Episode 65 – The Revolutions of 1848

Hello, and welcome to Relevant History. I’m Dan Toler. This episode is the second in a multi-part arc covering the unifications of Italy and Germany. If you’re new to the show, I strongly suggest starting with the previous episode: Episode 64 – The Reich and the Risorgimento. That episode came out a few months ago, and I’m sorry for the Carlinesque delay. To begin with, the Internet Archive’s free library got hacked, and that’s where I get like half of my sources, so I didn’t have access to them for almost six weeks. Nonetheless, I encourage everyone to donate to the Internet Archive if you value their services. They’re run by an all-volunteer team, and those guys work really hard to provide an irreplaceable service for free. Speaking of support, Patreon memberships are only $1 a month for the time being, and the subscription link is in the episode description. For that, you get access to all 27 episodes of my video series, Dan’s War College. Yes, that’s right. Despite having to delay my main show, I put together not one but two videos for my Patrons, the first discussing 19th-century American coastal defenses, and the second of which is a virtual tour of the defenses at Fort Adams in Newport, Rhode Island, where I recently visited and took a bunch of pictures. Call it a thank you for the continued financial support. So thanks again to all of my Patrons, as well as to everyone who shares this episode. You guys keep the show going. But yes, those were two roughly hour-long episodes that required writing, recording, and video editing, all of which is done by me because this is a one-man team. Along the same lines, another cause for the delay is distraction by other writing for this show. We’re just a few episodes away from the end of season one of Relevant History, and I’m already working on a broad outline with lots of reading for season two, which may end up being as long as the first season, but will be much more focused on a particular series of events. An announcement on this is forthcoming. Also, I built a new PC, which took up a bunch of additional time because I’ve never done that before. And in the process, I figured “Why not switch editing software?” which will be good in the long run but required some learning in the short-term. During this time, I also went through a breakup after a fifteen-year relationship with someone I lived with, which is basically like a divorce at that point, and that put me in a bit of a depression that made it tough to focus on much for a while. Thankfully, I had the research for this episode to occupy me, and that research was considerable. As you’ll discover, this is the most complex subject I’ve ever covered.

One last show note: if you follow Relevant History on YouTube, you probably noticed that instead of a still image, you’re seeing a video of me talking. I’m sorry to say that this is as exciting as it gets, at least for now. This is an audio podcast, and I only ever put anything up on YouTube because I have a couple of close friends who prefer to listen that way. But a few other people seem to have found it, and I’m told that YouTube likes videos more than it likes still pictures, so we’ll see if we can’t juice that algorithm. Okay, that covers everything. Let’s get started!

CHAPTER ONE: THE SLEEPING VOLCANO

Where we left off at the end of the last episode, most of the Italian states were in open revolt against their Austrian overlords, and King Charles Albert of Piedmont-Sardinia had just crossed the frontier into the northeastern Italian country of Lombardy-Venetia, with his armies waving the new Italian tricolor flag. The war that historians now call the First Italian War of Independence had begun. We’ll talk all about that war in a few minutes, but first, I want to switch back to Germany, starting with what’s going on in Austria, because Austria is in a tough position. On the one hand, it’s part of the German Confederation, the proto-EU-type federated body of 38 German states, most of them very small. Up in Germany, the Austrian Empire is following a policy of division. For example, while its most powerful German rival, Prussia, is forming a trade league with other German states and encouraging the development of pan-German culture, Austria maintains its steep border tariffs and uses its diplomatic weight to discourage any talk of German unification. But the Austrian Empire is complicated, because while the Austrian homeland is undeniably German, the Empire as a whole is a lot more than just Austria. It includes Hungary and most of the Balkans, and big chunks of modern-day Poland, and modern-day Italy and Czechia and Slovakia. All of these are separate realms, with their own local laws, customs, and rules of government. For example, Emperor Ferdinand is the Emperor of Austria, King of Bohemia, and rules most of Italy via puppets. These different realms have far less in common with each other than the divided states of Germany, yet are all ruled by the same imperial court. And in 1848, that imperial court has been dominated by one man for more than two decades: our friend Klemens von Metternich, Chancellor of the Austrian Empire.

        -Metternich is an old political hand, having served in government since Napoleonic times. And under the new, epileptic monarch Ferdinand I, he is effectively the Austrian head of state. High-ranking members of the Austrian court openly accuse him of running an empire without an emperor, but nobody can accuse him of failing to work for that empire’s interests. Every one of Metternich’s policies is aimed at preserving the Empire, from his strict censorship regime to his mass surveillance to his steep border taxes.

-See, most other European states are able to chart a center-left course during the mid-1800s and maintain some kind of stability, because liberal political theory has married the less radical aims of the French Revolution to the less reactionary aims of old-school monarchists. If legitimate sovereignty derives from the nation – from the people of a country – then a monarchy can be totally legitimate provided that it serves the interests of the nation. A king like Louis-Philippe in France, for example, can enact a few liberal reforms and reign for years in relative stability. The Austrian Empire doesn’t have that ability, except maybe in Austria itself, because the monarchy’s claim to legitimacy isn’t based on national sovereignty, meaning it has nothing to do with the will of the people or the cultural Zeitgeist. The monarchy’s claim to legitimacy is based on the Habsburg family’s historical territorial claim to specific lands, irrespective of their relationship to the indigenous people of those lands. If the Zeitgeist favors national independence while the Habsburg family’s interests favor an Empire, there’s a conflict of interest. So from the time Ferdinand I becomes Emperor in 1835, Metternich tries to freeze the Austrian Empire in a time capsule, where the old imperial claims to legitimacy still go unquestioned.

        -Even Metternich’s political opponents recognize that the Austrian Empire’s archaic structure puts the Chancellor in an impossible position. The liberal Interior Minister Franz von Kolowrat writes in one of his letters:

        “If we advance with the Zeitgeist our agglomerate of countries will fall apart; if we do not march with it we shall be crushed.”

        -Metternich’s repressive government is partially successful; from the fall of Napoleon until the early 1840s, there’s barely a whisper of revolutionary thought inside the Austrian Empire. That’s not because the Austrian people are particularly conservative, but because the censorship regime itself has become the main target of liberal thinkers. In a sense, Metternich is wagging the dog, and the Austrian intellectual class spends an entire generation debating censorship rather than engaging with any other issue. Besides which, life is good in major imperial cities, with plenty of job opportunities in the Empire’s sprawling civil service, many of which are now open to educated members of the upper-middle class. Austria’s best and brightest mostly learn not to rock the boat too much if they want to settle down in a lucrative career.

        -But outside the Empire’s cosmopolitan cities, conditions in the countryside are often medieval. These conditions vary from one imperial realm to another, and are most liberal of all in the Austrian homeland. But in Bohemia, for example, peasants still have to perform manual labor for their noble landlords, as well as hand over a tenth of their annual harvest. On the plus side, most peasants can’t read, and while many in the urban working classes can read, the censorship regime prevents any serious attempts at organization. So while much of Europe has revolutionary trouble in 1820 and 1830, Austria stays pretty quiet. Then come the 1840s, and three events converge to finally bring revolution to Austria’s doorstep.

The immediate cause of the Austrian revolutions of 1848 is the French Revolution of 1848, which we talked about last episode. King Louis-Philippe gets the boot, the French people install a republic led by President Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, and many places in Europe, such as Italy, experience their own revolutions. But the French Revolution of 1848 doesn’t completely explain what happens in Austria, because remember, Austria had already weathered revolutionary waves in 1820 and 1830 without any trouble. So what’s different this time? First, cracks begin to appear in the censorship regime, so for the first time in a long time, the Overton window in Austrian politics is allowed to shift to the left, and because it’s been so long since the window was allowed to shift, it’s not so much a gentle slide to the left as an abrupt lurch. Second, the potato blight that cripples much of Europe’s farming economy will also trigger a crisis in the Austrian economy. Let’s talk a bit more about both of these events going into 1848.

        -The censorship regime begins to fall apart in the late 1830s, not because of anything going on inside of Austria, but because of a proliferation of revolutionary writing outside of Austria. Basically, there’s so much written material coming into the country that there’s no way for Metternich’s censors to block all of it. Furthermore, there’s a gaping hole in the censorship regime in the form of private couriers. See, Metternich’s censors can read everybody’s mail, which means the average working person can forget about ordering revolutionary literature through the post. But if you’ve got enough money, you can hire a private courier service to deliver your mail, and all of a sudden the censors can’t read it. So the first people who start reading a lot of revolutionary literature aren’t the working poor, because they don’t have any money. The urban elites, meanwhile, are mostly satisfied with their government careers. It’s the rural nobility and upper middle classes that are most susceptible, if not to revolution, than to liberal reforms, because they can see the writing on the wall. The urban elites are isolated to some extent from the peasants and working poor who live out in the countryside and make up the bulk of Austrian society. The rural nobles and merchants are exposed to the worst kinds of suffering on a daily basis, and they can see that when revolution comes, it’s not going to go well for them. So you start to see calls for liberal reform coming, ironically enough, from the rural landowners who are among the biggest beneficiaries of the current system.

-Around the same time, in 1839, a union of Austrian booksellers openly petitions the crown for a relaxation of censorship laws. Ironically enough, this call for a change in the law is itself a violation of the law, but Metternich is not willing to go to war with the publishers, so he agrees to some liberal reforms. In slow, lumbering, bureaucratic fashion, a government commission is established to work out a plan to eliminate some old feudal duties via a buyout program. This mollifies some of the more restrained liberal voices, but many imperial subjects are getting sick of Metternich’s backwards regime, and throughout the 1840s, liberal thought leaders get bolder about what they’re willing to publish.

-A good example of this is a pamphlet called Austria and Her Future, published in 1843 by an aristocratic Austrian politician named Viktor Franz von Andrian-Werburg, who consults with representatives from various local imperial assemblies, called diets, to produce a comprehensive call for imperial reform. Andrian-Werburg and other reformers accuse Metternich’s government of wasting time as the rest of Europe moves forward, and in Austria and Her Future, they propose a new Austrian federation, with local self-government for people like the Czechs and the Hungarians, united under the imperial aegis for mutual free trade and common defense against enemies like the French, Russians, and Ottomans. Andrian-Werburg writes about this from the perspective of one of the Empire’s minority peoples, but of a native Austrian. He says in part:

“An Austrian… has no sense of nationhood or national pride, no uplifting awareness of his own strength – of necessity, since he sees and feels himself as isolated, excluded from any community of intellect or sympathy with his fellow-citizens of different races, whom he will not and cannot accept as compatriots, and his narrow-minded patriotism embraces no more than his village, or at best his province.

“This must be a very painful and oppressive feeling for an Austrian, and often have we pitied him on this account, as he stands alone among proud, confident peoples, the Cinderella of the great family of nations. A Frenchman, however mediocre and unprepossessing he may be, gains in stature every time he sings the praises of France, of his grande nation – and words lead to deeds, say what you will. Witness the Englishman in his proud isolation, who deems himself a king compared with men of other nations; witness how the lowliest citizen of Rome looked down on a king of the barbarians; or how the Russian, confident in his own strength and destiny, exalts himself above the rest and, like Brennus, he tosses his sword into the scale. How small then must the Austrian feel, who knows no such sentiments, not a single one, and who can pride himself at most on attaining the office of chamberlain or privy councilor!”

-Andrian-Werburg talks for a bit about the Napoleonic wars, and how Austrians felt a brief sense of real patriotism when they fought off the French, and he accuses Metternich’s government of wasting that patriotic sentiment by freezing the Austrian political system in carbonite. Then he continues, talking about the surge of patriotism during the Napoleonic wars:

“What these attempts did prove – if any proof were necessary – was how much importance governments (as well as the governed) have always attached, quite rightly, to the existence of national sentiment or, as we should properly call it, a sense of community or public spirit. In times of normality, governments, misguided by wrong policies and narrow petit bourgeois exclusivity, have sought to hinder and weaken the citizen’s involvement in public affairs, his awareness of the state and nation as complete entities, and the sense of solidarity that binds him to the whole and to his fellow-citizens. And in times of danger it was always governments who saw the need to fall back on that spurned and suppressed ally: patriotism. It is now time that this experience bore fruit; it is time that governments, having learned from history, finally understood that their most trustworthy ally is a strong and constantly active public spirit, engaging every citizen in the state and uniting the interests, opinions, and efforts of each individual in a bond of common cause; and that the machinery of governments alone, without the active participation and absolute conviction of those individuals, can never achieve more than a negative, passive civic life held together by mere inertia, which of necessity will fall to pieces at the first slight shock.”

-So this nationalist Zeitgeist that started really gaining strength with the French Revolution is now starting to gain steam in the Austrian Empire, particularly among the rural elite, and all of a sudden you have the kind of fertile soil where revolution can take root. But among the farmers and workers, all of this barely registers. As long as the harvests remain good and the economy keeps ticking and nobody’s sons are being sent off to war, people are happy. So Metternich’s government keeps chugging along, right up until the harvests stop being good and the economy stops ticking.

-Except, of course, the harvests do not remain good and the economy does not keep ticking. The potato blight causes mass food shortages, and I should reiterate something I said last episode. We Americans are most familiar with the potato blight in Ireland, where somewhere around a million people starve to death in the late 1840s. But Ireland is unique because the Irish grow potatoes as a monoculture and when the potatoes get riddled with fungus and become inedible there’s not much left to eat. In Germany and the Austrian Empire, potatoes are just one of many staple crops, so there’s still enough food for everybody. Nonetheless, when you take a major staple crop out of the market for a few years, it causes prices on all the other foods to go up as demand shifts from one good – in this case, potatoes – to another – in this case, mostly grains like wheat and barley. Prices on those staples go up, and so does everybody’s grocery bill. This puts stress on the working classes, who stop spending money on non-essentials, and you end up with a good old fashioned recession.

-Then, in late February of 1848, in the midst of an economic recession, King Louis Philippe of France abdicates, he’s replaced by the new Napoleon, and everyone in Europe gets flashbacks to 1830, when the French July Revolution had triggered a series of nationalist revolts around the confident. As news of this new French revolution arrives in the Austrian Empire, people start pulling their money out of the banks. Remember, in these days, money isn’t just some number on a spreadsheet in the bank’s computer. It’s actual precious metal currency, and if the bank runs out of currency, you’re not getting any. So as people start going to the bank to take out money, other people get worried that the bank will run out of money, so they go to the bank, and lines start to form, causing even more people to try to withdraw their money, and you end up with a good old fashioned banking panic.

-Now, you might be thinking that this financial crisis is just an example of the stupidity of herds. It’s like the toilet paper panic of 2020, where if everybody had just bought a normal amount of toilet paper then everyone would have been fine, but once people started hoarding, it suddenly became logical to hoard for yourself because the original hoarders had created a shortage. In other words, group hoarding is irrational, but individual hoarding has become the rational choice. It’s a failure of game theory where the pareto-optimal outcome is not the quote-unquote “best” state for anybody. And this is true, but there’s also more to the story.

-See, in 1811, during the Napoleonic Wars, as well as in 1816 immediately after those wars, the Austrian government had devalued everybody’s savings. Basically, the government had gone into the banks in the middle of the night and taken a certain percentage of everybody’s savings account to pay for the war debt. This obviously has to be done by surprise and without any public debate, since anyone who expects the government to devalue their savings will simply withdraw all their money and there will be nothing to devalue. So those people who run to the bank at the first sign of trouble in Europe, the ones who start the panic? They’re not just starting a panic for no reason. They’re trying to withdraw money because they think the government is likely to go bankrupt and tax their savings. And why do they think that? Because Metternich’s government is incredibly opaque about its finances, since it doesn’t want people to know whether or not it might go bankrupt and need to tax their savings.

        -So what we have here is a self-serving, self-dealing regime that’s interested only in the well-being of the Habsburg family, and which is perceived as being totally indifferent to the well-being of the citizenry. It’s not about any given policy or person – as much as anything else, it’s a vibe. This is best expressed by none other than Alexis de Tocqueville, the French writer and statesman who is so famous for his political analyses of both France and the United States. Now, this quote was cobbled together later from various after-the-fact accounts, so it’s not 100% accurate, but here’s something de Tocqueville says in a speech to the French Chamber of Deputies on January 29th 1848, just three weeks before the fall of King Louis-Philippe’s radical centrist government:

        “I am told that there is no danger because there are no riots; I am told that, because there is no visible disorder on the surface of society, there is no revolution at hand.

“Gentlemen, permit me to say that I believe you are mistaken. True, there is no actual disorder; but it has entered deeply into men's minds. See what is preparing itself amongst the working classes, who, I grant, are at present quiet. No doubt they are not disturbed by political passions, properly so called, to the same extent that they have been; but can you not see that their passions, instead of political, have become social? Do you not see that they are gradually forming opinions and ideas that are destined not only to upset this or that law, ministry, or even form of government, but society itself, until it totters upon the foundations on which it rests today? Do you not listen to what they say to themselves each day? Do you not hear them repeating unceasingly that all that is above them is incapable and unworthy of governing them; that the distribution of goods prevalent until now throughout the world is unjust; that property rests on a foundation that is not an equitable one?...

        “This, gentlemen, is my profound conviction: I believe that we are at this moment sleeping on a volcano. I am profoundly convinced of it… When I come to investigate what, at different times, in different periods, among different peoples, has been the effective cause that has brought about the downfall of the governing classes, I perceive this or that event, man, or accidental or superficial cause; but, believe me, the real reason, the effective reason that causes men to lose political power is that they have become unworthy to retain it.

        “Think, gentlemen, of the old monarchy: it was stronger than you are, stronger in its origin; it was able to lean more than you do upon ancient customs, ancient habits, ancient beliefs; it was stronger than you are, and yet it has fallen to dust. And why did it fall? Do you think it was by the particular mischance? Do you think it was by the act some man, by the deficit, the oath in the tennis court, Lafayette, Mirabeau? No, gentlemen; there was another reason: the class that was then the governing class had become, through its indifference, its selfishness, and its vices, incapable and unworthy of governing the country. That was the true reason.

“Well, gentlemen, if it is right to have this patriotic prejudice at all times, how much more is it not right to have it in our own? Do you not feel, by some intuitive instinct that is not capable of analysis, but that is undeniable, that the earth is quaking once again in Europe?... Will you allow it to take you by surprise?

        “Gentlemen, I implore you not to do so. I do not ask you, I implore you. I would gladly throw myself on my knees before you, so strongly do I believe in the reality and the seriousness of he danger, so convinced am I that my warnings are no empty rhetoric. Yes, the danger is great. Allay it while there is yet time; correct the evil by efficacious remedies, by attacking it not in its symptoms, but in itself…

        “Keep the laws as they are, if you wish. I think you would be very wrong to do so; but keep them. Keep the men, too, if it gives you any pleasure. I raise no objection so far as I am concerned. But, in God's name, change the spirit of the government; for, I repeat, that spirit will lead you to the abyss.”

        -Again, de Tocqueville is speaking in France at the end of January, but he might as well be talking about the situation in Austria six weeks later.

CHAPTER TWO: THE FALL OF METTERNICH

This brings us to March 13th 1848, when the Lower Austrian legislative body, the Landhaus, is scheduled to meet in Vienna. And when I say “Lower Austria,” I mean roughly the area that comprises modern, 21st-century Austria. The Habsburgs like to keep their lands politically divided, so there are actually a number of legislative bodies in the Austrian Empire, but the Landhaus is in many ways the most powerful because it represents the most influential people in the core Habsburg territories. And not only is the Landhaus operating in this environment where people of all classes have lost faith in their government, but we have the abdication of Louis-Philippe in France. And then, in the days leading up to this meeting on March 13th, the legislative assembly in Hungary issues a bunch of demands. We’ll get to that in a minute, and I hate going out of order like this, but the whole story is tangled up like a big knot of spaghetti. For now, the point is that the legislative assembly in Hungary, the most important part of the empire outside of Austria itself, has just issued a series of demands to Emperor Ferdinand. If the Landhaus hadn’t already felt bold enough to issue their own demands, they certainly do now.

        -Now, the Austrian Landhaus is made up of nobility and clergymen. There’s no representation for the common man here, not even for the educated business classes. Given the selective composition of this legislative body, you could be forgiven if you expected a little self-dealing. Instead, on March 13th 1848, the liberal party calls for a laundry list of reforms.

        -To begin with, they demand that the government publicly publish its finances. The Austrian economy is lagging behind its French, Prussian, and particularly British counterparts, and a big reason for this, besides the empire’s internal customs barriers, is the unfriendly business environment. Remember those bank account devaluations we just talked about? Well, nobody wants to do business in a country where the government might just arbitrarily seize a part of their money. The first step to restoring trust is financial transparency, so potential investors know the empire isn’t on the verge of bankruptcy. Along the same lines, the party demands a series of judicial reforms to make the legal system more predictable and less arbitrary.

        -The party calls for religious tolerance, the easing of press censorship, and increased voting rights and government representation – not just for the middle class, but also for peasants, who the party wants to grant the right to vote in provincial elections. Also for the peasants, the party demands relief from two unpopular taxes: the Zehent, or church tax, and the Robot, or an annual period of unpaid labor, which believe it or not many Austrian peasants are still obligated to perform for their feudal lords in the year 1848. Finally, the proposal calls for its most audacious demand: the immediate resignation of both Metternich and Josef Sedlnitzky, the head of the government’s censorship office.

        -Now, this series of demands doesn’t begin in the Landhaus. It actually starts as a student petition, which is presented to the Emperor himself on Sunday, March 12th, but this petition has been signed by a number of members of the liberal party, who then present it when the Landhaus meets in session the following morning.

        -Crowds of students and middle-class protesters gather in Vienna’s city center, waiting to hear the Emperor’s response. And as these people are waiting, there are radicals passing out leaflets with copies of a speech given in Hungary a few days earlier, where as I said the local government has already demanded reform from the Habsburgs. And for the benefit of those in the crowd who can’t read, some people start reading the speech out loud so everyone can hear it. So you can imagine the atmosphere is starting to get pretty charged.

        -If you remember from last episode, Emperor Ferdinand suffers from some chronic health conditions, including severe epilepsy, so he isn’t really running his government; Metternich is. So instead of getting the Emperor’s response to a call for reforms that includes Metternich’s resignation, the people get the response of the man himself.

        -Metternich agrees to meet with some representatives from the protesters and consider some of their reforms, although he tells the other government ministers that he has no intention of resigning. But before he meets with anybody, he wants to secure the city and prevent the already-agitated crowd from turning into an uncontrollable mob. To this end, he orders the local military commander to secure the city gates, as well as the immediate area around the government district.

        -This commander, Archduke Albrecht, Duke of Teschen, is one of the Emperor’s cousins, and he’s one of those guys who wouldn’t be a commander in a meritocratic society, and is only in charge because he’s part of the royal family. Anyway, this guy, Archduke Albrecht, orders his men to clear a plaza around the legislative chamber where some students have gotten particularly rowdy and are trying to force their way inside. Foolishly, Albrecht has ordered his men to go in with bayonets and live ammunition, which is not normally the practice when confronting unarmed protesters. Normally, troops would be sent in with bayonets at their sides instead of fixed to their guns, and with blank rounds loaded, although they’d certainly keep some live ammunition in case the situation were to deteriorate.

        -Anyway, these soldiers who are being sent in to clear the crowd aren’t even Austrian. As is standard practice for the Austrian Empire, the region is garrisoned by troops from a different nationality, which is meant to prevent local troops from joining any kind of uprising. Well, these particular troops are Italian. They don’t speak the language, miscommunications happen, and somehow a series of shots ring out, people in the crowd start panicking, and the soldiers clear out the plaza with their bayonets and rifle butts. At the end of the incident, several people lie dead and wounded, among them not just riotous students, but also respected middle-class citizens who by all accounts had been peacefully waiting for a government statement and gotten caught in the crossfire.

