by Lucy Riall
'I will be accused of pessimism [Garibaldi wrote in the preface to the 1872 edition of his memoirs]; but … [t]oday I am entering my 65th year, and having believed for the best part of my life in human progress, I am embittered to see so much misfortune and corruption in this self-styled civilised century.’125 ‘The priest!’ he exclaimed a few pages later. ‘Ah! He is the real Scourge of God. In Italy, he props up a cowardly government in the most degrading humiliation … !’126
My first reason for writing a novel [he told the readers of Cantoni] is to remind Italy of those brave men who fell on the field of battle for her sake … Secondly I want to appeal to the youth of Italy. I want to put before them the deeds which other young Italians have done and remind them of their duty to finish the task. In particular I want to point out the base and deceitful conduct of governments and priests.127
Here Garibaldi revives a traditional, and essentially Risorgimento, opposition between young, ‘brave’ Italians and their ‘deceitful’ rulers, and he does so on the basis of a radical memory of the Risorgimento.128 ‘Oh Thousand!’ he wrote at the beginning of I Mille, ‘in this time of shameful misfortune – I am happy to remember you – it lightens my soul to think of you.’129 At the end of the novel, he has a political dream: ‘in the snake pit which had poisoned Rome for so many centuries … a lightning bolt had fallen'; there was a ‘government for all by all’; a temporary dictatorship (‘a wise and energetic man elected by a popular majority’); a national guard kept the peace; there was a monument to the heroes of 1849; and ‘instead of the desert, beautiful farmsteads with verdant gardens and trees loaded with every kind of fruit, vast plains covered in goldcoloured grain’. But he wakes up, ‘pained’ by the ‘nauseating reality of presentday society’, and leaves, ‘sorrowful’, for ‘my isolated and deserted home’.130
This selfimage as preacher in the desert was one of Garibaldi's favourites,131 and it is revealing that he uses it here in opposition to the ‘nauseating reality’ of presentday Italy. Introducing Ida, Cantoni's companion who dresses as a man to fight alongside him in the defence of the Roman Republic, Garibaldi has the following to say about women:
Angel of life! … if the Almighty had a human form, it would be that of a woman. If mind was to prevail over matter – intelligence over brute force – the man over the elephant – the woman would lead the human family. If instead of the formless compound of hermaphrodites who govern Italy, we substituted a woman, she certainly would not allow us to be subjected to so many humiliations.132
There are two points being made in this passage. One the one hand, there is the proposal to include women in public life; Garibaldi repeatedly pressed for female emancipation, and saw the education of women as the means of their liberation from the tutelage of priests (‘these ministers of Satan’).133 On the other, there is the juxtaposition of true ‘virility’ (which can be male or female, and is associated with maturity, courage and intelligence)134 and perverse, effeminate sexuality, which is here identified with Italy's governing class. Now, there is nothing unusual about the use of metaphors of sexual and moral degeneracy to denigrate Italy's rulers; indeed, as Silvana Patriarca has shown, the use of these negative stereotypes to indicate Italy's decline was a prominent and lasting feature of Risorgimento discourse.135 But it is surprising to find these metaphors being used within the Risorgimento discourse to characterise and disparage those who, in theory at least, represented the fulfilment of the Risorgimento in liberal Italy. In his novels, as in his later political life, Garibaldi seeks to set up, or in a sense to revive, the rhetorical discourse where not just the Church but the government too is the enemy of Italian ‘resurgence’, and both are placed on the same degenerate side.
