David I. Kertzer, The Pope Who Would Be King: The Exile of Pius IX and the Emergence of Modern Europe (New York: Random House, 2018), 512 pp., $35.00.

ANYONE FAMILIAR with the nearly 2,000 year history of the papacy—and the long list of villains, ciphers and oddities occupying the papal throne between the reigns of many true saints, sages and statesmen—must sometimes wonder if there is a papal equivalent to the Peter Principle. As almost everyone knows, the Peter Principle posits, and experience certainly confirms, that people in large entities such as corporations and bureaucracies tend to be promoted to the level of their incompetence. In the case of the papacy, what one might call the St. Peter Principle often yields the same result. Never was there a more perfect example of the St. Peter Principle than the longest-reigning (1846–78) Pope of them all, Pius IX, the subject of a new political biography by David I. Kertzer.

Pius IX, or Pio Nono as he was known to the Italian faithful and not-so-faithful, was one of those kindly, virtuous and well-intentioned fellows who, in normal times, might have been able to handle the responsibilities that were thrust upon them—the examples of King Louis XVI of France and Czar Nicholas II of Russia come immediately to mind—but who simply weren’t up to their jobs in perilous times. There is a certain poetic justice to the fact that, in recent years, Pius IX and Nicholas II have both been proposed for sainthood in the Roman Catholic and Russian Orthodox churches respectively. Both men were worthy but inept martyrs to their beliefs although Nicholas, murdered by the Bolsheviks in 1918 along with his family, paid a far higher price for his martyrdom than Pius, who spent the last years of his life in luxurious, self-imposed confinement in the Vatican, expiring at the age of eighty-five.

In the case of Pius, religion had everything—and nothing—to do with his martyrdom. As Pope, he was spiritual head of the oldest and largest branch of Christianity. Indeed, in his own view, he was the sole legitimate head of all Christendom. Hundreds of millions of faithful Catholics around the world gladly accepted him as their pastoral leader without taking any interest in diplomacy or power politics on the Italian Peninsula which, in June of 1846 when he was elected pontiff, was still what Metternich dismissed as a “geographical expression” rather than a unified state.

FAR FROM being a nation, Italy in the middle of the nineteenth century was a crazy quilt of lesser kingdoms and principalities (as well as tiny San Marino, an ancient republic that nobody thought worth overrunning). Large tracts of it were governed directly, or through family branches, by the powerful Habsburg Empire, including the rich province of Lombardy-Venetia that included what had once been one of the world’s great maritime trading powers, the Venetian Republic. The two biggest homegrown Italian powers occupying opposite ends of the boot were the Kingdom of Sardinia, ruled from Turin by the House of Savoy in the north, and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, ruled by a Bourbon dynasty out of Naples in the south.

Smack in the middle of this geopolitical mélange was a backward, feudally-governed chunk of real estate—swampy, impoverished and riddled with corruption—that, with periodic expansions and contractions over the centuries, had been the earthly domain of the heirs of St. Peter, ruled from their religious and political capital, Rome. At least one Pope, Julius II (reigned 1503–1513) spent more of his time in the field commanding Papal troops or playing at power diplomacy than in spiritual affairs, although he did find time to patronize Michelangelo, the young Raphael and other artistic geniuses whose masterpieces are still on display in the Vatican. Other than its contributions to art and architecture, however, the Popes’ temporal realm—as opposed to their sacred role—could claim hardly any historical accomplishments. One of the few was a pioneer example of feminism run rampant. During the eleven-year reign of Pope Innocent X, an elderly, isolated misanthrope specializing in nepotism, the real reins of power were held by various greedy members of his family. Foremost among them was his termagant sister-in-law, Olympia Maidalchini, who systematically looted the Vatican treasury and controlled Papal patronage. As a leading churchman of the time, Cardinal Allesandro Bichi, remarked when Innocent X was settled on as a compromise choice to succeed Pope Urban VIII, “We have just elected a female Pope.” Which, in most temporal rather than spiritual respects, Olympia certainly was. Other than this rather forward-looking event, the Papal States were historically stagnant.

Even the name reflects the patchwork nature of the Popes’ dominions; rather than being known as the Papal State, they were usually called the Papal “States.” Papal tenure had always been a dicey business, with various early, medieval and renaissance Popes being murdered, mutilated or driven into exile, either by rival claimants to the Throne of St. Peter or by the Roman mob. Pope Formosus was even posthumously put on trial during the Cadaver Synod. But all such disturbances had ended with re-establishment of the Papal order. Even the French Revolution and Napoleon Bonaparte’s subsequent First Empire only resulted in a short-lived Roman Republic which morphed, simultaneously with Bonaparte’s own transformation from revolutionary hero to arriviste emperor, into the Kingdom of Rome (with Napoleon’s infant son proclaimed titular “King of Rome” much as heirs to the British throne are invested with the title “Prince of Wales”).

