WHY ITALY HATES AUSTRIA.
PEOPLE hav been heard to ask, even in thisyear 18a, why the Italians we suddenly so impatient to get rid of Austria. The Italians a not " so impatient " ; the wonder is that they have borne the fliction of repression, terror, suffering, loss, and dis- honour so I ng ; but since Englishmen have forgotten how the misery has come home to individuals, we will give a few passages of the old story. We have lately received those Neapolitan exiles who could exemplify in their own persons the treatment that they had experienced under a Government which daily violates the constitutional law of its own existence,—a Government against which our own had made a vain " demonstration," professedly to carry out the policy of 1856. At the other extremity of Italy the endurance of the natives was of an equally practical kind. Englishmen can have little idea of the annoyance which poisons the life of an Italian—say in Lombardy ; but a very few facts may possibly exemplify the habitual con- dition of the people. The police of Milan may be said to consist of an Austrian soldiery—a police armed with the sabre, holding the authority of a conquering race, and exasperated by inevitable alienation. The Austrians, as the reader will pre- sently understand, have rendered themselves so intolerable that Italians cannot associate with them ; and if you enter the pit of a theatre you will see the first few seats taken by Austrians, while the Italians who are driven to the back, leave one seat entirely vacant between themselves and the aliens. 'If an English officer in the Austrian service discovers relatives of his own amongst the Italians in Milan, he forbears to notice them, lest they should be- come suspected and be driven from Italian society. We pursue the narrative in the language of an esteemed correspondent, who knows the country well, and travelled it in recent years— In a recent paper on occupation in Italy, it is observed—" If England upholds such a system it is only from ignorance of its enormities." In order to aid in enlightening this ignorance, may I ask you to insert the following extracts from the Austian Penal Code, established in the Lom- bardo-Venetian provinces in 1815, with which few of your readers are likely to be acquainted, together with certain facts which may serve to modify the admiration occasionally expressed for the " paternal " rule of Austria. I could have added many more from my personal knowledge during a prolonged residenee in different parts of Italy in 1853-'54-'55, but I have preferred offering such as can be authenticated by evidence which the most violent enemies of Italian independence cannot call in question, the " Official Gazette of Milan." To begin with the Penal Code. What do Englishmen say to this ? 1. The proceedings are to be strictly secret. The defence of the accused to be given in writing; the prisoner can claim no defender, nor can he demand that the charges brought against him should be communicated to him." Art. 337.
Corporal chastisement forms a fundamental part of the code. High and low, rich and poor, man and woman are subjected to this degrading treatment, —as degrading to the full in the eyes of an Italian as in those of an Englishman. True, "not more than fifty blows are to be admin- istered at one time." In the case of youths under eighteen, and younger women, rods are to be substituted for the stick. Art. 20.
When the sentence has been pronounced, the punishment may be aug- mented by the addition of fasting and the bastinado. Art. 272L Imprisonment is of three descriptions—dui°, piu duro, durissimo. The latter is thus described in the penal code, art 14. " The prisoner is to be confined in a dungeon, shut out from all external communica- tion, with just air and light sufficient to sustain existence. He is to be loaded with fetters hand and foot, day and night, and to be fastened by a chain to an iron-ring rivetted round his waist—except during the hours of work. His food is to be bread and water, soup once in two days, no meat. His bed is to be formed of bare planks, and it is forbid- den to speak to any one even his gaolers." It was to this treatment that the illustrious patriots confined in the Spielberg were subjected ; it is beneath similar treatment that some of the best and noblest of Italians are now writhing. The Penal Code, section 377, commands "that in everything relating to the state, the tcife shall denounce the husband, the husband the wife, the child the father the father the child, or on pain of punishment as accomplices." Almost all political offences are still brought before what is called the " Tribunalo Stadario" (sect. 500-501 of the Penal Code.) This tribunal is composed of military officers, Ger- mans, Croats, and Bohemians, who scarcely understand a word of Italian, and who from habit, education, and national prejudice, detest and scorn the Italian people. They speak German to each other; the witnesses are questioned in German, of which, if Italians, they in their turn sel- dom comprehend a syllable, while if otherwise, they are sure to give their testimony against the prisoner. Thus, says Giovini, the learned author of " Austria in Italia," the accused having. no one to defend him may be condemned almost without knowing his crime, and learn it only when he is informed "that in half an hour the rope will be round his neck." The slightest demonstration of popular feeling is visited by the meat summary and brutal punishment Thus in 1849, on the birthday of the Emperor, certain hisses having been heard issuing from the midst of the crowd in one of the most frequented streets in Milan in front of the Café di Mazza, of which the object apparently was the Anetrian flag hoisted in the balcony of a well-known courtesan, " all the passers-by . wereveized, drugged-before a military nibunal, and condemned to diffe- rent degrees of corporal punishment, according to the degree of their offence," says the Gazette OffIciale of Milan, 24th August 1849. Among the accused were men of high standing and irreproachable character, merchants, barristers, students, many of whe— probably were utterly ignorant of the whole affair, and two young bals, also perfectly respect- able. The latter were condemned to forty strokes each. The sentence was executed instantly after being pronounced on the public place before the castle, in the presence of a troop of Austrian officers, who laughed with contemptuous cynicism at the indecent exposure and the cries of the victims. So far the tale. Now for the episode. The military com- mandant of Milan sent the municipality a bill for 33 florins, 9 kreuners (21. 