by Lucy Riall
The passionate reaction of many women to Garibaldi is especially interesting. This passion was surely due in part to his physical allure, or to his apparent skill at using sexual attraction to personalise his political appeal. Garibaldi's capacity to attract women through a powerful mix of the personal and the political was already evident in the 1850s (in his relations with von Schwartz and Jessie White), and continued through the early 1860s. Although sex is never openly discussed in any of these letters, we can perceive sexual desire in the constant allusions to Garibaldi's body, his bedroom and/or his bed. Like Mary Seely, Florence MacKnight (who met Garibaldi in Turin in 1861) also wrote to him of her ‘lonely pilgrimages’ around his bedroom, and of the ‘caresses’ given to his bed and pillow; and of her love for ‘you – just you … for the real, loyal, and tender man’; while another woman, ‘Sauvage’, wrote of her insatiable ‘hunger’ for a letter from him (‘I devour any writing of yours in the papers with an avidity which is perfectly frightful, as I feel more hungry and wish for more the instant after’).203 Sex, or at least feelings of intimate physical passion, was thus one basis of Garibaldi's personal charisma. As Mary Seely said to him: ‘You free the body, and enchain the mind’.204 Of course, women were by no means alone in responding to Garibaldi's powerful physical magnetism, but since they felt able to express their feelings for him in more openly sentimental ways, it is much easier for us to recognise this aspect of their response.
It is also apparent that Garibaldi's special relationship with women was the result of a conscious and long-term political strategy to get them on his side. He had begun addressing women directly in Rome in 1849 and, as we have seen, a huge number of his speeches and public letters were addressed specifically at the patriotic woman during Italian unification and in the years that followed. Equally, it is more than likely that he encouraged the personal displays and expressions of affection described above. He certainly replied more or less scrupulously and tenderly to all their letters. To Mary Seely he wrote: ‘Allow me to kiss your beneficent hand and to express the immense gratitude I owe to you, angelic woman! … believe me that my heart will remain with you all my life’; and he later wrote of his joy at receiving her letters: ‘recalling the angelic support of your arm in ascending and descending the stairs, the gentle care you took of me … and your face which I carry with me in my soul, I forget all my sorrows and I am happy’.205 He wrote the same, but more delicately, to the duchess of Sutherland (‘I kiss your beneficent hand; and … I thank you for your generous hospitality … Never so well as with you, in any corner of the world’);206 while to another admirer, Julie Salis Schwabe, he confessed: ‘I can never repeat enough, how much I owe to your kindness, and will be more than happy every time you demand [anything of] me.’207 When reading these words, however, we must be careful to remember that Garibaldi's relationships with these women were not purely personal. All of them were well connected politically to different currents of radicalism (Schwabe was a rich German widow, and a friend of Cobden and Bright; MacKnight was the daughter of a British peer favourable to Garibaldi), and all of them were recruited to do his political bidding in one way or another. It is also clear that these women were conscious of their role in his life; indeed, when the emotional demands of Julie Schwabe on him became especially insistent, Garibaldi put her off by referring to the ‘terrible responsibility’ of his political position, and to his ‘anxious concern to complete’ his life's mission, and she wrote to him that she entirely understood.208
Presumably, the tactics used by Garibaldi worked as well as they did because he had little competition. No one else, except perhaps Mazzini before him, made political use of British women in quite this way at this time. It is also worth noting what participation in the moral and material struggle for Italian liberation offered to middle-class and aristocratic women in Britain. While we should be clear that involvement with Italian patriotism never fully challenged the ideology of separate spheres (women usually worked as nurses or fund-raisers), through this work they could nevertheless acquire a personal autonomy and public authority that they did not enjoy elsewhere.209 As a result, many of these women became what Julie Schwabe described as Garibaldi's ‘sister[s] for life!’: their enthusiasm for Garibaldi's politics inseparable from their interest in his private welfare and emotions. MacKnight wrote to Garibaldi of her unhappiness at having to stay in Turin without him but concluded, ‘but I'll be brave [allons courage]! I'm a soldier too.’210 Schwabe told Garibaldi that she acted for him out of ‘pure, unselfish, loving interest in you and the cause you represent’; and in 1864 she fought hard (if unsuccessfully) to have him stay in her house in Manchester: ‘I have overcome all female dignity and modesty and tell you frankly that for your and your party's personal ease and comfort, as well as for your public interests you can be at Manchester not in better hands than mine.’211 Along with her expressions of undying affection, the duchess of Sutherland sent Garibaldi a bible, and lengthy analyses of religion;212 her mother-in-law wrote seriously to him about slavery and the American civil war;213 and another ‘sister’, Caroline Gifford Philipson, offered him her reflections on Protestantism as well as poetry and a jacket for his rheumatism.214 They all helped organise subscriptions, meetings and press campaigns in aid of the Italian cause. Thus, for these women, and perhaps especially for Schwabe (a relative outsider), love for Garibaldi and support of Italian liberation were indivisible, and both can be seen as a strategy to assert a public identity of their own.
