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The
"brigand lady" Michelina De Cesare,
tortured and killed. |
As
concerns the tone of the proclamations that
terrorized the population, O' Clery 
did a very useful thing and summarised their
general common content: «It
appears from these proclamations that the measures
adopted to suppress the so-called "brigandage"
were: 1) execution, with or without a trial,
of all people found armed; 2) pillage of rebel
cities and towns; 3) imprisonment, without trial
or charge, of suspects and "relatives of
brigands"; 4) treatment as accomplices
of brigands - and therefore execution or imprisonment
- for all those who: a) possessed weapons without
a license; b) worked without permission in the
fields in some areas; c) took to the fields
more food than what was necessary for a meal;
d) kept food stocks in the huts; e) shoed horses
and possessed or transported horseshoes without
license; 5) destruction of huts in the woods,
obligation to wall up all isolated cottages,
removal of men and livestock from small farms
to put them in places controlled by the army;
6) indictment of all neutral behaviours and
treatment of neutral people as friends and accomplices
of brigands; 7) severe censorship of the press».
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The Problem of Prisoners
As concerns prisoners, as Martucci wrote ,
there were about 50,000 Bourbon prisoners and more
than 18,000 papal prisoners among officers and soldiers.
10,000 Neapolitan soldiers were imprisoned in the
fortresses of Ponza and Ischia, to be a prey to typhus,
cholera, louses and dysentery. Foreign prisoners were
immediately released, as well as those belonging to
very important families. But not all of them: Farini,
when he was lieutenant-governor of Naples, considered
all prisoners, even Bourbon generals, as rebels without
a country and this even before the fall of Gaeta!
Then the deportations to the North began: tenths of
thousands of men were deported to the freezing alpine
prisons where they starved and were forced to live
in the filth.
Brigand
prisoners |
Martucci
quoted some passages from a letter written by
a witness above all suspicion, Lamarmora, who
on 18 November 1860, after a visit to Milan
prisons, wrote to Cavour:«he
found 1,600 Bourbon soldiers in describable
conditions, "all covered by scabies and
worms, many of them suffering from eye disease
or venereal diseases"; to his utmost surprise,
this "herd of swine", "these
scoundrels", "these dregs" refused
to join the Sardinian troops; prisoners "claimed
their right to go home because they did not
want to make a new oath since they had sworn
loyalty to Francis II". General La Marmora,
however, avoided to say whether those soldiers
so sick had been treated by Piedmont military
doctors, and he did not say why that stinky
crowd of miserable people had not received new
clothes». |
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