The Defeat of the Piedmontese

According to the latest reports arriving from Italy, the defeat of the Piedmontese at Novara is by no means as decisive as the telegraphic despatch sent to Paris had claimed.

The Piedmontese have been beaten, cut off from Turin and thrown back into the mountains. That is all.

If Piedmont were a republic, if the Turin government were revolutionary and had the courage to resort to revolutionary means – nothing would be lost. But Italian independence is being lost – not to the invincibility of Austrian arms, but to the cowardice of the Piedmontese monarchy.

How did the Austrians win? Through the fact that, in the Piedmontese army, two divisions were separated from the other three by Ramorino’s treachery, and these three isolated divisions were then defeated by Austrian superior numbers. These three divisions have now been driven back to the foot of the Valais Alps.

From the outset it was an enormous mistake that the Piedmontese opposed the Austrians with nothing but a regular army, that they wanted to wage an ordinary, bourgeois, honourable war against them. A people that wants to conquer its independence must not confine itself to the ordinary means of warfare. Mass uprising, revolutionary war, guerrillas everywhere – that is the only means whereby a small people can get the better of a large one, whereby a less strong army can be put in a position to resist a stronger and better-organised one.

The Spaniards proved it in 1807-12, the Hungarians are proving it even now.

Chrzanowski was defeated at Novara and cut off from Turin; Radetzky stood 9 miles from Turin. In a monarchy, like Piedmont, even a constitutional one, the campaign was thereby decided; peace was sued for from Radetzky. But in a republic nothing whatever was decided by this. Had not the unavoidable cowardice of monarchies, which never has the courage to resort to the most extreme revolutionary means, had not this cowardice held them back, Chrzanowski’s defeat could have become a blessing for Italy.

If Piedmont were a republic, which need take no account of monarchical traditions, a path stood open to it to end the campaign in quite a different way.

Chrzanowski was driven back towards Biella and Borgo Manero. There, where the Swiss Alps make any further retreat impossible, where the two or three narrow river valleys make any dispersal of the army as good as impossible, there it was easy to concentrate the army and, by a bold march, to render Radetzky’s victory fruitless.

If the chiefs of the Piedmontese army possessed revolutionary courage, if they knew that in Turin there sat a revolutionary government prepared for extremes, their course of action was very simple.

After the battle of Novara, 30-40,000 Piedmontese troops stood on Lake Maggiore. This corps, concentrated in two days, could have thrown itself into Lombardy, where there are not 12,000 Austrians; it could have occupied Milan, Brescia, Cremona, organised the general uprising, defeated piecemeal the individual Austrian corps advancing from the Venetian region, and thereby blown Radetzky’s entire operational base sky-high.

Radetzky, instead of marching on Turin, would at once have had to turn round and return to Lombardy, pursued by the mass levy of the Piedmontese, which naturally had to support the Lombard insurrection.

This genuine national war, a war such as the Lombards waged in March 1848 and with which they drove Radetzky back behind the Oglio and Mincio, this war would have driven the whole of Italy into the struggle and breathed quite different energy into the Romans and Tuscans.

While Radetzky still stood between the Po and the Ticino, pondering whether to go forward or backward, the Piedmontese and Lombards could have marched to the gates of Venice, relieved Venice, drawn La Marmora and Roman troops to themselves, harassed and weakened the Austrian Field Marshal by innumerable swarms of guerrillas, split up his troops and finally defeated him. Lombardy was only waiting for the entry of the Piedmontese; it rose already, without waiting for it. Only the Austrian citadels held the Lombard towns in check. Ten thousand Piedmontese were already in Lombardy; had another 20-30,000 marched in, Radetzky’s retreat would have been impossible.

But mass uprising, the general insurrection of the people – these are means at the thought of applying which monarchy recoils. These are means that only the republic applies – 1793 furnishes proof of that. These are means whose execution presupposes revolutionary terrorism, and where is the monarch who could bring himself to that?

Thus what has ruined the Italians is not the defeat at Novara and Vigevano, it is the cowardice and moderation into which the monarchy forces them. The lost battle of Novara brought only a strategic disadvantage: they were cut off from Turin, while the road there lay open for the Austrians. This disadvantage was utterly insignificant if the lost battle were followed immediately by the genuine revolutionary war, if the rest of the Italian army at once declared itself the nucleus of the national mass uprising, if the honourable strategic army war were transformed into a people’s war, such as the French waged in 1793.

But of course! Revolutionary war, mass levy and terrorism – monarchy will never bring itself to that. It will sooner make peace with its bitterest, equal-born enemy than ally itself with the people.

Charles Albert may be a traitor or not – the crown of Charles Albert, the monarchy alone would have sufficed to ruin Italy.

But Charles Albert is a traitor. The news is going through all the French papers of the great European counter-revolutionary plot among all the great powers, of the counter-revolution’s campaign plan for the final suppression of all the European peoples. Russia and England, Prussia and Austria, France and Sardinia have signed this new Holy Alliance.

Charles Albert had orders to begin war with Austria, to let himself be beaten and thereby afford the Austrians the opportunity to restore “order” in Piedmont, in Florence, in Rome, and to have constitutions under martial law imposed upon them everywhere. In return Charles Albert received Parma and Piacenza, the Russians pacified Hungary; France was to become an empire and with that Europe’s peace was restored. That is, according to the French papers, the great plan of the counter-revolution; and this plan explains Ramorino’s treachery and explains the defeat of the Italians.

Monarchy, however, has received a fresh blow through Radetzky’s victory. The battle of Novara and the subsequent paralysis of the Piedmontese prove that a people, in the most extreme situations, when it requires the exertion of all its strength to save itself, is hampered by nothing more than by monarchy. If Italy is not to perish through monarchy, then above all monarchy must perish in Italy.