Roman Republic (1849)
| Repubblica Romana | |||||
| Roman Republic | |||||
| 1849 | |||||
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| Official language | Italian | ||||
| Capital | Rome | ||||
| Form of government | republic | ||||
| Head of state , also head of government |
Carlo Armellini Giuseppe Mazzini Aurelio Saffi |
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| founding | February 9, 1849 | ||||
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The Roman Republic ( Italian Repubblica Romana ) of 1849 was just five months existing democratic republic in until then and then back existing (to 1870) Papal States . It was created after Pope Pius IX escaped . as a result of the revolutionary uprisings in Rome since 1848 . On February 9, 1849, it was officially proclaimed by supporters of Giuseppe Mazzini , an important radical democratic revolutionary of the Italian unification movement ( Risorgimento ) . After the military intervention by French and Spanish troops from April onwards, it was suppressed by July 3, 1849 and the political rule of the Roman Catholic Church was restored.
prehistory
The Italian unification movement had advocated secular rule over Rome since the 1830s. Rome was viewed by the democratic national revolutionaries (democratici) as well as by the bourgeois liberal-conservative representatives of an all-Italian constitutional monarchy (moderati) as the natural capital of Italy .
In 1848 there were revolutionary upheavals in almost all Italian states and principalities, which went hand in hand with the bourgeois-liberal revolutions in almost all of Central Europe .
The unrest and uprisings in the regions of the Apennine Peninsula , including Rome, were largely influenced by the Italian efforts to unite the Risorgimento (= resurrection), which had been democratically dominated from the Congress of Vienna from 1815 to the revolutionary year 1848/49. On the one hand, they were directed against the reactionary politics of the Restoration , especially in the principalities of central and northern Italy ruled by the Austrian Habsburgs and in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies ruled by the Spanish Bourbons . On the other hand, they campaigned for the establishment of an independent national state of Italy.
In the Papal States, whose territory stretched at the time between Rome and Bologna from Latium in the southwest on the Tyrrhenian Mediterranean coast over Umbria , the Marche to Romagna in the northeast on the Adriatic coast over a substantial part of central Italy, Pope Pius IX. at the beginning of his pontificate in 1846 recognized the signs of the times and began to introduce liberal reforms. He formed a council of state , founded a vigilante group , issued an amnesty for political prisoners and proposed a customs union of the Italian states. These reforms did not go far enough for the national revolutionaries. They demanded parliamentarization and fundamental democratization of the papal state.
From the revolution to the suppression of the republic
From mid-1848 the revolutionary unrest, which had already started in January in other Italian states and regions such as Sicily and in some northern Italian cities such as Milan , Brescia and Padua , also increased in Rome. After the politically motivated murder of the Prime Minister of the Papal States, Pellegrino Rossi , on November 15 of that year , the Pope fled the city on the night of November 23 to 24. He moved to Gaeta on the coast of Naples-Sicily and appointed the first Secretary of State , Cardinal Giacomo Antonelli , to be his governor in Rome. This tried in vain to the policy of Pius IX. to enforce against the rapidly emerging radical changes.
Against his efforts, the foundation of the republic in Rome was organized. A provisional government junta announced general elections for a constituent assembly on January 21, 1849, to which all male citizens of the Papal State were eligible to vote from the age of 21. Cardinal Antonelli, faced with unsuccessful efforts to maintain the authority of the Church, on January 4, 1849, urged the European powers to intervene in the Papal States to crush the revolution before following the Pope into exile in Gaeta.
After the election for the constituent assembly, in which the radical democrats achieved a majority, the constituent assembly met on February 5, 1849 , as a result of which on February 9, the Roman revolutionaries under Giuseppe Mazzini, who came from Genoa , proclaimed a republic in the papal state. By March 1849, this republic adopted the most progressive constitution of all Italian states until then , even though it never formally entered into force due to the crushing of the revolution a little later. For example, in addition to the introduction of unrestricted freedom of religion , the constitution provided for the abolition of the death penalty for capital crimes.
Mazzini, like Carlo Armellini and Aurelio Saffi, belonged to the triumvirate (= three-man rule) that led the republic in the following months. The most important decisions of the republican government were a fundamental reform of the education system and a reform of land rights , which was intended to redistribute agricultural property in the Papal States in favor of the smallholders who were dependent on the large landowners .
In February 1849, the Jacobean symbolism of the French Revolution of 1789 was adopted to propagate the republican idea and spread through actions such as the erection of trees of freedom and the organization of celebrations for the poor - also and especially in rural regions. For example, through the use of female allegories such as a goddess Italia as a personification of the desired Italian nation-state, democratic and national or patriotic virtues were placed in the foreground on the one hand, and attempts were made to underpin the end of the secular power of the papacy on the other . This was also officially proclaimed by the Roman Parliament as the end of all theocratic hypotheses .
In March 1849 the Roman Republic declared its amalgamation with the Tuscan Republic. Before that, democratic revolutionaries in the neighboring principality had overthrown the Habsburg Grand Duke Leopold II and proclaimed a - albeit short-lived - Republic of Tuscany . This coup led to a renewed military intervention by Austrian troops against the northern Italian aspirations for independence. Within a year, this led to Austria's second war against the constitutional monarchy Sardinia-Piedmont , which had already sided with the revolutionaries in Lombardy at the beginning of the uprisings in northern Italy (see First Italian War of Independence ). With the side of the Sardinian-Piedmontese royal family for a national Italian unification, the process began that made the country in the northwest of the Apennine Peninsula the determining state power of the Risorgimento despite its military defeats of 1848/49.
