GARIBALDI

Lucy Riall was educated at the London School of Economics and at

Cambridge University. She has taught at the University of Essex, the École
Nationale Supérieure, Paris, and at the Freie Universität Berlin. She is now
Professor of History at Birkbeck College, University of London. Among her
publications are Sicily and the Unification of Italy, 1859–1866 (1998) and
Risorgimento: The History of Italy from Napoleon to Nation State (2008).
 GARIBALDI
INVENTION OF A HERO

LUCY RIALL

YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS

NEW HAVEN AND LONDON
Copyright © 2007 Lucy Riall
First printed in paperback 2008
The right of Lucy Riall to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Riall, Lucy, 1962–
Garibaldi: invention of a hero/Lucy Riall.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978–0–300–11212–2 (alk. paper)
1. Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 1807–1882. 2. Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 1807–1882—Influence. 3. Garibaldi,
Giuseppe, 1807–1882—Public opinion. 4. Generals—Italy—Biography. 5. Statesmen—Italy—
Biography. 6. Italy—History—1849–1870. 7. Italy—History—1870–1914. I. Title.
DG552.8.G2R514 2007
945'.083092—dc22
[B]
2006032507
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-0-300-14423-9 (pbk)
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
A Ciccio
 CONTENTS

Cover
Title
Copyright
Dedication

List of Illustrations and Maps

Acknowledgements
Introduction

Chapter 1 Nation and Risorgimento

Chapter 2 In Search of Garibaldi
Chapter 3 Revolution
Chapter 4 Exile
Chapter 5 The Garibaldi Formula
Chapter 6 Independence
Chapter 7 Fashioning Garibaldi
Chapter 8 The Thousand
Chapter 9 Making Italian Heroes
Chapter 10 The Garibaldi Moment
Chapter 11 Unification
Chapter 12 Culture Wars
Conclusion The Myth of Garibaldi

Notes
Select Bibliography
Index
 ILLUSTRATIONS AND MAPS

ILLUSTRATIONS

1 Monument to Garibaldi in Rome (Emilio Galloni, 1895). Photograph

by Francesco Filangeri. 5
2 Portrait of Garibaldi in Il Mondo Illustrato, 5 February 1848. Museo
del Risorgimento, Milan. 54
3 ‘Suggestive effects’, Il Don Pirlone, 29 May 1849. Museo del
Risorgimento, Milan. 88
4 ‘Once again the knavish red devil has escaped through hell!’ Il
Fischietto, 21 August 1849. British Library, London. 89
5 ‘Garibaldi and his negro servant’, The Illustrated London News, 21 July
1849, p. 417. Senate House Library, University of London. 91
6 Headquarters of Garibaldi at Rome, The Illustrated London News, 23
June 1849, p. 36. Senate House Library, University of London. 92
7 Garibaldi in New York, engraving from a daguerreotype by Marcus
Root, in T. Dwight, The Roman Republic of 1849; with accounts of the
Inquisition and the siege of Rome (New York, 1851). 111
8 Garibaldi as Christ Pantocrator, lithograph, Piedmont, 1850s, in E. E. Y.
Hales, Pio Nono. A study in European politics and religion in the
nineteenth century (London, 1954), p. 161. 150
9 Garibaldi in 1859 by Gustave Doré, in Journal pour tous, supplement:
La guerre d'Italie, 1, 4 June 1859, p. 20. Bibliothèque Nationale de
France. 189
10 Garibaldi and the defenders of Italy, cover of L'Italia e i suoi
difensori. Album storico–biografico del'avv'Giuseppe Pistelli, ornato
da ritratti e stampe litografiche, Florence, 1860. Museo del
Risorgimento, Milan. 191
11 Garibaldi as a Piedmontese general, in L'Italia e i suoi difensori.
Album storico–biografico del'avv'Giuseppe Pistelli, ornato da ritratti e
stampe litografiche, Florence, 1860. Museo del Risorgimento, Milan.
193
12 Garibaldi the hero of the popular song: ‘Garibaldi’, in Souvenirs de la
guerre d'Italie. Chants guerriers par messieurs Auguste Barbier,
Pierre Dupont, Fernand Denoyers, Gustave Mathieu, Charles Vincent.
Musique et accompagnement de piano par MM. Darcier, Pierre
Dupont, Hector Salmon et Mme Mélanie Dentu, Paris, n.d. but 1859.
British Library, London. 204
13 ‘Landing in Marsala of General Garibaldi with 800 men’, in Il 19
luglio 1860. Festa popolare in Palermo pel giorno natalizio del
generale Giuseppe Garibaldi, Palermo, 1860, p. 12. Società Siciliana
per la Storia Patria, Palermo. 234
14 ‘Garibaldi hands Sicily over to the gentleman King’, in Il 19 luglio
1860. Festa popolare in Palermo pel giorno natalizio del generale
Giuseppe Garibaldi, Palermo, 1860, p. 21. Società Siciliana per la
Storia Patria, Palermo. 235
15 ‘Garibaldi the Liberator; or, the modern Perseus’, Punch, or the
London Charivari, 16 June 1860. Birkbeck College Library, University
of London. 250
16 ‘The revolution in Sicily. Narrow escape of our special artist’, The
Illustrated London News, 4 August 1860, p. 111. Senate House
Library, University of London. 255
17 ‘Garibaldian volunteers’, The Illustrated London News, 20 October
1860, p. 371. Senate House Library, University of London. 256
18 ‘The hero and the saint’, Punch, or the London Charivari, 22
September 1860. Birkbeck College Library, University of London. 257
19 ‘Garibaldi's departure from Genoa for Sicily’, Album storico–
artistico. Garibaldi nelle due Sicilie ossia guerra d'Italia nel 1860.
Scritta da B.G. con disegni dal vero, le barricate di Palermo, ritratti e
battaglie, litografati da migliori artisti, Milan, 1860–2. Società
Siciliana per la Storia Patria, Palermo. 260
20 ‘The taking of Milazzo’, Album storico–artistico. Garibaldi nelle due
Sicilie ossia guerra d'Italia nel 1860. Scritta da B.G. con disegni dal
vero, le barricate di Palermo, ritratti e battaglie, litografati da
 migliori artisti, Milan, 1860–2. Società Siciliana per la Storia Patria,
Palermo. 261
21 ‘Garibaldi's landing in Marsala’, Album storico–artistico. Garibaldi
nelle due Sicilie ossia guerra d'Italia nel 1860. Scritta da B.G. con
disegni dal vero, le barricate di Palermo, ritratti e battaglie,
litografati da migliori artisti, Milan, 1860–2. Società Siciliana per la
Storia Patria, Palermo. 262
22 Garibaldi as a cover hero: F. Mistrali, Storia popolare della
rivoluzione di Sicilia, Milan, 1860. Società Siciliana per la Storia
Patria, Palermo. 263
23 ‘General Garibaldi spearing fish by night off Caprera’, The Illustrated
London News, 26 January 1861, p. 67. Senate House Library,
University of London. 309
24 ‘The hermit of Caprera’, Giuseppe Garibaldi da Caprera ad
Aspromonte, 1860–61–62. Memorie Storiche raccolta da Felice
Venosta, Milan, n.d. Museo del Risorgimento, Milan. 310
25 ‘A young Spaniard who prefers to kill himself than leave Garibaldi’,
Giuseppe Garibaldi da Caprera ad Aspromonte, 1860–61–62.
Memorie Storiche raccolta da Felice Venosta, Milan, n.d. Museo del
Risorgimento, Milan. 311
26 ‘An insatiable Saturn who devours his children big and small
indiscriminately one after the other’, Il Fischietto, 4 September 1862.
British Library, London. 323
27 ‘Cain and Abel’, by Adolfo Matarelli, Il Lampione, 10 December
1862. Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, Milan. 326
28 ‘Aspromonte 28 August 1860’, cartoon, Italy 1862, in G. Sacerdote,
La vita di Giuseppe Garibaldi, Milan, 1933, p. 843. 327
29 ‘This is the noblest Roman of them all’, Punch, or the London
Charivari, 9 April 1864. Birkbeck College Library, University of
London. 333
30 ‘Garibaldi at home’, Staffordshire portrait figure, c.1864. The
Potteries Museum and Art Gallery, Stoke-on-Trent. 334
31 The transportation of Garibaldi's bust to the Campidoglio in Rome,
lithograph, Italy 1882. Istituto per la Storia del Risorgimento Italiano,
Rome. 359
32 ‘2 June 1882’, colour lithograph, Francesco Casanova, Italy 1882.
Istituto per la Storia del Risorgimento, Rome. 360
33 Garibaldi at the Augustus Mausoleum, 1875, photograph by P.
Tagliacozzo. Istituto per la Storia del Risorgimento Italiano, Rome.
363
34 Garibaldi in 1866, in Album della guerra del 1866, Milan, 1866–7.
Museo del Risorgimento, Milan. 366
MAPS

