Encouraged by the Grand Duke, Napoleon entered into direct contact with the Tsar with the aim of securing his support for a French-Piedmontese war against the Austrians in Italy. Having met the Tsar at Stuttgart in September 1857, Napoleon became so confident of his support that when he met Cavour the following July at Plombières to draw up war plans he assured the Piedmontese Prime Minister that he had Alexander’s solemn promise to back their plans in Italy: after the defeat of the Austrians in Lombardy-Venetia, an enlarged Piedmont would form a Kingdom of Northern Italy (as had emerged briefly in 1848–9) and become united with Tuscany, a reduced Papal State and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in an Italian Confederation; and for his efforts on behalf of the Italian cause, Napoleon would be rewarded with the return of Nice and Savoy to France. Cavour had pinned his hopes for Italy on the Franco-British alliance. That was why he had committed his Sardinian troops to the Crimean War. At the Paris congress he had won the sympathies of the British and the French through his influence behind the scenes, and although he had gained nothing tangible, no firm promise of support for the idea of Italy, he continued to believe that the Western powers were his only hope. Hardly believing that a Russian tsar would give his blessing to a national revolution, Cavour rushed to the nearby spa resort of Baden-Baden, where the ‘run-down kings and princes’ of Europe congregated, to consult with the Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna (Alexander’s influential liberal aunt), who confirmed that Russia could be counted on. ‘The Grand Duchess told me’, Cavour wrote to General Marmora, ‘that if France were to unite with us, public opinion would force the Russian government to participate.’31
But in truth, the Tsar was not keen to get involved in any war. In return for French commitments to cancel their support for the Black Sea clauses of the Paris Treaty, Alexander promised only armed neutrality, mobilizing a large Russian force on the border with Galicia to prevent the Austrians from sending troops to Italy. The Austrians had used armed neutrality in favour of the allies during the Crimean War, and Alexander’s decision to follow the same tactic let him take revenge on Austria for its betrayal. Napoleon, for his part, was unwilling to give a firm pledge on the Black Sea clauses, fearing it would damage his relations with Britain, so no formal treaty with the Russians could be reached. But there was a gentlemen’s agreement between the emperors, signed in March 1859, by which the Russians would adopt a stance of ‘benevolent neutrality’ in the event of a Franco-Austrian war in exchange for French ‘good offices’ at a ‘future date’.32
It was on this basis that the French and Piedmontese began their war against Austria in April 1859, in the knowledge that the Russians would advance 300,000 troops towards the Austrian frontier while they attacked in Italy. Only a few years before, Russia would have given military support to Austria against any French attempts to revise the Vienna treaty. The Crimean War had changed everything.
Under the command of Napoleon III and Victor Emmanuel, the Franco-Piedmontese army won a series of rapid victories, destroying the Austrian forces under the command of Emperor Franz Joseph at the battle of Solferino on 24 June, the last major battle in history in which all the armies were under the personal command of their monarchs. By this time, Napoleon was afraid that the German states might take up arms in support of Austria; therefore, without telling the Piedmontese, he signed an armistice with the Austrians at Villafranca, by which most of Lombardy, including its capital, Milan, was transferred to the French, who immediately gave it to Piedmont, as agreed by Napoleon and Cavour at Plombières. The Villafranca deal restored the monarchs of the central Italian states (Parma, Modena and Tuscany) who had been unseated by the popular revolts that broke out at the beginning of the war – a deal that enraged the Piedmontese, though it pleased the Russians, who had deep concerns about the way the Italian movement was taking a revolutionary turn. The Piedmontese army proceeded to annex the central states. Savoy and Nice were transferred to France, its agreed reward for helping the Italian cause. Their cession was opposed by the revolutionary general Giuseppe Garibaldi, a hero of the war against the Austrians, who had been born in Nice. In the spring of 1860, he led his thousand Redshirts on an expedition to conquer Sicily and Naples and unite them with the rest of Italy under Piedmont’s leadership.
The revolutionary turn taken by the Garibaldians placed a severe strain on the Tsar’s relations with Napoleon. It brought home to him that giving his support to the French Emperor’s policies could have dangerous consequences. There was nothing to prevent the tide of nationalism spreading into Habsburg lands and from there into Poland and other Russian territories. In October 1860 Russia broke off relations with Piedmont as a protest against its annexation of Naples. Gorchakov condemned Piedmont for promoting revolution, pledged to oppose the territorial changes taking place in Italy unless they were approved by a new international congress, and gave his cautious backing to the Austrians in Italy (there was no chance of the Russians actually fighting to keep the Habsburgs in Venetia, the only part of the peninsula, along with the papal city of Rome, that had not yet been unified under the control of the first Italian parliament, which met at Turin in 1861). When Victor Emmanuel took the title of King of Italy, in March 1861, the Russians and the Austrians agreed together to refuse him recognition, despite pressure from the British and French. When the British asked Gorchakov to use his influence on the Prussians to recognize the King, the Russian Foreign Minister refused. The Holy Alliance was not quite dead, it seemed. Justifying his refusal to cooperate with Britain’s plans for Italy, Gorchakov maintained that Austria and Turkey might be undermined by revolutionary movements if the powers left unchecked the nationalist uprisings started by the Piedmontese. With tongue in cheek, perhaps, given how the British had justified their actions in the Crimean War, Gorchakov informed Lord Napier, the British ambassador in St Petersburg: ‘We have two cardinal objects: the preservation of Turkey and the preservation of Austria.’33
François Rochebrune
The Polish uprising of 1863 was the final breaking point for Russia’s policy of friendship towards France. Inspired by Garibaldi, Polish students began demonstrations in 1861, prompting General Lambert, the Tsar’s viceroy, to impose martial law. The Polish leaders gathered secretly, some supporting the idea of a popular democratic revolution uniting peasants and workers, others, led by Czartoryski, more conservative, seeking to establish a national movement led by nobles and intellectuals. The uprising began as a spontaneous protest against conscription into the Russian army. Small groups of insurgents fought the mighty Russian army from guerrilla strongholds mainly in the forests of Lithuania, Poland, Belarus and western (Catholic) Ukraine. Some of them had fought against the Russians during the Crimean War, including many of the ‘Zouaves of Death’, organized by François Rochebrune, who had served as an officer with the French Zouaves in the Crimea and had taken part in the Anglo-French expedition to China in the Second Opium War of 1857 before settling in Cracow in Austrian Poland, where he set up a fencing school. Dressed in a black uniform with a white cross and a red fez, and many of them armed with Minié rifles from the Crimean War, the Polish Zouaves swore to die rather than surrender to the Russians.
A clandestine revolutionary government was established in Warsaw. It declared ‘all sons of Poland free and equal citizens’, gave the peasants ownership of land, and appealed for help to the nations of Europe. Pope Pius IX ordered special prayers for the victory of Catholic Poland against Orthodox Russia, and was active in arousing sympathy for the Polish rebels in Italy and France. Napoleon wanted to land troops in the Baltic to support the Poles, but was held back by the British, who feared a renewal of the Crimean War. In the end, the competing French invasion of Mexico prevented troops from being sent. The diplomatic intervention of the Western powers on behalf of Poland angered the Russians, who felt betrayed by the French, in particular. It made the Russians even more determined to crush the Polish insurrectionaries. The Russian army burned whole towns and villages. Tens of thousands of Polish men and women were exiled to Siberia, and hundreds of insurgents were publicly hanged.