Heroes_Saviors, Traitors, and Supermen_A History of Hero Worship

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  In Brazil Garibaldi scraped together a living as a coastal trader until he found himself a cause and a more congenial occupation. Nationalism was, in the age of Romantic revolutionaries, an international movement. “The man who defends his own country or attacks the country of others is no more than a soldier,” wrote Garibaldi years later, “but the man who … goes to offer his sword and his blood to every people struggling against tyranny is more than a soldier; he is a hero.” All over Europe and America men fought to liberate countries not their own. Frenchmen gave their lives to help the settlers of North America to throw off the English yoke. Byron was involved with the Carbonari, the precursors of Young Italy, and before finally deciding to go to Missolonghi to fight for the Greeks he had named his yacht the Bolívar and was contemplating going to South America instead. Englishmen and Germans fought for the Greeks against the Turks. There were Irishmen fighting in Chile, Germans fighting in Hungary, Italians fighting in Poland, and Poles fighting everywhere.

  When Garibaldi arrived there, Brazil was still ruled, albeit precariously, by a Portuguese emperor. In 1835 General Benito Gonçalves raised a rebellion in the southern district of Rio Grande do Sul with a view to establishing an independent republic. Garibaldi—who had recently written to a fellow exile, “My God, I am weary of dragging on this life of a trading sailor, so useless to our country. I long to plunge into it once again”—promptly plunged.

  He loved to fight. When, years later, he came to write his memoirs he was to declare himself a pacifist and dwell on his own gentleness and distaste for unnecessary bloodshed, on how as a child he had wept for hours after inadvertently breaking the leg of a grasshopper, but warfare intoxicated him. He was more than once to be strongly criticized by his own allies for provoking an unnecessary battle. He was also lauded and adored for his quixotic insistence on fighting to the finish against overwhelming odds. Several of his most celebrated actions were ghastly defeats, virtual massacres which a commander more careful of his men’s lives might have evaded or cut short by surrendering, but which won Garibaldi the glory of one prepared for martyrdom (his own or his men’s).

  For four years he fought for the cause of Rio Grande do Sul on land and sea, and for another six years he served the liberal government in a Uruguayan civil war. These were small wars fought in immense landscapes. The Rio Grandense navy, of which Garibaldi became commander, consisted of only two ships. With them Garibaldi, an audacious gadfly like Drake harassing an elephantine empire, took on the sixty-seven ships of the Brazilian navy, the biggest in South America. Rio Grande do Sul was the size of the British Isles; Brazil, from which it wished to secede, of all Europe including Russia. In these huge tracts of scantily populated land, covered by forests or pampas where the grass grew tall enough to conceal a man on horseback, the little armies and even littler guerrilla bands spent as much time searching for each other as they did fighting.

  When they did make contact their engagements were brief (one of Garibaldi’s most decisive battles lasted one and a half hours) and brutal. Later Garibaldi was idealized as a spotless paladin, but the record of his actual experience is as bloodstained as an irregular fighter’s tends to be. No one, maneuvering as fast as their horses could carry them over those vast plains, wished to take prisoners. There is a story which was frequently retold in later years, of how in Brazil Garibaldi intervened (as Wallenstein had once refused to do) to stop the execution of a boy, saying that he might yet be of use to the community. The anecdote is supposed to illustrate Garibaldi’s clemency, and so it does, but he had already had four men’s throats cut that day.

  His men were, as a rule, the same kind of “scum of the earth” that had crewed the Golden Hind. Garibaldi himself once described them as “unchained wild beasts.” (According to one source every one of the sixty men who made up the Rio Grandense navy was a convicted murderer.) They were pirates, as Garibaldi candidly acknowledged, and, according to one of their opponents, they acted accordingly: “They sacked and destroyed every creature or valuable thing which had the misfortune to fall into their power.” Discipline was hard to maintain. For decades Garibaldi was haunted by the memory of his troop, drunk and uncontrollable, using a corpse as a table, on which they set up candles and laid out their cards for a game. For some of the horrors he was directly responsible. After a defeat he blew up his ships with some of his men still on board. His detractors accused him of thus slaughtering his wounded. Garibaldi counterclaimed that the men who had remained on board were not wounded but drunk. Either way, they were helpless, and they died.

  His adventures and tribulations were many. He was captured and tortured; the story goes that later, when he had his torturer in his power, he demonstrated his saintly forgiveness by bringing the man a cup of coffee made with his own hands. He was overtaken by a hurricane at sea and had to swim ashore, abandoning his sinking ship (although he was an experienced seaman he does not appear to have been a very lucky one). On one occasion he and fourteen (or perhaps eleven—his accounts vary) men held out for several hours against 150 attackers, singing the Rio Grandense national anthem all the while, and eventually put them to flight, “which proves,” he wrote afterwards, “that one free man is worth twelve enslaved ones”—something he seems all his life to have truly believed.