1 The South America of Garibaldi.

2 The Unification of Italy, 1859–70.
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I wish to thank the following organisations for their generosity in funding

the research on which this book is based: the Leverhulme Trust, the British
Academy, the University of London Central Research Fund, and Birkbeck
College Faculty of Arts Research Fund. I am also grateful to the staff of the
Archivio di Stato and the Archivio Comunale, Palermo; the Istituto per la
Storia del Risorgimento Italiano, Rome; the Museo del Risorgimento,
Milan; and the National Archives, London. My thanks also to the librarians
of the Società Siciliana per la Storia Patria, Palermo; the Biblioteca di
Storia Moderna e Contemporanea, Rome; the Biblioteca Nazionale,
Florence; the Museo del Risorgimento, Genoa; the Fondazione
Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, Milan; the Staatsbibliothek and the Ibero-
Amerikanisches Institut, Berlin; the Bibliothèque Nationale de France; the
New York Public Library; the University of London Library; Birkbeck
College Library (especially Aubrey Greenwood); and the British Library.
I owe a very real debt to my colleagues in the School of History, Classics
and Archaeology at Birkbeck College for providing me with an
intellectually stimulating and socially relaxing environment in which I
could think about, and carry out the research for, this book. They were also
kind enough to allow me long stretches of leave so that I could write it. I
would like to thank John Arnold, Joanna Bourke, Filippo de Vivo, Catherine
Edwards, David Feldman, Marybeth Hamilton, Daniel Pick, Jan Rüger,
Chandak Sengoopta, Julian Swann and Frank Trentmann for answering all
my questions and requests for information. As well as providing
muchneeded scholarly advice, Sean Brady, Emma Dench and Naoko
Shimazu were a great source of personal encouragement; Sean Brady was
also kind enough to read the entire manuscript and encouraged me to clarify
many points and avoid as many errors. My thanks also to Jon Wilson for his
help with the illustrations.
A long series of discussions with Alberto Banti, Paul Ginsborg, Stephen
Gundle, Brian Hamnett, Maurizio Isabella, David Laven, Adrian Lyttelton
and Silvana Patriarca helped me to formulate the questions and ideas on
which the book is based. Stephen Gundle, Silvana Patriarca and John Foot
read and made very valuable comments on the manuscript. Colin Barr was
an obliging source of information on Irish Catholics and Garibaldi, and let
me see the letters of Paul Cullen that he is editing for publication. Nicola
Miller and David Rock helped me with the South American material; Rohan
McWilliam advised me on British popular politics; Axel Körner told me
about popular theatre; Derek Beales helped me understand nineteenth-
century British Protestantism; and Patrizia di Bello did the same for
nineteenth-century photography. Marta Bonsanti chased a number of
hardtofind references in Italy and Christopher Duggan answered questions
about Crispi. None of the above is responsible for my errors, but I am
grateful to all of them for their advice. I want especially to thank Denis
Mack Smith, who gave me the contents of his Garibaldi library at the
beginning of my research, and who has been a very generous supporter of
my version of the Garibaldi legend.
One of the pleasures of writing a book about a figure of international
popular renown has been the contacts which I have been able to make with
other scholars. Much of the material in this book has been tried out on
audiences in seminars, conference papers and lectures at the University of
Cambridge, the University of Oxford, the Institute of Historical Research
London, the British Academy, Columbia University, Princeton University,
Vanderbilt University, Wofford College, the British School at Rome, the
University of Pisa, the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, and the Freie
Universität, Berlin. The final result has benefited considerably from all their
comments and criticisms. My thanks to Gilles Pécout at the Ecole Normale
Supérieure and to Oliver Janz at the Freie Universität for arranging for me
to spend longer periods of time as a visiting professor at both institutions
and for their patient advice and encouragement. I hope that at least some of
my enjoyment and appreciation of these broader cultural opportunities is
conveyed in what follows.
It is a truism that writing a book is a strange and solitary, if satisfying,
experience, and this one has been no exception. So I am very happy to
thank all my friends for their help and support during some not always easy
times. Both my parents died before I finished the book but it owes a great
deal to my father's fair-mindedness and my mother's passionate enthusiasm.
For their generous hospitality during overseas research trips, I would like to
thank Annliese Nef, Cesare Garaffa, Marliese Eckau, Christian Garaffa,
Maria Luisa Garaffa and Marilyn Nicoud; and I must add a special thank-
you to Elena Pezzini, Rosa di Liberto and Sergio Aiosa for their company
and conversation during the long Palermo evenings after the libraries
closed. George and Fernanda Herford were an unfailing source of support
and friendship, while Matthew Brettler and Sarah Gavaghan were never far
from the other end of a telephone line. Andrew Hudders gave me a place to
stay in New York, and has followed attentively the book's progress in
London, Palermo and Berlin. The biggest thank-you must go to my
husband, Francesco Filangeri. He took many of the photographs for the
illustrations in this volume, and was an informative and lively guide
through the wealth of visual material on Garibaldi. More generally, his
advice, comments, criticisms and humour all proved indispensable, and I
hope that the book is a sufficient expression of my love and appreciation.
 INTRODUCTION

I have seen to-day the face of Garibaldi; and now all the devotion of
his friends is made as clear as day to me. You have only to look into
his face, and you feel that there is, perhaps, the one man in the world
in whose service you would, taking your heart in your hand, follow
blindfold to death.

