In the wake of the French Revolution of 1848, a serious national rising occurred in Italy. Since 1815, many Italians had looked upon the Habsburgs as foreign occupiers or oppressors, so when news of revolution reached their lands, the banner of revolt went up in many places, especially in Milan and Venice. Outside the Habsburg lands, liberal uprisings also swept Rome and Naples. In Habsburg Italy, however, war came swiftly. In late March, answering a plea from the Milanese, the Kingdom of Sardinia, the only Italian state with a native monarch, declared war on the emperor and marched into his lands.

        The Habsburg government in Austria was initially willing to make concessions to Sardinia, but it was strongly discouraged from doing so by its military commander in Italy, the old but highly respected and talented Field Marshal Radetzky. Radetzky had been the Austrian chief of staff in the war against Napoleon in 1813-14. In July 1848 Radetzky proved the value of his advice by defeating the Sardinians at Custoza, a victory that helped restore confidence to the Habsburg government as it faced so many enemies. Radetzky reimposed Habsburg rule in Milan and in Venice, and in March 1849 he defeated the Sardinians once again when they invaded Austria's Italian possessions.

        In Italy and Germany, national fervor found expression in the ideal of national unification. But the champions of unification were nonetheless liberals; they wanted a constitutional regime, if not a parliamentary one, one on the model of the south German States, France, and England. For all bourgeois, habeas corpus and the rights of man were a political gospel to which they felt more attached than to any religious gospel. Moreover, liberal Catholicism proved to them that the two were not incompatible.

        Venice also played a large role in the Italian Revolution of 1848-1849. Venetia, as far as the Adige River, including the city of Venice, Istria and Dalmatia, were ceded by Napoleon to Austria by the Treaty of Campo Formio on October 17, 1797 and confirmed as Austrian possessions at the Congress of Vienna in 1815. Initially, Austria thought she could gain the confidence of Venetians and Milanese by promising them eventual home rule. Mature reflection and experience confirmed that Venetians would accept nothing short of complete separation, in the long run. As a result, Austria reneged on the pledge. Although Austrian domination was not the unmitigated disaster once alleged, on balance it was injurious and fueled the flames of agitation demanding independence. Austria systematically exploited Venetia financially, economically, and politically, using it merely as a source of raw materials for the Hapsburg economy. Trieste was favored over Venice as the imperial seaport. By 1845, Austria took 45,000,000 Austrian lire more from the region than she spent. By refusing to grant credit to progressive entrepreneurs, the slow, bungling Austrian bureaucracy impeded the growth of Venetian capitalism. Towards the end of the 1840s, a dynamic amalgam of intellectuals, urban-based manufacturers, bankers, merchants, and provincial agrarians, although using non-violent means, accelerated the clamor for political change and greater economic openings.

        Against this background of provocation and civil unrest, Venice was swept up in the revolutionary tide crashing over the peninsula and the continent in 1848-49. Credit belongs to Daniele Manin for the dramatic transition from the legal struggle to outright revolt; born May 13, 1804, son of Pietr Manin, he descended from a Veronese Jewish family, which had converted to Christianity in the eighteenth century, and Anna Maria Bellotta of Padua. On March 22, 1848, Manin and a number of public-spirited Venetians entered the arsenal, Venice's great navy yard and munitions depot. It was a direct, daring, and significant challenge to the Austrian authorities. Since the Italian workers, the Ars enalotti, detested the Austrian overseers and the Italian military contingents in Austria's service were pro-Venetian, Manin and his supporters moved about at will, unharmed. Believing that historical circumstances were most favorable, Manin led his followers out of the compound with the cry, "Long Live St. Mark!" Venetians, if not Austrian officials, accepted this to mean restoration of the once renowned Venetian republic. Venetia's seven provinces, save Verona, immediately sided with the lagoon and threw off the Austrian yoke. The firm grip of Marshall Radetzky over Verona, the key to the Quadrilateral defense perimeter, made it extremely difficult for Veronese nationalists to launch an insurrection. The new regime acclaimed Manin president and endowed him with the dictatorial authority during the emergency. The middle class strongly approved the political overthrow; this in turn marked a permanent break with the powerful old commercial aristocracy. Manin prudently provided for the lower class needs, while he promised the bourgeoisie to enforce law and order strictly. Appearance of the Venetian republic was a startling surprise and remarkable achievement of nearly 2,000,000 people.

