Heroes_Saviors, Traitors, and Supermen_A History of Hero Worship

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  He was as upright as he was frugal. Even his opponents paid tribute to his integrity. When at the end of his sojourn in South America he resigned his Uruguayan command, his erstwhile enemies immediately tried to buy his services, offering to pay him any sum he asked. But Garibaldi was no Rodrigo Díaz to fight first on one side, then on the other. As the leader of his opponents in Uruguay wrote, “He cannot be won. He is a stubborn savage.” All his life people whose honesty was less absolute than his were to belittle him in similar terms, equating his straight dealing with doltishness. Others, though, were impressed. The British envoy deputed to broker a peace in Uruguay was repeatedly frustrated in his mission by Garibaldi who, determined to refuse all compromises, persistently turned down the terms offered, but he came away with a profound respect for the man who had been so troublesome to him: “a disinterested individual among those who only sought their own personal advantage … a person of great courage and military skill.”

  Garibaldi arrived in Montevideo an unemployed vagrant. By the time he left he was the most influential man in the city, despite the fact that he had no money and never used his devoted legion to enforce his own power. He rose to become overall commander of all the Uruguayan forces, to the outrage of more orthodox officers who called it a “degradation” and “a humiliation and infamy” to be placed under the command of a “vile adventurer,” the “Italian pirate José Garibaldi.” In his memoirs he boasted that he was so loved by the people of Montevideo he might easily have made himself dictator had he wished. It was probably true.

  In 1847 he fought the battle of Sant’ Antonio, the most celebrated engagement of his South American career. It was a defeat, like so many of his triumphs, but the grateful Montevidean government declared it all the same a “glorious day” and “a brilliant feat of arms.” Garibaldi and 186 of his men were attacked in open country by some fifteen hundred of the enemy. “The enemy are numerous, we are few; so much the better!” Garibaldi told his men. “The fewer we are, the more glorious will be the fight.” They took cover behind a derelict building and, refusing all calls to surrender, held out for nine hours against repeated assaults, fending off their attackers with musket and bayonet while the fifteen-year-old bugler sounded his bugle and Garibaldi led them in singing the Uruguayan national anthem. By nightfall thirty of them were dead, including all the officers. Under cover of darkness those that were left retreated, fighting off further attacks all the way back to the safety of a town three miles off. Garibaldi was promoted to the rank of general. The date was inscribed in letters of gold on the Italian legion’s banner while the legionaries were granted badges bearing the misleading but stirring legend “Invincible.”

  Sant’ Antonio was for Garibaldi, like Achilles’ immersion in the Styx, the close encounter with death which procured him immortal life. All the time he had been fighting in South America’s local wars he had firmly believed himself, however irrationally, to be serving the cause of Italy’s liberation, a cause to which he described his comrades who died in Rio Grande do Sul or Montevideo as martyrs. Mazzini, in exile in England, endorsed his interpretation, reporting his exploits with fervent enthusiasm in his journal L’Apostolato Repubblicano (published in London but clandestinely circulated in Italy), gradually building up his reputation, as the years went by, to heroic proportions.

  A brilliant propagandist, Mazzini knew that a movement needs its totemic figure: Garibaldi seemed made for the part. Out of the muddled and politically ambiguous material provided by Garibaldi’s South American adventures Mazzini manufactured a stirring epic. While at home Italian nationalists hardly dared identify themselves for fear of Metternich’s omnipresent agents and the chains and dungeons of Austria, Garibaldi at large on the pampas and broad rivers of the southern hemisphere provided an exhilarating model of energy and daring. And as his reputation grew, others besides Mazzini were drawn to exploit it. In Germany Paul Harro Harring, who had met Garibaldi in 1842, published a fervently romantic novel with him as its brave and noble hero. Gradually not only the radical press but mainstream newspapers as well began to take note of him. The war in Uruguay was of intense interest to the European powers. On its outcome depended who would control the lucrative flow of trade in and out of the River Plate. It was widely reported, and journalists seized on Garibaldi as the most colorful and sympathetic character on the liberal side. Reports of the battle of Sant’ Antonio were received with tremendous excitement in Italy. In Genoa Garibaldi’s name was cheered by the congress. In Florence his admirers raised money to buy him a sword of honor. He was probably not aware of it himself, but in the years of his absence he had become a great man.

