Heroes: A History of Hero Worship

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  “Great natures,” wrote Aristotle, “are especially prone to sorrow.” It was Achilles’ mournful awareness of his own imminent death that made him the most compelling character in the Iliad. Mid-nineteenth-century Europe (and America) had been, in the two generations before Garibaldi, first entranced by the weltschmerz of young Werther and subsequently enthralled by the melancholy exiles of Childe Harold and his creator. Garibaldi’s pitifully fallen fortunes and his status as a wanderer hunted from his homeland by those too crass in their sensibilities or cruel in their pursuit of political advantage to appreciate the romance of his character did nothing to diminish his reputation in the short term and, subsequently, when he was once again the man of the hour, this second exile became a particularly affecting passage in the legend of his life. “A great heart that breaks,” wrote Dumas about him, “is a spectacle which breaks all hearts.”

  For the time being, though, the man himself had more urgent priorities than the mythification of his life story. Garibaldi had a livelihood to get. He drifted for a year, but at last a kindly disposed Italian businessman offered him the command of a merchant ship. He became a seaman again, a modern Odysseus traveling ever farther from the homeland on which he claimed his heart was set. He had his share of adventures. He nearly died of a fever contracted in Panama. In Canton he was fired at by pirates. In Lima he was accused of embezzlement (probably actually just incompetent accounting—he really does seem to have been above financial greed), and, after he had beaten up a Frenchman who had insulted him and Italy, of murder. Also in Peru he went ashore to visit Manuela Saenz de Thorne, who had been Simon Bolívar’s mistress. She was paralyzed. Garibaldi, whose rheumatism was bad again, lay down beside her and for several hours the two of them lay chastely together in the darkened room, talking over past struggles, past glories. Since leaving Italy, he wrote to a friend, “I have led an unhappy life, restless and embittered by memory.” Visiting London with a cargo of coal in his ship’s hold he dined with Mazzini, Kossuth, the French republican Ledru-Rollin, and Herzen, all of them, like Garibaldi, mourning a lost cause while eking out a living in an adopted land. He had joined the melancholy brotherhood of revolutionary refugees.

  At last, in 1854, he received indirect word that the government of Piedmont, under the new prime minister Count Camillo Cavour, would not prevent him if he wished to return. He reclaimed his children and bought some land on Caprera, a rocky little island off the coast of Sardinia. There, with the help of his son Menotti, he built himself a simple one-story house and settled down to a kind of self-imposed internal exile. He hoed beans and milked goats. His great days appeared to be over.

  The life of Garibaldi the man had dwindled to that of a retired seaman—he was to write in his memoirs that the five years after his return to Europe “present no points of interest.” But the reputation of Garibaldi the hero was still flourishing. The New York Tribune, announcing his arrival in America, had described him as the “world-famed Italian.” It was hardly an exaggeration. Garibaldi and Anita galloping across the pampas, their eyes alight with revolutionary fervor, their long hair streaming behind them; Garibaldi sitting his white horse impassive amid a storm of bullets while his men marched willingly to their deaths at his command;

  Garibaldi pursued through Italy by four armies and eluding them all; Garibaldi weeping over Anita as she died in his arms: these were potent images and they were widely exploited for political, romantic, and commercial ends.

  Already, on both sides of the Atlantic, people were collecting Garibaldiana. The story goes that Garibaldi gave his American host the red shirt he had worn during the defense of Rome, though skeptics have wondered how Garibaldi, who surely took no luggage with him when he carried the dying Anita through the marshes, could still have had it with him in New York. In Italy Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning hired one of the ex-Garibaldini as a manservant, a human souvenir. Sympathizers of all sorts and all nations found ways to honor him. Visiting Newcastle to pick up a load of coal he was presented with a ceremonial sword and scroll paid for by the subscribed pennies of over a thousand working men ready to honor “the glorious defender of the Roman Republic.” When Garibaldi’s mother died in 1852, Alexander Herzen, who had yet to meet him, attended her funeral as a tribute to his fellow fighter in the cause of freedom. Even Mazzini, with whom Garibaldi had frequently quarreled in Rome, was sufficiently devoted to their shared cause and sufficiently generous to be ready to blow on the coals of his glory. “There is around the name of Garibaldi a halo which nothing can extinguish,” he wrote. “Garibaldi’s name is all-powerful.”

