by Lucy Riall
Thanks in part to this connection with the generation of 1837, and working with them to produce politicially engaged journalism, Cuneo became increasingly active as a writer and publisher.19 He collaborated on the papers El Iniciador and O Povo, the latter being the paper of the rebel Rio Grande republic engaged in a war of independence with the Brazilian empire, initially edited by Luigi Rossetti. In 1841, he founded and edited in Montevideo the free weekly newspaper L'Italiano, aimed at Italian workers. During the height of the war between Uruguay and Buenos Aires, in which both Cuneo and Garibaldi played an important part, Cuneo published another free paper, Il Legionario Italiano, which had as its mast head ‘Liberty, Equality, Independence, Unity, Humanity’. The paper quickly became a mouthpiece for Mazzinian ideas in Montevideo.
Garibaldi, who arrived in Rio at the age of twentyeight some two years after Cuneo, had a career which was at first much less remarkable. In fact, despite the efforts of his biographers to suggest otherwise, there had been little in his early life to indicate anything unusual about Garibaldi. Its peripatetic nature (he was a merchant seaman) and his shady political activities seem all too typical of this postrevolutionary generation, to which both Cuneo and Mazzini also belonged. Nor was there anything especially surprising about his association with the Young Italy uprisings in Genoa: Genoa was a hotbed of political conspiracy, and conspiracy provided an outlet for many disaffected young men during this period. Although Garibaldi had apparently been recruited for Young Italy (perhaps by Cuneo) in the Black Sea port of Taganrog in 1833, arguably just as important an influence on his political development was his encounter earlier in the same year with a group of SaintSimonian exiles, and especially with their leader Emile Barrault, whom he transported by ship from Marseille to Turkey. During the long journey, he talked with Barrault, and Barrault gave him a book, the Nouveau christianisme by Saint-Simon, which Garibaldi kept with him all his life.20 It is possible that the ideas of the romantic socialists – their confidence in the benefits of technological progress; their spiritualism and especially the faith in a new religion of ‘Humanity’; the idea of community based on affective ties; a belief in female emancipation; a nonmonogamous attitude to sex and the rejection of marriage – had as strong an impact on Garibaldi's political convictions, if not stronger, as the later nationalist elaborations of Mazzini.21
Garibaldi's motives for going to Rio de Janeiro in the summer of 1835 are not entirely clear. We know that he had found himself in a very precarious position. As a sailor in the Piedmontese navy, he had been placed under a sentence of death for having conspired against the king in the 1833–4 uprising, and during much of 1834 and the first half of 1835 he had been forced to lead a kind of twilight existence under a false name in Marseille, and had survived by travelling as a merchant seaman to Odessa and to Tunis. In 1835 he had apparently been entrusted with a political mission by Luigi Canessa, a maverick Mazzinian activist in Marseille, to carry out in South America. But his decision to leave Marseille may simply have been connected to the terrible cholera epidemic there or to general disillusionment at the prospects of revolution in Europe. Whatever the reasons, Garibaldi was given a warm welcome by the revolutionary exiles in Rio and he quickly made friends with Cuneo, Rossetti and others.22 However, he went on to pursue the fairly typical life of an Italian migrant, taking up his earlier career as a merchant seaman, and trading along the coast between Rio and Montevideo in a fishing boat. Then in 1837, and ‘tired’, as he put it, of leading ‘an existence so useless to our country’ and convinced of a ‘greater destiny’,23 he abandoned commercial life to become a ‘corsair’ for the Rio Grande rebels, and with his boat Mazzini and an assorted crew started to attack Brazilian shipping.24 At this stage, however, there were still few, if any, signs of the fame that was to come.
Garibaldi spent four tough years of fighting on land and at sea, during which he was taken prisoner and tortured, suffered a tragic shipwreck, and met and eloped with his first wife, Anita. As the Rio Grande wars petered out into a bloody guerrilla conflict, Garibaldi decided to move to Montevideo, where there was a more vibrant community of Italian exiles and migrants (some 6,000 Italians out of a population of 42,000, as well as 10,000 French and 3,000 Spaniards), including Cuneo and Francesco Anzani.25 Garibaldi left for Montevideo with his family in April 1841 and marched overland with 900 head of cattle to sell in the city; but none of the cattle survived the journey, so he was obliged to eke out an impoverished existence as a mathematics teacher and salesman. Despite these inauspicious beginnings, Garibaldi soon began to do well in Montevideo, and became involved with the complex and prolonged war between the government of Uruguay, led by General Fructuoso Rivera, and the Argentine Confederation, under the dictatorship of Juan Manuel de Rosas (see map 1 on page 40).
