Written by Marco Vigna
The figure of Austro-Bohemian Field Marshal Josef Radetzky (1766-1858) even during his own life was the object of a careful propaganda reconstruction by the Hapsburg Empire and Germanic nationalists, whose effects continue to this day, so much so that he is fondly remembered in Austria as Vater Radetzky (“Father Radetzky”) and Kaisertreu (“loyal to the emperor”).
However, even the ideological constructions developed to support this figure still reveal their illusiveness and mystification.
The Austrian scholar Franz Grillparzer, a chauvinist of violently anti-Italian sentiments long protected by Metternich, coined the very famous motto of Radetzky, In deinem Lager ist Österreich (“In your camp is Austria”).
This phrase, which was intended to be one of of praise and exaltation in wanting to almost identify the imperial structure with the army, ended up betraying the nature of a multinational State that could only stand on strength of arms rather than on the cultural identity and ethnic cohesion of the inhabitants, thus becoming the proverbial “prison of the peoples”.
Even in recent years, the Slovenian historian Janez J. Svajncer, a member of one of the most loyal ethnic groups of the Habsburg Empire, has reaffirmed and confirmed the veracity of the nineteenth-century definition of imperial Austria as Volkskerker.
The Radetzky March, composed by court musician Johann Baptist Strauss at the request of an imperial official to commemorate Austria's victory over the Italians at the Battle of Custoza, still boasts great popularity among the Austrians and traditionally closes the New Year's Concert which is held every year in Vienna.
In this regard, the considerations of the great Germanist Ladislao Mittner in his monumental “History of German Literature” are interesting; he noted that Strauss family, father and son, through their music represented “one of the most typical supporters of the pleasure-seeking alienation of the Austro-Hungarian subject, while also foreshadowing its collapse” (1), because they constituted a “cement between the nationalities of the Austro-Hungarian Empire”, but at the same time they revealed “their own agony and the agony of the Austrian Empire.” (2)
Mittner's judgment highlights the political and courtier character of Strauss' music (including of course the Radetzkymarsch, which holds a special place next to the Kaiser-Walzer later composed by Strauss Jr. for Emperor Franz Joseph), and together their fundamental inability to express a cohesive identity is a mirror of the Empire's crisis.
This great Germanist acutely inserts his observations in the chapter of his work intended to deal with the widespread mentality during the so-called Belle Époque, the nostalgic longing for which he does not hesitate to present as caused by a small minority who felt regret for the festive and dissolute life that they had been able to keep during the aforementioned period. (3)
This is a judgment that can be applied mutatis mutandis also to that literary tradition which pushes the so-called “Hapsburg myth”.
In fact, Mittner adds that Austrian literature from the mid-nineteenth century until Musil demonstrates an “uncontrollable taste”, even in the most serious works, for “plots and developments of an operettistic type, confirming with this that the last great flicker of Viennese operetta reveals the bitter hedonism of “après nous le déluge”. (4)
Radetzkymarsch (although the protagonist is not the Field Marshal) is also the name of a novel by Joseph Roth, one of the authors who established the mythological reconstruction of an imaginary “Happy Austria”. He was full of nostalgia for the deceased Empire, whose demise he could not understand on an existential level, so much so that he died tied to a hospital bed, prey to delirium tremens which is common in late-stage chronic alcoholics.
The popularity that Radetzky still enjoys today in the Austrian social environment, and the copious literature lavished upon his glory, serves to mask and distort the historical reality of his criminal deeds in the region of Lombardy-Venetia, since they spring from a limiting and partial re-reading of history.
Alan Sked, an Anglo-Saxon scholar, author of a fundamental study on Radetzky entitled The Survival of the Habsburg Empire: Radetzky, the Imperial Army and the Class War 1848 (5), noted that there are many hundreds of studies on this Field Marshal in German, but that “what work has been done on Radetzky has been distinctly hagiographical.” (6)
Marco Meriggi, a historian and author of a very balanced and measured study on the Kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia, keenly identifies the nature of the authentic military regime of Franz Joseph's government in general and of Radetzky's administration in particular, hence his reliance first of all on the army and repression, especially after 1848:
In 1830 Metternich's right-hand man, General Clam-Martinic, was charged with assessing and reporting on the situation in Italy. The report highlighted the weakness and unpopularity of Austrian domination in Italy.
Clam-Martinic wrote to Metternich that the Habsburg presence on Italian territory had to rely exclusively on the “dislocation of a massive military force”, suggesting also that no more enlistments be made in Italy and that “cultivating illusions” should be avoided, since in the event of war “everyone here will desert us”. (8) Sked said in this regard:
This Austrian general was then sent to Italian land by the Habsburg Prime Minister with the precise intention of using the imperial army as a true occupational force against a population judged to be resistant to foreign domination.
Clam Martinitz's opinion on the hostility of the Italians towards Habsburg domination was widely shared by the imperial ruling class. Field Marshal Radetzky, his general Von Schönhals, Admiral Zichy, Archduke Maximilian von Habsburg, brother of the emperor, admiral of the imperial fleet and then Viceroy of Lombardy-Venetia, were all unanimous in admitting that the Italian population was entirely hostile to the Austrians.
Radetzky wrote explicitly that it was utterly useless for the Habsburg regime to try to win the loyalty of the Italian populations and that the Austrians were no longer ruling in Italy, but merely dominating by force of arms a people who — from Sicily to the Alps — wanted their expulsion.
The Italian regions however, according to what the Field Marshal wrote in one of his reports, were to be kept under the imperial throne for reasons of economic interest for Austria and Bohemia. Lombardy-Venetia was therefore conceived by Radetzky exactly as a colony. (10)
The elderly Field Marshal was notorious for his violence even before the uprising of 1848, which was provoked to a large extent by his behavior.
