The revolutionary turn taken by the Garibaldians placed a severe strain on the Tsar’s relations with Napoleon. It brought home to him that giving his support to the French Emperor’s policies could have dangerous consequences. There was nothing to prevent the tide of nationalism spreading into Habsburg lands and from there into Poland and other Russian territories. In October 1860 Russia broke off relations with Piedmont as a protest against its annexation of Naples. Gorchakov condemned Piedmont for promoting revolution, pledged to oppose the territorial changes taking place in Italy unless they were approved by a new international congress, and gave his cautious backing to the Austrians in Italy (there was no chance of the Russians actually fighting to keep the Habsburgs in Venetia, the only part of the peninsula, along with the papal city of Rome, that had not yet been unified under the control of the first Italian parliament, which met at Turin in 1861). When Victor Emmanuel took the title of King of Italy, in March 1861, the Russians and the Austrians agreed together to refuse him recognition, despite pressure from the British and French. When the British asked Gorchakov to use his influence on the Prussians to recognize the King, the Russian Foreign Minister refused. The Holy Alliance was not quite dead, it seemed. Justifying his refusal to cooperate with Britain’s plans for Italy, Gorchakov maintained that Austria and Turkey might be undermined by revolutionary movements if the powers left unchecked the nationalist uprisings started by the Piedmontese. With tongue in cheek, perhaps, given how the British had justified their actions in the Crimean War, Gorchakov informed Lord Napier, the British ambassador in St Petersburg: ‘We have two cardinal objects: the preservation of Turkey and the preservation of Austria.’33
François Rochebrune
The Polish uprising of 1863 was the final breaking point for Russia’s policy of friendship towards France. Inspired by Garibaldi, Polish students began demonstrations in 1861, prompting General Lambert, the Tsar’s viceroy, to impose martial law. The Polish leaders gathered secretly, some supporting the idea of a popular democratic revolution uniting peasants and workers, others, led by Czartoryski, more conservative, seeking to establish a national movement led by nobles and intellectuals. The uprising began as a spontaneous protest against conscription into the Russian army. Small groups of insurgents fought the mighty Russian army from guerrilla strongholds mainly in the forests of Lithuania, Poland, Belarus and western (Catholic) Ukraine. Some of them had fought against the Russians during the Crimean War, including many of the ‘Zouaves of Death’, organized by François Rochebrune, who had served as an officer with the French Zouaves in the Crimea and had taken part in the Anglo-French expedition to China in the Second Opium War of 1857 before settling in Cracow in Austrian Poland, where he set up a fencing school. Dressed in a black uniform with a white cross and a red fez, and many of them armed with Minié rifles from the Crimean War, the Polish Zouaves swore to die rather than surrender to the Russians.
A clandestine revolutionary government was established in Warsaw. It declared ‘all sons of Poland free and equal citizens’, gave the peasants ownership of land, and appealed for help to the nations of Europe. Pope Pius IX ordered special prayers for the victory of Catholic Poland against Orthodox Russia, and was active in arousing sympathy for the Polish rebels in Italy and France. Napoleon wanted to land troops in the Baltic to support the Poles, but was held back by the British, who feared a renewal of the Crimean War. In the end, the competing French invasion of Mexico prevented troops from being sent. The diplomatic intervention of the Western powers on behalf of Poland angered the Russians, who felt betrayed by the French, in particular. It made the Russians even more determined to crush the Polish insurrectionaries. The Russian army burned whole towns and villages. Tens of thousands of Polish men and women were exiled to Siberia, and hundreds of insurgents were publicly hanged.
