Renzi resolved to enforce this programme by a sudden attack on Rimini, in which he was completely successful; but an ally of his, who had raised a revolt simultaneously in the lower Romagna, was compelled to retire before the Swiss troops of the Pope; and Renzi, apparently panic struck, retreated into Tuscany. Unfortunately, a reaction was then taking place there. Fossombroni had died in 1844, Corsini, the Minister who was most in sympathy with Fossombroni's policy, resigned in 1845; and the chief of the Jesuit party took his place. The Grand Duke Leopold himself was at first disposed to be friendly to Renzi; but, as the best protection to him, he advised his escape to France. Renzi soon returned, and Metternich, alarmed at the intensity of Italian feeling, denounced the Duke for protecting rebels, and, under the influence of Austrians, Jesuits, and of the Pope, Leopold consented to surrender Renzi to Gregory XVI.
The attention of the country was still further directed to this attempt by a pamphlet which came out immediately after, and which was written by a young Piedmontese nobleman, Count Massimo Tapparelli D'Azeglio. In this pamphlet D'Azeglio complained that the Rimini movement had been much misrepresented; but that the action of the insurgents had no doubt been a blunder, because the movement had been purely local, and they had not considered how to use the forces of the whole of Italy. He then proceeded to denounce the corruptions of the Papal Government, and the cruelties which had followed the suppression of this rising; particularly the gross injustice of imprisoning a lawyer because he had defended some of the prisoners. After a denunciation in detail of the evils of the Papal Government, he goes on to repudiate the use of secret societies, as having failed in their purpose; calls on the Italians to unite in peaceable protest against abuses, rather than in insurrection; and points to the Tugendbund of Germany as a model for Italian combinations. The pamphlet had little that was new in it, but attention was fixed upon the author, by the fact that he was immediately banished from Tuscany by the Grand Duke, and was, shortly after, welcomed in Piedmont.
Metternich's protest against this welcome might have been more decided had he not been hampered by the events which were occurring in Galicia. Ever since the insurrection of 1830, there had been a steady feeling of sympathy towards the Poles, not merely as an oppressed nation, but as _the_ nation whose restoration was the chief duty and necessity of the champions of liberty. Kossuth declared, at a somewhat later time, that there was a close connection between the liberties of Hungary and those of Poland. Mazzini had been eager to co-operate, where it was possible, with the exiled Poles. Robert Blum had shown a special enthusiasm for their cause, and was ready to help in a rising in Posen. Every Slavonic race looked on the wrongs of the Poles as the typical instance of the oppression of the Slavs by the Great Powers of Europe; while, at the same time, they honoured them as the most famous fighters in the cause of Slavonic freedom. But it was in France that the greatest enthusiasm was felt for the Poles, and the most complete organization of the exiles existed. There a special military school was founded for them in 1843; and in 1846, after a preparation of three years, the democratic section among the Poles resolved to strike a decisive blow against Austria.