The Last Bastion

The 20th of March stands as the anniversary of an event that has all but faded into the fog of posterity. This is regrettable because courage in any epoch, even in the defense of a “lost cause”, is worthy of remembrance so long as its exemplar is a worthy one. The event in question is the surrender, or rather the final demobilization, of the last contingent of the armed forces of the Kingdom of Two Sicilies at the fortress of Civitella Del Tronto in the Abruzzi. The story, in brief, goes thus:

King Francesco II, destined to be the last Bourbon monarch of the curiously named Kingdom of Two Sicilies, had by the 11th of October 1860 already lost both of his Kingdom’s “Sicilies”, which were, in point of fact, the actual island of Sicily and the royal capital of Naples. Both had been seized by the flamboyant revolutionary rabble-rouser, Giuseppe Garabaldi and his so-called thousand “Red-Shirts”, who had turned their zeal for Italian unification into an indefatigable armed leveler that would consume the last vestiges of the seven centuries old southern Italian polity. In Sicily, the luke-warm Bourbon defenders holed up at the fortress of Messina after some token resistance to Garabaldi’s ragamuffins, who quickly picked up new recruits amongst the truculent Sicilian peasants and liberal burghers. Supported by the British navy, Garabaldi then moved his troops across the straits of Messina to Calabria, where he found more disaffected Bourbon subjects to join his army. After a few inconclusive clashes with the main Neapolitan army, Francesco pulled his main army back to the fortress of Gaeta, leaving the capital of Naples to the Red Shirts, who triumphantly entered the city on the September 7th.  Shortly thereafter, on October 11th, 1860,  the forces of the Kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont, led by King Victor Emmanuel (House of Savoy) and General Cialdini, crossed the northern frontier of the Neapolitan Kingdom in the Marches and entered the Abruzzi.  The Sardinian army, the finest equipped and best trained of all of the Italian military hosts, expected a joyous reception from the populace upon entering the long-suffering northern Neapolitan provinces. However, like the French in 1799, this rather convenient appraisal of unanimous disaffection amongst the locals would prove to be dangerously simplistic.  While the local citizens militia–understandably disinclined to fight a forlorn delaying action on behalf of a sovereign whose father had waged an unrelenting campaign of repression on the region in the late 1840s and early 1850s–quickly capitulated with the support of the local intendant,  the single battalion of Bourbon regular troops garrisoning the province, commanded by a Colonel named Giovane, along with some local gendarmes and nobles, refused to surrender and entrenched themselves in the nearly impregnable fortress at Civitella Del Tronto. Leaving a small force under General Pinatelli behind to invest the fort, the Sardinians moved on southward to assist Garabaldi in besieging the Francesco and his army at the citadel of Gaeta.

Meanwhile in Civitella, Colonel Giovane and his men launched a guerrilla campaign against the occupying forces under General Pinatelli during the winter months. Allying themselves with local brigands, they assaulted the Sardinians supply lines and launched bloody sorties from the fortress. Wishing to avoid being cut off from the main force and destroyed piecemeal, Pinatelli withdrew from the province until the spring. It was a great moral victory for the courageous garrison, but Giovane and his men had no offensive striking power, of course, and could do nothing affect the outcome of the ongoing siege at Gaeta, where their hard-pressed king was eventually forced to throw in the towel on 13 February 1861.  Even before they had Francesco and his army in their power, however, the Sardinians had staged a farcical plebiscite whose outcome– not surprisingly considering it was done with open ballots under the watchful eye of Sardinian soldiers– expressed support of the people of the Two Sicilies for annexation to the Sardinian kingdom.  With the King and the main army now gone, Giovane and his men soon found themselves re-engaged with the bulk of the Sardinian expeditionary forces. In spite of all of the odds and the entreaties from the sympathetic Sardinian besiegers to surrender, Giovane and his troops refused to quit.  On the 17th of March, in order to assuage the brave defenders of Civitella–men without a state– to lay down their arms, the Sardinian parliament, led by the crafty Camillo Cavour, voted to re-style the Sardinian kingdom as the Kingdom of Italy. The Sardinians also coerced the former Bourbon King to personally implore his men to come down from their castle. Francesco readily complied, and with the words of their King and the knowledge that their adversaries had dissolved, albeit voluntarily, their nation as well,  the defenders of Civitella del Tronto surrendered their weapons and marched out of the gates of their bastion into a new country on 20 March 1861.