        Manin's strategic and tactical role was both a source of strength and a symptom of weakness. All knew that he had conceived and masterminded the coup which had reinstated the republic. Manin could function as a rallying point, a centripetal and coordinating element, but the relationship was of limited practical value, because the fate of the revolution was inextricably bound up with the fortunes of a single man, who could inspire but who had no experience. He was alternately wise and excessively trusting of subordinates, action-oriented and yet given to procrastination, farsighted and simultaneously slow to understand the complexity of men and events, unable to place them in sharp perspective. Destiny rested uncomfortably on the shoulders of one individual, of frail countenance and often bedridden. Perhaps the republic was doomed from the outset, but ineffectual leadership made it a certainty.

        In the ebb and flow of a very complex revolutionary situation, the Venetians' several fatal misconceptions produced miscalculations. They allowed the Austrian fleet stationed at Pola a privileged sanctuary. Manned primarily by Austrian Italians friendly to the revolution, Venetians should have commanded and steered the fleet, thus depriving Austria of a formidable weapon which she later employed in the siege of Venice. The revolutionaries should have prevented the dispersal of the Italian soldiers under Austrian command. Had Manin and his associates acted promptly and shrewdly, as they had in the opening assault on the arsenal, Venetia would have had the trained and disciplined regulars. Reforms solidified and transformed, at least momentarily, provincial enthusiasm into the willful and concerted submission to the common cause, but the revolutionary pioneers tragically failed to recruit a military force from the provinces that was capable of taking the field alongside papal guards and Neapolitan soldiers who comprised the bulk of General Pepe's expeditionary army. While Austria was pressed on every front, the Italians allowed her time to regroup and to reconquer Venice and the other troubled areas of the empire one by one. No sooner had he created the Venetian republic than Manin retreated, reluctant to offend the monarchial sensibilities of Piedmont's Charles Albert. The president' s maneuver was obviously transparent and insulting, pleasing no one. He persisted in believing that Piedmontese military assistance, and papal as well, would be forthcoming, oblivious to the fact that Charles Albert could hardly be disposed to sacrifice his own lands to fight for the survival of a republic that adjoined Lombardy, whose republican principles he naturally despised, any more than Pius IX could be expected to break with the Catholic Austrian Habsburgs.

        A major contributory factor to undermine the republic was her inability to fuse Venice and the provinces, lagoon and mainland. Many mainlanders mistrusted Venice's supposed monopoly of power, an apprehension originating in old suppositions, exacerbated by irregulars and defectors' wanton destruction of forest and countryside. Venetians unnecessarily provoked anxiety, whereas a united and expansive army might have removed in advance the debilitating effect of this distrust. When Charles Albert as a last resort dispatched a force under General Giovanni Durando to stop General Nugent's march on Verona, Venice could only offer a rabble of volunteers to supplement Durando's soldiers, who were later joined by Colonel Andrea Ferrari's papal regulars, all to no avail, as Nugent linked up with Radetzky. The republic was increasingly isolated. On July 4, 1848, by a 127-6 vote, the Venetian assembly, guided by Manin, abandoned the republic to merge Venetia into Charles Albert's ephemeral improvisation, the Kingdom of Northern Italy. In early October, Manin crushed the Mazzinians who dared to claim that a demonstration of unanimous republican sentiment would compel the new French republic to intervene to rescue the beleaguered Venetians, and would have converted Venice into the center of Italian liberation and inspire Garibaldi and other patriots into an anti-Austrian crusade. When Piedmont's premier Vincenzo Gioberti invited the Venetian republic to send delegates to a federal congress, sponsored by the national society for the union and confederation of Italy, scheduled for Turin, October 12, 1848, the Venetian ministers declined. Manin and his cabinet's reaction to Piedmont's declaration on Austria illustrated their failure to grasp realities: the Venetians recessed for two weeks. Radetzky's rout of Charles Albert at Novara on March 23, 1849, sealed the fate of Piedmont, Lombardy, Venetia, and possibly all Italy. As the price for sparing Piedmont a humiliating occupation, the Piedmontese agreed to withdraw their warships from Venetian waters. On April 2, 1849, the Venetian assembly, personally addressed by Manin, chose to fight on. The gesture was in vain, as the deadly Austrian boycott and bombardment of the lagoon accelerated. Between May 4-27, 60,000 projectiles were hurled into the port. Citizens faced starvation and an epidemic of cholera. Manin used the special powers conferred on him to negotiate the surrender of Venice with Radetzky, effective August 27. General Gorzkowsky's entrance into Venice on the following day marked the complete submission of Venetia to Austrian rule. Manin, his family, and thirty-nine of his closest collaborators were compelled to seek asylum out side of the peninsula.