It follows from Garibaldi's stance and public pronouncements that, in their struggle to make Italians and create a civic religion whose moral code would substitute for Catholicism, Italian nationalists did not speak with a single voice. There was nothing entirely new about this either: moderates and democrats had long disagreed about the future of Italy. However, as we have also seen, this disagreement was not especially evident before the early 1860s: moderates and democrats had ‘shared common sentiments and cultural conceptions about that obscure object of desire, the nation’,136and in 1860 the democrats were unable to distinguish their political language and symbols from those of moderate, monarchical Piedmont. But after unification, and especially after the divisive events of the mid-1860s (the September convention; the 1866 war; Mentana), this common patriotic discourse began to disintegrate, and nowhere was the damage more visible than in the speeches, writings and actions of Garibaldi. Yet he was so famous, and so closely identified with an official image of Italian resurgence, that it was difficult for the government to fight back without seeming to betray itself. Reflecting the symbolic corner it found itself in, the government greeted most of Garibaldi's attacks either with silence or with an attempt to deny him a serious political role: Garibaldi, in the words of the government paper, L'Opinione, was a man ‘in whom the most essential political qualities were lacking’, so that he was unable to ‘judge the needs of the country’ or assess ‘the conduct of government’.137
In assessing the political impact of Garibaldi's hostility to the new Italy, we must also situate his memoirs, novels and speeches in a much broader radical tradition of symbolic opposition to political institutions. The radicals may have been relatively ineffective in parliament or as a practical revolutionary party, but they were far more successful in publicising their political antagonism, in challenging and subverting official representations of national belonging, and in promoting a cult of the Republic.138 One tactic, which we have already seen used by Garibaldi, was to deflate the monarchy and its achievements and to emphasise instead a sense of disappointment and frustration. At the same time, the radicals set about constructing and promoting an alternative, radical myth of the Risorgimento. This myth was opposed to the official memory and was based on revolutionary traditions and memoirs; it involved the exaltation of ‘martyrs’ like the Bandiera brothers and Carlo Pisacane, and of ‘apostles’ like Mazzini. Radicals also began to organise public commemorations of revolutionary events such as the Five Days of Milan in 1848 and the Roman Republic of 1849.139 One of the most successful commemorations was the 1880 monument to the ‘martyrs’ of Mentana. Constructed in two years by public subscription and opened by Garibaldi, it provided the basis for a lengthy challenge to government attempts, undertaken in the same period, to commemorate the contribution of Napoleon III to the Risorgimento by a monument in Milan.140
Garibaldi was a major focus of this alternative radical mythology. From the late 1860s, a growing radical publishing industry concentrated on producing the works of Garibaldi cheaply, and in serial and/or illustrated formats, along with the writings of Mazzini and other anti-clerical and radical novels. Probably its most important single publication was Jessie White Mario's The life and times of Garibaldi, which was published in 1882 to tremendous acclaim (new editions came out in 1884, 1887 and 1905). Other important alternative histories included Guerzoni's Garibaldi (1882) and Bandi's I Mille da Genova a Capua (1886), while the poetry of Giosuè Carducci also largely reinforced a democratic myth of Garibaldi.141 In this radical symbology, efforts were made to reunite Mazzini and Garibaldi (whose disagreements were the subject of public debate).142 Their name-day, 19 March, was celebrated as the day of the ‘two Josephs [due Giuseppe]’; and an 1871 print shows them, each with a halo, working together as carpenters on the construction of the ‘European ship’, under the eyes of the female figure ‘Democracy’ (who is tying together a bundle of sheaves [fasci] representing political unity).143 The radical press also made use of Garibaldi in caricature as a means of ridiculing or denigrating the government. Thus, although his 1875 Tiber project was a practical failure, it was a visual gift to caricaturists. One paper, Il Pappagallo, represented him as ‘the new Italian Gulliver’: ‘the pygmies think they have tied the giant down, but in the end he w
ill get fed up, will get up and will shake them all off. In the meantime, he has presented to parliament three useful projects for Italy.’144
Garibaldi's novels were not especially successful. Only the first, Clelia, was published widely in translation; he had difficulty finding an Italian publisher for I Mille; and a fourth novel, Manlio, remained unpublished until 1982. The critics were often hostile,145 and his later memoirs did not meet with the popular acclaim of the 1859–60 versions.146 Yet these semi-autobiographical works should not be seen as an isolated publishing episode, but as just one element in a more substantial production of memoirs and novels by his colleagues and other volunteers in the wars of the Risorgimento. That this literary production, commonly known as ‘Garibaldian literature’ (letteratura garibaldina), added significantly to the Garibaldi cult after unification, and especially after his death, has long been recognised.147 Rather less well known is the extent to which many of the writers concerned sought to produce a memory of the Risorgimento which would be far from comforting or favourable to the government.
