by Lucy Riall
Far closer to Garibaldi than the Lombard volunteers was the journalist Giovanni Battista Cuneo, a friend and promoter since his South American days. In 1850, Cuneo published the first real biography of Garibaldi. It was only a sixtytwopage, cheaply produced book, but it had Garibaldi's cooperation and full approval.86 Like the memoirs of Dandolo et al., the biography was to some extent political intervention: part of the process of creating, promoting and controlling the memory of 1848–9. Yet Cuneo went a step further and used narrative elements borrowed directly from fiction to structure the biography, telling the story of Garibaldi's life as a series of decisively heroic episodes from his early childhood in Nice until his presentday exile. He adopted a threestage sequential narrative (what Northrop Frye has called ‘a sequential and processional form’):87 the series of minor adventures as a young man (when Garibaldi's heroism was already evident since he saved no fewer than three men from drowning); the perilous and characterforming journeys across South America; and the major ‘quest’ – the epic battle for Rome where the hero fights the enemy, finds his destiny and redeems Italian pride against French accusations of cowardice. In effect, Cuneo employs a standardised literary formula (the adventure romance), developed to entertain the reader and encourage his/her identification with the story's protagonist, and applies it to the construction of a biography as ‘exemplary life’.88
Cuneo's biography is a striking example of the fusion of politics with popular fiction. He ties a political (radical, nationalist) message to a popular narrative formula, he identifies Garibaldi's personal qualities with an ideal of public virtue, and he constructs his biography so that the life imagined enhances the appeal of the real. Garibaldi himself is part bold political leader, part fascinating romantic hero. He is energetic, brave and adventurous, and his whole life is ‘a continual and not unfruitful sacrifice for liberty and the fatherland’.89 As a man, he is goodlooking and attractive (on the book's original cover he gazes seductively at the reader in an almost languid pose in front of Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome):
Of medium height, wide in the chest and shoulders, sturdy and relaxed at the same time, he gives you an idea of strength and agility. At first glance, his face seems severe; and the tawny, uncut beard, the long blond hair, the large forehead which descends from it and which forms with his nose a straight line which falls in perpendicular, and his shrewd and piercing look all give him an imposing aspect; but looking at him more closely, a sweet harmony of line and form jumps out at you and confirms your expectations, and a feeling of trust and sympathy spontaneously rises up within your heart, and mixes with the respect which he had previously inspired in you.
He has a ‘chivalrous heart’ which is open to ‘all displays of beauty’; in particular, ‘music and poetry have a magic authority over him’. But he is also strong and steadfast: ‘constancy in the face of adversity, a courage which grows in relation to obstacles and dangers, a steadiness of purpose, a flash of the eye which rarely fails to strike in the most dire emergencies, and a serenity in every moment of life’ are also features of his personality.90
Although it was not until 1859 that publications about Garibaldi achieved a wide circulation, Cuneo's biography created the political–literary formula which structured all future approaches to Garibaldi. Elements of this formula had already arrived in England by the early 1850s, as the short biography of him published in the radical Northern Tribune in 1854 shows.91 The specific information on his early life – unknown in Britain before this time – was lifted from Cuneo's biography (and perhaps from Dwight's Roman Republic), with various elements added from British newspapers and periodicals, while others are embellishments invented by The Northern Tribune. Crucially, the biography is structured like an adventure story, with many of the familiar episodes included. Thus, we are told that Garibaldi was born in Nice in 180892 of ‘good family’ and that ‘his love of adventure led him to the sea’. The paper follows Cuneo in highlighting Garibaldi's dramatic escape after the discovery of the 1833 conspiracy; it has him crossing the River Var in February, and also asserts that this heroic act provides the inspiration for a similar incident in Giovanni Ruffini's novel, Lorenzo Benoni, published in Britain the previous year.93 Like Cuneo, the paper points to Garibaldi's nickname of ‘lion’ – a medieval symbol of resurrection and a modern euphemism for celebrity – by reproducing the figure of a lion in the accompanying illustration of Garibaldi, and by quoting from Joseph Cowen's address of welcome that his supporters are ‘not vulgar lionizers’.94 The article is proof both of Garibaldi's personal capacity to inspire flights of literary imagination, and of the circulation of standardised biographical elements relating to him.