(Harriet Meuricoffre, Naples, August 1860)1

An exemplary life

The life of Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807–82) spanned the defining events and
places of the nineteenth century. He was born in Nice, at that time under
Napoleonic rule, and spent much of his youth travelling as a merchant sailor
through the Mediterranean from Nice to the Black Sea and back again. It
was through travel that he acquired a political awareness, mainly through
encounters with French political exiles and with Italian revolutionary
conspirators. He became a follower of the Italian nationalist, Giuseppe
Mazzini, and embraced republican nationalism. In 1834, involvement with
an abortive ‘Young Italy’ uprising in Genoa against the Piedmontese
government obliged him to leave Europe altogether, and he was to spend
much of the formative period of his life (from twenty-eight to forty years of
age) in South America. South America was where Garibaldi first began to
get a name for himself. By the early 1840s, newspaper reports had already
begun to speak of Garibaldi as a romantic ‘bandit leader’ and to tell of (and
often condemn) his adventures in Brazil and of his formation of an ‘Italian
Legion of Montevideo’ to defend liberal Uruguay against the aggression of
Buenos Aires. Garibaldi then won international fame during the 1848–9
revolutions in Italy. Returning to Italy from South America to fight for the
revolution, he helped mastermind the heroic, if doomed, defence of the
Roman Republic against the French army sent to restore the Pope in the
summer of 1849. His lastditch attempt to march north to save the besieged
Venetian Republic, his daring exploits in eluding the enemy when all was
lost and the tragic death en route of his pregnant wife Anita added to the
growing legend surrounding Garibaldi.
During the early 1850s, already a celebrity and increasingly pursued by
journalists and assorted admirers, Garibaldi went once more into exile and
into a form of political retirement. He spent almost two years living quietly
among the Italian community in Staten Island, New York, and then travelled
again as a merchant sailor to central America and around the Pacific Ocean
to China and the Philippines. In 1854 he returned to Nice via England and
settled in a new home on the isolated island of Caprera off the northern
coast of Sardinia. In the more liberal climate of Italian politics from the
mid-1850s onwards, he seemed to abandon his republican convictions and
to distance himself from Mazzini; he came gradually out of retirement to
form close links with the Piedmontese government – with the Piedmontese
prime minister Cavour, with his Italian moderate liberal colleagues and with
the king of Piedmont, Vittorio Emanuele II. He appeared to endorse the
‘Piedmontese’ or monarchical formula for Italian unification. In 1859, he
even became a general in the Piedmontese army, and led a volunteer army
into the ‘Second War of Independence’ against Austria. Yet in 1860, in what
was probably his greatest triumph, he defied Cavour and the king of
Piedmont to head an expedition of a ‘Thousand’ volunteers, which sailed
across the Mediterranean from Quarto near Genoa to Marsala in Western
Sicily in order, as he put it, to help his ‘brothers in danger’,2 or in an
attempt to save a revolution in Sicily from certain defeat. These dramatic
actions completely overturned the status quo in Italy and in Europe as a
whole. The surprising success of Garibaldi's expedition led in under six
months to, successively, the collapse of the Bourbon monarchy of the Two
Sicilies, the overthrow of papal power in central Italy and the creation of an
Italian nation state, with Vittorio Emanuele II of Piedmont as its monarch.
After 1860, while ostensibly a national hero, Garibaldi became
increasingly alienated from the Piedmontese ‘solution’ and from
monarchical Italy. He moved ever further to the left, towards socialism and
extreme anti-clericalism. He organised two disastrous attempts (in 1862 and
1867), in the face of official opposition, to seize Rome from the Pope and
make it the capital of Italy. But he also participated in the 1866 war on the
government side against Austria, after which Italy gained control of Venetia.
He embarked on a triumphant tour of England in 1864. In 1870, already an
old and sick man, and in an emotional, if largely futile, attempt to help
defend the nascent French Republic against Prussia, Europe's new
superpower, he organised a final expedition of volunteers to fight in the
Franco-Prussian war. The rest of his life was spent in partial seclusion with
his family at home in Caprera, a seclusion interrupted by sporadic forays
into public life. Even before his death in 1882 Caprera had become a place
of pilgrimage, with a large and dedicated band of followers and enthusiasts
seeking to pay homage to Garibaldi. Only two months before his death, and
so incapacitated by arthritis that he could rarely leave his bed and had to be
carried in a specially designed chair, he had set out on a tour of southern
Italy, and came to Sicily once more, this time to commemorate the 600th
anniversary of the revolt known as the Sicilian Vespers.3
From relatively humble beginnings, Garibaldi became one of the most
popular and enduring political heroes of the nineteenth-century world. His
appeal transcended social classes and his fame crossed national frontiers.
Indeed, as a revolutionary ‘outsider’ with little, if any, official backing, and
as a political leader who was in power for less than six months in his entire
political career, he was the first to achieve a truly worldwide fame, and to
reach a mass audience via the new technologies of mass communication.
Lithographers and photographers produced countless images of Garibaldi,
stressing variously the hero's strength, bravery, endurance, virility,
humanity, kindness, saintliness and spirit of adventure. His name sold
newspapers and books in London, Paris, Berlin and New York, as well as in
Italy, and both journalists and their readers revelled in his exploits. He was
hated as much by the Church and traditionalists as he was loved by the
young and excluded. Young men volunteered to fight alongside him and
middle-class women rushed to get close to him. As head of the 1860
revolution in Sicily, he was said to be ‘worshipped’ by peasants ‘as a
mythical hero’4 and had children ‘held up towards him as before a
saviour’.5 Hailed on a visit in 1864 as ‘the greatest man by whom England
has ever been visited’, Garibaldi's arrival in London ‘resulted in such a
scene as can hardly be witnessed twice in a lifetime’.6 He attracted vast and
enthusiastic crowds, pubs were named after him, and souvenirs and replicas
were produced on a huge scale. As recounted in countless cheap
biographies and reproduced in innumerable illustrations, his life had all the
ingredients to make him famous and popular among the nineteenth-century
reading public. He was a general who triumphed against terrible odds, a
dignified leader who cared for the common man, and a romantic figure who
had experienced his full share of personal suffering, loneliness and
hardship. His striking appearance – his good looks and flamboyant clothes
– made him an instantly recognisable figure, while his simple manner and
austere lifestyle reinforced the seductive appeal of a hero unspoilt by his
cult status.
After his death in 1882, Garibaldi became the subject of an offical cult.
This cult was part of a concerted attempt by the Italian government, and
especially by Francesco Crispi, the dominant political figure of the time, to
create Italy's ‘Risorgimento’ (the ‘national resurgence’, c. 1792–c. 1870) as
a ‘place of memory’, as well as to give Italians a political education which
would compete with and replace the traditional loyalites and teachings of
the Catholic Church and old regime states.7 National ceremonies such as the
burial of King Vittorio Emanuele II's body in 1878 in the Pantheon in Rome
and the national pilgrimage in 1884 to his tomb;8 annual commemorative
events such as Constitution Day;9 huge choreographed parades to celebrate
anniversaries like that of 20 September (the date of the breach of Rome's
Porta Pia by the Italian government in 1870);10 and the creation of new
public spaces such as museums of the Risorgimento11 and monuments
(most famously the Vittoriano in Rome):12 all these were intended to
confirm the status of the Risorgimento as Italy's foundation story and to
create a ‘civic religion’ which would sacralise the secular state and create a
common sense of national and political belonging.13 And, since their
purpose was to lend legitimacy to the government, such memorials and
anniversaries sought to create and reinforce a particular memory of the
Risorgimento. They invariably stressed the unifying, and satisfactory, nature
of the monarchical solution to the Risorgimento, and told of the common
aims of its protagonists and the heroic, disinterested actions of its leaders.
Control of the posthumous memory of Garibaldi was central to this
secular yet monarchical vision of Italian national identity. Official efforts
concentrated on creating a conciliatory cult of national heroes, which was to
turn the old rivals Garibaldi, Vittorio Emanuele II, Cavour and Mazzini into
lifelong allies, and which venerated them alongside a medley of other
famous Italians such as Dante Alighieri, Christopher Columbus, Giordano
Bruno and Ugo Foscolo.14 During the twenty years after his death,
monuments were raised to Garibaldi all over Italy. Whether on horseback or
on foot, sword in hand or pointing toward future glory, Garibaldi replaced
princes, saints, and even sometimes the Madonna herself as the subject of
public representations in squares all over Italy.15 Garibaldi was to become a
secular saint, a symbol of Italian unity. At the inauguration of the Turin
monument to Garibaldi in 1887, the official orator, Tommaso Villa, spoke
passionately to the assembled crowds of Garibaldi's saintly qualities, of his
virtue and dedication to the nation, and of his role as a symbol of national
unity.16 The importance of Garibaldi to the government, and especially to
its leader, Crispi, was clear in Rome, where the monument to Garibaldi was
said to be the largest of its kind ever built in Europe and took almost ten
years to complete (see figure 1 opposite). The unveiling of the vast
equestrian statue on the Janiculum hill, the site of Garibaldi's famous
defence of the Roman Republic in 1849, was timed to coincide in 1895 with
the extended celebrations for the 25th anniversary of the Italian
government's seizure of Rome from the Pope, and Crispi used the occasion
openly to attack the Church, to claim that the destruction of the Pope's
temporal power was divinely ordained ‘just has it had been the will of the
Almighty that Italy … should be restored to unity’.17
 1 Monument to Garibaldi on the Janiculum hill in Rome (1895).

