Prisoner of the Vatican (17 page)

Around the same time, another of Visconti's sources of inside information on the Vatican, Prince Ruspoli, reported that it was now the pope himself—impetuous as always—who was angrily calling for an immediate departure. The pope had not believed that the Italian government would go through with its threat to move to Rome. When he realized that the king was in fact on his way, Ruspoli reported, his first reaction was that he should go immediately to Corsica, "leaving in his wake all the excommunications and all the medieval anathemas that the Roman Curia disposes of."

The prince believed that it was the cardinals in Rome who were now restraining the pope. "Enriched from public monopolies," wrote Ruspoli, "Antonelli and other of Rome's cardinals own land, palaces, and villas. It is only natural that they do not want to provoke a crisis, as they have too much to lose." Each time that upsetting news arrived, triggering the pope's anger, the cardinals found a way to distract him and calm him down. The prelates were most ingenious, the prince reported. On occasion they would improve his mood by presenting him "with a petition signed by priests, monks, and nuns." Other times, the irreverent prince reported, the cardinals brightened him up by announcing "the arrival of a foreign delegation, which was generally composed of a dozen uneducated Englishmen, along with a similar number of Germans of the same ilk and a handful of Poles." And so the harried cardinals were able to avert yet another threat: "The Pope calms down, while they get other distractions ready for the next time that he goes into one of his usual fits."
³⁸

P
IUS IX CAN BE FORGIVEN
if he failed to realize that 1870 was not to be a repeat of 1848 for either him or the Church. The Catholic press reflected his certainty that, as in past invasions of Rome, this one too would soon be repulsed. Two days after Rome was taken, Milan's Catholic daily assured its readers: "That they will leave Rome is a certainty, just as the Napoleonics, the Mazzinians, and before them all the other enemies of the Church. How and when they will leave, it is not yet possible to say. Probably they will leave soon and they will leave badly." A few weeks later the paper proclaimed: "The hand of God, which in the catastrophe of Sedan [the dramatic French defeat at the hands of the Prussians] brought down the foundation of the whole Babel-like tower constructed against the papacy, will destroy the ruins that still stand. The temporal throne of the popes is destined to see other thrones fall."
¹

Deep was the pope's faith in God, and the God that he knew so well would never allow the forces of evil to triumph. He would never abandon His Church. "The storm against us will, perhaps, grow worse," Pius told a group of Austrian visitors in March 1871, "but it must eventually recede. I do not know either when or how, but there will certainly arrive the day in which the Lord will command the stormy seas to be still. For while He, in the just designs of His Providence, allows all revolutions to take place, He also fixes the point past which they cannot go."
²

The pope continued to see France as his greatest hope, amid signs that the conservative Catholics were gaining strength and reports of France's anger at the Italians for failing to aid them in their fight with the Prussians.

On February 8,1871, elections in France brought victory to the conservative monarchists and a defeat for the anticlerical republicans. The pope was exultant, knowing that French Catholics viewed the restoration of his kingdom as a sacred cause. When a week later Adolphe Thiers was appointed provisional head of the government, many in the Vatican were excited, remembering him as a supporter of the pope's temporal power.
³
But the pope was to be disappointed, for, given the situation in which France found itself—occupied by the Germans, its capital in turmoil—Thiers was not eager to antagonize Italy. "I am very decided," he wrote, "not to resurrect the Roman question, which we are in no position to bring to a happy solution. Infinite regard for the pope, earnest entreaties that he be spared further torments, that is our natural and honorable role; but to embroil ourselves with Italy at this moment would be an imprudence and a folly."
⁴

