Battle of Mentana, 1867: Garibaldi's last march on Rome

Mentana was a small battle with a long shadow. In military terms it was, as the Enciclopedia Italiana puts it, of modest importance. Politically it was a disaster for France. It ended Garibaldi's last attempt to take Rome by force, it turned Italian opinion against Napoleon III, and three years later it helped leave the French emperor without allies when he went to war with Prussia.²

Background: Rome, the missing capital

By 1861 the new Kingdom of Italy held almost the whole peninsula, but not Rome. The city and the land around it, Latium, still belonged to Pope Pius IX, guarded by a French garrison. Garibaldi had already tried once to take it by force. In 1862 he raised volunteers in the south under the cry of Rome or death, and the Italian government, afraid of a clash with France, sent its own army to stop him. At Aspromonte in Calabria, on 29 August 1862, he was wounded and taken prisoner.³

Two years later the government tried diplomacy. In the September Convention of 1864, negotiated by Marco Minghetti, France agreed to withdraw its troops from Rome, and Italy pledged to respect the Pope's temporal power and keep out of his territory; a secret clause moved the Italian capital from Turin to Florence. The last French soldiers left the Papal States in December 1866. By then the war of 1866 had won Venetia for Italy, and every national hope turned to Rome.⁴ › Battle of Custoza, 1866

In the spring of 1867 Urbano Rattazzi returned to power. Britannica says he allowed Garibaldi to post volunteers along the papal border; Bolton King, in his history of Italian unity, describes volunteers enlisting in public, national guards handing them arms and troops helping them across the frontier. The government was playing a double game. Britannica's Denis Mack Smith writes that the expedition was secretly subsidized by the government while King Victor Emmanuel II pretended otherwise, and the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica speaks of the complicity of the Rattazzi cabinet.⁵

A march on Rome begins

The double game could not last. The government arrested Garibaldi at Sinalunga in southern Tuscany on 24 September 1867, on his way to the frontier, and after a few days in the fortress of Alessandria sent him home to his island of Caprera. His bands crossed into papal territory anyway in early October, from the north near Viterbo and from the south near Frosinone, and fought a string of small actions.⁶

Garibaldi did not stay on Caprera. Italian warships patrolled the island to keep him there, but in October he slipped past them in a small boat and reached the mainland. On 22 October he appeared openly in Florence, where the government, caught between two cabinets, did not dare to arrest him again, and the next day he crossed the papal frontier at Passo Corese.⁷

Inside Rome, the rising that was meant to greet him failed. On the evening of 22 October conspirators blew up part of the zouaves' barracks, but the city did not rise. On 23 October a small band led by the Cairoli brothers, trying to carry weapons into the city, was cut up on the Monti Parioli at Villa Glori, just outside the walls. On 25 October the volunteers stormed the castle town of Monterotondo, some 20 kilometers from Rome, after a bloody fight that lasted through the night.⁸

Armies and commanders

The volunteers were brave but barely an army. Both Bolton King and Bent put the force first gathered at about 7,000 men, and Bent describes it as organized in nothing more than battalions, without ambulances and with old, mixed muskets. Herodote.net calls the volunteers poorly equipped and undisciplined. Bolton King judges that Garibaldi's hand had lost its cunning: his best lieutenants of 1860 were now generals in the regular army, and he relied on his son Menotti and other young officers.⁹

The papal troops were led by General Hermann Kanzler, who sent them out from Rome against the volunteers. His sharpest units were the papal zouaves, the foreign carabinieri and the Legion of Antibes, a corps raised in France for the Pope. Behind them, from 30 October, stood the French: Napoleon III hesitated for days, then sent an expeditionary corps from Toulon on 26 October. Bolton King and the Enciclopedia Italiana both put the force at 22,000 men; the encyclopedia names its two brigade commanders, Generals Polhès and Duplessis.¹⁰

Retreat from the walls of Rome

On 29 October Garibaldi was almost under the walls of Rome. That evening a reconnaissance toward the city was met by rifle fire at the Nomentana bridge and fell back. With no rising inside the walls and the French arriving, he judged an attack hopeless and pulled back to Monterotondo. The retreat broke the spirit of many volunteers. Bolton King says 2,000 deserted in two days; Bent puts the number at no fewer than 5,000. On 30 October, the day the French reached Rome, the Italian army also crossed the papal frontier, as a protest against the French landing that was meant to avoid any clash with them. The same government publicly disowned the volunteers and held up their supplies at the border.¹¹

