Today, no one disputes the central role of Rome in contemporary Italy. The Eternal City encompasses artistic majesty, the seat of the Vatican, and the capital of the unified state. What seems obvious to us today was not always the case, even for our Transalpine neighbors. This makes it particularly interesting to delve into this “history of Rome and the Romans, from Napoleon I to the present day,” a book written by Catherine Brice, Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Paris XII and a teacher at Sciences-Po Paris. Drawing on her impressive knowledge of the city where she lived for ten years, the author enjoys unfolding a shared history, a unique parallel between the transformations of Rome and the rise of Italy. She describes, particularly smoothly, the close, sometimes poorly identified links between architectural transformations, urban changes, and national destiny.
In the context of the Agro Romano, “this vast sterile area about fifty kilometers around Rome, a region infested with brigands” and devoid of any agriculture, and the Rome envisioned by the Napoleonic Empire, that of the “seven hills rich in orchards and villas,” described by the prefect before the august visit, there exists a world: that of the Romans, aristocrats accompanied by their “families,” their clients, and their servants, in a “social mix that is hardly imaginable today,” explains Catherine Brice. Hence the “revolutionary” importance, strictly speaking, that must be given to the French occupation in the wake of 1789, a looting that Rome had not known since 1527, and which would gradually shift the city into European modernity. By attacking the basic unit of Roman organization, “the parish,” the French dealt the first blow to the papal power, before, under the Empire, fundamentally and definitively reorganizing the city under a dual inspiration: to adopt the administrative and urban model designed by the new imperial power and to form a secular and local ruling class. Even if it meant breaking the economic structure of Rome, which relies on a “Roman piety” articulated around a network of 85 parishes and 250 churches: the occupying power dispossessed the 43 “religious orders” whose missionaries leave Rome to evangelize the entire world. It would also sideline many of the 6000 clergy and 2000 nuns upon whom the entire education system rests.
While helping the reader – with a wealth of welcome maps and descriptions – to navigate through the neighborhoods on both banks of the Tiber, Catherine Brice reveals the origins and describes the “habitus” of the populations that reside there. But she tirelessly continues the main thread of her study: once General Berthier’s troops entered Rome at the request of the Directory on February 10, 1798, once the Republic was proclaimed and the “sovereign pope” forcibly disappeared, once again a dualism was established at the very head of the Urbs by setting up a political municipality, Rome, according to her, would never be the same again. Despite several interludes, including the one that opened on May 27, 1814, with the return of Pope Pius VII Chiaramonti after more than four years of absence, the Romans had apparently tasted enough democracy to overcome the “Zelante project” that tried to restore the old order. Too late indeed. During the French occupation, the great patrician families emancipated themselves from papal tutelage. They gained in influence and power. Temporarily defeated in his claims, the pope left the Quirinal and settled in the Vatican.
An essential part of this history of Rome, which gradually became that of Italy, will ultimately depend on these upheavals punctuated by religious resistance led from the Vatican City or by the progress made in political Rome: choice of institutions, economic system, urban reorganization. With two major stakes: the unification of the Peninsula and the choice of Rome as the capital. The “papacy against Italy” would almost summarize the author to evoke the difficult years of the 1870s. A choice that was so far from obvious that to the “two years asked of the Italians by Cavour to resolve the ‘Roman question’,” it took nine,” she specifies further. Indeed, Rome only had its first mayor in 1871. The rivalries between Florence, Rome, and Turin also remain numerous: having become “tactically” the capital in 1865, Florence resents having this “status snatched away” and Turin, the stronghold of the House of Savoy, is not satisfied with second place. In the meantime, Garibaldi’s allegiance to King Victor Emmanuel II, proclaimed King of Italy on March 14, 1861, and the Third War of Independence in 1866, which would allow including Venetia in the new entity, brought water to the mill of the Tiber.
With its procession of nationalisms and wars, the 20th century contributes, not without paradox, to reinforcing the centrality of Rome, even if it means eradicating, as Catherine Brice reminds us with a host of fascinating details, the ancestral foundations of the city: the destruction of Roman villas carried out by the regulatory plan of 1883 offers in return the physiognomy of the new city. As if, once again, the erection of modern Rome required the prior act of burying a past, a past that Fascist Italy would attempt to exhume by glorifying it. And Catherine Brice to realize “how much the Rome we know today is beholden to this period both in terms of its urbanism and its architecture.” This is the only chapter, it should be noted, where the academic does not mention the papal authority, which, if one dares say, reappears at the time of Mussolini’s ousting by the Grand Council on the evening of July 24, 1943.
Rome “a sacred city, in no way an industrial city,” if not for the film industry. The Rome of the year 2000 with its historic center “Disneylandized,” Catherine Brice ultimately laments, still retains the charm of its “locali” where mountains of “tramezzini, panini, pizza bianca” are savored, this on-the-go food of the Romans for decades. One of the few salvaged traditions?
Catherine Brice, “History of Rome and the Romans, from Napoleon I to the present,” Editions Perrin, 2007, 500 p., 24.50 Euros.
