A short-lived revolutionary state that briefly replaced papal rule in Rome with a democratic government, and whose constitution abolished capital punishment.
What the Work Is
The Roman Republic of 1849 is an account of the short-lived revolutionary state declared in Rome on 9 February 1849, when the government of the Papal States was temporarily replaced by a republican government following Pope Pius IX’s departure to Gaeta. The work examines the republic’s founding, its brief existence, and its fall to French military intervention. The republic itself was led by a triumvirate consisting of Carlo Armellini, Giuseppe Mazzini, and Aurelio Saffi, with Mazzini serving as the guiding spirit of the enterprise from its inception.
What the Book Is About
The book chronicles the dramatic sequence of events that led to the establishment of the Roman Republic and its swift demise. It traces the political crisis that began with the assassination of Pellegrino Rossi, the Papal government’s Minister of Justice, on 15 November 1848, and the subsequent popular uprising in Rome that demanded democratic government, social reforms, and war against the Austrian Empire. When Pope Pius IX fled Rome disguised as an ordinary priest to the fortress of Gaeta in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, he left behind a power vacuum that revolutionary forces quickly filled. The work details how the resulting constitutional assembly proclaimed the Roman Republic, and how the new state attempted to implement progressive reforms before being crushed by French troops sent to restore the Pope’s temporal power.
Key Ideas and Themes
The central theme of the work is the tension between revolutionary democratic aspirations and the entrenched power of the Catholic Church and European monarchies. The Roman Republic represented a radical break from the preceding papal government in several significant ways. Most notably, its constitution enshrined freedom of religion, guaranteeing Pope Pius IX and his successors the right to govern the Catholic Church while allowing all faiths to be practised. This stood in sharp contrast to the previous government, which had permitted only Catholicism and Judaism. The Constitution of the Roman Republic was also the first in the world to abolish capital punishment in its constitutional law, marking a landmark moment in the history of human rights.
The book also explores the republic’s social and economic policies. The Triumvirate passed popular legislation to eliminate burdensome taxes and provide work for the unemployed. Mazzini personally won support among the poor by confiscating some of the Church’s large landholdings and distributing them to peasants. He inaugurated reforms in prisons and insane asylums, established freedom of the press, and promoted secular education. However, he deliberately avoided implementing a “Right to Work” or work guarantee programme for the unemployed poor, having witnessed the failure of Louis Blanc’s compromise National Workshops measure in France shortly before. The government’s policies were fiscally expansionary, involving lower taxes and increased spending, which led to a decrease in the value of the currency.
A further theme is the complex international dimension of the republic’s brief existence. The work examines how the Pope appealed for military help from Catholic countries, and how France’s newly elected President Louis Napoleon found himself torn between his personal sympathies for Italian liberals and intense pressure from ultramontane French Catholics who had voted overwhelmingly for him. The book presents the French intervention as a pivotal moment, noting that Louis Napoleon ultimately decided to send French troops to restore the Pope, despite his own participation in an insurrection against the Pope in 1831. The decision reflected both domestic political calculations and broader foreign policy goals of expanding French influence in Italy while weakening Habsburg influence.
Structure and Approach
The work is organised chronologically, following the sequence of events from the assassination of Pellegrino Rossi through the proclamation of the republic, the elections, the foreign intervention, and the final French siege. It opens with the political crisis in Rome in November 1848, when liberals filled the streets demanding democratic government and social reforms. The narrative then moves through the establishment of the Costituente Romana, the scheduling of direct and universal elections for 21 January 1849, and the convening of the Constitutional Assembly on 8 February, which proclaimed the Roman Republic after midnight on 9 February.
The book gives particular attention to the elections, noting that the Pope had forbidden Catholics to vote, calling the convocation of the election “a monstrous act of felony made without a mask by the sponsors of the anarchic demagogy.” As a result, the resulting constitutional assembly, informally known as “The Assembly of the Damned,” had a republican inclination, with less than 50% of potential voters going to the polls in every part of the Papal States. The work describes the composition of the new assembly, which was dominated by the bourgeoisie, the affluent, professionals, and employees, including twenty-seven owners, a banker, fifty-three jurists and lawyers, six graduates, twelve professors, two writers, twenty-one doctors, one pharmacist, six engineers, five employees, two merchants, nineteen military officers, one prior, and one monsignore.
The narrative also covers the military aspects of the republic’s defence, including Giuseppe Garibaldi’s formation of the “Italian Legion” and the fortification of Rome against the French siege. The book describes the initial French attack on 30 April, when Oudinot’s out-of-date maps led him to march to a gate that had been walled up, and the astonished French were beaten back by the fiercely anti-clerical Romans of Trastevere, Garibaldi’s legionaries, and citizen-soldiers. It also recounts Mazzini’s fateful decision not to follow up this advantage, as he hoped the Roman Republic could befriend the French Republic, and his treatment of French prisoners as “guests of war,” sending them back with republican tracts citing Article V of the most recent French constitution: “France respects foreign nationalities. Her might will never be employed against the liberty of any people.”
