Garibaldi

by Lucy Riall

  To many contemporaries, the events of 1860 seemed miraculous, and even to us they still seem surprising. For Trevelyan, who wrote about them some fifty years later, the ‘Garibaldian legend’ was true. In his view, Garibaldi's claim ‘on the memory of men’ lay both in his abilities as a revolutionary soldier and in ‘his appeal to the imagination’: He is perhaps the only case … of the poet as the man of action’.191 This judgement is not entirely misplaced. In 1860, Garibaldi was both sign and lived existence: he was both a practical instigator of political change and an imaginary symbol of the excitement it could provoke. However, the ‘legend’ cannot usefully be called ‘true’. It appeared spontaneous because it provoked a broad and passionate response. It seemed unrehearsed because its production threw up such a dramatic smoke-screen, and because the motivations, purpose and methods of its creation and diffusion were cloaked in established nationalist rhetoric. Yet the cult of Garibaldi was quite carefully conceived, constructed and publicised; and its purpose was to assist, push through and justify a process of violent and rapid regime change. In short, the cult of Garibaldi was part of the political conflict in 1860, and it contributed to, and reflected, the broader struggle for power.

  CHAPTER 10

  THE GARIBALDI MOMENT

  The year 1860 was Garibaldi's ‘moment’. Despite a disastrous personal and political start to the year, he went on to overthrow a kingdom and help construct another. He also achieved a remarkable level of fame: he was cheered by crowds, pursued by journalists and made front-page news throughout the summer, and across the world. The purpose of this celebrity, as we have seen, was political communication. Garibaldi embodied and promoted a political ideal, and he symbolised – and aimed to construct – a sense of national identity which could be transformed into active political consent. The popularity of Garibaldi was meant to convert into support for the Italian nationalist cause. How successful was this process of communication? This is an important issue because by now we know a great deal about the cultural sources and political reasons for Garibaldi's fame, and the various means through which it was produced and expanded. However, there are aspects of the impact and reception of his fame which can still be further investigated.

  My purpose in this chapter is to explore possible answers to the difficult question of what the public thought of Garibaldi. I look at the responses of three separate (and loosely defined) groups who were the main audiences for political communication during the events of 1860: the Sicilian public,1 Italian volunteers, and foreign enthusiasts. We have already noted the tendency, during the events of 1859 and 1860, for an imaginary narrative to emerge and float free of the politics that produced it. In what follows, I assess how the broader public engaged with the cult of Garibaldi. Concentrating on (re)elaborations of the Garibaldi story, and on reactions to the Garibaldi story expressed by associations, in letters and orally, I consider whether the public understood his message, or what specifically they understood from it. In particular, I analyse how far Garibaldi's presence and popularity helped to create or increase a sense of national belonging in Sicily, and to what extent appeals to, or from, Garibaldi boosted practical and political support for the nationalist cause both within and outside Italy. In so doing, I hope to shed some light not just on the process of making Italians, but also on what Italians and others made of this process.

  ‘In the Italian way’

  Towards the end of the campaign in southern Italy, a committee in Naples organised a public subscription to honour Garibaldi. The plan was to offer him a ceremonial sword, which was to be made of gold and set with jewels, along with a sabre and a revolver, and to give him any money that was left over to support his future campaigns in Rome and Venice. A design was commissioned, replete with nationalist symbols and epigraphs, and Garibaldi accepted the offer, replying in characteristic terms that ‘although superior to my merits I accept the gift with pleasure’. But this subscription met with very little success in Palermo. The substantial volume (with space for 1,440 names) created to record the subscribers in Palermo remained empty: only eleven people signed their names, and four of those came from outside Sicily.2

