Epilogue I
"But evil things, in robes of sorrow,
Assailed the monarch's high estate.
(Ah, let us mourn!- for never morrow
Shall dawn upon him desolate!)
And round about his home the glory
That blushed and bloomed,
Is but a dim-remembered story
Of the old time entombed"
Edgar Allan Poe
Austria-Hungary
Of all the Powers it was the Austrian Empire that was most embroiled in Italian affairs and consequently Vienna had suffered greatly during the rise of Papal Italy. Twice in the space of a decade the proud KuK Army had been humiliated by the Vatican and the collapse of the Roman theocracy would change little in this regard. It was the memory of these defeats that Vienna sought to expunge with its aggressive intervention during the Italian Civil War. This rapidly escalated into a military expedition, crossing the borders in 1884, and for two years the Habsburg armies laid siege to Venice and fought to maintain a tenuous occupation of Lombardy-Venezia. This sudden reappearance of an old foe stirred the locals' own memories of Austrian rule and the invading armies provided a rare unifying standard on an otherwise bitterly divided peninsula
The ejection of the expeditionary armies from the peninsula following the Battle of Treviso in 1886 presented the most damning evidence that Austria's days as a Power of any measure were long over. For the next two decades the fortunes of the Empire were in visible decline and it was only as a puppet of Berlin that this awkward and unwieldy construct survived to 1905. Even then it was a moment of typical Habsburg ineptitude that sparked the war that would engulf both it and Europe. Whatever the underlying trends and movements towards conflict, the immediate cause of the Second Revolutionary Wars was Vienna's clumsy attempt to capitalise on disorder in Russia by invading Serbia. When the Serbs appealed to Italy for aid the die was cast and the days of the House of Habsburg numbered
The Second Revolutionary Wars displayed in full the disparity between Revolutionary Rome and Habsburg Vienna. Italy was emerging from a programme of intense industrialisation with a new confidence borne of possessing the military and industrial might to compete with any rival Great Power. In contrast the armies of Austria were riddled with dissent and paralysed with division*. They proved no match for the Army of the Revolution and collapsed entirely following the startling Italian victories of the Glorious August of 1905. The country soon followed suit as the various nationalist groups declared their independence from Vienna over the course of 1906. The lands of the Empire would be wracked by war for years to come but the House of Habsburg would play no further role in this history. When peace was finally secured, with the 1914 Stockholm Congress, the new Central European republics were formally recognised as masters of their lands
The Catholic Church
The Church did not die with Pius IX in 1878 but it was dealt a blow from which it would never recover. The glories of Papal Italy were replaced with the hardships of exile as the Papal bureaucracy relocated to Toledo, Spain. The disarray of the flight, in which at least a fifth of Italian cardinals and bishops were captured and later executed, produced a hasty papal conclave unlike any in living memory. The result was similarly erratic with the moderate Vincenzo Gioacchino Pecci being elected Pope as Leo XIII. After a series of
ultramontanist rulers the Church finally had a Pontiff willing to adapt to circumstances and refusing to regard himself as an autocratic ruler. While Leo was no liberal, his stance against the sins of "modernism" was not dissimilar to that of his predecessors, he was something of a humanist and appears genuinely concerned with the plight of the common folk. As befitting a man who viewed the collapse of Papal Italy as divine punishment for the Church's excesses, Leo attempted to steer the Church back towards its spiritual centre and withdraw somewhat from temporal affairs. The Church could not obviously disengage entirely from politics, and nor was there any suggestion that it would, but all claims of temporal superiority over secular rulers were quietly dropped**
Leo's efforts to return the Church to a more spiritual-orientated role ran against significant opposition from both within and outside the Church. Understandably the attitudes of many clerics had hardened considerably towards the idea of social reform (although given the reactionary nature of the pre-Revolution Church this was hardly a seismic shift in thinking) and the 1880s saw the emergence of the first influential Catholic political parties/organisations in many European nations. A concurrent political re-evaluation was taking place amongst Europe's political class as news of various horrors and atrocities filtered out from Italy. The merit of progress, seen as inevitable in an era of such rapid technological and social transformations, was suddenly brought into question and the undesirable side of change became apparent. How could the supposedly beneficial progress, which had entirely rebuilt European society within living memory, give rise to the likes of germ warfare and "democide"? The "brave new world" envisioned by most liberals had suddenly become a much darker place while conservatives saw in Italy a vindication of their warnings as to the danger posed by the landless proletariat. Taken together these trends led to an unprecedented meshing of cleric and politician
Pope Leo XIII (1810-1903)
However the loss of Italy served to accelerate both the growing anti-clericism of the working classes (already alienated by Papal autocracy and attracted by socialist promises) and the weakening power of the Pontiff himself. The authority of the Bishop of Rome naturally carried less weight when he no longer occupied Rome. For the Catholic Church, for which the Vatican had been an extremely powerful symbol of central authority, this was a devastating blow. Slowly, and without any major schisms, the Church began to lose the cohesion that has so distinguished it in the past as the various national hierarchies - which were, as noted above, increasingly forging political identities of their own - drifted apart to the point where it is fashionable today to talk of "the Catholic Churches"***. It is a far cry from the days of Pius IX but the Church has at least survived... except in Italy where successive post-Revolution governments have confirmed its status as an illegal organisation. Old sins continue to cast long shadows on the peninsula
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* One of the more recent works studying the increasingly rapid decay of Imperial institutions and government in Austria-Hungary, and a good introduction to the subject for beginners, is "Sked, A., (2001), The Decline and Fall of the Austrian Empire, London"
** This transitional period for the Church is perhaps best analysed in "Gilson, E., (1954), The Church Speaks to the Modern World, Toronto"
*** An updated (and non-partisan!) history of the 20th C Church is unfortunately long overdue. However for the purposes of our period of interest, "Helmreich, E.C., (1964), A Free Church In A Free State? The Catholic Church, Italy, Germany, France" is a solid, if outdated, reference
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