The judgment of Carlo Cattaneo, the great scholar who witnessed and participated in the events of 1848, is famous:
Nevertheless, Feldmarschalleutnant Welden, commander of the Austrian forces in Tyrol (where this regiment was garrisoned), did not consider this particularly dangerous, because:
Even before the great revolt of 1848 there were numerous acts of violence carried out by the Habsburg military forces against the Italian populations, in the absence of violence or threats by the subjects.
An example of this, among others, was the inauguration of Archbishop Romilli, who suffered a genuine assault with sabres drawn by Hapsburg soldiers against the crowd of faithful who were welcoming the new archbishop of Milan.
In September 1847 a very large crowd of faithful had gathered to welcome the new archbishop of Milan, namely Monsignor Romilli. For several hours before the ceremony the Habsburg soldiers literally began to sharpen their sabres in order to make them sharper.
The units were then hidden for some time in the barracks, so that the people could assemble without fear.
When the archbishop's welcoming ceremony began and the Italians were busy singing religious hymns, the soldiers approached holding their concealed weapons, and then drew them and assaulted the disarmed and defenseless Italians.
The assault had been carefully planned to punish the Milanese people, who were deemed “guilty” of celebrating the appointment of an Italian archbishop, in place of the previous Austrian one, the late Karl Kajetan von Gaisruck.
The violence committed by Hapsburg soldiers during the peaceful Milanese tobacco strike, which led to many deaths and even more injuries, was another example of the Field Marshal's work.
Tobacco in the Kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia was a state monopoly that yielded 4,386,000 lire a year to the Austrian Empire and its boycott was part of Milanese political tradition, since there had already been two previous boycotts in 1751 and 1766. (14)
The tobacco strike held just before the outbreak of the great uprising of 1848 was completely devoid of any violence by the Italian subjects, but instead was accompanied by armed aggressions by the imperial military, sometimes homicidal and preferably directed against children and the elderly.
Cattaneo wrote:
Alongside true violence, Radetzky added threats and demonstrations of force with the aim of terrorizing the Italians.
Clam-Martinic had in fact suggested giving the Italian population, dissatisfied with the Habsburg rule, a fearful impression of power by of the central government. And so Radetzky began to make massive military maneuvers in northern Italy to intimidate the inhabitants with his own threats. (17)
The Field Marshal also used subterfuge to more easily divide the Austrian military and the Italian population and instigate mutual hatred, using agent provocateurs and thus causing death sentences. (18)
The work of this general already before the Italian War of Independence of 1848-1849 was still consistent with the political tradition imposed by Vienna in Lombardy-Venetia, which since 1815 found itself subject to the conditions of a police state, by the precise will of the imperial sovereigns.
Citing the opinion of Czoernig, a police officer, Meriggi writes:
Moreover, during the First Italian War of Independence, Radetzky's troops were noted for their ferocity towards civilians.
The massacres committed against unarmed civilians during the Five Days of Milan; General Haynau's order to set fire to every house from which hostile acts were carried out and to shoot all its inhabitants indiscriminately (elderly, women and children included) during the Ten Days of Brescia; and the extremely harsh siege of a Venice already exhausted by carpet bombings, hunger and pestilence, are only the best-known cases in the long list of slaughter of civilians carried out by the Habsburg military units in the period from 1820 to 1866.
To understand how Radetkzy led the war against insurgents, an example can be given: that of Castelnuovo del Garda, a small town in Lombardy whose inhabitants were all killed by the Austrian troops in retaliation. Keep in mind that this is only one of many similar episodes committed by the Habsburg units during the long phase of the wars of Italian independence.
On April 11, 1848, a group of about 400 volunteer Lombard insurgents rested in the village of Castelnuovo del Garda, where they waited for the avant-gardes of the Sardinian army. Radetzky, taking advantage of the fact that the latter were still quite far away, sent a strong column of many thousands of men under the command of General Prince Thurn und Taxis, a member of the highest imperial aristocracy.
At first he subjected the territory in which the volunteers were barricaded to a massive bombardment with artillery, and then ordered an attack which, given the disproportion of the forces, forced the volunteers to retreat.
After the latter were forced to abandon the field, the Habsburg troops exterminated all the inhabitants of Castelnuovo: there were 113 victims. Only those who managed to flee could escape the massacre.
Piero Pieri writes in his masterpiece “Military History of the Risorgimento”:
After this retaliation, on April 12 the Habsburg troops returned to Verona, where the bulk of the Austrian forces were stationed, and in a show of force they paraded throughout the city with the loot they had captured in order to intimidate the citizens.
On April 13, Field Marshal Radetzky, known for his rhetorical verbosity, addressed a proclamation to his subjects, explaining that what had happened in Castelnuovo del Garda was a consequence of the “rebellion” and that he could not prevent such “consequences” (i.e. retaliation) from occurring.
This proclamation was clearly a threat to the Italians: whoever would rise up or even support the insurgents would suffer the same fate. (21)
The repression continued even in peacetime.
On his return, Radetzky decreed a state of siege and promulgated the “statutory law”, which provided the death penalty even for minor offenses and permitted the arrest, prosecution and execution of alleged violators within only two hours. These rules remained in force for several years. (22)
In just twelve months, from August 1848 to August 1849, 961 hangings and shootings were carried out and 4,000 were sentenced to prison for political reasons. The most affected classes were the aristocracy, professionals, intellectuals, and even a significant number of priests.
Many other Italian subjects of the Austrian emperor were condemned to the painful and humiliating pain of public beating.
Simultaneously with the Military Tribunal in Este, the so-called regular courts operated. Their modus operandi is is revealed in the trial that led to the executions of the “Belfiore martyrs”.
A Mazzinian committee, present in several cities of Lombardy-Venetia, was discovered by the Habsburg police, who made extensive use of torture against those who were arrested.
Some of them died from the torture; one of them preferred to commit suicide rather than betray his companions under pain of torture. In total 110 patriots were arrested, as well as thirty-three contumacious persons (including Benedetto Cairoli, 10th Prime Minister of Italy).
In most cases they were sentenced to death and then killed in the small valley of Belfiore, in Mantua.