One of the most important works in Garibaldian literature is the 1886 memoir, I Mille da Genova a Capua, written by the republican journalist Giuseppe Bandi. Bandi offered his readers a deliberately anti-Piedmontese, anti-annexationist version of the events of unification, and he sought explicitly to ‘de-sacralise’, though not de-heroicise, Garibaldi through a series of intimate narratives of the man, his habits and his actions. Bandi's work has been somewhat overshadowed by the much more congratulatory memoir, the Noterelle by Giuseppe Cesare Abba, also published in the 1880s.148 But the tone and direction of Bandi's memoir was paralleled in the work of other volunteer-writers – Alberto Mario, Emilio Zasio, Felice Cavallotti, Achille Bizzoni, Eugenio Checchi and Ettore Socci149 – whose memoirs of the Risorgimento were either overtly republican and anti-government or else adopted a deliberately anti-heroic, even irreverent approach to their Risorgimento past. Thus, both Mario and Zasio attacked the government for its treatment of the garibaldini: Mario refers (in 1865) to ‘four disenchanting years [which] have swept away belief and hope’, and to their shoddy treatment at the hands of the king and his entourage at Teano;150 Zasio returns time and again to the betrayal of Risorgimento ambitions for Italy.151 Cavallotti's memoir of Mentana, L'insurrezione di Roma, stressed the tragedy of the event. The volunteers who died were ‘martyrs’ for ‘the independence of the fatherland’, who were ‘mown down like the harvest in the fields’ in front of the lethal chassepot rifles; and ‘Garibaldi seemed transformed; gloomy, hoarse, pallid, only his eye lively and focused; thinking of everyone but himself: no one ever saw him look so old as on that day’.152
Bizzoni, Checchi and Socci were, like Cavallotti, younger radicals influenced by the bohemian scapigliata (‘dishevelled’) movement. They adopt a less obviously polemical but still political, bozzettino (‘sketchy’) style, which relied heavily on the evocation of informality, confusion and chaos in order to poke fun at Italy's grandiose sense of itself.153 He had learnt the following lesson from the war of 1866, Checchi told his readers: ‘that you can go off to war with your spirits full of excited, vigorous expectation, with healthy and robust limbs, and return filled with bitter disappointment and minus a few broken ribs’. In his memoirs, first serialised in La Gazzetta del Popolo in 1866, the war itself is a ‘miserable series of troubles’, where they were all hungry, tired and freezing with cold, ‘badly dressed in a poor red shirt’. While waiting for the war to begin in the Apulian town of Barletta, the setting for the novel Ettore Fieramosca and a central episode in Risorgimento narrative, Checchi is bored and disappointed by what he finds. The volunteeers get drunk every night and they swim every day, and are looked at with suspicion by the local population, ‘as if we were brigands from the Sila [forest] or the Gargano [peninsula]’. Their commander, Giovanni Nicotera (a Risorgimento hero and future government minister), is a self-important and rather preposterous figure:
a handsome man … with the fine baritone voice of a democratic Deputy … He began with a great eulogy in our honour, he told us that he had baptised us as brave men, that he had only one ambition, to die well: and that at the end of the war we would be proud to have belonged to the sixth regiment … that we would always win, that we would astound Europe with our bravery. In short, it seemed as though we and he would astound the world.
