by Lucy Riall
The quarrel between Mazzini and Garibaldi would probably have been less significant had it not been carried out in public. As it was, the distance between them was intensified and publicised as part of a strategy of attack on Mazzinian loyalists in Genoa by the increasingly broad and pro-Cavourian liberal movement. For example, Antonio Gallenga writing in the pro-Cavourian paper, Il Parlamento (edited by Sicilian exiles hostile to Mazzini and with links to Giacomo Medici), immediately picked up on and wrote about Garibaldi's disagreement with the Mazzinian line on his arrival back in Italy.108 Garibaldi's declaration against Mazzinian methods in Italia e Popolo was praised by the moderate papers. However, it met with a barrage of critical letters in the radical press, notably in the pages of Italia e Popolo and in the Turin paper, Il Goffredo Mameli. Most damaging of all was the dispute which erupted in print between Garibaldi and his old commander from the Roman Republic, Pietro Roselli. Already, in 1853, Roselli had published a pamphlet about the battle of Velletri (19 May 1849), in which he had attacked Garibaldi's conduct, accusing him of insubordination and of responsibility for the failure of this part of the campaign.109 After Garibaldi's declaration, Roselli reiterated his accusations of the previous year in Italia e Popolo. Garibaldi, once again suffering from rheumatism which he acknowledged had put him in a terrible mood, was so angered by the attack that he challenged both the director of Italia e Popolo, Francesco Savi, and Roselli to duels.110 In the end, a ‘jury’ had to be formed to resolve the dispute, with Medici and Enrico Cosenz acting for Garibaldi. Although it concluded that no offence had been caused to Garibaldi's honour, clear damage was done to personal relations.111
Garibaldi's behaviour after his return to Italy in 1854 diminished his standing in Mazzinian circles. As Mazzini put it, commenting on Garibaldi's declaration in Italia e Popolo: ‘what is he doing? how is he alive to the state and wants of his country? To his own duties? Why does he not feel that the hour has come? and that one word from him and the military nucleus [of Medici] strengthening mine, their names coupled with mine, would be more than sufficient to rouse the people?’ On the fallout thereafter, he was even less understanding, writing dismissively to Emilie Hawkes that ‘Garibaldi has been walking up and down from place to place in search of duels with – the Italians who protested against his declaration’.112
None of this made good publicity and, even before Garibaldi's return, Mazzini had sought to promote another hero. The man was Silvino Olivieri, who had fought in the wars of 1848–9, and who spent the early 1850s leading an Italian legion in Buenos Aires against the dictator Rosas. Mazzini had published an article on Olivieri – ‘La legione Italiana in Buenos Aires’ – in Italia e Popolo of 2 January 1854, which was very similar in content and structure to the early publicity given to Garibaldi. It included a long letter comparing ‘the valiant colonel’ to Garibaldi and to the Bandiera brothers, and a series of ‘official documents’ testifying to Olivieri's bravery and selflessness, and to his fame and popularity in Argentina.113 After the events of the summer of 1854, Mazzini wrote to Nicolao Ferrari in Genoa telling him explicitly to promote Olivieri, as ‘he will one day perhaps be our remplaçant for Garibaldi’.114 And although Olivieri was murdered, trying to organise a colony (‘New Rome’) in Bahia Blanca in Argentina, Mazzini's opinion of Garibaldi did not improve. He persisted in his hope that Garibaldi could be won back for republicanism, but was now consistently disparaging about his political abilities: ‘Garibaldi will never start anything’, he told Cuneo in November 1855; ‘he will follow us if we make it, the monarchists if they make it.’ To his English friend Jessie White he was even more forthright:
Garibaldi is good: he loves his country and hates the Austrians; but Garibaldi is weak. Therefore, changeful. I believe that he has been really ensnared by the Piedmontese Ministry; I believe that he feels himself now deceived by them … Moreover, he believes that I distrust him; therefore, he distrusts me. I do not believe that a cordial understanding can ever take place between us; still I believe … call me jesuitical for that … even the appearance of such [an understanding] would do good to Italy.115
