CONVENTION OF SEPTEMBER. - An Italo-French diplomatic act signed in Paris on September 15, 1864, in order to find a settlement, even if only a temporary one, for the arduous Roman Question. It arose from the tortuous diplomacy of Napoleon III and from the sincere desire of Italian moderates, who, following lines of policy already glimpsed by Cavour, wanted to gain time in order to unite the country in spirit and in administration. On the other hand, the failure of the ideal attempts of the summer of 1864 to resolve the Venetian question necessarily spurred the Minghetti cabinet to seek any modus vivendi whatsoever with regard to Rome, while Napoleon III felt ever more the need to escape from the contradictions into which he had fallen since 1849, by pursuing two contradictory policies side by side: the decisively liberal one and the pro-papal or Catholic one.
Italy undertook not to invade the pontifical territory, reduced to Latium alone, and to prevent there, even by arms, any insurrectional attempt; France undertook to withdraw its troops gradually from the State of the Pontiff within a maximum term of two years. Moreover, the Italian Government did not oppose the constitution of a pontifical army, even one of volunteers from every country; it was to begin negotiations to take upon itself the share of the public debt of the annexed former ecclesiastical territories, and by a secret protocol of guarantee it was to transfer, once the Convention itself had been approved by Parliament, the capital wherever it thought best, in substance from Turin to Florence.
As was to be expected, the Convention satisfied no one, and its articles, drafted moreover in a very elastic form, were interpreted in the way that best suited each party. But in the meantime the Pope, who nevertheless had great interests at stake in it, was the last to learn anything about it, and he did not fail to express all his just resentment also through the diplomatic steps of Antonelli, from which it emerges that the directives of Vatican policy in this regard were those of the most absolute reserve. The ambassador in Rome, De Sartigès, received from the Secretary of State a clear refusal to take official note of the relative dispatch of notification and a sharp interruption of every discussion on the matter. In a protest to the nuncios, on Nov. 19, Antonelli then pointed out the inconsistency of the French assurances and the dangers to which the Holy See remained exposed because of the foreseeable new complications.
In France and elsewhere many rightly suspected that the C. was nothing but an elegant pretext for leaving the Pontiff once again, as in 1859-60, at the mercy of Italian unifying and secularizing designs. In Vienna they limited themselves to observing with some irony that the C. would probably have had the same value as the famous treaty of Zurich. The violent reaction of French public opinion drew new fuel from the confirmations offered by too many of the most violent, least disciplined, or simply least skillful Italian innovators. The newspapers of the peninsula clearly affirmed that Florence would be nothing but a stage on the way to Rome. The French Cabinet was struck to the core by this and protested.
To avoid a scandal both sides had recourse to tacit understandings, but these soon faded, when, because of the street riots in Turin, caused by grief and resentment over the transfer of the capital, the Minghetti cabinet fell and was replaced by the king with Lamarmora; and even more when the document had to be submitted to the Chambers for ratification. Florence appeared more and more as a provisional capital, while in Rome they promised themselves to go in any way, except by open violence. Visconti Venosta, Minister of Foreign Affairs, insisted on saying that the problem was not resolved, but set on the road to a solution. Lanza, Minister of the Interior, maintained that, deprived of foreign bayonets, the temporal power could not long resist. Lamarmora observed that one could advance slowly, but never turn back. Garibaldi rose up against the execution of the C., and Mazzini made a worthy echo of him with violent, fantastic exaggerations before the inflamed public opinion. The only one to make heard a truly sensible and prudent voice was Massimo D'Azeglio, seeking to demonstrate the impossibility of any forced coexistence of the two powers in Rome, but he was heeded only out of deference. Thus, despite the spirit and the letter of the C., the country moved toward the occupation of the contested city (1870).
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Paolo Dalla Torre