The image of Garibaldi as a sacred symbol of secular Italy was promoted

relentlessly, and not just by the central government. Municipal councils
across Italy, with far fewer resources at their disposal but still keen to
contribute to the creation of new commemorative spaces, embarked on a
programme of renaming main streets and squares after Garibaldi. Marble
plaques were fixed to buildings, to honour where Garibaldi had been –
where he had slept, fought, thought and spoken – and to conserve this
memory for future generations.18 In the twenty or more years after his
death, continuing public enthusiasm for the cult of Garibaldi was reflected
in the proliferation of patriotic pamphlets and other ephemera (calendars,
flyers, postcards, china figures) both on the occasion of his death and to
commemorate various anniversaries thereafter.19 It can also be traced in the
growth of a large market of generally left-wing readers for Garibaldian
literature, which included major biographies, personal memoirs, novels,
plays and poetry. Many, especially Risorgimento veterans and those
involved in radical and left-wing politics, kept up an active commitment to
Garibaldi and to garibaldinismo.20
Far from diminishing the cult of Garibaldi, the rise of a new, more
strident nationalism in Italy in the years before the First World War,
together with a creeping disaffection with the ideals of Italian liberalism,
simply added to Garibaldi's mythical status. The writer and activist Gabriele
D'Annunzio recast Garibaldi as a futurist hero, an ‘Omnipotent Leader
[Duce]’21 and fearless warrior whose patriotic example would lead Italians
to sacrifice themselves for the nationalist cause. Encouraged equally by the
1907 celebrations for the centenary of his birth, Garibaldi's name was
invoked to claim ‘unredeemed’ Italy (l'Italia irredenta, namely, the Trentino
and Trieste) and then to justify intervention in the First World War. During
the war itself, Garibaldi's grandsons organised a volunteer legion to help
defend France against German aggression – to fight for Italy's ‘sister nation’
against ‘the German hordes’ – and two of them, Bruno and Costanzo, died
on the front at Argonne.22 This use of Garibaldi to (re)associate militarism
with national unity led, in turn, to his appropriation by Mussolini's Fascists,
who were seeking to co-opt the Risorgimento and rewrite it as their own
foundation story. An attempt was made to ‘Fascistise’ Garibaldi by stressing
continuities between his and Mussolini's actions (red shirts and black shirts;
the marches on Rome). In a parallel process driven by another of Garibaldi's
grandsons, the Fascist enthusiast Ezio Garibaldi, a new season of Garibaldi
publications got under way, which produced scholarly editions of his
writings, the re-issuing of biographies and volunteers' memoirs and the
journal Camicia Rossa. A high point was reached in 1932, the 50th
anniversary of Garibaldi's death. Official celebrations were personally
directed by Mussolini and included school holidays, an exhibition of relics
in Rome, and the inauguration of a monument to Garibaldi's first wife,
Anita, on the Janiculum hill, along with the ceremonial transfer of her ashes
from a cemetery in Genoa to the monument in Rome.23 In the mid-1930s,
the first professorial chairs in Risorgimento history were established at
Italian universities, and in 1934 Blasetti's film 1860, about the expedition of
Garibaldi's Thousand to Sicily, appeared on Italian screens.24
Fascism was not, however, the last word on Garibaldi and the
Garibaldian cult. Also during the 1930s, the opposition to Fascism sought to
combat the aggressive nationalism of the Fascist regime by reinvoking
Garibaldi as the symbol of popular liberation and internationalism.
Agitating against Mussolini's intervention on the side of Franco in the
Spanish Civil War, Carlo Rosselli, leader of the new Action Party,
proclaimed ‘today in Spain, tomorrow in Italy’. Volunteers for Spain were
organised into groups called ‘Garibaldi brigades’, and these fought with the
Republican Popular Front against Franco and his supporters. The ‘second
Risorgimento’ (1943–5) also saw communist Garibaldi brigades fight in the
Resistance in Italy and Yugoslavia.25
Thereafter, during the early years of the Italian Republic, Garibaldi found
his place again as a founding father of democracy, and was incorporated
into a revised republican ‘religion’ which linked the new myth of the
Resistance and anti-Fascism to the Risorgimento.26 Garibaldi became a
unifying and consensual figure, and in the long decades of Christian
Democrat rule after 1948 his extreme anti-clericalism tended to be erased
from public view. He was remembered every year on Republic Day (2 June,
the date of the referendum which created the Republic, coincidentally also
the date of Garibaldi's death), with its symbols and rituals referring
explicitly to Risorgimento iconography, and he was commemorated further
in a series of centenaries – in 1949 (for the Roman Republic of 1849); in
1959–60 (for national unification in 1859–60); and 1982 (the centenary of
his death). During the 1980s, two of Italy's most prominent politicians – the
leader of the republican party, Giovanni Spadolini, and the leader of the
socialist party, Bettino Craxi – vied with each other to re-propose Garibaldi
according to their own idealised images as, respectively, a symbol of
republican virtue and a founder of Italian socialism.27
Craxi was an intensely controversial figure who was later disgraced in
the mani pulite scandals of the early 1990s and forced to flee Italy to avoid
arrest. Not surprisingly, his part in celebrating and promoting Garibaldi was
the kiss of death for the Garibaldi cult as a ‘place of memory’ for the Italian
people. But, in any case, the power of the cult to evoke a popular response
had been in decline from the Second World War onwards. It is unlikely that
the efforts to revive Garibaldi and other Risorgimento heroes in the
aftermath of Fascism and Italy's military collapse in 1943 were ever that
successful; instead, Garibaldi shared the more general fate of patriotic
tropes and symbols, which lost much of their mobilising force in the post-
war period.
Indeed, it is hard to escape the conclusion that, by the end of the war, the
cult of Garibaldi had run its course. For almost a hundred years, Garibaldi
had been used as an ‘exemplary life’, held up as the physical embodiment
of a series of values and truths with which Italians should identify and so
construct a sense of national community.28 Yet the effort to turn Garibaldi
into a genuinely consensual national symbol in the cold war period reduced
his life to a succession of apolitical banalities, depriving it of precisely
those unusual and unsettling aspects which had given his figure such an
emotional charge. Thus, as personal links with the nineteenth century
receded with the passing of generations, Garibaldi's role as the symbol of
Italian identity was reduced to a list of received values – unity, virtue,
patriotism, military courage – whose repetition in public debate failed to
mask its emptiness as national rhetoric. Even Garibaldi's dress, appearance
and heroic gestures, hitherto considered among his most captivating
features, seemed increasingly ridiculous, appropriate perhaps for school
textbooks but embarrassing if taken seriously by adults. Finally, in the early
1960s, a new generation which cared little about either the Risorgimento or
its ideals produced a new political symbolism and an entirely different set
of heroes. In global consciousness, the place of Garibaldi, it may be argued,
was taken by Che Guevara, a figure of a rather different order, who
nonetheless shared with the ‘hero of two worlds’ some important
characteristics, notably a taste for guerrilla war, revolution rather than
government, an internationalist outlook and a striking personal appearance.
Garibaldi and the historians