  The flop of the Garibaldi subscription in Palermo seems symptomatic of a broader material indifference to the revolution in Sicily. As the naval minister in Palermo in 1860 grumbled to Agostino Bertani: ‘I try to do my best for this country, but what can you do when the country does not respond to the pressing needs which present themselves? How can we go forward with this feeble country, without resources and without the will to obtain them?’3 This problem was put even more bluntly by the British consul in Palermo, John Goodwin, who wrote that ‘the reception of Garibaldi in Palermo has been everything the heart could wish, in so far as cheers go, but at “cheers” it stops short. Very little money has been given … Manifestos and addresses make a grand show in the papers but the money and materials are wanting.’4 In many areas of Sicily, people refused to pay taxes, adding to the financial problems of a government already burdened by tax cuts, the cost of the war and the promise of public works (‘[t]he truth’, according to the democrat Angelo Bargoni, was ‘an incredible lack of funds’).5 Equally serious, and seemingly indicative of a lack of patriotic feeling, was the failure of military conscription. As early as the beginning of June, the new governor of Girgenti warned Crispi that conscription had caused ‘discontent’ in his province,6 while in Catania the British vice-consul reported that the copies of the published decree had ‘been torn from the walls’.7 In fact, faced with widespread public hostility, the government was forced to modify the decree: it introduced the principle of substitution, allowed a whole series of exemptions (for only sons, married men and priests), and granted a delay to rural communities until after the harvest was brought in.8 These modifications involved an acceptance that the immediate campaign in southern Italy would have to be fought largely by men from the North, thus dealing a serious blow to Garibaldi's project for the nation-at-arms.

  This fragile situation suggests that Sicilian enthusiasm for Garibaldi was indeed entirely superficial, based on ‘cheers’ and ‘addresses’ but signifying nothing. Faced with this, many of the garibaldini became disillusioned with Sicily, where the welcome was not what they had expected and the culture and geography were so very different from their own. For example, Ippolito Nievo contributed to the myth of the Thousand in public, but was privately very critical of the country and its experiences, identifying the lack of military enthusiasm with feminine weakness: ‘Sicilians are all women,’ he told his mother in July, ‘they have a passion for appearance and uproar’, but they had done little, materially, to liberate themselves from the Bourbons.9 Sometimes, this disappointment was expressed openly in the papers, and again it used a gendered discourse to depict the lack of enthusiasm among Sicilians for the revolution. Women too were included in these criticisms: ‘not one of them has a healthy, blooming look’, one volunteer letter complained about Sicilian women; ‘[at] Calatafimi I saw the faces of begging women which had no human form’.10 This disillusionment with Sicily is of great interest in that it both reflects and anticipates a broader discourse about the problems of the southern ‘character’. For our purposes, it is also important in suggesting a process of distancing between the garibaldini and the Sicilian people, involving a recognition of their failure to get Sicilians on their side.11

  The dictatorship's inability to persuade Sicilians materially to support their own liberation was a considerable failure. It points to the essentially elitist, urban and middle-class nature of the Risorgimento as a whole, based as it was on an appeal to those who had the time and ability to read Italian, and perhaps also reflects the waning of democratic revolution by the late 1850s, as Mazzinians and others on the left looked increasingly to Cavour and the Piedmontese monarchy for a partial solution to their political demands. It reminds us that the dictatorship had little understanding of conditions in the countryside and among the poor, that it had largely failed to bring in an effect
ive measure of land reform, and that, when faced with peasant revolt, it sided with the property-owning classes, and harshly restored order. At the same time, by undermining the dictatorship's practical capacity to bring about change in the region, the lack of mass support contributed to the weakness of Garibaldi's revolution and so to his ultimate defeat by Cavour.12

  It would nevertheless be a mistake to focus exclusively on this failure and its outcome. First, the lack of soldiers and subscriptions from Sicily is not that surprising. Militarism and war was not a major founding myth in Sicilian elite identity (for instance, the Vespers was an act of rebellion rather than war), and exemption from military service was a long-standing, and sometimes jealously guarded, privilege of the Sicilian people: ‘better to live as an animal than as a soldier’ was one popular saying.13 Moreover, there was little political tradition of voluntary subscription or association in an island whose modern political identity had been forged both in opposition to, and in material dependence on, the state.14 Time and a carefully structured policy were needed to transform these deep-rooted attitudes and practices, so their persistence in 1860 does not necessarily mean that there was no real support for Garibaldi in the towns, or even in the countryside. Indeed, where local knowledge and influence was used, as was done by Governor Perroni Paladini in the south-eastern district of Castroreale, men did come forward to volunteer, national guards were formed, and conscription was supported by local communities.15