        -This event galvanizes public support for the protesters, and within hours, 40,000 people have taken to the streets, forcing Archduke Albrecht’s outnumbered men to retreat to their barracks. Late that afternoon, the Landhaus formally signs on to the people’s demands, and submits it to the State Council, or cabinet, which has two hours to respond.

        -The following account of this meeting comes from 20th century Austrian historian Baroness Stella von Musulin, who doesn’t provide her source, but who would have known some people who were maybe not sitting in the room, but were the children or nephews or nieces of people who had sat in the room. In her book Vienna in the Age of Metternich: From Napoleon to Revolution, 1805-1848, she writes:

        “They had just two hours. Among those present were the Archdukes Ludwig, Johann and Franz Karl, Kolowrat and Metternich. During this time, the Estates had to hold the crowd at bay. And now for one and a half hours Metternich held a peroration on constitutional theory which contained nothing at all of any immediate relevance. At last Archduke Johann pulled out his watch. ‘…we have half an hour left and we have not yet discussed the reply which we are to give to the people.’

        “Kolowrat interrupted. ‘Your Imperial Highness! I have sat in this Cabinet with Prince Metternich for 25 years, and have always heard him speak like this without ever arriving at the point.’

        “Archduke Johann: ‘But today we must arrive at it immediately.’ [To Metternich ]: ‘Do you know that the leaders of the people demand your resignation?’

        Metternich: ‘On his deathbed the Emperor Franz I made me swear an oath never to abandon his heir. But if the imperial family wishes for my resignation I should consider myself released from my oath.’

        “The Archduchess assented and Metternich declared his resignation.”

        -By the way, it’s not 100% clear, but from the context, I assume that the Archduchess here is Maria Anna of Savoy, the wife of Emperor Ferdinand, who insists that the people be told that he agreed to everything. And just like that, Klemens von Metternich, who in one way or another has dominated Austrian politics for the last 39 years, is gone. For Metternich, retirement will be easy. After an overland journey to the Netherlands, he and his family will sail to England, where they will spend the next three years in the company of distinguished figures like the Duke of Wellington and future Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli. He will return from exile in 1851, and will spend the next several years writing about politics and acting as an unofficial advisor to various members of the Austrian government, but will never again hold an official role. He will die in 1859 in Vienna, where he has spent much of his life.

For the rest of the Austrian government, it’s not so easy as riding off into the sunset. As de Tocqueville had said in France, getting rid of a man won’t fix all the country’s problem. The important thing is to establish public trust, and the most important part of that most important thing is establishing a new government that the people see as trustworthy. To this end, the cabinet agrees on a unity government, led by the liberal Franz von Kolowrat in the new position of Minister-President, and the conservative Karl von Ficquelmont as Foreign Minister. Keep in mind the narrow Overton window of the times. Neither of these men is a radical. Kolowrat is a center-left constitutional monarchist, and Ficquelmont is a center-right constitutional monarchist. Both are what we today would call “establishment politicians” who have been in public service for decades, and neither man is likely to rock the boat.

-During their brief time at the helm, von Kolowrat and von Ficquelmont agree on a constitution called the Pillersdorf Constitution, named after Interior Minister Franz von Pillersdorf, and this constitution becomes effective on April 25th. The Pillersdorf Constitution establishes a parliamentary monarchy designed roughly along the British model, albeit with a much stronger executive. Still, there’s to be a bicameral legislature with an upper house made up of the hereditary nobility and a lower house made up of elected representatives, and Austrian citizens are to be guaranteed certain fundamental rights, including limited press freedom and the right to a trial by jury. In fact, the entire judicial system is overhauled, with the establishment of Austria’s first public prosecutor’s office to ensure the consistent enforcement of laws across the land, and the Supreme Court is overhauled to make it independent and not subservient to the Minister of Justice. A lot of this is going to change in the turmoil of the coming years, but the Pillersdorf Constitution has one important clause that will remain a bedrock principle of the Austrian Empire from 1848 until its dismemberment in 1918, and that’s a guarantee of rights for minority nationalities within the Empire.

-Well, sort of. See, I couldn’t find an English translation of the Pillersdorf Constitution to read for myself, only summaries, some of which mention guarantees for ethnic minorities, including the right to speak their own languages. So I turned to my friend Michael who kindly translated the relevant passage for me. Once you get past what he calls the “flowery Victorian language,” it says something like:

“It is enough to calm our hearts, from which our imperial word is loosed, to reciprocate the many features of true love and diversity(?) received from our beloved peoples. We display our concern for their well-being and our desire to ensure their legal status and grant them participation in the settlement of the problems of the fatherland in a way that secures their interests.”

-So as best I can tell, the Pillersdorf Constitution doesn’t make any ironclad guarantees to minorities. But it does at least express the idea that granting equal status to non-ethnic Germans is a good thing for the Empire.

-Unfortunately, despite the best efforts of the Austrian government to keep things on an even keel, fate decides to rock the boat for them, and Franz von Kolowrat almost immediately becomes ill and is forced to retire less than two weeks later, leaving von Ficquelmont as both Minister-President and Foreign Minister. This upsets the balance of power, with the government’s liberal faction now opposed to virtually anything Ficquelmont proposes. This is untenable, so less than a month later, on May 4th 1848, Ficquelmont resigns as both Minister-President and Foreign Minister. The new Foreign Minister is the conservative Johann von Wessenberg, while the new Minister-President is Franz von Pillersdorf, the author of the Pillersdorf Constitution. But von Pillersdorf is unable to unify the government behind any particular agenda, and he resigns on July 8th, handing over the reins to a younger liberal named Anton von Doblhoff, but Doblhoff only serves for 10 days before being forced to hand over the position of Minister-President to none other than the conservative Foreign Minister, Johann von Wessenberg, once again leaving the conservatives mostly in control of the government and the liberals mostly on the outside. We’ll leave them there for now, because in all of this confusing mess, there are a few things I want to touch on.

-To begin with, I want to fix these events in the timeline, number one because it’s been awhile, and number two because this story is really complicated. Remember the Five Days of Milan, that big revolution that breaks out in Northern Italy that we talked about at the end of the last episode, where the people of Milan revolt against the Austrian Empire and Charles Albert of Piedmont Sardinia marches his army to their aid? Well, the revolt breaks out on March 18th, five days after Metternich’s resignation, and Charles Albert invades on March 23rd, two days before the announcement of the Pillersdorf Constitution. So keep in mind that while all of that is going on in Northern Italy and Field Marshal Joseph Radetzky is leading the Austrian army in a fighting retreat, the government back at home is in turmoil. On the flip side, a big reason von Pillersdorf, Doblhoff, and von Wessenberg in their turns are unable to effectively lead the government is that the Empire is trying to work out an internal political revolution in Austria at the same time that it’s fighting a military revolution in Italy that has a lot of external help.

-Another thing I want to mention is the conspiracy theory angle on all this. Because one of my sources, Baroness Stella von Musulin, who I’ll remind you is someone who would know, talks about rumors going around in Britain that Metternich had resigned. This wouldn’t be surprising, if it weren’t for the fact that these rumors are going around at a dinner party on March 4th, nine days before Metternich’s resignation. And the people spreading this rumor are none other than members of the Rothschild family, the famous banking clan with its own network of informants throughout Europe. Now, the Rothschilds have gotten rich in large part by using their spy network to stay ahead of the rest of the market. Information is power, as they say. But unless the Rothschilds’ spies have the ability to travel through time, there’s no way they would know on March 4th that Metternich is going to resign. Not unless they have insider knowledge of a coup that is not recorded in our history books. Or maybe the Rothschilds are simply misinformed. There is, after all, a lot of political turmoil in the Austrian Empire, and in such an environment it wouldn’t be surprising if the Chancellor were to resign. A third possibility, mentioned by Baroness Musulin herself, is that the Rothschilds may be fabricating a rumor intentionally in order to create movement on the stock exchange which they can then take advantage of. This is the kind of thing they are known for. We’ll probably never know the truth, but it’s worth mentioning just the same, because it’s been fodder for so many conspiracy theories.

-A third thing to keep in mind is that there are revolutions all over the Austrian Empire during this time – not just protests in Vienna. Starting in March of 1848, there are also protests in Bohemia, led by Czech and Slovak nationalists who are demanding more autonomy within the Empire. These protests culminate in an armed rebellion by Czech students from June 12th through 17th. The students throw up barricades in the streets of Prague, dozens of people are killed, hundreds are wounded, and the rebellion is only put down when the local Austrian military commander lays siege to the city.

All of this is nothing compared to what’s about to happen in Hungary. We’ve talked a lot about Austria and the broader Austrian imperial holdings in Germany and Italy, but Hungary is the elephant in the room. It’s a Habsburg crownland, but it has its own government in parallel to the Austrian one. And unlike the other, smaller parts of the empire that Austria can dominate by sheer size, Hungary is not some minor country. It’s the largest part of the Austrian Empire. Remember from the last episode, how most of Austria’s navy is dependent on Italian sailors and especially Italian officers? Well, the Hungarians play a similar, if not-quite-so-dominant role in the Austrian Army. Many of the best officers and most distinguished regiments are Hungarian, so if there’s trouble in Hungary, all of a sudden, the government has to worry about the loyalty of army units all over the Empire. And with all the trouble elsewhere in Europe, it shouldn’t be surprising that the winds of revolution are also blowing through Hungary. Now, the Hungarian Revolution of 1848 is one of those events that could easily be its own episode or series of episodes. There’s a lot going on here. But we’re talking about Germany and Italy, so we’re going to blow through Hungary in a couple of minutes.

        -Longtime listeners of Relevant History will already be vaguely familiar with Hungary’s unusual relationship with the Austrian Empire. Long story short, the Hungarian crown is legally separate from the Austrian crown, but the Habsburgs have nonetheless ruled the kingdom for over 500 years. Like any long-term relationship, the relationship between Austria and Hungary has had its ups and downs. Over the last few decades, it’s been trending down. See, back in the 1790s, Emperor Joseph II had enacted a series of reforms designed to centralize Habsburg control across the family’s various territories, and one of these reforms was to abandon Latin as the official language of state and replace it with Austrian German. Getting rid of Latin and officially adopting a native language was right in line with Enlightenment principles, but German was not a native language in Hungary; Hungarian was, and many Hungarians had interpreted the switch from a dead language to a foreign language as an attack on their culture. In response, Hungarian elites had funded a wave of Hungarian-language writers and artists, the better to preserve their own national heritage.

        -By 1848, this movement has escalated to a full-on political revolution. On March 15th, students in Budapest protest outside the home of the Austrian ambassador. These students are carrying flyers that have been printed in Hungarian, and the flyers spell out a series of demands in a short, numbered list. These demands are now known as the Twelve Points, and they read as follows:

        “What the Hungarian nation wants.

“Let there be peace, liberty, and concord.

“1. We demand the freedom of the press, the abolition of censorship.

“2. Independent Hungarian government in Budapest.

“3. An annual national assembly in Pest.

“4. Civil and religious equality before the law.

“5. A national army.

“6. Universal and equal taxation.

“7. The abolition of socage. [feudal obligations of the peasantry]

“8. Juries and courts based on an equal legal representation.

“9. A national bank.

“10. The army must take an oath on the Constitution, recall our troops from abroad, and expel foreign troops from the country.

“11. The release of political prisoners.

“12. A political union [with Transylvania].”

-The Austrian government has too much trouble going on in Italy and its own homeland to object to anything the Hungarians are demanding, so the Austrian representative agrees, and in April of 1848, Hungary holds its first democratic elections, and just about every adult male is allowed to vote, not just the nobility.

-The elections result in a narrow conservative majority, and the new government, led by Prime Minister Lajos Batthyány, lays out a plan for moderate political reform, with Hungarian law to remain supreme in the Kingdom of Hungary, but with Emperor Ferdinand to remain as head of state. And in one of the government’s first acts, the Twelve Points are written into a series of laws called the April Laws. All of a sudden, Hungary has gone from being an integral part of the empire to being something like a British Commonwealth realm in the Second World War. A useful ally, to be sure. But nonetheless an independent country that has its own agenda. Predictably, this plan has its share of opponents, with many conservative Hungarians opposed to any kind of separation from the Habsburg empire, while most liberals and nationalists would prefer a more definitive break.

-So for most of 1848, the Hungarian government is politically weak, with few ardent supporters despite having won the election. Keep this in mind, because as the temperature keeps rising back in Austria proper, the Austrian government is going to have a lot of focus not just on the rebellion in Italy but also on events in Hungary, and they’re going to lose focus on Vienna.

CHAPTER THREE: THE VIENNA UPRISING AND THE HUNGARIAN REBELLION

This brings us to the summer of 1848, where back in Vienna the conservative party has taken control of the government. This has gotten the liberal party and especially the more radical workers all worked up, and where traditionally the Emperor or the imperial family might have acted as a unifying force, not only is Emperor Ferdinand too physically infirm to take an active role in government, but the entire imperial court has relocated from Vienna to Innsbruck, which is where the Habsburg family’s mythical ancestors have lived, and which is located in a region, Tyrol, which is the core of Habsburg power. Incidentally, Tyrol is also located close to northern Italy, where Marshal Radetzky is fighting against the Italian uprising, so the imperial family has relocated not only to the region where they have the strongest political support, but also where they’re close to their strongest army. They look like reactionaries, and nobody is in Vienna trying to negotiate with the liberal parties. In Vienna itself, conservative newspapers attack the liberals, branding them all as radicals to link the more moderate liberals with violent workers’ street gangs. This is effective, with the key upper-middle-class Austrian demographic shifting from slightly liberal to overwhelmingly conservative by the beginning of fall. This is basic law-and-order politics of the kind we see play out all the time in all kinds of societies.

        -One of my sources for these events is none other than a 27-year-old Friedrich Engels, who is living up in Prussia at the time and publishing a radical newspaper with his friend Karl Marx. Engels writes at length about the effects of civil disorder on the middle classes, and he says that these effects are particularly bad in Austria because Austria’s production economy is based on luxury goods. With the imperial court out of the city and many of Austria’s other elites taking to their country estates to avoid urban unrest, fewer people are buying those luxury goods. Who does this hurt? Skilled tradesmen like clockmakers, or the tailors who make fancy clothes for all the lavish parties that aren’t happening in Vienna this year.

        -Now, I’ve been talking about a shift to the right, but anyone who studies politics knows that in any power game, be that an election or a revolution, having numbers on your side isn’t enough. Your people also need to be motivated. So at the same time as the middle classes are shifting to the right, many people in the working classes are becoming more motivated than ever. The European food crisis we talked about last episode is still ongoing, and inflation is hitting the working poor harder than anyone else.

-Now, none of these things are cut and dried. Many upper- and middle-class liberals, far from moving to the right, double down on their positions, fearful that with the conservatives in power, they’re about to end up with another few decades under another Metternich. By the same token, many of the Austrian working class are shifting to the right during this time. If you’re just some dude who works at the paper mill and the paper mill gets shut down for a day because a bunch of students and labor agitators are rioting outside, you don’t get paid for that day. These people didn’t make your life better – they’re making it demonstrably worse. All of this thanks to a lack of moderate liberal leadership and a power vacuum at the top when Austria needs a strong Emperor. It’s also worth noting that the imperial family returns to Vienna in July, and we’ll get to that in a second.

So, political tensions are rising in Austria, and while everyone on the street and in the press is paying attention to that, a crisis breaks out in Hungary. On September 11th 1848, a Croatian viceroy named Josip Jelačić invades, with the intention of overthrowing Prime Minister Lajos Batthyány’s elected government and taking power as king… in the name of Emperor Ferdinand. At this point, if you’re anything like me, your head is about to explode. What kind of unholy Central European spaghetti politics is going on here? Well, what’s going on is an overlapping of not one but two power struggles.

        -The first power struggle is one we’re going to talk about a whole lot during the next season of the show: the battle for control over the Balkans. The Ottoman Empire has long ruled over the Balkans, and Hungary has traditionally been Austria’s bulwark against Ottoman encroachment. In the middle of the nineteenth century, encroachment is hardly a threat. The Ottoman Empire is in a long period of slow decline, and its weakness in the Balkans presents opportunities for both the Austrians and the powerful, expansionist Russian Empire. For all three of these great powers – the Ottomans, Austria, and Russia – control of the Balkans hinges on the support of the Slavic population, who despite their own linguistic, cultural, and religious differences, are the overwhelming ethnic majority throughout most of the region.

        -The second power struggle is a struggle for control over Hungary itself. For centuries, the Habsburg dynasty has ruled Hungary by remaining popular with the ruling nobility who made up the Diet. Now that Hungary is under popular rule, this entire model has been upended. And who holds power in this narrowly-elected Hungarian government? The ethnic Magyars, which is just the proper word for “Hungarians,” who make up a majority of the population. This upsets the local Slavs, who would rather be part of a multi-ethnic Austrian Empire than a Hungarian nation dominated by the Magyar majority.

        -All of this plays into internal Austrian politics, because the Habsburg family also relies on the support of another Slavic people: the Czechs, who are often called Bohemians during this time. The Habsburg history with Bohemia is a long and… checkered one. But puns aside, wars have been fought over Bohemia’s status within the Empire, and the Bohemian nobility have an outsized influence in the Austrian court.

        -Now throw a third power struggle into the mix: the pan-European revolution of 1848. In his book The Habsburg Monarchy: From Enlightenment to Eclipse, British historian Robin Okey describes the situation as follows:

        “How, though, was post-revolutionary central Europe to be organized? Habsburg Slavs and Magyars had their own visions, ultimately just as utopian. Slavs dreamt of a federalized Austria, giving pride of place to its Slav majority and preserving the European balance of power against German or Russian hegemony… Magyars believed an alliance of the region’s ‘historic’ peoples was the only safeguard of the revolution, linking a united Germany with a liberal Hungary.

        “The Slav program, which has been dubbed Austro-Slavism, was largely a Czech-led affair. The more radical agenda of Polish exiles, which shrewdly enough saw Russia as the mainstay of European reaction, was quickly stalled by the reluctance of new liberal regimes in Prussia and France to take on the Tsar. The gist of Austro-Slavism was for a federation of equal Habsburg peoples, as a barrier to both German and Russian hegemony…

        “On the other hand, the vision underlying this pawky prudence far outran it… The Slav program of 1848 was really the most revolutionary of all, for its concept of national fraternity through ethnic federalism presupposed the greatest change in the status quo. But the Czechs could not persuade even their Bohemian German neighbors to this perspective… The simplest call for national and language equality involved a can of worms. If it meant officials should speak both languages, then the bilingual Czech intelligentsia would get all the jobs, because Germans thought learning a minor language like Czech a waste of time… Outside Bohemia, complications multiplied…

        “What of the Hungarians? Priding themselves on political skills gained through their constitutional heritage they dismissed both the illusions of the Austro-German hegemonism and the Slavs’ trust in their dynasty. The… mainstream in Hungarian politics after March doubted the dynasty’s loyalty to the April laws. If the revolution survived, Austria’s Polish, Italian, and German provinces would gravitate elsewhere, leaving Hungary to enter into an alliance with the new Germany.”

        -Into this mix comes a Hungarian politician named Lajos Kossuth. Kossuth is an ardent Magyar nationalist, and while he serves as Finance Minister in the government of the more moderate Prime Minister Lajos Batthyány, from almost the beginning of Hungarian democracy, Kossuth is the more popular of the two. As Finance Minister, he unilaterally begins issuing Hungarian currency, something that isn’t strictly legal under the terms of Hungary’s complex relationship with the Austrian crown. Starting in July of 1848, Kossuth calls for the creation of an expanded Hungarian army, and uses his power as Finance Minister to purchase equipment for 200,000 men. All of this in self-defense, of course.

This is the environment in which Emperor Ferdinand and the Habsburg royal family return to Vienna. Remember, I said they would return to Vienna in July. And in his history, titled Germany: Revolution and Counter-Revolution, Friedrich Engels looks at this from the perspective of a German labor radical. He writes:

        “The meeting of the Constituent Assembly in July was hailed with delight as the end of the revolutionary era; so was the return of the Court, which, after the… advent of the reactionary ministry of Doblhoff, considered itself strong enough to brave the popular torrent, and which, at the same time, was wanted in Vienna in order to complete its intrigues with the Slavonic majority in the Diet. [By “Slavonic, Engels means Austro-Slavic.] While the Constituent Diet discussed the laws on the emancipation of the peasantry from feudal bondage and forced labor for the nobility, the Court completed a master stroke. On August 19th the Emperor was made to review the National Guard; the Imperial family, the courtiers, the general officers, outbade each other in flatteries to the armed burghers who were already intoxicated with pride at thus seeing themselves publicly acknowledged as one of the important bodies of the State; and immediately afterwards a decree, signed by Herr Schwarzer, the only popular minister in the Cabinet, was published, withdrawing the Government aid, given hitherto to the workmen out of employ. The trick succeeded; the working classes got up a demonstration; the middle-class National Guards declared for the decree of their minister; they were launched upon the ‘Anarchists,’ fell like tigers on the unarmed and unresisting workpeople, and massacred a great number of them on August 23rd. Thus the unity and strength of the revolutionary force was broken; the class-struggle between bourgeois and proletarian had come in Vienna, too, to a bloody outbreak, and the counter-revolutionary camarilla saw the day approaching on which it might strike its grand blow.”

        -So the Austrian government forms a middle-class National Guard and goads the working-class gangs into a confrontation and puts them down at the end of August. Then they ask the Hungarian government to resign and allow an Austrian governor to take power, and the Hungarians refuse. Then the Austrians back the Imperial Viceroy, this Croatian guy named Josip Jelačić, in his invasion of Hungary. Now, Jelačić himself is a Croatian nationalist who wants to increase Slavic power and rule an independent Hungary for himself. But we will resist the urge to follow that line of thinking any further because thinking about Balkan politics for too long will drive you insane. For now, Josip Jelačić the Croatian nationalist is happy to get imperial backing for his invasion, and on September 11th, he’s got the green light.

        -What does this mean back in Vienna? It means that troops from Austria will need to be deployed to back Jelačić’s fully-sanctioned invasion. Remember, the Austrian Empire traditionally uses troops from around the empire to put down rebellions in different territories. They’re not going to rely on local Hungarian troops to side with Jelačić’s invading Croats in the name of imperial unity. Instead, on October 5th 1848, the Austrian government publishes a decree in Vienna’s largest newspaper, the Vienna Gazette. This decree does three things. First, it officially dissolves the Hungarian Diet, basically ending democracy in Hungary. Second, it officially names Josip Jelačić as both civil and military governor in Hungary. Neither of these things would be terribly controversial with most Viennese people, who are accustomed to hearing reports of disorder in one part or another of the Empire. It’s the third part of the government decree that gets people upset, and that’s an order to local troops – many of them Czech, many of them native Austrian – to march south and link up with the Croatian army under Jelačić’s command. That actually won’t be too hard. Jelačić’s army has just been defeated by the Hungarians in battle and has retreated into Austrian territory to regroup.

        -Regardless, the people of Vienna, particularly the remaining liberal parties, are very upset by the idea of Austrian troops participating in what they see as a war not against the nationalist government of Lajos Kossuth, who has just taken full power as Hungarian Prime Minister, but against the Hungarian people, who the Austrians view with a sense of brotherhood.

        -In the wee hours of the morning on October 6th, the unpopular conservative war minister Theodor von Latour issues an order for troops in the local garrisons to immediately board trains for the Hungarian front. Almost as soon as the order is issued, student and labor organizations, as well as many of the local National Guards, take to the streets and surround the local military barracks, preventing the troops from mobilizing. And many of those troops don’t need any encouragement to keep from mobilizing. In one of Vienna’s suburbs, a place called Gumpendorf, a battalion of grenadiers responds to the order to mobilize by rioting, smashing all the furniture in their barracks, and joining the students and workers outside.

