by Lucy Riall
Nevertheless, the fame of Garibaldi was tied to the making of a specifically Italian public opinion in the years immediately before and after the election of the ‘liberal’ pope, Pius IX, in 1846. His fame contributed to and was helped by this broader development. By the end of 1847, Garibaldi had become a well-known personality in liberal – nationalist circles in Italy. His character and actions had been created and recorded, and these formed part of a new narrative which Italians could tell themselves about themselves, or hold up as an example for others to aspire to. Thus, the two or so years before the outbreak of revolution in 1848 saw the first fashionings of a cult of Garibaldi. The building blocks of a story were laid; a story which, by its power to move, entertain and inspire, helped to create a stronger, more persuasive and arguably more political sense of an Italian national community.
CHAPTER 3
REVOLUTION
The age of the hero
The early fame of Garibaldi was a Mazzinian creation, and its success was tied up with immediate political events. More precisely, the growing political cult of Garibaldi reflected and assisted the rapidly changing nature of Italian politics and public opinion in the early to mid-1840s. These changes then combined with economic hardship and social transformation to produce a general revolutionary conflagration in 1848 and 1849. Yet like the revolutions themselves, which were the product of a long-term crisis and extended rapidly across Europe, the pace at which Garibaldi's popularity grew and spread cannot be understood as a short-term or purely Italian phenomenon. Rather, the development of a Garibaldi cult was part of a longer European tradition of heroes and hero worship, a tradition which had a clear, and deliberate, political purpose. This tradition is worth looking at briefly as it helps us to understand both the success of Garibaldi and the radical aspects of his image.
The fact that Garibaldi ‘worked’ as a political hero was due to an existing public familiarity with such figures. Equally, he had to fit in with, or otherwise appeal to, public expectations. By the time Garibaldi emerged on the political scene in the early 1840s, the European public's familiarity with political heroes was already of quite long standing: as with much else in mid-nineteenth-century revolutionary politics, it dated back to the French Revolution. The French Revolution had provoked, and thus had to face, a symbolic as well as a material vacuum at the centre of power. In particular, the initial desacralisation and the ultimate destruction of the monarchy through the creation of a republic and execution of the king – the ‘father’ of the French ‘family’ – had led to a crisis in the representation of power, spelling the apparent ruin of paternal and religious symbols of royal authority and the end of deference as the basis for political obedience.1 Power, in the words of François Furet, ‘had lost its moorings’ and ‘was perceived by everyone as vacant’.2 French revolutionary leaders had responded to this vacuum by seeking to establish both an alternative revolutionary discourse of power based on fraternity and a new ‘iconological rubric’ which would represent the Republic and help create a different sense of political community. This task was not easy, and it was undermined by the persistence in the popular imagination of the traditional symbols of power, by the absence of any clear personification of the abstract ideal of ‘Republic’, and by the sheer scale of the challenge which revolutionaries had set themselves – ‘to mobilise, engage and galvanise the masses’ with the second revolution of 1792 and the coming of war during the same year.3
In the effort to overcome the difficulties of creating a new political symbolism to reach and inspire the whole of French society, the whole of society had become the object of a symbolic reinvention. The clothes people wore and the way they behaved, as well as the structure of their lives (consumer goods, currency, the calendar), became a sign of revolutionary belonging and ‘a field of political struggle’ between government and people.4 Revolutionary festivals sought to create and transmit a new tradition, and to transform and transfer in people's imagination the sacrality of the old regime on to the Republic.5 The Greek hero Hercules, the personification of physical strength and courage, was made an emblem of the Republic; the lion, a traditional symbol of power, was recast to represent popular sovereignty; and an invented and idealised woman in a Phrygian cap – ‘Marianne’ – became first the representation of liberty and later of the Republic in general.6 Politics became an instrument for reshaping society and sought to absorb and control all aspects of culture. The Revolution, to quote Furet again, ‘ushered in a world where mental representations of power governed all actions, and where a network of signs completely dominated political life’.7