  We should recall that, at the start of the campaign, volunteer forces had been successfully formed by sympathetic landowners, into rural squadre of so-called picciotti (‘kids’). These were quite numerous (around 700–1,000 men at Calatafimi, at least 3,000 before the descent to Palermo, and perhaps 7–8,000 by the time they crossed the Straits), and they were extremely helpful to Garibaldi's forces. The problem was that most garibaldini – including the Sicilian, Crispi – viewed these volunteers with suspicion, and feared they would prove as violent and uncontrollable as similar peasant bands during the disastrous expeditions of the Bandiera brothers and Pisacane in Calabria, and in the 1848 revolutions. Thus, they abolished the squadre as soon as they could decently do so.16 In other words, political considerations and organisational problems on the part of the government may have played just as important a role in the failure of men to come forward as any popular or elite indifference to the revolution had.

  It is also possible that historians have been looking in the wrong place for evidence of support for Garibaldi. As I explained in the previous chapter, the regime's social and administrative policies were part of an ambitious programme of Mazzinian origin, which aimed to ‘regenerate’ Italy, and which, by encouraging popular identification with the idea of the nation, proposed to unite government and people in a new political religion. The cultural policy of Garibaldi's government was especially interesting because it sought a democratic basis: it differed from some other kinds of nationalism, and especially from the forms of nationalism which developed later in the century, in its inclusive appeal. The vision of national belonging proposed by Garibaldi was aimed not just at intellectuals, or just at the literate, middle-class male, but also at those (women, peasants) who were often given a secondary role in the nationalist hierarchy, or at priests, who were often excluded entirely. The question that we need to address here is whether this policy actually worked. Did Garibaldi gain the support of Palermo intellectuals, and how far did the sphere of culture endorse the project of ‘making Italians’? Did priests approve his campaign? Did the new political religion have any impact on popular consciousness? In short, did the cheers of Sicilians mean anything?

  Although problems of evidence mean that it is hard to give an accurate, or even certain, answer to any of these questions, a number of developments in Sicily during 1860 and afterwards are significant. In terms of understanding the elite response to Garibaldi, the most important of these was the rapid growth of (often ephemeral) newspapers and the flurry of press activity in Palermo and elsewhere after the lifting of Bourbon censorship: ‘Actually more than twenty little papers fill every street corner’, wrote one Palermo observer on 19 June.17 This development was not always seen in a positive light, even by the papers themselves. ‘Oof! I can't take any more!!’ complained one paper, Il Vessillo Italiano, on 15 June: ‘Papers here, papers there, high papers, low papers … oof! I can't take any more … all of them assume the stance of a periodical without any idea of actual politics, and the benefit of Italian freedom.’ ‘Mercy! a new paper!’ announced La Frusta as its opening line of the first issue, ‘the Frusta too! and so what? Are all those others not enough, which drown the country every day without pity, scrounging our pennies, without the shadow of an idea of useful education?’18 Despite such (self-)accusations of disloyalty and irrelevance, all the new papers endorsed the lead given by the main government papers: Il Giornale di Sicilia and Il Precursore. A glance at some of the titles – The Constancy and Supremacy of Italy; Redeemed Italy; Italian Unity; The War; The New World; The Italian Preacher; Liberty; and Garibaldi19 – reveals much about the press's desire to proclaim its adherence to the new political order and its principles. Moreover, their articles, letters and editorials consistently followed an established discursive line in glorifying both Garibaldi and the idea of a new, national religion.