One of the most striking images of Garibaldi during this time is not taken from a photograph: it is an idealised representation of him, printed in Turin, as Christ Pantocrator (probably intended for clandestine circulation in the rest of Italy; see figure 8 overleaf).95 This image provides us with a clue to one of the great battles of the Risorgimento after 1848–9, which was the struggle between the nationalists and the Catholic Church. Among the first, and in some ways most revealing, of all contributions to the cult of Garibaldi was produced by the stridently antinationalist Jesuit priest, Padre Antonio Bresciani. His ‘historical novel’, Lionello, first published in the pages of La Civiltà Cattolica in 1852, was partly set in Rome in the days of the Republic of 1849. During the revolutionary events, the eponymous hero takes up with Garibaldi, to the surprise of his friends, who knew Garibaldi as ‘a highwayman on land and a pirate on the seas, who lays waste to every place he lands at, throwing out fire and flame under his feet, and making blood gush from everything he touches with a deadly hand’. But, in a parody of Cuneo's Biografia, Lionello defends Garibaldi:
8 Garibaldi as Christ Pantocrator, printed in Piedmont in the 1850s and circulated clandestinely elsewhere.
he is of medium stature and with a sturdy and compressed figure but … as quick as a lion, which combines force with agility, solidity with slenderness, the ardent eye with the constant gaze, a proud and merciful heart; the lion can most easily be said to resemble him, with his great blond mane which descends to the shoulders, the tawny beard, the high forehead, and the grave and serious look at first glance, but he who looks at him well sees a generous, open and serene face, which inspires reverence, trust and sympathy in you.
Garibaldi, according to Lionello, has a soul which is:
noble, frank, sincere, lofty and entirely harmonious, on which music has a sweet authority, and poetry carries him off on flights which are as sublime as they are strong … with his sword he subdued the barbarian, with his pen he sung the triumphs and bravery of Greece, with his mind he made philosophy, and with his heart he burns for the love of freedom.96
This satire of Cuneo's biography is continued in the pages that follow. Every episode of Garibaldi's life – his love of Rome, his heroism in South America, his wife Anita – is recounted by Bresciani in a deliberately exaggerated and poor imitation of Cuneo's style and episodic structure. In this way, the real character of the ‘hero’ Garibaldi – the destroyer of Rome, the insidious conspirator, the perfidious husband – is clearly revealed.
What makes Bresciani's work so interesting for us is his attempt to fuse the traditional reactionary attack on Garibaldi as a bloodthirsty and destructive bandit97 with a parody of the nationalist ‘style’ pioneered by Cuneo and others. That Bresciani should have attempted to do so at all is a sign of the wider influence and circulation of this style. The literary impact of Italian nationalism, and of Garibaldi in particular, is also suggested by his appearance in a number of British novels of the period, part of a minor ‘pulp’ genre which swapped the Italian castles of Gothic romances for the events and places of Risorgimento Italy.98 The first of these, Angelo, was published in 1854 and is the story of a love affair between an ex-Jesuit priest, Angelo Maturin, and the heroine, Leoline, set against the backdrop of the 1848–9 revolutions in Rome.99Amid a whole host of exotic a
nd violent characters we find the defender of Rome, ‘the notorious Gariboni’, the head of a band of mercenaries: ‘a character singularly adapted for the execution of the bloody work he had undertaken’ and with ‘qualities which strongly excited the enthusiasm of his followers’.
