by Lucy Riall
After 1860, while ostensibly a national hero, Garibaldi became increasingly alienated from the Piedmontese ‘solution’ and from monarchical Italy. He moved ever further to the left, towards socialism and extreme anti-clericalism. He organised two disastrous attempts (in 1862 and 1867), in the face of official opposition, to seize Rome from the Pope and make it the capital of Italy. But he also participated in the 1866 war on the government side against Austria, after which Italy gained control of Venetia. He embarked on a triumphant tour of England in 1864. In 1870, already an old and sick man, and in an emotional, if largely futile, attempt to help defend the nascent French Republic against Prussia, Europe's new superpower, he organised a final expedition of volunteers to fight in the Franco-Prussian war. The rest of his life was spent in partial seclusion with his family at home in Caprera, a seclusion interrupted by sporadic forays into public life. Even before his death in 1882 Caprera had become a place of pilgrimage, with a large and dedicated band of followers and enthusiasts seeking to pay homage to Garibaldi. Only two months before his death, and so incapacitated by arthritis that he could rarely leave his bed and had to be carried in a specially designed chair, he had set out on a tour of southern Italy, and came to Sicily once more, this time to commemorate the 600th anniversary of the revolt known as the Sicilian Vespers.3
From relatively humble beginnings, Garibaldi became one of the most popular and enduring political heroes of the nineteenth-century world. His appeal transcended social classes and his fame crossed national frontiers. Indeed, as a revolutionary ‘outsider’ with little, if any, official backing, and as a political leader who was in power for less than six months in his entire political career, he was the first to achieve a truly worldwide fame, and to reach a mass audience via the new technologies of mass communication. Lithographers and photographers produced countless images of Garibaldi, stressing variously the hero's strength, bravery, endurance, virility, humanity, kindness, saintliness and spirit of adventure. His name sold newspapers and books in London, Paris, Berlin and New York, as well as in Italy, and both journalists and their readers revelled in his exploits. He was hated as much by the Church and traditionalists as he was loved by the young and excluded. Young men volunteered to fight alongside him and middle-class women rushed to get close to him. As head of the 1860 revolution in Sicily, he was said to be ‘worshipped’ by peasants ‘as a mythical hero’4 and had children ‘held up towards him as before a saviour’.5 Hailed on a visit in 1864 as ‘the greatest man by whom England has ever been visited’, Garibaldi's arrival in London ‘resulted in such a scene as can hardly be witnessed twice in a lifetime’.6 He attracted vast and enthusiastic crowds, pubs were named after him, and souvenirs and replicas were produced on a huge scale. As recounted in countless cheap biographies and reproduced in innumerable illustrations, his life had all the ingredients to make him famous and popular among the nineteenth-century reading public. He was a general who triumphed against terrible odds, a dignified leader who cared for the common man, and a romantic figure who had experienced his full share of personal suffering, loneliness and hardship. His striking appearance – his good looks and flamboyant clothes – made him an instantly recognisable figure, while his simple manner and austere lifestyle reinforced the seductive appeal of a hero unspoilt by his cult status.
After his death in 1882, Garibaldi became the subject of an offical cult. This cult was part of a concerted attempt by the Italian government, and especially by Francesco Crispi, the dominant political figure of the time, to create Italy's ‘Risorgimento’ (the ‘national resurgence’, c. 1792–c. 1870) as a ‘place of memory’, as well as to give Italians a political education which would compete with and replace the traditional loyalites and teachings of the Catholic Church and old regime states.7 National ceremonies such as the burial of King Vittorio Emanuele II's body in 1878 in the Pantheon in Rome and the national pilgrimage in 1884 to his tomb;8 annual commemorative events such as Constitution Day;9 huge choreographed parades to celebrate anniversaries like that of 20 September (the date of the breach of Rome's Porta Pia by the Italian government in 1870);10 and the creation of new public spaces such as museums of the Risorgimento11 and monuments (most famously the Vittoriano in Rome):12 all these were intended to confirm the status of the Risorgimento as Italy's foundation story and to create a ‘civic religion’ which would sacralise the secular state and create a common sense of national and political belonging.13 And, since their purpose was to lend legitimacy to the government, such memorials and anniversaries sought to create and reinforce a particular memory of the Risorgimento. They invariably stressed the unifying, and satisfactory, nature of the monarchical solution to the Risorgimento, and told of the common aims of its protagonists and the heroic, disinterested actions of its leaders.