The Petrograd Mutiny

Following three years of military stalemate on the Eastern front, on 11 and 12 March, 1917  faced with orders to violently suppress the burgeoning anti-government and anti-war protests that have racked the Russian capital, the reserve Guards regiments of the Petrograd garrison mutiny. After rapidly overcoming the few remaining loyalist units and officers, the renegades–aided by the demonstrators–seize control of all the key strategic points in the city by nightfall. The surrounding garrisons, demoralized at the prospect of returning to the slaughter of the trenches, join their comrades in St. Petersburg the next day. Unable to regain control of the situation, Tsar Nicholas II, whose family had ruled. Russia since in the early 17th century, abdicates his throne in favor of an elected Constituent assembly. As the historian Thomas Carlyle noted succinctly nearly a century before the Petrograd uprising, “Soldiers do revolt: were it not so, several things which are transient in this world might be perennial.”

One of the best English language accounts–albeit one that is a bit too circumspect at times–of the events in and around Petrograd on the 27/28 February is Alexsei Tarasov-Rodionov’s February 1917.  Rodionov, a Bolshevik underground cell member, was assigned to an army machine gun training company outside of the capital shortly before the worker demonstrations began in early March (or late February by the old “Orthodox” Julian calendar used in Russia at the time). He eventually found himself at the head of a rag-tag column of 50,000 renegades from the disparate Finland Gulf garrisons, who he deftly marched to the capital in support of their refractory comrades. After relinquishing command his band of merry mutineers to the newly formed Petrograd Soviet, Rodionov would go on to command a Red Army division during the ensuing civil war. Following the war, he became a noted Communist literati. Unfortunately for Tarasov-Rodionov, his novels were a bit too expositional and critical for the party, and when Stalin began purging the USSR of enemies, real and imagined, Alexsei found himself on the list of proscribed.  He was “disappeared” sometime in 1938 and never heard from again. As with so many revolutions before and since, the Russian Revolution consumed many of its own children.

Mercenaries and Repression

In the  midst of the slaughter underway in Libya and Bahrain, many outraged demonstrators and observers have alleged that foreign mercenaries–Saudi Arabs in Bahrain and Sub-Saharan Africans in Libya– have been at the vanguard of the government’s crackdown. Certainly this accusation seems plausible. In Bahrain’s case, it’s government, like most Gulf monarchies, does employ some foreigners in its army. Before Iraq became an international pariah in 1991, many such Gulf Arab gun hands were Iraqis; today, Saudis seem to make up the preponderance of the GCC’s soldiers of fortune.  The practice of employing Saudi nationals in the military became so widespread in Kuwait, in fact, that it was eventually forbidden in 2004 out of fear of radical Islamist infiltration in the armed forces there. 

Historically, the ancien regime European monarchies employed mercenaries, the most ubiquitous being those from Switzerland and the southern German states. The reason for any government, past and present, to use non-native troops is two fold: first, they augment existing forces without the social or economic impact of conscripting natives (a crucial consideration in small polities), and second, they are often viewed as more reliable in suppressing domestic insurrections.  

Some notable examples of hired foreign military augmentees in western history are:

The foederati of Ancient Rome were treaty allies, or client states, obligated to provide soldiers when required by the Roman government. These troops become progressively independent during the later part of the empire. It was a series of foederati renegades that eventually toppled the Western Empire: notably the German chieftains Alaric (410) and Odoacer (476).

As noted above, the Italian city-states of the Renaissance period often employed condottiere for financial reasons, much to the chagrin of Italian unionists like Machiavelli, who advocated a citizen’s militia based upon that of ancient Rome. The condottiere became a scourge to their employers, often betraying them at inopportune moments or becoming involved in domestic intrigues.

The German House of Hanover that ruled over Great Britain until modern times contracted Hessian (from Hesse-Cassel)  mercenaries to fight an unpopular war against rebellious colonists in America in 1776.

The French Bourbon Monarchy’s famous Swiss Guards made their glorious final stand against a republican mob on the 10th of August 1792 at the Tuileries Palace.

The Swiss Guards retained by the Bourbon Kings of Naples from the early part of the 19th century until their recall in 1860 by the new pacifist Swiss government. The Bourbon used these troops to deadly effect on 15 May 1848, to suppress a liberal opposition and a National Guard mutiny in Naples. Their withdraw cost the Kingdom of Two Sicilies their most redoubtable combatants.