Unfortunately for Mazzini, it was the ‘appearance’ of quarrelling and disagreement which was the most visible aspect of the democratic movement in Italy in the mid-1850s. Along with Manin's denunciation of Mazzinian methods, Garibaldi's disagreement with Mazzini and the Mazzinians was one of the most public manifestations of what had gone wrong, in terms both of dealing personally with the bitter legacy of 1848–9 and of developing a strategy for responding to moderate liberalism in Piedmont and to political reaction in the rest of Italy. The first beneficiary of this disarray, and of Garibaldi's disaffection as a result of it, was the National Society. Between 1856 and 1859, the National Society largely filled the political vacuum left in nationalist politics, and in Garibaldi's life, by the apparent failure of Mazzinianism. Garibaldi was among the first officially to join the Society by signing its programme, writing to its president, Pallavicino, that ‘[t]he ideas expressed by you are mine, and … I am proud to accompany you in any political demonstration’.116 His presence was to prove ‘in the next two years … one of the Party's greatest strengths’; for Pallavicino, they had won the name that would ‘add prestige’.117 Garibaldi also accepted a post as the Society's vice-president, and he even went so far as to write to one supporter that ‘[t]he National Society is Italy, it is the whole nation!’118
Garibaldi's relations with the National Society, and especially with its secretary, Giuseppe La Farina, came to benefit Cavour as well. Cavour was initially very wary of Garibaldi (as he wrote in 1854, ‘if he is only coming back to see his family and children, we won't bother him at all; but if he intends to come here to carry out Mazzini's business, we won't tolerate his presence here for one minute’),119 but gradually, faced with the more ‘gentlemanly’ Garibaldi and influenced by La Farina, he came to appreciate the advantages of an alliance with him.120 The two men were introduced by La Farina for the first time in August 1856, and Cavour was said to have been friendly and courteous. They met again in December 1858, at which point Cavour let Garibaldi into some aspects of his plan for provoking a war with Austria. Cavour and Garibaldi apparently met on more than one occasion in the months that followed. In March 1859, Cavour also introduced Garibaldi to the king of Piedmont, Vittorio Emanuele II, and some kind of trust and sympathy seems to have developed between the two men.121
Yet despite his friendship with the Piedmontese government, Garibaldi's own political beliefs were much more ambiguous. He never gave up on the idea of revolutionary expeditions. In 1854, at the same time as he told Herzen that he was opposed to insurrections, he extolled the virtues of a seafaring life where, in his words, he and his followers might sail ‘over the ocean, hardening ourselves in the rough life of sailors, in conflict with the elements and with danger … A floating revolution, ready to put in at any shore, independent and unassailable!’122 Although he refused to take part in Pisacane's 1857 expedition, throughout 1855 and 1856 he had been quite prepared to help and even to head another expedition to liberate prominent political prisoners being held on the island of Santo Stefano off the coast of Naples.123 He tried to enlist the National Society's support in persuading Piedmont to pay for three ships in a major campaign which he planned for the spring of 1857.124 Nor had he abandoned the quintessentially Mazzinian idea of political sacrifice and martyrdom. Refusing to take any part in Pisacane's disastrous expedition, he made his own position very clear to Jessie White:
if Garibaldi was sure of being followed by a distinct majority … and even with a small chance of success, oh my Jessie! do you doubt that I would throw myself, with a feverish joy, into the fulfilment of this idea which has been my whole life, even if the only compensation was the most terrible martyrdom … My life is there, for Italy, and my idea of paradise is to take up arms for her. Happiness, a wife, children would not be enough to hold me back and nothing will hold me back when it is a question of the holy cause.125
/> ‘The years have rather worn me out,’ Garibaldi told Cuneo two months later, ‘but I am proud to tell you that I have kept my soul together.’126
Towards unification
In the 1850s Garibaldi abandoned Mazzini and republicanism for practical reasons but he remained dedicated to Mazzini's nationalist ideals. As he never tired of repeating, Garibaldi believed in the alliance with the Piedmontese monarchy and army but he was equally convinced by Mazzini's religious vision of the nation and by the idea of revolution leading to national redemption.