In 1852, after the trial of the “Belfiore martyrs”, the mothers and wives of those patriots sentenced to death wrote a collective letter to Emperor Franz Joseph, asking for pardon for men who were guilty only of being members of the Mazzinian organization.
Not only was the request rejected, but those who were tortured — among whom there was also a priest, Don Tazzoli — were denied burial in consecrated ground. (25)
Together with the use of pure and simple violence, the Field Marshal made use of economic and financial oppression, to better harass and exhaust the population.
On his return, Radetzy imposed heavy taxes, certainly extraordinary taxes and sometimes even individualized (ad personam) land ownership. (26)
To these exorbitant measures, which increased a taxation already very high for the time, were added other extraordinary taxes (189 people, including the best of the Milanese aristocracy, paid a total of 20 million Austrian lire, almost 7 million florins), a series of enormous compulsory loans, the total seizure and freezing of assets of the exiles and refugees. (27)
During “the years from 1848 to 1854 [...] even without officially proclaiming it, Vienna essentially demanded from its Italian provinces the reimbursement of expenses caused by the insurrections.” (28)
The overall result of this set of measures was, as it was easy to imagine, completely counterproductive and increased the hostility of every social class towards foreign Austrian domination:
He expressed himself sharply concerning the fate of Dalmatia, arguing that it was necessary to slavicize it in order to erase the Italian cultural heritage transmitted to it by Venice. Recall that Dudan wrote:
The Field Marshal threatened to carry out an ethnic cleansing of large proportions against the inhabitants of Lombardy-Venetia, which, according to his plan, would have consisted in the expulsion or killing of the local ruling class, modeled on the “Galician Slaughter”.
In that Habsburg region a very serious agrarian crisis provoked an extensive peasant uprising in 1846, which led to the massacre of many hundreds of landowners.
This bloody revolt did not meet any effective resistance from the Habsburg military and police authorities and indeed aroused the suspicion that the Habsburg administrators had fomented it and favored it, in order to better control the Galician region by sowing division among the ethnic groups that lived there.
In fact, the insurrection saw the local farmers, of Ruthenian ethnicity, slaughtering the landowners, of Polish ethnicity.
Radetzky's threats to repeat the “Galician Slaughter” in Italy, however contradictory it was to his theoretical role as guarantor of public order (whereas in this way he was subversive), were not in vain, since also in the Lombardy-Venetia there were different tumults in 1846-1847 caused by the agrarian crisis, which were attributed by a good part of public opinion to the provocative action of the Austrian government.
There are numerous memoirs that mention Radetzky's threats of repeating in Lombardy and Venetia the massacres he made in Galicia, and the Field Marshal personally reported them in his numerous proclamations after 1848. (32)
This Austro-Bohemian noble indeed hated and despised the urban classes of Italy, whose customs and mentality seemed scarcely understandable and in any case “different” from those of the feudal world from which he came.
This attitude was shared by many other aristocrats of “Mitteleuropa”, who looked at the Italian nobility with astonishment and contempt: their mainly urban existence, their great attention to culture and its promotion, and their entrepreneurial economic commitment was severely out of touch with the rural, feudal and military models of the Austrian and Central European aristocracies. (33)
The total failure of Radetzky's policy, based solely on the work of military and police forces, was evidenced by the failure of Emperor Franz Joseph's two visits in 1851 (March-April in Venice, September-October in Milan, Como and Monza), which had demonstrated unequivocally that the Italian population was hostile to the Viennese government.
Even worse, if possible, was the outcome of the visit of the imperial couple — formed by the kaiser accompanied by his wife — to Italy in 1856-1857.
The well-known biographer of Franz Joseph, Franz Herre, provided a detailed description of the isolation and hostility to which the emperor and empress found themselves surrounded by in Italy. (34)
At first the imperial couple went to Venice, coldly welcomed by “a wall of silent people”. Then, inside the palace reserved for them, they discovered that “a decoration made using the three colors of the Italian flag: on the floor of the white and red dining room, a green carpet had been laid out.”
Venetian society deserted the official reception, so much so that out of 130 guests only 30 arrived, and upon entering the palace the couple was insulted by the crowd.
Herre informs us that Franz Joseph and his wife spent Christmas “in an oppressive atmosphere: in order to have the tree, they had to have it taken from the Botanical Garden, a clear sign that they were not at home in Venice.”
The emperor then visited Brescia, where “the gloomy air that General Haynau had left behind still blew”, this city having been partially destroyed by the imperial troops in 1849. Finally Franz Joseph went to Milan, where both his solemn entrance into the city and the gala show at La Scala were characterized by the almost total absence of the population.
Those who welcomed the sovereign, who entered the Ambrosian metropolis on January 15, 1857, were mainly peasants from the surrounding villages who had been paid to appear and who, although present, remained silent.
On the same day, a delegation of members of Milanese society was in Turin to deliver to the Savoyard authorities a sum collected for the purchase of cannons, naturally destined to be used against the Habsburg army.
Even the most sought-after social gatherings organized to give prestige to the emperor actually ended by revealing the general hostility towards foreign domination:
This support allowed Radetzky to rule Lombardy-Venetia for a good eight years after the revolt of 1848, before being replaced in January 1857 by Archduke Maximilian. The basic reason for the substitution was not so much his attitude towards the Italian population, but rather the criticism that the Field Marshal leveled against his sovereign's foreign policy.
Of course, the use of violence to suppress dissent continued even after the disappearance of Field Marshal Radetzky from the political scene, since Austrian foreign rule was absolutely unpopular with the Italian subjects and could only survive through coercion and the imposition of a military occupation regime.
References
1. Storia della letteratura tedesca, volume III Dal realismo alla sperimentazione (1820-1970): Dal Biedermeier al fine secolo (1820-1890), second tomb, fourth part, ch. 263, Mito e realtà della ‘belle époque’, p. 864.