The Pope’s Swiss Guards, who gained fame through their forlorn defense of the Vatican in 1527, were reborn in the tribulations of 19th century Italian Risorgimento, which forced the Papal government to reconstitute its army with foreign Catholic aid. They remain one of last vestiges of the legendary corps of Swiss pikeman.

The Spanish and French Foreign Legions are well-known forces, though the Spanish legion is now only open to native Spaniards.

The colonies of the Western nations often provided troops to support their foreign wars, though in some cases, as in the Spanish Civil War 1936-1939, they were used against their employers.

The Spanish Civil War saw foreign volunteers on both sides, including the COMINTERN’s International Brigades and Hitler’s Condor Legion.

The Second World War featured a significant amount of “emigre” and “volunteer” foreign legions, including the Spanish Blue Division, which fought in the German Army. 

Serbian and German mercenaries were rumored to have been employed in large numbers by various Western and non-Western governments in the wake of the Balkans Conflicts and World War II, respectively.

Revolution and Reaction, continued

As we approach the anniversary of the ratification of the ill-fated Constitution of the Kingdom of Two Sicilies (February 10-13, 1848), it perhaps bears reflecting upon the words of the Neapolitan scholar Luigi Settembrini (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luigi_Settembrini), a moderate liberal professor and Mazzinian dissident, whose scathing indictment of the Bourbon court and ministry, Protesta del popolo delle due Sicilie (1847), became a sort of sacred pamphlet for disaffected moderates and radical reformers in the kingdom. Hounded into exile by the government for his writings shortly before the uprisings in January 1848, Settembrini returned to a hero’s welcome in mid-February, where he was appointed Minister of Public Instruction. However, shortly after taking the post Settembrini became disturbed by the license and disorder he saw overtaking the capital and countryside as a result of the relaxed laws and radical policies that the new ministry has promulgated in the wake of the enactment of the constitutional statute. While by no means a conservative in his political worldview, Settembrini was deeply shocked by his fellow citizens’ abuse of their new freedoms and was even more irritated at his liberal colleagues’ failure to build durable institutions to solidify the gains that had been made.  In short, Settembrini saw the liberals incompetent governance, their lack of leadership and their irrational contempt for anything associated with the old order would invite the very counter-revolution and reaction that in fact occurred on 15 May 1848.  In his memoirs he described the scene,

The revamped (liberal) ministry, however, could not prevent the excitement from growing daily. They broke up the great machine of the old government, but with little wisdom. They were able to eliminate the bad, but they failed to find the good to put in their places. The clever and the corrupt often remained. The inept substitutes did not know what to do. everybody chattered, in the streets they complained about everything. They had won a constitution by shouting, so everyone thought he could get a job by shouting. In the clubs there was much talking about every subject under the sun, and those who talked the fastest and aired the most fantastic plans were the most applauded. The press, unrestricted, published scandal, calumny, truth, infamy and criticized everybody. The masses said, “If there is no work, and we are starving, what liberty is that? Previously the King was one man and ate for one;  now he is a thousand, and they eat for a thousand. We must concern ourselves with our own situation.” In the provinces the peasants invaded and divided up the lands of the king, or of the landlords who had seized them earlier and were hated because they had gotten rich through usury and extortion…And in the city of Naples, the mob, not having any lands to divide up, contemplated attacking and sacking the houses (of the rich) as had been done in 1799…Henceforth the people became crazy, the constitution contented no one anymore…Every day the tumult grew. Crowds gathered in the streets and shouted down with the ministry, or down with this or that official, as the government trembled in fear. (Settembrini, Ricordanze, 180-183, as quote in J. Santore, “Modern Naples: A Documentary History 1799-1999)

–Cornelius

(part 1 of Revolution and Reaction: https://historicalcurios.wordpress.com/2011/02/05/revolution-and-reaction/ )

The Citizen and the Soldier

 

I suppose it is fitting that a blog that has focused so much attention on–and has its banner image bedecked with a painting of the spiritual founder of–the nation-state army, should itself be launched in a time where standing militaries have again played a crucial role in two major revolutionary upheavals.

