by Lucy Riall
Garibaldi now broke definitively with Mazzini, and this time he moved to the left of him. He came out entirely in favour of the Paris Commune and internationalism, and his stance brought him much closer to the younger radicals, especially Cavallotti, and gave him a new lease on political life. From his support was born an initiative to relaunch a broad party of the radical left. ‘Why’, Garibaldi wrote from Caprera, ‘don't we pull together in one fasces [organised group] the Freemasonry, democratic societies, workers’ clubs, Rationalists, Mutual Aid etc., which have the same tendency towards good?’49 He became involved in organising a general democratic congress, a Congress of Unity, which was to be held in the Colosseum in Rome in November 1872. As well as having the support of radical organisations, the Congress was endorsed by the anti-clerical free-thinking group, the socialist groups in Emilia–Romagna, the social workers’ movement in Tuscany, and the Plebe group from Lodi, and was a striking example of the unifying power of Garibaldi's name.50 Although the Congress was banned by the government, the committee itself went ahead and held a meeting in the Teatro Argentina. There they signed the Pact of Roma on the basis of a package of radical policies which included universal suffrage, compulsory lay education, progressive taxation, administrative reform and the abolition of the death penalty.51
Nor was this the end of Garibaldi's political activity. After his return from France, he substantially revised and republished his memoirs, and produced a new novel, I Mille, which was both anti-clerical and anti-Mazzinian.52 In 1873, he issued a public declaration in support of the new republic in Spain and, in the same year, he endorsed the programme of an anti-clerical meeting held in Milan, attended by radical groups, Masonic lodges and various atheistic and free-thinking societies.53 Amid a deepening economic crisis, he then stood for parliament as a radical candidate and was elected for Rome in the general election of 1874. He had long been interested in public works, and in early 1875 he travelled to Rome to take his seat, and to present a grandiose project to revitalise the city by diverting the course of the Tiber from Rome and reclaiming the surrounding land, so making the river navigable and the city free of disease. He was now sixty-eight and increasingly infirm, but still dressed in red shirt and poncho, and huge crowds greeted him in Civitavecchia, where he disembarked, and in Rome's railway station, where he was taken in triumphal procession to his hotel.54 Although the Tiber project came to nothing, Garibaldi still refused to retire. Also in 1875, he wrote to parliament protesting at the emergency legislation proposed for Sicily and the South, and the following year he proposed limiting the size of government pensions and salaries (this was part of a broader attack on the privileges of public life, including a critique of the king's very substantial civil list).55 In 1879, in the midst of widespread dissatisfaction with the political record of the new government of the Sinistra, he went to Rome again to help launch a new campaign with his old comrade-in-arms, Alberto Mario. The League of Democracy founded by him, Mario, Bertani and Cavallotti, among others, restated the 1872 programme of electoral, administrative and financial reform; it also called for the legal and political emancipation of women, the replacement of the regular army by the nation-at-arms, and a plan of public works to improve the Roman countryside.56
In 1880, Garibaldi issued a series of manifestos and addresses calling for universal suffrage. He also went to Genoa to protest at the arrest of his son-in-law, Stefano Canzio, for political sedition, and travelled to Milan for the inauguration of the monument to those fallen at Mentana. Since he was too ill to speak at the ceremony, Canzio read his speech out for him, which ended with a call for universal suffrage.57 In March 1882, at the age of seventy-four, Garibaldi left Alassio (on the Italian Riviera, where he had spent the winter for health reasons), and travelled to southern Italy; he arrived first in Naples, and then took the train to Palermo in order to attend the commemoration of the 600th anniversary of the Sicilian Vespers. According to his daughter, Clelia, who was with him, Garibaldi had said that he wanted to see ‘the palermitani’ before he died, and was especially keen to greet those who had fought with him in 1860.58 But Garibaldi also had immediate political reasons for going to Palermo. These were connected to the French government's recent seizure of Tunis, traditionally seen as an Italian (and specifically Sicilian) sphere of influence. So, the radicals saw the celebrations for the Sicilian Vespers as an opportunity for anti-French, anti-government agitation, and Garibaldi sought to support them, much to the alarm of government repesentatives, who wanted to use the ceremony as an official festival of unity and national belonging. As it turned out, Garibaldi was so ill that he could not attend the main ceremony on 31 March, although he did manage to go to the inauguration of a monument to the Thousand in the mountains at Gibilrossa.59
Garibaldi returned to Caprera in mid-April and two months later, in early June, he died in bed after an attack of acute bronchitis. In the end, he died quickly, so only his eldest son, Menotti, and his third wife, Francesca, were with him. He left what have been called ‘plans of remarkable precision’ for his funeral.60 He gave strict instructions that he was to be cremated, and told his doctor that he wanted:
a pile of firewood two metres high, of acacia, mastic, myrtle and other aromatic wood. On the pile a small iron bed should be placed and on this the uncovered coffin, with my remains inside, adorned in a red shirt. A handful of ashes should be placed in an ordinary urn, and this should be placed in the graveyard where the ashes of my children Rosa and Anita lie.