  He also fell in love. Photographs, which show him lean and beaky-faced, his famous tawny mane smoothed down, fail to capture it, but plenty of his contemporaries testify to Garibaldi’s extraordinary sex appeal. His life was crowded with women, lovers and would-be lovers, wives and would-be wives, adoring fans, women who encountered him by chance when on the run and risked their lives to save him. Stories circulated about his sexual voracity and Garibaldi himself did nothing to dispel the rumors. As he explained, he had no patience with coy maidens, no time or relish for extended courtship. “When a woman takes my fancy I say, Do you love me? I love you! You don’t love me? Tant pis pour toi.” But energetic womanizer as he undoubtedly was, he was also a romantic. In Rio Grande do Sul he met the love of his life, and laid claim to her with his normal abruptness.

  He was half a world away from family and home. The last of the Italian comrades who had accompanied him across the Atlantic had been killed when his ship went down. “In the immense void made around me by the terrible catastrophe I felt the want of a human heart to love me; without this heart existence to me was insupportable.” Sailing into a port he raised his telescope to scan the town and saw just what he was after, a young woman who, as one of the nineteenth century’s most celebrated real-life romantic heroines, is conventionally portrayed as an exquisite beauty, but who was described by one who knew her as being tall and stout, with pendulous breasts and a face covered in freckles, this rather unprepossessing picture mitigated by the attractions of large black eyes and thick, flowing black hair. By the time Garibaldi had disembarked she was nowhere in sight. Despondent, he wandered around until he happened to encounter a man he knew who invited him home for coffee. There, in the dimness of the little house, he found the girl whom he had been pursuing. To continue the story in his own words: “We both remained enraptured and silent, gazing on each other like two people who had met before, and seeking in each other’s faces something which makes it easier to recall the forgotten past. At last I greeted her and said to her ‘You must be mine.’ ” Anita was already married, a fact at which Garibaldi hinted in his memoirs, speaking vaguely of having “sinned greatly” and of an “innocent existence shattered” by their elopement, but which his more prudish admirers, willfully ignoring these semiconfessions, did their utmost to deny or suppress for over a century. All the same, she went with him. “My impudence was magnetic. I had formed a tie, pronounced a decree, which only death could annul.”

  Anita made him a formidable mate. As a teenager she had horsewhipped a man who attempted to rape her. When she left town with Garibaldi she gave her sewing scissors to a girlfriend, as though in token that she was leaving feminine domesticity behind her. “She looked upon battle
s as a pleasure,” he wrote, “and the hardships of camp life as a pastime.” When, during a battle at sea, he saw her thrown to the deck by a cannonball which killed the two men who had been standing beside her, he begged her to go below. She agreed, but only so that she could tongue-lash the men who were skulking in safety belowdecks and chase them back up to rejoin the fight. She was Garibaldi’s lieutenant by day, his lover by night. She was tireless, fearless, and absolutely devoted to her man. During one battle a bullet passed through her hat, her horse was shot from under her, and she was taken prisoner. Undaunted, she harangued the Brazilian officer before whom she was brought, passionately condemning him and all his fellow imperialists. That night, when her guards were asleep, she escaped. For four days she struggled through the dense forest, living on berries. When she finally arrived at a friendly homestead she paused only long enough to drink one cup of coffee before galloping off to rejoin Garibaldi.

  The Cid had his Jimena, but the presence of Anita at Garibaldi’s side, in actual fact and in the frequently retold stories associated with them, is a novel element in his heroic reputation. She is the personification of his tremendous sexual energy, her vigor and physical courage a measure of the fabulous virility of the man who could make her his own. Their first son, Menotti, was conceived, or so Garibaldi maintained, on the battlefield, after a hard and successful day’s fighting.

  Even for such a superman and superwoman, though, the life of a guerrilla fighter was incompatible with parenthood. After Menotti’s birth Garibaldi abandoned the cause of Rio Grande do Sul and went south to Montevideo, the Uruguayan capital. There he attempted to make a living as a cattle trader, a merchant in macaroni, and a teacher of mathematics, proving himself lamentably incompetent in all three fields. It was probably with some relief that he welcomed the outbreak of a civil war between the liberal Uruguayan government and right-wing rebels backed by Argentina.

  Montevideo was a polyglot city, a refuge for exiles from all over Europe and an outpost of liberalism. The president called on the foreign communities to organize themselves for warfare and he asked Garibaldi to create an Italian legion to assist in the defense of the liberal cause. In its first battle (when Garibaldi was not present) the legion disgraced itself. Two of the three battalions refused orders to advance and then ran away. Six days later Garibaldi harangued them and—demonstrating his magical power to infuse courage into even the most craven—led them in a swift, ferocious, and successful bayonet charge from which they returned with only three men wounded and over forty enemy prisoners. The following month they were awarded their colors, a banner bearing the symbol of Young Italy, an erupting volcano on a black background. (The black signified their mourning that Italy was not yet free, the volcano the submerged but explosive power of the revolutionary movement.) In company Garibaldi had long been given to singing patriotic Italian songs; not one for false modesty, he maintained that “if I had had no other vocation, I could have been a good singer.” At last in Montevideo he found himself fighting alongside fellow devotees of the Italian nationalist cause, albeit on the wrong continent and in the wrong war.