WITH NAPOLEON'S final defeat at Waterloo in 1815, the Congress of Vienna seemed to have engineered the restoration of the old European order, including the full restoration of Papal temporal territory and powers. Actually, it was a rather streamlined, updated version of the old order with many small principalities annexed or eliminated and a handful of major monarchical powers—notably France, Great Britain, Prussia, Austria and Russia—dominating their smaller neighbors. With the exception of Britain—which, since the 1688 deposition of James II, had been a constitutional monarchy—this meant that, except for Switzerland, almost all of Europe was once again governed by monarchs claiming, at least nominally, to rule by divine right. Since all of the rulers of Italian kingdoms and principalities, and many of the rulers of German principalities were Catholic, and, since Austria, France, Spain and Portugal were all Catholic countries ruled by Catholic sovereigns, supporting the Papal claim to a divine right to govern the Papal States was not only a matter of faith for many crowned heads but also a symbolic way of legitimizing their own claims to divinely-ordained rule.

The cracks in Metternich’s new “old order” of divine right monarchies didn’t begin to show until 1830, when a popular uprising in Paris drove Charles X, the last legitimist King of France, from the throne. He was succeeded by a transitional figure, his cousin Louis Philippe. A member of the junior, Orleans branch of the dynasty, Louis-Philippe presented himself as a “Citizen King,” chosen by popular will rather than divine right, replacing the ancient white-and-gold fleur-de-lis banner of the Bourbons with the tricolor of revolutionary and Napoleonic France, and fashioning himself King “of the French” rather than King “of France” in a semantic bow to popular rule. He maintained, however, most of the traditional institutions of the monarchy, including close ties to the Catholic Church and the Papacy. Louis-Philippe would govern until 1848, when a stronger revolutionary wave would sweep over not only France, but most of Europe, including the Papal States.

Pius IX, whom Kertzer somewhat dubiously describes as the “most important” Pope in modern history, was born Giovanni Maria Mastai-Ferretti, the fourth son of a minor Italian aristocrat and, like his father, entitled to the courtesy honorific of “count,” on May 13, 1792. Thus, he was just old enough to have vivid memories of the pre-1815 revolutionary and Napoleonic convulsions experienced by the Papacy as well as the rest of Europe. A sickly and probably epileptic child, he served briefly in the Papal Guardia Nobile (Noble Guard), a mainly ornamental unit of aristocrats with more pedigree than martial ardor. According to one nineteenth-century memoirist, the young guardsman fell in love with a “Miss Foster,” an Irish girl of good family, and became engaged to her. Unfortunately, young Giovanni’s family didn’t approve of the bride-to-be. In the first of many examples of his yielding to the pressures of stronger personalities around him, the hapless Giovanni failed to show up at the Church of San Luigi dei Francesi for the nuptials. What subsequently became of “Miss Foster” is not known but, presumably, she did not enter a nunnery. As for her erstwhile suitor, instinctively rather than intellectually religious, and never a deep theological thinker, he ended up taking holy orders in 1818 after the manner of countless other younger sons of the Italian aristocracy, urged on, it is said, by a pious mother. By 1827, aged thirty-five, he was named archbishop of Spoleto, “a town midway between his hometown and Rome,” remarking to a friend at the time that, “God really is having some fun on earth, for he has wished to promote a miserable insect to such an honor,” a half-serious, self-deprecating tone he would often use when referring to himself.

In Spoleto and afterwards in the more prestigious archdiocese of Imola, near Bologna, the “second city” of the Papal States, Mastai “would acquire a reputation . . . as fair-minded, principled, and good-natured, although he could be stern when necessary.” Nor was he blind to the faults of the local clergy, declaring that: “Far from . . . pastors of their flocks, they are more like wolves, a scandal and the ruin of their flocks.” By 1842 he had been made a cardinal and was beginning to earn a reputation far from Rome. In a letter from the Austrian ambassador in Rome to Prince Metternich in Vienna, he was described as a possible compromise choice to succeed Pope Gregory XVI, a dour, unpopular pontiff in many respects his opposite.

According to Kertzer:

Bishop of a minor town and lacking any experience in the intrigues of the Roman Curia – the central administration of the Holy See – Mastai was in some ways an odd choice to be pope. But he was respected for his good humor, his lack of pretension, and his success in winning popular favor in a portion of the Papal States known for its hostility to priestly rule . . . For the conservatives, it was his very weakness that made him so appealing. Given his inexperience in the world of Roman politics, they thought, he might, with proper care, be led along the right path.