Control of the posthumous memory of Garibaldi was central to this secular yet monarchical vision of Italian national identity. Official efforts concentrated on creating a conciliatory cult of national heroes, which was to turn the old rivals Garibaldi, Vittorio Emanuele II, Cavour and Mazzini into lifelong allies, and which venerated them alongside a medley of other famous Italians such as Dante Alighieri, Christopher Columbus, Giordano Bruno and Ugo Foscolo.14 During the twenty years after his death, monuments were raised to Garibaldi all over Italy. Whether on horseback or on foot, sword in hand or pointing toward future glory, Garibaldi replaced princes, saints, and even sometimes the Madonna herself as the subject of public representations in squares all over Italy.15 Garibaldi was to become a secular saint, a symbol of Italian unity. At the inauguration of the Turin monument to Garibaldi in 1887, the official orator, Tommaso Villa, spoke passionately to the assembled crowds of Garibaldi's saintly qualities, of his virtue and dedication to the nation, and of his role as a symbol of national unity.16 The importance of Garibaldi to the government, and especially to its leader, Crispi, was clear in Rome, where the monument to Garibaldi was said to be the largest of its kind ever built in Europe and took almost ten years to complete (see figure 1 opposite). The unveiling of the vast equestrian statue on the Janiculum hill, the site of Garibaldi's famous defence of the Roman Republic in 1849, was timed to coincide in 1895 with the extended celebrations for the 25th anniversary of the Italian government's seizure of Rome from the Pope, and Crispi used the occasion openly to attack the Church, to claim that the destruction of the Pope's temporal power was divinely ordained ‘just has it had been the will of the Almighty that Italy … should be restored to unity’.17
1 Monument to Garibaldi on the Janiculum hill in Rome (1895).
The image of Garibaldi as a sacred symbol of secular Italy was promoted relentlessly, and not just by the central government. Municipal councils across Italy, with far fewer resources at their disposal but still keen to contribute to the creation of new commemorative spaces, embarked on a programme of renaming main streets and squares after Garibaldi. Marble plaques were fixed to buildings, to honour where Garibaldi had been – where he had slept, fought, thought and spoken – and to conserve this memory for future generations.18 In the twenty or more years after his death, continuing public enthusiasm for the cult of Garibaldi was reflected in the proliferation of patriotic pamphlets and other ephemera (calendars, flyers, postcards, china figures) both on the occasion of his death and to commemorate various anniversaries thereafter.19 It can also be traced in the growth of a large market of generally left-wing readers for Garibaldian literature, which included major biographies, personal memoirs, novels, plays and poetry. Many, especially Risorgimento veterans and those involved in radical and left-wing politics, kept up an active commitment to Garibaldi and to garibaldinismo.20
Far from diminishing the cult of Garibaldi, the rise of a new, more strident nationalism in Italy in the years before the First World War, together with a creeping disaffection with the ideals of Italian liberalism, simply added to Garibaldi's mythical status. The writer and activist Gabriele D'Annunzio recast Garibaldi as a futurist hero, an ‘Omnipotent Leader [Duce]�
�21 and fearless warrior whose patriotic example would lead Italians to sacrifice themselves for the nationalist cause. Encouraged equally by the 1907 celebrations for the centenary of his birth, Garibaldi's name was invoked to claim ‘unredeemed’ Italy (l'Italia irredenta, namely, the Trentino and Trieste) and then to justify intervention in the First World War. During the war itself, Garibaldi's grandsons organised a volunteer legion to help defend France against German aggression – to fight for Italy's ‘sister nation’ against ‘the German hordes’ – and two of them, Bruno and Costanzo, died on the front at Argonne.22 This use of Garibaldi to (re)associate militarism with national unity led, in turn, to his appropriation by Mussolini's Fascists, who were seeking to co-opt the Risorgimento and rewrite it as their own foundation story. An attempt was made to ‘Fascistise’ Garibaldi by stressing continuities between his and Mussolini's actions (red shirts and black shirts; the marches on Rome). In a parallel process driven by another of Garibaldi's grandsons, the Fascist enthusiast Ezio Garibaldi, a new season of Garibaldi publications got under way, which produced scholarly editions of his writings, the re-issuing of biographies and volunteers' memoirs and the journal Camicia Rossa. A high point was reached in 1932, the 50th anniversary of Garibaldi's death. Official celebrations were personally directed by Mussolini and included school holidays, an exhibition of relics in Rome, and the inauguration of a monument to Garibaldi's first wife, Anita, on the Janiculum hill, along with the ceremonial transfer of her ashes from a cemetery in Genoa to the monument in Rome.23 In the mid-1930s, the first professorial chairs in Risorgimento history were established at Italian universities, and in 1934 Blasetti's film 1860, about the expedition of Garibaldi's Thousand to Sicily, appeared on Italian screens.24
Fascism was not, however, the last word on Garibaldi and the Garibaldian cult. Also during the 1930s, the opposition to Fascism sought to combat the aggressive nationalism of the Fascist regime by reinvoking Garibaldi as the symbol of popular liberation and internationalism. Agitating against Mussolini's intervention on the side of Franco in the Spanish Civil War, Carlo Rosselli, leader of the new Action Party, proclaimed ‘today in Spain, tomorrow in Italy’. Volunteers for Spain were organised into groups called ‘Garibaldi brigades’, and these fought with the Republican Popular Front against Franco and his supporters. The ‘second Risorgimento’ (1943–5) also saw communist Garibaldi brigades fight in the Resistance in Italy and Yugoslavia.25
Thereafter, during the early years of the Italian Republic, Garibaldi found his place again as a founding father of democracy, and was incorporated into a revised republican ‘religion’ which linked the new myth of the Resistance and anti-Fascism to the Risorgimento.26 Garibaldi became a unifying and consensual figure, and in the long decades of Christian Democrat rule after 1948 his extreme anti-clericalism tended to be erased from public view. He was remembered every year on Republic Day (2 June, the date of the referendum which created the Republic, coincidentally also the date of Garibaldi's death), with its symbols and rituals referring explicitly to Risorgimento iconography, and he was commemorated further in a series of centenaries – in 1949 (for the Roman Republic of 1849); in 1959–60 (for national unification in 1859–60); and 1982 (the centenary of his death). During the 1980s, two of Italy's most prominent politicians – the leader of the republican party, Giovanni Spadolini, and the leader of the socialist party, Bettino Craxi – vied with each other to re-propose Garibaldi according to their own idealised images as, respectively, a symbol of republican virtue and a founder of Italian socialism.27
Craxi was an intensely controversial figure who was later disgraced in the mani pulite scandals of the early 1990s and forced to flee Italy to avoid arrest. Not surprisingly, his part in celebrating and promoting Garibaldi was the kiss of death for the Garibaldi cult as a ‘place of memory’ for the Italian people. But, in any case, the power of the cult to evoke a popular response had been in decline from the Second World War onwards. It is unlikely that the efforts to revive Garibaldi and other Risorgimento heroes in the aftermath of Fascism and Italy's military collapse in 1943 were ever that successful; instead, Garibaldi shared the more general fate of patriotic tropes and symbols, which lost much of their mobilising force in the post-war period.