  Il Garibaldi, as its name suggests, was dedicated to the subject of Garibaldi. It published a version of Garibaldi's memoirs, and along with two other papers (Il Gazzettino della Sera and the L'Unità Italiana) reprinted Louis Jourdain's fervent tribute to him in the French paper, Le Siècle.20 Il Corriere di Sicilia offered its readers a physical portrait of Garibaldi from a ‘correspondent’: this was really a modified extract from Cuneo's biography.21 Although La Forbice (‘The Scissors’) promised to be more lively and interesting than Il Giornale di Sicilia, it went on to describe Garibaldi in well-worn terms as the ‘brave Garibaldi’, ‘the new Washington’, and repeated Cuneo's assertion that ‘[h]is life is a continual sacrifice in favour of the Italian nation; [he has] a generous and chivalrous soul’; although it did show some originality in mid-June when it referred to him as the ‘new Hannibal of war’.22 Perhaps the best example of the broader diffusion and acceptance of Risorgimento discourse, and of Garibaldi's role within it, by the Palermo papers is the extended tribute to Garibaldi paid by L'Italia Redenta in its first number, of 20 June. Proclaiming its programme as the redemption of Italy, ‘the beautiful country, source of all knowledge, perpetual theatre of war and civil discord’, its main article, entitled ‘The sword of Garibaldi compared to the great men of antiquity’, concluded that Garibaldi was better than any of them. Charlemagne was a possible comparison, and the paper cited a pantheon of famous Italians:

  Here is the heroic sword of Garibaldi which never fails, and which at the head of the movement routs, beats and conquers the enemy, and hoists the standard of Italian freedom … What Dante did for the leadership of Italian thought; what Macchiavelli practised, by seizing the sceptre of politics in Italy; and finally what Galileo discovered, by establishing the movement of the heavens in yearly cycles around the sun, the valiant victor of Varese and Como could properly compete with, as part of the current Italian movement.

  ‘Our admiration is reserved for one man alone, Giuseppe Garibaldi’, proclaimed La Mola in its first number, and in a rough echo of Mazzini's instructions to Young Italy: ‘for the leadership of armed democracy, which liberated us, for the greatest lover of the peninsula, which he believes in and which will be; one Italy, one fatherland for all the people from the mountains to the sea who speak and feel in the Italian way’.23

  The Palermo press was also very quick to pick up and pursue the regime's proposal of Garibaldi as the leader of a new religion. In various issues of La Forbice, Garibaldi was ‘our heroic Liberator … our immortal Dictator’, ‘this genius created by God in a moment of divine enthusiasm for the longed-for regeneration of Italy’, and the ‘destroying angel of tyranny’;24 for Il Garibaldi, he wa
s ‘the armed missionary of Italian liberation’ at the head of a ‘holy cause’;25 while for La Cicala Italiana he was ‘the Holy Man’: ‘He is life, he is liberty with a lightening glance, with a pure and undefiled soul, with a lofty and extensive mind, and an invincible arm’.26 Finally, in L'Unità Italiana, the new editor, Ignazio Lombardi, told his readers in his first editorial that Garibaldi was the symbol and saviour of Italy, ‘the Redeemer of the Ausonian provinces [i.e. Sicily], the Nazarene of Italy … the Archangel of wrath … the Angel of health and comfort … the Man of providence on whom rests the guardian eye of God’.27

  The papers were equally keen to encourage acts of patriotism, and especially exalted the idea of war and volunteering, making little reference to the problems of conscription. Only Il Garibaldi noted that the arrival of volunteers from the continent ‘was a tacit and bitter rebuke to those few who still don't understand the inestimable advantage of conscription’, while La Forbice criticised the ‘feebleness’ of ‘idle young men’.28 However, La Frusta expressed confidence in conscription and praised the idea of the free soldier: ‘the symbol of civic virtue and military heroism … he lives only for the fatherland and knows how to die with honour for it; but his name will live on in all our hearts … because there is nothing more fitting and more glorious for a man than to die for the fatherland and for its free institutions’.29 Almost every issue of Il Garibaldi included a call to arms. ‘[C]ome, come …. come to Palermo,’ it told its readers, ‘and be inspired by the scene, truly worthy of Italy, and see how the rich, the poor and the aristocrats compete with each other to crown their sons, laying them down on the altar of the fatherland.’30 La Guerra, perhaps unsurprisingly given its name, also encouraged volunteering, and in a short article entitled ‘The soldier of Garibaldi’ summarised the aesthetic, military and political ideal on which it was based.