History would prove them right and, when their first choice, hard-line Cardinal Lambruschini, failed to garner the necessary two-thirds majority, they threw their support to the supposedly moderate, but presumably malleable, Mastai. He was elected Pope on the fourth ballot and chose the name Pius IX. Thus it was that a mild-mannered, rather naive cleric became the spiritual leader of all the world’s Catholics and the temporal ruler of a semi-feudal domain in the heart of Italy, occupying 14 percent of its area, with a population of about three million people, mostly illiterate peasants and impoverished city laborers but with a growing and increasingly alienated educated class of wealthy professionals and merchants, their numbers swelled by dissident members of the aristocracy with revolutionary aspirations. Initial enthusiasm for Pius IX was even shared by a then-obscure Italian expatriate in Montevideo, Uruguay who sent an impassioned letter to the new prelate declaring that,

If these hands, used to fighting, would be acceptable to His Holiness, we most thankfully dedicate them to the service of him who deserves so well of the Church and of the fatherland. Joyful indeed shall we be if we may be allowed to shed our blood in defense of Pius IX’s work of redemption.

The writer of the letter was none other than Giuseppe Garibaldi, the impulsive, impressionable future warrior hero of Italian nationalism. Described by one contemporary as a man with “the heart of a lion and the mind of an ox,” his boundless enthusiasm for Pius IX would soon enough turn to blind hatred, to the point where he would ultimately advocate total abolition of the Holy See itself.

Things began well enough. The new Pope inaugurated a series of minor reforms, throwing open the gates to Rome’s Jewish ghetto—the last one in Western Europe—and declaring a political amnesty. In 1847 he set up city and state councils transferring some powers previously held by clerics into lay hands. Development schemes, including plans for the first railway in the Papal States, were launched, and “Pio Nono” even lent lip service to the nascent force of Italian nationalism. It didn’t take long for the bubble to burst. J.N.D. Kelley summed it up succinctly in the Oxford Dictionary of Popes:

The resulting outburst of popularity . . . along with his liberal reputation, subsided when he made it clear that, believing the temporal sovereignty of the Holy See indispensable to its spiritual independence, he had no intention of establishing a constitutional state . . . [w]hen he firmly refused (29 Apr. 1848) to join in the war to expel Austria from Italy his neutrality seemed a betrayal. In a crisis made worse by economic breakdown his prime minister, Count Rossi, was murdered on 15 November 1848, and Pius himself fled in disguise to Gaeta, north of Naples [nine days later].

EIGHTEEN FORTY-EIGHT was the year of violent revolution in Europe. Shortly after Pius IX fled Rome to Gaeta in the reactionary Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, the Roman mob, egged on by Italian nationalists from other parts of Italy, declared a Roman Republic in open defiance of Papal authority. It didn’t last long, but while it did, it became a Mecca for leading Italian nationalists like Giuseppe Mazzini, who served as its political mastermind, and Garibaldi who took command of its ragtag army of bourgeois militiamen, youthful volunteers and adventurers from all over Italy.

It was at this point, to borrow a phrase from Irving Kristol, that Pius IX became “a liberal mugged by reality.” While Austrian forces systematically crushed popular uprisings in Papal territory outside of Rome, a French expeditionary force dispatched by Louis Napoleon—soon to be Emperor Napoleon III but currently president of France’s Second Republic and eager to gain credit with conservative French Catholics by posing as the defender of the Papacy—besieged, shelled and then occupied Rome, crushing the short-lived Roman Republic.

Refusing to return to Rome from Gaeta until order—meaning the old order—was fully restored, it was at this point that Pius IX, generally thought to be so straightforward and naive, demonstrated an unexpected talent for stringing along his foreign backers. Meanwhile, his hardline clerical supporters re-established the corrupt Papal ancien régime with the backing of Austrian and French bayonets, and under the guidance of Pius’ éminence grise, Cardinal Giacomo Antonelli. That more-than-worldly churchman, Kertzer informs us,

entered the prelature, but . . . was never ordained and could not say mass. . . . Pius IX, who made him a cardinal in 1847, at the age of forty-one, increasingly came to rely on Antonelli, his opposite in so many ways, and it would be Antonelli, as his secretary of state, who would mastermind the pope’s turn to Austria and reaction.

