ABSTRACT
MOST BRITISH HISTORIANS, and a fair slice of the reading public, were long ago made familiar by G. M. Trevelyan with the epic of the defence of the Roman Republic. Trevelyan preferred to write of the 'defence', rather than the 'fall' of the Republic, though the story is, of course, the story of the defeat of a regime, but a defeat-like that of Dunkirk in 1940-which was transformed into a kind of victory by the very desperate nature of the crisis, and the upsurge of public sentiment that accompanied it. Garibaldi's offer, to anyone who would follow him in his retreat from Rome, of 'hunger, thirst, forced marches, battles and death' was evidently the inspiration for Churchill's offer of 'blood, sweat, toil and tears'. Even more powerful perhaps was Garibaldi's argument in favour of withdrawing from the city, rather than surrendering or waiting until the French had destroyed it. His argument was quite simply: 'Dovunque saremo, cofa sara Roma'-'Wherever we are, there will be Rome'. Almost equally well known to English-speaking readers who have made any kind of study of nineteenth-century history is the role of Pius IX in 1848, and his reforms after his election in 1846. The Berkeleys' Italy in the Making and Mr. E. E. Y. Hales's Pio Nono are both well thumb-marked in university and public libraries. The period between Pius IX's flight from Rome in November 1848, and the final defence and fall of the Roman Republic in June 1849, however, is less well known and understood by English-speaking readers, who have grown accustomed to the outline history, which dismisses the period as one of 'confusion'. Even the better outline accounts, which tell their readers something of the setting up of the Constituent Assembly and the arrival of Mazzini, are inclined to dismiss the weeks following the departure of the Pope as ones of 'confusion', though there is in fact no confusion in our knowledge of what happened. For one thing, the Pope left Rome as the direct result of a clear-cut insurrection on November 16, not because, as one historian has put it, he was 'alarmed at radical agitation'. He had anyhow lost power, so that whether he left or not was unimportant. The Pope had been surrounded inside his palace by a large number of armed men, who had fired through doors and windows, and in so doing had killed one man-a bishopinside the palace. The Pope might have been pardoned if he had protested that this was 'radical agitation' of a rather uninhibited nature.