In terms of their relationship to Garibaldi, historians were, for once, at the

forefront of popular trends. Most of them had lost interest in him as early as
the 1950s, if not some time before. Previously, historians had embraced the
nationalist legend of Garibaldi, and indeed had contributed significantly to
the creation of a national past for Italy through histories and biographies
which glorified Garibaldi's contribution to Italian unification.29 But after the
Second World War, with the experience of dictatorship an all too powerful
memory, historians throughout Europe began strenuously to resist the
hagiography of ‘Great Men’ and their role in history.30 Alberto Mario
Ghisalberti, head of Rome's Istituto per la Storia del Risorgimento Italiano
(Institute for the History of the Italian Risorgimento), and Emilia Morelli,
first the secretary and then Ghisalberti's successor at the Institute, who
together controlled the official academic approach to the Risorgimento from
the mid-1930s until the late 1980s, took a decidedly unheroic line on
Garibaldi. Ghisalberti went against prevailing orthodoxy to emphasise the
contribution of Mazzini to the achievement of national unity in 1860–1 and
downplayed the importance of Garibaldi.31 He also broke with the practice
of Risorgimento historiography and challenged the celebration of its
principal protagonists (Vittorio Emanuele II, Cavour, Garibaldi and
Mazzini) to focus on lesser-known figures and activists, ‘to search for’, as
he put it, ‘the contribution of so many humble heroes to the solid and
durable construction of a new Italy’.32 In a series of articles written for the
Giornale d'Italia in 1949 to commemorate the centenary exhibition on the
Roman Republic, Ghisalberti called for attention to be focused on ‘minor
figures of the Risorgimento’, on ‘lesser-known personalities and aspects’,33
on important, but neglected figures such as Pietro Roselli, whose actions in
defence of the 1849 republic had, as Ghisalberti put it, been overshadowed
by the ‘gigantic figure of the man from Nice’.34
Ghisalberti and Morelli also concentrated their efforts on accumulating
and cataloguing vast quantities of historical documents relating to the
Risorgimento in their institute's archive in Rome. This emphasis on archival
research – and thus exclusively on what was knowable from the original
sources – represented in itself a departure from nationalist traditions of
Risorgimento narrative, where it had long been held inappropriate, in the
words of one Italian prime minister, Giovanni Giolitti, to let ‘beautiful
historical legends be discredited by historical criticism’.35 It gave rise to a
more prosaic and critical attitude to the Risorgimento. Henceforth, scholarly
interest in, for instance, the 1849 Roman Republic moved away from the
dramatic and heroic actions of Garibaldi and his men, and towards both the
daily details of government and the mistakes of its political leaders,
including Garibaldi.36 This approach, with the huge amount of new archival
material which became available to historians in the post-war period, found
its way also into post-war biographies of Garibaldi, where the stress was
increasingly on Garibaldi the man, politician and/or general, rather than on
Garibaldi ‘the hero’ per se. Nonetheless it is worth noting that historians
were still reluctant really to ‘speak badly of Garibaldi’ (parlar male di
Garibaldi); the new biographies remained essentially within the old
nationalist historiographical tradition. So this new research did not manage
to shake the consensus on, and thus revitalise interest in, Garibaldi as a
historical figure.37
In 1949, as the celebrations for the centenary of the Roman Republic got
under way, Antonio Gramsci's notebooks on the Italian Risorgimento were
published for the first time.38 These notebooks, part of a huge collection of
writings produced by the communist theorist and activist while in a Fascist
prison, outlined a radically different, Marxist interpretation of Italian
unification and its consequences. Gramsci found the origins of the Fascist
dictatorship in the weaknesses of the Risorgimento and the Italian state
which it had created. He defined the Risorgimento as a failed social
revolution, where capitalism had failed to emerge from the ruins of
feudalism and the bourgeoisie had been unable to defeat the nobility; Italy
was thus unfit for liberalism and instead a kind of ‘bastard’, and inherently
unstable, political system was created, without an effective opposition and
based on a mixture of coercion, corruption and incompetence.39 Gramsci's
notebooks gave a huge stimulus to historical debate in Italy. By the 1950s,
indeed, the pre-eminent position of the Institute for Risorgimento History
and the control of Ghisalberti and Morelli over Risorgimento research were
being vigorously challenged by a group of Marxist historians – often based
at the Istituto Gramsci in Rome, a few streets away from the home of the
Institute for Risorgimento History – who outlined an alternative view.
Marxist historians found in the Risorgimento evidence of ‘passive
revolution’, repressed class conflict and political betrayal. They stressed the
frustration of popular aspiration, denied the primacy of politics and
questioned the assumption that Risorgimento history, as outlined by
Ghisalberti et al., was ideologically objective and ‘value-free’.40
The bitter controversy generated by this challenge still did little to spark
new debate about Garibaldi. On the one hand, Ghisalberti and Morelli came
to insist on more respect for Garibaldi and the ‘Risorgimento myth’,41 while
on the other, Marxist historians suggested that the role played in Italian
unification by human action, and especially by Risorgimento heroes such as
Garibaldi, had simply been overstated. At the same time, Marxist historians
refused to exonerate Risorgimento leaders from responsibility for what had
gone wrong. Gramsci always insisted that the failure of Italian unification
was really the fault of its leaders: despite their rhetoric, Mazzinians had
never organised themselves as a mass-mobilising revolutionary vanguard
since they were secretly frightened of popular, especially peasant,
revolution. Garibaldi had ‘a relationship of personal subordination’ to
Cavour and his moderate liberal party, and instead of forging an ‘organic
and coherent’ link with the masses he had preferred to lead a paternalistic
and superficial movement, ‘the political equivalent of gypsy bands and
nomads’.42 Nor was this the end of Garibaldi's now harsh treatment at the
hands of historians. The arrival in Italy towards the end of the 1970s of the
‘new social history’ with its emphasis on the view from below, and on
structures and trends rather than on political action, accelerated the move
away from the study of politics and political leaders like Garibaldi. The
effect was to create a growing sense among historians of modern Italy that
Garibaldi, along with the Risorgimento itself, was ‘old hat’. The history of
the Risorgimento was said to be dominated by an elitist and conservative
historical approach which favoured ‘great men’ over ‘labouring men’ (and
women), and the actions of these men was felt to be much less relevant to
an understanding of contemporary Italy than were, for example, the
experience of Fascism or the policies of post-war politicians.43
There has, of course, been a recent revival of interest in the Risorgimento
and nineteenth-century Italian nationalism. Much new research has
followed the lead given some years ago by scholars like Ernest Gellner, Eric
Hobsbawm and Benedict Anderson, who have encouraged us to look at
national identity not as ancient or inevitable but as something modern, and
as the deliberate, and largely artificial, creation of a new bourgeois elite.44
As a result, historians have turned back to studying the idea and images of
the Italian nation, but this time in the hope of understanding (rather than
either glorifying or decrying) the bases, appeal and impact of nationalism
and nationalist movements in Italy, and as a means of redefining their own
relationship to a complex historiographical tradition which itself has its
origins in the Risorgimento.45
Looking at the early decades of the Risorgimento (the 1790s to around
the 1830s), and primarily at cultural developments rather than political
conflict, Alberto Banti has argued for the existence of a Risorgimento
‘canon’. He points to the key role played by around forty texts (novels,
poems, histories, paintings and operas) in producing the symbols,
metaphors and images which Italian nationalists made their own, and on
which Italian nationalism based its appeal. Crucially, Banti suggests that the
idea of an Italian resurgence was primarily the result of a cultural
elaboration, that it became immensely popular quite quickly (if only among
an educated elite) and that this cultural movement ultimately accounts for
the willingness of young Italian men to become revolutionaries and, if
necessary, die on the barricades. According to Banti, this cultural movement
brought about political change: writing, painting or singing about Italy
became, in the repressive political climate of post-Napoleonic government,
a substitute, basis and impetus for political action.46
Banti's culturalist approach is paralleled, but to an extent also counter-
balanced and contradicted, by research into Italian nationalism after
national unification. Here historians have looked at how Italy's leaders
sought to ‘make Italians’, and at political attempts, such as those made by
Francesco Crispi, which were described above, to construct a sense of
national belonging based on the language, symbols and rituals produced
during the Risorgimento. In contrast to Banti, however, most have argued
that these post-unification attempts to create an Italian national identity
were not only politically driven and imposed from above, but were also
unconvincing and ineffective. Research had shown that most national
commemorations and monuments did not impact upon the collective
imagination and, if anything, served to focus attention on the weaknesses
and divisions within the Italian nation.47
 What scholarly attention has been paid to Garibaldi in this new research
has concentrated on his role as a place of memory, and particularly on the
official cult of Garibaldi, which was created after his death and lasted into
the twentieth century. We now know a great deal about the manifestations
and manipulations of the official cult, from Crispi through Mussolini to
Bettino Craxi, and how it changed over time. We are familiar with the
people who constructed, supported, paid for or opposed the cult.48 We have
become especially accustomed to hearing of its shortcomings and failures.
We know about radical and socialist attempts to protest against Garibaldi's
appropriation by the monarchists49 and about the struggles between
Mussolini and Garibaldi's grandson, Ezio, over the precise codification of
political meaning in the 50th anniversary commemorations of Garibaldi's
death.50 Thanks to the work of Maurice Agulhon, we have also been
informed of the rise and fall of the myth of Garibaldi in France, and the
controversies surrounding it, and we know something about the myth of
Garibaldi elsewhere as well.51 More recent studies have either remained
within the reverential tradition of older biographies, or have focused on
lesser-known aspects of his political career, or on his role in the
international circulation of republican ideas.52
Yet, quite remarkably, we still understand rather little about the
popularity of Garibaldi in his own lifetime. This lacuna reflects our more
general ignorance, in terms of current research, about how Italian
nationalism changed during the climactic years of national unification: that
is, between the early 1840s and 1860s. Currently, we have only the vaguest
sense of what must have happened to transform a patriotic literary canon
espoused by an intellectual elite in the early years of the nineteenth century
into a nationalist orthodoxy available to be used (rather unsuccessfully, as it
turns out) as a political justification for the Italian nation state in the 1880s
and thereafter. Recent research on Italian nationalism leaves the critical
moments of political action and political transformation largely out of the
equation. In particular, it ignores the role of Mazzinian and democratic
activists in producing and synthesising an idea of the Italian nation, which
was also a blueprint (successful or not) for political action.
Thanks to the efforts of previous generations of historians, we are
familiar with every last detail of Garibaldi's colourful life. But we don't
really know how he became so famous and why his contemporaries
considered his life to be politically significant and emotionally moving. We
have hardly thought at all about what message his fame was meant to
convey and to whom, or about the political or cultural impact of Garibaldi's
celebrity. What part, if any, Garibaldi himself played in creating, promoting
and popularising the cult which surrounded him has rarely been considered.
Garibaldi, as one historian has remarked, ‘precisely because of the
suffocating rhetoric which has overwhelmed him’, still remains ‘largely
unknown’.53
Rethinking Garibaldi