One of the most evident, and perhaps the most enduring, of the ‘signs’ of mass politics was the creation and use of personality cults. Jacobin cults are generally associated with the attempt both to replace the symbols and rituals of Catholicism and to appropriate them for the new religion of the fatherland. Leaders introduced new ceremonies and a revolutionary liturgy, and they promoted a cult of ‘patriot saints’, most famously with the commemoration and funeral of the assassinated leader Marat and the celebration of the boy-hero Bara, executed in the Vendée by counter-revolutionaries for refusing to shout Vive le roi.8 Such ‘martyrs for liberty’ were heroes of the Revolution in much the same way as religious martyrs can be seen as heroes of God. Hence, the purpose of such cults was to encourage an emotional identification with, and popular allegiance to, the patriot saint and, through him, to the source of his greatness – the Republic itself. Yet it is unlikely that these cults were especially successful in supplanting traditional religion. Although Marat was a great sans-culotte hero, there is little evidence that people attributed therapeutic or other sacralising powers to him, and in so far as the various ceremonies in his honour did lead to his sanctification in the popular imagination, they may also have encouraged a resurgence in religious feeling and an affirmation of Catholic rituals.9
Nevertheless, the promotion of these cults in revolutionary France served to popularise an ideal of the heroic individual which was tied to a new political aesthetic drawn from neo-classicism. In the famous paintings by Jacques-Louis David, Marat at his Last Breath (1793) and The Death of Bara (1793), the political virtue of Marat and Bara – their selfless heroism as a model for political engagement – was associated with an aesthetic ideal of antique Greek art and a political ideal of freedom enjoyed by the Greek states in antiquity. Beauty was identified with freedom, and personified by a virtuous, and either dead or dying, male hero. It was in this way that the male hero – physically beautiful, morally virtuous, personally courageous and, until Napoleon, never living – came to be a powerful political symbol both for the revolution and for the heirs of the revolution.10
David's paintings of Marat and Bara are part of a much larger body of work which celebrated male heroes in antiquity (the Horaces; Socrates; Brutus), and especially the ideals of male beauty and male companionship.11 In the earlier part of his career, his artistic production coincided with, and contributed to, a broader Jacobin cult of antiquity, where the virtues of republican Rome were promoted as a model of political behaviour and personal morality as well as of artistic taste. Here antiquity reinforced a cult of Great Men and marginalised other forms of identity. With the breakdown of court and aristocratic culture in France, the men of the revolution self-consciously ‘manufactured … classical identities for themselves’ and identified with the heroes of classical times; they adopted a ‘Stoic’ role – a physical demeanour of dignity, reserve and authenticity – so as to personify personally and physically the individual ‘classical’ virtues which were held to be at the basis of public life.12 Equally, neo-classicism – whether as personal role-playing or as artistic style – reinforced a prevailing tendency to exclude women and the feminine as active protagonists in the revolution. On both a symbolic and material level, women were confined to the family and to a restricted ‘feminine’ domain of sensibility and emotion; in revolutionary mythology, according to Dorinda Outram, ‘women react, relate, perceive,
involve; men cling to the heroic moments and postures of personification’.13 Moreover, in the novels and paintings of the Jacobin period, as well as in government legislation and the legal system, the traditional family (not just the father, but also wives and, to a lesser extent, sisters) was sacrificed or, at best, ignored and subordinated for the sake of the Republic. The Republic was represented as an alternative family, a voluntary act of belonging to a non-hierarchical fellowship of men. Thus, the patriarchal family was replaced by a voluntary fraternity or a ‘band of brothers’. These brothers, in revolutionary discourse, were the heroes of the revolution: ‘romantic heroes willing to fight for virtue and the triumph of the republic … prepared to become martyrs for their cause … [whose] chief reward was their sense of solidarity with their brothers’, and who reached true heroic status only with death.14
Napoleon marks a development of, and a change of direction in, revolutionary symbolism, in much the same way as he does with revolutionary politics more generally. Under the Jacobins, revolutionary heroes (ancient or modern) personified abstract virtues such as courage, dignity and selfless service to the Republic, which were meant to inspire and encourage popular emulation. With Napoleon, however, revolutionary symbolism had a more simple purpose: it was used to glorify his personal power and enhance the process of his self-legitimation. The cult of the hero was no longer identified with a collective ideal but became a purpose in itself. Art became a tool in Napoleonic propaganda. Neo-classicism ceased to have an educative function and was appropriated and recast as a decorative and architectural style which recalled the florid opulence of imperial Rome; and history – ancient Rome, along with the Merovingian and Carolingian monarchies and Renaissance painting – was ‘plundered’ for sources to represent Napoleonic power. Napoleon himself posed as a man of literature and learning, a patron of the arts as well as a fierce warrior and tireless ruler.15 He became a classical hero: cold, reserved but with a great inner strength.16 The pantheon of dead republican brothers was reduced to one living ‘Great Man’.