  In Italy cracks were finally appearing in the political structures he dreamed of dismantling. In 1847 a new Pope, Pius IX, introduced some cautiously liberal reforms. Mazzini from London and Garibaldi from Montevideo—priest-haters though they both were—each wrote to him urging him to do more, and Garibaldi offered him the services of the entire Italian legion of Montevideo should he undertake to liberate and unify Italy. Pius did not respond. Meanwhile King Charles Albert of Piedmont (whose subject Garibaldi was) followed the Pope’s lead with some minor constitutional reforms and the abolition of press censorship. In December a Piedmontese ship carrying copies of the newly uncensored and outspokenly revolutionary newspapers arrived in Montevideo and the entire Italian community turned out into the streets chanting patriotic songs for a torchlit parade, led by the legion with Garibaldi at its head. It was time for the Italian hero to see Italy again. A month later Garibaldi sent Anita and their children ahead to Europe. In April he followed, bringing just sixty-three legionaries with him. He did not know where he was going. He was still under sentence of death in Piedmont. But with those sixty-three men he intended to start a revolution.

  He was just in time. It was 1848. In June Garibaldi made his first European landfall, putting into a port in Spain to buy supplies and to hear the amazing news that the French monarchy had been overthrown, Prince Metternich had fled from Vienna, there were uprisings in Sicily, Naples, Florence, Milan, Lombardy, Venice, Parma, and Modena. King Charles Albert had declared war on Austria. Garibaldi’s sixty-three volunteers now had the entire Piedmontese army on their side.

  All over Italy people were waiting for him. The hour had struck. The curtain had risen. All that was lacking was the hero, and Garibaldi had been assigned that role. “The future of Italy is in his hands; that is predestined,” said one of his officers that year. Mazzini had seen to it that the stories of his do-or-die courage, his dashing band of red-shirted followers, his devotion to his country which remained true even when he was driven across the world by despotic authorities, had been disseminated all over Italy. When Anita disembarked with the children she was astonished to be met by huge crowds chanting “Long live Garibaldi! Long live the family of Garibaldi!” When the man himself finally arrived the harbor was full of small boats packed with waving enthusiasts, and a banquet for four hundred guests had been organized in his honor. It was a fine homecoming for one who had left the country as an insignificant seaman under sentence of death. The exile had returned, to be welcomed as a redeemer. His long absence had kept him free of the compromising entanglements of actual Italian politics. He swept in from the vast pampas, from across the vaster sea, pure, brave, and true-hearted as a knight of old, ready to take his place at the head of the great struggle about to begin.

  He looked, and acted, the part to perfection. To his admirers he seemed as beautiful as Alcibiades, as masculine as the Cid, and in the great plumed hat and sweeping poncho that he was to continue to wear for the rest of his life he appeared both exotic and archaic. Alexander Herzen called him “a hero of antiquity, a figure out of the Aeneid.” Victor Hugo agreed: “Virgil would have called him vir, a man.” Against the background of the moral maze of nineteenth-century diplomacy and of the increasingly sordid and gruesome practice of modern warfare he stood out, pure and glittering. Half a century earlier Edmund Burke had written, “The
age of chivalry is gone: that of sophisters, economists and calculators has succeeded: and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever.” Garibaldi seemed like the incarnation of that lost glory.

  Young Italy was a republican movement. Mazzini, back on Italian soil at last, was calling vociferously for republican governments in the newly liberated or soon-to-be-liberated states and warning his supporters to beware of replacing the Austrian oppressor with a homegrown one. But Garibaldi was far more a nationalist than he was a republican. (This was to be the cause of bitter arguments between him and Mazzini throughout the rest of their lives.) To him what mattered was that Italy should be under Italian rule. Forget about politics, he told his admirers. “The great and only question of the moment is the expulsion of the foreigner. Men, arms, money, that is what we need, not idle arguments about political systems.” He offered his services to Charles Albert, king of Piedmont, the monarch against whom, fourteen years before, he had attempted to raise a rebellion and whose government had condemned him to death.