There is a long tradition in Italian politics, dating back to the Risorgimento,

of portraying Garibaldi as honest and honourable but also as personally
foolish and politically inept. This image served his opponents in obvious
ways. By allowing Garibaldi a role as a moral symbol while denying him
one as a thinker and strategist, it helped to neutralise his presence as an
effective leader or representative of a genuine movement: Garibaldi had
charm, it was said, but should not be taken too seriously.54 Yet this image,
cast in a more positive light, worked equally in Garibaldi's favour and was
promoted by the democratic left. It enhanced his status as a genuinely
popular figure. Unlike Cavour, Mazzini and most other Risorgimento
leaders, Garibaldi could be portrayed as ‘of the people’: uneducated,
unsophisticated, with a plain upbringing and modest demeanour. Garibaldi's
apparent sincerity also distinguished him effectively from the compromises
of public life, and preserved him from the accusations of self-serving
cynicism which damaged so many of his contemporaries and successors on
the Italian political scene then and later. Most crucially perhaps, his
conspicuous simplicity helped maintain a distance between his political
presence and the emotional response to it; his own lack of calculation made
the cult of Garibaldi seem spontaneous and, hence, much more genuine and
more powerful.
Promoted by his opponents and supporters, and whether presented as a
defect or a virtue, this image of Garibaldi as a humble hero has proved
remarkably enduring. With very few exceptions, it has prevented historians
from ever considering that he might have played a serious part in creating
himself as a political celebrity.55 However, my research suggests that this
view of Garibaldi is unsustainable. As a political leader, Garibaldi was not
especially foolish or inept, although the prevailing, elitist rules of public life
may have made him seem uneducated and unworldly. He read a lot and
wrote copiously, was an expert (if selftaught) in navigation, agriculture and
warfare, and had travelled very widely, from a very early age. Moreover,
from his South American days onwards, Garibaldi worked closely with
other nationalist leaders to promote himself and seek publicity for the
Italian cause. Any careful analysis of his public persona taken as a whole –
his speeches, his memoirs, his novels and poetry, his clothes, his appearance
and the photographs of it, his actions on the battlefield, his behaviour in
parliament, his lifestyle on Caprera – must surely conclude that here was a
man who understood very well the impact of his presence and knew how to
protect and manipulate it to achieve the desired effect. It seems clear, in
other words, as I will seek to show, that Garibaldi's celebrity was the result
of a political and rhetorical strategy.56 How this strategy worked both in
structure and content, what its purpose was, and what impact it had, are the
major concerns of this book.
The heroic narrative of Italian unification, and especially the climactic
events between the 1848–9 revolutions and Garibaldi's expedition to Sicily,
captivated most contemporaries. And, at least until the last years of Fascist
rule, the same narrative obscured historical hindsight in Italy and elsewhere.
For example, both nineteenthcentury English liberals and the great English
liberal historian George Macaulay Trevelyan, writing in the early 1900s,
saw the Risorgimento as a kind of ‘latterday morality tale’, a battle between
good (the Italians) and bad (the Austrian Empire; the Papacy) and with the
satisfaction of a happy ending, where virtue seemed to triumph with the
unification of Italy.57 Yet, however biased or inaccurate this tale may seem
to us, it would be a mistake entirely to ignore it, since it provides us with a
key to understanding Risorgimento politics. The moral engagement of
British liberals with Italian unification should be seen as the reflection of a
successful, and enduring, Risorgimento myth or, to follow Anthony Smith's
definition, a nationalist narrative of ‘cultural-ideological’ descent which
sought to recreate, and identify itself with, the ‘heroic spirit (and the
heroes)’ of a ‘past golden age’.58 Equally, the creation of this Risorgimento
myth was the outcome of a sophisticated propaganda exercise organised by
Italy's nationalist leaders and aimed outside as well as inside Italy, which
presented their struggle for political liberty as a concluding stage in Italy's
national story. Put simply, the conviction that Italian unification was
morally just and historically grounded, and the contrary view of Austria and
the Papacy as irretreivably retrograde and undeniably evil, may have been a
misrepresentation, an illusion or an outright untruth, but it had an
undeniable rhetorical and mobilising force, which was at least partly the
effect of a careful political strategy.59 Indeed, so successful was this
political strategy that to this day it still conditions our understanding of, and
our response to, the Risorgimento and its protagonists.
Garibaldi was crucial to this strategy. The deliberate creation of a cult of
Garibaldi meant that his military successes were not just applauded and
admired, they also became a symbol of all that was justifiable (virtuous,
inevitable) about the Italian cause. Hence, the heroic cult of Garibaldi was
used to represent and spread the Italian nationalist myth at home and
abroad. The fame of Garibaldi brought material support – men and money –
for the wars of Italian unification and helped to make them victorious. So
the cult served to focus, integrate and mobilise public support for the
political myth of the Italian nation and to legitimise Italian nationalism as a
political movement. As a symbol of the Italian nation, the cult of Garibaldi
was supposed to transform the way people imagined their rulers and
thought about politics; his heroic leadership was part of a broader attempt to
create new rituals and promote a political language, and to make persuasive
the nationalist vision of the future and the past.60 After unification, the cult
of Garibaldi was used in different attempts to create and reinforce a
collective national identity, or a sense of political belonging which could
accompany the new legal definitions of the state's relationship with society
and would bind people emotionally to their new rulers.61 The great interest
to us of a man like Garibaldi is that his fame, and the use which was made
of it, allows us to ask general questions about how political heroes are made
and what purpose they serve as collective symbols of a political idea.
As a political leader, Garibaldi seems to conform very closely to the ideal
type of ‘charismatic’ authority defined by Max Weber as a ‘certain quality
of an individual personality by virtue of which he is considered
extraordinary and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at
least specifically exceptional powers or qualities’, and on the basis of which
he is recognised by others as a leader.62 Weber's analysis of charismatic
authority has been immensely influential, notably in studies of the
twentieth-century dictators, and is extremely useful in helping us to
understand the general social and political conditions under which
charismatic authority can develop, and the mechanisms of its operation.
Other scholars have pointed to a ‘widespread disposition to attribute
charismatic propensities to ordinary secular roles’, or for any form of
‘central authority’ to acquire an ‘inherent sacredness’ or charisma; they
suggest that Weber's analysis can offer broader insights into the relationship
between political power and its symbolic representation.63 The association
of Garibaldi, in various textual and visual representations, with
‘extraordinariness’; with divine and/or sacred qualities, magical powers and
physical prowess, are all suggestive of the charismatic properties of his
public persona.64 So, in this book, I follow Weber in treating the cult of
Garibaldi as an example of charismatic authority, and I also seek to explain
the political and symbolic purpose which it served.
However, my emphasis is more strictly historical and, as such, rather
different from the more general sociological interests of Weber. In
particular, I seek to analyse and explain the specific means by which
Garibaldi's charisma was created and promoted; in other words, I am
interested in how, when and why Garibaldi became ‘extraordinary’ and a
charismatic leader in the eyes of a general public. I argue that the cult of
Garibaldi was part of a process of political and cultural modernisation, and
especially that its reach and impact were made possible by huge
improvements in mass communication. It is also worth remembering that
the public's perception of Garibaldi as an extraordinary and exceptional
individual preceded the general success of the Italian nationalist movement.
Although the nationalist victories in Italy gave an enormous boost to his
fame, he remained, for the most part, as (if not more) effective as an
alternative political symbol, or as a symbol which represented political
opposition and aversion.65 In effect, what makes a study of Garibaldi
especially interesting and important is that, unlike most successful
charismatic leaders of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Europe, he
was not (or was hardly ever) in power. His success allows us to examine the
process, generally neglected by scholars of both charismatic leadership and
modern political symbolism, whereby radical movements invent new rituals
and symbols, and use these both to delegitimise established authority and to
make believable their claim to be the genuine governing elite.66
The present study seeks to go beyond both the hagiography of traditional
histories and the neglect characteristic of more recent research on Garibaldi.
Rather than either celebrating or deflating the heroic cult of Garibaldi, my
work engages directly with the cult and its manifestations. My aim is to
explore the political motives for the creation of a Garibaldi cult, the
political message which it embodied and popularised and the forms of its
public representation. But rather than looking at the official cult of
Garibaldi after 1882, this study concentrates on his own lifetime and on his
own activity, and on the period of his major political engagement and
popularity between the mid-1840s and the 1870s. My focus, in other words,
is on Garibaldi the symbol of revolutionary nationalism rather on the
posthumous Garibaldi, an official symbol of the Italian state. Since
Garibaldi must be understood as an international celebrity as well as a
nationalist hero, my research also takes in the view of Garibaldi offered by
the press in London, Paris, Berlin, New York and Buenos Aires. At the same
time, I place great emphasis on Garibaldi's experiences in Sicily. The reason
for doing so is that this brief period (May to October 1860) was the only
time he enjoyed political power. It was also the absolute high point of his
national and international fame. Lastly, I consider anti-Garibaldi rhetoric,
especially attempts by the Church to enter into, and combat, the nationalist
discourse, and I also look at how both Garibaldi and his public dealt with
his political failures and his old age.
Garibaldi's life has always been told as a coherent and ordered narrative,
with a series of minor adventures leading to a heroic climax and a gradual
retirement thereafter. In so far as it uses a chronological approach, this book
is no exception. On a purely practical level, it is difficult to make sense of
Garibaldi's long career without reference to his own life cycle and the
changing political times he lived through and participated in. Nevertheless,
my analysis places equal weight on the conscious creation and diffusion of
a biography of Garibaldi and on the literary construction of an exemplary
life for political purposes. The life of Garibaldi must be considered through
the study of two different narratives, each with its own timing and logic: the
first being the highs and lows of Garibaldi's political career and military
engagements; the second, the refashioning of this career as a public
spectacle representing a series of political and moral imperatives (or the
creation of a ‘myth’ of Garibaldi as part of his personality cult). In the latter
case, his life story could be made up and it had more than one author. His
biography was in fact the product of several authors (including Garibaldi
himself) whose stories could conflict with each other and escape into the
realms of fiction and fantasy, and where the dominant motif was as much
entertainment, dramatic appeal and literary convention as biographical
truth.
Weber was clear that charismatic authority was inherently unstable, prone
both to ‘routinisation’ and to challenge and failure.67 Most studies of
twentieth-century leader cults have found a stark distinction between image
and reality, or a huge gulf between a ‘script’ which cast these leaders as
popular heroes and an entirely different political truth, which was about
constructing an apparatus of power and ‘stupefying the masses’. Recently,
even British Fascism has been recast as a ‘spectacular’ failure, whose
electoral and ideological bankruptcy contrasts with its energetic marketing
of megalomania.68 In the case of Garibaldi, all these contrasts are much less
vivid. First, the Garibaldi cult was surprisingly resistant to attempts at
institutionalisation, at least during his lifetime and for a while thereafter.
Second, although part of his heroic image was, as I have just stressed, an
elaborate construction, based on novelistic fantasy and dramatic invention,
part of it was also based on his military accomplishments and undeniable
physical presence. In this sense, the life lived and the life imagined were
dependent on each other; to give just one example, the events of 1859–60
provide an effective climax to both. The moment of Garibaldi's greatest
military and political successes also offered a chance to rewrite Garibaldi's
life story, and to revisit and recast his previous adventures as a precursor to
this triumph. And during the political failures which followed, the memory
of 1860 could be used to give a glorious, melancholic and persuasive
rationale to Garibaldi's actions. Garibaldi, in other words, was not just a
‘sign’, he was also ‘lived existence’.69 If Garibaldi's greatness has
significance for historians, it should lie precisely in this combination of
invention and reality, or this mixture of literary elaboration and concrete
achievement, and in our attempt to explore and understand it.
If it is a mistake neatly to separate Garibaldi's political and military
successes from the stories told about them, it is equally imposssible to
ignore their public impact and reception. My study will also be concerned
with the response to Garibaldi: with the formation of a liberal public keen
on Garibaldi and with the need to keep this public informed, well-read and
satisfied with the stories told about him. One of the general concerns of this
book is to make visible the complex dialogue which developed in the
middle of the nineteenth century – thanks largely to new technologies and
to increased education and wealth – between political leaders, journalists
and the public over the production and control of information, and over the
kind of language and symbols used to represent the public sphere. Perhaps
especially, a study of the cult of Garibaldi bears out Geoff Eley's point
about the existence of diverse and competing publics, rather than a single,
liberal model, and about the increasingly ‘democratic resonance’ and radical
character of the public sphere in the nineteenth century.70 I will also argue
that Garibaldi was genuinely ‘popular’, in that his appeal stretched beyond
an elite intellectual readership and reached a broader literate public through
cheap and easily accessible textual and visual media. Most of the sources
which I have used to study the cult of Garibaldi are those of romantic low
literature, a literature which was commercially successful, characterised by
increasingly standardised forms and which created a new and popular, if by
no means mass, reading culture.71 It was this culture which formed
Garibaldi's public.
Modern political heroes, like the nationalist movements with which they
are identified, are often treated as political inventions imposed from above
on a passive population. I will suggest instead that, while there was a great
deal about Garibaldi's appeal which was planned by political leaders, his
definition and creation as a political hero was still a largely collaborative
effort, involving audience participation as well as directions from the
stage.72 The public's enthusiasm for Garibaldi reflected a broader
contemporary appetite for romantic heroes and adventure stories, and
Garibaldi modelled his political image to fit this popular demand. The task
of Garibaldi was not only to make Italy, he had also to make Italy
convincing. How he did so, and whether he fully succeeded, will be
discussed in the chapters which follow.
 CHAPTER 1

