Garibaldi

by Lucy Riall

  On a more immediately political level, writing was part of a broad focus on the educative action of intellectuals in creating the popolo and indicates Mazzini's firm belief in the power of journalism and publishing. For Mazzini, the press with its power to persuade public opinion was a key tool in the realisation of the Italian nation; as Galante Garrone puts it, ‘to move and enlighten people … [was] to provoke thoughts and actions’.45 Mazzini called the press ‘the arbiter of nations’ (‘the ink of the wise is a match for the sword of the strong’)46 and ‘our only hope’. Journalism was ‘a power; and even the only power in modern times; because it speaks and insists … it speaks to all the classes; it discusses all questions; it touches all the chords which move in the human soul … it is for the intellect what steam is for industry’.47 Almost from the start (from 1832), Young Italy had a newspaper – La Giovine Italia – and Mazzini spared no effort in producing it, and in smuggling it past the censors and into Italy. He also encouraged the publication of other journals, newspapers and pamphlets by exiles in France and Switzerland.48 In his own long political career Mazzini acted as, variously, a founder, director, editor, collaborator, correspondent, printer, copyeditor and shipping agent in the world of journalism.49

  It is in this emphasis on the press and cultural production that Young Italy most resembles a modern political party, and here Mazzini can justifiably lay a claim to genuine political innovation. Moreover, Mazzini's interest in public opinion reached past the sphere of cultural production strictly defined, and involved the use of politics itself – especially insurrection – as symbolic action. Mazzini's insistence on insurrection, his apparently blind faith that a few conspirators would inspire a general revolutionary conflagration, has long been considered his real undoing, and in a sense it was, since the constant lack of popular uprisings and the brutal effectiveness of Austrian repression led to disillusionment and widespread defection among Mazzini's followers. However, these insurrections must be understood as part of a broader political strategy. If we take just one example – the disastrous 1844 insurrection of the Bandiera brothers – this strategy becomes quite clear. Defying widespread criticism of his role, Mazzini came out fighting and published a series of articles on ‘martyrs of Italian liberty’, with the Bandieras in first place. For Mazzini, their willingness to die, and – as he insisted – to die calmly and happily was the sign of ‘God fermenting in the heart of a great people’. Men like the Bandiera brothers, Mazzini wrote, ‘are Apostles; their tomb is an Altar. It matters little that they have not succeeded. The Appeal of Martyrdom is brother to the Angel of Victory.’50 They were proof that Italy existed.

  The endless litany of botched uprisings organised by Mazzini did not simply illustrate poor military planning and implementation (which it undoubtedly did). It may even be a mistake to see the risings as revolutions, in the sense of rapid regime change. These uprisings were, to borrow a phrase from Sudhir Hazareesingh, ‘not so much goaldriven as expressive’;51 they were equally – and sometimes even primarily – successful symbolic events. As a political romantic, Mazzini believed that death could be heroic, and heroic failure a form of success. A failed insurrection was not futile; it could – and indeed did – reveal Austrian repression to the Italians and, equally importantly, to the restof the world. It was still a chance to appeal to the public imagination, to assert physically the existence of a political Italy; it was an occasion for speeches, proclamations and demonstrations and an opportunity to create heroes and martyrs. A failed insurrection could also be the opening salvo in a more general and prolonged assault on public opinion, involving letters to and articles in the press, the production of commemorative books and pamphlets, and, to act as a reminder some time later, the publication of personal memoirs by those caught up in the action or those who had suffered prison and exile for their convictions.

