Republic of San Marco - History - Maintaining Independence

Maintaining Independence

After bringing his army in to protect the Kingdom of Sardinia, King Charles Albert of Piedmont–Sardinia chose to seek plebiscites in the territories gaining his protection, rather than concentrating on pursuing the Austrian retreat, despite popular support in the Papal States, the Grand Duchy of Tuscany and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies for reinforcement of and support for the Piedmontese troops.

Despite enthusiastic support from the revolutionary republics, such as the Republic of San Marco and Giuseppe Mazzini's Milanese volunteers, the Austrians started to regain ground but, with both the Vienna Rebellion and the Hungarian Revolution of 1848, along with other Revolutions of 1848 in the Habsburg areas, Radetzky was instructed to seek a truce, an order he ignored.

Militarily, misreadings of the fluctuating political status in northern Italy—combined with Manin's indecision and ill-health, which confined the revolutionary to bed at critical moments—led to several damaging poor judgements. The Imperial fleet were allowed to remain in the Istrian port of Pola, despite Venice having enough sympathy and support in the formerly-Venetian city to steal the fleet from the empire. Similarly, had the Venetians encouraged the desertion of Italian soldiers under imperial command, the trained and disciplined troops might have been able to provide defensive strength to the nascent republic; whilst revolutionary reform was generating popular support for the new régime, the revolutionaries failed to recruit troops from the Venetian mainland who might have joined the 2000 Papal guards and Neapolitan soldiers under General Pepe, who had ignored orders to retreat in favour of supporting the infant republics. While Austria was pressed on every front, the Italians allowed her time to regroup and to reconquer Venice and the other troubled areas of the empire one by one.

After an Italian rout at the Battle of Custoza, Charles Albert abandoned Milan, which lost half its population when Radetzky offered its citizens free passage from the city, and signed an armistice with the Austrians that restored the Piedmontese border at the Ticino river. At the same time, the Piedmontese navy abandoned its support of Venice. The following year, Charles Albert's forces resumed their fight against the Austrian Empire, being defeated again at the Battle of Novara and costing Charles Albert his throne, in favour of his son Victor Emmanuel, who went on to become the first king of a reunified Italy.

Meanwhile, Manin retreated from his republican fervour, for fear of offending the monarch Charles Albert; this move was, however, both transparent and ineffectual. He also relied on reinforcement from Piedmontese and Papal troops, not understanding that a Piedmontese-Sardinian kingdom would inevitably be concerned by a powerful republican neighbour—particularly at a time when monarchies were under threat across Europe—and that Pope Pius IX could not continue to support war between two Catholic monarchs practically on his border.

A further failure on the part of the Venetian revolutionaries was their inability properly to incorporate the terra ferma into the lagoon-based republic; mainlanders were mistrustful of Venetian power, probably as a result of old assumptions about the earlier Mariner Republic combined with the inevitable destruction of countryside that comes with warfare, a situation that might have been avoided had the revolutionaries recruited across terra ferma. When General Durando led a Piedmontese force to defend Verona, Venice could only supply a few volunteers, later joined by Colonel Ferrari's Papal regulars, without avail, as General Nugent's march met up with Radetzky's forces.

On 5 August 1848, the Venetian assembly voted 127–6 to approve Manin's subsumption into the Piedmontese-led Kingdom of Sardinia, which lasted only five days, as a result of a Piedmontese armistice with Austria. Three months later, Manin's desire not to offend the Piedmontese king led him to suppress Giuseppe Mazzini's supporters, who wished to demonstrate their republicanism in a fashion that might force the French Second Republic to aid Venice, hoping to convert the city into a centre of Italian liberation and inspire Garibaldi into an anti-Austrian crusade. When Vincenzo Gioberti, the Prime Minister of Piedmont–Sardinia invited Venice to send delegates to a federal congress in Turin on 12 October 1848, the Venetians declined. The revolutionary authorities' reaction to Piedmont's declaration on Austria illustrated their failure to grasp realities — the Venetians recessed for two weeks.