A generation later, however, some of the prosperity of the city was recovered. It reverted to type. It became once more the haven for travellers and tourists; eleven large hotels, and innumerable smaller hostelries, were opened to serve them. Gas lighting was introduced to increase the romantic charm of the nocturnal city. This was the Venice that Turner depicted. The population began to rise. The merchants, and the glass-makers, and the gondoliers were prosperous. By the 1850s there were no less than eighty-two shoe-shops and one hundred retailers of silk. Yet the city was still part of the Hapsburg dominion, with the principal social and economic decisions being taken far away in Vienna. Venice had become only one distant and subsidiary limb of a large empire. Of course the Venetians resented their loss of status. There were complaints concerning high taxes, and oppressive censorship. The Austrian soldiers, in particular, were not liked. They were even compared unfavourably to their French predecessors. “There is hardly a Venetian house to which an Austrian is admitted,” the English consul general wrote. “Persons supposed to have a leaning towards the government are held up to public execration and their names are written upon the walls as traitors to the country.”
Shelley believed that the Venetian people themselves had forfeited their identity under the occupation of the French and the Austrian armies. “I had no conception,” he wrote, “of the excess to which avarice, cowardice, superstition, ignorance, passionless lust, & all the inexpressible brutalities to which human nature could be carried, until I had lived a few days among the Venetians.”
Yet it would be quite wrong to say that the Venetians had entirely lost their spirit or their energy. These human characteristics are stubborn and persistent. When the test came, in a few months of 1848, they rose to the challenge. This was the time of the siege of Venice.
It began in “the year of revolutions,” 1848, when the dynasty of the House of Orleans fell and the second republic was instituted in France. The contagion of liberty spread all over Europe. Most significantly there was great unrest at the heart of the Austrian Empire, Vienna, and the emperor was forced to grant a new constitution to his entire dominions. On receipt of this news, brought by a postal steamer from Trieste, the Venetian people rose up against the Austrian army of occupation. They congregated in Saint Mark’s Square and demanded the release of a Jewish lawyer, Daniele Manin, who had been imprisoned for uttering patriotic Venetian sentiments. The Arsenal was captured by the local people. In the face of general insurrection, with which they could not adequately deal, the Austrian army agreed to withdraw from Venice and retired by sea to Trieste. On 22 March Manin was declared to be president of a newly formed republic. When he was told that the people were idle and self-indulgent he replied that “Neither you nor anyone else knows the people of Venice. They have always been misunderstood. My boast is that I know them better. It is my only merit.” It seemed at the time that Venice had once more risen from the depths. An editorial in the
But there can be no certainty in human affairs; all is miscalculation, error and confusion. What is predicted does not take place; the unforeseen, and the unexpected, make up the life of the world. In 1849 the Austrians defeated the nationalist forces on the Italian mainland, and reoccupied the Veneto. Venice once more stood alone against a threatening world. It was the crisis that throughout their history the Venetians had always most feared. Their fears then took material shape. The Austrian army laid siege to the city. It lasted for seventeen months.
Yet popular feeling demanded resistance at all costs. It was the ancient spirit of independence reasserting itself in a city that had for two centuries been dismissed as effete and inglorious. The Venetian people were ready to risk everything in order to defend themselves from foreign oppression. They gladly gave up their plate and jewellery to help in the noble cause of saving Venice; even the poorest of them donated their thin bracelets and silver hairpins. The workers of the Arsenal laboured through the night to produce more vessels of war. There were rumours at one stage that the city was about to be bombed from the air, by means of balloons, but the threat was lampooned mercilessly in cartoons and street placards. Some air balloons were released on 12 July, but they lived up to comic expectations; they fell into the lagoon or drifted back to the Austrian side.
