Do you hear the Lion roar? An account of the beginning of 1848 in Venice-Part I
Oh Venice! Venice! when thy marble walls
Are level with the waters, there shall be
A cry of nations o'er thy sunken halls,
A loud lament along the sweeping sea!
If I, a northern wanderer, weep for thee,
What should thy sons do?--anything but weep
And yet they only murmur in their sleep.
In contrast with their fathers--as the slime,
The dull green ooze of the receding deep,
Is with the dashing of the spring-tide foam
That drives the sailor shipless to his home,
Are they to those that were; and thus they creep,
Crouching and crab-like, through their sapping streets.
Oh! Agony-that centuries should reap
No mellower harvest! Thirteen hundred years
Of wealth and glory turn'd to dust and tears;
And every monument the stranger meets,
Church, palace, pillar, as a mourner greets;
And even the Lion all subdued appears,
And the harsh sound of the barbarian
With dull and daily dissonance, repeats
The echo of thy tyrant's voice along
The soft waves, once all musical to song
The lines above, borrowed by Lord Byron’s “Ode on Venice” (1819) can be regarded as a manifesto of what Venice had become in the eyes of Europe throughout the years of Hapsburg rule: the symbol of decadence. The streets, the canals, even its inhabitants seemed to visitors like husks, empty shells bearing little to no resemblance to the glorious past of “La Dominante”(1). One wonders what would have Byron written of that very Venice just nineteen yers later, when the winds of 1848 started to blow under the Lion’s wings. This “wind of change” was so strong that, as of the beginning of March 1848 Lieutenant-Marshal Ferdinand Zichy, commander of the fortress of Venice, estimated that he needed “fifteen thousand extra men to hope to hold the city”. Since the total forces under Radetzky in the whole of Lombardy-Venetia amounted to a nominal 80000 soldiers and that the Field Marshal deeply underestimated the dissatisfaction of the Lombard and Venetian people, Zychy only received a battalion of 1300 Grenzer (2).
To give Zychy some credit, the ethnic composition of the forces he commanded was not of the most promising: around 3000 of the Austrian soldiers in the city were Italian, and thus unreliable, and the Navy was to be considered “not Austrian, but fully Italian”. Finally, there was the Arsenal: the biggest arms and ammunition depot in the city, where around 1200 Venetians worked in a state “of open agitation” was the weakest spot in the Austrian defense in the whole of Lombardy-Venetia.
And yet, the beginning of the Venetian revolution was a pacific one, in the fashion of the “ “legal agitation” promoted by Daniele Manin and Niccolò Tommaseo. What was the main act of such “disobedience”? A formal request to create a commission to “assess the reasons of the people’s discontent, find solutions to them, and finally, let the government know the needs and the desires of the populace”. The Venetian nobility, chiefly Alvise Francesco Mocenigo (3) and Giovanni Francesco Avesani (4), was no stranger to such demands, nor opposed them.
However, the Austrian response was not a receptive one: Manin and Tommaseo were arrested on January 18th, and this act alone was the death call for the attempted “revolution within the law”. The government response, coupled with news of the concession of Constitutions from the other Italian States sparked cries of “Viva San Marco” “Viva Pio IX”; the walls became dotted with writings of “Morte ai Tedeschi” (“Death to the Germans) and a flourishing of tricolor flags (heralding briefly even from the Tower Bell in San Marco’s square) and cockades all over the city. Gala events such as concerts at the Teatro la Fenice, or gatherings of “ladies and knights” at the many cafés in Piazza San Marco became occasions of manifestations of open joy for this desire of liberty and dissent for the lack of governmental response to it.
The common people in Venice did not stay idle, either: on March 20th, over 5000 (10000 according to Pálffy, but fear multiplies the number of enemies) people went on the streets to publicly ask for the liberation of Manin and Tommaseo. Liberated nearly on the spot by the Governor, the two were taken in triumph to Piazza San Marco, where Manin held a memorable speech to the crowd, in which the calls for calm and moderation were drowned by the final sentence: “There are, however, solemn times and cases, signaled by the Providence, in which insurrection is no right, but duty”. (5)
The people of Venice dutifully obliged.
Footnotes
- “The Dominant”, one of the nicknames the Republic of Venice (this particular one to be shared with the Republic of Genoa)
- Frontier soldier of Croatian ethnicity of the Austrian Empire
- Venetian patrician, of liberal leanings, son-in-law of Austrian Governor Johan B. Spaur
- Originally from Verona, one the best lawyers in Venice, and Italian patriot of moderate leanings
- This, as basically all this chapter, is OTL.