  It was true. And that halo, that all-powerful name, made Garibaldi a political tool far too useful to be left to rust indefinitely. In December 1858, nine years after he had been deported from Piedmont, Piedmont’s new chief minister summoned him to Turin. His premature retirement was over. The second act of his heroic drama was about to begin.

  The man who recalled him, Count Camillo Cavour, Victor Emmanuel’s chief minister, was to play a crucial if profoundly equivocal role in that drama. Cavour was Garibaldi’s antithesis—Athens to his Sparta, Odysseus to his Achilles. Garibaldi’s heart was always prominently, often unwisely, displayed on his sleeve. Cavour was a political games player whose machinations were so intricately tortuous that no one, either among his contemporaries or among modern historians, has ever been able to distinguish with absolute certainty between his genuine aims and those assumed for diplomacy’s sake. Garibaldi compared himself with the heroes of romance and swaggered in archaic fancy dress. Cavour was a modern bureaucrat, a desk man and a diplomat, short-haired, neatly waistcoated and trousered. To the cartoonists of the European press Cavour’s trademark was his little round spectacles—when the Empress Eugénie, playing charades at Fontainebleau in 1860, wanted one of her gentlemen to represent Cavour she suggested he do so simply by donning a pair. (Garibaldi, as it happened, was by this time almost equally nearsighted, but while Cavour’s specs were perfectly of a piece with his publicly perceived character, those of Garibaldi’s admirers who managed to contrive a meeting with him were dismayed to find him peering at them through pince-nez—haloed heroes were not supposed to wear eyeglasses.) Cavour was to exploit Garibaldi, to thwart him and betray him. Garibaldi later said of him and his king, “They use men like they use oranges. They suck the juice out to the last drop and throw the peel away in the corner,” and it was true. But it was also true that without Cavour’s enlightened decision to enlist him Garibaldi could not have achieved any of the miracles he was to perform over the next two years.

  In 1858 Cavour and Louis-Napoleon, now the Emperor Napoleon III, secretly agreed to go to war together on the Austrians with the intention of sweeping them out of northern Italy. The Piedmontese commander in chief was General La Marmora, to whom had fallen the tricky task of arresting Garibaldi in 1849. He had noted then: “Garibaldi is not an ordinary man … It was a great mistake not to make use of him. If there is another war he will be a man to employ.” Cavour was of the same opinion. At their December meeting he told Garibaldi that as soon as a pretext could be found the war would begin, and he asked for his assistance. A friend who saw Garibaldi soon afterward recalls: “His face was radiant, his voice was broken with emotion as, extending his arms, he exclaimed: ‘This time we shall do it!’ ”

  “The adherence of Garibaldi is an event of immense importance,” wrote the Marquis of Pallavicino, another republican who had decided to support the Piedmontese monarchy. “It secures for us the sympathies and, when required, the active assistance of all the youth of Italy.” But Cavour had to be careful how he used the man whose chiefest claim to glory was the resolution with which he had defended Rome against Piedmont’s new allies, the French. While Garibaldi’s name was given great prominence, Garibaldi the man was kept to the sidelines. He was ordered to set up camp forty miles from Turin. The thousands of young men who joined up expressly in order to serve under him were diverted to other regiments. “I was kept as
a flag to attract recruits,” he wrote later, “to summon volunteers in large numbers but to command only a small proportion of them, and those the least fit to bear arms.” To his force were assigned the boys and the old men, the physically feeble and the disaffected—“We intend to give the deserters to Garibaldi,” wrote Cavour to a fellow minister—and he was fobbed off with the scantiest of equipment, superannuated muskets, not enough boots, not enough cartridge belts, no artillery, no horses.