Yet the pope would not easily relinquish his faith in the French. In March the count of Harcourt, a conservative Catholic much appreciated by the Vatican, was appointed ambassador to the Holy See. Over the next several months, Italians inside the government and liberal journalists outside speculated feverishly about Harcourt's presumed role in plotting the pope's restoration. The French foreign minister, Jules Favre, too was concerned about what the arch-Catholic Harcourt might do. He had been appointed to keep the French conservatives happy, but Favre—himself no acolyte of papal power and partly for this reason detested by the right in France—wanted to be sure he did nothing to stir up trouble. "Should the Holy Father seek to engage you in a conversation on this subject," Favre instructed Harcourt, "I want you to be struck by a respectful deafness." With Antonelli, Favre told him, he could be more explicit. His message was simple: "France is by a great majority favorable to the institution of temporal power, but it will do nothing to reestablish it."
⁵

Meanwhile, Thiers and his compatriots had other problems, as did the Church, for a popular uprising had erupted in Paris. Officially pronounced on March 28, the Commune was a revolt against the conservative clerical forces that dominated the government. While its leaders called for universal suffrage and the complete separation of church and state, the rioters took special aim at the Catholic clergy. Churches and monasteries were sacked, and priests hauled off to jail. Attacked by military forces loyal to the government, the Commune finally dissolved in late May in a bloody week of fighting and chaos, in which twenty-four clerics, including the archbishop of Paris, Georges Darboy, recently returned from the Vatican Council, were put before a Communard firing squad and murdered. The forces of the right were no less brutal: twenty thousand Communards were killed in the week of fighting, and another twenty-two thousand executed at its end.

But the chaos in Paris did nothing to distract French conservatives from their campaign on the pope's behalf. To the contrary, they saw a link between the two: "Our disasters began the day we abandoned Rome,"
Le Monde
told its readers on May 8. "They will not end until we resume the defense of the Holy See ... France succumbed twice. She rose in 1814 with the restoration of Pius VII. She will rise in 1871 only after restoring Pius IX." The pope heartily agreed, telling a delegation of Frenchmen: "The atheism of the laws, religious indifferentism, and those pernicious doctrines known as Catholic-liberalism, it is these, these that are the true causes of the ruin of States, and these have brought great ruin on France."
⁶

Although France's ambassador to Florence insisted that his country had no desire to take up the pope's call for action against Italy, the Italian government kept getting disturbing reports of a secret French plot aimed at restoring the Papal States. On May 10, Visconti received such news from one of his informants in Rome: in the wake of its humiliating defeat by the Prussians, he reported, "France will not be pacified until it wages an external, glorious—at least as far as their vanity is concerned—war." The only logical target for attack, he added, was Italy, and "seeing as the hatred against us is intense, such a war would be extremely popular." The French embassy to the Holy See, Visconti's informant charged, "is our sworn enemy and is doing everything it can to excite the French government and the French nation against us."
⁷

By June, French bishops and their allies were organizing a huge petition drive aimed at forcing the French government to take military action. They demanded that the French ambassador to Italy be recalled and that warships be put at the disposal of a French colonel in the pope's service. Meanwhile,
L'Univers,
France's principal Catholic newspaper, whose editor, Louis Veuillot, was close to Pius, kept up a drumbeat for war on the pope's behalf. Among Veuillot's arguments was that such a war would help France in its struggle with Prussia, although his logic was less than clear. "We do not say," he wrote in early July, "that France should make war on Italy right away, but we think that ... a war against Italy to restore the pope to his provinces would be the best road to the return of Alsace and Lorraine to France.
⁸

As it turned out, the conservative Catholics' saber rattling cost them dearly, for the French population, weary of bloodshed, had little appetite for a new military adventure. With partial parliamentary elections scheduled for July 2, the republican press accused the Catholics of wanting another war, the bishops a new crusade. As a result, the Catholics suffered a major defeat, and the republicans won most of the open seats.
⁹

The transfer of Italy's capital from Florence to Rome on July 1,1871, did nothing to stanch the rumors of France's secret plans to take in the pope and thereby place itself at the head of Catholicism worldwide. There was much speculation that the French monarchists—closely linked to the Church—saw taking in the pope as a means of coming to power. Reflecting on this scenario, the liberal Roman newspaper, II
Diritto,
concluded that the pope's flight to France would be equivalent to a French declaration of war on Italy aimed at restoring the pope's temporal power. These suspicions were fanned by the Prussian ambassador in Rome, Arnim, who as part of his campaign against France was spreading word of just such a nefarious French conspiracy.
¹⁰