2. Ibidem, p. 865
3. Ibidem, p. 863
4. Ibidem, p. 865
5. Original ed., London-New York 1979; Italian ed. Radetkzy e le armate imperiali. L’impero d’Austria e l’esercito asburgico nella rivoluzione del 1848, Bologna 1983.
6. Ibidem, p. 13
7. M. Meriggi, ll regno Lombardo-Veneto, Torino 1987, pp. 349-350.
8. Sked, Radetzky, cit., p. 159.
9. Ibidem, p. 163
10. The citations are reported in Sked, Radetkzy e le armate imperiali, cit.
11. C. Cattaneo, Dell'insurrezione di Milano nel 1848 e della successiva guerra, Firenze 1949, cap. II.
12. Sked, Radetzky, cit., p. 114.
13. Ibidem, p. 178
14. Ibidem, cit.
15. Cattaneo, Dell'insurrezione di Milano, cit., cap. III.
16. Sked, Radetzky, cit.
17. Ibidem, cit., p. 161
18. Ibidem, p. 147
19. Meriggi, ll regno Lombardo-Veneto, cit., pp. 89-90.
20. Piero Pieri, Storia militare del Risorgimento, Torino 1962, p. 319.
21. Tommaso Netti, Castelnuovo e gli Austriaci nel 1848, edited by Antonio Pighi, Verona 1888; Francesco Vecchiato, Castelnuovo del Garda e il 1848 veronese nella cronaca inedita di Gaetano Spandri, Castelnuovo del Garda 2009.
22. Meriggi, Il Regno, cit., pp. 351-352.
23. Ibidem, cit., p. 352
24. Piero Brunello, Ribelli, questuanti e banditi. Proteste contadine in Veneto e Friuli 1814-1866, Venezia 1981.
25. Timoleone Vedovi, Cenni biografici dei martiri di Belfiore e di S. Giorgio, Mantova 1872; Alessandro Luzio, I martiri di Belfiore, Milano 1905.
26. Sked, Radetzky e le armate imperiali, cit., cap. IV.
27. Meriggi, Il regno, cit., pp. 352 fol.
28. Ibidem, p. 353
29. Giorgio Candeloro, Storia dell’Italia moderna, vol. III, 1846-1849, La rivoluzione nazionale, Milano 1971, p. 413.
30. Alessandro Dudan, La Monarchia degli Absburgo, origini, grandezza e decadenza; con documenti inediti, Roma 1915, p. 268.
31. On this specific point the primary reference is the excellent study of Professor Luciano Monzali, Italiani di Dalmazia: dal Risorgimento alla grande guerra, Firenze 2004.
32. C. A. Macartney, L’Impero degli Asburgo, 1790-1918, Milano 1976, pp. 356-359; Meriggi, Il regno, cit., p. 327; Cattaneo, Dell'insurrezione di Milano nel 1848 e della successiva guerra, cit., cap. III, “Marshal Radetzky, surrounded by a staff of Teutomaniacs, was desperate at the time to shed blood, boasting of wanting to repeat the massacres of Galicia in Italy. How could we doubt it when we witnessed the executioner Ludwig von Benedek appear in Brescia with military authority, and the brother of the executioner Breindl invested with civil authority?”
33. Meriggi, Il regno, cit., pp. 107-110, 122-145, p. 322.
34. F. Herre, Francesco Giuseppe, Milano 1990, pp. 148-149.
The figure of Austro-Bohemian Field Marshal Josef Radetzky (1766-1858) even during his own life was the object of a careful propaganda reconstruction by the Hapsburg Empire and Germanic nationalists, whose effects continue to this day, so much so that he is fondly remembered in Austria as Vater Radetzky (“Father Radetzky”) and Kaisertreu (“loyal to the emperor”).
However, even the ideological constructions developed to support this figure still reveal their illusiveness and mystification.
The Austrian scholar Franz Grillparzer, a chauvinist of violently anti-Italian sentiments long protected by Metternich, coined the very famous motto of Radetzky, In deinem Lager ist Österreich (“In your camp is Austria”).
This phrase, which was intended to be one of of praise and exaltation in wanting to almost identify the imperial structure with the army, ended up betraying the nature of a multinational State that could only stand on strength of arms rather than on the cultural identity and ethnic cohesion of the inhabitants, thus becoming the proverbial “prison of the peoples”.
Even in recent years, the Slovenian historian Janez J. Svajncer, a member of one of the most loyal ethnic groups of the Habsburg Empire, has reaffirmed and confirmed the veracity of the nineteenth-century definition of imperial Austria as Volkskerker.
The Radetzky March, composed by court musician Johann Baptist Strauss at the request of an imperial official to commemorate Austria's victory over the Italians at the Battle of Custoza, still boasts great popularity among the Austrians and traditionally closes the New Year's Concert which is held every year in Vienna.
In this regard, the considerations of the great Germanist Ladislao Mittner in his monumental “History of German Literature” are interesting; he noted that Strauss family, father and son, through their music represented “one of the most typical supporters of the pleasure-seeking alienation of the Austro-Hungarian subject, while also foreshadowing its collapse” (1), because they constituted a “cement between the nationalities of the Austro-Hungarian Empire”, but at the same time they revealed “their own agony and the agony of the Austrian Empire.” (2)
Mittner's judgment highlights the political and courtier character of Strauss' music (including of course the Radetzkymarsch, which holds a special place next to the Kaiser-Walzer later composed by Strauss Jr. for Emperor Franz Joseph), and together their fundamental inability to express a cohesive identity is a mirror of the Empire's crisis.
This great Germanist acutely inserts his observations in the chapter of his work intended to deal with the widespread mentality during the so-called Belle Époque, the nostalgic longing for which he does not hesitate to present as caused by a small minority who felt regret for the festive and dissolute life that they had been able to keep during the aforementioned period. (3)
This is a judgment that can be applied mutatis mutandis also to that literary tradition which pushes the so-called “Hapsburg myth”.