        -In response to this mutiny, War Minister von Latour calls in more troops. These troops don’t mutiny, probably because they haven’t been ordered to go to Hungary, so they follow their orders and start herding the rebellious grenadiers towards Vienna’s railway station. They make progress, but it’s slow, and it keeps getting slower because a bunch of these student and labor groups are now rallying to the grenadiers, and the grenadiers’ musicians are banging on their drums and chanting slogans to encourage the protestors.

        -While all this is going on, some other rioters are busy near the railyard, which is on the other side of a bridge. So the rioters tear up some of the bridges’ wooden arches and use them to build a barricade in front of the railyard. The Austrian army commander, General Hugo von Bredy, orders some of his engineers to repair the bridge so the troops can keep moving, but there’s a problem: the grenadiers, along with many rioters, are between the Austrian army soldiers and the bridge. A standoff ensues, with neither side backing down but also holding their fire. In this tense environment, a group of trade unionists charges towards the army’s line, grabs one of their cannons, and starts rolling it back towards the rebel side. Von Bredy orders his men to fire at them, the grenadiers and laborers and students shoot back. Dozens are killed and wounded in the exchange, including von Bredy, who is killed in the first volley. The rebels have superior numbers, and the loyalist troops are forced to withdraw outside of Vienna.

        -Throughout the city, other groups of soldiers and insurgents hear the eruption of gunfire, and they start shooting at each-other too. As with the situation at the bridge, the insurgents have the advantage of overwhelming numbers, and by evening all loyalist troops have been evicted from the city. And what I see here, both from Engels and from others, is a vision of complete chaos on all sides. In his book 1848: Year of Revolution, Scottish historian Mike Rapport writes about the situation in the government district as the mob closes in:

        “Parliament and government alike had called for calm, but by now barricades had risen around the city center. Left with minimal protection, the ministries were exposed to the vengeance of the crowd. Latour was protected by a cordon of soldiers outside the War Ministry, but the government, seeking to stop the bloodshed, ordered the military to retreat. This left the minister horribly vulnerable to an angry mob bearing axes, pikes and iron bars. They smashed at the immense doors of the ministry, shouting, ‘Where is Latour? He must die!’ A deputation from the parliament rushed to the scene to intercede, while Latour took shelter in the attic of the building. The crowd jeered at the deputies and streamed through the ministry, looking for their prey. When they found Latour, the parliamentarians tried to shield him from their fury, but they were pushed aside. The minister was then battered to death, his head caved in with a hammer and cleaved with a saber before a bayonet sliced into his heart. He was then set upon with a grisly array of weapons until his mangled, limp body was dragged to the square of Am Holf. There the broken corpse was left dangling from a lamp-post for fourteen hours before it was finally cut down.

        “Meanwhile, the arsenal had been taken by the insurgents, but only after the troops guarding it had swept the streets with grapeshot and inflicted terrible casualties. The revolutionaries had then bombarded the building with captured Congreve rockets and it burst into flames. Thousands of muskets were seized, however, and some insurgents were seen leaving the arsenal wearing breastplates and medieval helmets and bearing a range of other historical artifacts, including Turkish scimitars.”

        -Even after taking over the city, the Viennese revolutionaries are directionless. The remaining elected government – which still includes some pro-Habsburg and pro-Austro-Slavic deputies, by the way – does nothing to take control of the situation. The best-armed part of the population, the middle-class National Guard, is also the best-organized. It’s also just as divided as the elected government, with many individual National Guard units choosing to sit out the rebellion or even take the regime’s side, while many other units are on board with the revolution. The workers and students, who are the most passionate revolutionaries, are the most poorly-armed. Remember, some are basically running around in medieval armor with old rusty swords. As for their leadership, Friedrich Engels spends a long paragraph of his history talking about how disorganized they are.

-Engels dedicates at least as much space to discussing how organized the regime is becoming. See, the Imperial Court isn’t trapped in the government district. They had already left the city before all the rioting broke out, and the Emperor is safe up in Olmutz, which is a city in fiercely Austro-Slavic Bohemia. Meanwhile, all the armies, not just from Vienna, but from Bohemia and Italy and other parts of the empire, which had already been on the trains to go join Josip Jelačić and his Croatian army… Well, they simply get off their trains a few stations early outside Vienna, and before long there’s a massive force of loyalist troops surrounding the city, somewhere in the neighborhood of 60,000 to 70,000 men. Ironically, a significant number of these men are Hungarian. You can’t use the Hungarian troops to put down a rebellion in Hungary, but you can use them against the Viennese. Even more ironically, these Hungarians are now fighting alongside Josip Jelačić’s Croats, who have taken a break from the war in Hungary to join the Imperial army in its siege. Along with Jelačić, the army is commanded by an Austro-Bohemian nobleman, the elderly Alfred von Windischgrätz, who is old enough to have served in the Napoleonic Wars starting way back in 1804.

-On October 24th 1848, von Windischgrätz decides he’s ready to take Vienna, and he tells the rebels that they have two days to surrender before he begins his assault. They don’t answer, and as promised, the Imperial army begins its bombardment on October 26th. This is a preparatory bombardment, mostly focused on rebel outposts around the city, which the Imperial army has cleared out by the evening. On the morning of the 27th, the attack begins in earnest, with all the army’s artillery hammering the rebel barricades at Vienna’s outskirts. Von Windischgrätz personally leads his vanguard into the industrial district, which he wants to capture at once to prevent the rebels from vandalizing it. Meanwhile, Jelačić leads his Croats into the eastern suburbs, where the rebels have some of their strongest support and where they’ve set up the most barricades. Clearing these areas out takes all day, much of it spent in urban combat at close quarters, but by the end of the 27th, the Imperial army stands at the gates of the inner city, and the artillery keeps hammering the rebels all night, artillery that in this era includes not just old-school cannons, but also a lot of rockets that are designed to set fires and spread chaos in the enemy ranks.

-On the morning of the 28th, von Windischgrätz orders his artillery to halt their bombardment, and when the firing stops, the Vienna city council sends out a delegation to offer their surrender. Everything might have ended here. Yes, there’s a hard core of rebels who want to fight to some glorious last stand. A lot of those guys are the leaders who are probably going to be executed for treason regardless. But for the most part, the Viennese rebels are willing to lay down their arms. But even as the surrender is being finalized, there’s a new development.

-Lajos Kossuth, the Hungarian Prime Minister, hasn’t been sitting idle. Instead, he’s been pursuing Josip Jelačić’s Croatian army, crossed the frontier into Austria, and a National Guard officer standing watch on Vienna’s cathedral tower spots the Hungarians at a distance of several miles, and the students and laborers decide they’re not going to surrender just yet. They’re going to see how this plays out.

-Well, it plays out horribly for the Hungarians. Windischgrätz sends out 28,000 men, a little under half of his army, to intercept them. These men set an ambush, and something like 25,000 Hungarian troops march right into a nest of 60 cannons, which open up with grapeshot, and after a few minutes of carnage, most of those 25,000 men are running back towards Hungary. The rest of the Imperial army then turns back for Vienna, where they arrive on October 30th. And after another night of artillery bombardment, the Viennese rebels surrender unconditionally on the morning of the 31st.

-Unfortunately, that handful of hardcore rebels still refuses to surrender, so while most of Vienna’s residents hunker down in their homes with white sheets hanging outside the windows, the army has to spend all day clearing out clusters of resistance in more close-range urban combat. In all, around 2,000 Viennese are killed in the fighting, which includes an unknown number of noncombatants caught in the crossfire. In addition, twenty-five of the captured rebel leaders will ultimately be executed.

CHAPTER FOUR: ENTER FRANZ JOSEPH

From the perspective of a radical revolutionary who wants total change right now, the Vienna Uprising is a failure. The rebel leaders are rounded up and executed, and the conservative Habsburg government is back in control. It’s also a disaster if you’re a Hungarian nationalist. Your army just had the chance to end the war and win national independence with one swift strike on Vienna, and it failed. Nonetheless, the Vienna Uprising does signify the first real pushback from the Austrian people themselves against this idea of Austro-Slavism as a governing philosophy.

        -From a longer-term perspective, the Vienna Uprising has a huge impact, because it hardens the Austrian leadership’s anti-nationalist views. The new Prime Minister, Felix von Schwarzenberg, accepts office on one condition: the chronically ill Emperor Ferdinand is to abdicate in favor of his nephew, 18-year-old Franz Joseph. The royal family agrees.

        -Schwarzenberg himself is a pragmatic conservative, who immediately assembles a unity cabinet that includes some well-known liberals. On domestic policy, he’s known as a centrist, but he will spend his entire tenure aggressively pursuing anti-nationalist policies – first in Hungary, and then, as we’ll see later on, up north in Germany. Moreover, Schwarzenberg is something of a role model for the new Emperor, Franz Joseph, who is only 18 years old and has spent his entire life growing up in this era of nationalist and liberal thought.

        -More importantly, Franz Joseph is active. Now, I’m not trying to dunk on handicapped people, and history has given us some powerful leaders who suffered from some kind of disability; FDR and King Baldwin of Jerusalem come to mind. But Emperor Ferdinand is so profoundly disabled that he’s simply incapable of fulfilling his duties, and we’ve seen how chaotic things are getting in Austria without a strong figure at the helm.

        -Franz Joseph is not that guy… At least not if you’re looking for a traditional conservative strongman. For one thing, like I said, he’s only 18 years old, and while he does hold a commission as a military officer, his mother Sophie has made sure to keep him well away from combat. For another thing, he seems a little bit starstruck by Prime Minister Schwarzenberg. But what he can do right away is show up for public functions, rally support for the regime, and actively participate in cabinet meetings. As Franz Joseph grows older, we’ll see him mature into a more seasoned leader. We’ll also watch his views on nationalism shift from outright opposition to a more nuanced belief in a centralized yet multi-ethnic empire with strong minority rights. This in turn will have massive implications for World War I, because a far more seasoned Franz Joseph will still be Emperor in 1914, and it’s his heir Franz Ferdinand who will be shot on the streets of Sarajevo, kicking off the whole conflict. But that’s far in the future.

For now, the most immediate impact of the Vienna Uprising will be felt in Hungary, where Lajos Kossuth is still licking his wounds and reconstituting his army. With Vienna now securely in imperial hands, all those troops who had needed to stop there to put down the rebellion once again march south into Hungary. The Hungarians will put up a valiant defense, but they’re now fighting with the imperial regime fully focused on their uprising and without any help from abroad. Now, I’m trying to get past this whole Hungarian uprising because it’s only ancillary to our story in Germany, so here’s the quick version. In January of 1849, General Windischgrätz takes the main Hungarian cities of Buda and Pest, but Kossuth fights on, and against incredible odds, his army retakes Buda and Pest in April. In May, he resigns, confidently handing over the position of Prime Minister to a fellow independence leader, a guy named Bertalan Szemere who we won’t bother ourselves with. But then, the Hungarians get hit by a new enemy: the Russian Army.

-As a matter of fact, throughout the invasion, or counter-revolution depending on your point of view, Windisch-Grätz works closely with Russian troops. I’m not going to go too far down this Hungarian rabbit-hole because it only leads to more rabbit-holes. See, the Russians are helping the Austrians in Hungary because they’ve been dealing with their own little nationalist rebellion in nearby Romania, and they don’t want any of this revolutionary nonsense anywhere in Eastern Europe. And in Romania, the Ottoman Empire has in turn helped the Russians to put down the rebellion, but not before the issue led to a palace coup in Istanbul. So we’re not going any further down this road. Not doing it. The takeaway here is that 1848-1849 are wild, wild years pretty much everywhere in Europe, and the Russian army is helping the Austrians put down the Hungarian rebellion because “reasons.”

-Anyway, the Hungarians had already beaten off a weak and halfhearted Russian attack in 1848, but as is often the case, the Russians just come back with way more guys, and in 1849, in a two-front war against both the Russians and the Austrian imperial forces, the Hungarians don’t stand a chance. On August 13th, the last rebel army surrenders to the Russians, who immediately hand over control of the captured territory to the Austrians and withdraw.

-The Austrian response is far from what you’d expect from a usually enlightened people. To begin with, there’s a succession crisis in the Hungarian royal line, because while Emperor Ferdinand has resigned in Austria, it’s unconstitutional for him to resign as King of Austria. So among the Hungarian public, even royalists are unwilling to submit to Emperor Franz Joseph unless the constitutional succession process is followed. And in a proclamation of March 7th 1849, Franz Joseph issues a new constitution that rolls back a number of reforms, but most importantly for our purposes it sidesteps the issue of royal succession altogether by putting Hungary under martial law and carving it up into five military districts. Moreover, some of the surrounding lands are given formal status as separate realms under the Austrian Empire, independent of Hungarian rule. These include the Grand Principality of Transylvania, and the Emperor will soon also restore the Voivodeship of Serbia. At the same time, Hungary itself will be subjected to forced Germanization, with German made the official language of government, a change that will force many non-German-speaking ethnic Magyars out of government employment. And like I said, all of this just further enrages Hungarian nationalists, many of whom, even traditional monarchists, view Franz Joseph as illegitimate.

-When the dust settles, the reprisals are unusually brutal. Hungary’s first Prime Minister, Lajos Batthyány, is executed, as are thirteen of the fourteen most senior officers in the Hungarian army. The fourteenth, Artúr Görgei, who is also the Hungarian dictator by the end of the rebellion, is only spared thanks to intercession by the Russians, to whom he had personally surrendered.

-Ironically, the Austrians receive a great deal of support from Hungarian ethnic minorities. Remember, this whole Hungarian rebellion hadn’t just been about political independence. It had also been about Magyar nationalism, and while Magyars are the majority in Hungary, there are a lot of Slavs and even a fair number of Germans in the area, and if you’re one of those people, being ruled by a semi-benevolent military dictatorship looks a lot more appealing than being ruled by a bunch of Magyar nationalists.

-Now, I’m going to get back to events in Germany, but put a pin in Hungary, because as you may have guessed this situation is only temporary. Hungary is simply too big and important a country for Austria to rule indefinitely as an occupying power, and eventually there will have to be a political resolution.

CHAPTER FIVE: CRISIS IN GERMANY

1848 and to a lesser extent 1849 are years of crisis throughout Europe, and while Austria is dealing both with liberal revolutionaries and nationalist rebellions, the Imperial Court watches impotently as German nationalists whittle away at their influence in the German Confederation. These years will see low levels of political violence in Germany, and we’ll get to that in a second. But the violence is nothing on the level of the Hungarian civil war or the Vienna Uprising, nor is it ever widespread. Instead, most of the revolutionary activity in Germany takes the form of old-school political debates, with would-be reformers working within the system to effect change. As we’ll see, it gets more heated than that at times, but the small outbreaks of real violence in Germany, while lethal, are also very local. So let’s wind back the clock once again to February of 1848, when the French radical centrist king Louis-Philippe loses his throne and is replaced by – for now – President Napoleon III. We’ve seen how this results in revolutionary chaos in Italy, Hungary, and even Austria. In Germany, the sudden change in the French regime isn’t so much a political threat as a national security threat.

        -People will often ask why, historically speaking, Germany seems to be such a militaristic country. Even before Germany becomes Germany – even in 1848, when we’re talking about Prussia and the three dozen or so states that make up the German Confederation – Germany’s leading power, Prussia, is a military one. Well, that’s because of Germany’s location. Being in Central Europe means that if other European countries are going to war, there’s a good chance they end up going through your territory, which may or may not get you involved, even if the war initially had nothing to do with you and you only ever wanted to stay out of it. And if you don’t have a powerful military of your own, then you’re going to end up as a client state to one or another great power.

        -This is the immediate concern when Louis-Philippe abdicates, not because of any threat from Napoleon III’s new quasi-republican French regime, but because of the possible reaction from other European powers, by which I mean the Russians. Tsar Nicholas I has taken on the role of protector of Europe’s old autocratic order, and even before Nicholas was in power, the Russians had already been the most powerful force in the various anti-Napoleon coalitions at the beginning of the century. So the idea of Russian armies marching into Paris to evict Napoleon III and restore the French monarchy isn’t totally out of the question, and of course this army would be marching right across German territory and causing all kinds of trouble. The problem, of course, is that Germany isn’t a country at this time. It’s a confederation of 38 mostly-tiny states. Imagine the European Union if most of the countries were the size of Rhode Island, and you can see how this is a problem.

        -Before we continue, I should stress that I’m about to grossly oversimplify an incredibly complex and dense period of history. This period of time in Germany is really a “for experts only” kind of deal, and I am far from being an expert. We’re talking about 38 states, each with its own government and views and agendas, all trying to negotiate some kind of solution. You could literally do an entire podcast series on just the revolutions of 1848 in Germany, and no matter how old you are right now, you would grow old and die before you ever ran out of content. So when I say I’m oversimplifying, I’m really oversimplifying. Even Friedrich Engels, who is present and involved in some of the events, ignores much of 1848 altogether, saying:

        “We pass over the sometimes curious, but mostly tedious, parliamentary proceedings and local struggles that occupied, in Germany, the different parties during the summer.”

        -So I will follow Engels’ lead, and suffice it to say that not much happens as far as Germany forming a united military response to the Russian threat. There is no need. By the time various German states even get into serious negotiations in late spring, it’s already clear that there is no imminent Russian invasion.

        -That said, you still have some kind of government response, and what happens in Germany is that all the various states send representatives to a meeting in Frankfurt in March of 1848. Some of these representatives are appointed directly by heads of state or local assemblies, while others are popularly elected and still others are invited by people who have already been appointed or elected. So the rules are kind of a patchwork and what you end up with is 574 representatives altogether, and they’re calling this ad hoc assembly a “pre-parliament”. What is a pre-parliament, you may ask? If you’ve ever worked an office job, then at some point you’ve probably attended a meeting where the only purpose of the meeting was to plan another, more formal meeting. Well, a pre-parliament is basically that, but for a national assembly.

        -The membership of this pre-parliament is disproportionately left-leaning, and that’s more or less down to the structure of most of the German states. The conservatives represent the classes that are already in power and feel secure in their power. In these sorts of mostly-traditional states, there’s simply no need for a conservative political movement. On the left, on the other hand, there’s plenty of impetus to form political clubs, organizations, and newspapers. So when the 574-member pre-parliament meets in Frankfurt on March 31st 1848, many people expect some kind of radical reforms. Instead, a moderate nobleman named Heinrich von Gagern rallies the assembly’s liberal faction to support a stronger confederation consisting of sovereign constitutional monarchies with a united foreign policy and an elected federal assembly. This is certainly a major change from the status quo, but it’s far from the calls for outright democracy that are coming from the far left. The next day, April 1st, the vote is taken, and a whopping 425 of the 574 delegates support Gagern’s proposal. A fifty-man committee creatively named the “Committee of Fifty” is then elected to prepare the ground for the actual meeting of Parliament in May, while everyone else is supposed to go home. The committee has a liberal-ish bent.

        -That’s when things go off the rails. The radicals, none of whose names are terribly important, storm out, and many of them go to the Grand Duchy of Baden in southern Germany, near the Swiss border, where a peasant rebellion has broken out against the local nobles, who still act as feudal overlords in that area. Meanwhile, Heinrich von Gagern, the guy who had led the liberals to victory, also storms out of the parliament when he isn’t elected to the Committee of Fifty.

        -The radicals launch a larger-scale rebellion in Baden in April, and the Committee of Fifty sends troops from the German Confederation to put it down. Now, the local troops in service of the Grand Duke of Baden may not be reliable against the rebels, but these other troops from around Germany are, and they’re able to put down the rebellion without a lot of trouble, although ironically, Heinrich von Gagern, who is leading the government troops, is one of the first to be killed in the short battle. The surviving rebels run off into Switzerland, and order is restored. There are a few similar outbreaks of violence elsewhere in Germany with similar results, and the long and short of it is that the liberals, who a few months ago had been almost as much of a bogeyman to the conservatives as the radicals, suddenly come out as the party of law and order. One radical leader who had remained in government and tried to work with the Committee of Fifty, a guy named Robert Blum, says of the surviving rebel leaders that the: “…have betrayed the country in the eyes of the law – that’s trivial – but they betrayed the people by their insane insurrection and checked us on the way to victory. That is a hideous crime.”

CHAPTER SIX: THE CURIOUS CASE OF LOLA MONTEZ

Ironically, if you don’t count Emperor Ferdinand’s resignation in Austria because Austria isn’t part of modern-day Germany, the only German head of state to lose power in 1848 is King Ludwig I of Bavaria. That little snafu has nothing to do with politics in the traditional sense and everything to do with Ludwig I’s socially unacceptable behavior. See, Ludwig I is famous as not just a patron of the arts but an art collector, and spends a significant portion of his fortune not just on Renaissance artwork from around Europe but also from the classical world. He constructs a number of major buildings in the classical style, most of which are still standing, and the most famous of which is probably the Ruhmeshalle in Munich. He even writes a massive quantity of bad poetry. And you know what? This is 19th century Germany, a cultural wonderland. Ludwig I’s removal from power has nothing to do with his lavish cultural spending and everything to do with his relationship with a certain courtesan named Lola Montez. Is this really relevant to German unification? No. But it’s the kind of story I can’t just skip over, because Lola Montez is one of those characters that sticks in the popular imagination, and in her own way she’s as famous as Metternich, Garibaldi, Engels, and the other major political figures of the day.

        -Now, with a name like Lola Montez, you might be expecting an exotic character from a faraway land – maybe somewhere from the colonies, like Cuba. But Lola Montez is not this woman’s actual name; it’s the stage name of 27-year-old Eliza Gilbert, who comes from a relatively normal family in Ireland. Born in 1821 in County Sligo, Eliza’s father was an up-and-coming cavalry officer, and her mother’s father was a member of parliament. Eliza would never remember her time in Ireland, because when she was only two years old, the family would relocate to India, where her father’s regiment was being stationed. In those days, India was a place where white people went when they wanted to die of incurable tropical diseases, and sure enough, within a few months, Eliza’s father was dead from Cholera. Her mother remarried within a year, and while by all accounts her new stepfather loved her, it soon became clear that Eliza was not like the other British girls her age. She was constantly acting out, and so it was decided that she would be sent to Scotland to live with her step-grandfather and get a proper British upbringing. But Eliza’s bizarre behavior would continue, including a penchant for running through the streets naked. Eliza would be moved to England at the age of ten, this time to live at a boarding school run by her step-aunt, but she would only last a year before being moved to yet another school at the age of 11. At 16, Eliza would leave that school by eloping with a young cavalry officer named Thomas James, and the young couple moved to Calcutta, back in British India. But their love was not to last, and they would divorce five years later in 1837.

        -Here, Eliza Gilbert falls off the map for a little while, and different sources make different claims about her activities. Some say she stays in Calcutta and learns the art of exotic dancing, while others make all kinds of claims, including that she travels to Spain and learns to dance there. Whatever happens, Eliza Gilbert disappears, and reappears in London in 1843 as a stage performer billed as “Lola Montez, the Spanish dancer.” As it turns out, London is not the best choice for a debut. It doesn’t take long before some audience members recognize Lola Montez as Mrs. James, the wife of a cavalry officer. This causes a minor scandal, since in the 1840s it’s considered totally inappropriate for a married woman to be performing as a dancer. So, Lola decides to take her act to the European continent, where she’s less likely to be recognized.

