by Lucy Riall
The general acceptance of the National Society's assumption that Italy was a nation, which had simply lost her independence and ‘genius’ to internal divisions and foreign oppression, shows how far nationalist ideas – dismissed as foolish a decade earlier – had achieved a wide circulation and penetrated political debate, even as Mazzinianism declined as a political movement. Just as striking was the status of this nationalist vision among the reading public outside Italy. As we saw in the previous chapter, there had been great, if not unanimous, enthusiasm for the exiles of 1848–9 in the United States, and American enthusiasm was transformed into broad support for nationalist demands in Italy during the 1850s.55 In France too, Italian questions were given greater prominence in the press. Edgar Quinet's Les Révolutions d'Italie, based on lectures given in the Collège de France, was published in three volumes between 1848 and 1852. In Paris, Manin also made great efforts to promote and control discussion of the Italian question in France. He saw the proofs of all the articles on Italy which appeared in the progressive paper, La Presse, while the equally progressive Le Siècle published his essays on Italy. Even after Manin's death in 1857, his influence continued. There was a well-supported press campaign in France for a monument to him, and leading French liberals began to use praise of Manin as a means of expressing public sympathy for Italy and of seeking contact with the National Society.56
Yet it was in Britain, with its large radical reading public, that Italian nationalism seems to have had most resonance and had the clearest impact on political debate. As in France and the USA, sympathy for Italy in Britain was generated partly by the writings of artists, poets and academics who travelled to Italy and studied its past. Some of these – Arthur Clough, Elizabeth Barrett Browning – had witnessed the 1848–9 revolutions at first hand and published poems about the events. In her famous poem, ‘Casa Guidi windows’, Barrett Browning praised Italian efforts at ‘redemption’; Clough, although more openly cynical, still testified to the fascination of Garibaldi and his followers.57 In the early 1850s, the negative campaign against Bourbon ‘misrule’ was given a tremendous political boost by the then High Tory, William Ewart Gladstone, who after a visit to Italy published a famous denunciation of conditions in Neapolitan prisons and of the Neapolitan state as ‘the negation of God erected into a system of government’ (the ‘Two letters to the Earl of Aberdeen’).58 He also helped publish and partly translated Luigi Carlo Farini's history of Rome in the nineteenth century.59
Still the single most important reason for the high profile of the Italian question in Britain was the presence of Mazzini. Following his return to London as a hero after the events of Rome in 1849, Mazzini enjoyed even greater fame and influence in Britain than before. His personality ‘was appropriated by the supporters of radical politics and likened to that of national radical heroes like Milton or Cromwell’.60 His philosophy of ‘moral regeneration’ helped to revive British radicalism in the aftermath of the Chartist defeats; he helped William Linton temporarily revive the republican movement; and his activity in radical circles contributed to the development of a broad liberal consensus which provided a basis for Gladstonian liberalism throughout the 1860s and after.61 Mazzini also used his position to mobilise and organise public opinion in favour of Italy. In 1851, he established the Society of the Friends of Italy, which spanned a wide section of the progressive middle class and included prominent liberal reformers, religious Dissenters and leading figures of Victorian literary bohemia. Although the Friends of Italy disbanded in 1853, during the fallout from the Milan insurrection, prominent Mazzinians in England – James Stansfeld, William Ashurst, Joseph Cowen – founded a new organisation, the Emancipation of Italy Fund Committee, aimed at the working class, and in 1856 members of the same group set up the Garibaldi Fund Committee. All of these committees had offices and affiliations in provincial centres as well as in London.62 The committees raised significant amounts of money, indicating a considerable level of support. Initial subscriptions to the Friends of Italy were often as high as £5 and the Friends eventually contributed over £12,800 to the Italian cause.63