In fact, Mittner adds that Austrian literature from the mid-nineteenth century until Musil demonstrates an “uncontrollable taste”, even in the most serious works, for “plots and developments of an operettistic type, confirming with this that the last great flicker of Viennese operetta reveals the bitter hedonism of “après nous le déluge”. (4)
Radetzkymarsch (although the protagonist is not the Field Marshal) is also the name of a novel by Joseph Roth, one of the authors who established the mythological reconstruction of an imaginary “Happy Austria”. He was full of nostalgia for the deceased Empire, whose demise he could not understand on an existential level, so much so that he died tied to a hospital bed, prey to delirium tremens which is common in late-stage chronic alcoholics.
The popularity that Radetzky still enjoys today in the Austrian social environment, and the copious literature lavished upon his glory, serves to mask and distort the historical reality of his criminal deeds in the region of Lombardy-Venetia, since they spring from a limiting and partial re-reading of history.
Alan Sked, an Anglo-Saxon scholar, author of a fundamental study on Radetzky entitled The Survival of the Habsburg Empire: Radetzky, the Imperial Army and the Class War 1848 (5), noted that there are many hundreds of studies on this Field Marshal in German, but that “what work has been done on Radetzky has been distinctly hagiographical.” (6)
Marco Meriggi, a historian and author of a very balanced and measured study on the Kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia, keenly identifies the nature of the authentic military regime of Franz Joseph's government in general and of Radetzky's administration in particular, hence his reliance first of all on the army and repression, especially after 1848:
“Another central aspect of the new conformation of Habsburg power in the first ten years of Franz Joseph's reign was constituted by the rise of the “military party” in the Viennese sphere of influence. It was the generals, primarily Radetzky, who saved the Empire from collapse; and Franz Joseph, for his part, had a more pronounced military vocation than that of his predecessors, and most of them were willing to listen to the solicitations coming from those environments. The predominantly military declination of power that Radetzky, especially in his early years, exercised in the reconquered Lombardy-Venetia, therefore represented a local variant, albeit magnified by the peculiarity of the situation, of a more general tendency that had solid general connective roots in Vienna.” (7)The decision to send this military commander to Italy was in fact provoked by a precise assessment of the situation in Lombardy-Venetia. The Viennese government acknowledged that the Italian population was plainly opposed to Habsburg rule and that the only way the Empire could maintain control over Italian territories was through the use of brute force.
In 1830 Metternich's right-hand man, General Clam-Martinic, was charged with assessing and reporting on the situation in Italy. The report highlighted the weakness and unpopularity of Austrian domination in Italy.
Clam-Martinic wrote to Metternich that the Habsburg presence on Italian territory had to rely exclusively on the “dislocation of a massive military force”, suggesting also that no more enlistments be made in Italy and that “cultivating illusions” should be avoided, since in the event of war “everyone here will desert us”. (8) Sked said in this regard:
“Clam-Martinitz's advice had been that the Austrians should frighten a people which would always regard them as strangers. The army's presence in Italy, therefore, was never meant to be a reassuring one and its propaganda produced the inevitable result: Italians hated it.” (9)It was in consequence of this relationship, carried out by Metternich directly through his principal assistant, that Radetzky was sent to Italy to implement the ideas contained in the report.
This Austrian general was then sent to Italian land by the Habsburg Prime Minister with the precise intention of using the imperial army as a true occupational force against a population judged to be resistant to foreign domination.
Clam Martinitz's opinion on the hostility of the Italians towards Habsburg domination was widely shared by the imperial ruling class. Field Marshal Radetzky, his general Von Schönhals, Admiral Zichy, Archduke Maximilian von Habsburg, brother of the emperor, admiral of the imperial fleet and then Viceroy of Lombardy-Venetia, were all unanimous in admitting that the Italian population was entirely hostile to the Austrians.
Radetzky wrote explicitly that it was utterly useless for the Habsburg regime to try to win the loyalty of the Italian populations and that the Austrians were no longer ruling in Italy, but merely dominating by force of arms a people who — from Sicily to the Alps — wanted their expulsion.
The Italian regions however, according to what the Field Marshal wrote in one of his reports, were to be kept under the imperial throne for reasons of economic interest for Austria and Bohemia. Lombardy-Venetia was therefore conceived by Radetzky exactly as a colony. (10)
The elderly Field Marshal was notorious for his violence even before the uprising of 1848, which was provoked to a large extent by his behavior.
The judgment of Carlo Cattaneo, the great scholar who witnessed and participated in the events of 1848, is famous:
“Radetzki's army is a freikorps that gained a pretext to live off robbery in the most beautiful country in Europe.” (11)The brutality of the Habsburg soldiers was also exacerbated by the high presence of common criminals enlisted in their ranks. For example, one infantry regiment, named “Erzherzog Ferdinand von Este”, consisting of 12 companies, counted as many as 284 “partially dangerous criminals”.
Nevertheless, Feldmarschalleutnant Welden, commander of the Austrian forces in Tyrol (where this regiment was garrisoned), did not consider this particularly dangerous, because:
“The company, battalion and regimental punishments are almost two-thirds less than those of the Tyrolean Jäger regiment, which is supposedly composed exclusively of elite troops and which has the power to transfer its worst elements to other regiments.”Regarding the way in which Radetzky posed before the civilian population, suffice it to say that the instructions given to the troops by this commander permitted the use of arms even if they were deemed to be “provoked”, i.e. to defend their “honor”: the elasticity and subjectivity of these criteria therefore allowed Habsburg soldiers to commit violence against Italian subjects even in the absence of any aggression. (13)
(12)
Even before the great revolt of 1848 there were numerous acts of violence carried out by the Habsburg military forces against the Italian populations, in the absence of violence or threats by the subjects.
An example of this, among others, was the inauguration of Archbishop Romilli, who suffered a genuine assault with sabres drawn by Hapsburg soldiers against the crowd of faithful who were welcoming the new archbishop of Milan.