        -Her European tour is a wild success. Lola perfects a particularly erotic dance that apparently involves a lot of legwork, because it’s known as the “spider dance,” and she spends the next couple of years performing this dance in Paris, where she meets and has romantic affairs with a number of famous luminaries, including the writer Alexandre Dumas and the composer Franz Liszt. Among Lola’s many partners is a newspaper owner and drama critic named Alexandre Dujarrier, who ensures that her shows always get rave reviews. One day, Dujarrier is at a party with Lola and another man, and the two of them get into a jealous argument over her. When words fail to resolve the issue, the two men take things outside for an old-school pistol duel, where Dujarrier is shot dead. Lola now has no cover from a press that is growing increasingly hostile. She’s deep in debt, and is finding it harder and harder to find men who are willing to finance her lifestyle. After yet another argument that involves her firing a pistol through a door at one of her lovers, Lola decides to take her act elsewhere, and that “elsewhere” turns out to be the city of Munich, which is where she enters the story of Germany.

        -By this point, Lola Montez is famous throughout Europe for her dancing, her unpredictable antics, and her almost otherworldly beauty. She creates such an impression that as recently as 2013, Danish rock band Volbeat wrote a song about her, and it became a hit single, reaching number one on the US Mainstream Rock chart. The band writes:

        “Her performance utterly

Erotic subversive to all ideas

And for public morality

And cool as she was she didn't care

See the miner throw his gold

Lifting her skirt howling loud like a wolf

Hell-raising and full of sin

When Lola was dancing and showing her skin

        “Wherever she walks

She will be captivating all the men

Don't look in her eyes

You might fall and find the love of your life, heavenly

But she'll catch you in her web

The love of your life, yeah”

        -This is the Lola Montez who shows up in Bavaria in 1846. And where does she choose to make her grand entrance into Bavarian society? Where else but Bavaria’s most famous public event: Oktoberfest. Ironically, Oktoberfest had first been celebrated in 1810 to mark the marriage of King Ludwig and his wife, Therese of Saxe-Hildburghausen, who by now his used to the artistic, whimsical Ludwig’s tendency to chase after every available woman. He’s already had more than one affair at more than one Oktoberfest, so it’s only natural that he should take an interest in this exotic “Spanish” dancer.

        -On October 8th, he grants her a private audience, officially to hear her request for permission to perform at one of Munich’s premiere theaters, but really because Ludwig is familiar with Lola’s reputation, and he simply has to see her for himself. In his book Lola Montez: Her Life & Conquests, author James Morton writes:

        “The private audience lasted far longer than was strictly necessary and Ludwig could be heard talking loudly in Spanish. It is at this point in their meeting that one of the great Lola legends has arisen. The King is said to have been fascinated by her bosom and wanted to know whether it was real or false. Whatever things were false about Lola, and there were many, her bosom was not among them. The story goes that Lola either took a pair of scissors and cut or simply tore her dress for the king’s delectation.”

        -Ludwig is totally captivated, and not only authorizes Lola’s stage performance, but attends her debut two days later, on his own wedding anniversary. Two days after that, Ludwig invites her to his palace to have her portrait painted for his gallery of beauties, because yes, King Ludwig is the kind of guy who pays to have paintings made of beautiful women so he can keep them in a special gallery for that purpose. Anyway, Ludwig has Lola come to his palace for these portrait sittings, and then starts visiting her at her hotel. This isn’t out of the ordinary for him, actually. King Ludwig does his own shopping at the market, regularly attends theaters and museums on a whim and without security present, and generally lives his life as if he were a regular person instead of the king. This is how he once managed to carry on an affair with a shopkeeper. Anyway, now he’s seeing Lola in her hotel room, and within a year, in August of 1847, Ludwig has made her a Baroness, then a Countess, and granted her some very valuable estates, making Lola one of the wealthiest independent women in Germany.

        -Lola isn’t content being a fake Countess who collects a fat paycheck and sleeps with the King. She’s actually been getting involved with politics, and by late 1847, many in polite society are whispering that Lola Montez, not King Ludwig, is actually running Bavaria. Part of Lola’s involvement in politics is purely self-preservation. Despite its liberal, artistic-minded monarch, Bavaria is a culturally conservative country. For example, while there is officially freedom of religion, two thirds of the country is Catholic compared to around one third Protestant, and the Jesuits are writing the laws surrounding education and public morality. You can see why Lola Montez and the Jesuits might come into conflict, and indeed they do.

        -There are a number of public arguments between Lola and Ludwig’s conservative cabinet ministers, which comes to a head when she is made a Countess over the heated objections of the conservative Minister of State, Karl von Abel, who Ludwig then dismisses along with some other conservative cabinet ministers. This, along with plausible rumors that Lola is a British spy sent to instigate a revolution in Bavaria, makes her very unpopular with the Bavarian public. Even when she does something popular, she often does it in such a way that it annoys people. For example, she convinces King Ludwig to approve a pay increase for Bavarian teachers, who are living on poverty wages. Ludwig approves the increase, but then Lola goes and announces it herself, undercutting the royal decree and making it look as if she’s the one making policy.

        -Lola keeps lovers on the side, and uses them to undercut political rivals, at one point stating that a candidate for a ministerial appointment would never move forward because he had worked against her in the past. When some of Ludwig’s friends bring him evidence of her infidelity and political meddling, he doesn’t believe them. James Morton writes:

        “In another display of willful blindness, coupled with a sense that she must be allowed to defend herself, he arranged that the unfortunate Heideck [an old retired Baron] should put the points to her and obtain detailed answers. The meeting at his apartment was not a success. The little actress, very often far more convincing off stage than on, was enraged, swore on her father’s grave that the allegations were false, tore at her clothes, reviled the King and wept, saying she would return to Paris at once. In true musical comedy tradition, Ludwig came into the room and instantly her fury was turned on him. Heideck now said she should beg the King’s forgiveness and he again suffered her abuse and the destruction of a number of his teacups. So far as she was concerned an innocent woman had no need of forgiveness.”

        -The political meddling intensifies, with Ludwig’s cooperation. Munich’s chief of police investigates her for various crimes, and finds himself reassigned to a rural province. The same happens to a colonel who has the audacity to complain to the king when Lola insults him at a party. Despite all the drama, Lola and Ludwig seem to genuinely be in love during this time. They share everything together, including syphilis. Appropriately, nobody knows whether Ludwig gives syphilis to Lola or vice-versa. Anyway, the two are madly in love, but both the public and the royal ministry are increasingly opposed to this wild exotic dancer and her influence with the king.

        -Despite being raised to the nobility, the other nobility in Bavaria refuse to see Lola, and she finds herself shunned from the kind of high society parties she had always loved. So she sidelines Ludwig for the time being and begins taking more lovers to regain access to these parties, and makes use of a student fraternity known as the Allemania to listen in on people’s gossip and report anyone who says anything bad about Lola, so she can have them removed from the capital somehow. Of course, the Allemania fraternity is headed by one of her not-so-secret lovers.

        -The story goes on for months, and is filled with drama I don’t have time to get into during this already-lengthy diversion. If you want the whole story, James Morton’s book is an excellent telling not just of the events in Bavaria but of the full life and legend of Lola Montez. Anyway, it all comes to a head on March 4th, when a mob surrounds a house Ludwig had given to Lola, and Ludwig himself has to go out in person and convince the mob to go home. They do, but not everyone is content; somebody throws a rock, which hits but does not seriously injure King Ludwig.

        -By now, Lola Montez has made enemies of the court’s powerful conservative faction, the kingdom’s powerful local Jesuit order, the nobility, and the working class. Basically everyone in the kingdom whose name isn’t Ludwig von Wittelsbach, King of Bavaria. Reluctantly, the King orders Lola to go into exile in Switzerland, where he promises to meet her. He actually tries, but there’s a miscommunication and Ludwig and Lola end up trying to meet each-other in different Swiss cities. When Ludwig returns to Bavaria, he successfully locates Lola and invites her to come back, which she does. But there is to be no joyful reunion. Conservative government ministers intercept her at the border, and the police search her and her belongings for anything that might be deemed contraband. They find nothing, but in the process, they trigger a constitutional crisis. See, Ludwig had specifically ordered that Lola Montez not be searched at the border, and his police minister had violated his orders with the backing of other cabinet ministers, who insist that the police were only following the law. In other words, these conservatives are now asserting that there are constitutional limits on the king’s power. Again, we come back to that really narrow Overton window that people are operating in at this time. Even the conservatives are not absolutists; they’re constitutional monarchists. In Ludwig’s mind, this is totally unacceptable, but the royal ministers are unmoved. Either Ludwig allows them to expel Lola from Bavaria, or he keeps her under house arrest so she will stay out of trouble, or he must abdicate the throne. Ludwig chooses abdication, opting to let his son Maximilian rule Bavaria instead. That’s how King Ludwig of Bavaria loses his throne during the Revolutions of 1848, and like I said, it has nothing to do with the Revolution and everything to do with Lola Montez.

        -After this, Ludwig and Lola will never see her again. Maximilian agrees to have her exiled once and for all, and Ludwig, for all his love for Lola, is unwilling to leave Bavaria to spend his life with her. This is probably for the best. He lives for another 20 years, spending a relatively drama-free life as a patron of the arts, and presumably continuing to cheat on his wife with an endless series of women. As for Lola, she goes on to marry yet another British military officer who dies of tuberculosis in Portugal, leaving the now-widowed Lola Montez to support herself. She tours the United States, moves to California, then tours Australia, where she famously horsewhips a newspaper editor who gives a negative review of one of her shows. After this, she moves back to the United States, where she spends a few years in Brooklyn as a lecturer and advocate for impoverished women, before ultimately dying of syphilis in 1861, at only 39 years old. As Volbeat sings in their hit song:

        “Oh, Lola, I'm sure that the love would have been

The key to all your pain

The key to all your pain

No words will later come

Did the spider bite your tongue?

We will surely not forget

We will surely not forget

The Lola spider dance

Whoa!”

CHAPTER SEVEN: KING FRIEDRICH WILHELM, THE CONSERVATIVE REVOLUTIONARY

We’ve talked about Austria and the smaller German statelets and how they weathered the Revolutions of 1848. Before we move back to Italy, we still need to discuss the other, non-Austrian major power in the German Confederation: Prussia. If you’ll remember from last episode, which was oh so many months ago, Prussia is ruled by King Friedrich Wilhelm IV, who is known as a romantic and a patron of the arts; among other things, he builds the Cologne Cathedral, one of Europe’s most iconic architectural marvels. Unlike his fellow romantic King Ludwig, Friedrich Wilhelm IV is a savvy politician and a master at crafting the perfect public image. He’s not about to have a scandalous affair with an exotic dancer, for example. The only real blemish on his image is his drinking, which leads his critics to call him the “red-nosed king”. But every politician, even every king, has his detractors, and all things considered, Friedrich Wilhelm IV has managed to hold on to more personal power than most European monarchs while maintaining a liberal-ish façade.

        -At the beginning of 1848, the King of Prussia is one of the few remaining absolute monarchs in Europe, outside of the Russian Empire and some parts of the Balkans. However, unlike in those absolutist countries, Prussia has a proud tradition of local participatory government, and just like in the rest of Germany, all of the crises of the 1840s – the revolutions elsewhere in Europe, the economic crisis, the food crisis – have motivated people to get more involved. And in Prussia, this takes two forms: first, participation in local government, and second, participation in the many new and growing political clubs. In his book The Long Nineteenth Century: A History of Germany, 1780–1918, Vanderbilt University historian David Blackbourn writes of these political clubs:

        “Associations, or Vereine, hitherto largely the preserve of notables, became a vehicle for much wider participation during the revolution. The most obvious sign of this political flowering was the enormous growth in the number of clubs that identified themselves with a particular ideological position or party. They included democratic, liberal and conservative associations, the Communist League, and the Pius Associations (named after Pope Pius IX) that were the principal focus of a formidable Catholic political mobilization. The extent of popular political involvement was extraordinary by prerevolutionary standards. An idea of what this meant in practice can be gained by considering just two examples. Democratic associations not only flourished in radical areas like the Rhineland and Wurttemberg: by August 1848, 200,000 members were enrolled in 200 local branches of Ludwig Schlinke's Silesian Hauptrustikalverein. And the Pius Associations were able, with considerable clerical assistance, to collect well over a quarter of a million Catholic signatures on petitions. The press was also revolutionized: new papers appeared (more than 300 in Austria alone), alongside pamphlets and satirical broadsheets 'a flood of street literature'. 'March verses' were sold by hawkers and 'March songs' sung; unpopular figures were serenaded with charivaris or 'rough music' outside their windows, when they were not hanged in effigy.”

        -There are a few things I want to tease out of this quote, because Blackbourn is telling us a lot in this paragraph. To begin with, he tells us that these German political clubs aren’t all left-leaning. They generally are, before the March revolutions make the conservatives realize how disorganized they are. But by late 1848, there will be all kinds of political organizations.

        -Blackbourn makes a point of mentioning the Pius Associations, and if you’ll remember from our last episode, down in Italy, a lot of the Italian nationalists are hoping Pope Pius IX will step up and claim the throne of a united Kingdom of Italy and build an Italian state from there. Well, up in Germany, these Pius associations are Catholic nationalists, and they tend to be very conservative. The liberal parties, by and large, tend to be Protestant, although again, these are broad generalizations. All of this to say that 1848 is a complicated year, and not everybody who’s agitating for change is agitating for a shift to the left. Just as many are advocating a shift to the right. As I pointed out, King Ludwig of Bavaria isn’t overthrown by radical revolutionaries. He resigns because conservative ministers want a king who acts more conservatively and are chipping away at his power. In that environment, it’s worth noting that Friedrich Wilhelm IV is a Calvinist, yet relies on a conservative base of support that is disproportionately Catholic. His supporters include both old-school Prussian aristocrats and populist Catholic nationalists. How do you keep that coalition happy? You have to be a master politician.

        -Another thing David Blackbourn talks about are “March verses” and “March songs,” and these are political anthems written during the March revolutions. We talked a lot about the March revolutions in Austria, but up in Prussia, in the month of March 1848 sees its own share of rioting. I’m not going to go into the nitty-gritty details because a lot of this is just the same thing over and over in different parts of the map. But what’s important here is not the riots, which begin on March 13th in the Prussian capital of Berlin. What’s important is Friedrich Wilhelm’s response.

        -On March 21st, he leads a military parade out of his palace and directly into the middle of the riots. But he’s not leading the army out to crush the rebellion. No, Friedrich Wilhelm IV is coming out to take his place at the head of the German revolution. Instead of the black Prussian eagle, his cavalry are flying the black, red, and gold revolutionary banner, and Frederick himself is wearing a revolutionary armband. At the head of the parade, in front of the King himself, is a Prussian officer wearing civilian clothes, also carrying a black, red, and gold flag. This officer in civilian clothes represents a fusion of the old Prussian military ideals with the new, more people-centered ideals of the revolution.

        -Friedrich Wilhelm stops multiple times along the way to speak to the protestors, who stop and listen to him. When he’s done speaking, most of them cheer. Then, in front of a large crowd, the King proclaims his own personal support for a pan-German parliament. Remember that pre-parliament that’s meeting down in Frankfurt in March? Well, Friedrich Wilhelm IV has just endorsed that pre-parliament.

        -Eight days later, on March 29th, he goes further, firing his government and appointing a new royal ministry with an all-liberal membership. Basically, he’s gone full-on enlightened monarch and given the protesters everything they asked for. Oh, and he also forms an alliance with the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia in its Italian rebellion against Austria. Wow!

        -But the devil is in the details. For one thing, this Prussian alliance with Piedmont-Sardinia exists only on paper. There is no way, in the current environment, that Friedrich Wilhelm IV will risk tearing apart the entire German Confederation in a war against Austria, just to appease some radical revolutionaries. It’s not gonna happen, and this bold anti-Austrian alliance never amounts to more than a little diplomatic dust-up and a footnote in the history books.

        -Moreover, while he does appoint a liberal cabinet, Friedrich Wilhelm also appoints a secret shadow government that his family and close supporters know about, but which otherwise just meets quietly in private and keeps tabs on events, waiting for the day that the King can ditch his revolutionary façade and put the conservatives back in power. So he’s taking this role as leader of the revolution while simultaneously keeping the loyalty of all the leading conservatives and even having this conservative shadow government. The guy’s just working on a level where most politicians can’t or won’t operate.

CHAPTER EIGHT: THE FIRST SCHLESWIG-HOLSTEIN WAR

While Friedrich Wilhelm is doing this, he’s also asserting Prussia’s role as the leader of the new Germany’s foreign policy. See, in March of 1848, in the midst of Prussia’s change in government, a rebellion breaks out in the duchies of Schleswig, Holstein, and Lauenburg, which sit between Germany and Denmark. I could go into this rebellion in detail, and I read a lot about it because I have to chase down some of these rabbit-holes. There’s a link to a good book on this war in the episode description. I can assure you that for our purposes, it is indeed only a rabbit-hole, so I’ll sum it up and move on to its implications, which are more important.

        -Basically, there are some territories called Schleswig, Holstein, and Lauenburg, which lie between Germany and Denmark. In fact, the modern 21st-century German-Danish border cuts right across this area near the south of the Jutland peninsula, where mainland Denmark juts north of the European mainland. Back in the mid-18th-century, these border territories are ruled by the King of Denmark, and except for a short intermission during the Napoleonic Wars, they have been ruled by the King of Denmark since the late 1200s. Until recently, none of this has been controversial, but now that nationalism has come into style in Europe, many of the residents of Schleswig, Holstein, and Lauenburg are unhappy with the current arrangement, as are many German nationalists.

        -See, the southeastern-most of these territories, Lauenburg, is almost entirely populated by ethnic Germans, not Danes, and while there are many Danes in the central of the three territories, Holstein, Holstein is nonetheless still majority German. These ethnic majorities are so longstanding that even though the King of Denmark has ruled Holstein and Lauenburg for hundreds of years, they are not part of Denmark. They are independent duchies ruled by the King of Denmark in his capacity as Duke of those territories. They have their own governments, their own laws, and their own rules of succession, and they’re actually part of the German confederation, so it shouldn’t be surprising that German nationalists are calling for Holstein and Lauenburg to be liberated from Danish rule and integrated into the new German state the nationalists are trying to build. Meanwhile, the northernmost of the three border territories, Schleswig, is majority-Danish, and is an independent duchy ruled by the King of Denmark outside of the German Confederation. However, Schleswig has close cultural, historic, and economic ties to neighboring Holstein, so many German nationalists believe that Schleswig should also become part of Germany because it would be a shame to break the two up. Danish nationalist views are more nuanced, with some believing that all three territories should be integrated into Denmark, while others want to maintain the status quo, and still others favor Denmark keeping majority-Danish Schleswig, while majority-German Holstein and Lauenburg would become part of Germany. Incidentally, this last option is what will historically end up happening after World War I.

        -So what does this have to do with Germany? Well, because the year 1848 insists on being as complicated as possible, the King of Denmark, Christian VIII, dies on January 20th, and his son Frederick VII becomes heir. Frederick VII is impotent, and unfortunately for everyone, he’s also the last male heir of the Danish royal line. In Denmark itself, this isn’t a big deal. Frederick has some close female relatives who could become queen. However, in the territories of Schleswig, Holstein, and Lauenburg, succession is governed by something called Salic Law, and if you remember my episodes on the War of the Austrian Succession, you’ll remember that this law has caused trouble in the past.

-Under Salic Law, the rules are clear: a female cannot rule the country. Therefore, upon Frederick’s death, the rulership of the three duchies would devolve to an entirely different branch of the family because they’d have to go way back to King Christian III in the 1500s to find the closest existing male line of inheritance. In other words, when Frederick VII becomes King of Denmark at the beginning of 1848, it immediately triggers a succession crisis not over his own rise to the throne, but of who is going to be heir in his different territories when he dies.

-In March of 1848, with France reeling from its own revolution, with Austria paralyzed by rioting, the Hungarian rebellion, and political chaos, Prince Frederick, a claimant to the ducal title, launches a rebellion with a mob of university students. They march into a major fortress, which has somehow been left open, Frederick gives a speech about the importance of home rule, membership in the German Confederation, and liberal constitutional monarchy, and all the troops in the fortress join the rebellion. Frederick is even kind enough to let the local Danish officers go free, provided they swear not to fight against the independent duchies, which we’ll now call Schleswig-Holstein for the sake of historical consistency and also my sanity. So now Frederick is at the head of a rebellion against a new Danish king, and he turns to the Germans for help. It’s worth noting that Frederick is also in rebellion against his older brother Christian August, who also claims to be Duke of Schleswig-Holstein and also wants it to be part of the German Confederation and have a liberal constitutional monarch, only with himself at the head instead of Frederick. So you have people fighting old dynastic struggles but doing it under the color of 19th-century nationalism, and it’s all very Byzantine, but the upshot is that Frederick is the brother with an army, and he’s the one who asks the German Confederation for help.

        -As I said, Holstein and Lauenburg are part of the German Confederation, so any call for aid from these territories brings into question the idea of national sovereignty. The Frankfurt Parliament is being elected as this is going on, and claims to represent the German nation. Part of the German nation is now at war with a foreign king. If the Frankfurt Parliament is going to have any legitimacy, the current German Confederation Diet needs to answer that call for aid. And so, on April 12th 1848, the German Confederation formally recognizes Prince Frederick’s provisional government of Schleswig-Holstein, and calls for Prussian troops to liberate the territory from Danish troops.

        -This puts Friedrich Wilhelm IV in a bind. On the one hand, he’s got his own anti-monarchist faction to deal with, and the last thing he wants to do while the police and the military are needed to stabilize the country is to go to war with another European monarch. On the other hand, he’s just held this big parade where he flew the German nationalist flag, and he’s just appointed this liberal nationalist government, and now he has the opportunity to lead the nationalist military effort. Given his choices, Friedrich Wilhelm IV decides that if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em, and only a week after the German Confederation’s call for help, on April 19th, Prussian troops cross the frontier into Schleswig-Holstein.

        -Should be an easy win, right? Prussia is a major power, Denmark is a second-tier power, and the Danish King is both new and managing a succession crisis. But Denmark is like a kid on the playground who isn’t that tough, but he’s got a couple of friends on the football team. So when big bully Prussia comes and tries to steal Denmark’s lunch money, Denmark goes to its football player friends for help. And in this analogy, those football player friends are named Britain and Russia, who are major trading partners that rely on the Danish Straits to trade with each-other. Those straits between Jutland and Scandinavia are the only way for ships to travel back and forth between Great Britain and Russia’s all-season ports. They can trade up north at Arkhangelsk, but only during the summer, and trade via the Pacific isn’t practical because the Trans-Siberian Railroad doesn’t exist yet, so trade through Russia’s Baltic ports is strategically critical, and Britain and Russia certainly don’t want any new German nation to extend its territory anywhere near the Danish Straits where it could threaten that trade, and they start making loud noises that if Friedrich Wilhelm IV doesn’t get his troops out of Schleswig-Holstein right this second, they’re going to beat him up and steal his lunch money. Russian Tsar Nicholas I even mobilizes his army and deploys part of Russia’s Baltic Fleet to protect Danish trade near the conflict zone. His wife Tsarina Charlotte of Prussia, King Friedrich Wilhelm’s sister, writes a letter to her brother that includes a veiled threat as well as a plea for common sense in the face of realpolitik:

        “The war can be expanded widely if you pursue it. Stop! There is still time! Think about the difficulties Germany has to battle in order to bring about inner security, the dangers which threaten in the West. Do not force upon the Tsar the necessity to come to the assistance with strong measures of another state whose downfall Russia cannot regard with indifference and will not tolerate. It cannot come to pass that Denmark is absorbed into Germany; of this you can be certain.”