So Mazzini's declining fortunes in Italy were not reflected in the British public's perception of him. In his first address to the Friends of Italy, Mazzini urged them to win support for Italian freedom through letters, articles in the press, pamphlets and petitions. Mazzini himself continued to write copiously in the new British radical papers of the 1850s. In this activity, he was assisted by a talented group of collaborators and fellow exiles whose publications and lecture tours contributed greatly to publicising the Italian question, and especially the issue of papal and Austrian opression. As well as touring North America, Father Alessandro Gavazzi went on a tour of the British Isles to give a series of anti-Catholic public lectures or ‘orations’ in the early 1850s which were well attended, while the ex-Roman triumvir Aurelio Saffi in an article in The Westminster Review argued that Italy should no longer be considered a Catholic country. Saffi taught Italian literature at Oxford from 1853, and he went on to give public lectures on Dante and Machiavelli in Manchester, and on the Risorgimento in conferences in London, Edinburgh and Glasgow. It was reported that 1,600 people attended his speech in Glasgow. In the same years Garibaldi's friend Jessie White, who had recently returned from Italy enthused by Mazzinian ideals, produced a series of articles on Italy for the Daily News said to have been ghostwritten by Mazzini, and she too went on a lecture tour of the British provinces. Even those less sympathetic to Mazzini managed to stir up public enthusiasm over the sufferings of Italy. Felice Orsini's lecture tour, which took place shortly after he escaped from an Austrian prison in Mantua, was a sellout. His racy memoirs, published as The Austrian Dungeons of Italy in 1856, sold 35,000 copies, and a second edition was published in 1859.64
We must not read too much into British enthusiasm for Italian causes. In part, sympathy for Italy in Britain, as well as in France and the USA, masked a distinct sense of cultural and political condescension towards what was seen as a oncegreat nation, seemingly compromised by misgovernment and unable to liberate itself without assistance. Thus, for many Americans in Rome, papal corruption was fascinating precisely because it seemed so decadent and thus tended to confirm the superiority of their own political system.65 Having celebrated in print the 1848 revolutions in Florence, Elizabeth Barrett Browning confessed in private to ‘a gentle and affectionate approach to contempt’ at the fickleness of Italians: ‘Poor Rome! Poor Italy! Here there are men only fit for the Goldoni theatre, the coffee houses and the sunny side of the Arno …’66 Even the historian Edgar Quinet was primarily interested in the 1848–9 revolutions in Italy as an example for France of the violence and factionalism which could be caused by Catholic culture and ideals.67
Likewise, for British political activists the Italian cause was essentially a ‘safe’ and workable way for middle and workingclass liberals to assert their own identities and beliefs.68 For the vocal and popular anti-Catholic lobby in Victorian England, incensed by the Pope's appointment of a Catholic hierarchy in England in 1851, the radical anti-Catholicism of many Italian exiles in England, with their stories of the Inquisition and papal corruption, made them extremely convenient allies.69 Gladstone's interest in Italy was rooted in his study of Dante, and he found in the issue of Italian reform a means of smoothing his transition from High Tory to Liberal in British politics. His ‘Two letters to the Earl of Aberdeen’ were in fact ‘eminently conservative documents’, intended not to support Mazzini (whom Gladstone abhorred) but as a warning that repression was doing the work of Mazzini, by, in his words, ‘desolating entire classes upon which the life and growth of the nation depend, undermining the foundation of all civil rule and preparing the way for violent revolution …’. Gladstone's ‘Letters’ were thus not only a plea for reform in Italy, they were also an argument against Mazzini and revolution.70
Finally, it is worth remembering that not everyone supported the Italian nationalist cause, either in Britain
or elsewhere. Mazzini is said to have ‘ruffled the sensibilities of many sympathisers’ with his attacks on socialism in Britain. Marx and Engels, as is well known, were especially disparaging about ‘the rotten Italians’ and their ‘revolution’, and sought to combat Mazzini's influence in the press with a series of anonymous attacks in the New York Daily Tribune.71 But during the 1850s it was the right, and especially the Catholic Church, which did most to contest support for Italian nationalism. In Rome, the Catholic hierarchy began to mobilise its own anti-nationalist propaganda machine with the foundation of a paper, La Civiltà Cattolica. La Civiltà Cattolica had been established by the papal authorities in Naples in 1850, and after it was moved to Rome it became a crucial – and all too modern – weapon in the struggle against nationalism in Italy. It had a much greater circulation than any of its nationalist counterparts, with 7,000 subscriptions in the year of its launch (1850), reaching 11,000 in 1853 (with a print run of 13,000 copies). It closely followed and commented on political events in the peninsula, and it attacked without distinction Cavour, the National Society and Mazzini. It also published to great popular success the serialised novels of one of its founders, the Jesuit priest Antonio Bresciani. Bresciani's writings sought to combine the appeal of the historical novel with the duties of strict religious morality: or to entertain readers while teaching them ‘the dogmas and moral truths of our holy Religion’. His villains were often revolutionaries and many of the novels had a specifically antinationalist theme.72