  Conclusion

  Mazzini was denounced by Metternich as the most dangerous man in Europe, while his erstwhile associate, the novelist and activist Guerrazzi, described Mazzini as a man ‘who disturbed the sleep of kings and terrified the great powers of Europe’. His British friend Carlyle said he never saw a more ‘beautiful person … with his soft flashing eyes, and face full of intelligence’.52 A contentious figure in his own lifetime, Mazzini has often been judged a failure by historians, an idealist who organised doomed insurrections or a cynic who must bear his share of the responsibility for the failure of the democratic movement in Italy and the conservative turn of Italian and European politics from the late 1850s onwards.53 Even those historians who don't condemn him admit he is a difficult figure to judge, ‘hard to classify ideologically and politically’, with a life ‘full of ironies and paradoxes’, who ‘worked on the minds of men rather than through the more easily studied means of politics, diplomacy or military conquest’.54 Yet these strong reactions to Mazzini, and the confusion about his achievements, point us directly to his motives and the real nature of his success. He was in exile almost all his adult life and had hardly any money at his disposal; he was at the head of government only once, in Rome in 1849, for a very brief period, and was under attack from his opponents from the outset. His achievement lies in having provoked such robust responses and in having established such fame, notoriety and affection for himself, on the basis of so little.

  To attain his ultimate goal of transforming European politics on the basis of progress and the association of humanity, Mazzini placed great hope in the militant and military enthusiasm of youth, and he had equal confidence in the persuasive power of writing, education and example. All of Mazzini's activities can be seen as an expression of his belief in the unity of thought and action. As the next chapter will show, his contacts, networks and personal friendships; the use of newspapers, letters to newspapers and pamphlets; his own appearance, behaviour and lifestyle and those of his followers; and the organisation of conspiracies, uprisings and expeditions, even those doomed to failure – all of these were a means of publicising his political mission for Italy, of giving Italy a new foundation story and of creating a new language of politics with the ‘republic’ and ‘nation’ as its main forms of identification. It is in the context of this task to promote Italy by every means possible, of the uphill struggle to make the romantic idea of Italy visible, convincing and successful politically, that Mazzini's comment about Garibaldi with which we began this chapter can best be understood.

  CHAPTER 2

  IN SEARCH OF GARIBALDI

  London calling

  At the time of his 1843 letter to Cuneo about Garibaldi, Mazzini had been in exile from Italy for a decade. Young Italy had been more or less wiped out in Piedmont and elsewhere after the failure of a series of conspiracies which Mazzini had organised in Genoa in 1833 and 1834. In the harsh crackdown which ensued, most of his followers – including Cuneo and Garibaldi – had been forced to flee Genoa, while conditions became so difficult for Mazzini in Marseille that he had to leave for Geneva in 1833. In Geneva he founded a new organisation, ‘Young Europe’, to encourage and assist national revolutions throughout Europe and beyond. But while this new association partly restored his standing in revolutionary circles it also attracted the attention of the police, so that soon he was forced to go underground to avoid arrest and eventually had to leave Switzerland too. He chose this time to go to London, arriving there in 1837 in time for Queen Victoria's coronation, and was immediately shocked by the dirt, the fog and the expense of the city as well as by the drunken behaviour of its inhabitants. Yet London was to be his home for virtually all of the rest of his life.1

  Apart from the daily and very real material difficulties which he had to deal with in London, Mazzini had severe problems on the political front too. Revolution seemed very far away. The conservative regimes in Restoration Italy had generally never been stronger or enjoyed more stability, and many were in the process of introducing administrative reform. Moderate liberals in northern and central Italy, soon to become the great rivals of Mazzini in
presenting an alternative vision to conservatism, were already starting to voice their opposition to his republicanism and to his ‘absurd’ unitary vision for Italy. Mazzini's own networks were in disarray. He faced criticism of his tactics from within his own movement, notably from the fellow conspirator Nicola Fabrizi who, from his place of exile in Malta, sought to organise an autonomous legione italica which would lead a guerrilla movement and would have its base far from Mazzini, in southern Italy. Fabrizi focused especially on Sicily, where a cholera outbreak in 1837 had provoked widespread popular disturbances, but Mazzini feared Sicilian separatism, and suggested that the Sicilian rebels would break free from Naples and had no interest in uniting Italy.2

