judged more benevolent than wise. In France agitation was
directed chiefly against the Jesuits, active in the movement to
displace ancient local catechisms and liturgies by the Roman
texts, to enroll the laity in Roman confraternities, and to induce
the bishops to visit Rome more frequently. To check this
ultramontane propaganda the government secured from the
papacy in 1845 the promise to close the Jesuit houses and
novitiates in France.
In Italy, however, lay the chief obstacles to the success of all papal undertakings. The revolution of 1830, though somewhat tardily felt in the States of the Church, compelled Gregory to rest his rule on foreign bayonets. In return he was obliged to lend an ear to the proposals of France, and above all to those of Austria. This meant opposition to all schemes for the unification of Italy. In 1815 the Italian peninsula had been divided into seven small states. Besides the government of the pope there were three kingdoms: Sardinia, Lombardo-Venetia and Naples; and three duchies: Parma, Modena, Tuscany. To these regions the Napoleonic régime had given a certain measure of unity; but Metternich, dominant after 1815, held Italy to be merely a geographical term. To its unification Austria was the chief obstacle; she owned Lombardo-Venetia; she controlled the three duchies, whose rulers were Austrian princes; and she upheld the autocracy of the king of Naples and that of the pope against all revolutionary movements. To the Italian patriot the papacy seemed in league with the oppressor. The pope sacrificed the national aspirations of his subjects to his international relations as head of the Church; and he sacrificed their craving for liberty to the alliance with autocracy on which rested the continued existence of the temporal power. The dual position of the pope, as supreme head of the Church on earth and as a minor Italian prince, was destined to break down through its inherent contradiction; it was the task of Pius IX. to postpone the catastrophe.
The reign of Pius IX. falls into three distinct parts. Until
driven from Rome by the republican agitation of 1848 he was
a popular idol, open to liberal political views. From
his return in 1850 to 1870 he was the reactionary
ruler of territories menaced by the movement for
Italian unity, and sustained only by French bayonets; yet he
Pius IX.
1846–1878.
was interested primarily in pointing out to an often incredulous
world that most of the vaunted, intellectual and religious
progress of the 19th century was but pestilent error, properly
to be condemned by himself as the infallible vicegerent of God.
The third division of his career, from the loss of the temporal
power to his death, inaugurates a new period for the papacy.
At the outset of his reign he faced a crisis. It was clear that he could not continue the repressive tactics of his predecessor. Italy and Europe were astir with the Liberal agitation, which in 1848 Culminated in the series of revolutions which the settlement of 1815 was destined to be profoundly modified. Liberal churchmen in Italy, The Papacy and Italian Unity. while rejecting Mazzini’s dream of a republic, had evolved projects for attaining national unity while preserving the temporal power. The exiled abbe Vincenzo Gioberti championed an Italian confederacy under the presidency of the pope; hand in hand with the unity of the nation should go the unity of the faith. In allusion to medieval partisans of the papacy this theory was dubbed Neo-Guelphism. Towards such a solution Pius IX. was at first not unfavourably inclined, but the revolution of 1848 cured him of his Liberal leanings. In November of that year he fled in disguise from his capital to Gaeta, in the kingdom of Naples, and when French arms had made feasible his restoration to Rome in April 1850 he returned in a temper of stubborn resistance to all reform; henceforth he was no longer open to the influence of men of the type of Rossi or Rosmini, but took the inspiration of his policy from Cardinal Antonelli and the Jesuits. The same pope who had signalized his accession by carrying out a certain number of Liberal reforms set his name in 1864 to the famous Syllabus, which was in effect a declaration of war by the papacy against the leading principles of modern civilization (see Syllabus).
As from 1849 to 1870 the fate of the papacy was determined not so much by domestic conditions, which, save for certain slight ameliorations, were those of the preceding reigns, as by foreign politics, it is necessary to consider the relations of Rome with each of the powers in turn; and in so doing one must trace not merely the negotiations of kings and popes, but must seek to understand also the aims of parliamentary parties, which from 1848 on increasingly determine ecclesiastical legislation.
The chief ally of the papacy from 1849 to 1870 was France. The policy which made Louis Napoleon dictator forced him into mortal conflict with the republican parties; and price of the parliamentary support of the Catholic majority was high. Even before Napoleon’s election as president, Falloux, the Catholic leader, had promised Louis Napoleon and the Papacy. to secure intervention in favour of the dispossessed pope. Napoleon, however, could not forget that as a young man he himself had vainly fought to obtain from Gregory XVI. those liberties which Pius IX. still refused to grant; he therefore essayed diplomacy, not arms. Nevertheless, to forestall the rescue of the pope by Austrian troops, he sent, in August 1849, an army corps under Oudinot to Civita Vecchia. By heading off reactionary Austria Napoleon hoped to conciliate the French Liberals; by helping the pope, to satisfy the Catholics; by concessions to be wrung both from Pius and from the Roman triumvirs, to achieve a bloodless victory. As neither party yielded, Oudinot listened to his Catholic advisers, attacked Rome, with which the French Republic was technically at peace—and was roundly repulsed by Garibaldi. To relieve their inglorious predicament the ministry hurried the Liberal diplomatist, Ferdinand de Lesseps, to Rome to prevent further conflict. At the moment when Lesseps had secured the signing of a treaty with the Roman Republic permitting peaceful occupation of the city by the French army, he was peremptorily recalled and Oudinot was as unexpectedly ordered to take the city by storm. This amazing reversal of policy was procured by the intrigues of Catholic diplomatists and GermanFrench Capture of Rome. Jesuits, conveyed to Paris by Prince de la Tour d’Auvergne. For the honour of the army and the Church republican France thereupon destroyed the Roman republic. Napoleon lost 1200 in dead and wounded, actually secured not a single reform on which he had insisted, and drew upon himself the fateful obligation to mount perpetual guard over the Vatican. As the catspaw of clerical reaction he had also to acquiesce in that “Roman campaign at home” that resulted in the Falloux Act of 1850, which in the name of liberty of education put the university in bondage to the archbishops, militated against lay teachers in secondary and primary schools, and set themNapoleon III. and the Papacy. under clerical control, made it ominously easy for members of religious congregations to become instructors of youth, and cut the nerve of the communal school system. That education was delivered up to the Church was partly the result of the terror inspired in the middle classes by the socialistic upheavals of 1848. The bourgeoisie sought the support of the clergy, and irreligion became as unfashionable among them as it had been among the nobility after 1793. Religion was thought to be part of a fashionable education, and the training of girls came almost exclusively into the hands of the religious orders and congregations. So long as the alliance of the autocratic empire and the clergy lasted (1852–1860), intellectual reaction reigned; the university professorships of history and philosophy were suppressed. This alliance of the empire with the clergy was shaken by the Italian War of 1859, which resulted in the loss by the pope of two-thirds of his territories. Napoleon was evidently returning to the traditions of his youth, and in the September Convention of 1864 it looked as if he would abandon Rome to its manifest destiny. This solution was spoiled by the impatience of Garibaldi and the supineness of the Romans themselves. In 1867 Napoleon made himself once more guardian of the Holy See; but the wonders wrought by the new French chassepots at the battle of Mentana cost the friendship of Italy. Thereafter Napoleon was blindly staggering to his fall. He