‘Gariboni’ is not just cruel, he is also selfpossessed: ‘Insensible to the suggestions either of pity or remorse, he could talk calmly, or even jocosely with his victim, and motion at the same instant to his attendants to prepare for his immediate destruction’; but he is a man of principle and honour, if without feeling or mercy. He is, above all, a sexually attractive outsider; he is heavily armed and flamboyantly dressed in a green blouse with red slashed sleeves, red trousers and ‘an embroidered pelisse’ over his shoulders. His transgressive appearance causes particular excitement among Rome's nuns:
many a female glance, long turned from carnal vanities, rested with satisfaction on his clear blue eye, high forehead, small mouth, luxuriant hair falling in rich curls about his neck, and graceful moustache; and many a heart that ought to have been lost in dreams of Divine love and universal charity, hushed its momentary fears at the appearance of so noble and imposing an invader.100
Two years later, Garibaldi appeared in another novel set in Rome during the revolutions, this time a more lighthearted adventure following the journey of an English Catholic family in Italy. In the novel, Modern Society in Rome, whose British author was a proPiedmontese, liberal Catholic, Garibaldi appears once more as an exotic ‘banditto’ character, a ‘dreaded condottiere’, part of ‘as wild looking a party … as ever went a gypsying on a summer morning’. His dress is described as ‘picturesque’, and includes: ‘Large pointed boots, falling loose round the calves of his legs’, short breeches, a green silk scarf around his waist, a scarlet tunic, a large cloak ‘with a great capote like that of the Capuchin monks’, a broad South American hat and the inevitable pistols and daggers stuck into his belt. Yet despite this alarming appearance, his physical presence is extremely seductive. He is impressive, athletic (‘a racehorse or a lion’), beautiful, proud, frank and generous, and his voice is so deep and measured that all ‘felt kindly confidence towards him at once’.101 Anita features in the narrative too, pretty and sweet but ‘no less striking than … the wild leader himself’, as do the thousand athletic men brought by Garibaldi to Rome, ‘[t]all, darkvisaged, strong men, all nerve and muscle, with hollow eyes and long curling clotted hair, that fell down on their shoulders’, who frightened the Romans with their South American dress and manners.102
In the novel's climax, the fortunes of the English family become intertwined with those of Garibaldi and Anita, and thus with Italy more generally. This occurs most notably in an absurd plot twist during the retreat from Rome. As Anita lies dying in Garibaldi's arms, which in the novel occurs on ‘perhaps the most beautiful of Italian roads’ near Ravenna, the two surviving English protagonists – Horace Enderby and Mary Aglethorpe – pass by in a carriage on their way to the Tyrol:
‘Good heavens, Mary!’ exclaimed Horace Enderby … ‘good heavens, my beloved, it is Garibaldi and Anita!’ … ‘Oh, for a drop of wine!’ exclaimed Garibaldi, wildly. Horace sprang back to the carriage and brought forth a flask. ‘It is all we have. It is cold tea: but it may refresh her.’
But giving ‘an unmistakable look of love’ to Garibaldi, Anita dies. Mary bursts into tears. Garibaldi gets up ‘with the dignity of unutterable woe’, and ‘turning from them to hide the tears that streamed down his sunburnt cheeks [and] … gently taking the body of his Anita in his arms, he disposed his cloak over it, and strode off into the broken country’. He mourns over her until dark, and then buries her in a mound of sand with his own hands, leaving her in ‘that dear land of Italy, from which he himself must go forth a wanderer and an exile’.103
One other British novel of the 1850s in which Garibaldi features deserves our attention. The Exiles of Italy, or Garibaldi's miraculous escapes, published in 1857, is more openly nationalist than the previous two and is explicitly anti-Catholic, and it calls itself ‘a novel’ with ‘a strictly authentic History of the period embraced’. The female author, C. G. Hamilton, acknowledges the influence of Saffi's lectures on Italy in the formation of her views; and the preface – which calls attention to the ‘sufferings and oppression endured by the Italians’ – is essentially a virulent attack on papal despotism and the conditions in Neapolitan prisons.104 The novel's plot turns on the adventures of two exiled Neapolitan noblemen but, once again, significant passages in the novel are given over to Garibaldi. He appears about a third of the way through the story, during the siege of Rome:
turning an angle of the street … a noble-looking man on horseback appeared. He was advancing slowly, for the crowd that surrounded him stayed his progress, and as he from time to time returned their acclamations with courteous acknowledgement, the smile with which he regarded them was like that of a father blessing his children. He appeared about fifty years old, of middle stature; his forehead was high, his eyes bright and piercing; the hair of his head and beard was light; and his whole bearing bespoke the dauntless courage that inspired the beholders, and the genial kindness which made him the idol of his followers. He was dressed in a short scarlet cloak, without any insignia of military rank save his cap and sword.105