NATION AND RISORGIMENTO

Mazzini and ‘Young Italy’

In 1843, the Italian nationalist leader Giuseppe Mazzini wrote from his
exile in London to another Italian exile in Uruguay: ‘Garibaldi is a man
who will be of use to the country when it is time for action’.1 His
correspondent was Giovanni Battista Cuneo, who was a journalist and a
Ligurian like Mazzini, and who, like Mazzini and Garibaldi himself, had
been forced to flee Italy in the early 1830s as a result of his involvement in
political conspiracies against the Piedmontese government. Such
transatlantic contacts between Mazzini and Cuneo tell us much about the
ambitions of Mazzini and the role he envisaged for Garibaldi. They were
part of a political strategy which he had developed over the previous
decade, and reflected the network he had built up, incorporating exiles,
activists, writers and sympathisers in Europe and the Americas, as well as
conspirators within Italy itself.
Mazzini was the founder and head of what he claimed to be an immense
revolutionary organisation called ‘Young Italy’ (Giovine Italia), of which
Cuneo and Garibaldi were both members. He had established Young Italy in
Marseille in 1831, after the failure of a series of uprisings against the
conservative governments in central Italy. These uprisings had discredited
the Carbonari secret society (to which Mazzini had belonged) and other
revolutionary secret societies, and had shown both their conspiratorial
methods and their dependence on French leadership to be misguided.2 The
new movement – Young Italy – which Mazzini proposed aimed to be quite
different from the secret societies. It was based on youth because only the
young, Mazzini believed, were uncompromised by the failure of the old
sectarian organisations and their practices inherited from the French
Revolution; the young had no memory of that revolution and were instead
the bearers of a new, romantic spirit and culture. Only they could carry out
the task of democratic renewal and national ‘resurrection’ which Mazzini
envisaged for Italy.3
The goal of Mazzini was nothing less than the creation of a new society
based on the Saint-Simonian principles of association, progress and
religious faith.4 However, unlike Saint-Simon, he made Italy, not France,
the leader of the new age: ‘It is in Italy that the European knot must be
untied. To Italy belongs the high office of emancipation; Italy will fulfill its
civilizing mission.’5 His mission for Italy in Europe was expressed
succinctly in a letter written to a sympathiser in 1846: ‘Twice we have
given moral Unity to Europe; and I have faith in God that we will give it …
a third time.’6 Mazzini's new religion of ‘Humanity’ was also to be
achieved through a political revolution which would introduce a concrete
set of changes. In an early draft of the statutes and instructions for the
organisation, Mazzini set out five political, religious and social aims:

1. One republic, undivided across the whole territory of Italy, independent, united and free. 2.
The destruction of the entire upper hierarchy of the clergy and the introduction of a simple
parish system. 3. The abolition of all aristocracy and every privilege which is not the result of
the eternal law of capacity and action. 4. An unlimited encouragement of public education. 5.
The most explicit declaration of the rights of man and the citizen.7

Young Italy was to adopt the slogan ‘Unity, Independence, Liberty’, and the
establishment of a unitary republic in Italy was to be the signal for a general
revolution, marking the end of monarchy, aristocracy and clerical privilege
across Europe.
Mazzini's republican and democratic vision for Italy represented a fusion
of romantic socialist and Jacobin ideas. In fact, Mazzini admitted that the
ideas behind Young Italy were not especially original but were simply
intended to realise and apply to Italy ‘truths that today are diffused
throughout Europe’.8 Mazzini's early strategies were equally derivative.
They were influenced as much by the old Italian Jacobin, Buonarotti, as
they were by his desire to distinguish the new movement from, and
supplant, Buonarotti's methods.9 And it is worth remembering that for
Mazzini and his followers the risorgimento (‘resurgence’) of Italy was a call
for immediate military action. To become a nation, Italians had to fight. The
new foundation story for the ‘Third Rome’ was to be based on political
freedom and military success: Italians would become an example to the rest
of the world of military heroism as well as civic virtue.
Military planning was central both to Mazzini's thinking and to
disagreements with him. Debates about strategy revolved around two
difficult questions: how to overcome the indifference of the mostly rural
population – how, in other words, to involve the Italian people militarily in
their own emancipation – and how the revolution could defend itself against
the unquestionably superior forces of Austria and its allies. Mazzini's
general answer was that Italians would liberate themselves, and specifically
that the selfless heroism of a few activists could inspire the Italian people to
rise and throw off the Austrian yoke. The link to, and the creation of, the
people – no longer mere individuals but now the popolo associated as a
nation – would be entrusted to a recognisably Jacobin figure: a ‘genius’, ‘a
prophetic actor of the future destinies of nations and of humanity’, a ‘spark
of God’, and a thinker and activist capable of expressing and embodying the
unity and ‘brotherhood’ of humanity.10 In this way, the revolution would
encompass an elite and a mass ‘moment’. As Mazzini conceived of it
initially, it would start off as an urban uprising led by the elite conspirators
of Young Italy, but would continue as a rural war or guerra per bande, with
the people organised into guerrilla bands in the countryside.11
As one of Mazzini's biographers remarks, Young Italy was part secret
society and part modern political party. It was a secret society in so far as it
relied on conspiratorial methods and the leadership of ‘an inner core of true
believers’, but it was also modern in that it ‘called out to the people’.12 In
practice, Mazzini relied heavily on the dedication and enthusiasm of his
(mostly young, mostly educated) followers and on their readiness to die for
Italy. The ‘general instruction for the brothers of Young Italy’, which
members – including Garibaldi – swore when they joined, resembles the
oaths sworn by members of secret societies in its appeal to a sense of
religious truth and belonging. A lengthy preamble stated the rationale for
Young Italy as ‘the brotherhood of Italians believing in a law of progress
and duty … convinced that Italy is destined to be a nation’, while it defined
the territory of Italy as the peninsula ‘between the sea to the south and the
upper circle of the Alps to the north’ and the islands ‘declared as Italian in
the talk of native inhabitants’. The preamble further declared Young Italy's
aims to be ‘republican and unitary’ by nature, history and destiny:
republican because ‘all the men of a nation are destined … to be free, equal
and brothers; and the republican institution is the only one which assures
them this future – because sovereignty resides essentially in the nation’; and
unitary because ‘without unity there is no nation … no force … because the
entire logic of Italian civilisation has for centuries … tended towards unity’.
Furthermore, in swearing loyalty to Young Italy, members swore loyalty
not only to Italy but to everything the nation could feasibly be identified
with: God, the (national) saints and martyrs, family (brothers, mothers and
children), a sense of place and history, and a sense of duty, morality and
sacrifice for the community. Thus, members swore:

In the name of God and Italy, [i]n the name of all the martyrs of the holy Italian cause, fallen
under the blows of foreign and domestic tyranny … [and] for the duties that tie me to the land
where God has placed me, and to the brothers that God has given me – for the love, innate in
every man, for the places where my mother was born and where my children will live – for the
hate, innate in every man, for evil, injustice, usurpation, arbitrary power … for the memory of
past glory – for the knowledge of present humiliation – for the tears of Italian mothers – for
sons who have died on the scaffold, in prisons, in exile – for the misery of millions.