Visconti and Lanza were desperate to find out what the pope was going to do. On November 10, their chargé d'affaires in Paris told of a meeting he had just had with the new French minister of foreign affairs, Rémusat, in which France's plans to send an ambassador to the Italian government in Rome were discussed. "He told me," the envoy wrote, "that he feared that the new French ambassador's arrival in Rome might trigger the Pope's departure. Signor de Rémusat insisted on this prediction and led me to believe that he had received some kind of warning that justified it."

Advised by the Italian envoy that the pope's refuge in France would provoke deep sentiment against France in Italy, Rémusat replied that he was well aware of it and of the many other dangers that would come from having the pope on French soil. But what choice did his government have? he asked. They could hardly close the door to the pope when the French republic took in political exiles of every stripe. They had already done all they could to discourage Pius from such a course, he insisted, but the Italians should not fool themselves into thinking that it would make any difference. "From the general tone of Signor de Rémusat's remarks," the Italian chargé d'affaires concluded, "I got the impression that his predictions of the Holy Father's departure from Rome are founded on something more solid than mere supposition."
¹¹

Lanza and Visconti remained suspicious of French intentions.
¹²
Their worry that Pius might be taken into exile by the French was heightened because, ever since the Italians seized Rome, the French had stationed a warship, the
Orénoque,
in the harbor of Civitavecchia for the sole purpose of carrying the pope off at any time he chose. As month after month passed with the ship still docked in the Italian harbor, the king and prime minister tried mightily to pretend it was not there. But the liberal papers showed no such restraint, constantly warning that the presence of the ship reflected France's plans to restore the pope to power in Rome.

At the same time, in Berlin, Bismarck, who had just succeeded in unifying Germany, was becoming increasingly worried about the Vatican's influence on German affairs. Of greatest concern was the new Catholic Center party, which was pressing the government to take the pope's side in his struggle with Italy. Bismarck reacted by unleashing the fateful crusade against the Catholics that came to be called the
Kulturkampf
(literally, "struggle for culture").

These German developments in turn fed the fears of the French government about the impact of having the pope on French soil. Thiers realized the danger, as he explained in a September 1872 letter to his own foreign minister: "During the open war undertaken by Prussia against the papacy, the retreat of the pope into France would be a serious matter. Honor would not allow us to refuse, but it is not necessary to invite embarrassments."
¹³

Although Thiers himself was not eager to take the pope's side, he was under great pressure from French conservatives. Events came to a head late in 1872. In both 1870 and 1871, the officers of the
Orénoque
had gone to pay homage to the pope on Christmas. While in Rome, they studiously avoided paying their respects to the king or to any other Italian official. With the Italian press denouncing the French for scheming with the Vatican and the presence of the French warship in the Italian harbor a continuing sore point, Thiers decided that a change should be made in the Christmas rites. The ships' officers were told to pay their respects to the pope on Christmas, as they had in thepast, but then—in an effort to be more evenhanded—they were to offer their respects to the Italian king on New Year's.

Antonelli and Pius IX, enraged at this news, called in Count Jean François de Bourgoing, who had become the new French ambassador to the Holy See a few months earlier. Afterward Bourgoing, a staunch Catholic, handed in his resignation to protest the French slight to the Holy See. The incident became a political scandal in France, where Thiers depended on the National Assembly's conservative Catholic majority. A difficult several months followed, as Thiers struggled frantically to placate the pope.
¹⁴

For the Italians, the affair simply served as a painful reminder of the presence of the French warship in their harbor. In mid-January 1873, Visconti wrote to his ambassador in Paris, Costantino Nigra, urging him to get the French government to withdraw the ship. "A Government has the right to send one of its ships to a port of a friendly State," Visconti pointed out, "but there are limits to the amount of time such a ship can stay there; even if these are not specified in any treaty, they are understood and appreciated."
¹⁵