ABSTRACT
The Roman question dominated Italian foreign relations for twelve years after 1870 and the defence of Rome was Italy’s main preoccupation. The fury of Catholics abroad, particularly in France, was indeed alarming. In February 1871 the French elected a National Assembly with a royalist and ardently Catholic majority. In a series of manifestos the Comte de Chambord, who seemed likely soon to become King Henri V, stressed his belief that the restoration of his royal House and the restoration of papal independence were inseparable; the protection of the Holy See had been in past centuries ‘the most incontrovertible cause of France’s greatness among the nations’. 1 French bishops organised petitions to the National Assembly, urging the government to rescue the Pope from ‘imprisonment’ and restore the temporal power. 2 Fortunately for Italy, the strength of the monarchist cause in France declined steadily after 1871. Thiers, who became provisional President of the French Republic in July 1871, had no thought of a crusade to liberate the Pope. But, though a republican, he was no great friend of Italy, which he described in public as a nation ‘created by the unhappy blindness’ of Napoleon III. Many besides clericals and monarchists regarded the seizure of Rome as an insult to Gallic pride and accused the Italians of base ingratitude. Nor could Thiers and his prime ministers, even had they so wished, entirely ignore the pressure of their Catholic supporters. Italian fears seemed to be confirmed by Thiers’s refusal to withdraw the Orenoque from Civitavecchia, where it remained to wound Italian feelings, waiting to take Pius IX aboard should he decide to leave Rome. In May 1873 the fall of Thiers and his replacement as President by MacMahon, a devout Catholic with monarchist sympathies, were followed by a new outbreak of bellicose clerical demonstrations and a sharp increase of tension between the two countries.
