He left in anonymity as he had lived in his short season on the throne, which lasted less than two years. The last king of Naples had certified the end of an ancient kingdom that had not been able to grasp the wind of modernity for its own survival. Francis II of Bourbon died on 27 December 1894 in Arco, in the Trentino area of the then Austro-Hungarian Empire, at the end of the 19th century, over thirty years after his exile. In the history that had overwhelmed him he left no significant traces because he gave no imprint to history, neither his personal one nor that of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies which disintegrated between his fingers, perhaps the least guilty of all those who they were around. Betrayed, deluded, deceived or abandoned by those who were supposed to advise and guide him, who instead had sensed the wind of history, raising the sails in favor.
Shy, taciturn and with a strict religious education, he was immediately Franceschiello
In private, as the people did, they called him Franceschiello: in that diminutive there was his size. His army, which in 1860 either did not fight or fought badly against Garibaldi’s red shirts, was immediately called “Franceschiello’s army”, which in the Italian language is the archetype of Mario Monicelli’s Brancaleone army. Pusillanimous generals, incapable or sold at the price of ranks and privileges to be maintained with the new Savoy course, headed the fate of the king and the monarchy towards disaster.
Francesco almost always suffered events and did not determine them. He married by proxy, as was the custom at the time, the eighteen-year-old Princess Maria Sofia of Bavaria, and it was a luxury, but perhaps he didn’t understand it: the future queen, Sissi’s sister who married Franz Joseph of Habsburg, was beautiful and intelligent , and she also had that character that her husband lacked. While he was tolerated and treated with disdain, she was actually opposed by the decadent Neapolitan court. In intimacy she was also kept away from the royal bed by her husband, who was suffering from phimosis which prevented him from consummating the marriage for nine years. After the wedding had just celebrated, in 1859, King Ferdinand II fell ill and died, and his taciturn, introverted, sad and pious son ascended the throne, as was written.
The Pope’s holy water and the salt water dominated by his fleet did not protect him
He did not understand or was not made to understand the prospects of Cavour’s offer for an “Italian” alliance which envisaged the division of a good part of the Papal State, an unacceptable hypothesis for him, a very Catholic. Like his ancestors, he believed that his kingdom was protected to the north by the Pope’s holy water and elsewhere by the salt water dominated by the powerful Neapolitan war and commercial fleet; and then Vittorio Emanuele II was his cousin, and he did not glimpse the threat brought instead indirectly through Giuseppe Garibaldi (if things had gone badly, Cavour could have dumped him in an instant).
As for reforms to modernize the state, he had some in mind but they were not at the top of his concerns, and when he decided it was too late. His fleet was unable to intercept the “Piedmont” and the “Lombardo” with the thousand in red shirts on board, who landed in Marsala without the batteries being able to catch them and sink them because English ships had positioned themselves in the line of fire to load wine. England had an interest in the creation of a kingdom of Italy not strong enough to worry its dominion in the Mediterranean but enough to annoy its rival France. Garibaldi, then, enjoyed wide credit in London and, being a Freemason, also among free masons.
Franceschiello saw the spread of those irregulars against an army that should have torn them to pieces, and he saw all the cracks that announced the collapse, irreversible with the arrival in force of the Piedmontese of his cousin Savoy. Naples was abandoned to avoid unnecessary bloodshed and Garibaldi proclaimed himself dictator; just enough time to bring in the Piedmontese who avoided the republican drift and got their hands on the treasure of the Banco di Napoli which was going to replenish the exhausted Turin coffers bled dry by two very costly wars of independence.
The proud queen Maria Sofia heroines in Gaeta besieged by the Piedmontese
The nobility, as happened in Sicily, had passed en masse to the side of the Savoy, and in advance of Tomasi di Lampedusa’s Leopard they changed everything so that nothing would change. In Gaeta, surrounded by siege for three months, Maria Sofia wore the trousers, and not just in a manner of speaking. She was the soul of the resistance, tireless in giving courage to the soldiers who remained faithful and in treating their wounds, heroine of a symbolic battle lost from the start. The unnecessarily complicated flag of the Two Sicilies was lowered on the Tyrrhenian Sea but remained chattering in the wind in the distant Abruzzi, in Civitella del Tronto: while on 17 March 1861 the Kingdom of Italy was proclaimed in parliament in Turin, the fortress defended the past by fighting .
Then the whole kingdom ended, which was neither that of flowers according to hagiography nor even the denial of God erected as a system of government, according to the words of Lord Gladstone. The generals passed as one man under the tricolor and the soldiers who refused to change flag ended up in the north in the infamous Fenestrelle prison which anticipated some of the themes of the concentration camps and gulags. Many of them were freed to be “given” to the Americans engaged in the civil war, and in fact the Italians fought both in the Unionist and Confederate ranks for a cause that was not theirs.
The long exile and the dream of returning to his beloved Naples
Franceschiello and his wife will find refuge first in Rome, where the queen admired throughout Europe for the courage shown in Gaeta will not be spared the outrage of the spread of pornographic photomontages; then to Paris, dreaming of an unlikely restoration that will not happen either by fueling brigandage (more troops will be used there and there will be more victims than in the three wars of independence) or in any other way. Of the aristocracy that prostrated and swooned in front of the royals, only the modest Duke of Peoples will follow them into exile in the intermediate stage of Lake Starnberg, in Bavaria. Francesco and Maria Sofia will also delude themselves about dynastic continuity, but their only daughter Maria Cristina Pia will survive only three months.
There will be no other Bourbon in the direct line, even if there will be no shortage of pretenders to the virtual throne, as will also happen with the Savoys after 1946. The figure of Francis, baptized in the explicit sign of the Saint of Assisi (was part of the name) , will be re-evaluated by the Church in 2000 with the proclamation as Servant of God. Maria Sofia will die on 19 January 1925 in Munich. Almost no one had recognized her, aged as she was, when during the First World War she provided assistance to Italian soldiers prisoners in concentration camps, she addressed them in an Italian stiffened by German pronunciation and softened by Neapolitan expressions, and always asked where from they came, to illuminate when he recognized locations of his lost kingdom.
The enemy Vittorio Emanuele III, when he was born, as heir to the throne had received the title of Prince of Naples, for the first time alternating with the traditional Prince of Piedmont. There will be no one else. The remains of the last Bourbons, reunited in the piety of death, rest in Naples in the basilica of Santa Chiara.