In September 1847 a very large crowd of faithful had gathered to welcome the new archbishop of Milan, namely Monsignor Romilli. For several hours before the ceremony the Habsburg soldiers literally began to sharpen their sabres in order to make them sharper.
The units were then hidden for some time in the barracks, so that the people could assemble without fear.
When the archbishop's welcoming ceremony began and the Italians were busy singing religious hymns, the soldiers approached holding their concealed weapons, and then drew them and assaulted the disarmed and defenseless Italians.
The assault had been carefully planned to punish the Milanese people, who were deemed “guilty” of celebrating the appointment of an Italian archbishop, in place of the previous Austrian one, the late Karl Kajetan von Gaisruck.
The violence committed by Hapsburg soldiers during the peaceful Milanese tobacco strike, which led to many deaths and even more injuries, was another example of the Field Marshal's work.
Tobacco in the Kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia was a state monopoly that yielded 4,386,000 lire a year to the Austrian Empire and its boycott was part of Milanese political tradition, since there had already been two previous boycotts in 1751 and 1766. (14)
The tobacco strike held just before the outbreak of the great uprising of 1848 was completely devoid of any violence by the Italian subjects, but instead was accompanied by armed aggressions by the imperial military, sometimes homicidal and preferably directed against children and the elderly.
Cattaneo wrote:
“At the beginning of January, young people from all over the kingdom had invited each other not to smoke any more tobacco, in order to take away from the Austrian economy one of its main sources of income. The Austrian General Staff handed out thirty thousand cigars to the soldiers, and giving them enough money to get them drunk, sent them to cause trouble in the city. The prison doctors recognized bands of convicts in the street, some smoking to irritate the people, others yelling behind the smoking soldiers. On the evening of January 3, Hungarian grenadiers and German dragoons armed with sabres hurled themselves onto the people who moved peacefully through the city; avoiding the youth, they wounded and killed elderly and children. When it was learned that they arrested many unarmed civilians, thereby demonstrating the vile cowardliness of the military, many openly declared: ‘next time we too will be armed, and we will see what happens!’” (15)Radetzky had asked the government for the possibility of conducting a “decisive action”, even though until then the inhabitants of Lombardy-Venetia had not been guilty of any uprising. (16)
Alongside true violence, Radetzky added threats and demonstrations of force with the aim of terrorizing the Italians.
Clam-Martinic had in fact suggested giving the Italian population, dissatisfied with the Habsburg rule, a fearful impression of power by of the central government. And so Radetzky began to make massive military maneuvers in northern Italy to intimidate the inhabitants with his own threats. (17)
The Field Marshal also used subterfuge to more easily divide the Austrian military and the Italian population and instigate mutual hatred, using agent provocateurs and thus causing death sentences. (18)
The work of this general already before the Italian War of Independence of 1848-1849 was still consistent with the political tradition imposed by Vienna in Lombardy-Venetia, which since 1815 found itself subject to the conditions of a police state, by the precise will of the imperial sovereigns.
Citing the opinion of Czoernig, a police officer, Meriggi writes:
“The fact that the Austrian government in Lombardy-Venetia is mainly remembered today as a police state is not due merely to the strength of Risorgimento rhetoric, but instead has its roots in the very structuring of the power system that was headed by Vienna [...] In fact, within the Austrian administrative conception, the police acted as the main instrument of the emperor's paternal vigilance.” (19)This was a government practice followed since the time of Francis I, and was later transmitted to Ferdinand I and Franz Joseph.
Moreover, during the First Italian War of Independence, Radetzky's troops were noted for their ferocity towards civilians.
The massacres committed against unarmed civilians during the Five Days of Milan; General Haynau's order to set fire to every house from which hostile acts were carried out and to shoot all its inhabitants indiscriminately (elderly, women and children included) during the Ten Days of Brescia; and the extremely harsh siege of a Venice already exhausted by carpet bombings, hunger and pestilence, are only the best-known cases in the long list of slaughter of civilians carried out by the Habsburg military units in the period from 1820 to 1866.
To understand how Radetkzy led the war against insurgents, an example can be given: that of Castelnuovo del Garda, a small town in Lombardy whose inhabitants were all killed by the Austrian troops in retaliation. Keep in mind that this is only one of many similar episodes committed by the Habsburg units during the long phase of the wars of Italian independence.
On April 11, 1848, a group of about 400 volunteer Lombard insurgents rested in the village of Castelnuovo del Garda, where they waited for the avant-gardes of the Sardinian army. Radetzky, taking advantage of the fact that the latter were still quite far away, sent a strong column of many thousands of men under the command of General Prince Thurn und Taxis, a member of the highest imperial aristocracy.
At first he subjected the territory in which the volunteers were barricaded to a massive bombardment with artillery, and then ordered an attack which, given the disproportion of the forces, forced the volunteers to retreat.
After the latter were forced to abandon the field, the Habsburg troops exterminated all the inhabitants of Castelnuovo: there were 113 victims. Only those who managed to flee could escape the massacre.
Piero Pieri writes in his masterpiece “Military History of the Risorgimento”:
“The village is set on fire: the Austrian troops want to scare the people from supporting the Piedmontese and insurgents; as many as 113 people, including old men, women, children in great numbers, are massacred or die in the flames.” (20)During the massacre the local church was desecrated and the attractive women were raped before being killed. After that, the town was set on fire and destroyed by the blaze.
After this retaliation, on April 12 the Habsburg troops returned to Verona, where the bulk of the Austrian forces were stationed, and in a show of force they paraded throughout the city with the loot they had captured in order to intimidate the citizens.
On April 13, Field Marshal Radetzky, known for his rhetorical verbosity, addressed a proclamation to his subjects, explaining that what had happened in Castelnuovo del Garda was a consequence of the “rebellion” and that he could not prevent such “consequences” (i.e. retaliation) from occurring.
This proclamation was clearly a threat to the Italians: whoever would rise up or even support the insurgents would suffer the same fate. (21)
The repression continued even in peacetime.