The Catholic press had an international reach, and the Church itself had a call on people's loyalties which could cut across and cancel out the appeal of Italian nationalism and other liberal causes. Under Napoleon III in France, the power of Catholicism was unquestionable, and clerical papers like L'Univers, L'Union and Le Correspondant enjoyed a large circulation.73 Even in Britain, where the situation was completely different, support for Italian nationalism and for its attacks on the Catholic religion was publicly contested by Catholics. The new archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Wiseman (whose appointment had caused such a furore of anti-Catholic feeling in Britain), published a counterattack on Gavazzi,74 and he went on to make a triumphant tour of Ireland in 1858 to celebrate and honour the man he called the real victim in Italy – the besieged Pope in Rome. In Ireland itself, Paul Cullen, archbishop of Dublin throughout this whole period (1852 to 1878), was a more than able opponent of Mazzini. He had been a student in Rome in the 1830s and a supporter of the archreactionary, Pope Gregory XVI, and he had stayed on in Rome at the Irish College and so witnessed all the events and fighting during the 1849 revolution. From the 1850s onwards, Cullen did everything in his power to fight what he saw as the alliance between Protestantism, Freemasonry, revolution in Ireland (led by ‘Orange Catholics’) and Italian nationalism.75 An Irish MP, John Francis Maguire, published a defence of the Pope's temporal power – Rome, its rulers and its insitutions – to great acclaim in 1856, and this volume was reissued in 1859. Indeed, propapal enthusiasm can be said to have fuelled Irish nationalism in the 1850s; it also led to feuds and nearviolence in Clerkenwell in 1853 between Italian refugees who insulted local Irish priests and Irish Catholics determined to defend their ‘spiritual father’.76 In the USA too, where the Catholic hierarchy was dominated by the Irish, Italian nationalists did not have everything their own way and Catholics were vocal in their defence of the Pope.77 Finally, from the 1848–9 revolutions onwards, the Catholic press in the southern German – and traditionally more liberal – states painted an apocalyptic picture of the threat of Mazzini and revolution, and presented the political struggles in Italy as the decisive battle between the ‘kingdom of God’ and the ‘kingdom of darkness’.78
Nevertheless, the fact that so many men and women were, by the late 1850s, ‘passionately concerned with the fate of the [Italian] peninsula’,79 and that the issue of Italian independence had come to eclipse most other great liberal causes in the international press at this time, is extremely significant. In this respect, the battle with the Catholic Church was deliberately sought by the nationalists: it served to sharpen the rhetorical defences of the nationalists and ensured them wide publicity. Clerical counterattacks provided them with an occasion to relaunch and restate their core ideas.80 As the events of 1859–60 were to make abundantly clear, the pressure of international liberal public opinion also helped to give Italian nationalists – including Cavour and the moderates – an ultimately unassailable head start over the Austrians and their allies in the Italian peninsula.
Yet even before these dramatic conflicts took place, the dialogue between Italian exiles, on the one hand, and their readership and audiences, on the other, helped to define the coming struggle and determined perceptions of it. First, the technological and cultural developments of the 1850s opened up new possibilities for Italian nationalists. In this decade, both radical propagandists and the more moderate National Society were able to reach beyond the secret groups of nationalist conspirators and the elite circles of their enthusiasts and connect with a much broader – if educated and still largely middleclass – international reading public. Second, the public debates among nationalists, their language and slogans, even the disagreements between them and the attacks upon them, which were carried out in meetings, lectures, pamphlets, newspapers and books throughout this period, served to promote the new political idea of Italy. The press and public debate publicised the Piedmontese ‘solution’ and helped give nationalists the appearance (if not the reality) of unity and unanimity. Most of all, the press helped to distil the message of Italian nationalism into a simple but potent narrative, which presented the liberal public with an ostensibly unquestionable moral choice: on the one side, Neapolitan prisons, papal corruption and Austrian repression and, on the other, political freedom, national independence, and the heroism of a few selfless and exceptional individuals.