  All these difficulties are worth stressing because Mazzini, while temporarily depressed, was ultimately undaunted. In 1840, he reorganised and relaunched Young Italy from London. This political organisation reaffirmed his romantic belief in the revolutionary potential of the younger generation, but this time he placed more emphasis on education and made a particular appeal to women and to workers. Workers had their own newspaper, Apostolato Popolare, most of which Mazzini wrote himself and managed to circulate in the United States and North Africa as well as throughout Europe. Mazzini also raised a public subscription to set up a free school in Hatton Garden in Holborn for the families of Italian migrants.3 He continued to be involved with conspiracies in Italy. In 1844 he initially encouraged the disastrous mutiny and expedition planned by Attilio and Emilio Bandiera, two Venetian officers in the Austrian navy, arguing that it was ‘better [to] act and fail than do absolutely nothing’ and that their actions would offer Europe proof of the dedication and courage of Italians.4 Perhaps especially important were the lasting friendships he forged with British writers and radicals. Thomas and Jane Carlyle helped to introduce him to London literary circles, where he met Dickens, Browning and the romantic poet Samuel Rogers, and his close friendship with the Carlyles, with the family of the radical lawyer William Ashurst and with Ashurst's soninlaw James Stansfeld did much to sustain Mazzini personally while in exile. Moreover, it was these friendships which served both to revitalise his own ideas and tactics and, in the longer term, to mobilise British liberal opinion in favour of the Italian national cause.5

  It is hard to overemphasise the importance of the British experience for Mazzini's fame, political strategy and contacts. Long before the 1848–9 revolutions made household names of Mazzini, Garibaldi and other Italian and European revolutionaries, London life had helped Mazzini to develop his own image as a nationalist hero and selfless martyr of the revolution. He had always been an admirer of Byron, and might have been imagining either himself or an idealised Mazzinian follower when in 1840 he wrote in the Monthly Chronicle of Byron's genius ‘as a man and a poet’: ‘He never deserted our cause: he never betrayed a single human sympathy. Lonely and unhappy since childhood … slandered … beset by pecuniary problems; forced to leave his country … without friends …’6 And while Mazzini could not hope to emulate Byron's flamboyance or overt sexuality, he still cultivated an air of romantic intensity and passionate dedication by living a life of extreme frugality, dressing always in black (because in mourning for his country), never marrying and displaying a general (if by many accounts false) indifference to sexual passion. He worked all night, lived on coffee and cigars and gave away what little money he earned or was sent by his mother; ‘money is shit’ he told his mother in 1843.7 This pose seemingly held a strong fascination for the middleclass radical men and (perhaps especially) women whom Mazzini was assiduous in cultivating.

  Britain, and London in particular, confirmed Mazzini's belief in the power of publicity, and especially the press, in politics. By the early 1840s, Mazzini had established a distinct public profile in London. His contacts with the Carlyles gave him the chance to publish articles on politics and literature in journals like The Westminster Review, and he gained additional publicity and made more useful contacts through his activities at the Italian school in Hatton Garden. Even the disastrous expedition of the Bandiera brothers in the end worked in his favour. Although he was blamed when the brothers were captured in Calabria and executed, it later emerged that his letters had been intercepted by the British government and passed on to the government in Vienna. The huge public and parliamentary outcry which resulted gave free publicity to Italian nationalism and to Mazzini in particular. Thomas Carlyle wrote a letter to The Times extolling Mazzini's ‘genius and virtue’ and his ‘sterling veracity, humanity, and nobleness of mind’; Mazzini, he stated, was one ‘of those rare men … who are worthy to be called martyr souls, who, in silence, piously in their daily life, understand and practice what is meant by that’.8 Pictures were sold of Mazzini all over London and Mazzini published an article praising the Bandieras' ‘martyrdom’ in The People's Journal.

  Mazzini arrived in England at the height of Chartist agitation, and he was profoundly affected by it and by the whole popular radical tradition in British politics. His new interest in workingclass politics, expressed in the reorganisation of Young Italy, clearly reflects the influence of Chartist associational life.9 He was especially struck by how Chartists successfully encouraged, and made political use of, popular involvement in radical issues. During the 1840s, the Chartist press produced newspapers, periodicals and works of fiction, and these grew increasingly in number and circulation.10 The behaviour of Chartist leaders – their use of new print media, of visual images and artefacts, and of clothing and appearance(s) to promote themselves (and what James Vernon calls the ‘insatiable appetite’ of the British public for such leaders and heroes) – was arguably crucial in developing Mazzini's understanding of personality and the use of theatre and performance in popular politics.11 At the opposite end of the political spectrum, he would have been equally aware of the promotion of Queen Victoria through popular publishing – through newspapers and the visual image – as a populist monarch.12 (I discuss these developments in more detail in Chapter 5.)

