The importance of a strong and united Fatherland was the basis of the Italian Risorgimento; a desire to free the nation from the yoke of foreign oppression, exacerbated by the quarrelsome and retrograde pre-unitary States. The violence of the Habsburg Empire and of the troops of Marshal Radetzky provides an idea of the frightful barbarity to which the Italian peninsula had been subjected for centuries, violated and pillaged by foreigners, with all do respect to the Neo-Bourbonists and the pro-Habsburgists with their anti-Italian historical revisionism.
The Habsburg Empire was a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural entity that constantly sought to suppress the Italic populations of northern Italy, with true and proper campaigns of ethnic genocide perpetrated with the aid of the Slavic and German-speaking elements of the Empire. Let's go into detail.
Radetzky's army had committed repeated acts of violence against unarmed civilians before the war of 1848-1849. There was widespread hostile behavior towards Italians by many members of the imperial army, either because of Slavic elements hostile to Italy, or because of common criminals enlisted in the army: a single infantry regiment, named "Erzherzog Ferdinand von Este", consisting of 12 companies, counted as many as 284 "partially dangerous criminals" according to the imperial officers themselves. This animosity obviously grew and was able to manifest itself freely during the conflict.
The lower ranking soldiers and junior officers were given instructions from above to conduct massacres against unarmed people during the Five Days of Milan; during the Ten Days of Brescia General Haynau ordered his men to set fire to every house from which hostile acts were carried out and to shoot all its inhabitants indiscriminately (elderly, women and children included); there was also the very tough siege of an already-exhausted Venice, suffering from hunger and pestilence. These are only the best-known cases in the long list of slaughter of civilians carried out by the Habsburg military units in the period from 1820 to 1866.
To understand how Radetkzy led the war against insurgents, an example can be given: that of Castelnuovo del Garda, a small town in Lombardy whose inhabitants were all killed by the Austrian troops in retaliation. Keep in mind that this is only one of many similar episodes committed by the Habsburg units during the long phase of the wars of Italian independence.
On April 11, 1848, a group of about 400 volunteer Lombard insurgents rested in the village of Castelnuovo del Garda, where they waited for the avant-gardes of the Sardinian army. Radetzky, taking advantage of the fact that the latter were still quite far away, sent a strong column of many thousands of men under the command of General Prince Thurn und Taxis, a member of the highest imperial aristocracy. At first he subjected the territory in which the volunteers were barricaded to a massive bombardment with artillery, and then ordered an attack which, given the disproportion of the forces, forced the volunteers to retreat. After the latter were forced to abandon the field, the Habsburg troops exterminated all the inhabitants of Castelnuovo: there were 113 victims. Only those who managed to flee could escape the massacre. Piero Pieri writes in his masterpiece "Storia militare del Risorgimento":
"The village is set on fire: the Austrian troops want to scare the people from supporting the Piedmontese and insurgents; as many as 113 people, including old men, women, children in great numbers, are massacred or die in the flames."
[PIERO PIERI, “Storia militare del Risorgimento”, Torino 1962, p. 319]During the massacre the local church was desecrated and the attractive women were raped before being killed. After that, the town was set on fire and destroyed by the blaze. After this retaliation, on April 12 the Habsburg troops returned to Verona, where the bulk of the Austrian forces were stationed, and in a show of force they paraded throughout the city with the loot they had captured in order to intimidate the citizens. On April 13, Field Marshal Radetzky, known for his rhetorical verbosity, addressed a proclamation to his subjects, explaining that what had happened in Castelnuovo del Garda was a consequence of the "rebellion" and that he could not prevent such "consequences" (i.e. retaliation) from occurring. This proclamation was clearly a threat to the Italians: whoever would rise up or even support the insurgents would suffer the same fate.
[TOMMASO NETTI, “Castelnuovo e gli Austriaci nel 1848”, edited by Antonio Pighi, Verona 1888; FRANCESCO VECCHIATO, “Castelnuovo del Garda e il 1848 veronese nella cronaca inedita di Gaetano Spandri”, Castelnuovo del Garda 2009]
The repression continued even in peacetime. On his return, Radetzky decreed a state of siege and promulgated the "statutory law", which provided the death penalty even for minor offenses and permitted the arrest, prosecution and execution of alleged violators within only two hours. These rules remained in force for several years. [M. MERIGGI, “ll regno Lombardo-Veneto”, Torino 1987, pp. 351-352]
In just twelve months, from August 1848 to August 1849, 961 hangings and shootings were carried out and 4,000 were sentenced to prison for political reasons. The most affected classes were the aristocracy, professionals, intellectuals, and even a significant number of priests. Many other Italian subjects of the Austrian emperor were condemned to the painful and humiliating pain of public beating:
"From August to December 1848 they arrested and shot several Milanese citizens found to be in possession of weapons, while several others, although not dealt with as harshly, were nevertheless subjected by the military authority — who de facto held full powers of the situation in the absence of a clear administrative reorganization of the territory — to the odious ceremony of public beatings."
[MERIGGI, “Il Regno”, cit., p. 352]All of this was consistent with the mindset of Radetzky himself and also with the instructions that the field marshal had received upon being sent to Italy. The arrival of the Austro-Bohemian noble had been decided by Metternich years earlier as a result of a detailed report by General Clam-Martinic, which an English historian, Alan Sked, summarizes in his essay “The Survival of the Habsburg Empire: Radetzky, the Imperial Army and the Class War, 1848”, writing:
"Clam-Martinitz's advice had been that the Austrians should frighten a people which would always regard them as strangers."This was done both before, during and after the war of 1848-1849.
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