stood firm, adamant that Tuscany must remain independent. Mazzini left for Rome, bitterly disappointed that his unitary nationalism had failed to overcome old provincial loyalties.
²⁴
On 5 March, fresh elections were held for a Tuscan constituent assembly, simultaneously with the choice of delegates to the Roman
costituente
. Yet Tuscany was now on the brink of civil war. Only 20 per cent of the electorate turned out: supporters of the triumvirate won a majority primarily because conservatives and moderates shunned the polls. Guerrazzi had to mobilise troops and civic guards to defend Florence from peasant insurgents marching in support of the Grand Duke and worried that a republican Tuscany meant war - with either Austria or Piedmont - and higher taxes. They were effortlessly stirred up by the clergy and landowners, whose position became almost unassailable when the country was, as feared, suddenly faced with an Austrian invasion.