The fusion of authoritarian and traditional symbols of power with those of revolution, and its concentration into one living ruler (the ‘Emperor’), filled the symbolic vacancy caused by the French Revolution. Although foreshadowed in many ways by the aesthetic ideals and totalitising practices of Jacobinism, Napoleon's shift towards authoritarianism and dictatorship is generally seen as definitive, marking a decisive rightward turn in the symbols and rituals of mass politics. Focusing specifically on Germany, George Mosse traces a general ideal of ‘heroic manhood’ derived from neo-classicism back to the revolutionary and Napoleonic period, through the nineteenth century and forward to the authoritarian regimes of the twentieth century. He argues that an unchanging and public representation of masculinity as beautiful, courageous and self-controlled was established during the French Revolution and came to be adopted or ‘co-opted’ by political movements thereafter, and especially by nationalist movements, as ‘one means of … [their] self-representation’.17 Thus, post-revolutionary nationalist movements came to use an idealised man – a Greek youth, a beautiful athlete – as a symbol of the nation. Moreover, through the experience of war, first the national wars of the early nineteenth century and then the total wars of the twentieth, masculinity became ever more identified with a military aesthetic and military values. ‘The modern warrior now joined the Greek youth and the athlete as a model of masculinity’, and the military virtues of death and sacrifice became central both to the masculine stereotype and to images of the nation itself.18
This trope of masculinity as used by nationalist movements in the nineteenth century (and beyond) was generally regarded as a positive stereotype – ‘a motor that drove the nation and society at large’19–but actually worked to constrain and to exclude. Mosse says that it enforced middle-class notions of sexual respectability and restraint, and may even have served to de-sexualise the male body: ‘The nation protected the ideal of beauty from the lower passions of man and helped transform it into a symbol of self-control and purity’.20 At the same time, the association of masculinity and nation with war and soldiering helped to make war more seductive and the nation more aggressive. If fraternity could be expressed by volunteering (or being conscripted) to fight for the fatherland – by being part of the arms-bearing brotherhood of citizens – then the idea of the fatherland in continental Europe was increasingly shaped by military values and images. The image of the soldier also changed. No longer was it enough to obey and be brave: the soldier had to sacrifice himself for the nation. Both in France, as we have seen, and in Prussia during the wars of liberation, a myth was created of the patriotic hero choosing freely to die for his country and, in so doing, being elevated to the status of martyr and immortalised.21 Equally, in the long term, the identification of war with sacrifice and heroism, and with nation, can explain why nationalists should have become the main advocates of a much more belligerent and chauvinistic masculinity in the decades after the French Revolution.22
When Mazzini's friend Thomas Carlyle bemoaned the devaluation of heroes in contemporary society – the lack of opportunities for ‘Able-man’ and the absence of ‘Hero-worship’ – he inadvertently betrayed his culture's obsession with them.23 The nineteenth century became the age of the hero. Fictional heroes like Ivanhoe, D'Artagnan and Ettore Fieramosca captured the imagination of the nineteenth-century reader, and literary geniuses as diverse as Lord Byron and Dante Alighieri jostled for the attention of the public. Whether remembered or imagined as with the Jacobins, or borrowed and elaborated as in the person of Napoleon, the cult of the hero became a central part of nineteenth-century nationalism and was celebrated in monuments, paintings, poetry, novels and history all over Europe and the Americas. Napoleon survived defeat, exile and death to become a symbol of France and a far more genuinely popular figure than in his own lifetime. The cult of the hero also spread to Britain, one of Napoleon's fiercest opponents, and was expressed in the ongoing public enthusiasm for military heroes like Nelson and Wellington, and liberal and radical heroes such as Daniel O'Connell, William Gladstone, and the Chartist leaders Ernest Jones and Feargus O'Connor. From the 1830s onwards, it is also possible to talk of a cult of political celebrity, where figures like Queen Victoria and Napoleon III were actively produced and promoted using the new technologies of print media.24
Throughout the nineteenth century, the political purpose of the hero remained broadly that of the French Revolution: to personify a political idea, to embody an elite or collective movement, and/or to sacralise a regime. In particular, nationalist heroes seemed to give voice to the nation, and they lent credibility to claims for the existence of national communities and the genuineness of nationalist feeling. It was precisely in this way that Garibaldi embodied and legitimised the claims of Risorgimento Italy, and he was fashioned explicitly for this purpose. Indeed, he probably represents the most complete expression of ‘heroic masculinity’ allied with nationalism in all of nineteenthcentury politics.
