Friedrich Engel-Janosi, “Two Austrian Ambassadors Discuss the Successor of Pius IX” (1944)

Friedrich Engel-Janosi’s historical article examines Austrian diplomatic assessments of the College of Cardinals in 1861, 1869, and 1870. Through reports by Baron Alexander Bach and Count Ferdinand Trautmannsdorff, it reconstructs changing expectations about Pius IX’s successor and, more importantly, changing definitions of Austria’s interests in the papacy. Its central movement is from the defense of Catholic legitimacy against Italian nationalism to anxiety about an increasingly centralized Church independent of secular governments. These confidential judgments also illuminate divisions within the Italian clergy that Engel-Janosi considers indispensable to understanding the Risorgimento.

The opening establishes why succession became a recurrent diplomatic question during an exceptionally long pontificate. Pius’s illnesses repeatedly encouraged speculation, while the destruction of his territorial sovereignty made a conclave potentially dangerous. France, Austria, and Italy considered influencing the succession during their alliance negotiations of 1869. Pius himself sought safeguards against political disruption and conflict over electoral authority, including arrangements for an accelerated election and for a vacancy during the Vatican Council. The cardinals mattered both as electors and as participants in ecclesiastical government.

Bach’s survey of December 1861 followed the proclamation of the Italian kingdom and the loss of most papal territory. Austria’s attachment to legitimacy made restoration of the Pontifical State a matter of European principle, but military defeat and internal weakness prevented intervention. Bach, formerly the powerful minister associated with Austrian reaction, approached the Sacred College through this contradiction between conservative commitments and restricted means. Yet Engel-Janosi cautions against treating his political categories as transparent descriptions:

The designation of liberal had a special connotation at that time.

The article distinguishes older French and Austrian alignments, reformist opposition to the zelanti, neo-Guelph hopes for a papally led Italian confederation, and support for unification under Savoy. These positions could overlap without being identical. Engel-Janosi reconstructs Cavour’s unsuccessful negotiations with Rome in 1860–1861 to show that willingness to discuss reconciliation could unsettle conventional reputations. Santucci, whom Bach regarded as exemplary in his conservatism, had participated substantially in those negotiations. Bach’s favorable judgment may have reflected Santucci’s contribution to the Austrian concordat of 1855.

Bach preferred De Angelis, whose uncompromising conservatism and persecution by the Italian authorities strengthened his Austrian credentials. He recommended excluding several cardinals associated with liberal or national sympathies, while dismissing the capacities of Pecci, the future Leo XIII. Engel-Janosi compares these assessments with other evidence, exposing inconsistencies without dismissing the reports’ historical value. Their limitations reveal the criteria organizing diplomatic perception:

His judgment and selection, however, were completely dominated by the political interests of his country, which he thought Catholic, conservative, and anti- or supra-national, in contrast to the policy of the Italy of Victor Emmanuel II and of the France of Napoleon III.

The portraits also recover conflicts within papal government. Antonelli appears as an effective but power-seeking secretary of state whose colleagues resented their exclusion from influence. Opposition to him could therefore arise from institutional rivalry as well as political conviction. Engel-Janosi resists both hostile anecdote and idealization, distinguishing political intelligence from personal ambition.

Trautmannsdorff’s report of July 1869 belongs to a transformed setting. Austria had lost Venetia and its German predominance in 1866; Beust sought cooperation with France and Italy, while domestic liberal legislation challenged Bach’s concordat. Although personally conservative and religious, the ambassador now sought a pope capable of accommodation with contemporary governments. His criteria were largely defensive: the candidate should be neither conspicuously compromised against Italy nor excessively conciliatory toward it, neither intolerant nor hostile to Austria. His assessment of the available leadership was bleak:

There is really no superior man among the cardinals of today and none of the eligibles is really above mediocrity.

Engel-Janosi qualifies such judgments by noting overlooked intellectual distinction, including Cardinal Pitra’s scholarship. More consequential than this pessimism was Austria’s difficulty in identifying a positive candidate. Trautmannsdorff recommended Asquini, Panebianco, and Trevisanato, but none seemed to offer exceptional leadership. The contrast with Bach registers an imperial policy increasingly concerned with managing losses rather than restoring an older order.

The decisive conceptual shift appears in Trautmannsdorff’s report of July 18, 1870, the day papal infallibility was proclaimed. The Council suggested that future conclave alignments would no longer depend primarily on sympathy toward Austria or Italy:

The new trends which had become evident proved that the Church would not rely longer on any government, but exclusively on herself.

This was the ambassador’s interpretation of the Council: ecclesiastical self-reliance would strengthen papal authority and diminish episcopal rights. He therefore feared a young, militant successor and favored transition and pacification. Earlier national distinctions weakened; Morichini, previously marked for exclusion, no longer appeared necessarily unacceptable. Cooperation with France now promised restraint of Roman intransigence, whereas Beust principally sought an alliance against Prussia.

Engel-Janosi closes by extending the reports’ significance beyond Austrian diplomacy. Their partial, politically interested testimony exposes clerical struggles over nationalism, temporal sovereignty, reform, and ecclesiastical authority. A satisfactory history of Italian unification must include these conflicts—the religious-political struggle he calls the Kulturkampf of Sardinia and Italy—rather than treating the clergy as a uniform obstacle to national statehood.