Indeed, it is hard to escape the conclusion that, by the end of the war, the cult of Garibaldi had run its course. For almost a hundred years, Garibaldi had been used as an ‘exemplary life’, held up as the physical embodiment of a series of values and truths with which Italians should identify and so construct a sense of national community.28 Yet the effort to turn Garibaldi into a genuinely consensual national symbol in the cold war period reduced his life to a succession of apolitical banalities, depriving it of precisely those unusual and unsettling aspects which had given his figure such an emotional charge. Thus, as personal links with the nineteenth century receded with the passing of generations, Garibaldi's role as the symbol of Italian identity was reduced to a list of received values – unity, virtue, patriotism, military courage – whose repetition in public debate failed to mask its emptiness as national rhetoric. Even Garibaldi's dress, appearance and heroic gestures, hitherto considered among his most captivating features, seemed increasingly ridiculous, appropriate perhaps for school textbooks but embarrassing if taken seriously by adults. Finally, in the early 1960s, a new generation which cared little about either the Risorgimento or its ideals produced a new political symbolism and an entirely different set of heroes. In global consciousness, the place of Garibaldi, it may be argued, was taken by Che Guevara, a figure of a rather different order, who nonetheless shared with the ‘hero of two worlds’ some important characteristics, notably a taste for guerrilla war, revolution rather than government, an internationalist outlook and a striking personal appearance.
Garibaldi and the historians
In terms of their relationship to Garibaldi, historians were, for once, at the forefront of popular trends. Most of them had lost interest in him as early as the 1950s, if not some time before. Previously, historians had embraced the nationalist legend of Garibaldi, and indeed had contributed significantly to the creation of a national past for Italy through histories and biographies which glorified Garibaldi's contribution to Italian unification.29 But after the Second World War, with the experience of dictatorship an all too powerful memory, historians throughout Europe began strenuously to resist the hagiography of ‘Great Men’ and their role in history.30 Alberto Mario Ghisalberti, head of Rome's Istituto per la Storia del Risorgimento Italiano (Institute for the History of the Italian Risorgimento), and Emilia Morelli, first the secretary and then Ghisalberti's successor at the Institute, who together controlled the official academic approach to the Risorgimento from the mid-1930s until the late 1980s, took a decidedly unheroic line on Garibaldi. Ghisalberti went against prevailing orthodoxy to emphasise the contribution of Mazzini to the achievement of national unity in 1860–1 and downplayed the importance of Garibaldi.31 He also broke with the practice of Risorgimento historiography and challenged the celebration of its principal protagonists (Vittorio Emanuele II, Cavour, Garibaldi and Mazzini) to focus on lesser-known figures and activists, ‘to search for’, as he put it, ‘the contribution of so many humble heroes to the solid and durable construction of a new Italy’.32 In a series of articles written for the Giornale d'Italia in 1949 to commemorate the centenary exhibition on the Roman Republic, Ghisalberti called for attention to be focused on ‘minor figures of the Risorgimento’, on ‘lesser-known personalities and aspects’,33 on important, but neglected figures such as Pietro Roselli, whose actions in defence of the 1849 republic had, as Ghisalberti put it, been overshadowed by the ‘gigantic figure of the man from Nice’.34
Ghisalberti and Morelli also concentrated their efforts on accumulating and cataloguing vast quantities of historical documents relating to the Risorgimento in their institute's archive in Rome. This emphasis on archival research – and thus exclusively on what was knowable from the original sources – repres
ented in itself a departure from nationalist traditions of Risorgimento narrative, where it had long been held inappropriate, in the words of one Italian prime minister, Giovanni Giolitti, to let ‘beautiful historical legends be discredited by historical criticism’.35 It gave rise to a more prosaic and critical attitude to the Risorgimento. Henceforth, scholarly interest in, for instance, the 1849 Roman Republic moved away from the dramatic and heroic actions of Garibaldi and his men, and towards both the daily details of government and the mistakes of its political leaders, including Garibaldi.36 This approach, with the huge amount of new archival material which became available to historians in the post-war period, found its way also into post-war biographies of Garibaldi, where the stress was increasingly on Garibaldi the man, politician and/or general, rather than on Garibaldi ‘the hero’ per se. Nonetheless it is worth noting that historians were still reluctant really to ‘speak badly of Garibaldi’ (parlar male di Garibaldi); the new biographies remained essentially within the old nationalist historiographical tradition. So this new research did not manage to shake the consensus on, and thus revitalise interest in, Garibaldi as a historical figure.37