As early as March 23, 1849, the royal Piedmontese army and the republican troop units were defeated in the battle of Novara , which meant a decisive and lasting defeat for the unification movement, which had been democratically dominated until then. The Austrian troops soon gained control of the republican rebels in the region around Bologna, i.e. in the north of the Papal States, Romagna, and initiated the counter-revolution there.
In Rome, in April 1849, troops from the French Republic and the Spanish monarchy intervened against the young Repubblica Romana with the aim of restoring the rule of the Pope. Revolutionary units under the leadership of Giuseppe Garibaldi and Antonio Arcionis were initially able to repel the intervention army , after which Rome was besieged for about a month. On June 30, 1849 , the representatives of the republic finally capitulated to the predominance of Franco-Spanish forces. Reasons for this were, among other things, the poor supply situation caused by the siege and the lack of support from outside, because potentially supportive troops from the northern Italian states were militarily broken after their defeat against Austria in the war of independence. Shortly afterwards, Mazzini and Saffi fled via Switzerland to England into temporary exile, Garibaldi to New York / USA. On July 3, 1849, the Roman Revolution was finally crushed by the intervention troops. This led to popular protests in France itself, for example in Lyon . With the February revolution of 1848 a new, the second French republic, was also constituted there.
After the defeat of the Roman Republic, an executive committee made up of cardinals took over power in the papal state. The Pope did not return until 1850. In some cases he reversed his originally liberal reforms and established police-state relations in Rome. French troops remained stationed as a protective power in the Papal States until 1870 . In gratitude for Spain's share in the intervention, the Pope founded a special holiday in honor of the Holy Blood of Jesus (Santísima Sangre). B. in the Spanish Dénia is still celebrated every year at the beginning of July.
Subsequent development in the Italian context
Besides the Roman Republic, all other revolutionary upheavals in the Italian principalities of 1848/49 were suppressed, especially by Austrian troops; last on August 23, 1849, the Repubblica di San Marco in Venice under its leader Daniele Manin . The democratic movement had suffered a lasting defeat. From 1849 the Kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont developed under King Victor Emmanuel II and his Prime Minister Camillo Benso von Cavour - now under more liberal-conservative auspices - to the leading power of the Risorgimento. In particular, due to Cavour's diplomatic skill and military strategy, an Italian nation-state in alliance with Napoléon III. , who had himself proclaimed French emperor in France in 1852, was enforced until 1861 after the Sardinian War against Austria.
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In the wake of this war, the Marches and Umbria came under the influence of Sardinia-Piedmont through renewed uprisings against the Austrian protective power in the north of the Papal States - for example in Romagna - and through military conquests by the Piedmontese army . Meanwhile were Freischärlereinheiten led Garibaldi (who returned in 1854 from the USA to Italy) from the south, where they the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies by the rule of the Spanish Bourbons, meanwhile, last King Francis II. Had liberated (see. Garibaldi " train the thousands “), On the advance towards the Papal States. Its final conquest by Garibaldi's troops was prevented by Sardinia-Piedmont in order to avoid a renewed military intervention by France in favor of the Pope. After these campaigns, the majority of the populations of the captured areas spoke out in plebiscites in favor of joining Sardinia-Piedmont. Garibaldi then resigned from his Republican claim to power in the south. On March 17, 1861, the now unified Italian state was proclaimed as a constitutional monarchy , which enclosed the remaining church state, Latium with Rome.
In the following years Garibaldi made two more attempts with some freemen to take this remnant church state. After a failed attempt in 1862, he repeated his attack on Rome in October 1867. However, his units were defeated by French and papal forces on November 3, 1867.
When Napoléon III. withdrew its protection troops from Rome as a result of the beginning of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, this suited the young Italian state. Italian military units conquered Rome on September 20, 1870 and, after a new referendum, integrated the remaining church state in the Italian kingdom. A little later, Rome was proclaimed the new Italian capital. The conflict over the legal status of the Vatican or the power center of the Catholic Church in Rome remained unresolved for a long time. It was not until 1929 that this so-called “ Roman question ” was settled with the Lateran Treaties . Rome was recognized by the “ Holy See ” as the capital of Italy, while the Italian government guaranteed the Vatican as Vatican City political independence and full state sovereignty .
literature
- Christopher Hibbert: Rome - Biography of a City. Deutscher Taschenbuch-Verlag, Munich 1992, 451 pages, ISBN 3-423-30303-4 .
- Thomas Kroll: “Jacobean Italy”. Democrats and Republicans in the Revolution of 1848/49. In: Irmtraud Götz von Olenhusen (Ed.): 1848/49 in Europe and the myth of the French Revolution. Göttingen 1998, pp. 39-62.
- Simonetta Soldani: Approaching Europe on behalf of the nation. The Italian Revolution 1846–1849. In: Dieter Dowe / Heinz-Gerhardt Haupt / Dieter Langewiesche u. a. (Ed.): Europa 1848. Revolution und Reform , Bonn 1998, pp. 125–166.
- Giorgio Candeloro: Storia dell'Italia moderna, Vol. III: La Rivoluzione nazionale, 1846-1849 . 2nd edition, Milan 1991.
Web links
- Roman Republic. In: Encyclopedia of 1848 Revolutions (English)
- graphic overview presentation on the “Italian Revolution” 1848/1849 (development in the overall Italian context from the 1820s to the return of the Pope to Rome in 1850); use the directional arrows below to move around the graphic
Individual evidence
- ^ Eamon Duffy: Saints and Sinners, a History of the Popes Yale University Press, 1997; Pp. 222-235; here p. 222