He told his family not to tell the political authorities until the ceremony had been carried out.61
Allegedly inspired by the cremation of the poet Shelley (on an open fire at the beach in Viareggio), Garibaldi's funeral instructions reflect his enduringly romantic beliefs and sensibilities; but they are also a curious, if entirely typical, combination of the personal and political. His death was conceived as a ‘last battle against the Vatican’,62 and it was defiantly secular. In his ‘political testament’ (1871–2), he had stated his rejection of ‘the odious, despicable and wicked ministry of a priest, whom I consider to be the atrocious enemy of humankind and of Italy in particular’ at the moment of his death,63 and we must remember that cremation was an illegal procedure in Italy until 1888, and condemned by the Church (and that Garibaldi had lent his support to the radical filocremazionista League which had agitated for a change in the law during the 1870s).64 So his instructions are interesting for what they tell us about Garibaldi's enduringly political attitude to his life and fame. Even in death, he fought for control of his body and of the means of its representation, by seeking to leave the public stage in a political manner and moment of his own choosing.
Unfortunately, the Italian authorities found out about his plans, and they insisted on an official commemoration. So instead Garibaldi's body was made to lie in state in his bedroom at Caprera surrounded by funeral wreaths and with a crimson rose fixed to his red shirt. The body was viewed by veterans, admirers and politicians; and the funeral itself was an elaborate ceremony, attended by royalty, officials, and 1,200 different associations, and with 100 flags. Garibaldi was not cremated; instead, to the sound of firing cannons, his coffin was carried by members of the Thousand and placed in a tomb covered with a large granite block. The funeral ended in a violent storm which trapped many of the dignitaries on Caprera for the night.65
This ceremony was followed by other elaborate funeral processions in the major Italian cities. In Milan, the procession was attended by some 50,000 people, including military veterans, Masons, workers' organisations, women's groups and mutual aid societies, with a huge bust of Garibaldi at the centre of proceedings. In Rome, the commemorations were even more elaborate. As part of a vast procession which started in Piazza del Popolo and moved towards the Campidoglio, a bust of Garibaldi (which had been crowned with a laurel wreath by a statue of liberty placed alongside the bust) was drawn in a carriage by eight white horses dressed in mourning (see figure 31 opposite). Carved into the sides of the
carriage were representations of Garibaldi's triumphal entrances into Rome, Naples and Palermo.66
A wave of national mourning swept across Italian public spaces. Black edges framed the front pages of newspapers, and flags were lowered to half-mast on town halls and almost every other public and private meeting place. All public and political events, including Constitution Day and other local festivals, were cancelled, and many politicians and veterans made a public display of their grief; some were said to have wept openly. These demonstrations were accompanied by a succession of speeches by public figures and poems by famous writers like Giosuè Carducci, as well as by minor speeches, songs and patriotic hymns; and parades were held in towns and villages across Italy. Often these were also published as separate pamphlets and/or as items in the local papers.67 ‘His death has pierced the heart of Italy with a universal, deep, and unutterable pain’, Enrico Panzacchi announced to the Progressive Constitutional Association in Bologna; ‘death's scythe reaped the life of the brave of the braves, Giuseppe Garibaldi, yesterday evening at 6 o'clock’, the citizens of Conegliano, near Venice, were told.68In Codogno, a small rural community in the Milan hinterland, a service to honour Garibaldi was held in the local theatre, which was decked out in black flags, with a bust of Garibaldi similarly draped in mourning; in Pisa, a huge choreographed procession was organised on 15 June; in Siracusa, a commemoration was held in the Greek theatre; while in Macerata in the Marche, the whole of the following April was given over to a prolonged celebration of Garibaldi, which involved every social club, democratic association, mutual aid society, veterans' group, bank, library and musical band in the district.69
31 The transportation of Garibaldi's bust to the Campidoglio in Rome. This colour lithograph was one of many produced to commemorate the elaborate ‘funeral’ celebrations held after Garibaldi's death.