Only Garibaldi escapes the sarcasm. He stays above the military chaos ‘in an all-white little house’, and he takes care to visit and talk personally to the wounded. Leaving the hospital, ‘he removed his hat, and shook his poor fellow-soldiers by the hand, saying goodbye! Until we meet again! and left accompanied by the cheers of us all.’154
Even in these most deflating accounts, the power of Garibaldi as an authentic symbol of national heroism is still confirmed. Mario remembers Palermo in 1860 as ‘a sort of delicious ecstasy’, where ‘faith in the future was boundless’ and ‘Garibaldi, in his pavilion, was a magician’.155 Garibaldi could be (and often was) attacked for his political mistakes, but on a symbolic level he was more or less untouchable. Even the young radical left which had ventured to criticise him in the 1860s had been, as we have seen quite clearly, won over by the '70s. None of this is that surprising, although it does confirm Garibaldi's enduring ability to appeal to a very broad audience; but what is worth dwelling on is the extent to which this iconic status and widespread fame posed problems for the government. After 1867, Garibaldi adopted a very public attitude in opposition to the state. He refused to take part in any official ceremonies of italianità (although he paid a private visit to the king in 1874, he refused to make a public announcement in his support, even on the occasion of his funeral in 1878), but he lent his considerable presence to anti-government meetings and ceremonies. Moreover, since he did all this prior to the government's developing, in the 1880s, a thorough programme of ‘making Italians’, he helped the radical, anti-government myth to promote and consolidate itself some time before the government even got started. George Mosse tells us that the purpose of the secular religions established by nation states in the course of the nineteenth century was to bind government and people together,156 but the experience of liberal Italy offers us a different lesson entirely. Thanks in part to Garibaldi's actions, a sense of italianità was invented in the years after unification, but it was effective and convincing largely as an ideology of opposition to the nation's official leaders.
The death and funeral of Garibaldi form an interesting contrast to the rites celebrated four years previously for the king, Vittorio Emanuele, which represented a partial reconciliation between Church and monarch.157 The service for Garibaldi established a tradition of ‘lay death’ from which the Church was entirely excluded; and this secular rite was subsequently adopted for other heroes of the Italian nation. However, although Garibaldi's death appeared to produce a mood of national reconciliation around admiration for the Hero, it also provided a new stage for the articulation and promotion of conflict between rival conceptions of that nation. We have seen that Garibaldi was not given the radical funeral he wanted, but something more official and pro-government instead. This divergence between the radical and official Garibaldi was evident in every other aspect of the commemorations. Many on the government side wanted his body to be brought to Rome: as Crispi's paper, La Riforma, put it, Garibaldi should be made to lie ‘[i]n front of the Vatican, in this Rome, mother of ancient heroes … Garibaldi … does not belong to a party but to the nation’;158 others proposed a common tomb to house Cavour, Vittorio Emanuele and Garibaldi, ‘the mind, the heart, and the arm of the fatherland’. But there is evidence that the new king, Umberto I, was quite unhappy with this notion and resisted any such proposal. It was certainly opposed by the radicals, who insisted on Caprera as the burial place for Garibaldi. ‘In a Pantheon, next to certain false heroes he would feel uncomfortable’, was the opinion of one Bologna university student.159
The flurry of public and printed eulogies to Garibaldi after his deat
h seems, on the surface, to offer striking confirmation of his role as a unifying symbol of the Italian nation. His death halted Italian public life and led to an immense display of national emotion. Most of the eulogies adopted the same biographical structure and exalted his death as a secular apotheosis. Beyond this, however, there were huge differences. In parliament, the prime minister, Agostino Depretis, described Garibaldi as ‘the great citizen’ and the most ‘disinterested collaborator of the great King who established national unity’; others stressed his sense of duty (the obbedisco) and sacrifice to the greater cause of Italy. But the radicals announced that ‘the living legend of the fatherland’ had died with Garibaldi.160 Anton Barilli warned against making too much of a cult out of love for the ‘fatherland’: ‘Too many enemies are still alive: too many friends are lukewarm; too much envy, not enough support for our chances’; while in a passionate political speech, Giosuè Carducci directly questioned the identification of Garibaldi with a present-day Italy where ‘our co-nationals are … sought out to be killed in the streets of foreign cities’, where Trieste and Trento were still ‘unredeemed’, where Tunisia was in the hands of the French and ‘we are the friends and second-compass bearers of Bismarck’.161 ‘Socialists, republicans, all true democrats, let's join hands’, announced the young socialist leader, Andrea Costa, ‘and go forward together in the name of Garibaldi.’162