However, the example of Garibaldi is also significant because it suggests real problems with the model outlined by Mosse. Garibaldi points us to a tradition in democratic thought which directly challenged the authoritarian symbolism of Napoleon. Thus, Saint-Simonians admired Napoleon, but they also argued that in removing himself from society – by posing as a great man and saviour – he had become less effective: a hero did not have to be a ‘great man’ responsible for exceptional deeds. Historians in post-revolutionary France – Guizot, Thierry, Michelet – as well as many democrats, such as Louis Blanc, took pains to question the idea of an exceptional individual, and argued that greatness resided just as much in a capacity to identify with the hopes and action of the people.25 As Thierry put it, ‘the essential aim of [my] history is to contemplate the destiny of peoples, and not that of certain famous men, to recount the adventures of social life, and not those of individual life’. For Michelet, genius was ‘the people’, and the new identity was one of collect
ivity. ‘How I need to clasp hold of the patrie,’ he wrote, ‘to know and love France more and more!’26
This critique of the authoritarian hero should also remind us of an older, American and republican, tradition of hero worship, where the hero was a man like Washington, uncomfortable with power, and imagined as ‘a symbol of people's aspirations’ rather than being venerated for his own achievements.27 Crucially, this critique of the exceptional individual was taken up by another republican, Mazzini. Mazzini challenged what he saw as the primacy given to the ‘individual’ (his emphasis) in nineteenth-century thought and in an essay, ‘On the works of Thomas Carlyle (genius and tendencies)’, he publicly criticised his friend's belief that ‘[t]he nationality of Italy is the glory of having produced Dante and Christopher Columbus; the nationality of Germany that of having given birth to Luther, to Goethe’. He insisted that these men ‘were only the interpreters or prophets’ of national thought: they were ‘of the people, who alone are its depositary’. Thus, for Mazzini, the hero – or what he called ‘genius’ – was a democrat, whose function was to perceive and represent the collectivity, and he protested ‘in the name of the democratic spirit of the age’ against the ‘great man’ thesis:
History is not the biography of great men … The great men of the earth are but the marking stones on the road of humanity: they are the priests of its religion … There is yet something greater, more divinely mysterious, than all the great men – and that is the earth which bears them, the human race which includes them, the thought of God which stirs within them, and which the whole human race collectively can alone accomplish … The inspiration of genius belongs one half to heaven, the other to the crowds of common mortals from whose life it springs.28
Like the Jacobins before them, Mazzinian nationalists were convinced that politics held the key to cultural transformation – in this case, to ‘making Italians’. But their task differed from that of both the Jacobins and Napoleon in a number of ways. First, they were not in power, but mostly outside or excluded from it. Second, they were democrats and were part of a moment of democratic politics in the middle decades of the nineteenth century when mass politics was a revolutionary idea and where its signs were those of opposition and rebellion. Thus, the function of the hero was to include and to liberate, and to defy the prevailing status quo. Moreover, if we look at political culture and taste in mid-nineteenth-century Europe, what is immediately striking is not so much the presence of neo-classicism as the influence of romanticism. In the Italian case, it is especially worth remembering that neo-classicism (or simply ‘classicism’) was seen as part of a cosmopolitan tradition against which romantics specifically and vocally identified themselves; Italian romantics looked instead to the very different ideals, traditions and images of medievalism for inspiration.29 For politically engaged romantics, including Mazzini, classicism was also a discredited movement as a result of its association with Napoleon and thus with an older, now superseded, political epoch. And whatever the importance of classical Rome as a symbol of Italian ‘primacy’, its precise meaning was equivocal as a result of the inevitable confusion between its republican and imperial pasts. For all these reasons, Risorgimento nationalists preferred to refer to the medieval past and to its far clearer associations with political independence, freedom and community.30