As an ideological choice, this position was extremely ambiguous. Raymond Grew tells us that, like Garibaldi, the whole of the National Society felt that ‘the love of the fatherland [was] … a religion’, and that the men of the Society were convinced they pursued a ‘holy goal’. Pallavicino wrote that the virtues most valued by this ‘religion’ were a ‘disinterested, fervent, holy love of public life’, a ‘religion of sacrifice’ of men with the ‘strongest convictions’ and ‘immaculate lives’, and ‘civil heroism … that faces long martyrdom’.127 Yet by allying themselves to the Piedmontese monarchy, to an essentially pragmatic, and in many ways conservative, political tradition, and to Cavour, the most opportunistic of politicians, the National Society not only relegated revolution to a secondary phase, they also deprived it of its moral ‘vitality’. As Grew comments: ‘The concept of the Risorgimento was being changed from a revolution that would remake society to a merely political change brought about by the force of arms’.128 At the same time, neither Garibaldi nor anybody else ever fully acknowledged this ideological shift. Instead, national unification became a vague and generic imperative, postponing all other decisions, and this catch-all aim obscured all kinds of other political divisions and unresolved issues. The alliance between religion and pragmatism, however productive in political terms, was never entirely clear in either its methods or objectives. Hence, it is not to be wondered at that Garibaldi's involvement with the National Society, and above all with Cavour and the Piedmontese state, came to cause a whole series of equivocations, misunderstandings and betrayals.
Even in practical terms, Garibaldi's attitude could cause difficulties. After the retreat from Rome and the death of his wife in 1849, Garibaldi had been very reluctant to commit himself to political action, and this reluctance persisted following his return to Europe in 1854. In fact, despite his previous reputation as a man of action, there was a curious passivity and lack of real initiative in much of Garibaldi's political activity during the 1850s, and this had a longterm impact on perceptions of him in democratic circles. His attitude was very clear in England in 1854, especially during a visit to Newcastle which he made to buy coal for transport to Genoa. Although the British radicals in Newcastle, led by Joseph Cowen, were keen to hold a demonstration in his honour, Garibaldi refused, and they had to be content with giving him ‘an address of welcome and sympathy’ and a sword and telescope. In his introduction to the address, Cowen even acknowledged Garibaldi's ‘personal dislike’ of publicity and added: ‘We beg to assure you … that we are not here as vulgar lionizers’.129 Over the next couple of years, Garibaldi spent a great deal of time travelling privately as a merchant seaman and away from the political arena. The death of his brother, Felice, in late 1855 partly resolved the financial problems which had obliged him to work for a living, and in early 1856 he used the money inherited from his brother to purchase half of the remote island of Caprera off the north-west corner of Sardinia, where he would then retreat for long periods each year. His life at Caprera removed him from a great deal of the mundane but crucial political activity in nationalist circles in Turin, Genoa and elsewhere in 1857 and 1858.130
While Garibaldi gradually came out of his self-imposed political retirement through his involvement with the National Society, he did so on a sporadic and fitful basis. Indeed, after his purchase of Caprera, he developed a lifelong habit of suddenly appearing on the political scene and then disappearing back to Caprera, sometimes disrupting other political action and processes. In a strange way, therefore, he continued to live in exile even after his return to Italy. Although the leaders of the National Society in the 1850s were interested as much in the prestige of his name as in his physical presence, Garibaldi's distance from the daily grind of nationalist activities was still unhelpful. It did little to alleviate the ordinary problems of organisation, assistance and finance which beset many parts of the broader movement. It also constrained his own ability to manoeuvre politically, reducing his knowledge of political developments as well as his capacity to engage in, and influence, political debate or manage events. Already in 1854, over the dispute with Roselli, Garibaldi's lack of political expertise had damaged his personal reputation, and he failed fully to regain the respect of many nationalists thereafter. In 1857, he was only the third man to join the National Society, and although by so doing he saved the whole project – since everyone else in Genoa had refused to sign up – he seemed unaware of this vital fact. Unlike Manin, who managed to maintain a certain distance from the Piedmontese government, Garibaldi gave his open and unconditional support to the same. He subsequently allowed himself to be controlled by La Farina in gaining access to Cavour and, as we shall see in Chapter 6, by Cavour as well in the lead-up to the war of 1859.131