This war lasted for over twelve years, and from 1842 involved the blockade and then siege of Montevideo by the Argentine Confederation; the siege itself was organised by the deposed Uruguayan president General Oribe, who had gone over to the Argentine side. The conflict was more significant than the Rio Grande wars, in that it had consequences for international trade and specifically damaged the commercial interests of both Great Britain and France. In 1845, Britain and France organised a joint naval intervention to prevent the Argentine conquest of Uruguay by blockading Buenos Aires.26 The conflict was also much more newsworthy than the Rio Grande wars. Propaganda, of which the Argentine dictator Rosas was a wellknown master,27 played a major part in the war, with both the liberal Uruguayans and the Rosistas seeking to persuade the British and the French that trading interests would be better served by their winning the war. Both sides conducted lengthy press campaigns in the foreign language newspapers of the Rio de la Plata as well as in the national newspapers of London and Paris.28 After the AngloFrench intervention, the Argentine government sought to present itself as the victim of foreign aggression,29 while Uruguay, helped by its series of talented writers, represented the war as a great liberal cause, ‘pitting a weak and increasingly defenceless state against a powerful Argentine adversary in a desperate fight for survival’. Thus, the defence of Montevideo came to symbolise ‘in the European mind the virtues of nationalist struggle and political progress’.30
The South America of Garibaldi
The Uruguayan government first placed Garibaldi in command of a naval squadron. This squadron was sent up the Paraná river right through Argentine territory, in a daring attempt to bring supplies to the besieged province of Corrientes and cut off Argentine trade with Paraguay. However, and perhaps not surprisingly, this expedition ended in failure and Garibaldi was forced to burn all his ships and escape with the surviving crews. In 1843, Garibaldi raised enough money by public subscription to build up a new naval force with which he attempted to disrupt Argentine shipping in the River Plate area. He intensified these activities after 1845 when, as commander of the Uruguayan fleet, he began to work with the AngloFrench naval forces, and he helped them to capture the Uruguayan port of Colonia and the island of Martín García. Also in 1843, Garibaldi decided to continue the fight on land and he organised an Italian Legion of volunteers to help in the military defence of Montevideo. This force of around 600 men was modelled on the much larger French Legion set up for the same purpose, and which had its own newspaper, Le Patriote Français. Initially, the Italian Legion met with a mixed reception and had equivocal results. Its members were accused of cowardice after one engagement, of brutality after another, and of deserting and going over to Rosas' forces when they reached enemy lines. However, all this changed in February 1846, when Garibaldi and his men stood firm against a much larger enemy force at San Antonio del Salto and won a celebrated victory. Salto marks the real change in Garibaldi's fortunes. It was after Salto that Garibaldi became famous and a political and military actor in his own right. A special issue of Il Legionario Italiano was published which was entirely dedicated to the heroism of Garibaldi and his men; it included letters from Garibaldi, official decrees and a poem, an
d presented the battle as an emblematic moment in Italy's recovery of past glory.31 It was only after Salto that Mazzini and the Mazzinian press back in Europe began to take a more active interest in Garibaldi and his men.32
Garibaldi's life and experiences in South America are among the least known and most mythologised of his entire career. Certain episodes – Garibaldi's torture when a prisoner at Gualeguay; his meeting with his first wife Anita; Anita's own flight from the enemy while, variously, pregnant or with Garibaldi's infant son in her arms; the battles of the Italian Legion in defence of Montevideo – have achieved a kind of canonical status. However, much of what we know about Garibaldi's activities in the service of the Rio Grande rebels we know from Garibaldi himself, from his memoirs written in the 1850s, and these are not always reliable. Although his years in Uruguay are better documented, here too it is difficult to penetrate both the mythology produced by the war itself, of the celebration of Montevideo as the ‘New Troy’ and of Garibaldi as the defender of Uruguayan freedom,33 and the use subsequently made of it by nationalist propagandists back in Italy. So it is hard to establish with any certainty the real nature and scale of his military achievements in these years.
