Austria strikes back: the Capuchins, the blockade and the expulsion of 1853

The secularization of 1852 and the Capuchins

The radical government of Ticino pursued in the early 1850s a programme of secularization that combined school reform, the suppression of religious houses and the transfer of their property to the state. The law of 28 May 1852 abolished the male religious teaching orders, and in the same year the canton expelled the Capuchins, most of whom were Lombards and therefore Austrian subjects.¹ Once the friars had left, their convents and the property attached to them passed to the cantonal state. For the radicals the measure removed from public life an order they regarded as an instrument of clerical and Austrian influence. For Austria it was an injury to its subjects and to the Church, which the Habsburg monarchy claimed to protect in Lombardy.

The legal dispute that followed is instructive. Austria demanded, through its chargé d'affaires in Bern, that the government of Ticino grant the expelled Capuchins an appropriate lifelong pension. In its reply of 3 January 1853 the Federal Council rejected the claim that religious orders enjoyed special legal protection and insisted that the state retained its sovereign rights, which it could exercise by laws and decrees as circumstances required.² It accepted, however, the principle that a state which took over the property of a suppressed monastery should pay reasonable pensions to its members out of that property. It refused to add public funds beyond what the monastic property yielded. As a compromise it offered to pay the expelled friars a pension for three years in place of the usual travel allowance, in the hope that Austria would show the same consideration towards Swiss citizens in Lombardy.³ The argument is a recognizably modern one: a sovereign may expropriate, but expropriation creates an obligation to compensate that is measured by the value of what was taken.

Blockade and expulsion

Austria did not accept the offer. A month later, after the failed rising in Milan of 6 February 1853, Field Marshal Radetzky closed the frontier with Ticino and ordered the expulsion of all Ticinese from Lombardy.⁴ The Dizionario storico della Svizzera gives the number of persons expelled as more than 6,000. Stefania Bianchi, in a study of Ticinese emigration to Milan, specifies that the measure affected seasonal and periodic migrants, pedlars and cross-border workers, more than 6,000 persons in all.⁵ Bianchi adds that entire families were affected. The expelled belonged to the trades described above, masons, kilnmen, stonecutters, porters, chestnut-sellers, coffee-house keepers, innkeepers and merchants, the descendants of the emigrant trades that Chapter A.III follows back to the sixteenth century. Many had lived in Milan for years, some with property, workshops and debts there.

The blockade was an economic weapon aimed at the most vulnerable point of the canton. Ticino sold goods on the Lombard markets and lived in large part from the earnings of its emigrants. When the frontier closed, emigrant families lost the earnings on which they depended, and the canton had to absorb several thousand returning workers whom its own economy could hardly employ. The cantonal government ordered an inquiry to measure the incidence of the expulsions and to quantify the social and economic costs of the closure of the frontier. The plight of the canton found sympathy far away: Hungarian exiles who had once found refuge in Ticino organized, on hearing of the blockade, a benefit performance in New York for the poor of the canton.⁶ The school reform of the same years suffered, as the cantonal budget came under pressure.⁷ Seen from Vienna, the measure was a reprisal for the Capuchins and a punishment for the conspiracy of February. Seen from Bellinzona, it was collective punishment of a population for acts committed by Italian exiles.

Notes

1. Snider, "La scuola media pubblica" (above), on the law of 28 May 1852; Bauer, "Royaume lombard-vénitien" (above): "l'expulsion en 1852 par le canton du Tessin des capucins, principalement lombards"; Carlo Moos, "Italien", in HLS, version of 27 June 2016, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/003359/ (consulted 4 October 2026): "Die Ausweisung meist lombardischer Kapuziner aus dem Tessin 1852". ↩
2. Federal Council to the Austrian chargé d'affaires in Bern, L. Karnicki, 3 January 1853, DDS, vol. 1, doc. 158, https://dodis.ch/41157 (consulted 4 October 2026). ↩
3. Federal Council to Karnicki, 3 January 1853 (above). ↩
4. Bauer, "Royaume lombard-vénitien" (above), and the Italian version of the same article in the DSS, version of 24 March 2011, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/it/articles/006630/2011-03-24/ (consulted 5 October 2026): "nel 1853 il governatore austriaco, il feldmaresciallo Johann Joseph Franz Karl Radetzky, fece chiudere le frontiere ed espulse più di 6000 Ticinesi dalla Lombardia". Neither version gives the exact date of the decree. ↩
5. Bauer, "Royaume lombard-vénitien" (above): Radetzky "fit chasser plus de 6000 Tessinois de la Lombardie"; Bianchi, "Ticinesi a Milano" (above): "tra migranti stagionali e periodici, ambulanti e frontalieri, il provvedimento riguarda più di 6.000 persone". ↩
6. Bianchi, "Ticinesi a Milano" (above), on the trades of the emigrants, on the expulsion of "più di 6.000 persone, comprendenti interi nuclei familiari" and on the cantonal inquiry "per valutarne l'incidenza e per quantificare i costi sociali ed economici della chiusura del confine"; Martinola, "Fraternità con gli Ungheresi raminghi" (above): "Appena saputo del blocco austriaco imposto nel '53 al Ticino, gli ungheresi, che avevano raggiunte le lontane sponde ospitali d'America [...]". ↩
7. Snider, "La scuola media pubblica" (above), noting the effect of the expulsion of 1853 on the stability of the schools. ↩

For general information only. This article does not constitute legal or tax advice, does not replace advice on an individual case and creates no lawyer-client relationship. It reflects the legal position as of August 2025.