        -There are some battles between Prussia and Denmark and negotiations between the major powers. Like I said, rabbit-hole, but long story short, Friedrich Wilhelm IV agrees to get out of Schleswig-Holstein, and signs a peace treaty on August 26th, without consulting the Frankfurt Parliament. The Parliament objects, but without Prussian troops there’s not much they can do to support Schleswig-Holstein, so they too agree to the peace treaty. Here we have Friedrich Wilhelm emulating Napoleon not as a conqueror but as a sort of semi-absolutist revolutionary leader. He’s leading the nationalist reform, and he’s ostensibly supporting a liberal government, but he’s also the one who makes the tough decisions at the end of the day. Germany needs peace, and he’s going to give her peace whether German people’s elected representatives want peace or not.

        -This period of peace gives Friedrich-Wilhelm IV a much-needed window to take back control of the political situation in Prussia. When the newly-elected Prussian National Assembly had convened on May 22nd, members of the conservative party had proposed a draft constitution written by Friedrich Wilhelm’s own representatives. This draft constitution had been immediately rejected by the Assembly, which has started considering more and more liberal versions of the new constitution with more and more restrictions on the King’s power.

        -Around the same time, on June 28th, the Frankfurt Parliament had appointed an Austrian nobleman, Archduke Johann of Austria, as its Imperial Regent, basically its version of a President. So not only is Friedrich-Wilhelm dealing with an elected parliament at home that wants to limit his power, but he’s dealing with an elected pan-German government that’s trying to establish a new German state that will make his position obsolete. Here, he once again manages to play the master politician, and the radical left gives him plenty of cover.

        -See, while the Frankfurt Parliament has made many German nationalists and liberals ecstatic, the far left isn’t happy with the direction it’s taking. I mean, the Frankfurt Parliament isn’t in power for more than a few weeks before they go and hand the executive to an Austrian Archduke! What are they thinking? Students and workers riot and even launch local rebellions throughout Germany, and who does the Frankfurt Parliament look to to restore order? The armies of its member states. And who has the most powerful army by far? Friedrich Wilhelm. Without Prussian troops, Archduke Johann is just an empty suit and the members of the Frankfurt Parliament are political cosplayers. Returning to David Blackbourn’s book:

“The parliament, like the March ministries in the individual states, was left behind by the dynamic of the revolution. On the one side, democratic and radical elements mobilized popular support in the southwest and west, in Saxony, even in rural areas of eastern Prussia like Silesia. Popular impatience led to a series of uprisings, put down by Confederation troops ordered in by the provisional executive: in Wiesbaden and Frankfurt-Sachsenhausen in July; in Frankfurt again and in Baden in September, an insurrection that brought together social discontent, radical impatience and nationalist anger over the Schleswig-Holstein crisis; in central Germany, where salt miners and toy-makers rose in October. By these actions, the provisional executive acquired a reputation among the radical and socially discontented as being no better than the repressive Vormarz regimes. At the same time, its attempts to maintain 'order' played into the hands of reactionaries and revealed its own fundamental impotence. Recognized diplomatically only by the USA and small European powers like Greece, Belgium and Sweden, the provisional executive also possessed little real power at home. It had a minister of the interior without police, a minister of finance without revenue. The one area in which it acted decisively – deploying Confederation troops to suppress disorder – was dependent on the goodwill of the German states. And here the counter-revolution was growing in strength through the summer and into the autumn.”

-It’s worth noting that the war over Schleswig-Holstein, known as the First Schleswig-Holstein War, will continue in fits and starts all the way up through May of 1852, mostly because it takes that long to get Russia, Britain, Denmark, and Prussia to come to an agreement that everyone can live with. But like I said, that’s a rabbit-hole, and the point is that Friedrich-Wilhelm IV is doing the negotiating for the German side, not Archduke Johann or the Frankfurt Parliament.

-We’ll leave him there for now, slowly rooting out far-left dissidents while carefully leading the German nationalist movement for his own ends and trying to outmaneuver the liberal Prussian National Assembly while his conservative shadow government waits in the background, ready to help him retake power. Friedrich-Wilhelm IV is a busy guy, and we’ll have plenty to catch up on with him in the next episode.

CHAPTER NINE: THE REVOLUTION IN VENICE

For now, I want to get back to the situation in Italy. As you may recall from last episode, in March of 1848, the people of Milan rebelled against their Austrian overlords, kicking off a revolution known appropriately as the Five Days of Milan. During this revolt, the sometimes-liberal, sometimes-conservative, always-ambitious Charles Albert, King of Piedmont-Sardinia, declared solidarity with the Milanese rebels and invaded Northern Italy to help them out. Within a few days, the local Austrian army, under the command of Field Marshal Josef Radetzky, was forced to withdraw. If you’re a radical Milanese revolutionary, you’re probably a bit ambivalent about all this. See, King Charles Albert has invaded not as a liberator, but as the self-declared King of the yet-to-be-established Kingdom of Italy. But most revolutionaries are not radicals. To lead a mass movement, you need to appeal to the average person, and for most of the revolutionaries – liberals and nationalists alike – Charles Albert’s promise of Italian nationalism and constitutional monarchy sound like exactly what Italy needs.

        -Things do not look good for Austrian rule in Italy. With Radetzky beaten back and with so much unrest in the core imperial territories of Austria and Hungary, it seems like the Habsburgs may have to give up a chunk of their empire. This seems to be the consensus among Italy’s local rulers, who rally around King Charles Albert in the weeks following the victory at Milan. The major players here are Leopold II of Tuscany and Ferdinand II of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, both of whom are members of the Habsburg family and both of whom send troops to assist Charles Albert. However, the first ally to arrive in northern Italy is none other than Pope Pius IX. Well, he doesn’t arrive, but the Papal Army does, with something like 17,000 men to fight for Italian independence. This may be surprising if you remember that Pius IX has already been offered the chance to become King of Italy and lead a revolution himself, and he had very publicly refused and urged the people not to go to war against the Austrians. What is going through his head?

        -What’s most likely going through Pius IX’s head is exactly what I said. Things look really bad for the Austrian Empire right now. Their forces are on the run and all of Italy seems to be rallying behind Charles Albert. If the Papal States sit out the rebellion, they’re not going to get a seat at the table when it comes time for peace negotiations. And if Charles Albert becomes King of Italy, as seems likely, then he’ll be free to basically dictate the terms of this new Italian government to the Pope himself. By sending his army straight to Charles Albert’s aid, and by being the very first power to do so, Pope Pius IX ensures that he’ll have a great deal of influence in how this new country is set up. In fact, despite the fact that Leopold II of Tuscany and Ferdinand II of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies both have bigger armies than the Pope, Pius IX is the largest contributor by manpower to Charles Albert’s revolution.

        -With this many allies, it’s going to take a few weeks for Charles Albert to get his coalition’s armies together and press the attack against the Austrians, which gives Marshal Radetzky some much-needed breathing room to come up with some kind of defense, and he doesn’t need to think too hard because the Austrian Empire actually has a plan for this. Back during the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, this area of Northern Italy had been a constant sore spot for the Austrians. More than once, French armies had attacked from this direction and gotten close enough to Vienna to force Austria out of a war. After the wars, Austria’s military planners had said “never again” and built a series of defenses designed to repel any such future attempt to attack the heart of the empire from Northern Italy. These defenses are called the Quadrilatero, or Quadrilateral, and consists of four massive fortresses built to the latest military designs. The Quadrilateral gets its name from the roughly kite-shaped pattern of the four forts, which lie in the relatively open country between the Po, Mincio, and Adige rivers. The two better-known corners of the Quadrilateral are Verona in the north, on the banks of the Adige river, and Mantua in the south, located on an artificial peninsula formed along the banks for the Mincio river. The other, lesser-known corners are at the towns of Peschiera in the west, which sits at the mouth of Garda Lake where it drains into the Mincio River, and Legnago to the east, on the banks of the Adige river.

        -Now, taking any one of these forts should be a manageable task for any army that’s big enough to invade Austria to begin with. But the thing about the Quadrilateral is that you’re not just attacking one fort, you’re attacking four of them, and they’re close enough to each-other to be mutually supporting. For example, Verona and Mantua are roughly 24 miles apart by road. So if one of those forts comes under attack, the other forts can send out raiding parties to harass the attackers and help their buddies in the besieged fort. So what does Josef Radetzky do when his army is under overwhelming attack and he’s forced to abandon Milan? He sticks to the plan, and the plan says that if the army isn’t able to hold Northern Italy, it’s supposed to fall back to the Quadrilateral.

        -This little reset works to Austria’s advantage. Up until now, the Italian revolutionaries have had the initiative. The shift from social protest to full-on violent revolution had happened almost overnight and almost by accident, and Charles Albert’s intervention had given Italian nationalists the manpower they needed at exactly the right moment. This happens often in history; revolutions start out hot because the powers that be aren’t expecting them and aren’t prepared. But once the establishment gets its act together, the revolutionaries often realize that they bit off more than they could chew. And – spoiler alert – that’s what’s about to happen in Italy.

-But before we talk about the fighting in the Quadrilateral, there’s a missing piece of the puzzle. The Quadrilateral is located smack in the center of the boot of Italy, right at the north of the boot where the Apennine Peninsula meets the European mainland, and just west of the spine of the Apennine Mountains. To the north are the Alps, hardly a promising territory through which for an enemy to attack. Anyone coming from the south or west, meanwhile, will have to fight past the Quadrilateral to get into the far northeastern part of Italy and the Austrian frontier. However, just 75 miles to the east of Verona, at the north end of the Adriatic Sea, is the city of Venice, which is also subject to the Austrian Empire, and sits between the Quadrilateral and Austria itself. And in March of 1848, another one of these local Italian uprisings breaks out in Venice, threatening not just Austria’s possession of a major trade port, but also Marshal Radetzky’s line of supply.

Last episode, I talked about the Bandiera brothers, the Italian officers in the Austrian navy who led an abortive revolt in southern Italy, only to be arrested by local police and executed. Well, the Bandiera brothers had come from Venice, and their execution is just one in a series of events that feeds growing public support for the Venetian independence movement. Unlike most  of Italy, Venice doesn’t have to look all the way back to the Roman Empire to find its glory days. In fact, the Republic of Venice existed as an independent state for 1,100 years, from 697AD until its conquest by Napoleon in 1797. It had only become part of the Austrian Empire in 1798, which in the year 1848 is only 50 years ago. Every Venetian senior citizen can look back and remember growing up in an independent Venice. Men of a certain age may even remember fighting for that independent Venice against the overwhelming might of Revolutionary France. So not only does Venice, like the rest of Italy, have its own little independence movement, but Venetians actually have experience at independence.

-Moreover, the Venetians’ cosmopolitan, commerce-oriented culture is causing them to constantly butt heads with the Austrians, who are far more protectionist and insular. The latest political dispute is over the construction of a railway across northern Italy. Starting as early as 1836, the Venetian Chamber of Commerce had been seriously studying a railroad to link Venice and Milan, and negotiations between the two cities and their Austrian overlords have been ongoing. In theory, the Austrians are in favor of a railroad. Not only would it link two major cities, but it could then be used to connect Venice further east to the Slovenian port of Trieste, and then north all the way to Vienna. It would be great for trade and communications, as well as for national security, since a railroad is a great way to move troops. However, Milan wants to construct another spur going further west to the port of Genoa, which is in the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia. This would be great for Milan, which is closer to Genoa than to Venice, and would love to use the Genoese port. The Venetians aren’t thrilled about this part of the plan but are willing to go along because a railroad would still be a net positive for them. But for the Austrians, a railroad from Milan, a great city of the Empire, to Genoa, a foreign trade port, is a non-starter. There is absolutely no way they’re going to allow Milan to send the bulk of its trade outside the Empire. Because of this and other disputes, the railroad project has languished for years.

        -The Venetian Revolution of 1848 is triggered not just by broad political trends but, like many revolutions, by the actions of a singular revolutionary figure; a guy named Daniele Manin. Daniele Manin is an attorney, and by all accounts a real genius, a man fluent not just in the local dialect of Italian but also French, English, German, Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. It’s a good thing he has all this brain-power, because Manin is anything but an imposing figure. Not only is he apparently very short, but he also suffers from some kind of digestive issue that keeps him bedridden for intermittent periods. These periods sometimes overlap with other periods of what a modern psychologist would most likely diagnose as clinical depression. He spends days at a time laying in bed, eating very little, and writing journals that are mostly self-critical.

        -But when Daniele Manin is active, he’s very active. Maybe our fictional psychologist should upgrade his diagnosis from one of clinical depression to manic depression, because he’s notoriously full of energy, and has a strong speaking voice that can command a room despite his short stature. Most importantly, Daniele Manin has a unique passion for the independence movement, and it’s the passion of a new convert.

-I mean this in both the literal religious sense and in the allegorical sense. On the religious front, Manin’s family is Jewish, but his grandfather had converted to Catholicism in 1759.  When he had converted, this grandfather had traded the family’s Jewish name – Medina – for a Christian name – Manin. And why this particular name? Because grandpa Manin’s sponsor for his baptism is none other than Ludovico Manin, the man who will serve as the last Doge of Venice from 1789 to 1797. That’s like the President. So kind of a big deal, and meaningful again in more ways than one, because this baptism and conversion to Catholicism is part and parcel of the new Manin family’s integration into Venetian society. See, Daniele Manin’s grandfather wasn’t actually Venetian; he was from Verona. But around the time of his baptism, in the mid-1700s, the family had relocated from Verona to Venice, and had become part of the local elite. These are people who are deeply invested in Venice, who gave up their old home and their ancestral religion to join Venetian society. 44-year-old Daniele Manin may not personally remember the days of Venetian independence; he wasn’t born until 1804. But his family remembers, and he was raised from the cradle to love Venice and hate their Austrian overlords.

-Manin gets involved in the railway issue, and ends up leading a faction of shareholders that tries to keep the railway company independent and in Italian hands. But in 1845, Austrian investors succeed in buying a majority of shares and converting the Venetian railway into an Austrian state asset. Daniele Manin has now dipped his toe in the world of politics. Unfortunately for him, he’s both a non-Austrian and of common birth, the combination of which completely disqualifies him from any kind of political career in the Austrian empire. Instead, he becomes an activist, fiercely defending Venetian interests in front of local Austrian authorities, a personal crusade he labels the lotta legale, or “legal struggle.” In particular, Manin lobbies the government to honor three promises Emperor Francis I had made to his Italian subjects back in 1815, at the end of the Napoleonic wars. These had been first to respect Italian national sentiment when governing, second to permit local assemblies to represent the people in local affairs, and third to allow individual citizens to freely criticize the government. For the last 33 years, the Austrian Empire has been breaking every one of these promises.

-In his book Daniele Manin and the Venetian Revolution of 1848-1849, British historian Paul Ginsborg sums up the political environment for Manin’s lotta legale as follows:

“The legal struggle took place in the context of heightening tension throughout Italy. The rulers of both Piedmont and Tuscany had followed the example of Pius IX and made a number of limited concessions in their states. On 3 November 1847 a declaration of principle in favor of a customs union was signed between Rome, Florence and Turin. At Milan, the appointment of a new archbishop was the pretext for further demonstrations in honor of Pius IX, and led to bloody encounters between police and demonstrators; one person was killed and a number wounded. In the autumn, Austrian troops occupied Ferrara, which was in the Papal States, and at the end of 1847 Vienna concluded a defensive/offensive alliance with the reactionary rulers of Parma and Modena, an alliance which Balbo called ‘the great line of separation between Austria and Italy’.”

-Ginsborg goes on to quote a letter from Daniele Manin to the government around this time, and in his letter, Manin is advocating for better measures to protect against cholera, which is starting to become an issue in Venice. And Manin’s tone here is just scathing:

“The Venetian Republic in its wisdom knew how to defend its people from contagious diseases. It defended them from plagues; it would have defended them from cholera, if it had broken out during the Republic’s lifetime. Governments who dominate a people have a duty in turn to look after the people whom they are dominating.”

-This and other letters of late 1847 put Daniele Manin squarely on the radar of the Austrian authorities. But it’s his letter to the Austrian governor on January 8th 1848 that finally causes them to bring down the hammer. In it, Manin demands full nationalization for a new kingdom of Lombardo-Venetia, and his demands basically look like what the Hungarians are asking for. He demands an independent army and navy that are to be based only in Austria, separate finances from the Habsburg crown, and the abolition of local Austrian governors and police, with the King of Lombardo-Venetia answerable only to the Emperor himself. Moreover, Manin demands the emancipation of Venice’s Jews, the creation of a new, Venetian police force, complete freedom of speech, and the elimination of various agricultural taxes. Ten days later, he and another nationalist leader, Niccolò Tommaseo, are both arrested and charged with high treason.

The arrests of Manin and Tomasseo kick off a new wave of nationalist protests, but it doesn’t look like it’s going to amount to more than angry words. But then, on March 17th 1848, news arrives in Venice that Metternich has resigned, and emboldened protesters take to the streets and storm the governor’s mansion, demanding the release of the two prisoners, who the jailers wisely set free. There are more protests throughout the day, and red, white, and green Italian tricolor flags are set up all over the city. But for now, we’re talking about protests, not violence. Other than the storming of the governor’s mansion, in which no-one is seriously hurt, there’s no actual violence, and most of the protesters go home in the evening. Most of them.

        - The next day, March 18th, some Croatian and Hungarian troops attempt to tear down some of these tricolors in the Piazza San Marco, which is this huge Renaissance-style public square where Venetians hold public events, most famously Carnival. Well, there are a bunch of protestors still hanging around in the square, and they start chanting and mocking the soldiers who are tearing down their tricolors, and a hot-headed Austrian junior officer orders his men to fire, killing or wounding five of the protestors. Predictably, this only makes the Venetians angrier, and as word of the massacre spreads, more people pour into the streets.

        -With the protests threatening to turn into a riot, Daniele Manin approaches Austrian Governor Aloys Palffy with a proposition: raise a civic guard to ensure that the protests remain peaceful. This kind of thing has been done before, for example, during the French Revolution, when moderate constitutional monarchists like the Marquis de Lafayette tried to use an upper-middle-class National Guard to protect Paris from working-class mobs as much as from any royalist army. Governor Palffy doesn’t want any kind of revolution, even a moderate one, so he tries to delay Manin by saying that he has to consult with the local imperial viceroy. Smelling a rat, Daniele Manin goes ahead and raises his own militia, which isn’t hard given his public profile and status as de facto leader of the Venetian revolution. By the end of March 18th 1848, more than 2,000 civic guardsmen are patrolling the streets, wearing distinctive white sashes to set themselves apart both from Austrian soldiers and from independent revolutionary groups who are flying the Italian tricolor.

        -The next day, March 19th, it seems as if everything is going to return to normal. In fact, news even comes from Vienna that the Emperor has promised a constitution, and Governor Palffy makes a big deal of announcing this in public before going to a concert that night with his wife, where the crowd gives the couple a standing ovation.

        -Under the surface, tensions are rising. Rumors are going around that Venice’s Austrian army garrison, which is made up of Croatians, is about to be reinforced, and that they may even be ordered to bombard the city. At the same time, the revolution in Milan seems to be succeeding. For the Venetian revolutionaries, it’s now or never, and while Governor Palffy is getting his ovation and enjoying his concert, Daniele Manin attends a meeting with other revolutionary leaders to come up with a plan to neutralize the Austrian garrison before the local military commander, a guy named Captain Marinovich, can act.

        -As you probably know, Venice is intimately connected to the water, with its famous canals and longstanding trade port. Any attempt to get into the garrison will require the use of water, so Daniele Manin chooses to work with an Italian naval officer named Antonio Paolucci, who promises to mobilize Italian sailors to take the garrison by surprise. To provide more manpower, Manin and Paolucci turn to local dockworkers, who have their own grudge not so much against the Austrian Empire, but against the military commander Captain Marinovich in particular. See, these dockworkers’ families have been in the trade for generations, and it’s normal for them to earn extra money by repairing private gondolas on the side, as well as to help themselves to some of the supplies left around the naval yard. Captain Marinovich has banned these practices, which made the dockworkers both poor and angry. So more than 1,500 of these workers, known as arsenalotti, agree to help with the rebellion. The plan is simple: three days later, March 22nd, at noon, Manin’s civic guardsmen are to surround the Venetian arsenal from the outside. Once the perimeter is secure, the workers will open the gates, let them in, and together they will force the Austrian garrison to surrender.

        -As Daniele Manin himself might have predicted in a more clear-headed moment, this doesn’t go down as planned. The civic guardsmen do their part, as do Antonio Paolucci and his sailors. But the workers go off-script, as Mike Rapport describes in his book:

        “That day the arsenalotti made the first move spontaneously, when they angrily confronted Marinovich with their own demands. The captain was left virtually defenseless 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 tricolor; the black and gold Habsburg emblems were later seen floating in their hundreds in the city’s canals.”

        -Daniele Manin now orders his civic guard to seize some cannons at the Piazza San Marco and point them at the governor’s palace, where Governor Palffy has already gathered Venice’s city council. Some of these men are in the pocket of the Austrians, while others are just old-school nobles who don’t want Venice’s government to fall into the hands of some bourgeois revolution. This is almost certainly how Manin would have seen it too, by the way; it’s a class thing. Manin’s revolutionaries have now put a red Jacobin cap, representing the French revolution, on top of the Italian tricolor, and Manin himself is leading a chant of “Long live the republic!” However, one member of the city council, Gian Francisco Avesani, supports the revolutionaries, and he decides it’s time to press the advantage. So, on his own, he demands that the Austrians remove all non-Italian troops from the city and hand over their forts to local, Italian troops. Governor Palffy doesn’t dare agree to this, but he doesn’t dare resist, so he resigns, turning over command to an Austrian count who withdraws imperial troops from the city and formally hands control of Venice to Avesani, the pro-revolutionary city councilor. In the wee hours of the morning on March 23rd, Avesani performs his first and only major act as governor of Venice; he proclaims a new provisional Venetian Republic, with Daniele Manin as its interim President. The Austrian army’s official report to Vienna begins with the simple statement: “Venice has truly fallen.”

        -A more radical revolutionary might go full-on reactionary and try to restore the old Republic of Venice. But Daniele Manin is a pragmatist, and he knows that however wealthy Venice is, it’s just one city, and it can’t hope to fight alone against the Austrian Empire. The only hope for independence from Austria is to follow the new path of Italian nationalism, so as the Venetian President, Manin immediately agrees to hand over Venice to Piedmont-Sardinia, to help King Charles Albert forge his new Italian kingdom. So not only has Austria now lost a major trade port, but this trade port is actively helping the Italian national revolution. Oh, and it’s at this point that Prussia signs its agreement with Charles Albert supporting his conquest of Northern Italy, although like I said this will never go beyond offering verbal support.

CHAPTER TEN: CHARLES ALBERT VERSUS RADETZKY

Charles Albert will take any help he can get. While the Italian War for Independence couldn’t be going better in the north, there’s trouble in the south. Down in Naples, local rebels are once again agitating for full independence, with particularly widespread violence in Sicily, where Sicilians want no part of a unified Italy, but most certainly do want to overthrow King Ferdinand II, who is, after all, a Habsburg. So Ferdinand II pulls out of Charles Albert’s war against Austria, instead choosing to focus on his own internal rebellions. He’s also got to be a bit ambivalent about fighting for a unified Italy which will see him downgraded from King to… Whatever he would be under the rule of Charles Albert. Can’t say I blame him. Anyway, the withdrawal of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies from Charles Albert’s little coalition has no immediate impact on the wider revolution. For one thing, Ferdinand II’s troops had yet to arrive in Northern Italy to begin with, so it’s not as if there are guys getting pulled off the front lines in the middle of a war.