  The king was embarrassed. For all the rest of his life—regardless of his immense popularity—Garibaldi was to be undervalued, snubbed, and frustrated by those whom he served. One of Charles Albert’s ministers told him that he might be more welcome in the newly proclaimed republic of Venice. “There you can ply your trade as a buccaneer. That’s your place—there’s none for you here.” Garibaldi was undeterred. He demanded, and got, an audience with Charles Albert. It did him no good. As the king wrote to one of his ministers, it was absolutely impossible to employ the adventurer, with his questionable past and his known republicanism. The best course, he concluded (showing how little he knew his man), would be to pay Garibaldi to go away. Garibaldi went anyway. The Milanese had driven out their Austrian governors and proclaimed an independent state of Lombardy. They allowed Garibaldi to take command of a rabble of some fifteen hundred deserters and invalids, inadequately armed and dressed in the ousted Austrians’ abandoned white uniforms.

  Piedmont and its allies were rapidly defeated. Within weeks of Garibaldi’s arrival Milan was reoccupied by the Austrians and Charles Albert surrendered. But Garibaldi refused to give up. He issued a proclamation, which was distributed all over Italy, confirming all that his admirers had heard about his dauntless courage, his patriotism, and his high-minded integrity. “The King [of Piedmont] has a crown which he wishes to save by guilt and cowardice,” but he and his companions would never, he declared, “abandon, without sacrificing ourselves, our sacred soil to the mockery of those who oppress and ravage it.” He liked to fight against impossible odds. In Rio Grande do Sul, as he afterwards boasted, “with a crew of sixteen men and a barque of thirty tons, I declared war on an empire.” His unpromising band of Milanese had already dwindled to barely a thousand men but with them he would take on all Austria. “The war will continue,” he wrote.

  He led his men into the mountains around Lake Como where he embarked upon a guerrilla campaign. He commandeered two pleasure steamers and in these he cruised the lake, descending on Austrian positions while the local women (or so he recalled in his memoirs) waved to him from their flower-bedecked balconies, their faces alive with joy “as if they wished to fly to welcome the brave men.” His successes were small. His soldiers kept defecting. “With what contempt,” he wrote to Anita, “you must look on this generation of hermaphrodites in Italy, on these countrymen of mine that I have tried to make noble with such little result!” He himself was the acme of nobility and manliness. “The body keeps pace with the soul of that man,” wrote one of his officers; “both are of iron.”

  After less than a month, with only seventy troops left, he gave up and retreated over the border into Switzerland. But he had greatly enhanced his personal myth. The man who dared to defy the might of an empire with his little band of poorly equipped men had proved himself worthy of the great role allotted him. When he arrived in Livorno a few weeks later, the streets were decorated in his honor, a huge crowd turned out to greet him, and when he went to the opera the entire audience rose cheering to its feet.

  It was a doubly romantic age, and Garibaldi seemed a fit hero both by the standards of the old romances and of the new Romanticism. Two centuries earlier, in 1637, Rodrigo Díaz had been brought back to life as Don Rodrigue, the hero of Pierre Corneille’s high-minded tragedy Le Cid. Corneille reimagined the mercenary warlord as a man prepared to sacrifice everything—love, happiness, and life itself—to satisfy the dictates of honor. When Byron was a schoolboy Le Cid was his favorite reading. The Romantic poet and brilliant self-mythologizer, whom Carlyle called “the noblest spirit in Europe,” liked to present his own expatriate life as a kind of principled exile, the refusal of a great-hearted man of honor to acquiesce in the grubby littleness of modern life. No wonder he was especially moved by the story of Don Rodrigue, an aristocrat of unimpeachable integrity, unflinching pride. So were many of his French contemporaries. In 1811, when Napoleon’s armies occupied Burgos, they paid markedly mixed homage at the tomb of the Cid. Some of the officers, according to Robert Southey “used to visit the church and spout passages of Corneille’s tragedy.” Meanwhile the less educated soldiery deliberately desecrated the shrine of Spain’s national hero, using the tomb for target practice and leaving it badly knocked about by their bullets. The Cid, at the opening of the nineteenth century, was both a high-minded devotee of an archaic but stirring concept of honor and a modern patriot defined by his nationality. And so, two generations later, was Garibaldi, serving the modern cause of nationalism in a style which gave him the luster of a hero from medieval romance.