It goes without saying that military coup d’état, even ones precipitated by mass popular uprisings, can be somewhat of a mixed blessing, but they are by no means inevitably a precursor to a Bonapartist military strongman or junta. Portugal’s 1974 “April Captains” coup and subsequent Carnation Revolution led to the creation of a parliamentary republic in that country. Tunisia and Egypt’s fates, of course, are yet to be decided.  

In  Tunisia, the catalyst of former President Ben Ali’s departure was Army commander, Rashid Ammar and his generals.  Upon securing Ben Ali’s abdication, several party leaders and high-ranking military officers offered General Ammar the presidency, however, he spurned the mantle and returned to his duties as chief of the army staff leaving Ben Ali’s technocrat Prime Minister to head the embattled government.  In Egypt, the Supreme Military Council, led by Defense Minister Hussein Tantawi, deposed Hosni Mubarak–along with his ephemeral Vice President– and has taken over the executive and legislative functions of the administration. Hopefully, both countries will move onto the glide path of representative governance and judicial reform while sustaining the secular and pluralist social policies of their predecessors.

Since we have about exhausted this topic, we will leave our readers with the following quote from Thomas Howard, the 3rd Earl of Effingham, who in the spring of 1775 was ordered to lead his 22nd Regiment of Foot across the Atlantic to aid the British forces there attempting to suppress a massive insurrection that had ignited the King’s American colonies. Instead,  Lord Thomas abjured and resigned his commission in protest. Effingham, like many of his brother officers and noblemen, sympathized with the American cause, but in stark contrast to most of his compatriots, he had the moral fortitude to publicly repudiate the government’s policies.  Called before his colleagues in the House of Lords to explain his decision, he delivered a brief but eloquent meditation on the obligations of a citizen-soldier that would win him fame in the rebellious colonies and respect amongst his peers:

“Ever since I was a an age to have any ambition at all, my highest has been to serve my country in a military capacity. If there was on earth an event I dreaded, it was to see this country so situated, as to make that profession incompatible with my duty as a citizen. That period is, in my opinion arrived; and I have thought myself bound to relinquish all the hopes I had formed, by a resignation; which appeared to me as the only method of avoiding the guilt of enslaving my country, and imbruing my hands in the blood of her sons. When the duties of a soldier and citizen become inconsistent, I shall always think myself obliged to sink the character of the soldier in that of the citizen, till such time as those duties shall again, by malice of our real enemies, become united.”

–Servius

Frunze Academy Reunion?

My take on the latest developments in Egypt:

While the Obama administration has justifiably left Mubarak and his lieutenants  in the lurch, the problem is that the sclerotic Egyptian military oligarchy clearly doesn’t appreciate Washington’s sanctimonious lectures and seems less and less apt to cede power anytime soon. Egyptian VP Omar Suleiman has publicly aired his discontent with ”foreign interference” in the demonstrations and he recently indicated that his patience for the festive masses in Tahrir square is reaching its terminus.  My prediction is that the Egyptian junta–which is filled with geriatric graduates of Moscow’s Frunze Military Academy– will attempt to gravitate toward its former Cold War comrade, Russia, for the diplomatic cover necessary to effectuate a crackdown. The advantage for the Putin/Medvedev government is that, in contrast to the scathing condemnation it received for its tacit support of Lukashenko’s suppression of pro-democratic demonstrations this past winter, it can obfuscate any complicity it might have in any ugliness in Egypt by pointing ominously to the US for that country’s past support of Mubarak. The Russians could then emerge from the shadows to make a feeble attempt to appear to be an honest broker in the region, as they did in Iran, until, of course, they start signing trade and arms deals with the Egyptian government.

Of course, it could be that I’m just a pessimist.

–Gracchus

Sundry open source articles on Russian-Egyptian relations:

http://www.acus.org/new_atlanticist/mubarak-legend

http://t.co/GWVIzh7

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article6565539.ece

http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/may/14/newsid_2511000/2511423.stm

Pauper-Agitators

While perusing the online dailies this morning, I spotted this article from the redoubtable Der Spiegel with the tendentious byline, ”Mubarak’s Hired Thugs : Rural Poor Paid to Attack Opposition Supporters.”  http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,743537,00.html .