  For five years, as commander of the Italian legion and as commander in chief of the tiny Uruguayan navy, Garibaldi served his adopted country. Few of the actions he undertook on behalf of Montevideo were actually successful, but several were glorious. He was celebrated not for any capacity to secure strategic advantages but for his unflinching courage, his romantic gallantry, his readiness to tackle tremendous odds and to fight to the finish, and for what he himself described, with the simplicity of one alluding to a matter of acknowledged fact, “the boundless confidence that I in general inspire in those I command.”

  A guerrilla, not a regular soldier, he was not a disciplinarian, not a spit-and-polish man. He had learned the arts of warfare among men who lived rough and fought dirty. In Rio Grande his troops had lived off captured cattle, or by robbing the country people. In Montevideo he enlisted criminals and deserters, to the disapproval of regular officers. His men desecrated churches. They broke down cattle fences. They stripped the towns in which they were quartered of valuables. On one occasion, when an Argentine couple offered their house for use as a hospital, Garibaldi’s men abused their generosity to the extent of robbing the silver even while one of their own wounded comrades lay stretched out on the dining room table. “These men are coarse, cruel, and have acquired immoral habits through leading a life of adventure, and they respect no authority except that of their leader, Colonel Garibaldi,” wrote a regular Uruguayan general, torn between disapproval and professional envy. Garibaldi permitted all kinds of unruliness. “He knows how to get his men killed, but not how to flog them,” wrote another observer, but he was as unorthodox in his readiness to impose a supreme penalty as in his reluctance to make use of pettier ones. He was capable, said one of his officers years later, of ordering an execution without even laying down his cigar. In Montevideo he wore his pistols in his belt at all times, and when asked by a British emissary how he dealt with a troublemaker, he replied coolly, “I blow his brains out.”

  He had the toughness and the outlaw swagger of a Francis Drake and, unlike Drake, he was a beautiful man. He was short, only about five foot six, and a dispassionate observer records that he seemed to squint slightly, but he had the gift (more valuable than perfect features) of dazzling all who laid eyes on him. An English lady who met him years later noted in her dairy, “I have today seen the face of Garibaldi; and now all the devotion of his friends is made clear as day to me. You have only to look into his face, and you feel that here is, perhaps, the one man in the world you would follow blindfolded to death.” Those who encountered him in Montevideo described the nobility and regularity of his face, his piercing eyes, his spellbinding voice, “low and veiled and almost tremulous with inner emotions.” His personality was as compelling as his appearance. The future president of Argentina saw in him “a true hero in flesh and blood, with a sublime ideal.”

  Years later one of Queen Victoria’s advisers was to tell her, Garibaldi “has achieved great things by ‘dash.’ ” Dash he had aplenty. His principles were simple and absolute. His appearance was extravagantly theatrical. His hats were large, his threadbare clothes were covered with a swirling white poncho, his red-blond hair and beard were long. Male hair is potently symbolic stuff. Spartan boys signaled their virility and belligerence by growing theirs and went into battle with it all braided and bewreathed with flowers. The Cid’s voluminous beard was the token of his strength and patriarchal dignity. For Garibaldi’s contemporaries hair was, besides, the badge of the revolutionary. When the king of Naples saw a group of young gentlemen with loose unpowdered hair at the opera, he left immediately and ordered out the troops.

  The Italian legionaries emulated their leader. Garibaldi addressed them as the “sons of heroism” and encouraged them to conduct themselves as a privileged elite. A contemporary Portuguese newspaper described their flowing locks and tremendous mustaches, their “Sicilian capotes” and plumed hats, their belts stuck with daggers and pistols. In 1843, at a loss for how, in a blockaded city, to obtain uniforms for its volunteer forces, the Montevidean government requisitioned a stock of bright red smocks due to have been shipped to Buenos Aires for the slaughterhouse workers. Belted around the waist they could pass for military tunics. So the look was complete. As the distinctive dress of Garibaldi’s followers, the red shirts were to become famous all over the world, prized as relics long after their wearers were dead.

  Garibaldi looked like a brigand, but though his men might loot and pillage he himself was scrupulously honest, more of a Cato than a Drake. Like Cato, he became a byword for the frugality of his style of living. He really had no taste for luxury. He later came close to marrying a rich English widow, but balked at committing himself to her, explaining that a way of life which involved spending three hours at the dinner table would be intolerable to him. In 1860, on his victorious progress through Sicily and southern Italy, he twice found
himself in undisputed possession of a royal palace. On each occasion he chose a small, bare room in which to erect his own camp bed, leaving his staff to enjoy the ballrooms and grand saloons. In Uruguay, when there was prize money to be distributed he gave his portion to the poor. In 1845 he turned down the government’s offer of land grants to the members of the Italian legion on the grounds that he and his men needed no recompense for performing “the duty of every free man, to fight for freedom wherever it is attacked by tyranny.” (What his legionaries thought of this high-minded refusal we do not know.)

  He lived austerely. In Montevideo he and Anita and their growing family lived in a single rented room, sharing a kitchen with the other occupants of the house. Garibaldi seldom drank anything other than water and ate very little; he subsisted chiefly on small quantities of bread, garlic, and fruit and on large quantities of cigars (the latter, in that time and place, being the dirt-cheap solace of the poor).