Apart from his dignified countenance, it is Garibaldi's love for Anita which is dwelt upon at length and, once again, their relationship parallels the love affairs of the novel's two heroes and the tragedy of the 1848–9 revolutions. The retreat from Rome is described in considerable, if largely improbable, detail; Garibaldi calls Anita ‘my life’ and mourns her ‘bright elastic spirit that in all their wanderings had shed its sunshine over her husband's perilous and stormy career’. The death of Anita takes place in the Alps, and not even the arrival of a ‘shaggy’ Saint-Bernard dog who guides the travellers to a mountain hut can save her. Before she dies, she tells her husband: ‘I shall be with you, my friend; whether riding by your side, as in days of yore, or looking down upon you from that bright heaven.’ This time, he buries her in ‘a green, lonely spot, where the dark fig-trees threw their shadows on the grass, and the girdling rocks shut out all human eyes’. He becomes ‘a lonely wanderer on the earth’; excluded even from the comfort of his blue-eyed, fair-skinned mother and his four beautiful children.106
Garibaldi's emergence as a character in British novels is interesting for a number of reasons, not least because it parallels the wider enthusiasm for Italian nationalism which gathered pace in Britain during the 1850s. As a result, the novels allow us to explore the spread and reception of the cult of Garibaldi in British public opinion. Although it is impossible to trace with any accuracy the sources on Garibaldi for these novels, it is likely that reports in both The Times and The Illustrated London News were used in the descriptions of his appearance, and that either Dwight or von Hofstetter could have provided some basis for the otherwise wildly romanticised stories of the retreat from Rome. Equally revealing of contemporary attitudes and future trends is the sheer extent of fantasy involved in representations of Garibaldi and his adventures, a fantasy which is nevertheless grounded in the repetition of a formulaic, and already familiar, narrative.
In the three Britis novels published between 1854 and 1857, the shift in public perceptions of Garibaldi from cruel bandit to picturesque outlaw and then to older gentleman soldier can be read very clearly. More striking still, however, is the element of continuity provided by the fascination of Garibaldi's physical presence. We saw this preoccupation with his personal appearance and behaviour in contemporary reports throughout 1848–9, and again in the accounts of Dwight, Dumas, Dandolo, von Hofstetter, Cuneo and (in negative terms) Bresciani. In the British novels, the sexual overtones of this fascination are made explicit for the first time. Garibaldi is a man who excites nuns and engages in orgies, and his whole appearance ‘sends us again to those times, when, by the capture of the senses, reason could be laid asleep’; he is a husb
and who likes nothing more than to walk hand in hand with his wife and admire the view from under the shade of a chestnut tree; and he becomes a devastated sunburnt lover weeping over the body of his beautiful dead wife.107 He is not just violent and physically inspiring, he is also sensitive and loving. Here (and not for the last time), the fashioning of an imaginary Garibaldi tailored specifically to the demands of women readers needs to be noted.
Reading Garibaldi
Despite his partial withdrawal from active politics, Garibaldi was far more committed to publicising himself and his political ideas in these years than he liked to let on. We know, for example, that he read and approved Cuneo's biography, and that his help was acknowledged by Dwight in the account of the Roman Republic. That he, too, was involved in the construction of his own biography as ‘exemplary life’ is indicated by the fact that during these years of exile he wrote his memoirs. He first mentioned his memoirs in a letter to his cousin Augusto in January 1850 (which also referred to an earlier correspondence about them while he was in La Maddalena in October 1849). Before he left Tangier in the spring of 1850, he had apparently completed large sections of his memoirs and a series of biographical sketches of his ‘dead companions-in-arms’, including an essay on Anita; and during his voyage from Tangier to New York via Gibraltar and Liverpool he sent parts of the manuscript to his cousin and to his friend Francesco Carpaneto in an unsuccessful attempt to get them published.108 Although this original manuscript of his memoirs was lost, during the 1850s Garibaldi gave copies and authorised publication to a series of friends. He first gave a copy in 1850 to Dwight, who culled them extensively in preparing the sections on Garibaldi for his Roman Republic manuscript; subsequently Garibaldi gave another copy to Esperanza von Schwartz, in 1855; and then in 1860 he made available the text both to the Italian officer Francesco Carrano and to the French novelist Alexandre Dumas. In the event, each published a different version in English, German, Italian and French between 1859 and 1861, and each put in their own additions and embellishments.109