  None of it mattered. The war, which lasted ten weeks, was only a limited success for Cavour: Piedmont gained only Lombardy, less than he had hoped. But for Garibaldi it was glorious. He was operating, as he had done eleven years before, in the mountainous regions around the Italian lakes, doing what he did best, appearing where he was least expected, swinging round in midmarch, leaving roads to scramble over mountain paths and arriving—swift, silent, and unexpected—miles from where he was looked for, leading his men as they dashed down a mountainside like a living torrent, sweeping unopposed into unguarded towns, helping himself to supplies and ammunition left behind by Austrian garrisons which fled precipitately when he appeared. He ordered his men to jettison even their knapsacks and stow all they needed into bread bags and pockets. He himself left his general’s helmet behind and resumed his favorite broad-brimmed black hat, slinging his poncho over his uniform. His troop called themselves the Cacciatori delle Alpi. Ill trained and unfit at the beginning of the campaign, they were transfigured by their sense of participation in an adventure as romantic as it was successful. “Sono nella poesía,” wrote Nino Bixio, one of his commanders. “I am living in poetry.”

  Everywhere Garibaldi was greeted with rapture. He seemed, wrote a local official, not so much a general as “the head of a new religion followed by a crowd of fanatics … it was delirium.” The villages through which the Cacciatori passed were full of people cheering and throwing flowers. They brought their babies so Garibaldi could bless or even—to the scandal of the orthodox—baptize them. They made shrines to him, lighting candles before his picture. “The people were wild with delight,” wrote one of the Cacciatori later. “Men with torches marched on either side of Garibaldi’s horse and old and young rushed forward kissing his feet and clothes. Old men with tears streaming down their faces and young girls threw their arms round our necks and greeted us as deliverers.” Bands played, bells pealed, crowds yelled “Viva l’Italia! Viva Garibaldi!” In every town they took, Garibaldi would speak to the people in his thrilling solemn voice, always holding himself aloof from rejoicing, always urging them on to sacrifice. “Come! He who stays at home is a coward. I promise you weariness, hardship and battles. We will conquer or die!” The Croats in the Austrian army told tales of bullets rebounding from Garibaldi’s chest and called him the “Red Devil.” To his Italian supporters he was something very like a messiah.

  It was all very irritating for Cavour, and for the regular officers of the Piedmontese army who fought equally hard and never received anything like the adulation accorded Garibaldi. He was given a gold medal but soon afterwards he suffered his first defeat when his troops were attacked by a far larger Austrian force. The reinforcements he had been promised didn’t reach him in time and he was obliged to retreat. Garibaldi believed for years afterwards that their nonappearance represented “a deliberate attempt to get rid of a man who had it in his power to become dangerous.”

  The war ended in July, but for Garibaldi—who had commissioned a song which became known as “the Garibaldi hymn” with the refrain “Va fuori d’Italia, va fuori, O stranier” (“Get out of Italy! Get out, foreigner!”)—the struggle would never end until Italy was free. Until he set off for Sicily in April of the following year he was once again a warrior without a war, a hero without a plot.

  Both publicly and privately he was living in an atmosphere of frantically heightened emotion. As he traveled through central Italy in the summer and autumn of 1859 he was received everywhere by crowds whose adulation now amounted to a kind of hysteria. They wept and cheered as he spoke to them from balconies. They took the horses out of his carriage and dragged it themselves through villages packed with ecstatic worshipers. When he revisited the territory through which he had fled in 1849 he was mobbed by people asking for his blessing and showing him relics—shirts and handkerchiefs supposedly his which they had treasured for ten years and which they now begged him to reconsecrate by his touch. He was entertained at a banquet in the house where Anita had died. Afterwards forty young men dressed in black carried her exhumed coffin, which he wished to have reburied in Nice, twenty miles on foot to Ravenna. Wherever he went bells rang, scarves waved, women swooned, cigars patriotically wrapped in red, green, and white ribbons were sold, bands played the Garibaldi hymn. And it was not only those around him who had succumbed to Garibaldi fever. Biographies of him were published that summer in Paris, Amsterdam, Weimar, and London. In London his exploits were enacted on the stage of Astley’s Theatre, and as he lay in bed (throughout his life he slept little, waking shortly after midnight and reading in bed until dawn) he could, and did, read fervently admiring accounts of his exploits in the Illustrated London News.