        -For another thing, a large number of Neapolitan troops continue to fight on. When orders arrive to withdraw on May 21st 1848, Ferdinand’s senior commander, a guy named Guglielmo Pepe, immediately resigns, and leads 2,000 volunteers to the city of Venice, which by now is under the threat of attack by an Austrian army.

        -While all this is going on, King Charles Albert of Piedmont-Sardinia, along with his Italian allies, is bogged down in the Quadrilateral, trying to dislodge Radetzky’s Austrian army from those four mutually-supporting forts. Fighting during the spring goes both ways, but mostly favors the Italians. By April 10th 1848, less than three weeks after the Five Days of Milan, a Piedmontese army is besieging the westernmost fortress in the Quadrilateral, the one at Peschiera, while more Italian armies fan out to occupy the surrounding countryside and cut off Peschiera from the other supporting forts. While Charles Albert and his Tuscan allies are doing this, the Papal army, which remember is the most powerful of the Italian allies, does an end run around Marshal Radetzky’s army and occupies the city of Vincenza, on the eastern or Austrian side of the Quadrilateral. This leaves Radetzky between three enemy armies. At the west side of the Quadrilateral, along the Mincio River, King Charles Albert has besieged the fortress of Peschiera and cut it off from the other forts. To the northeast, at Vincenza, is the Papal Army, while the Venetian rebels lie to his southeast.

        -A lesser commander would do what Marshal Radetzky has been ordered to do and negotiate a settlement. But Radetzky is not just any commander, and he reasons – correctly – that only one of the three armies surrounding him is a serious threat. The Papal Army to the northeast is powerful, but it’s not actually doing anything. It’s just sitting there in Vincenza, in a strong defensive position, daring Radetzky to attack it. Unless he’s foolish enough to take the bait, the Papal Army is no real threat. Along the same lines, attacking Venice would be a nightmare; imagine anti-insurgent combat in a city full of canals. But the Venetian rebels are mostly militia and some aren’t even armed. They’re no threat to march out of Venice and attack the Austrian supply lines. No. The only real danger to Radetzky’s army is King Charles Albert. Defeat the King of Piedmont-Sardinia and his allies, including the Papal Army, will go home. Then the Austrian army will be free to pacify Venice at its leisure.

        -So Radetzky turns the full weight of his army east against Charles Albert, and strikes first not at the Piedmont-Sardinian army itself, but at its Italian allies. On May 28th and 29th, Radetzky attacks and defeats a division of Tuscan volunteers near the Mincio River, all but annihilating the Tuscan field army. While some of the Tuscan survivors will make their way to Peschiera and link up with Charles Albert’s main army, the majority will simply walk home, where they spread word of the Tuscan army’s failure, leading to a loss in public confidence in Grand Duke Leopold II’s constitutional monarchist government. See, the Tuscan army had been relying mostly on volunteers to begin with because most of the Grand Duchy’s real professional troops are stationed at home to maintain order and keep radical revolutionaries from getting any ideas about overthrowing the local monarchy and installing a republic. Basically, Leopold II has been trying to thread the needle, on the one hand providing some support for Italian nationalism under the leadership of King Charles Albert, while on the other hand holding onto his own local base of power in Florence. This will have more implications later, but for now the defeat of the Tuscan division in Northern Italy means that Field Marshal Radetzky has King Charles Albert exactly where he wants him: in a one-on-one fight that the Austrian Army can actually win. This does not go as planned.

        -From his base at Mantua, the southernmost corner of the Quadrilateral, Radetzky marches northwest along the Mincio River towards the fortress at Peschiera at the western corner of the Quadrilateral. Charles Albert marches out to meet him, and positions his army at a town called Goito, where he can anchor one end of his main line on the river in front of the town while deploying his artillery on the high ground around the town itself. This terrain advantage proves decisive.

        -When Marshal Radetzky attacks on May 30th, his artillery is unable to dislodge the Italian troops on the main line – at least not without getting close enough to come under fire from the Italian guns in the town. The Austrians are also unable to get around the east side of the Italian line because it’s anchored on the river, so all Radetzky can do is launch a series of attacks against the west side of the Italian line, which Charles Albert and his top general, a guy named Eusebio Bava, have already anticipated, so the best Italian troops are already deployed near where the Austrians are going to attack. After a fierce day’s fighting where the Austrian elite troops nearly break through the Italian line a couple of times, Radetzky orders his men to withdraw for the evening.

        -That night, two things happen. First, it starts to rain, which makes it hard for both sides to operate, but it makes things especially hard for the attacker because the attacker is the one who has to maneuver while the defender’s troops can mostly sit in their trenches and bail out the water. The second thing that happens on the night of May 30th is that word arrives that the Austrian garrison at Peschiera has just surrendered. Charles Albert’s troops are jubilant, and from their wet tents on the plains below Goito, the Austrian soldiers can hear cheers and celebratory gunfire from the Italian lines.

        -Any initiative Marshal Radetzky might have had is gone. His own men are demoralized while the guys on the other side are pumped up and ready for a fight. Add to this the fact that the fortress of Peschiera has fallen and there’s no garrison to relieve, and it becomes obvious that this is not the time to attack Charles Albert’s army. After a day’s standoff outside Goito, Marshal Radetzky wisely chooses to withdraw.

        -The Battle of Goito looks like a strategic defeat for the Austrians, but it really isn’t. It’s a tactical draw followed by an orderly withdrawal. The real strategic defeat is at Peschiera, where the western corner of the Quadrilateral has just fallen, opening up the northern half of the Mincio River for Piedmont-Sardinian troops. And without having defeated Charles Albert in the field, Marshal Radetzky has left the Italians free to maneuver at will.

June of 1848 marks the high water mark of the Italian Revolution of 1848, which historians now call the First Italian War of Independence. Most of modern-day Italy is in the control of Charles Albert and his allies. Even the Venetian rebels are getting their act together, establishing a proper government with Daniele Manin as President and calling themselves the Republic of San Marco. But under the surface, things are not going as well for Italian nationalists as they may have hoped. For one thing, Charles Albert’s victory by default at the Battle of Goito has become overhyped and made the Italians arrogant. For another thing, politics are starting to get in the way of any further attacks against the Austrians.

        -Following the Austrian withdrawal, Pope Pius IX, Charles Albert’s biggest ally, has announced that the Papal army will no longer participate in any attacks against the Austrian Empire. The Pope’s stance is based in Christian just war theory, and here’s his reasoning. The cause for war was the liberation of Italy from Austrian imperial domination. The presence of Austrian troops on Italian soil provided a so-called jus ad bellum, literally meaning a “right to war,” meaning that in Christian moral theory, in Pius IX’s thinking, the presence of those troops is moral justification for the taking of human life. With Radetzky’s withdrawal, the Austrian presence is small and their complete withdrawal can likely be negotiated. Therefore, any further attacks on the Austrian Empire represent an unjustified assault on a fellow Christian country, and would be tantamount to murder. At least, that’s what the Pope says in public. In fact, the Papal Army has just been defeated in the field. See, Marshal Radetzky’s army has fought a series of battles around Vincenza throughout May and June, and after withdrawing from his attack on Charles albert, he had turned his main army around to face the Papal Army. On June 11th 1848, the last Papal forces had been forced out of the city. Radetzky’s “withdrawal,” such as it was, had come at the expense of the Papal army, and with them out of the way and Vincenza back in Austrian hands, Radetzky has secured his supply lines back to Austria.

        -Meanwhile, at this critical juncture, Charles Albert takes a lead from Pius IX and stops pressing the attack. Maybe he’s done the math and realizes that attacking the remaining three Quadrilateral forces and putting them under siege without the help of the Papal army just isn’t practical. Regardless, he decides that instead of pushing for further military victory, he’s going to establish political legitimacy, and goes around setting up local referendums in the liberated territories, most notably Milan, for the Italian people to vote on becoming part of his new Kingdom of Italy. So while Marshal Radetzky is licking his wounds and preparing for the next fight, Charles Albert is acting like he’s already won. This proves to be a fatal miscalculation.

Until now, Charles Albert – and the Italian revolutionaries more generally – have been fighting a dynamic, offensive war. By constantly moving and attacking various targets, they’ve kept the Austrians on their back foot. Now, all of a sudden, the Italian forces become static, and worse yet, they get strung out. Charles Albert has 66,000 men at his disposal, enough to defeat any Austrian force in Northern Italy, but he’s strung them out across a roughly 43-mile front. On paper, this isn’t a terrible idea. At the north end of the Italian line is Peschiera, which is at the south shore of Lake Garda, which is a fairly big lake that extends north into mountainous terrain and basically makes it impossible for the Austrians to outflank Charles Albert to the north. So far, so good. This isn’t a bad place to anchor the north end of your line. From Peschiera, the Mincio River runs south to the town of Curtatone, where the south end of the Italian line is anchored. Again, not bad. You’ve got the river, which is a nice natural obstacle, and from Curtatone, the river turns sharply to the east towards Mantua, one of those other Quadrilateral fortresses Charles Albert might want to take.

        -But Charles Albert’s defensive line doesn’t follow the Mincio River from north to south. See, there’s an arc of hills to the east of the river, up in the north near Peschiera, and Charles Albert has also deployed a bunch of guys in these hills, well forward of the river. The idea is to control not just the west side of the Mincio River, but also to control some of the land inside the Quadrilateral. However, this forward deployment means that Charles Albert’s 66,000 men are deployed on both sides of a major river, across a bunch of hills, in a big arc that stretches deep into no-man’s land. So what is a big army on paper really turns into a handful of smaller units that are too far apart for all of them to support each-other if a sharp Austrian commander should decide to attack them.

        -Marshal Radetzky attacks on July 23rd, striking the northern end of this bulge in the Italian line. With 60,000 men, he marches all the way to the Mincio River, arriving just south of Peschiera late on the 24th. The Italians withdraw in good order to a more defensible position on the west bank of the river. But now Radetzky’s men have cut off the northern half of that bulge in the Italian line, and you have this weird situation where the Italians still have their bulge into Austrian lines in the south, but the Austrians have created their own bulge in the north, so if you look at the disposition of forces it’s kind of like a Yin-Yang. Now, Charles Albert and his generals decide to exploit this by attacking with the troops at the head of the spear so to speak. Those guys in the northeastern part of the Italian bulge are going to attack right up north into the back of the Austrian bulge and cut off Radetzky’s supply lines. Basically, roll up his army before they get rolled up.

        -My sources here are pretty slim, and the only tactical details I can find are in Italian, but the long and short of it is that the Italian counterattack fails for two reasons. First, communications are terrible and troops in the Italian rear don’t get their orders to move to the front as quickly as they should. Remember, everybody’s all spread out, and it’s going to take time for the troops to get into position. Second, it doesn’t seem like the entire Italian high command is behind this counterattack, and some of the generals just straight-up refuse to attack altogether. So some troops won’t attack and others are late getting their orders, and by the time Piedmont-Sardinian general Eusebio Bava attacks the town of Custoza on July 24th, he’s able to occupy a nearby hillside but he doesn’t have enough men to press the attack. Radetzky turns his men around from the Mincio River, counterattacks on the 25th, and without any reinforcements or support, Bava is forced to retreat, which he does in good order, falling back only a few miles by the end of the day.

        -At first, this looks like a minor Austrian victory. In fact, Radetzky’s army suffers roughly twice the losses of his Italian counterparts. But the Battle of Custoza is one of those tipping points in the history of war where one side loses momentum. The Italians are now falling back on the entire front, and after another fighting retreat on July 26th, the Austrian army is across the Mincio River. That nice natural barrier Charles Albert was keeping between himself and Radetzky? Gone. Not only that, but ever since the Papal army got kicked out of Vincenza, Austrian reinforcements have been trickling into the Quadrilateral. Not a ton of them – there’s still that whole civil war in Hungary and domestic unrest at home. But there are enough of them to present a real threat to Piedmont-Sardinia, which is now basically fighting by itself.

        -At this point, Charles Albert could form another defensive line at the Oglio River and fight the Austrians there. It’s likely that he could hold there and reach a political settlement with the Austrians that allows the formation of something like an Italian version of the German Confederation. Maybe not full nationhood like the hardcore Italian nationalists want, but at least a step in that direction. In such an Italian Confederation, Charles Albert’s Piedmont-Sardinia could even play the role of Friedrich-Wilhelm’s Prussia, as the dominant power in a growing country. Instead of trying for this, or even launching some bold, Napoleon-style counterattack against mounting odds, Charles Albert retreats even further west, all the way back to Milan where the revolution had started. And he arrives there on July 31st. Why does he fall back so far? Politics

CHAPTER ELEVEN: ENTER GARIBALDI

While Charles Albert has been out fighting for a Kingdom of Italy that does not yet exist, many people back home are still talking about the idea of a republic. This idea runs deepest in Milan, where the people are about to turn to a popular revolutionary named Giuseppe Garibaldi, who we’ll talk about in a second. But even back in Piedmont-Sardinia’s capital city of Turin, there’s a nascent republican movement. In his book The Making of Italy, 1796-1870, English historian Denis Mack Smith writes:

        “Against the advice of his generals, Charles Albert decided to fall back on Milan, his main motive being to prevent the proclamation of a republic there. The king was anxious to avoid being saved by the French troops whose help was now being sought by the Milanese, as he was also anxious to discourage the kind of popular war Garibaldi was now beginning to fight on his own. There were fairly good chances of defending Milan if a real effort had been made, but the king seems to have done almost nothing to exploit them. When General Salasco was instructed to conclude an armistice, not only Garibaldi but the king’s ministers at Turin accused Charles Albert and the generals of doing this so as to suffocate the revolution.”

        -This armistice, which is named after the poor general who’s ordered to sign it and is known as the Armistice of Salasco, is signed on August 9th 1848, and it basically resets the Austrian relationship with Piedmont-Sardinia to the pre-war status quo. Charles Albert is to withdraw his army back into his own land, and to stop helping anti-Austrian revolutionary movements. This will free up Marshal Radetzky from fighting Piedmont-Sardinia’s professional troops and allow him to focus on local revolutionary movements instead. For his part, Charles Albert gets a much-needed breather to run back to Turin and take a breather.

        -Charles Albert will keep his crown, for now. In Tuscany, his friend Grand Duke Leopold II will not be so lucky. And just as a refresher, Leopold II is a liberal monarch who also happens to be a Habsburg, while the Grand Duchy of Tuscany is nestled in the northwest corner of the boot of Italy, centered on the city of Florence, with Piedmont-Sardinia to the northwest, Milan to the northeast, and the Papal States to the south. So Tuscany is smack in the middle of Italian politics, and Leopold II is keenly aware that he could lose power overnight not just to a revolution, but also potentially to some kind of political coup. He needs to maintain an aura of strength, which is why he’d withdrawn his army from Northern Italy back in May after like one defeat in the field.

        -Instead of strengthening his position at home, the return of the army weakens it. Many of the returning soldiers have no jobs to return to, so now they feel betrayed by their country. Throw in a healthy dose of pre-existing Italian political radicalism, and it’s easy to understand what happens when news arrives in Florence of Charles Albert’s defeat at Custoza. The people are already demoralized, and now that the Austrians are one step closer to Florence itself, they riot. Leopold II’s centrist cabinet resigns, and the new Prime Minister is a center-left politician named Gino Capponi. Capponi is a realist who knows that Tuscany has no chance of fighting Austria alone, but he also knows that if he doesn’t throw some red meat to the people, there will be more riots. Like a master tightrope walker, he takes a seemingly-impossible middle course, staying out of the revolution for now, but promising to commit more Tuscan troops if the armistice breaks down and Piedmont-Sardinia rejoins the fight.

        -What happens next sounds a lot like any other of the local revolts we’ve talked about, so I’ll let Mike Rapport sum it up for us:

        “The real drama occurred in Livorno, which was always prickly about Florentine pre-eminence and where the dockers, in particular, were stricken by unemployment in the economic downturn. The Livornese democrats were roused by Father Gavazzi, the fire-breathing friar and preacher of holy war, who, ignoring a ban imposed by the government, had stepped ashore in the port. When he was arrested, Livorno rose up on 23 August; the crowd tore up the railway lines and occupied the arsenal. With the port threatening to become virtually an independent city-state, Capponi, in desperation, sent the popular radical Francesco Guerrazzi to try to calm Livornese spirits. Guerrazzi had himself been arrested in January for leading an insurrection in the city, but now he was afraid of the prospect of social upheaval. He had to exercise all his moral authority – and some physical force – to prevent the radicals from proclaiming a republic. But despite his work in restoring some semblance of order, Capponi disliked him and replaced him with a democrat and fervent advocate of a costituente, Professor Giuseppe Montanelli, who had been lionized as a hero for his valor at the battle of Curtatone. Yet even he struggled to master the situation in the city. Ultimately, the only way for the Grand Duke to prevent more violence was to yield to the democrats and appoint a radical ministry. In October he chose Montanelli, who refused to serve without Guerrazzi, so the two radicals assumed power together.”

        -Long story short, as the Italian Revolution of 1848 is failing, the constitutional monarchists are either stepping aside or getting pushed aside, and the revolutionary movement is being taken over by radicals. Tuscany is Example A. Example B is Milan, which by late summer has fallen to Radetzky’s Austrian army. But in the countryside outside Milan, a revolutionary leader named Giuseppe Garibaldi is starting to win hearts and minds among the Italian people.

Giuseppe Garibaldi is something like Italy’s George Washington, although as we’ll see the modern nation of Italy, much like the United States, has more than one major founding figure. But he’s this guy that just keeps on fighting no matter what, and while he’s obviously an Italian nationalist, I also think Garibaldi just loves fighting. By the time he enters our story, in 1848, he’s already been fighting in one war or another for 13 years.

        -Giuseppe Garibaldi was born in the city of Nice in 1807. Nice is located along the Mediterranean coast to the northwest of the boot of Italy, and at the time of Garibaldi’s birth it had actually been an occupied city. While previously part of Sardinia, Nice had been annexed by revolutionary France in 1792. Nonetheless, Garibaldi’s parents, Domenico and Maria Rosa, were both Italians, and in 1814, when Garibaldi was just seven years old, Nice would be transferred from France back to Piedmont-Sardinia during the negotiations at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Yay Italy. Actually, nobody cares, because Nice will end up going back to France in 1860, but that happens later in our story.

        -Garibaldi wouldn’t be who he is if he hadn’t grown up where he did. His family was respected in Nice, where his mother Maria Rosa was known for her philanthropic work, while his father Domenico was the captain of a merchant ship called the Santa Riparata. Domenico was an esteemed captain, known for getting his goods to port on schedule even in the harshest conditions. The young Giuseppe would take after his father, spending time on a handful of ships. By the time he was 26 years old in 1833, Giuseppe Garibaldi had already worked as a teacher in the Ottoman Empire when he was stuck in port for a while due to a war with the Russia. Not long after, he had traveled to Russian ports on the Black Sea. Here in the far east of Europe, Garibaldi would meet a number of Italian political exiles, including some who were connected to the Young Italy movement.

        -In November of 1833, Garibaldi had traveled to Genoa, which isn’t very far from Nice. There, he had met Giuseppe Mazzini, the founder of Young Italy who we talked about a lot in the last episode. There’s a lot of speculation about this meeting because neither man writes anything about the specifics, but here’s what Garibaldi says in his autobiography:

        “A passionate lover of my country from childhood up, and burning with indignation against her oppressors, I was earnestly desirous of being initiated into the secret plots for her redemption. With this object in view, I sought everywhere for books and other writings relating to Italian liberty, and to the men whose lives were consecrated thereto. On a voyage to Taganrog I fell in with a young Genoese, who was the first to inform me of the progress of our cause. Columbus can hardly have experienced so much satisfaction at the discovery of a new world, as did I on finding a man who was actually concerned in the redemption of our country.”

        -Garibaldi doesn’t even mention Mazzini by name; he refers to him as “a young Genoese,” but the impact of this meeting on Garibaldi is apparent. It lights him on fire. He immediately gets involved in an abortive insurrection in Piedmont, which he kind of skips over in his autobiography, but then he continues:

        “I threw myself body and soul into what I had so long felt to be my true element; and on the 5th of January, 1834, I left the Porta della Lanterna at Genoa, disguised as a peasant, an outcast from my country. This was the beginning of my public career. A few days later, I had the pleasure of seeing my name for the first time in a newspaper. It appeared in a decree condemning me to death.”

        -Garibaldi spends some time in Tunisia and works as an ambulance volunteer in Marseilles before he decides to sail for safer waters in the new world, and soon arrives in Rio de Janiero in the Empire of Brazil. He spends a few months looking for work before opportunity arrives in September of 1835. And when I say “opportunity,” I mean “revolution.”

        -The failed uprising known as the Ragamuffin War is complicated and I’m not going to get into it. It’s similar to many civil wars, where one part of Brazil had benefitted from trade restrictions while other parts of Brazil wanted free trade, and because of steep tariffs the cost of salted beef got really high, and there were some cowboys called gauchos who all got really hungry, and it’s another one of those rabbit holes that could be really interesting but would also get us way off track. For our purposes, Garibaldi sees the Ragamuffin War as a chance to become a professional revolutionary.

        -With a few of his Italian exile friends, he obtains a letter of marque from the revolutionary republican government. A letter of marque is basically a license for state-sanctioned piracy. So if you have a letter of marque from the revolutionary government, you have a license to plunder any vessels from countries that are at war with said revolutionary government. Of course, this license is only recognized by the revolutionary government, which could become a problem, but for now Garibaldi and his friends have a piracy license, and they also manage to scrape together enough cash to buy a tiny single-masted ship that they name the Mazzini.

        -With the Mazzini, Garibaldi’s crew manages to capture a larger vessel, but they don’t have enough guys to crew both ships, so they scuttle the Mazzini and start using the slightly bigger ship. Here, his autobiography starts to sound like an adventure novel. There’s one point where his ship is sailing through a storm and the waves are so high they’re washing over the deck and there’s a school of sharks swarming around the ship just waiting for it to sink, and they barely limp into port and of course it’s a very near-run thing.

        -This first part of Garibaldi’s life is a great and heroic story. There’s a reason that Garibaldi, along with the Marquis de Lafayette, is one of two people I know of who are referred to as the “Hero of Both Worlds.” But I don’t want to get bogged down in the various South American revolutions he participates in, so I’ll limit myself to one more glimpse at this time in Garibaldi’s life, because it’s an important one. And that’s the part where he meets his soon-to-be wife, Anita. Garibaldi writes:

        “Walking up and down the quarter-deck of the Itaparica, wrapped in my own gloomy thoughts, I came, after trying every species of argument, to the conclusion that I would look out for a woman, so as to escape from a position of intolerable weariness and discomfort.

        “By chance I cast my eyes towards the houses on the Barra – a tolerably high hill on the south side of the entrance to the lagoon, where a few simple and picturesque dwellings were visible. Outside one of these, by means of the telescope I usually carried with me when on deck, I espied a young woman, and forthwith gave orders for the boat to be got out, as I wished to go ashore. I landed, and, making for the houses where I expected to find the object of my excursion, I had just given up all hope of seeing her again, when I met an inhabitant of the place, whose acquaintance I had made soon after our arrival.

        “He invited me to take coffee in his house; we entered, and the first person who met my eyes was the damsel who had attracted me ashore. It was Anita, the mother of my children, who shared my life for better, for worse – the wife whose courage I have so often felt the loss of. We both remained enraptured and silent, gazing on one another like two people who met not for the first time, and seek in each other’s faces something which makes it easier to recall the forgotten past. At last I greeted her by saying, “Thou oughtest to be mine!” I could speak but little Portuguese, and uttered the bold words in Italian. Yet my insolence was magnetic. I had formed a tie, pronounced a decree, which death alone could annul. I had come upon a forbidden treasure, but yet a treasure of great price.”