Conclusion
In the final version of his memoirs, written between 1871 and 1872, Garibaldi dedicates very little space to the years immediately following Italian unification. Only Aspromonte is mentioned and it is given eight terse pages; and he describes his life in its aftermath as ‘idle and useless.’215 Yet this is not entirely fair. In Italian politics, the period between 1860 and 1865 was one of transition, and Garibaldi played a central role in establishing the direction of political life. Through a prodigious correspondence and relentless publicity in the press, he did an enormous amount to keep the issues of Rome and Venice alive, and constantly in front of the Italian and European public. He continued to attract huge popular support, and reached out to a broad cross-section of society. As well as the literate, male middle classes, he encouraged peasants, priests, workers and women to become involved in political action; he maintained political contacts with groups all over Italy, in the South as well as in the North; and he worked hard, and not unsuccessfully, to establish reciprocal links between the nationalist struggle in Italy and similar political struggles all over Europe and beyond Europe. He helped set the political agenda for liberal Italy in the years after unification, and made sure it would be a radical nationalist one. He also developed a mass political style, unique in Italy at this time, of using open spaces and theatres to make short speeches and hold impromptu dialogues with the crowd.216 For all these reasons, a study of Garibaldi's activity after unification can add considerably to our understanding of the ideas and political opportunities of the democratic movement in the period between the defeat of traditional conservatism in the late 1850s and the rise of mass socialist parties some twenty years later.
Garibaldi's career is equally revealing of the problems which faced the democratic movement. In Italy, and like their socialist counterparts later in the century, democratic activists had to choose between the parliamentary route to achieving their political ambitions or reliance on revolution; and, as their socialist counterparts were also to find out, this choice was an extremely divisive one, leading to lasting bitterness which their opponents were quick to take advantage of. Here, Garibaldi was no help at all. In the changed circumstances of a united Italy, his continuing loyalty to the crown and persistent belief in revolutionary action were incompatible; so his political attitude merely mirrored the left's dilemma rather than offering a solution to it. Moreover, some of his activities – his withdrawal to Caprera, his sudden appearance in parliament, Aspromonte – contributed
significantly to the disarray on the left, and further stunted its capacity for practical political action. Although he was involved with political discontent in the South, his encouragement helped create a vast and diffuse southern opposition rather than an organised movement of democratic opposition to government policy.217 Even his behaviour in England – allowing himself to be controlled by liberal aristocrats and then leaving with the tour half done – was typical of a disdainful attitude to practical political activity which was very obstructive. In this respect, Garibaldi's political career prefigures the disconnection of the democratic movement during the early 1870s.