A recent study based on British government sources has suggested that, on their own, Garibaldi and his men ‘achieved very little’ in La Defensa of Montevideo. Contemporary British reports referred to him not as a hero but as an adventurer, and they complained specifically about his habit of seizing and requisitioning private shipping, which disrupted trade and arguably prolonged the war. Although Garibaldi was popular with the civilian population, especially in the countryside where the humane conduct of his soldiers seemed to compare favourably with the brutality of the Argentine troops, he made himself unpopular with some sections of the government in Montevideo for his ‘maritime misdemeanours’ and general refusal to obey orders. The Uruguayan leader, Rivera, was told that Garibaldi had ‘scandalously plundered Colonia and Gualeguaychú’ in 1845, and that his actions would ‘greatly discredit’ their cause. Some Montevidean leaders also viewed Garibaldi with suspicion as a ‘foreigner’ whose powerful position threatened Uruguayan independence. Indeed, it was said to be ‘the general dislike evinced on the part of all at having an Italian at the head of the garrison and at having the town completely under the foreign mercenaries’ which forced his resignation as the commander of the Uruguayan navy in July 1847.34 All this suggests that Garibaldi's negative reputation in Buenos Aires as a dangerous ‘adventurer’ was not entirely unjustified.
Nevertheless, Garibaldi's experiences in these years were crucial for his own personal and political development; especially important were the revolutionary contacts and ideals he developed there. It was in Rio de Janeiro that he first joined the Freemasons, a significant front organisation for Young Italy in South America,35 and a crucial political network for much of the rest of his life. What was to become an enduring belief in biographical writing and journalism as an extension of political action may owe as much to Garibaldi's direct contacts with men like Mitre of the Argentine generation of 1837, or to his knowledge of the work of Domingo Sarmiento, as it did to the arguably more indirect influence of Mazzinian journalism.36 It was also during the years in Rio Grande that Garibaldi met his first wife, Anita, a person by all accounts as adventurous, courageous and unconventional as he, and who remained in most respects his female ideal for the rest of his life.37 Garibaldi made other important friends in Rio Grande and in Uruguay. Some of them, like Rossetti, died early (in 1840), but others – like Cuneo, Francesco Anzani and Livio Zambeccari – stayed with him much longer; all these friends came to represent a vision of fraternal friendship and male ‘virility’ which influenced his own behaviour and which he used as a political model in his later political writings and speeches.
Anzani (who died in 1848 returning to Italy with Garibaldi) was an older revolutionary and an exile from the revolutions of 1821. Before fighting for the Rio Grande rebels, where he met Garibaldi, Anzani had already fought as a volunteer in the Greek war of independence and in the Portuguese civil war, and he became a key influence on Garibaldi's military thinking. He helped him organise the Italian Legion of Montevideo, and was responsible for main taining discipline and order in the ranks.38 Another Italian exile who did much to encourage and influence Garibaldi's political and military career was the intellectual and carbonaro Zambeccari. In the late 1830s he was the chief propagandist for the Rio Grande rebels.39 He was also the initial point of contact between Garibaldi and the Rio Grande president, Bento Gonçalves da Silva, a prominent republican whom one historian has described as ‘a copybook romantic leader and popular hero … a fine horseman, picturesque in dress, enthusiastically followed by his men’, and who, in turn, did much to influence and encourage Garibaldi's political activities.40 For the rest of his life, Garibaldi maintained friendly contacts with the Uruguayan leader, Joaquín Suárez. Suárez invited Garibaldi to return to Montevideo in the 1850s and, at the moment of Garibaldi's greatest triumph in 1860, wrote to congratulate him and to acknowledge the great contribution he had made to ‘the independence of my country’.41