Stories of love, liberty and adventure
The rapid extension of the reading public in Europe, the consequent broadening of the public sphere and the changes in the language of political debate, as well as the increasing prominence within this debate of the problem of Italy's future, help us to understand the presence and impact of Garibaldi in mid-nineteenth-century European politics. Seen from the perspective of this new political culture, rather than from the more traditional and narrow standpoint of high politics, Garibaldi's extended exile from politics and his political setbacks seem arguably less significant than the continuing spread of public interest in him, expressed through the medium of publishing and reading.
As we know, both the radical and the conservative press had made much of Garibaldi's retreat from Rome. Radical British and American journalists followed his progress from Europe to North America, and only finally lost interest in him when he disappeared into the Pacific. In America Dwight had recast Garibaldi as the ‘retiring’ and ‘noblehearted’ commander and epitome of Protestant virtue, involved in a ceaseless struggle against what Dwight calls ‘chronicles’ of papal ‘despotism’.81 In France, during the same period, the celebrated novelist Alexandre Dumas fashioned Garibaldi as the passionate, blueeyed defender of Montevideo – physically beautiful, gracious in his movements, softly spoken – as part of his creation and celebration of the siege of Montevideo as ‘a new Troy’.82 These foreign writers were clearly well aware of the pliability and resonance of Garibaldi's public image. In the aftermath of the revolution, a series of pamphlets were published in Piedmont which commemorated Garibaldi's role in the 1848–9 revolutions, and especially the story of the retreat from Rome.83 Throughout the 1850s, he remained before the Italian public by means of a series of printed images, as a protagonist in political memoirs, as the subject of a biography, and via appearances in adventure romances. These publications produced a narrative formula apparently so compelling that it structured Garibaldi's political appeal in 1859–60 and thereafter.
In the early 1850s, some of the protagonists in the Roman Republic and in its defence – the political ac
tivists Carlo Pisacane, Augusto Vecchi and Luigi Farini; the Lombard volunteer Emilio Dandolo and the Swiss volunteer Gustav von Hofstetter – published their histories and memoirs of recent events. Dandolo and von Hofstetter had fought together in the defence of Rome in Luciano Manara's Lombard legion. Their memoirs aimed and helped to create a romantic memory of the Roman Republic as one of the most tragic and glorious episodes in the whole Risorgimento; in their accounts, young men – ‘united by a common sentiment, filled with fervour and enthusiasm’ – die stoically as martyrs on the walls of the ‘eternal city’, and their deaths reunite the Italian family and establish Italy's destiny as a warrior nation.84 Interestingly, none of these writers was entirely on Garibaldi's side, and Pisacane in particular was critical of Garibaldi's military skills. Yet they were unanimous in praising his bravery in battle and all acknowledged his personal charisma. Dandolo and von Hofstetter wrote at length about Garibaldi's captivating physical presence and radical behaviour, stressing his energy, virility and exotic clothes and gestures (see pages 85–7). Thus, they helped to create and publicise a myth of Garibaldi and to link this myth to an heroic ideal of italianità, even while Garibaldi himself had withdrawn from active politics.
It was a sign of the changing times that these writers were able to take advantage of the lack of press censorship and publish their work in Piedmont, and that their work was published abroad as well. Dandolo, Farini and Vecchi were translated into English from Italian; both Dandolo and Vecchi's accounts were published in more than one Italian edition; and von Hoffstetter's was translated from German into Italian. There is evidence, moreover, that these works were widely read and were influential. Dandolo, along with his brother Enrico and other volunteers who died in the defence of Rome, became heroes in their own right as a result of the memoir (when Dandolo died in 1859 he was given a huge funeral in Milan, which provided the occasion for anti-Austrian demonstrations). Von Hofstetter was with Garibaldi on the retreat from Rome, and his memoir remains an important source on that episode. At the time, it helped inspire at least one enthusiast, Garibaldi's future lover and biographer Esperanza von Schwartz, to seek out Garibaldi at his home in Caprera.85