On his return, Radetzky decreed a state of siege and promulgated the “statutory law”, which provided the death penalty even for minor offenses and permitted the arrest, prosecution and execution of alleged violators within only two hours. These rules remained in force for several years. (22)
In just twelve months, from August 1848 to August 1849, 961 hangings and shootings were carried out and 4,000 were sentenced to prison for political reasons. The most affected classes were the aristocracy, professionals, intellectuals, and even a significant number of priests.
Many other Italian subjects of the Austrian emperor were condemned to the painful and humiliating pain of public beating.
“From August to December 1848 they arrested and shot several Milanese citizens found to be in possession of weapons, while several others, although not dealt with as harshly, were nevertheless subjected by the military authority — who de facto held full powers of the situation in the absence of a clear administrative reorganization of the territory — to the odious ceremony of public beatings.” (23)In the aftermath of these events, the only Military Tribunal in Este (an itinerant military court which did not have a permanent seat, but wandered and moved around the territory to process in an extraordinary form and with little or no guarantees for the defendants) within a few years (the early 1850's) issued about a thousand death sentences. (24)
Simultaneously with the Military Tribunal in Este, the so-called regular courts operated. Their modus operandi is is revealed in the trial that led to the executions of the “Belfiore martyrs”.
A Mazzinian committee, present in several cities of Lombardy-Venetia, was discovered by the Habsburg police, who made extensive use of torture against those who were arrested.
Some of them died from the torture; one of them preferred to commit suicide rather than betray his companions under pain of torture. In total 110 patriots were arrested, as well as thirty-three contumacious persons (including Benedetto Cairoli, 10th Prime Minister of Italy).
In most cases they were sentenced to death and then killed in the small valley of Belfiore, in Mantua.
In 1852, after the trial of the “Belfiore martyrs”, the mothers and wives of those patriots sentenced to death wrote a collective letter to Emperor Franz Joseph, asking for pardon for men who were guilty only of being members of the Mazzinian organization.
Not only was the request rejected, but those who were tortured — among whom there was also a priest, Don Tazzoli — were denied burial in consecrated ground. (25)
Together with the use of pure and simple violence, the Field Marshal made use of economic and financial oppression, to better harass and exhaust the population.
On his return, Radetzy imposed heavy taxes, certainly extraordinary taxes and sometimes even individualized (ad personam) land ownership. (26)
To these exorbitant measures, which increased a taxation already very high for the time, were added other extraordinary taxes (189 people, including the best of the Milanese aristocracy, paid a total of 20 million Austrian lire, almost 7 million florins), a series of enormous compulsory loans, the total seizure and freezing of assets of the exiles and refugees. (27)
During “the years from 1848 to 1854 [...] even without officially proclaiming it, Vienna essentially demanded from its Italian provinces the reimbursement of expenses caused by the insurrections.” (28)
The overall result of this set of measures was, as it was easy to imagine, completely counterproductive and increased the hostility of every social class towards foreign Austrian domination:
“The military regime, spreading terror everywhere, aggravated the hatred [of the Italians] against the foreign rulers. The numerous executions of people found in possession of weapons, the beatings, the fines and the war contributions exacerbated the populations of the cities and the countryside, and removed all the effectiveness of Radetzky's demagogy.” (29)Radetzky came to advance projects of true ethnic cleansing against the Italians.
He expressed himself sharply concerning the fate of Dalmatia, arguing that it was necessary to slavicize it in order to erase the Italian cultural heritage transmitted to it by Venice. Recall that Dudan wrote:
“It should not be forgotten that Radetzky was one of the directors of the slavicization of the eastern shore of the Adriatic.” (30)Radetzky's project was then realized years later on the order of Franz Joseph, who imposed and completed the slavicization of Dalmatia. (31)
The Field Marshal threatened to carry out an ethnic cleansing of large proportions against the inhabitants of Lombardy-Venetia, which, according to his plan, would have consisted in the expulsion or killing of the local ruling class, modeled on the “Galician Slaughter”.
In that Habsburg region a very serious agrarian crisis provoked an extensive peasant uprising in 1846, which led to the massacre of many hundreds of landowners.
This bloody revolt did not meet any effective resistance from the Habsburg military and police authorities and indeed aroused the suspicion that the Habsburg administrators had fomented it and favored it, in order to better control the Galician region by sowing division among the ethnic groups that lived there.
In fact, the insurrection saw the local farmers, of Ruthenian ethnicity, slaughtering the landowners, of Polish ethnicity.
Radetzky's threats to repeat the “Galician Slaughter” in Italy, however contradictory it was to his theoretical role as guarantor of public order (whereas in this way he was subversive), were not in vain, since also in the Lombardy-Venetia there were different tumults in 1846-1847 caused by the agrarian crisis, which were attributed by a good part of public opinion to the provocative action of the Austrian government.
There are numerous memoirs that mention Radetzky's threats of repeating in Lombardy and Venetia the massacres he made in Galicia, and the Field Marshal personally reported them in his numerous proclamations after 1848. (32)
This Austro-Bohemian noble indeed hated and despised the urban classes of Italy, whose customs and mentality seemed scarcely understandable and in any case “different” from those of the feudal world from which he came.
This attitude was shared by many other aristocrats of “Mitteleuropa”, who looked at the Italian nobility with astonishment and contempt: their mainly urban existence, their great attention to culture and its promotion, and their entrepreneurial economic commitment was severely out of touch with the rural, feudal and military models of the Austrian and Central European aristocracies. (33)
The total failure of Radetzky's policy, based solely on the work of military and police forces, was evidenced by the failure of Emperor Franz Joseph's two visits in 1851 (March-April in Venice, September-October in Milan, Como and Monza), which had demonstrated unequivocally that the Italian population was hostile to the Viennese government.
Even worse, if possible, was the outcome of the visit of the imperial couple — formed by the kaiser accompanied by his wife — to Italy in 1856-1857.
