The first name he gave was not his own. Giovanni Rossi: a convenient alias, sufficiently common to afford a few minutes’ shelter to a man whose luggage accused him far more eloquently than any denunciation. In the room of an inn at Ronchi, on the 16th of September 1882, Guglielmo Oberdan had just been arrested in possession of two bombs. He had resisted; a revolver shot had gone off in the struggle. Blood covered his brow. Trieste was preparing for the reception of Franz Joseph, and this traveller had certainly not come to applaud.
He was twenty-four years of age. His native city belonged to the Habsburg Empire; he wished it to be Italian. A student of engineering in Vienna, then a deserter during the mobilisation of 1878 attendant upon the occupation of Bosnia, he had reached Italy and lived chiefly in Rome. Exile had sharpened his convictions. When the Emperor announced his imperial progress to Trieste, the irredentist set out alongside Donato Ragosa. He carried with him the means to turn a dynastic ceremony into an outrage.
Yet the secret had already travelled faster than the men.
In the diplomatic telegrams preserved and reproduced by Francesco Salata, a certain Fabris was supplying intelligence to the Austrian authorities. He reported the departures, the companions, the intended crossing near Buttrio; he even warned that heightened vigilance might drive the travellers onto byways. Then followed a recommendation that lends to this entire correspondence its singular flavour: should the arrests take place, they ought, as far as possible, to be kept secret for several days. The informant wished to pursue his work. A conspiracy unearthed was, to his mind, merely a matter still in hand.
Oberdan, for his part, was endeavouring to cross the frontier. The carrier Giuseppe Sabbadini assisted in the journey; local guides and sympathisers facilitated the passage. Ragosa pressed on towards Trieste. Oberdan remained at Ronchi, either to rest or to await a more propitious hour. That delay proved decisive. When the gendarmes appeared, the bombs were still upon their bearer. The Emperor had not been approached. Between the intention and its fulfilment, an inn door had swung shut.
Brought to a chamber in the town hall, Oberdan was kept in handcuffs until the arrival of the magistrate from Monfalcone. A surgeon examined his wounds. The interrogation commenced in the late afternoon; the earliest administrative reports promptly depicted an accused man who was arrogant, cynical, and hostile to Austrian rule. From this hostility he made little attempt to shrink. The false name was meant to protect something; certainly not his opinions.
After ten o’clock in the evening, he was marched to the gaol at Monfalcone. There he remained under strict surveillance, his hands pinioned, a gendarme regularly entering his cell. On the following day, he was conveyed by train to Trieste. The Emperor was entering the city to receive homage; the man who had come to disturb his sojourn arrived between guards. Two contrary ceremonies were following the selfsame rails, though only one was inscribed upon the programme.
The populace encountered during the transfer did not welcome him as a liberator. There were shouts, jeers, and hostile demonstrations. Oberdan met them with his conviction that minds would change. Events would lend to these scenes a peculiar irony: a city whose inhabitants had reviled the prisoner was destined to become the principal theatre of his patriotic memory. In September, however, that memory did not yet exist. There remained only an arrested youth, seized munitions, and magistrates impatient for names.
On the 19th, a photograph shattered the identity of Giovanni Rossi. This portrait, once given to a friend and seized in an earlier affair, re-emerged from a dossier to identify its living subject. Oberdan was compelled to resume his name. The proceedings could now unite the conspirator with the deserter; this conjunction would soon cause civil justice to give way to military authority.
Yet he preserved a curious manner of defending himself. Concerning his own person, he spoke until he stood self-condemned; concerning others, he closed every avenue. He attributed his commission to a committee in Trieste, refused to name its members, and obfuscated his itinerary. When confronted with Sabbadini, he disputed the carrier’s depositions rather than profit from a clarification that might have eased his own plight. Interrogators ran up against this inner boundary: his convictions were laid bare to his judges; his confederates were withheld.
Regarding the Emperor, his answers grew more compromising. A hostile demonstration, an affront: these initial explanations might still have left some latitude. Then Oberdan conceded that he would not have hesitated to employ the bombs against the sovereign. He drew a distinction between the common people, whom he claimed he had no wish to harm, and the imperial dignitaries whom he held accountable for Austrian policy. This distinction disarmed neither the infernal machines nor the prosecution. On the contrary, it established how thoroughly political his resolve was, and how deadly that politics could become.
In October, the military auditor Fongarolli took over the preliminary examination. The authorities in Vienna demanded dispatch. Civil depositions were reaffirmed; interrogations and confrontations brought the case to readiness for judgment. On the 20th of October, the military court delivered its verdict in a closed proceeding, absent the public debate wherein prosecution and defence answer one another before the witnesses of a city. A cause destined to resound throughout Europe was being decided beyond its sight.
The bombs were present; the assault against Franz Joseph, however, had not occurred. That interval did not avert the capital penalty. Imperial justice conjoined the scheme of high treason with desertion and the political confessions of the accused. Oberdan, who spurned all subterfuge, had furnished them with abundant material. His mother petitioned for clemency. Foreign appeals sought to stay the execution; Victor Hugo himself lent his voice to the effort. Yet it was not enough to ask a sovereign to be clement. An empire had also to resolve whether it could permit to live a man who had sought to make of his death a proclamation.
Another docket prolonged the suspense: the explosion perpetrated in Trieste on the 2nd of August, which had claimed two lives. Suspicions attached to Oberdan; this complicity was never judicially established. The supplementary inquest therefore did not transform those fatalities into a proven crime against him. His condemnation pursued its own course, and December brought an end to all reprieves.
On the 20th of December 1882, at seven o’clock in the morning, he was hanged in the enclosed courtyard of a Trieste barracks. The Austrian reports themselves recorded his cries in favour of Italy and a free Trieste; drums accompanied the execution. Later proclamations would adorn the scene, but the condemned man’s voice had not waited for the poets to contradict the martial ceremonial.
At twenty minutes past eight, a telegram announced that all had passed without incident. The formula was accurate enough for the service, far less so for posterity. The bombs of Ronchi had not detonated; the name restored by a photograph had just entered into a history that the authorities could no longer confine within their files.