David Alvarez,The Pope’s Soldiers: A Military History of the Modern Vatican

Reviewed by: Oliver Logan, University of East Anglia, UK

The internationally recruited military forces that served the Papacy between 1860 and 1870 (and of which the picturesquely pantalooned Zouave regiments were the most famous) were the object of a contemporary clericalist mythology. Most of the relevant historiography dealing with them is around a century old, although there is a discrete recent one in French and English. Alvarez’s book breaks new ground with a history of the Papacy’s armed servants, basically between the 1790s and the present. The Papal army was totally incapable of resisting the French invasions of the States of the Church of 1797 and 1800, while military reforms were fairly ineffectual up to 1848 and even 1860. In 1848, the volunteer force of the Roman Legion under General Durando, formed to protect the frontiers of the Papal States, in the absence of clear instructions from Rome and certainly against the wishes of Pius IX, engaged in combat with the Austrian forces, first creditably and then disastrously. Between 1860 and 1870, the Papacy faced three classes of enemy: local insurrectionary groups, including ones in Rome itself, Garibaldian irregulars, and the Piedmontese (subsequently Italian) royal army. Successive Piedmontese and Italian governments repeatedly connived with the former two. In 1860 the Papal States faced invasion by Red Shirts from the South and the Piedmontese from the North. The Belgian Monsignor Xavier de Mérode, a former officer in the French Foreign Legion turned priest, was made Minister of Arms and obtained the appointment of a fellow ex-legionary Chrisophe de Lamoricière to organize the Papal army. The Secretary of State Cardinal Antonelli looked to diplomacy and to French protection to secure the Papal States and had no faith in a military option, but de Mérode and Lamoricière, who mistrusted Louis Napoleon, firmly believed in its necessity and its relative viability, if only to buy enough time for diplomacy to work. They appealed for volunteers to European Catholic communities.

The resulting international force, composed at that stage largely of French, Belgian and Irish volunteers, met disaster at Castelfidardo, letting the northern parts of the Papal States be lost to the new kingdom of Italy. Following this, de Mérode and his successor General Hermann Kanzler set about the organization and modernization of the army in renewed earnest, notwithstanding the hostility of Antonelli and the apathy of most monsignori in the Vatican. The army was in fact predominantly Italian, the foreign components (infantry) being the internationally recruited Zouaves and the French Légion d’Antibes aka Legione Romana, the latter tepidly supported by Louis Napoleon’s government. According to Alvarez, the small army was an efficient and well-motivated fighting force by any European standards, and the experience gained in the repression of banditry served it well when Garibaldian irregulars invaded the Papal States in 1867. But it was no match for the Italian army. During the latter’s assault on Rome in 1870, there was a serious exchange of fire between Papal and Italian armies because Kanzler disobeyed the Pope’s orders to offer only token resistance. At all events, resistance demonstrated to the world that the Papacy was not conniving at the so-called ‘Piedmontese’ takeover. By the terms of the Papacy’s capitulation, its effective military force was abolished and the only armed personnel left to it were for security and ceremonial purposes.

The Swiss Guard was developed as a serious security force dedicated to protection of the Pope’s person and from 1911 recruits were required to have completed basic training in the Swiss army. The ceremonial units supported the still courtly style of the Papacy up to the pontificate of Pius XII. From September 1943 the security units and even the aristocratic ceremonial units were mobilized to resist a feared German invasion of the Vatican; the commander of the Swiss Guard was evidently not going to pay too much attention to Pius XII’s instruction that armed resistance should not be offered to the Germans. Some manifest resistance would at least prevent a German walkover and thereby expose the Third Reich to the judgement of international opinion. Under John XXIII, the Papacy sought to present a more pastoral, less grandiose image of itself, and the colourful ceremonial units, with the exception of the Swiss Guard, were abolished. Thus the composition and accoutrements of the Papal armed services have reflected the Papacy’s changing self-image.

Academic historians may feel that the exciting narratives of campaigns and security operations in this book are over-extended, but they do serve to highlight the Popes’ relative lack of control over their armed units. Jean Guenel’s La dernière guerre du Pape. Les Zouaves pontificaux au secours du Saint-Siège 1860–1870 (1998) has the best treatment of the geographical origins and cultural grounding of the French Zouaves, but Alvarez is stronger on military organization and on debates within the Vatican.