How much Pius IX deliberately played “good cop” to Cardinal Antonelli’s “bad cop,” or how much the Pope was a weak naif manipulated by a cynical, clerical Machiavelli, we may never know, but the great French novelist, Victor Hugo—a contemporary of both men—seemed to take the latter of the two views, writing that,

Pope Pius IX is simple, sweet, timid, fearful, slow in his movements, negligent about his person . . . one would say a country priest. Beside him, Antonelli, in his red stockings, with his look of a diplomat and the eyebrows of a spy, resembles nothing so much as an unsavory bodyguard.

Between the two of them, they successfully managed to wear down all French efforts to commit the Holy See to constitutional reform even as they stayed in power mainly due to the permanent French garrison installed by the Second Republic and maintained by the Second Empire. The Papal dungeons were refilled with political prisoners, some of whom were executed. The corrupt, clerically-run administration was restored, complete with informers, and the Pope exhorted the faithful throughout Europe to loyally submit to their divinely-ordained sovereigns as the 1848 wave of revolution receded and the old order was once again restored throughout most of the continent. Until 1861, the Papal States survived in a kind of militarily-imposed stasis. Luigi Carlo Farini, a physician, historian and one of the first prime ministers of a united Italy itemized the reaction’s results as of 1850:

Both education and charity governed and administered by the clergy. Clerical police and French police in Rome, clerical police and Austrian police in the provinces. Censorship of the press administered . . . not by any law, but by the whim of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, the bishops, the police . . . All the old civil, communal, ecclesiastical, mixed, and exceptional tribunals restored . . . The Jesuits resurgent and more powerful . . . The prisons full.

At the time, the Pope and his Secretary of State seemed far more concerned about securing outside financing than winning the hearts and minds of their disaffected subjects. Ironically, when financial succor came it was from, of all places, the House of Rothschild. The same Pope who had reversed his earlier act of tolerance and “ordered the Jews of the Papal States back into their ghettos, now depended on the goodwill of Europe’s most prominent Jews to be able to return to his capital.” The loan was forthcoming and a kind of grim normalcy settled in. But in the ensuing decade, as the Austrians were driven out of much of Italy and King Victor Emmanuel’s modern Piedmontese army swept down from the north and Garibaldi’s volunteers overran the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in the south, all that survived of the Papal States was the city of Rome and its environs, protected by its French garrison. Visiting Rome in early 1869, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

found the city “beleaguered” and “depressing.” “I look out of the window this gray, rainy day,” he wrote to an American friend, “and see the streets all mud and the roofs all green mould, and the mist lying like a pall over the lower town, and Rome seems to me like king Lear staggering in the storm and crowned with weeds.” What most struck Longfellow was how little Rome had changed in the forty years since he had first visited it, an observation he shared in his meeting with Cardinal Antonelli. “Yes, thank God!” replied the cardinal, pausing to put a pinch of snuff in his nose.

LESS THAN two years later, the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War compelled Napoleon III to recall his Roman garrison to defend France itself. Left to itself, the rather pathetic Papal Army was quickly rolled over by the Italian Army and, in October of 1870, Rome was officially incorporated into the Kingdom of Italy by plebiscite; the Eternal City soon became the capital of a united Italy. In 1871, the Italian government passed a Law of Guarantees recognizing the Pope’s personal inviolability, guaranteeing the papacy’s tenure to the Vatican and certain other papal buildings, and offering a number of special immunities.

Rather than accept these terms, quite similar to the conditions under which the Vatican City functions today, Pius IX decided to become a self-made martyr. Until his death in 1878, he never again set foot outside the Vatican and, on top of that, declared anyone who took office in the new Kingdom of Italy excommunicated. Although the myth of the Papal Martyr was played for everything it was worth by the Church—including the world-wide distribution of picture cards depicting the Pope as a prisoner behind bars sleeping on a bed of straw—nothing could have been further from the truth.

In a delightful, totally apolitical little book on papal eating habits throughout the ages (Buon Appetito, Your Holiness: The Secrets of the Papal Table) Mariangela Rinaldi and Mariangela Vicini describe how Pio Nono, with his family background as a member of the rural gentry,

loved riding, even on his own; until the end of his days, as an old, frail man, he went for rides on a mule, which the stablemen saddled up and left for him at a certain place in the Vatican Gardens. The Holy Father climbed up two stone steps to make mounting easier. He went for a little ride and then went back to his rooms to continue his regular existence.

This included enjoying “an elegant and well-laid table” often featuring risotto and fritto misto, a Roman specialty. His favorite dessert was a bignè, an Italian cream puff, and lunch was never complete without “a glass of fine claret.” For dinner, there was always a good white Bordeaux.