        -If Giuseppe Garibaldi is a literary hero, then Anita Garibaldi is his warrior princess. She travels with him everywhere on campaign, and acts as a go-between between Garibaldi and various gaucho rebel groups. At one point, when she’s pregnant with their first child, Anita gets captured by the enemy, and her guards tell her that Garibaldi is dead. So she talks them into letting her search the battlefield for his body, and when she can’t find him, she steals a horse, runs away, gets her horse shot out from under her, and jumps into a river, which she follows for four days through the jungle before getting help from a local peasant family and linking back up with Garibaldi. The couple would go on to have four children together, and would travel to Uruguay in 1841, where Garibaldi would work as a teacher and merchant for exactly one year before joining another revolution in 1842. That same year, Anita would marry Garibaldi, and the two would remain together until her death. It’s during this time in Uruguay that Garibaldi and his band of Italian emigrees would begin wearing their trademark red shirts, gaining the nickname of “Redshirts.” How creative.

        -Garibaldi would remain active in South America until 1848, when word reached him of the revolutions in Italy. So, he’d sailed for Italy, and upon his arrival, he’d gone straight to Charles Albert to offer his services. This was before Charles Albert had declared war on Austria. But already, Charles Albert distrusted Garibaldi because of Garibaldi’s republican politics, so he’d refused Garibaldi’s assistance. Interestingly, despite having strong anti-Catholic beliefs, Garibaldi had also offered his services to Pope Pius IX. It’s fascinating to think what the Papal army could have done in the First Italian war of Independence, had it been commanded by someone like Garibaldi, but it was not to be. Pius IX, like Charles Albert, had declined Garibaldi’s service.

        -Instead, Garibaldi travels to Milan, which by this point is firmly in Italian hands as Charles Albert campaigns over in the Quadrliateral. Garibaldi spends his time in the countryside networking with local anti-Austrian leaders and putting together a militia. But time is not on his side, and just as his little army is ready to get into the fight, the city of Milan falls to the Austrians and Charles Albert signs the Armistice of Salasco. Garibaldi vows to fight on, and with only a few hundred volunteers to work with, it’s going to have to be a guerilla war. He calls it the “War of the People.”

        -Here in early August of 1848, Giuseppe Garibaldi faces two insurmountable obstacles. To begin with, there’s the overwhelming superiority of Austrian forces in the area. Austrian Field Marshal Laval Nugent had marched thousands of troops into Italy right before the armistice, and now these guys have nothing to do but hunt guerillas. This obstacle alone wouldn’t stop Garibaldi from fighting; he’s fought insurmountable odds for years in South America. But in Milan, Garibaldi also lacks the sympathy of the local populace.

        -Remember, Garibaldi is an ally of Giuseppe Mazzini, and in 1848, Mazzini had dissolved the radical republican Young Italy organization to form the Italian Association, a more pragmatic organization that prioritizes Italian unity over left-wing politics. Basically, Mazzini had purged the hardcore Republicans to get his organization firmly behind Charles Albert, and Garibaldi had gone along with this as a matter of realpolitik. When Charles Albert had been winning, this was a popular policy. Now that Charles Albert has signed an armistice and there are Austrian troops all over the countryside, many of the population blame anyone associated with Charles Albert, including Giuseppe Garibaldi. As a result, it’s tough for Garibaldi to get help from the population, and without that kind of help, it’s really tough to win a guerilla war.

        -That said, before he’s forced to flee Milan and go into exile in Switzerland, Garibaldi does manage to win a couple of skirmishes, enough to give the Austrians a bloody nose on his way out the door. In the absence of any tangible long-term victories in the 1848 revolution, these defiant skirmishes would take on outsized importance that would feed Garibaldi’s legend.

        -I his book War Fought in Italy in the Years 1848-49, fellow Italian revolutionary Carlo Pisacane writes:

        “The disillusioned men who were attempting to form a republican party, not knowing what to do, said that [Garibaldi’s] skirmishes at Luino and Morazzone were greater victories than Goito, Pastrengo and Volta [fought by the regular Piedmontese army], in the same exaggerated way as these latter actions were compared by the royalists with Napoleon’s victories at Rivoli and Arcola. And just as the monarchists had proclaimed Charles Albert a great captain simply on the grounds that he had an army, so the republicans declared Garibaldi a great captain even though he did no fighting and had no army. Lacking a true principle of action, they clutched at individuals and strove to feed the cult of personality.”

        -Cult of personality or no, Garibaldi’s legend will only grow, and his stay in Switzerland will be brief. He’s about to come back in a big way, but this time he’ll be in the city that’s foremost in the minds of all true Italian nationalists: Rome.

CHAPTER TWELVE: A SIDEBAR ON SICILY

Okay, so we’re not going to Rome quite yet. Since we’ll be in Rome for almost all of the rest of the episode, I’ll just insert a quick sidebar here so we stay up to tabs on the rest of Italy. You may remember that a few months back, King Ferdinand II of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies had withdrawn his troops from Charles Albert’s Italian army to put down a rebellion at home. Unrest in the city of Naples in Southern Italy is put down relatively quickly, but by the beginning of September 1848, almost all of the island of Sicily has been taken over by Sicilian nationalists who have declared a new Kingdom of Sicily that wants nothing to do either with Ferdinand II or with any broader Italian nation. On September 1st, Neapolitan troops land near the city of Messina.

        -Messina is a heavily fortified port that’s been involved in numerous wars since the classical era. The royal army there has been on the defensive for nearly a year, as a sustained rebel siege has winnowed them down from controlling the whole city to a small garrison that only holds a single citadel near the mouth of the harbor. On September 3rd, the Neapolitan relief army begins its assault. With the local Sicilians fighting tooth and nail for every street and with irregular fighters hiding amidst the civilian population, Ferdinand II’s general in command of the expedition, Carlo Filangieri, orders a brutal bombardment. Along with regular cannon balls and explosive rounds, the Neapolitan artillery fires a new kind of shell: phosphorus, which burns intensely even in the presence of water and destroys entire city blocks. When the ground is clear, Neapolitan troops are ordered to advance, killing anything that moves. When Messina’s rebels officially surrender on September 6th, a few holdouts keep on fighting. So on the morning of September 7th, General Filangieri orders an eight-hour bombardment of the city center, killing untold numbers of civilians before finally ordering his infantry to relieve the garrison. By the end of the day, Messina is in the hands of the royal army, and Ferdinand II now has a base from which to retake the rest of Sicily.

        -The siege of Messina is proof of the oft-repeated observation that civil wars are the most brutal wars. Innocent civilians are burned to death in their homes, or shot down by infantry as they try to run away. Women and children seek shelter in churches, only for the attacking soldiers to march in and do horrible things to them. One letter from a survivor mentions a woman who is not only raped but then has her breasts cut off before finally being beheaded, and the sense we get from the historical sources is that this case is not unique during the assault. If this kind of thing were to happen today, people would call it a crime against humanity and there would be calls for General Filangieri to be hauled before the World Court. Well, there are actually British and French observers at the siege, and when they report back to their governments both the British and the French ambassadors in Naples basically tell Ferdinand II to cool it with the war crimes or they’re going to pull their support for his government. So, on September 11th, King Ferdinand signs an armistice with the rebels.

        -When the armistice ends in early April of 1849, General Filangieri will once again go on the offensive, besieging the key strategic city of Palermo on April 14th. By mid-May, Palermo will be in royal hands and the revolution in Sicily will be completely pacified. However, this brutal pacification campaign will leave scars that resonate into the future – even down to modern times. To begin with, the brutality of the Neapolitan Bourbon army – remember, Ferdinand II is part of the House of Bourbon, like the old kings of France – the brutality of the Bourbon army when they bombarded Messina will become something of a legend. A few years down the road when the Sicilians rebel again, the garrison there will be the target of their anger.

-Not only that, but even with all the brutality his army can muster, Carlo Filangieri is not able to crush the resistance entirely. Like many civil wars, the civil war in Sicily is multi-sided, and besides the Sicilian nationalist rebels, there are also gangs of armed criminals called squadre who are rebels in the sense that they’re running around looting people and don’t recognize the government, but not in the sense that they have any agenda or political beliefs. Deciding that the nationalist rebels are the more dangerous concern, General Filangieri uses his army to fight them, while appointing a Sicilian named Salvatore Maniscalo as the island’s chief of police, and ordering him to deal with the squadre. Maniscalo, who will be chief of police all the way through 1860, decides that instead of fighting the squadre gangs, he should just hire them. So he “eliminates” the squadre problem by turning these guys into semi-official public employees. The squadre are allowed to enforce laws and even collect taxes, and they get to keep a cut of any fines and taxes they collect. These squadre will become so powerful in Sicily that no future Italian government, not even Mussolini’s, will be powerful enough to eliminate them. Of course, we don’t call them the squadre anymore, but you’ve probably heard of some guys called the Mafia, and this is where they get their start.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN: THE RETURN OF MAZZINI

Let’s get back to September of 1848, when Pope Pius IX has become more and more concern with unrest in the Papal States. The countryside is as calm as any place in Europe. Most of the rural people are deeply devout Catholics who are content to enjoy apolitical lives in one of the safest countries on the map. However, Rome itself is a hotbed of Italian nationalism, and when the Papal Army had been recalled from the war against the Austrians, thousands of Roman volunteers had stayed behind to fight with Charles Albert. Now that Charles Albert has signed an armistice, these revolutionaries have returned to Rome, where street protests are now becoming more frequent and violent. Much of the violence is propagated by the returned veterans, who are now calling themselves the Reduci, which simply means “the Returned.”

        -On September 10th, Pius IX appoints a new Interior Minister, a man named Pellegrino Rossi, and on September 16th, Rossi is made Minister of Finance, giving him control of the two biggest levers of power in the Papal government: the police and the treasury. Pope Pius has made Pellegrino Rossi his de facto head of government because Rossi shares similar politics. A center-left moderate, Rossi is an Italian native who had served as the French ambassador to the Papal States before getting summarily fired when Louis-Philippe’s French government had fallen back in February. Given his experiences in France, Rossi is all too aware of the dangers of revolution, and tries to block any revolutionary movement by giving the people some moderate liberal reforms. For example, the Papal States will now function as a constitutional monarchy, with an elected senate that has real power over spending. But it’s not going to become a full-on republic; the Pope will still be head of state and will still retain significant power of his own.

        -Pellegrino Rossi shares Pius IX’ foreign policy views as well. Italy needs to be free of Austrian control, but not as a unitary nation-state in its own right. Instead, the existing Italian states should form a confederation for trade and mutual defense, and the Papal States should take a leading role. This view had played into Pius’ withdrawal of Papal troops from the war against Austria when they had a good chance of winning. Yes, they might have ejected the Austrians, but they also would have furthered the cause of Italian nationalism. Just as badly, a victory against the Austrians would have given Charles Albert control over all of Northern Italy, making Piedmont-Sardinia significantly more powerful than the Papal States. So along with moderate liberal reforms at home, Pellegrino Rossi favors a “wait and see” approach to the Italian revolution, with Papal troops remaining on the sidelines – at least for now.

        -Rossi’s support for an Italian League isn’t just empty talk. He actually manages to get Charles Albert on board with the idea, along with Tuscany. This, along with Rossi’s crackdown on revolutionary newspapers, earns him the hatred of Roman radicals. On November 15th, he takes a carriage to the government building where the Senate of the Papal States is scheduled to have its first meeting. Outside, a crowd has gathered, many of whom are onlookers, many of whom are supporters, and many of whom are angry Reduci wearing their unofficial uniform of long grey tunics and blue pants. Rossi gets out of his carriage and waves to the crowd, but as he’s climbing the stairs to the building, one of the Reduci jumps out of the crowd and gives him a light shove. Rossi turns around, angry, and that’s when another Reduci pulls out a dagger and slashes his throat. Apparently the guy knows what he’s doing with a knife, because he cuts right through Pellegrino Rossi’s carotid artery, which sprays blood all over the horrified onlookers. The assassin runs off into the crowd, and this appears to be a coordinated attack, because at the same time a bunch of the other Reduci all pull out similar daggers and scatter into the crowd, and these are all young men in identical clothing, so the police are never able to identify the assassin. Various theories abound, but most historians agree that the assassin is a left-wing revolutionary, and most believe that he is associated with the former Carbonari.

        -From here, things move very quickly. Riots spread through the streets of Rome, and by the evening of November 15th, just a few hours after Rossi’s death, a crowd has gathered in front of his widow’s house to throw an impromptu celebration, and some people are cheering “Blessed be the hand that stabbed Rossi!”

        -The next day, the 16th, a mob surrounds the Apostolic Palace and overpowers the Swiss Guards in the courtyard, effectively imprisoning Pope Pius inside. He appoints a new, more liberal head of government who wants to go back to war with the Austrians, but even this isn’t good enough for the crowd. Now they are demanding a republic. Pope Pius refuses, even when revolutionaries start firing rifles at the palace windows, killing one of the papal secretaries. When the revolutionaries roll a cannon up to the palace gate, Pius finally agrees to appoint a new government, and he appoints some guys who are hardcore revolutionaries who want to make Rome a republic. It’s worth noting that Pius IX is surrounded by foreign diplomats at the time, and he tells them all that he’s doing this under duress.

        -For the next eight days, Pope Pius remains in the Apostolic Palace. While he’s free to come and go as he pleases, the atmosphere in Rome is not safe for him, so he’s basically under house arrest, and his friends are afraid to visit him. One walks to the palace with a pair of loaded pistols tucked into his belt for protection. On November 24th, Pius IX puts on the uniform of a simple parish priest, leaves the Apostolic Palace through a side door, climbs into an inconspicuous carriage, and quietly travels to Naples. If only the French royal family had been so discreet during the Flight to Varennes, none of this might have happened.

        -Anyway, Pope Pius IX will spend the next few months in Naples, building alliances with not just the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, which includes Naples, but also with the Spanish, who don’t send military help, but do provide diplomatic assistance. Amazingly, Emperor Franz Joseph readily agrees to help Pius IX regain power. Perhaps he prefers the idea of a divided Italian League under papal leadership to the idea of a united Kingdom of Italy under Charles Albert. Pope Pius also builds alliances inside the church; he disavows his liberal ministry and takes a new, conservative advisor. If and when he gets back to Rome, the constitutional monarchy will look far different than the center-left system that Pellegrino Rossi would have created.

Now, we’d talked about the Grand Duchy of Tuscany turning into a republic and Duke Leopold II going into exile. And it’s here that a familiar character re-enters our story: Giuseppe Mazzini. He’s been in the background the entire time, first fomenting the Bandiera Brothers’ failed uprising in 1844, then more recently reforming Young Italy into the less republican, more nationalist Italian Association. Mazzini has also been busy on the ground. When the revolution broke out in Milan in spring of 1848, he had returned from his exile in England and gone to Milan, where he had joined the revolutionary government. However, Mazzini had still favored a Lombard Republic at this time, as opposed to having Milan fall under Charles Albert’s rule. This had put him at odds with the local Milanese, who wanted independence from Austria at any cost. So when Charles Albert signed the armistice, Giuseppe Mazzini had linked back up with his old friend Garibaldi, joined the guerilla movement, and gone into Switzerland.

        -However, when the Tuscan Republic was declared, Mazzini had rushed from Italy to the Tuscan capital of Florence, where he had arrived to the cheers of adoring crowds. But he would find no place in the Tuscan government, which was already run by a radical republican triumvirate of local politicians, and they weren’t keen on anyone else getting into power. So, Mazzini would travel on to Rome, arriving there on February 5th 1849, the very day that the Roman Republic is declared. At the very first meeting of Rome’s Constituent Assembly, Mazzini gives a speech that helps set the tone for foreign policy

        -Mazzini argues for the unification of the Roman and Tuscan republics, as a defense against both Austrian and Piedmontese hegemony. He’s now fusing his nationalist and republican views, and he’s telling the Romans “If you want a republic, it needs to be big enough to stand up to both King Charles Albert and Emperor Franz Josef, and that means joining with Tuscany.” This would be fine, except that the Tuscans have already made it clear that they have no interest in joining some new republic that will obviously be dominated by Mazzini and Rome.

        -This provokes a reaction in Florence, where the local triumvirate’s radical republican supporters riot on election day, which is March 5th 1849. Armed gangs march through the streets, intimidating moderate and conservative voters and smashing up ballot boxes in right-leaning precincts. This intimidation campaign is so successful that modern historians estimate voter turnout rates of around 20%, and it’s no surprise that the new Tuscan government is made up only of radical republicans. And I guess I should be super-clear about what I mean here, because in this context the term “radical republican” doesn’t only refer to far-left politics. It also refers to a belief in local home rule, shunning both the old ruling dynasties and the new nationalist movements. These radical republicans want many of the same things as Mazzini, such as universal male suffrage, but they don’t share his vision of a united Italy. They want a local Tuscan Republic, and that’s it.

        -At the same time, radical republican policies are not popular in the Tuscan countryside. Much like our modern world, politics in this time period often take on a sharp urban/rural aspect, and so it is in Tuscany, with most of Florence’s population in full support of the revolution and with most of the rural peasants and clerics against it. Organized bands of peasants even launch a counter-revolution, seizing goods along the roads between Florence and other cities, and at one point even threatening to march into Florence itself and put Leopold II on the throne. Because of the situation in the countryside, the Tuscan Republic is paralyzed, with the Triumvirate never holding real control over anything outside Florence itself.

        -This puts the Roman Republic in a bind. Although it controls Rome – for now – the Austrians are openly planning to come crush the little republic and restore Pope Pius IX as soon as they’re done mopping up the remaining resistance in Northern Italy, which is mainly in Venice. With Charles Albert on the sidelines, the Tuscan Republic paralyzed, and Ferdinand II going full-on anti-revolutionary down in Naples and Sicily and even giving sanctuary to the Pope, there’s nowhere for the Romans to turn for aid in their city’s defense, much less to help him mount an offensive against the Austrians. The Roman Republic stands alone.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN: CHARLES ALBERT TRIES AGAIN

At this point, fate intervenes once again, and by “fate,” I mean Charles Albert. From his perspective, things have changed in his favor during the armistice. Rather than rolling through Northern Italy and straight down into the boot, Austrian forces are still tied up with local resistance movements up north, especially in Venice, where Daniele Manin’s government continues to hold out valiantly. This makes the Austrians look weak, and on March 1st 1849, the Chamber of Deputies of Piedmont-Sardinia votes overwhelmingly to authorize the resumption of the war. On March 12th, Charles Albert officially notifies the Austrians that the Armistice of Salasco is ended, and the way he does this shows us that this second campaign of Charles Albert is going to be different from the first campaign. Instead of rushing to join a grassroots revolutionary movement, he plays the old-school statesman, and as required by the terms of the armistice, he gives the Austrians eight days’ notice of the resumption of the hostilities.

        -Much like last time, the goal of this campaign is the city of Milan and the broader region of Lombardy in north-central Italy. But what kind of campaign will it be? Mike Rapport tells us:

        “The British and French had tried to mediate and turn the truce into a lasting peace, but neither Austria nor Piedmont was willing to relinquish its claims to Lombardy. On the outbreak of war, the fledgling Roman republic offered to place its fifteen-thousand-strong force under Charles Albert’s orders, but the offer from a bunch of republican usurpers was turned down scornfully by the monarch. This was to be – more nakedly than in 1848 – a war of dynastic expansion. So hostile was the Piedmontese leadership to the republicans that some, such as the liberal politician Count Camillo di Cavour (who would become one of the central figures of nineteenth-century Italy), argued that an Austrian victory in the coming war would be preferable to a triumph in which the likes of Mazzini had a share of the spoils.”

        -This refusal to accept Roman aid will soon come back to bite Charles Albert. On paper, Piedmont-Sardinia should be more than a match for the Austrian army in Northern Italy. Charles Albert has 80,000 men in the field, compared to Austrian Field Marshal Joseph Radetzky’s 73,000-man army, so the Piedmontese have a tiny numerical advantage. But Radetzky’s troops are hardened veterans, while many of Charles Albert’s men are fresh troops who have been hastily called into service. Moreover, Charles Albert has also fired several of his generals, including his former top general Eusebio Bava, who had gone and published a tell-all book about secret army planning sessions during the last campaign, so it was probably a smart call to fire that guy. What isn’t smart is replacing him with an inexperienced 56-year-old Polish general named Wojciech Chrzanowski, whose most prestigious career move to date was acting as a British attaché to the Ottoman military. It seems like Charles Albert appoints this underqualified officer as commander-in-chief because he expects to pull the strings himself, but that’s not what happens. Instead, his other generals lose respect for the entire command structure and are slow to respond to orders in the field, and Chrzanowski is unable to keep discipline.

        -Charles Albert’s embarrassing second campaign against the Austrians lasts only four days. On the first day, March 20th, you might expect him to move first. After all, he’s had more than eight days’ advance warning; you’d expect an attack. Instead, the army of Piedmont-Sardinia basically sits still along a defensive line in Northern Italy, only launching a couple of minor scouting missions. Meanwhile, Marshal Radetzky, despite having “only” eight days’ notice of the resumption of hostilities, attacks aggressively, striking the south end of the Italian line, which is anchored near the city of Pavia under the command of General Girolamo Ramorino.

        -Ramorino has been ordered to hold a fort at a place called La Cava, which is near Pavia and guards a critical river crossing. Instead, he acts on his own faulty intelligence, and moves a bunch of his men to the south. So when Field Marshal Radetzky attacks La Cava as expected, there aren’t enough guys there to defend it, and General Ramorino’s entire army needs to withdraw to the south, not only giving the Austrians control of the river crossing, but also cutting Ramorino’s whole army, a sixth of Piedmont-Sardinia’s force, off from the rest of the army. For this foolishness, Ramorino will eventually be court martialed and executed in May.

        -Now, there’s a whole series of battles, many of which are close calls, and Charles Albert personally fights alongside his men and bravely tries to lead them to victory. But the long and short of it is that the Austrians got the jump on them, started rolling up their flank, and every time Charles Albert tries to organize a proper retreat so his army can fall back and regroup, Radetzky or one of his underlings attacks them before they’re ready, and on March 23rd, only three days after the resumption of hostilities, Field Marshal Radetzky’s main army routs Charles Albert main army, despite the King of Piedmont-Sardinia himself charging into the midst of a retreat to rally his men. The army retreats north towards the Alps, leaving the road open for the Austrians to march west and attack the city of Turin, the capital of Piedmont-Sardinia. Later that evening, Charles Albert meets with an Austrian representative and hears their peace terms, after which he promptly resigns as king, leaving his 29-year-old son Victor Emmanuel in charge of Piedmont-Sardinia, hoping that he can negotiate better terms.

        -In the end, the peace terms are surprisingly lenient. Austria doesn’t ask for any land back, and only asks for the payment of a small war indemnity. This isn’t because the Austrians have some special love for Piedmont-Sardinia; it’s because they don’t want to provoke more uprisings and calls for independence. Already, the port city of Genoa has revolted against Piedmont-Sardinia, with many of Charles Albert’s returning war veterans joining a workers’ revolution against Victor Emmanuel’s new government. Austria doesn’t want this. It creates disorder near their frontier and it also threatens to draw in French intervention, which would only make the French more powerful in Northern Italy. So the Austrians look at all of their options, and decide that a stable Piedmont-Sardinia with a moderate constitutional monarchy under Victor Emmanuel II is the best possible outcome. They make a generous peace, and Victor Emmanuel is now free to put down the Genoese rebellion and govern his country as he sees fit.