The well-known biographer of Franz Joseph, Franz Herre, provided a detailed description of the isolation and hostility to which the emperor and empress found themselves surrounded by in Italy. (34)
At first the imperial couple went to Venice, coldly welcomed by “a wall of silent people”. Then, inside the palace reserved for them, they discovered that “a decoration made using the three colors of the Italian flag: on the floor of the white and red dining room, a green carpet had been laid out.”
Venetian society deserted the official reception, so much so that out of 130 guests only 30 arrived, and upon entering the palace the couple was insulted by the crowd.
Herre informs us that Franz Joseph and his wife spent Christmas “in an oppressive atmosphere: in order to have the tree, they had to have it taken from the Botanical Garden, a clear sign that they were not at home in Venice.”
The emperor then visited Brescia, where “the gloomy air that General Haynau had left behind still blew”, this city having been partially destroyed by the imperial troops in 1849. Finally Franz Joseph went to Milan, where both his solemn entrance into the city and the gala show at La Scala were characterized by the almost total absence of the population.
Those who welcomed the sovereign, who entered the Ambrosian metropolis on January 15, 1857, were mainly peasants from the surrounding villages who had been paid to appear and who, although present, remained silent.
On the same day, a delegation of members of Milanese society was in Turin to deliver to the Savoyard authorities a sum collected for the purchase of cannons, naturally destined to be used against the Habsburg army.
Even the most sought-after social gatherings organized to give prestige to the emperor actually ended by revealing the general hostility towards foreign domination:
“At La Scala, at the gala show in honor of the imperial couple, the seats were all occupied, but not by the noble ticket holders, but by their servants. At the official reception, the Austrians remained among them: there were only two parvenus of Milanese society, who had to hurry past the malevolent stares of those who were keeping good guard in front of the palace.”The negative consequences of the Field Marshal's policies also became apparent at the court, despite the support which the king had always given to the measures of the senior official.
This support allowed Radetzky to rule Lombardy-Venetia for a good eight years after the revolt of 1848, before being replaced in January 1857 by Archduke Maximilian. The basic reason for the substitution was not so much his attitude towards the Italian population, but rather the criticism that the Field Marshal leveled against his sovereign's foreign policy.
Of course, the use of violence to suppress dissent continued even after the disappearance of Field Marshal Radetzky from the political scene, since Austrian foreign rule was absolutely unpopular with the Italian subjects and could only survive through coercion and the imposition of a military occupation regime.
References
1. Storia della letteratura tedesca, volume III Dal realismo alla sperimentazione (1820-1970): Dal Biedermeier al fine secolo (1820-1890), second tomb, fourth part, ch. 263, Mito e realtà della ‘belle époque’, p. 864.
2. Ibidem, p. 865
3. Ibidem, p. 863
4. Ibidem, p. 865
5. Original ed., London-New York 1979; Italian ed. Radetkzy e le armate imperiali. L’impero d’Austria e l’esercito asburgico nella rivoluzione del 1848, Bologna 1983.
6. Ibidem, p. 13
7. M. Meriggi, ll regno Lombardo-Veneto, Torino 1987, pp. 349-350.
8. Sked, Radetzky, cit., p. 159.
9. Ibidem, p. 163
10. The citations are reported in Sked, Radetkzy e le armate imperiali, cit.
11. C. Cattaneo, Dell'insurrezione di Milano nel 1848 e della successiva guerra, Firenze 1949, cap. II.
12. Sked, Radetzky, cit., p. 114.
13. Ibidem, p. 178
14. Ibidem, cit.
15. Cattaneo, Dell'insurrezione di Milano, cit., cap. III.
16. Sked, Radetzky, cit.
17. Ibidem, cit., p. 161
18. Ibidem, p. 147
19. Meriggi, ll regno Lombardo-Veneto, cit., pp. 89-90.
20. Piero Pieri, Storia militare del Risorgimento, Torino 1962, p. 319.
21. Tommaso Netti, Castelnuovo e gli Austriaci nel 1848, edited by Antonio Pighi, Verona 1888; Francesco Vecchiato, Castelnuovo del Garda e il 1848 veronese nella cronaca inedita di Gaetano Spandri, Castelnuovo del Garda 2009.
22. Meriggi, Il Regno, cit., pp. 351-352.
23. Ibidem, cit., p. 352
24. Piero Brunello, Ribelli, questuanti e banditi. Proteste contadine in Veneto e Friuli 1814-1866, Venezia 1981.
25. Timoleone Vedovi, Cenni biografici dei martiri di Belfiore e di S. Giorgio, Mantova 1872; Alessandro Luzio, I martiri di Belfiore, Milano 1905.
26. Sked, Radetzky e le armate imperiali, cit., cap. IV.
27. Meriggi, Il regno, cit., pp. 352 fol.
28. Ibidem, p. 353
29. Giorgio Candeloro, Storia dell’Italia moderna, vol. III, 1846-1849, La rivoluzione nazionale, Milano 1971, p. 413.
30. Alessandro Dudan, La Monarchia degli Absburgo, origini, grandezza e decadenza; con documenti inediti, Roma 1915, p. 268.
31. On this specific point the primary reference is the excellent study of Professor Luciano Monzali, Italiani di Dalmazia: dal Risorgimento alla grande guerra, Firenze 2004.
32. C. A. Macartney, L’Impero degli Asburgo, 1790-1918, Milano 1976, pp. 356-359; Meriggi, Il regno, cit., p. 327; Cattaneo, Dell'insurrezione di Milano nel 1848 e della successiva guerra, cit., cap. III, “Marshal Radetzky, surrounded by a staff of Teutomaniacs, was desperate at the time to shed blood, boasting of wanting to repeat the massacres of Galicia in Italy. How could we doubt it when we witnessed the executioner Ludwig von Benedek appear in Brescia with military authority, and the brother of the executioner Breindl invested with civil authority?”
33. Meriggi, Il regno, cit., pp. 107-110, 122-145, p. 322.
34. F. Herre, Francesco Giuseppe, Milano 1990, pp. 148-149.