On the strictly religious front, Pio Nono’s reign was highly productive, including the calling of the First Vatican Council which formally recognized the doctrine of papal infallibility, though, by declaring all Popes infallible, it seemed to suggest that God himself might be fallible—or at least fickle—in changing his mind as it expressed itself through the pronouncements of succeeding, and sometimes contradictory, Popes. Even as the church lost ground, figuratively and literally, in Italy, the Vatican accelerated missionary activities throughout the world and, because of the essentially kindly, humane personal image of the Pope, earned the devotion and respect of millions of ordinary Roman Catholics around the globe. It never seems to have occurred to Pius IX that the best thing that ever happened to both himself and the papacy was being freed from the antiquated burden of a corrupt, semi-feudal principality that distracted the Papacy from its global spiritual mission and provided endless ammunition for enemies of religion who could point to the decayed, heavy-handed Papal States as a repellent example of the kind of oppressive theocracy the Papacy would inflict on the rest of us if it ever had the power to do so.

KERTZER OFFERS us a crisp, well-documented historical narrative and paints pithy portraits of a colorful cast of clergymen, soldiers, diplomats, politicians and revolutionaries. But he is more than a little off course in some of his underlying assumptions. However significant the years during which he was Pope were in the evolution of the Roman Catholic church, Pius himself was more of a passenger than a driver of the engine of history. He certainly was not the “most important” modern Pope, especially when compared to a dynamic papal leader like John Paul II who, with no temporal power but incredible moral force, helped to bring down the Iron Curtain.

Nor did the fall of the Papal States deliver the coup de grace to the divine right of kings, a concept that actually succumbed to a gradual erosion that had begun during the eighteenth-century enlightenment, accelerated during the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era, and fostered a gradual, largely peaceful evolution that resulted in all major European monarchies except Czarist Russia, being run on a constitutional, parliamentary basis—with varying degrees of executive power still reserved for the ruler—by the end of the nineteenth century. And, from the death of Pius IX to the present, repressive papal stances against freedom of expression, freedom of religion and various other restrictions he advocated have been lifted or diluted. Pope John Paul II seems to have grasped the big picture—and perhaps exercised a bit of ironic humor—when he simultaneously beatified Pius IX, a personally exemplary pontiff who sometimes mistook corrupt papal worldly power for the will of God, and Pope John XXIII, an equally worthy soul who sometimes confused pandering to worldly trends with working for a more enlightened, relevant Catholic Church.

Kertzer’s previous books include The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe, Prisoner of the Vatican: The Popes’ Secret Plot to Capture Rome From the Italian State and The Popes Against the Jews: The Vatican’s Role in the Rise of Modern Anti-Semitism. As some of the titles suggest, he approaches his subject with a mixture of scholarship and tabloid sensationalism—“secret” seems to be one of his favorite adjectives—that makes for readable, if not always balanced content. Nor is his work free from some howlers.

A Dutch ambassador is characterized as the “longtime deacon” rather than the longtime dean of Rome’s diplomatic corps. The corps diplomatique is described as “changing into long tails and black ties” in the evening—an impossibility, given that the ties would of course have been white. Austrian ambassador Count Moritz Esterházy, whom Kertzer portrays as elegant, distinguished, “slender, and well proportioned,” is revealed in an accompanying engraving as a spikey-haired oddball with a beak-like nose looking, for all the world, like a nineteenth century, aristocratic version of Woody Woodpecker. Pius IX is said to have sought “exile” rather than asylum in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. A French ambassador, Eugène, duc d’Harcourt, is referred to as Duke Harcourt, which is like calling Queen Elizabeth’s husband “Duke Edinburgh” or her late maternal uncle “Duke Windsor.” One of the French commanders in Rome is described as “the son of the highest-ranking general in Napoleon Bonaparte’s army.” In fact, Nicholas Oudinot was only one of twenty-six marshals created by Napoleon and far from the most distinguished; a good man to lead a charge but not a particularly competent independent commander.

Above all, Kertzer seems to be blind to the lessons of modern history. Obsessed with the “baleful results of this continued brew of religious and political authority” and the “cold repression enforced by religious police or . . . the bloody battles waged in God’s name” he conveniently ignores the fact that from the eighteenth century down to our own day, almost all major wars have been waged for territorial or ideological rather than religious reasons and that the bloodiest butcher bills of all can be credited to anti-religious or downright atheistic political cults led by such strictly secular monstrosities as Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot. Conversely, time and again, whether it was in the battles against slavery or for civil rights in America, or the resistance to Communism and Fascism in Europe, some of the most heroic champions of freedom and tolerance have been people of faith.

Aram Bakshian Jr. served as an aide to Presidents Nixon, Ford and Reagan, and has written extensively on politics, history, gastronomy and the arts for American and overseas publications.