        -As for Charles Albert, there’s no longer any place for him in Italy. Distrusted by just about everybody and now without a throne, he travels to Portugal, where he plans to board a ship for the New World. Unfortunately, he gets sick on the way and begins suffering liver symptoms, which worsen and force him to stop in Portugal, in the city of Oporto, where he settles in a house with an ocean view. Sadly, his symptoms continue to worsen, painful abscesses break out on his skin, and he suffers from three heart attacks, the third of which kills him on July 28th 1849. In less than a year, Charles Albert has gone from hero of Italy to disgraced former king to dead at the age of 51. His body is returned to Turin and is buried in the royal crypt, where it remains to this day.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN: THE  FALL OF THE ROMAN REPUBLIC

The collapse of Charles Albert’s army opens the way for the Austrian army to enter southern Italy, sparking a panic in the Roman Republic. On March 29th, two members of the government’s ruling triumvirate resign, and both are replaced. None of the names of these men are important except for one: Giuseppe Mazzini, who now takes one of the three seats. Because with Mazzini on the triumvirate and his massive public backing, the Roman Republic is now a revolutionary dictatorship in all but name, but if the dictator’s lifestyle is any indication, then his rule is clearly benevolent. Mazzini lives in a simple one-room apartment, has no bodyguards, and eats dinner in public at a popular restaurant, where anyone can speak with him. Freedom of the press is restored, freedom of religion is established, the inquisition is banned, and religious courts are replaced by secular ones. At the same time, Mazzini’s government is even-handed in its enforcement of the laws. Freedom of the press means freedom for all press, including conservative newspapers. And unlike in many of Europe’s other revolutions, there are to be no anti-clerical reprisals. In one case, a radical named Callimaco Zambianchi leads the torture and massacre of a dozen priests, and the authorities arrest him. Unfortunately, he manages to get away during all the chaos I’m about to describe, and will later return as a subcommander under Garibaldi. Regardless, my point is that Giuseppe Mazzini doesn’t rule as a revolutionary radical. He rules as a center-left liberal, and even attends 1849’s Easter Mass in Saint Peter’s Basilica. This display of loyalty to the Catholic faith – if not to Pope Pius IX – helps establish Mazzini as someone the people can trust, particularly in the deeply religious countryside surrounding Rome.

        -Securing the loyalty of the people is step one. Step two is building the Roman Republic’s defenses. This Mazzini does with the help of Giuseppe Garibaldi, who has spent the last few months recruiting a 4,000-man army to fight the Austrians in Northern Italy. After Charles Albert’s humiliating defeat at the hands of Marshal Radetzky, Garibaldi knew he couldn’t fight the Austrians alone, so now he’s marched south to the Roman Republic, recruited thousands of more men, and is guarding the northern frontier against Austrian attack. Unfortunately for the Roman Republic, the Austrian army is not their only threat.

        -Now, I don’t know how many of you guys play grand strategy video games, but one of my favorites is Europa Universalis IV, and Europa Universalis has this neat mechanic where if you occupy Rome, then every Catholic power on the map will automatically become hostile until you give Rome back to the Pope. Now, that game is set in the centuries before this time period, but there’s still enough residual old-school Catholicism around in the middle of the 19th century that the Roman Republic now faces a growing coalition.

        -Along with the Austrians in the north, the Roman Republic now faces an open military threat from the south, where Ferdinand II has massed his own army along the frontier. Ferdinand, who just a few months prior had been an ally of Charles Albert, is now totally fed up with the revolutionaries, thanks in large part to his experiences in Sicily, and now he’s having dinner with his guest Pope Pius and making plans to restore the Papal States. Spain is on board, with the Spanish crown offering financial assistance to Piux IX’s allies.

        -But crucially, the Italian revolution has lost the support of France. Up until now, French President Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, along with the British, has acted as a mediator between Italian nationalists and the Austrian government. This is a partially matter of realpolitik. France and Austria are historical rivals, and France does not want Austria to become too powerful in Italy. It’s one thing if they put down some rebellions in areas near the Austrian frontier, like Venice or even Milan. It’s another thing if Austria is dictating terms all the way down in Rome.

        -Beyond realpolitik, Louis-Napoleon has another incentive to not just stop supporting the Italian revolution, but to actively take the side of the Pope, and that’s his domestic base. Like most democratic leaders, Louis-Napoleon relies on a coalition of voters to keep him in power, and one of his biggest bases of support is ultra-religious Catholics, and as you can imagine, that voter base really, really wants to see the Pope restored to power. So, how do you keep the Austrians from dictating terms in Rome while also pleasing your conservative Catholic voter base? Restore the Pope yourself!

        -So in April, 1849, the French organize a seaborne expedition, and on April 24th, six thousand men under the command of General Nicolas Oudinot occupy the port of Civita Vecchia, which is Rome’s main source of trade. On April 30th, Oudinot marches on Rome, and a 9,000-man republican coalition commanded by Giuseppe Garibaldi and other Italian nationalists takes up their defenses. Garibaldi writes in his autobiography:

        “From the highest points in Rome, the hostile army was seen advancing slowly and with precaution, marching in column along the road from Civita Vecchia to Porta Cavalleggieri. Having come within cannon-shot, they placed some of their artillery in commanding positions, and deployed several corps, which resolutely marched up to attack the walls.

        “The French general’s mode of attack showed an utter scorn of us; it was a case of Don Quixote and the windmills. He attacked us just as if we had had no ramparts, or as if our walls had been garrisoned with children. In truth, General Oudinot, the son of a marshal of the First Empire, had not thought it necessary, in order to crush ‘four brigands d’Italiens,’ to provide himself with a map of Rome.

        “He soon perceived that we were men defending our city against hirelings who were republicans in name only. Those gallant sons of Italy, after having calmly allowed the enemy to approach, poured into them a volley of cannon and musket-shots, which killed a great many of the most advanced.”

-Oudinot’s French push through the wave of Italian fire, taking heavy losses, before pushing into the dense streets at the foot of Vatican Hill. There, with no maps, with limited artillery support, and with Garibaldi’s revolutionaries rushing in from every alley and avenue, the French expeditionary force scurries back to Civita Vecchia, hundreds of them are captured, and Oudinot is forced to sail back to France. Giuseppe Mazzini orders the prisoners returned to France with copies of Article V of the French Constitution in their pockets, which reads: “France respects foreign nationalities. Her might will never be employed against the liberty of any people.”

This republican victory stirs the hopes of Garibaldi and others, but it’s a false hope because all the while the noose is tightening. At the same time as the revolutionaries are beating back the French attack, a Spanish army of 4,000 men has landed at the port of Gaeta, 60 miles northwest of Naples, where Ferdinand II has his base of operations and Pius IX is living in temporary exile. In the north, the Austrians are slowly advancing. They focus on the eastern half of the Italian boot, the side closest to Austria, and they take Bologna on May 16th, before advancing down the Adriatic coast to Ancona, which they besiege on May 25th.

        -On June 1st, General Oudinot lands a new invasion force outside of Rome. The French government has run a quick PR campaign claiming that the previous expedition was a successful reconnaissance in force, and Oudinot is now returning with a force of 30,000 men. Rome’s defenders now number 16,000, not counting a large number of civilian resistance fighters and non-combat volunteers, such as the more than 6,000 Roman women who volunteer as nurses during the siege.

        -For a month, the French relentlessly bombard the Roman walls, as French troops methodically take one strategic point after another. Garibaldi leads a vigorous defense, often putting himself near the center of the fighting while wearing his trademark red shirt, which are also worn by some of his best soldiers, his South American veterans. Anita, his Brazilian bride who is once again pregnant, fights by his side.

        -Despite the Italians’ bravery, they’re no match for the superior French numbers and General Oudinot’s more cautious, methodical approach to the attack. On July 1st, after 30 days of fighting, the French control almost all the city of Rome, and Garibaldi reports to Mazzini that he can no longer guarantee the safety of the republican government. Unable to fight, the triumvirate surrenders to the French on July 2nd. Ten days later, on July 12th, Giuseppe Mazzini goes into exile in London, but don’t worry; he’ll be back later.

-Before the official surrender, in the wee hours of July 2nd, Garibaldi rallies his 4,000 most loyal supporters in Saint Peter’s Square, and gives the following speech as reported by an eyewitness:

        “Soldiers! You who have shared with me the labor and the dangers of fighting for our fatherland, you who have won a rich share of glory and honor, all you can expect if you now come with me into exile is heat and thirst by day, cold and hunger by night. No other wages await you save hard work and danger. You will live in the open, without rest, without food, and there will be long night watches, forced marches, and fighting at every step.

        “Let him who loves his country follow me.”

        -With that, Garibaldi’s men disperse, splitting into small bands to avoid first the French siege army, then the Austrian patrols that rove the countryside north of Rome. Their objective is Venice, where Daniele Manin’s little Venetian Republic, the Republic of San Marco, continues to hold out against a constant Austrian assault.

-Back in Rome, Pius IX has turned his civilian government over to a new triumvirate, which people start calling the Red Triumvirate because it consists of three cardinals, but they may as well be referring to its policies. Under the Red Triumvirate, the inquisition is returned, press censorship is restored, all voting rights are abolished, and the use of torture is reapproved. Draconian punishments are imposed for anyone who had supported the revolution, but these actually backfire. Due to the way the laws are written, just about everybody in the Papal States is considered a revolutionary. Are you a dairy farmer who went into the city and sold some milk and took some of your profit and spent it at a shop that turned out to be owned by a supporter of Mazzini? You’re also a revolutionary! Because just about everybody is guilty, nobody is willing to talk. Witnesses for even serious crimes are impossible to come by, and at the end of the day, only 38 Roman revolutionaries are punished in any way. As reactionary purges go, this is about as mild as it gets.

-Meanwhile, Tuscany’s republican government has fallen after the Austrians occupied a single small city and crowds of joyful peasants ran in from the surrounding countryside to greet them as liberators. Unable to even control the small estates around Florence itself, the government had voted in April to hand power back over to Grand Duke Leopold II, who had returned to his throne after putting down a couple small pockets of resistance. So if you’re Garibaldi and you’re trying to get your army somewhere they can actually do some good, the Republic of San Marco is your only option.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN: THE SIEGE OF VENICE

As dedicated as the Venetian resistance is, their little republic isn’t long for this world. Venice’s greatest strength is its geography. It’s located at the north end of the Adriatic Sea, making it the closest Mediterranean port to much of Central Europe. It’s also located on an island, which is itself sheltered in a coastal lagoon surrounded by barrier islands. So we have a rich city with plenty of trade, which sits on an island in an incredibly defensible position. This is how Venice was able to run an influential merchant republic for over a thousand years. Until early May of 1849, the island of Venice itself had maintained a railway bridge to the mainland, where it could receive crucial supplies. The north end of this bridge, where it met the mainland, had been guarded by two forts: Fort Marghera and Fort San Giuliano.

        -I’m speaking in the past tense because after beating Charles Albert once and for all back in March, Austrian Field Marshal Joseph Radetzky had turned his army back from the west and besieged Venice with more than 30,000 men. The siege force’s first goal was to cut Venice off from supply, which they did by besieging Forts Marghera and San Giuliano, beginning on May 4th. On May 27th, the defenders were forced to retreat, although they spiked their guns and actually laid mines in Fort San Giuliano which they blew up after the Austrians occupied the fort. The Venetians had retreated in good order across the railroad causeway, tearing up the first five bridge arches behind them so the Austrians couldn’t follow. As it happens, there were some railway platforms at intervals along the sides of the causeway, and the Venetians positioned artillery on these platforms to shoot back at the Austrians on the seashore, and Mike Rapport tells us that the Austrian artillery in turn start targeting the guys on the closest platform. To be asked to man a gun on this platform at the end of the bridge was a death sentence, yet guys kept doing it anyway. It was a valiant defense, but the damage was done. Without a railroad, Venice could no longer be supplied by land.

        -The Austrians have also been blockading Venice by sea, and by the time Giuseppe Garibaldi and his 4,000 or so men are on their way to help, an Austrian fleet is shelling the city day and night with huge, 24-pound artillery on the land and naval guns at sea. And if you look at everything they’re facing, it’s remarkable that the Venetians hang on as long as they do. Because not only are they dealing with traditional artillery, they’re dealing with the 19th-century equivalent of cruise missiles: incendiary balloons. From land and sea, as the wind allows, the Austrians are releasing experimental hot air balloons that are timed to drop small explosive payloads over Venice. Now, these balloons don’t do a ton of damage – certainly not compared to all the heavy artillery – but there’s a certain psychological impact to seeing a bunch of balloons hovering towards you and they’re glowing against the night sky and you can see them floating closer and closer and there’s nothing you can do about it.

        -If the military situation is horrendous, the political situation inside the Republic of San Marco is just as bad. Remember the likely manic-depressive lawyer-turned-President Daniele Manin and his moderate-left views? Well, he’s under attack from all sides. A lot of the troops defending Venice are revolutionaries who have come there from other parts of Italy as their own local revolutions collapsed. Garibaldi isn’t the only guy to have gotten this idea. Manin needs these fighters if he’s going to have any chance of fighting off the Austrians. But these fighters, as you might expect, are very passionate revolutionaries, and their far-left politics don’t sit well at all with the old-school Venetian leadership, which still favors a kind of merchant republic where only the wealthy are able to vote. So on the one hand, Daniele Manin has super-radical revolutionary troops to keep happy, and on the other hand, he has some members of the political elite openly saying that they’d rather surrender to the Austrians than allow universal manhood suffrage. Remarkably, Manin manages to chart a middle course, and wins the support of some labor groups, most notably the influential gondoliers union, who back his proposal for a limited vote. It’s this kind of talent for coalition-building that allows Daniele Manin to remain president and keep working for some kind of negotiated settlement. His best offer to the Austrians is for Venice to surrender in exchange for becoming a special autonomous zone within the Austrian Empire. Marshal Radetzky’s best offer is amnesty for all Manin’s fighters and safe passage to exile for the military leadership, so basically the revolutionaries will be allowed to walk away with their lives.

        -As summer goes on, the Austrian blockade takes its toll. Price controls on basic necessities, which had actually worked as long as the railway bridge was open, now have to be lifted out of necessity. The Venetians even begin mixing rye into their wheat bread, which seems like a minor sacrifice to even bring up during a siege. But the Venetians are really pampered, and they get really upset without their white bread, and anyone who can afford it starts hoarding white bread, and because bread is the most important food staple for most people, this throws the whole food market out of equilibrium. On July 15th 1849, things get more serious; the city’s mills shut down completely. They’re out of grain. The next day, there’s a panic as everyone rushes to buy whatever bread they can, and crowds of women who arrived to the bakery too late can be heard crying in the streets. The next day, the 17th, Manin’s government begins issuing ration cards. To make matters worse, there’s also a cholera outbreak in the city, no doubt exacerbated by poor nutrition and crowded conditions.

        -The handwriting is on the wall, and all but the most brain-addled revolutionaries know it. On August 5th, after the reading of a report in the Venetian assembly on the deadly progress of the cholera epidemic, Daniele Manin demands approval from the Venetian assembly to take complete power as dictator so he can negotiate a surrender as quickly as possible. If the assembly votes any other way, he warns, he will resign as President. The assembly agrees and votes 56 to 37 to make him Dictator. Seventeen days later, on August 22nd 1849, Manin surrenders to Marshal Radetzky on Austria’s terms. There is to be no Venetian autonomous zone. Venice is going back to Austria, full stop. And just like that, the First Italian War of independence is over. There is to be no nationalist victory, at least not this time. But the memory of this fight will live on in the memory of those who were there, and the blood of the dead, as it so often does, will create fertile soil for a future revolution.

        -Paul Ginsborg summarizes the fight of the Venetians as follows:

        “For five months Venice was to withstand every Austrian attempt to force her into subjugation. With no hope remaining, the Venetians rivalled the Romans in the heroism with which they defended their city. G.M. Trevelyan, in describing Garibaldi’s defense of Rome, wrote: ‘If the Englishman does not know when he is beaten, the Italian sometimes knows it and does not care.’ It was like this with the venetians; as the summer reached its height, and the Austrian guns intoned their incessant message across the lagoon, Venice began to starve… A chicken cost a working man his week’s wages, there was no wine, and butter could not be bought even by the rich. Then, to these deprivations were added the horrors of bombardment and finally the ravages of cholera. Throughout it all, the Venetian people did not once raise their voice to demand surrender. On 13 August 1849, when Manin spoke to the Venetians for the last time from his balcony on the Piazza San Marco, he was so overcome with emotion as to be unable to finish what he had been trying to say. Stepping back into his study, he murmured to those nearest to him, ‘Such a people! To be forced to surrender with such a people!’”

        -The surviving Venetian revolutionaries go into exile wherever they can. Daniele Manin himself departs on a French ship, arriving in Marseille in early September. To add insult to injury, his wife Theresa dies of cholera herself shortly after their arrival. In France, Manin would link up with other Italian exiles in Paris, and become a constitutional monarchist, convinced that only Charles Albert’s successor, King Victor Emmanuel II of Piedmont-Sardinia, can unite Italy. Daniele Manin is more right than he will ever know. Always a frail man, his health collapses in 1857 and he dies in Paris. After Italian unification, his remains will be returned to Venice and buried with honor outside the Basilica San Marco, where they remain to this day.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: THE END OF THE REVOLUTION

As for Garibaldi and his 4,000 men, their road to Venice is fraught with challenges. Garibaldi himself has to flee troops from multiple nations, and soon finds himself on the eastern side of the Italian peninsula in the city-state of San Marino, with fewer than 250 men of his hardcore veterans, the so-called red shirt legion, remaining. They decide to make for the coast, steal some fishing boats, and sail to Venice in short hops, hugging the coast to avoid Austrian patrols. During this desperate run for Venice, Garibaldi’s wife Anita is desperately ill. Not only is she heavily pregnant, but she’s suffering from m alaria, and he begs her to stay in the tiny Republic of San Marino where she can recover in safety. But she refuses and insists on traveling with him, and with each passing day she gets weaker and weaker. Garibaldi writes in his autobiography:

        “When we reached La Mandriola, Anita was lying on a mattress in the cart which had brought her, and I said to Dr. Zannini, who arrived almost immediately, ‘Try and save her.’ The doctor said to me, ‘We must try to get her to bed.’ The four of us then each took a corner of the mattress, and carried her into the house, to a room at the head of the stairs. In laying her down on the bed, I thought I saw the death-look in her face. I felt her wrist – there was no pulse. The mother of my children, the woman I loved, was lying before me a corpse. When I first meet them again, they will ask me for their mother!

        “I mourned bitterly for the loss of my Anita, my inseparable companion in the most adventurous passages of my life. I directed the good people about me to bury the body, and left, yielding to their entreaties, and knowing that I should compromise them by remaining longer. I staggered along, scarcely able to walk, to Sant’ Alberto, accompanied by a guide, who took me to the house of a tailor, a poor man, but honest and generous.”

        -Not long after, Giuseppe Garibaldi gets word that Venice has fallen, and travels instead for Piedmont-Sardinia, where he hopes to find refuge. Italy’s greatest revolutionary hero is once more headed into exile, having achieved nothing. And not only has he, as he would put it, failed to liberate Italy, but he has also lost his closest companion.

-There’s another passage from Garibaldi’s autobiography that jumps out at me, because he seems to be talking not only about his grief over Anita, but for his grief over Italy and the lives that have been lost for nothing. He says:

“If guilt there was, it was mine alone. And there was guilt. Two hearts were joined in an infinite love; but an innocent existence was shattered. She is dead; I am wretched… On the day when, vainly hoping to bring her back to life, I clasped the hand of a corpse, with bitter tears of despair, then I knew the evil I had wrought. I sinned greatly, but I sinned alone.”

As the summer of 1849 fades into fall, it seems like not much has changed since the beginning of our story. The Austrian Empire is once again dominant in a divided Italy, with the French Republic a close second in terms of influence. The most powerful Italian nation is once again Piedmont-Sardinia, although now that Northwestern Italian powerhouse is governed by Victor Emmanuel II, not Charles Albert.

        -But the Italian nationalist movement is still alive! Victor Emmanuel II himself has ambitions to follow in his father’s footsteps, and grants sanctuary to large numbers of nationalist activists. In all, more than 20,000 nationalists settle in Piedmont-Sardinia, most of them in the capital city of Turin and the port city of Genoa. These people come from all over Italy, and their presence makes Piedmont-Sardinia simultaneously more cosmopolitan and more Italian. Many of the refugees are writers and pamphleteers, and their work leads to a number of surprising candidates winning in the country’s parliamentary elections. One of these is a new Prime Minister, Camillo Benso, the Count of Cavour. We’ll talk about him much more in the future, but for now, know that Cavour will one day become the first Italian Prime Minister, and will eventually be named as one of Italy’s four official founding fathers, alongside Giuseppe Mazzini, Victor Emmanuel II, and Giuseppe Garibaldi.

        -As for Garibaldi himself, Victor Emmanuel is unwilling to take the political risk of giving sanctuary to such a famous republican revolutionary. After stopping in Nice just long enough to hug his children and be told he isn’t welcome, Garibaldi sails to Tunis, where he’s not welcome, and then via a few other stops to Tangier, where he decides that Italy is not yet ready for unification and decides to become a merchant seaman. He sails to New York, but is unable to raise funds for a ship, so he runs around the Americas for a while, spending time with famous Italian emigrees and former revolutionaries alike, before he finally ends up in Peru and is given command of a ship. After making a pair of voyages in the Pacific and around Cape Horn to the United States. In 1854, he’ll finally be allowed to return to Italy, where he settles in Genoa, buys part of a small island, and takes up farming. We’ll leave him there for now, but he’ll be back in action before long.

        -Austria’s position in Italy may look as strong as ever, but it’s actually weak. Remember, Austria is having trouble all over the map, particularly in Hungary, where the nationalist revolution may have been put down, but where the empire must now station thousands of extra troops to keep order. Meanwhile, up in Germany, Prussia’s ambitious King, Friedrich Wilhelm IV, will do everything he can to take advantage of Austrian weakness. All that and more in the next episode of Relevant History.

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS LINKED FROM: https://www.DanTolerPodcast.com/ 

SOURCES FOR THIS EPISODE:

David Blackbourn, The Long Nineteenth Century: A History of Germany 1780-1918 – https://www.scribd.com/document/261666797/Long-Nineteenth-Century-History-of-Germany-1780-1918-the-David-Blackbourn 

Tim Chapman, The Risorgimento: Italy 1815-71 – https://read.amazon.com/?asin=B003SNK19G&ref_=dbs_t_r_kcr 

Gordon A. Craig, Germany 1866-1945

Friedrich Engels, Germany: Revolution and Counter-Revolution – https://archive.org/details/germanyrevolutio00enge_0 

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-Volume 1: https://archive.org/details/autobiographyofg0001gari/page/n3/mode/2up 

-Volume 2: https://archive.org/details/autobiographyofg0002gari/page/n3/mode/2up 

-Supplement by Jesse White Mario: https://archive.org/details/autobiographyofg0003gari/page/4/mode/2up 

Paul Ginsborg, Daniele Manin and the Venetian Revolution of 1848-1849 - https://archive.org/details/danielemaninvene0000gins/page/n5/mode/2up 

James Morton, Lola Montez: Her Life & Conquests - https://archive.org/details/lolamontezherlif0000mort/page/80/mode/2up 

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Alan Palmer, Twilight of the Habsburgs: The Life and Times of Emperor Francis Joseph – https://archive.org/details/twilightofhabsbu0000palm 

Carlo Pisacane, Guerra Combattuta in Italia Neglo Anni 1848-49

Mike Rapport, 1848, Year of Revolution

Denis Mack Smith, The Making of Italy, 1796-1870 – https://archive.org/details/makingofitaly1790000mack/page/n3/mode/2up 

Denis Mack Smith, Modern Italy, A Political History

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