The immediate years following 1860 are equally interesting in terms of the representation of politics. Garibaldi's function as a symbol of Italy probably revealed more than it should have about Italy after 1860. His withdrawal to Caprera, and his behaviour there and elsewhere, indicated a deep dissatisfaction with the outcome of national unification. His image was used satirically to attack the prime minister as well as the Pope; and his reception in London both embarrassed the Italian government and irritated Italian radicals. On the left, there was a growing tendency to sanctify Garibaldi, even as political criticism of him grew, to place him on a rocky island, altar or cross, away from or above the struggles and setbacks of daily politics. After Aspromonte, this strategy was useful for rhetorical purposes; it helped turn a political disaster into a propaganda triumph and it probably helped greatly in the popular dissemination of his image. Yet this heavy use of traditional symbolism did little to clarify what Garibaldi really stood for in political terms. As we saw, during his visit to London Garibaldi could be made to represent a vast range of different characters: a ‘noble Roman’, a working-class radical, an English gentleman and a romantic Italian lover. So in Britain too he seems to have represented a style or a ‘look’ as much as a real set of political issues.
In fact, part of Garibaldi's activity in these years should be understood as a struggle by him to direct his own role, to invest it with a political meaning of his choosing, and to use it to further his own programme – namely the nation-at-arms, and union with Rome and Venice – rather than simply to endorse the programmes of political colleagues like Crispi or Bertani. Still, in the end, neither he, nor the left, nor the government entirely controlled the use of his image. Indeed, the need to fashion and manage the political image of Italy, which had occupied Mazzini since the early 1830s, continued to trouble political leaders in the years after national unification; so, as such a potent symbol of Italian identity, Garibaldi started to become a reflection of its problems. Hence, a study of Garibaldi's function as a political symbol in this period can shed light on the broader difficulties of directing the process of political communication in liberal Italy, now that its metaphors and ambitions had become fully visible and its mechanisms freely available.
Equally interesting is the public reception of, and reaction to, Garibaldi. Although it is difficult to calculate accurately the extent of his support, it was undoubtedly considerable. It was not unique. Indeed, as I have sought to show, public enthusiasm for Garibaldi can best be explained by reference to a wider European and American cult of ‘hero worship’, which was a prevalent feature of support for democratic leaders like him. However, its scale, duration and intensity was unusual. As historians, we should cast a sceptical eye on descriptions of the crowds in London and elsewhere, and we can deconstruct the language and purposes of letters to Garibaldi. Nevertheless, they still offer us glimpses of an intense individual response to Garibaldi, and of a passionate engagement with the ideals which he was held to represent; and this response is all the more interesting as the voices of support for Garibaldi were often marginal to, or excluded from, the political system. Equally, we can perceive the presence of political acting in Garibaldi's humble home on Caprera, and see his simplicity as deliberate or staged. Yet our understanding of his private life as political statement should not obscure the importance of it to him as a model of democratic identity and behaviour, or lead us to ignore his audience, who found it so appealing and convincing. All the evidence, in other words, points not to the loss of support, but rather to the continuing vitality and potency of the popular cult of Garibaldi in the years immediately following the unification of Italy.
CHAPTER 12
CULTURE WARS
Rome and death
Garibaldi lived for twenty more years after his defeat at Aspromonte, and he was involved in three more military campaigns. The first of these was in the summer of 1866 when he fought with his volunteers on the side of the king and the royal army, who had joined Prussia in the war against Austria. Once again in this war, his volunteers were armed at the last minute, and they were sent away from the main action around the Po and Mincio rivers, up into the mountains of the Tyrol. There they engaged in two battles, at Monte Suello and Bezzecca, neither of which was a clear victory; at Bezzecca, Garibaldi was incapacitated by a thigh wound and had to direct the fighting from a carriage, and his army had heavy casualties.1 The war itself was a dramatic failure. Indeed, the Italian army was so poorly prepared, and so badly co-ordinated and directed, that it stumbled into a major defeat at Custoza against an army which was less than half its size and before most of its divisions were engaged. Shortly thereafter, the Italian navy suffered an equally bad defeat at the island of Lissa by a smaller Austrian naval force. Italy's humiliation was completed by its ally, Prussia, which made a separate armistice with Austria. By the terms of the peace settlement, and in an echo of 1859, Austria ceded the Veneto to France, which only then handed it over to Italy, and the Tyrol remained in Austrian hands.2