Garibaldi decided to march east to Tivoli, in the hills. In Bolton King's account he meant to gather reinforcements there and, with the Apennines at his back, wait or fight a guerrilla war; the march exposed his flank to the enemy, and it began hours late. Bent and the Enciclopedia Italiana give the same figure for the column that set out on 3 November: 4,700 men. Kanzler and the French, meanwhile, had marched out of Rome to find him.¹²

The battle in phases

The column had only just passed Mentana when its vanguard ran into rifle fire. Papal zouaves and carabinieri had come up the road from Rome and taken position on the hill, and the surprised vanguard fell back on the village so that the battalions could form a line.¹³

The first phase went to the volunteers. A furious charge by Menotti's battalions drove the zouaves from their position, and Bolton King describes Garibaldi rallying his men to a fine bayonet charge that pressed the papal troops hard. Bent says the volunteers retook the ground they had lost, and the papal line began to fall back toward Rome.¹⁴

Turning point: the chassepots

Then the French came up from the second line, where their brigade had been waiting. Its infantry carried the chassepot, the French breech-loading service rifle of 1866, and Mentana was its first battle; the 1911 Britannica says it inflicted severe losses on Garibaldi's troops. Herodote.net calls its fire effective and accurate. The volunteers, Bolton King writes, were now outnumbered two to one, and the chassepots mowed them down.¹⁵

By late afternoon the day was lost. Enemy troops had worked around the volunteers' flank, and the Garibaldini fell back under fire toward Monterotondo. The accounts of the end differ: the Enciclopedia Italiana says the volunteers could not even reach the town because the road had been cut, while Bent has the main body back there that evening.¹⁶

Counting the cost

The sources differ sharply on the losses. The Enciclopedia Italiana gives 150 killed and 220 wounded among the volunteers, 30 killed and 103 wounded among the papal troops and 2 killed and 38 wounded among the French. Bent says Garibaldi left 400 or 500 men on the field and about as many prisoners. Herodote.net puts the volunteers' loss at nearly a thousand killed and wounded, with 1,500 taken prisoner and 2,000 rifles left behind, and the papal loss at about a hundred killed and wounded.¹⁷

Aftermath

In the night the volunteers made for Passo Corese on the frontier, and on 4 November they handed over their weapons to the Italian troops guarding the border. Garibaldi took a train for Florence, but at Figline station he was arrested on the government's orders and taken to the fort of Varignano near La Spezia, then back to Caprera. Herodote.net adds that the French were careful not to pursue a man so popular around the world.¹⁸

For the French army the day was a success. "The chassepots have done wonders", the French command reported. The Enciclopedia Italiana calls General de Failly's remark cynical and says it deeply offended Italian national feeling; Bolton King calls it tactless, and says it started the suspicion that the expedition had partly been a trial of the new rifle. The Marquis Gioacchino Pepoli, on the King's behalf, warned Napoleon III that Mentana had dealt a mortal blow to the alliance between the two countries.¹⁹

Bolton King's verdict on Garibaldi is severe: he had blundered as a politician and as a general, and the campaign was a series of military mistakes that raised the prestige of the Papacy and humiliated Italy. Britannica records a marked loss of Italian prestige, political and military. The French did not go home either: their troops stayed in the Papal States, and the Pope kept his French protection until Napoleon III fell in 1870.²⁰

Legacy and memory

The loss of goodwill mattered three years later. In 1870, according to the Enciclopedia Italiana, the memory of Mentana was the main obstacle to an alliance of France, Italy and Austria, and Napoleon III faced Prussia alone. His defeat took away the Pope's protector. On 20 September 1870 Italian troops breached the walls at Porta Pia and entered Rome, and Pius IX withdrew into the Vatican, calling himself its prisoner. Garibaldi lost at Mentana, but the cause he fought for won within three years. In that same war, on 9 November 1870, the French won a rare victory at Coulmiers.²¹

For Italian democrats, Mentana became a rallying cry against the Napoleonic alliance and against compromise with the Church. In 1880 an ailing Garibaldi went to Milan for the unveiling of a monument to those who fell at Mentana, paid for, Bent says, by the democratic party as a protest against a subscription then under way for a monument in the city to Napoleon III. The 1911 Britannica records the same visit.²²

Visiting Mentana today

Mentana is a small town on the first slopes of the Sabine hills, a few kilometers from Monterotondo and easily reached from Rome. Its Museo Garibaldino, known as MuGa, was built in 1905 to a design by the architect Giulio De Angelis to keep the relics of the 1867 campaign for Rome and, above all, of the battle of 3 November.²³ › 3 November in military history