  He was also the object of a great deal of sexual attention. Even during the years of his exile, depressed and unresponsive as he was, he had been assiduously courted by numerous high-minded but impressionable ladies infatuated with the romance of his story and his tawny locks. He was briefly engaged to a rich English widow. She gave him a ship, but their marriage never took place. Failing a wife he got himself a housekeeper, a young woman from Nice named Battistina Ravello who cooked and cleaned for him on Caprera, shared his bed, and bore him a daughter. He considered marrying her but was deflected from doing so by two other women. The first was Baroness Speranza von Schwartz, a cosmopolitan writer of independent means and equally independent mind. She visited Garibaldi on Caprera and struck him as a possible mate. A year later he proposed to her. She temporized, perhaps because she suspected that he was sleeping with Battistina. But in the event it was neither the housekeeper nor the literary baroness who became his second wife.

  When Garibaldi met Anita he had felt an urgent need for a woman. He seems to have been in the same state of mind in 1859. In the early summer, while campaigning near Lake Maggiore, he met a seventeen-year-old aristocrat, the Marchesina Giuseppina Raimondi, who appeared to him on the road, as he afterwards put it, “like a lovely vision.” She was carrying a message from his supporters in Como. The Austrian lines were between his position and the town. Giuseppina, a young lady traveling by carriage escorted only by a priest, had passed through them unsuspected. Garibaldi was immediately smitten. “At the first sight of this dear creature … her features were indelibly engraved upon my heart.” She went back with him to his headquarters and there, so he afterwards wrote, he went down on his knees to her exclaiming, “Oh that I might belong to you in some way or another.” Still, he held back from committing himself, and a few weeks after their meeting he wrote to her confessing that he was “neither physically nor spiritually free.” Two months later Speranza von Schwartz was traveling as part of his entourage through central Italy when she learned that the housekeeper, Battistina, had just given birth to his daughter. Speranza took her leave. Battistina waited in vain for Garibaldi to return to her. In October Garibaldi, who seems to have been being buffeted by some sort of erotic and emotional hurricane, met and promptly proposed to yet a fourth woman, the young widow Marchesa Paulina Zucchine, who wisely refused him. Finally, at the end of November, he became engaged to Giuseppina Raimondi, and in January, disastrously for both of them, they were married.

  The episode is a pathetic one, discreditable to all concerned. Garibaldi may have figured in the erotic fantasies of women all over Europe (the twelve-year-old heroine of Elizabeth Anna Hart’s novel The Runaway tells her father that Garibaldi is the only man in the world she will marry), but in prosaic reality people meeting him for the first time tended to be greatly disappointed. A French journalist w
ho interviewed him that year arrived with a head full of pictures of “a felt hat, a ferocious countenance imbedded in a mass of dishevelled hair, a blouse and large waist-belt adorned with a dozen cavalry pistols, a naked sabre” and was nonplussed to meet instead a bespectacled and neatly brushed officer (Garibaldi was always fastidious—once in South America he had taken time off in the middle of a battle to wash a sweat-stained shirt), a rheumaticky middle-aged man whose leonine mane was beginning to recede. The spirited girl driving through enemy lines to serve the cause must have seemed to Garibaldi a second Anita, but he was no longer the kind of physically compelling man whom a young woman would follow on a word.

  As the teenage bride and the fifty-three-year-old general (who was even less spry than usual—he had had to put off the wedding after falling from a horse and breaking his kneecap) came out of the church, a young Major Rovelli, Giuseppina’s cousin, gave Garibaldi a note. Garibaldi read it and passed it on to Giuseppina, demanding to know whether its contents were true. She told him that they were. Furious, he picked up a chair and went as though to strike her with it, calling her a whore. She faced him coolly, saying she had thought him a hero but saw now he was just a brutal soldier. He handed her to her father and left, never to speak to her again.