Garibaldi found personal happiness at Caprera. He began to build a South-American-style bungalow and went hunting and fishing almost daily. He started to reclaim and cultivate the land, and he planted trees and raised livestock. His diaries from Caprera have survived and are proof of his enthusiasm for, and commitment to, farming the land.132 Various political friends, like Nino Bixio, came to stay and Garibaldi brought his children there so they could grow up ‘strong and active like children of the fields’. His letters speak of the curative powers of gardening, the mild climate and the crystal-clear water.133 Until it was wrecked in a storm, he also had his own sailing boat which allowed him to move around the Mediterranean as he liked. We can speculate that, for Garibaldi, Caprera represented a kind of ideal romantic socialist community, its inhabitants living in harmony with nature and bound to each other by the ties of hard work and love. When the anarchist Michael Bakunin visited Garibaldi in 1863, he pronounced the little community working in the fields at Caprera to be the prototype of ‘a democratic social republic’.134
Moreover, Caprera could be said to have served a quite notable political purpose. At Caprera, Garibaldi could hide from his public, and his manifest desire to do so is perhaps an indication of the growing personal burden of his fame. The political importance of privacy, and of the beneficial effects of the island for his health, should not be underestimated, given how serious and incapacitating Garibaldi's attacks of rheumatism had already become. In addition, the neartotal seclusion allowed him to pursue various intimate relationships with a series of rich, educated women more or less simultaneously and in complete privacy: first an engagement with the wealthy British widow, Emma Roberts, then a close friendship with her travelling companion, Jessie White, and a relationship with an Italian countess, Maria della Torre (who wrote to him of her pride at being chosen ‘as your companion’). He subsequently had a long love affair with the German baroness and writer, Esperanza (or ‘Speranza’) von Schwartz, to whom he proposed marriage; although she rejected him, she continued to write him passionate letters and to assure him of the ‘unbounded affection which I feel for you and will always feel for you’. Throughout this time, Garibaldi also enjoyed a sexual relationship with his housekeeper at Caprera, Battistina Ravello, with whom he had a daughter, Anita, in the spring of 1859.135 In terms of an overall strategy of political display, Caprera was where Garibaldi could go ‘backstage’, where he could relax and step out of character for a while.136
Arguably just as crucial from a political point of view, at Caprera Garibaldi could discuss strategy and plan another ‘performance’ without being observed by outsiders. By living in Caprera, Garibaldi could control access both to himself personally and t
o his public appearances and the part he had to play. As Garibaldi's island home, Caprera soon acquired a mythical status of its own, and was to become a kind of second, more privileged, stage in itself.
CHAPTER 5
THE GARIBALDI FORMULA
Print culture and the performance of politics
It is ironic that the Mazzinian movement suffered its greatest setbacks and schisms at a time when the propaganda methods which it had pioneered were being vindicated. Perhaps especially, the changes of the 1850s showed that Mazzini's faith in writing and the printed word as a vehicle for the production and dissemination of nationalist ideas had not been misplaced. In fact, the repression of the 1850s and the restrictions it imposed on press and other cultural and social activity did not really manage to close the new space for political action opened up by the 1848–9 revolutions, and one reason for this was the ‘revolution’ in reading and publishing sweeping Europe. It was also during the 1840s and 1850s that the market for literature expanded at an extraordinary rate, and it becomes possible to speak of the emergence of modern mass-media print. This phenomenon is worth exploring in some detail as it explains much about public support for national unification in Italy and about the popularity of Garibaldi in particular.1