Describing the alleged origins of the pro-government toughs who clashed last Wednesday with the anti-Mubarak  activists  in and around Tahrir Square in Cairo, the authors of the piece assert that,

In Cairo’s working-class district, they organized a big demonstration, including a motorcade of cars and motorbikes. They (the pro-Mubarak supporters) shouted slogans such as “Mubarak, we kneel before you,” and “Yes to the president of peace.” Taking part were members of trade unions and associations, as well as employees of state-run companies, who were obviously told by their bosses to attend…

In every province, there are party offices. There, people — and especially seasonal workers — are assembled and offered a tiny sum of money to take part in the bloody battle to keep Mubarak in power. There is not much work on the land at this time of year. Terribly poor and illiterate, they set off to do their employers’ bidding for a paltry sum equivalent to around €10-€15 ($14-$20). They are cheap, they are desperate, and they don’t ask questions. Thousands have taken part, though it is difficult to estimate the exact figure. According to eyewitnesses, around 4,000 people took part in the counter-demonstrations in Cairo and Alexandria on Wednesday.

While it is certainly possible that the allegations of pay-offs and coercion are true, no evidence of such was provided in the story; not even an anonymous quote from one of these gullible pauper-agitators.  While the tradition of political parties, community organizers and labor unions cajoling poor people to take part in political activities for meager compensation is nothing new nor solely relegated  to authoritarian states, I do find the contrast between the media’s coverage of the two divergent camps quite unsatisfactory. The Mubarak regime is popular among certain segments of the upper and middle class, the civil service and the military, but it also retains some genuine support from the peasantry and working classes as well. 1)  http://bit.ly/h1J4Ac  2)  http://www.sify.com/news/cameleer-only-wanted-to-end-protests-so-he-could-feed-kin-news-international-lchrkicchji.html

For a historical parallel, I will return to the forlorn Kingdom of Two Sicilies in the 19th century, whose capital, Naples, was home to the famous lazzaroni: the penurious princes of the city’s sizeable indigent population. Cropping up first during the Spanish domination period of Southern Italy (the Viceroyalty)  in the 16th century, the lazzaroni were artfully described by Angus Heriot in his tale of The French in Italy 1796-1799 (see http://tinyurl.com/4a3o9bb  for a full citation):

“..most numerous and most important of all in Naples, there were the poor (estimated to be 30 to 40,000 in 1799)– the milling thousands who inhabited the narrow alleys and teetering tenements of the city, the very type of the ancestral slum-dweller. ..Their aristocracy were the lazzaroni–ragged, flamboyant creatures who lived by their wits, despising work and only doing it when nothing else offered, yet half-respected by the most respectable classes and the King himself. Under Masaniello (a fish-monger turned rabble-rouser) they had taken possession of the city (from the Spanish in 1647); they were again its masters in 1799 when (King) Ferdinand had fled and the French not yet arrived, and the inept aristocracy proved unequal to their task.”

To use modern parlance, the lazzaroni were underemployed homeless people, who occasionally worked odd jobs as stevedores, hucksters and street cleaners while taking advantage of Naples’ extensive network of government and church-run poorhouses and  food banks to sustain them.While often capable of organizing themselves for concerted action when the opportunity presented itself, they were by no means a monolithic or fixed class. In general, however, it can be stated that their ranks grew throughout the 18th century, as thousands of provincials flocked to Naples to escape famines and droughts in the countryside. They also tended to ally themselves with the monarchy, which, during the reign of Ferdinand I (1751-1825), had commissioned the construction of several massive hospices and food distribution centers in the capital. Furthermore, because the liberal economic reformers of the 18th century railed openly against the unintended consequences of the royal government’s paternalism which they felt had aggrandized and enabled the city’s chronic indigent population, large numbers of lazzaroni hoods sided with the Bourbons in their clashes with Jacobin and liberal partisans in the late 18th and 19th centuries. Like the anti-government activists in Egypt today, liberal polemicists would often accuse the court of inciting lazzaroni mobs with specie or promises of unfettered plunder and license. How much was true then, as now, is uncertain, but the evidence seems to indicate that the lazzaroni were not as staunchly or uniformly pro-Bourbon as their opponents imagined. Like any social group they were above all opportunists: in 1848 they joined the King’s army in its assault against the liberal National Guard on the sanguinary 15th of May, but when Garabaldi expelled the feckless Francis II and his army from the city twelve year later,  the lazzaroni welcomed the charismatic revolutionary and his red shirts with jubilance and celebration.

–Cornelius