Death came to be seen as the apotheosis of Garibaldi's life, and provided an occasion for the unrestrained use of Risorgimento rhetoric. ‘I salute you … I place on your venerable forehead the laurels of immortality’, one of the Thousand, Eugenio Dionese, announced in a speech in Lipari, in the Æolian islands.70 ‘He is dead? That's a lie! … Garibaldi is not a man, he is a symbol, an idea, he is Jacob reborn … Ideas don't die, Garibaldi lives’, the students at the University of Messina were told; while in Trapani, the head of the local school, Gino de' Nobili, made a speech in the Teatro Garibaldi, where a bust of Garibaldi was again crowned with a laurel wreath by a figure representing Italy; in his speech he declared Garibaldi's apotheosis and described him as ‘a Greek soul spirtualised by the Christian world’.71 ‘Garibaldi is dead! Viva Garibaldi!’ Matilde Caselli wrote in Naples.72 He ‘personified the courage and sacrifice of Leonidas, the loyalty and patriotism of Washington. Like a marvellous meteor which leaves a sparkling and dazzling trail in its wake’, the speaker at a ceremony in Pachino (in the extreme south-eastern corner of Sicily) informed his audience.73 Many of the visual images produced at this time show Garibaldi sanctified or deified, received into paradise by a complete pantheon of Italian heroes (see figure 32 opposite); in others, he is already a monument, standing above the Italian people or riding his horse off into the clouds.74 There was a marked tendency to idealise every aspect of his life, and to establish a hagiographic script which was to endure during the decades which followed. Even the moment of his death was idealised as a peaceful slumber surrounded by his loving family, with Garibaldi's two dead daughters represented as birds outside his bedroom window, ready to take him to paradise.75
32 ‘2 June 1882’: this lithograph imagines Garibaldi's arrival in paradise. Welcoming him in the clouds are Cavour, Vittorio Emanuele and Mazzini, and behind them are other Risorgimento heroes. Ranged around this central group are examples of Garibaldi's heroism and at his feet are Italy, France, America and a volunteer. The picture is a striking example of attempts to create a conciliatory pantheon of nationalist heroes and of the pervasion of nationalist rhetoric by religious discourse.
In New York, Harper's Weekly presented Garibaldi's life as a triumph. He ‘lived to see the completion of a work that none but himself could have perfected’; he ‘waved his magic wand … and all was changed’; ‘not Gracchus, nor Cicero, nor any Roman patriot who labored for freedom in the classic age, has so well deserved the grateful tears of every Roman’; Garibaldi was ‘one of the figures of romance which occasionally appear in history, and are remembered as the personification of heroic qualities’.76 The London Times, as we shall see, was less positive in its assessment (and dwelt at length on the dispute over his funeral), but it still agreed that he was ‘the last hero of the heroic age of new Italy’.77 In Paris, the Revue des Deux Mondes printed a sharply critical article entitled ‘The last of the condottieri’, but it too grudgingly paid tribute to Garibaldi's sincerity, bravery and sang-froid, as well as his sense of theatre: ‘famous men should always arrange to end their lives on an island, nothing makes them greater than the solitude which it creates around them. The smaller the island, the greater the man appears, and Caprera was just a tiny little island.’78
The funeral of Garibaldi, and the political events leading up to his death, offer us a valuable insight into the struggle for control of his image and memory, a struggle which I will examine in the last sections of this chapter. Before I do so, however, I want to stress the importance of his last years in political terms. The late 1870s mark the beginning of trasformismo in Italy, or the formation of government majorities based on parliamentary alliances between left and right, and this strategy helped to create a more or less unified party of the ruling elite. This system was unstable and often unpopular, and helped bring the parliamentary system in Italy into considerable disrepute.79 However, as Axel Körner has pointed out, the rise of trasformismo also saw ‘a strengthening of the opposition on the Radical Left, despite the ideological differences between Garibaldini, Republicans and oppositional democrats’.80 At least part of the credit for this achievement must go to Garibaldi's tireless political activity in the fifteen years after Mentana.