Garibaldi was much taken by the land and the people of South America. In his memoirs, he romanticised the life of the pampas and was especially enthused by what he saw as the ‘independent’ life of its gaucho inhabitants. Described as a ‘white savage, divorced from society’, the gaucho was a ‘mounted nomad’ and an important figure on the early nineteenth-century South American pampas. The antithesis of urban, cultured society, the gaucho refused settled work or occupation and rejected family, home and respectability.42 It may be that Garibaldi saw in gaucho society a kind of embodiment of his romantic socialist ideas. According to Guerzoni, Garibaldi's friend and biographer, Garibaldi always admired the gaucho as the ‘ideal type’ of free man. Indeed, Guerzoni writes, Garibaldi brought back from South America the ‘beliefs’ and ‘personal habits and clothes’ of the ‘corsairs, soldiers, sailors and cattle ranchers’ he met there: ‘The Garibaldi who came back to Italy in 1848 was … a gaucho … Time and the habits of civility would partially change him … but a gaucho he fundamentally remained all his life.’43 The restlessness and poverty of Garibaldi's daily life during the South American years display features of the gaucho. Gaucho values, together with romantic socialist beliefs, may also help to explain his (for the time) scandalous relationship with his wife Anita, who was an eighteen-year-old married woman when he met her, whom he more or less seized from her home and ran off with, and whom he married only in 1842, two years after the birth of their first child.44
Some of Garibaldi's political ideas, most notably his lasting belief in the virtue of dictatorships – if only in time of war and for a limited period – were derived from his observations of politics and the conduct of war in South America. Many of the battles over the political forms of nation-building and the struggles between conservatives and liberals which Garibaldi was to become involved in on his return to Italy, he first encountered in republican circles in Montevideo.45 He seems equally to have been affected by the public or theatrical aspects of Rio de la Plata politics, arguably in much the same way as Mazzini was affected by the Chartists in Britain. Here too the gauchos would seem to have been important, in that many features of their rebellious and violent culture were adopted and adapted as a political style by leaders such as the Argentinian dictator Rosas.46 John Lynch tells us that while Rosas did little to help the gauchos in social terms and punished any signs of crime and rebellion with astonishing rapidity and cruelty, he still ‘identified culturally with the gaucho’, in part as a means of representing the interests of the interior provinces against those of the liberal, more European-oriented elites of Buenos Aires. Rosas was noted for his horsemanship, went about dressed as a gaucho and his idea of a joke when out riding was to throw a lasso around a man's neck and drag him along the ground. He also encouraged the extensive use of brutal rituals and employed a language of politics ‘which was charged with
violence and designed to terrorize’.47 Aspects of gaucho behaviour were adopted by Garibaldi, although for very different purposes to those of Rosas. Many of the elements of Garibaldi's public persona which were to captivate Europeans in 1848 and 1849 – his physical strength, his long hair and beard, his ‘poncho’ and brightly coloured clothes, as well as his displays of horsemanship, daring gestures and eccentric manners – were clearly fashioned during his years in South America. These characteristics were copied directly from the gaucho militias with – and against – whom Garibaldi fought. They may also have been adopted by him as a public means of challenging and subverting Rosista propaganda, of giving Rosas' violent populist style a revolutionary and democratic ‘twist’ by directing it to liberal and humanitarian ends.
South America was crucial for Garibaldi in a more practical sense still, for it was in Rio Grande and Uruguay that he learnt how to fight. As it turned out, the kinds of battles he fought in South America – commanding untrained men of mixed background and capabilities; fighting against an enemy superior in number and resources; relying on mobility and surprise to gain advantage – were to prove invaluable when he returned to Italy, as was his newly acquired ability to ride a horse. Perhaps most notably of all, Garibaldi seems to have discovered in himself at this time the qualities of an inspiring and talented leader of men. His letters regarding the conduct of war in Montevideo reveal a professionalism and knowledge of military tactics which are surprising in someone hitherto entirely untrained.48 Even allowing, moreover, for the inevitable hyperbole of newspaper reports and of retrospective accounts designed to exalt his exceptional bravery, Garibaldi appears to have been increasingly entrusted in South America with leading what he called – not without irony – ‘chivalrous enterprises’ (as he wrote to Cuneo after the Paraná expedition: ‘Never mind! These chivalrous enterprises always come down to me’).49 Such daring missions, whether they failed (as with the Paraná expedition) or succeeded (as with the conflict at San Antonio del Salto), relied on the energy, enthusiasm and stamina of the men and their leader, and were designed to confuse and demoralise the enemy by their sheer audacity and their displays of individual courage. They also did much to publicise the Uruguayan liberal cause to the national and international press.