19s. 64) far lime expense of ice applied to the swollen lacerated fiedi to prevent gangrene, and for the sticks and rods broken and consumed in the punishment of the seditious in the revolt of the 10th of August. In addi- dition the Marshal commanded the town to indemnify the courtesan who had been "terr(fied by the scene," with the sum of 20,000 livres (6001.) How touching is the care of such a paternal government. It may be objected, that these disgraceful barbarities were committed only immediately after the revolution of 1848-'9, at a period of great irritation. Did space permit, I could present you with countless well authenticated cases, to prove that this system of tyranny, and brutality commenced from the very moment that Italy was handed over in 1815 to the mercy of her Austrian masters, that it is one from which Austria has never deviated, and which she imposes wherever she is mistress. What scenes have I not beheld at Leghorn, Bologna, Ancona, Ferrara, wherever the Austrians had established garrisons. Under pretext of defending Pins IX., they have taken justice or vengeance into their own hands, condemning to a summary and ignominious death, often without trial, hundreds of men, many completely innocent; levying enormous taxes in the name of the Pope, who never received one farthing of them ; living in free quarters on the unfortunate inhabitants, and rewarding them by the bastinado, administered literally at pleasure without dis- tinction of rank or sex. [A recent " reform ' appoints women to basti- nado women.j The following will be found in the Augsburg Unica-sal Gazette, hum- ray 20, 1852,—a paper unduly partial to the Italians. Captain I., commanding officer of the 21st Austrian regiment of the Line, posted at Perouse, has commanded forty blows to be administered in the public place to an estimable citizen M. Monganelli, simply be- cause he refused to receive a second Austrian officer when he had one already quartered on him. (There were only ten to be divided among all the inhabitants.) This arbitrary sentence was preceded neither by inquiry nor formality. The same officer, a few days before, inflicted forty blows on a poor peasant, who happened to have a cotton handker- chief round his neck which once had been of three colours, though they were nearly obliterated by repeated washings." Not less deplorable is the universal venality of the Austrian adminis- trators, civil and military, in Italy; they regard it as a conquered coun- try, to be plundered ad libitum. This will account for those enormous fortunes which so many have accumulated.
Nowhere is this exhibited so unblushingly as in the conscription, where youths utterly unfit by bodily infirmities for military services are inscribed as fit, merely for the purpose of extorting money to obtain their release. If they are suspected of patriotic or liberal sentiments, a differ- ent course is adopted ; they are first permitted to pay for a substitute, and then seized and compelled by threats and blows to enroll in an Aus- trian regiment, to be sent to the marshes of Croatia, to be forced to fight against their own flesh and blood. It is said that the Lombard soldiers have returned with alacrity to their regiments. If so, the reason lies, doubtless, in the fact that the communes to which they belong are heavily fined for every soldier missing; that, in addition, their relatives
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are liable to the most cruel treatment in case of their desertion. Several cases of this description came under my own observation. Austria ap- peals to the treaties of 1816. Even supposing that any treaty can be sacred in which one nation is recklessly sacrificed, bound hand and foot to the ambition of another, how can Austria dare to invoke them ? Did she remember them when she annexed the republic of Cracow to her dominion; in defiance of the protestations of Europe, under pretext that the tranquillity of Poland demanded that annexation ? Dares she invoke them now, that the peace and security of Europe, the best and holiest interests of humanity, are at stake ? Surely, the cline is at hand when Europe will perceive that, even in an interested point of view, an Italy, strong, tranquil, and independent, is preferable to one perpetually agi- tated by the convulsions of agony and despair, and in its turn agitating all surrounding nations.
It must be remembered that the police, as we have said, are an armed soldiery characterized by the manners of a common sol- diery; the Italians are a very sober people. They abstain from going near the Austrian canteen not only because the spectacles there are intolerable, almost unimaginable to the Italian, but be- cause the proximity is actually unsafe. That is not the worst. The Austrian soldiers are men of strongly-developed physique ; Italian women are peculiarly attractive; soldiers feel them- selves free to assail any woman, any lay, anywhere,—even the presence of her husband not shielding her. And should he be provoked into a brawl with the soldiery, the Police authorities, of course, know which side must be in the right. We have said no- thing here of the drain of wealth from Lombardo-Venetia to feed Austrian tyranny ; nothing of social misery flowing from political oppression ; nothing of restrictions forced upon a land naturally made for commerce : we have spoken only of those sufferings which become personal in their pressure, and which make the Ita- lian hate and loathe the very sight or sound. of a live Austrian.
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