        The constant factor on both revolutions was national awakening. The call for freedom in 1848 was particularly strong in Italy. Vincenzo Gioberti's "neo-Guelf" program proposed reforms and a federated Italy with the pope as president. Thus contemporaries perceived the election of a reforming Pope Pius IX as harbinger of transformation. Pius IX's appointment of a leading liberal (Cardinal Gizzi) as his secretary of state won the hearts of Italians. The subsequent amnesty of political prisoners in the Papal States creating an exaggerated expectation of liberality. The Sicilian priest Gioacchino Ventura actively championed an alliance between the catholic church and liberty. In opposition and sustaining the struggle against Italian unity was Cardinal Giacomo Antonelli, a great diplomatic champion of counter-Risorgimento.

        The European revolutions in 1848 actually began in Sicily in an uprising against the arbitrary, corrupt, and repressive Bourbon government of Ferdinand II (Bomba). The Neapolitan revolutionary, Silvio Spaventa, promoted united Italy, whose ideal of material and moral progress ultimately triumphed. Among the enemies of the revolution, we include Carlo Filangieri, a hostile counterpart to the great world revolutionist of Nice, Garibaldi. But in a larger sense the "Risorgimento" only climaxed its first stage in 1848-49. The group gathered around this newspaper furnished a name to a stage in Italian and world history, and the 1848 revolution marked a transition between an earlier idealistic romanticism and ushered in a pragmatic, diplomatic, practical era following the military defeat of Charles Albert of Piedmont-Sardinia. An interim historical judgement on King Charles Albert, accentuates his weaknesses and the ulterior motives of his policy. But some contemporary Italians in what many will consider her darkest hour can return for inspiration to the pure ideal of Giuseppe Mazzini, who could inspire passionate devotion to the duty of Italians to give their lives in patriotic devotion to liberate Italy from all tyranny. A primary inspiration for all Italians, including her revolutionaries, is music. Goffredo Mameli, the martyred follower of Mazzini and composer of Fratelli d'Italia, the Italian national anthem, is as arousing as the story of the Jewish leader of the Venetian Republic Daniele Manin in the crucial struggle on the lagoons. Democrats recall with pride street fighters Carlo Cattaneo and Mauro Macchi in the critical five glorious days of Milan, when they ousted the army of the world's greatest military force from the city. And anyone who loves Italy should acknowledge the "Popular participation in the Italian revolutions." Others may want to peruse the articles on Guiseppe Ferrari and "federalism" to question if Italy's excessively centralized administrations has been a curse more than strength, if the centralism contributed to some of modern Italy's present political difficulties. Yet such a hasty conclusion must be balanced by the cautionary note from the sketches of Saldino Sterbini, Massimo Taparelli d'Azeglio, Angelo Brunetti ("Ciceruacchio"), and Giuseppe Montanelli, champions of Italian unity. And what of the role of women like Princess Christina Belgiojoso-Trivulzio and Sarah Margaret Fuller? The rich fabric of Italy's revolutionary history reminds all that the story is not simple and only simpletons offer facile solutions.

Three Important Dates in the Italian Revolution of 1848

March 22, 1848: Revolution broke out in Venice and the Venetian Republic was reestablished. All of these revolutions followed the same pattern: The news of revolution in France would attract excited crowds, groups of men (mostly journalists, lawyers, and students) met to discuss the rumors. The government, in fear of revolution, would call out the army, which would begin to skirmish with the citizenry. Barricades would come up and mob action would ensue. It is important to note that these revolutions took place in one city and that not all of the countries involved declared a republic, only their capitals did.

May, 1848: Piedmont declared war on Austria with a papal blessing and his troops, but Pius IX soon pulled out saying he could not fight a Catholic Austria. The Piedmontese seemed overwhelmed, but had managed to win a battle by the end of May.