The war of 1866 was considered a national disaster. Venice was taken without any great scenes of popular enthusiasm, although the population dutifully voted in a plebiscite for union with Italy. Although the numbers of Italian casualties were relatively small (600 dead at Lissa and 750 at Custoza),3 the poor performance of the military was a terrible embarrassment. ‘To be Italian was something we once longed for,’ Crispi wrote to Bertani in August, ‘now, in the present circumstances, it is shameful.’4 Pasquale Villari, a respected intellectual and politician of the right, asked ‘Whose fault is it?’ and pointed to ‘our colossal ignorance, our multitudes of illiterates, our machine bureaucrats, childish politicians, ignoramus professors, hopeless diplomats, incapable generals, unskilled workers, primitive farmers, and the rhetoric which gnaws our very bones’. ‘Never again’, he announced, ‘can we look at ourselves quite as we used to do.’5 If this was not bad enough, in mid-September, a week-long rebellion resulted in the seizure of the city of Palermo. Police and government officials were assaulted and murdered; the prefect and mayor of Palermo barricaded themselves into the royal palace; a political committee was formed to direct the revolution; and the revolt spread to the outlying provinces. The government declared martial law, and took three days of bitter street fighting to restore its authority in the city, and an even longer, equally violent campaign to do so in the countryside. During the official inquiries which followed, the extent of elite disaffection, popular deprivation and government incompetence in this part of Sicily was vividly revealed.6 ‘The result is dispiriting,’ the academic and literary critic Francesco de Sanctis announced a few years later in a lecture on Mazzini, ‘Italy is as it always was.’7
The war of 1866 and its aftermath represent a turning-point of sorts for the new state and the idea of the Italian nation. It marks the public emergence of a mood of national disillusionment, a sense of moral disappointment with Italy as a nation, and the first explicit use of disappointment as a rhetorical device in political debate after the achievement of national unification. At the end of the war, Garibaldi both accepted the peace publicly and expressed his displeasure with it in a celebrated oneword telegram to the king – ‘Obbedisco [I obey]’ – and retired to Caprera. The government fell in early 1867 following a vote of no confidence, and a more left-leaning government under Rattazzi was formed. However, this mood of disillu
sionment was not confined to feelings about the government, but stretched beyond it to encompass the opposition. The old democratic left of Mazzini, Bertani and Crispi found itself under attack for political failure from a younger generation of revolutionaries influenced by socialist and anarchist ideas; some also revived the criticisms which Pisacane had made of Garibaldi's military tactics in the 1850s, and criticised him for accepting the peace terms with Austria rather than continuing the war in the Tyrol. Meanwhile, the divisions within the democratic left remained unresolved. Although Garibaldi and Mazzini grew closer during this period, Crispi had broken very publicly and definitively with Mazzini over the question of the monarchy (when Crispi accepted the monarchy, Mazzini loudly accused him of opportunism). In turn, Crispi and Bertani, despite repeated efforts to work together, grew further apart. They collaborated to produce a new paper of the left, La Riforma, and although the paper was an important one (and a mouthpiece for Crispi), it had financial problems and not very many readers, and it proved unable to maintain a single editorial line on the main political issues facing the left, notably its attitude to the monarchy.8
It was in the midst of this unstable political situation that the attention of both Garibaldi and the government turned to Rome. Some two years previously, the government had concluded a treaty with France: the so-called ‘September convention’ of 1864, whereby the Italian government recognised and guaranteed papal Rome and moved its capital from Turin to Florence, and Napoleon III agreed to withdraw his troops guarding the Pope in Rome. This treaty, which seemed to represent a relinquishment of Rome as the capital of Italy, was unpopular and caused a wave of protest, and there were riots in Turin over the loss of its status as capital city. However, the arrival of Rattazzi as prime minister in 1867 seemed to add new life to the idea of winning Rome for Italy. In fact, Rattazzi and the king hatched an essentially nefarious plan secretly to encourage Garibaldi to invade the Papal States. They gave him money and arms, but seemingly intended to use his invasion as ‘an excuse for the Italian army to cross the frontier in pursuit, so that the temporal power and the forces of radicalism could be destroyed in one blow’. Suspecting this, and fearing a second Aspromonte, many on the left advised Garibaldi against any such action.9