Roman Republic (1849): Mazzini and Garibaldi Defend Rome

The Roman Republic of 1849 was a revolutionary state proclaimed in Rome on 9 February 1849, after Pope Pius IX fled the city. Led by Giuseppe Mazzini and defended in arms by Giuseppe Garibaldi, it lasted less than five months before a French army restored papal rule. Its defence became one of the founding legends of Italian unification.

Background

In 1848 revolutions swept across Europe, and the Papal States, which the pope ruled as a secular monarch across central Italy, were not spared. Pius IX had begun his reign in 1846 with reforms that made him popular with liberals, but in April 1848 he refused to join a war against Austria. His standing collapsed.

On 15 November 1848 his chief minister, Pellegrino Rossi, was stabbed to death in Rome. Crowds besieged the papal palace, and on 24 November Pius IX escaped in disguise to Gaeta in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. From there he refused to negotiate with the government left behind in Rome. These events formed part of the wider Revolutions of 1848.

The republic is proclaimed

Elections held in January 1849 under universal male suffrage produced a Constituent Assembly, which met on 5 February. In the early hours of 9 February it voted by a large majority for a “Fundamental Decree” declaring the end of the pope’s temporal power and establishing a democratic Roman Republic. The pope was to keep guarantees for his spiritual role.

Mazzini, the leading prophet of a united, republican Italy, arrived in March. After Piedmont was defeated by Austria at Novara, the Assembly entrusted executive power on 29 March to a triumvirate of Mazzini, Carlo Armellini and Aurelio Saffi. In practice Mazzini dominated it.

The government abolished the Inquisition’s tribunals, removed censorship and turned church property to public uses, including housing for the poor. It tried to avoid revolutionary terror and was, for its time, notably tolerant. Its constitution, drafted over the following months, provided for universal male suffrage, freedom of worship and the abolition of the death penalty.

The French intervention

Pius IX appealed to Austria, Spain, Naples and France to restore him. France, a republic itself under President Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, acted first, partly to win Catholic support at home and partly to stop Austria from controlling the peninsula. An expeditionary force under General Charles Oudinot landed at Civitavecchia in late April 1849.

Oudinot expected little resistance. On 30 April his troops attacked the walls near the Vatican and the Janiculum hill and were driven back, with Garibaldi’s legion counter-attacking in the villa gardens outside the walls. In May Garibaldi also defeated Neapolitan troops at Palestrina and Velletri, while Austrian forces took Bologna and besieged Ancona in the north of the Papal States.

A French envoy, Ferdinand de Lesseps, negotiated a truce in May, but Paris disowned his agreement. Reinforced to around 30,000 men with siege artillery, Oudinot attacked again early on 3 June, a day before he had said hostilities would resume. His troops seized the Villa Pamphili and the Villa Corsini, also called the Casino dei Quattro Venti, on the high ground west of the city.

The siege of Rome

The fighting for the Villa Corsini on 3 June was among the bloodiest of the campaign. Garibaldi sent wave after wave of volunteers up a narrow approach under fire, and many of them were killed or wounded. Among the wounded was Goffredo Mameli, author of the song that is now Italy’s national anthem; he died of his wounds on 6 July.

For the rest of June the French dug siege trenches and battered the bastions of the Janiculum, defended by roughly 20,000 men of very mixed training. The Villa del Vascello, held by Giacomo Medici’s men, became a symbol of stubborn resistance. The photographer Stefano Lecchi’s pictures of the shattered villas, taken that year, are among the earliest images of war damage anywhere.

On the night of 29 to 30 June the French stormed the breaches. Luciano Manara, Garibaldi’s chief of staff, was killed in the fighting. Mazzini wanted to fight on in the streets, while Garibaldi proposed taking the army into the countryside. On 30 June the Assembly voted to cease a defence that had become impossible but to remain at its post.

Fall and retreat

On 2 July Garibaldi gathered volunteers in St Peter’s Square and offered those who followed him no pay, only hardship, battle and possible death. Around 4,000 men left Rome with him that evening. Pursued by several armies, the column dwindled; most disbanded in San Marino, and Garibaldi’s wife Anita, who was pregnant, died near Ravenna on 4 August.

On 3 July French troops entered Rome. That same day the Assembly proclaimed the republic’s constitution from the Capitol, a symbolic gesture before it was dispersed. Mazzini went into exile in London. Papal government was restored, though Pius IX did not return to Rome until April 1850.

Legacy

The republic’s defeat was total, but its moral effect was large. The defence of Rome turned Garibaldi into an international hero and showed that Italians from many states would fight together for a national cause. Its leaders resurfaced a decade later in the Unification of Italy, above all during the Expedition of the Thousand in 1860.

A French garrison remained in Rome to protect the pope, with a short break, until 1870, when it was withdrawn during the Franco-Prussian War and Italian troops took the city. Today the Janiculum is lined with busts of the republic’s defenders, and its 1849 constitution is often cited as a forerunner of the Italian Republic’s constitution of 1948.

Timeline

• 1848, 15 November: Papal minister Pellegrino Rossi is assassinated in Rome.
• 1848, 24 November: Pope Pius IX flees to Gaeta.
• 1849, 9 February: The Constituent Assembly proclaims the Roman Republic.
• 1849, 29 March: Mazzini, Armellini and Saffi are named triumvirs.
• 1849, 30 April: The first French attack on Rome is repulsed.
• 1849, 3 June: French forces resume the offensive and seize the villas west of the city.
• 1849, 30 June: After the French break through, the Assembly ends resistance.
• 1849, 3 July: French troops enter Rome; the constitution is proclaimed from the Capitol.

Why it matters

The Roman Republic was brief, but it combined democratic government, religious freedom and national feeling in a way that inspired later Italian patriots. Its fall also tied France to the defence of papal Rome for two decades, shaping the politics of Italian unification.