  Mazzini's interest in Garibaldi as a potential Italian nationalist hero must be traced in part to his experiences of the British press and British politics: to his awareness of the successful publicity strategies of British radical leaders and the use of the press to promote political issues and endorse the prevailing cult of personality in politics. On a more immediate level, his interest in Garibaldi can be linked to a series of new political contacts. The renewal of Chartist contacts with, and commitment to, European radicalism confirmed Mazzini's own belief in the potential of international revolutionary networks, and he came increasingly to use London's role as the centre of European political emigration to meet and often make longterm friendships with Hungarian, Polish and Russian exiles as well as with other Italians.13 In 1847, he helped to found the People's International League, based on a loose network of liberal reformers, Nonconformists, workingclass radicals and foreign exiles. Its purpose was to mobilise British public opinion in favour of radical and nationalist causes in Europe.14

  Equally, Mazzini began to establish contact with exiles and sympathisers beyond Europe. He was in contact with some Young Italy exiles among emigrant circles in New York. He also struck up a correspondence with the Christian Alliance in the United States, an organisation of Protestant missionaries who were sympathetic both to Mazzini's anticlerical stance and to his use of religious language. Particularly useful in the longer term was the relationship which developed between Mazzini and the American writer, Margaret Fuller, a prominent member of the Transcendentalists of New England, who came to London in 1846.15 When she decided to go on to Italy later that year, Mazzini wrote her a letter of introduction, describing her as ‘the rarest of women for her love and active sympathy for everything which is beautiful, great and holy, and, thus, for our Italy’ and encouraging followers also to ‘convert’ her travelling companions, two prominent antislavery campaigners from the USA, to the Italian cause.16 In fact, Fuller met and married a Mazzinian sympathiser, the Marchese Ossoli, during her Italia
n journey.

  Perhaps especially significant were the contacts which Mazzini established with Italian migrant workers and political exiles in South America. These contacts were important because Young Italy had continued to recruit in the coastal towns of Brazil and the Rio de la Plata during the otherwise lean period of the late 1830s. By the early 1840s Young Italy in South America had a leadership, newspapers and something approaching a mass movement.17 It was here that a group of young and militant enthusiasts, based in Rio de Janeiro and in the Uruguayan capital, Montevideo, formed around the journalistic and organisational activities of Cuneo and another prominent member of Young Italy in South America, Luigi Rossetti. Many were also involved in the naval and military exploits led by Garibaldi. And it was for this group – young, active and, as journalists and soldiers, the living expression of Mazzini's concept of the unity of ‘thought and action’ – that Mazzini began to make great plans.

  A South American romance

  After the abortive Young Italy uprisings of 1833–4 in Genoa, both Cuneo and Garibaldi had gone into exile. Giovanni Battista Cuneo, who was one of Garibaldi's political mentors during his years in South America, arrived there earlier than Garibaldi, in 1834, and quickly became involved in exile politics. In typical Mazzinian fashion, he immediately established a local branch of Young Italy and a newspaper (also called Young Italy) in Rio de Janeiro. Moving to Montevideo, he made a series of influential contacts with the socalled ‘generation of 1837’. These young literary and political exiles, men such as Juan Bautista Alberdi, Esteban Echeverría, and Bartolomé Mitre along with another celebrated exile, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (based in Chile), had been forced out of Buenos Aires by the dictator Rosas and had begun to mount a propaganda assault on the Rosas regime through novels, poetry and journalism. They were also greatly influenced by Mazzinian ideas and language and originally called themselves ‘the Association of the Young Argentine Generation’.18