Significance and Influence
The work presents the Roman Republic as a significant episode in the broader struggle for Italian unification, the Risorgimento, and as a precursor to the eventual unification of Italy. The republic’s brief existence demonstrated both the possibilities and the limitations of revolutionary nationalism in mid-nineteenth-century Europe. Its constitution, with its abolition of capital punishment and its guarantee of religious freedom, represented progressive ideals that were ahead of their time.
The book also examines the longer-term consequences of the republic’s fall. The French Army entered Rome on 3 July 1849 and reestablished the Holy See’s temporal power. French soldiers propped up the papal administration in Rome until they were withdrawn at the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, which led to the subsequent capture of Rome and its annexation by the Kingdom of Italy. The work quotes Raffaele De Cesare’s assessment that “the Roman question was the stone tied to Napoleon’s feet – that dragged him into the abyss,” suggesting that the French intervention in Rome ultimately contributed to Napoleon III’s downfall. The book notes that for twenty years Napoleon III had been the true sovereign of Rome, and that without him the temporal power would never have been reconstituted, nor, being reconstituted, would have endured.
The work also highlights the symbolic significance of the republic for Italian nationalists. When the name of Carlo Luciano Bonaparte was called during the roll-call at the Constitutional Assembly, he replied by calling out “Long live the Republic!” The acclamation of Giuseppe Mazzini as a Roman citizen expressed the sense that the Roman Republic was a foretaste of wider expectations for Italian unification. Garibaldi’s famous words upon the republic’s fall — “Wherever we may be, there will be Rome!” — captured the enduring ideal that the republic represented for the Italian nationalist movement.
The work also addresses the internal political dynamics of the republic, particularly the composition and evolution of its leadership. The Triumvirate itself underwent changes, with Saliceti and Montecchi leaving the Triumvirate, their places filled on 29 March by Saffi and Mazzini. The book notes that the government was led by Muzzarelli and composed also of Aurelio Saffi, and that the republic’s movement of troops in the area was a threat to Austria, which was certainly capable of attacking Rome itself. The commander-in-chief of Austrian forces in Milan, Count Joseph Radetzky von Radetz, had remarked during the “Five Glorious Days” of Milan, “Three days of blood will give us thirty years of peace.”
The narrative also covers the republic’s relationship with the broader Italian revolutionary movement. Many Italians from outside the Papal States went to Rome to fight for the Republic, among them Goffredo Mameli, who had tried to form a common state joining the Roman Republic and Tuscany, and who died of a wound suffered in the defence of Rome. The book describes how Garibaldi’s “Italian Legion” drew recruits from Piedmont and the Austrian territories of Lombardy and Venetia, rising to about 1,000 men and gaining discipline and organization at its station at Rieti on the border with the Kingdom of Two Sicilies.
The Final Days and Aftermath
The work details the final military campaign against the republic. The siege began in earnest on 1 June, and despite the resistance of the Republican army led by Garibaldi, the French prevailed on 29 June. On 30 June the Roman Assembly met and debated three options: to surrender; to continue fighting in the streets of Rome; or to retreat from Rome and continue the resistance from the Apennine Mountains. Garibaldi made a speech in which he favoured the third option and then said: “Dovunque saremo, colà sarà Roma” (“Wherever we may be, there will be Rome!”).
A truce was negotiated on 1 July, and on 2 July Garibaldi, followed by some 4,000 troops, withdrew from Rome for refuge in the neutral Republic of San Marino. The book also recounts the diplomatic aftermath of the republic’s fall. In August, Louis Napoleon issued a sort of manifesto in which he asked of Pius IX a general amnesty, a secularized administration, the establishment of the Code Napoléon, and in general a Liberal Government. Pius, from Gaeta, promised reforms that he declared motu proprio, that is, of his own volition, not in answer to the French. The pope did not return to Rome itself until April 1850, since the French were considered liberals all the same, and the pope would not return until assured of no French meddling in his affairs. In the interim, Rome was governed by a “Red Triumvirate” of cardinals.
The International Response
The work also examines the wider international reaction to the republic’s establishment. Spain sent 4,000 men under Fernando Fernández de Córdova to Gaeta, where the Pope remained in his refuge. The French sent a staff officer on 26 April to meet with Giuseppe Mazzini with a stiff assertion that the pope would be restored to power, and the revolutionary Roman Assembly, amid thunderous shouts of “Guerra!, Guerra!”, authorised Mazzini to resist the French by force of arms. The book describes how the French expected little resistance from the usurpers, but republican resolve was stiffened by Garibaldi’s long-delayed triumphal entry into Rome on 27 April, and by the arrival on 29 April of the Lombard Bersaglieri, who had recently driven the Austrians from the streets of Milan with new tactics of house-to-house fighting. Hasty defences were erected on the Janiculum wall, and the villas on the city’s outskirts were garrisoned.
The narrative also covers the diplomatic manoeuvring during the siege. A letter from Louis Napoleon encouraged Oudinot and assured him of French reinforcements. The French government sent Ferdinand de Lesseps to negotiate a more formal ceasefire. Neapolitan troops sympathetic to the papacy entered Roman Republic territory, and de Lesseps suggested that Oudinot’s forces in their current position might protect the city from the converging approach of an Austrian army with the Neapolitan force: the Roman Triumvirate agreed.