  Throughout the autumn of 1848 Garibaldi was a rebel without a cause, crisscrossing northern Italy at the head of an irregular band of adoring volunteers—the few dozen who had followed him from South America, now supplemented by Italian recruits—in search of a people willing to be freed. Everywhere he went he was greeted by noisily ecstatic crowds, hailing him as the Hero of Montevideo and the Hope of Italy, and by embarrassed officials torn between their desire to claim a share in his popularity by being seen to welcome him and their anxiety to get rid of him and his ill-disciplined train as soon as possible.

  Imperfectly liberated, imperfectly subdued, all Italy was in a state of political flux. The people were excitable, their rulers nervous. In the diplomatic intricacies of the moment Garibaldi’s outspoken republicanism and hostility to all foreigners were potentially as destructive as stones flung through a spider web. Besides, the Garibaldini (as the General’s followers were known) had no quartermaster. “Organising troops is the most tedious of occupations for me,” wrote Garibaldi later. His genius was for inspiring his men; he never gave much thought to the dull business of feeding them. Since Wallenstein’s day it had become commonplace for a state to support a standing army, financing it through tax revenues, but the Garibaldini were stateless volunteers. It was nobody’s responsibility to pay or provide for them. They were modern knights-errant, and as Don Quixote remarked, a knight carries no purse. A regular officer who campaigned alongside them the following year described with shocked fascination their method of provisioning themselves. “Three or four threw themselves on the bare backs of their horses and, armed with long lassoes, set off at full speed in search of sheep or oxen. When they had collected a sufficient quantity they returned, driving their ill-gotten flocks before them … and then all indiscriminately, officers and men, fell to, killing, cutting up and roasting at enormous fires quarters of oxen, besides kids and young pigs, to say nothing of booty of smaller sort, such as poultry, geese, etc.” When they needed a barracks Garibaldi liked to take over monasteries, both because their architecture was appropriate to the purpose and because, anticlerical as he was, he derived satisfaction from flouting the Church. (To him priests were “the very scourge of that Italy which, seven or seventy times, they have sold to the stranger,” the “black brood, pestilent scum of humanity, caryatids of thrones still reeking with the scent of human burnt offerings where tyranny still reigns.�
�) Any door closed to him he had blown open. To the Quixotes who followed Garibaldi it no doubt seemed that whatever the people on whom they preyed might lose in the way of livestock and other provisions would be amply repaid by the great gift of Freedom which he intended eventually to bestow upon them. To the Sancho Panzas of the regimes through whose territories they passed they seemed predatory, disruptive, and extremely expensive.

  At last they found an adventure worthy of them. In Rome, in November 1848, the chief minister of the Papal States was stabbed to death on the steps of the government offices. Nine days later, after a revolutionary mob had invaded his palace and killed his confessor, the Pope, disguised as an ordinary priest and trembling so violently that he was unable to walk unaided, escaped down a secret staircase and through a back door and fled to the court of the Bourbon king Ferdinand of Naples. Reformists called an election for a new constituent assembly. Mazzini, exultant, arrived from London to become the dominant member of a triumvirate of chief ministers. The election was to be the most democratic in all preceding human history. All adult male Romans were eligible to vote.

  It was wonderful. “Rome to me,” wrote Garibaldi in his memoirs, was a “gigantic sublime ruin” haunted by a “luminous spectre”—that of republican liberty. He had been on his way to Venice. Promptly he turned around and marched his men towards Rome, establishing a base for them to the north of the city. He himself stood for election to the new assembly. He was, then and always, a disruptive parliamentarian. Incapacitated by rheumatism (an inconveniently unheroic disease which plagued him increasingly for the rest of his life), he had to be carried into the chamber on a stretcher, but to him it seemed that it was his fellows who were supine. At the first session he interrupted the lengthy process of swearing in the new deputies, crying out that to waste time on formalities was a crime. “Are the descendants of the ancient Romans, the Romans of today, incapable of being Republicans?” His interruption was ignored, his frustration soothed. It took the assembly another three days to reach the point to which he had been so impatient to leap. In February 1849, nearly nineteen centuries after Cato had killed himself in despair of saving it, the Roman Republic was revived.