Garibaldi is unusual in that he became more, not less, radical as he grew older. It is possible to disparage his futile attempts to defend the French Republic, but they represent a striking commitment to the principles of international republicanism.81 We should also be clear that his internationalism was not socialist in the Marxist sense, but more a mix of early-nineteenth-century cosmopolitanism, Saint-Simonianism, and Masonic associationalism; equally, Garibaldi distanced himself from Bakunin and anarchism in the early 1870s.82 His stated aim was merely to turn what he called ‘such a strong association’ to ‘a good end rather than a bad’.83 Nevertheless, his commitment to the First International did a great deal to help the diffusion of socialism in Italy and encourage the adherence of a younger generation to socialist and anarchist groups.
The Italian radical movement in the 1870s was not especially successful. Garibaldi's Tiber project was a failure, the various programmes of political reform remained unenacted, and the broadly constructed, mass-based party that he envisaged was never established. Nevertheless, the policies promoted by Garibaldi publicised a concern with the ‘social question’: they were an attempt to resolve the problems of Italy's poor and of Italy's landscape, and to prevent the growth of social unrest. Thus, Garibaldi's support of radical policies in public works, education and taxation helped place these issues clearly on the political agenda; furthermore, along with Bertani and Mario, he helped promote the issue of female emancipation, and women activists were consistently involved in his last campaign with the League of Democracy.84 Although universal suffrage was not attained, the suffrage was widened in 1882, and the campaign for a new suffrage in that year relaunched radicalism as a political movement.85 Perhaps especially, Garibaldi's relationship with younger radicals (notably Cavallotti but also a large number of lesser-known activists) helped create a heterogeneous but arguably national network of radical associations and clubs. The new methods of political communication p
ioneered by the radical movement, through speeches and dialogues with the crowd and mass meetings in open spaces and theatres, which tended to challenge and overcome the otherwise narrow, elitist basis of political life in Italy, were at least partly the invention of Garibaldi.86 His energetic, physical style – garibaldinismo, a ‘romanticism which translates into political action’,87 based on a fusion of religious and secular symbols – was to prove remarkably influential in Italian politics. In all these ways, Garibaldi's later political career, along with those of other radicals, provides a crucial link between the democratic movement of the Risorgimento and the rise of mass socialist parties towards the end of the nineteenth century.
It is often argued that the last period of Garibaldi's career was unhappy and even futile, that he was worn down by personal illness and political failure. As The Times commented in its obituary, ‘had he, like Cavour, died at the opportune moment, [he] would have been deemed absolutely without fault’, but there was ‘a weak side’ to his nature which made him commit an ‘extraordinary number of blunders’ (‘happy if he had spoken less and written nothing!’).88 Photographs of him as an old man show a tired figure stiffened by rheumatism (at a democratic meeting in the Augustus Mausoleum in 1875, he slumps in a chair, visibly ill, covered with a poncho which seems more like a blanket; see figure 33 above); and a late painting of him at Caprera by the avantgarde macchiaolo artist Vincenzo Cabianca, holding his wounded foot and with his crutch beside him, anticipates his death by casting him in a shadowy, melancholy light.89 The view that his last years were ‘empty and mundane’ was put forward in compelling terms by Garibaldi's biographer, his secretary Giuseppe Guerzoni: