The Revolutionary Movement of 1848-9 in Italy, Austria-Hungary, and Germany: With Some Examination of the Previous Thirty-three YearsMaurice, C. Edmund (Charles Edmund)
History
The Revolutionary Movement of 1848-9 in Italy, Austria-Hungary, and Germany: With Some Examination of the Previous Thirty-three Years
Maurice, C. Edmund (Charles Edmund)
Europe -- History -- 1848-1849; Revolutions -- Europe
That the Government should enter on all those social reforms which are
required by the spirit of the age, and of which all the _civil_
governments of Europe have given an example.
Renzi resolved to enforce this programme by a sudden attack on Rimini,
in which he was completely successful; but an ally of his, who had
raised a revolt simultaneously in the lower Romagna, was compelled to
retire before the Swiss troops of the Pope; and Renzi, apparently
panic struck, retreated into Tuscany. Unfortunately, a reaction was
then taking place there. Fossombroni had died in 1844, Corsini, the
Minister who was most in sympathy with Fossombroni's policy, resigned
in 1845; and the chief of the Jesuit party took his place. The Grand
Duke Leopold himself was at first disposed to be friendly to Renzi;
but, as the best protection to him, he advised his escape to France.
Renzi soon returned, and Metternich, alarmed at the intensity of
Italian feeling, denounced the Duke for protecting rebels, and, under
the influence of Austrians, Jesuits, and of the Pope, Leopold
consented to surrender Renzi to Gregory XVI.
The attention of the country was still further directed to this
attempt by a pamphlet which came out immediately after, and which was
written by a young Piedmontese nobleman, Count Massimo Tapparelli
D'Azeglio. In this pamphlet D'Azeglio complained that the Rimini
movement had been much misrepresented; but that the action of the
insurgents had no doubt been a blunder, because the movement had been
purely local, and they had not considered how to use the forces of the
whole of Italy. He then proceeded to denounce the corruptions of the
Papal Government, and the cruelties which had followed the suppression
of this rising; particularly the gross injustice of imprisoning a
lawyer because he had defended some of the prisoners. After a
denunciation in detail of the evils of the Papal Government, he goes
on to repudiate the use of secret societies, as having failed in their
purpose; calls on the Italians to unite in peaceable protest against
abuses, rather than in insurrection; and points to the Tugendbund of
Germany as a model for Italian combinations. The pamphlet had little
that was new in it, but attention was fixed upon the author, by the
fact that he was immediately banished from Tuscany by the Grand Duke,
and was, shortly after, welcomed in Piedmont.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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