In the waning light of a late November afternoon in Rome, in the year 1848, a man in the simple black garb of a parish priest could be seen leaving a back door of the Quirinal Palace, the papal residence. In front of the palace was an angry mob of 10,000 Romans, many of them armed. Meanwhile, in the pope’s private quarters, the French ambassador was engaged in a long conversation . . . with nobody. Alone in the room, he kept talking to convince any eavesdroppers that the pope was still there. For the exiting priest was Pope Pius IX in disguise.
He stepped into a waiting carriage, accompanied by a Bavarian count armed with a pistol. Pius was on his way to exile, though only his companion, the Bavarian ambassador, knew where—not Marseille, as the French ambassador thought, not Majorca, as the Spanish ambassador hoped, but a small town down the coast called Gaeta, under the rule of the reactionary King Ferdinand II of Naples. He must have felt he was running for his life. A few days earlier a sniper in the crowd outside the Quirinal had shot dead a papal official looking out a window; a few days before that an assassin had slit the throat of the pope’s new civilian prime minister.
It was a dramatic moment—and a stunning reversal of fortune in just two years. Giovanni Ferretti, an amiable, obscure cardinal, was unexpectedly elected pope in 1846, making him the absolute monarch, as all popes had been for over a thousand years, of a realm that in the 19th century stretched from Rome east to the Adriatic and north to include such cities as Bologna, Ferrara, and Ravenna.
The previous pope, Gregory XVI, was a morose, intransigent monk who made sure modern ills like railroads, scientific books, and liberal ideas were kept out of the Papal States. Pius IX—Pio Nono in Italian—seemed the opposite. He was modest, accommodating, and had a gift for mischievous irony. A British envoy found his conversation “easy and unrestrained, sometimes almost playful.” “After the dour Pope Gregory,” David I. Kertzer remarks in his new book, The Pope Who Would Be King, “Pio Nono was the pope who smiled.”
He quickly won over an initially suspicious Roman populace. His first official act was to free all political prisoners, followed by tentative reforms, including a constitution, plus railroads and telegraph lines. He soon became a familiar, unpretentious presence in Rome, taking daily walks through the streets, chatting with humble citizens along the way. Cries of “Viva Pio Nono!” were heard from the crowds at his public appearances.
The American writer Margaret Fuller, probably the first woman to be anyone’s foreign correspondent anywhere, was in Rome for the New York Tribune, and she sensed a basic decency—he had “set his heart upon doing something solid for the benefit of man.” In a quieter time, that might have been the whole story.
But in the revolutionary year of 1848, it was, to modify a Mel Brooks line, not so good to be king. Wherever you stepped in continental Europe, you had to watch out for falling dynasties. The revolutions, each with an elaborate script of its own, mostly failed in the end, but they changed everything, especially people’s minds.
And in Rome, as Kertzer makes clear, there was a lot to change one’s mind about. The city, with 170,000 residents, was far from a modern metropolis. Inside its walls were open fields where shepherds tended their flocks among the ancient ruins. The streets and Baroque churches had taken on a faded and melancholy aura. There were almost no industries except the ecclesiastical one (and the mendicant one: Beggars were notoriously numerous and shameless). And Italy, which hadn’t been united under one government since the Roman Empire, was still a mosaic of anachronistic kingdoms and small duchies, with extensive territory, including Venice and Milan, under iron-fisted Austrian rule.
Pio Nono found himself ruling three million restive subjects who had no say in how they were ruled. It was a government of the priests, by the priests, and for the priests. Cardinals held the highest positions, living like princes in palatial residences. Parish priests exercised police powers, having the right to enter the rooms of ordinary Romans at any time in search of illicit sex, blasphemy, or banned books and to report offenders to the courts, where all the judges were priests.
Stendhal, who loved all things Italian except the church, kept a journal that wittily portrays Rome in 1827-29. In it he writes, “When my young barber tells me about some absurd custom about which he complains, he always adds, ‘What do you expect, sir, we are ruled by priests!’ ”
And the problem for Pio Nono was that he was a ruling priest just when Romans were wondering if the theocratic arrangements in place since the 8th century needed to last forever. His reforms didn’t satisfy anyone—not the scheming cardinals and Jesuits who opposed them, not the emerging newspapers and tumultuous café political clubs that were openly demanding, as censorship broke down, a new representative, perhaps republican, form of government.
When Pio Nono refused to order the small papal army to join Italian forces fighting Austrians in the north, he went from acclaimed patriotic hero to reviled traitor almost overnight. The rest of the story, in Kertzer’s telling, is not only dramatic but, being Italian, operatic—confusing plot, large cast of passionate, declamatory characters, cloak-and-dagger intrigue, and some satirical and sartorial sacrilege (e.g., prostitutes parading through Roman streets dressed in priestly garb).
Despite the initial mob-driven violence, the Roman republic that was proclaimed after the pope’s flight was orderly and moderate under the direction of Giuseppe Mazzini, who had returned from exile in London. Garibaldi, the other charismatic hero of Italian unification, arrived to take command of its defense. But, despite the valiant resistance of volunteers from all over Italy, it was doomed, as the Austrians competed with a French expeditionary force for the dubious distinction of crushing it.
The French, tripping over themselves every step of the way, won out, losing most of the principles and honor of their short-lived Second Republic in the process. They restored to precarious and unpopular sovereignty a pope who, during 17 months of exile with the sinister, cynical Cardinal Antonelli whispering in his ear, had lost all interest in reform. The mess made even Alexis de Tocqueville, briefly the French foreign minister, look bad.
And even that resolution postponed the inevitable downfall of the papal realm, soon reduced to Rome itself, by only 11 years. In 1870, French troops left the city, and the new kingdom of Italy took it over as its capital. Pio Nono, his sense of humor long gone, became a symbol of papal obduracy, issuing the famous Syllabus of Errors (one error being any notion that the pope should “reconcile himself to progress, liberalism, and modern civilization”). He also convened the Vatican Council that declared papal infallibility.
Kertzer deftly sets the Roman scene and extracts a captivating narrative from the standard 1848 labyrinth of conspiracy, illusion, heroism, and ineptitude. This is a book not only for Italophiles but for anyone interested in the way Europe backed into modernity. Stendhal, who didn’t live to see the events it vividly describes, would have relished it.