They also promised to dedicate themselves (‘di consecrarmi’) for ever to

the cause of Italy ‘united, independent, free, republican’ and to ‘promote’
by all possible means, ‘by word, writings, action, [and] the education of my
brothers’, the values and association of Young Italy.13
Mazzini's use of religious and romantic language can easily confuse the
reader today, but the essential point here is that Young Italy was a
revolutionary organisation, and that Mazzini's ‘general instruction’ seeks to
be both political rhetoric – in that it seeks to encourage and inspire believers
– and a concrete statement of political realities. The long preamble states
the existence of Italy (‘destined to be a nation’) and delineates its physical
borders, hence justifying the actions of Young Italy; the invocation gives its
members a common history, experience and identity (‘for the memory of
past glory – for the knowledge of present humiliation’) and places a special
emphasis on sacrifice and martyrdom for the community; while the pledge
offers them a goal (Italy ‘united, independent, free, republican’) and all the
means – words, action, education – to achieve it. Like his Jacobin
predecessors, Mazzini sought not just to overthrow the existing government
but to transform the way Europeans (led by the Italians) thought, talked and
behaved politically. And, perhaps even more than the Jacobins, Mazzini
sought to achieve this revolution as much by an appeal to religious
dedication and emotional belonging as by a call to reason and recourse to
armed conflict. Young Italy was a secular religion. As Emilio Gentile has
remarked, Young Italy ‘was an apostolate, revolutionary action devoted to
the “religion of martyrdom” and leading to the resurrection of a “new
Italy”’.14
The idea of the nation

Mazzini's invocation of religion and history, and his reliance on the selfless
dedication (even until death) of young men, also reflected his perception of
the problems which Italian nationalists faced in making visible and
convincing their idea of the Italian nation. Scholars of nationalism and
nationalist movements have long disagreed about whether modern nations
are built on pre-existing ‘ethnies’ or whether they are merely the product of
modernisation, either as the accompaniment to urbanisation and
industrialisation or as a conscious invention of new political elites in the
last three decades of the nineteenth century.15 However, if we look more
closely at how Italian national identity was formed, this debate appears to
be somewhat misconceived. What Alberto Banti has called the ‘national–
patriotic discourse’ in Risorgimento Italy seems neither to have been
invented ex nuovo nor to be based on an existing ethnic or political identity.
Instead, the national–patriotic discourse simply ‘manipulated’, ‘transposed’
and ‘modelled itself on’ an existing set of symbols, metaphors and rituals.16
It is equally clear that although Italy did not exist politically in any sense
before the middle of the nineteenth century, quite a strong sense of cultural
italianità (Italianness) did exist among a small educated elite in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and was expressed in their scientific
interests, in their associational life – in courts, salons, academies and opera
houses – and in literature and the visual arts.17 Indeed, as Raymond Grew
tells us, ‘[e]ducated Italians took delight in their common culture: the Latin
classics; Dante, and all the Italian poets after him; five centuries of
paintings and sculptures recognized as Italian, and music that was admired
and imitated across Europe. Culture ranked with geography … as a marker
of Italian identity.’18
However, this elite culture was profoundly affected by the French
invasions and occupations of Italy which took place between 1792 and
1815. The French Revolution and Napoleonic wars represent a watershed in
the politics of the Italian peninsula: the ensuing upheavals shook the
legitimacy of the ancien régime states; upset the already delicate relations
between state, Church and nobility; brutally modernised and centralised the
administration of power; and repeatedly altered Italy's internal and external
frontiers. The revolution in government brought about social change in that
a new generation and a new class of men, with new ideas and values, came
to fill important positions in public administration and the army.19 Perhaps
most significantly for our understanding of the rise of nationalism in Italy
was the experience of the shortlived Jacobin Republics (1797–9), which
sought to transform the way people thought about politics. The Jacobins
introduced new political symbols and rituals and a new language of politics,
and encouraged new forms of political engagement and belonging. And
although many intellectuals denounced the revolution, they did embrace
some of its principles, and the arrival of the French gave an enormous
stimulus to intellectual life, especially in cities like Milan, which saw the
establishment of forty journals between 1796 and 1799.20 Most of all, the
old elite language of italianità proved receptive to the introduction of a new
political vocabulary of revolution, which had words like ‘nation’ and
‘patria’ (fatherland) at its core.21
In short, Italian national identity was derived from the culture of the
eighteenth-century elite, but this culture was first transformed by the French
Revolution and then by Napoleon. Restoration Italy did the rest. The
revolutionary period was followed by a public backlash after the return of
Italy's ancien régime rulers in 1814–15 as part of a general settlement
created by the Congress of Vienna, which restored (most of) Italy's internal
frontiers and placed the whole peninsula within an Austrian, and thus
conservative, sphere of influence. The antirevolutionary backlash sought to
punish and ‘purge’ those who had supported the revolution and to repress its
symbols – to outlaw the use of revolutionary images, rituals and language –
as well as to cancel some (although by no means all) of its political ideas
and administrative legacy.22 Political discussions of italianità, associated
with the vocabulary of revolution, were stifled by government censors. But
since the censors in Restoration Italy were concerned with an ostensibly
political threat, they largely failed to notice and control the growing
popularity of the idea of Italy in the arts: in poetry, novels, opera, histories
and painting. In fact, under the influence of the romantic movement, whose
arrival in Italy was announced by Mme de Staël in 1816, studying Italy's
past, painting Italian subjects and writing and singing about Italy became
highly fashionable.23
Italian romanticism is usually seen as less interesting than its English or
German counterparts. It is said to be largely derivative of the romantic
movement in northern Europe; to represent less of a break with the
eighteenthcentury Enlightenment; and to have developed in Italy only when
it was already past its peak elsewhere. For our purposes, however, the
artistic merits of Italian romanticism are less important than its impact and
reception, and here it is worth noting that romanticism in Italy was less
conservatively inclined and had a broader reach than romanticism
elsewhere. Partly because it was more consensual, romanticism in Italy was
able to incorporate both a strongly religious dimension and progressive
eighteenthcentury ideas. This consensus meant that while Italian romantics
united around what they called the ‘modernisation’ of Italian literature and
rejected the rigid conservatism of the academy, they could do this without
denying the weight of their own history and culture. They spoke of the need
for art and literature to reach the people and of a literary, linguistic and
artistic tradition which was specifically ‘Southern’ and had its roots in the
medieval period. In this way, Italian romantics could openly engage with
problems of the present while embracing specific aspects of their ‘national’
past.24
In post-revolutionary Italy, the concern with Italy's past probably owes as
much to this new culture of romanticism as it does to previous narratives of
italianità. Banti suggests that the romantic literary and artistic forms
through which italianità was expressed in Restoration Italy meant that it
reached a far wider audience than a ‘cold and remote work of [political]
analysis’ might have done.25 For example, the historical adventure novel
was something of a publishing phenomenon in the 1820s and 1830s. Walter
Scott's medieval romance, Ivanhoe, was published in nine separate editions
between 1822 and 1854, and Italy produced its own version of this genre,
most notably with the novels of Alessandro Manzoni, Domenico Guerrazzi
and Massimo d'Azeglio.26 Generally, through the works of such writers, as
well as the poetry of Foscolo and Leopardi, the operas of Rossini, Bellini
and Verdi and the paintings of Hayez, the idea of Italy met with public
acclaim and touched a chord in public emotions. In this way, the
conservatism and censorship of Restoration Italy can be said to have
indirectly stimulated the growth of a Risorgimento culture. It helped to
introduce future Italian patriots to an Italian nation whose appeal was all the
more powerful because it was first heard in romantic novels, paintings or
song.
The central argument of Alberto Banti's work is that the Risorgimento
texts produced by romantic writers and artists in Restoration Italy created
the symbols, images and metaphors which Italian nationalists like Mazzini
were then able to make their own. Hence, the national–patriotic discourse
gave shape to the political struggles of the Risorgimento and offered an
identity to united Italy. According to Banti, this discourse used a number of
key themes which were common to all Risorgimento texts and are repeated
in the political rhetoric of all Italian nationalists: the nation is conceived as
a voluntary pact amongst a free and equal fraternity, and is also a natural
and organic community, an extended family and a shared historical identity.
The nation is, in other words, envisaged as a community established by
bonds of nature, affection and history. For example, in L'assedio di Firenze,
a historical novel about the end of the Florentine Republic in 1530 and the
final defeat of Italian independence and liberty, Guerrazzi describes the
fatherland as the place which ‘first gives you life and the air that you
breathe and the light which you see and the love of your father and
mother’.27 Yet, as Guerrazzi's novel makes clear, the fatherland is under
threat, and Italy's more recent past must be written as a story of decadence,
foreign oppression and internal division. Hence, another common theme of
Risorgimento narratives is suffering and danger – a hero betrayed, a virgin
dishonoured, a land oppressed by foreign tyranny – and with this threat
comes an equal emphasis on the redemptive power of courage, rebellion
and martyrdom.
 One of the most popular of all Risorgimento narratives was the Sicilian
Vespers. This popular rising in Palermo against the French in 1282 was
studied by two historians (Nicolini in 1831; Amari in 1842), was painted no
less than three times by Hayez (in 1822, 1835 and 1844–6), and was the
subject of an opera by Verdi in 1853. For Amari, who was Sicilian, the
outbreak of the revolt – when a Frenchman was killed with a single blow
for insulting the honour of a Sicilian woman on her way to church –
‘restored Grecian virtue to the people of Palermo, and the latter to the
whole island’. ‘Our people’, Amari maintained in a specific reference to the
Vespers as a national foundation story and in an attempt to make Sicily part
of an Italian narrative, ‘proudly preserves until today the memories of that
ancient fierce virtue.’ The broader significance of the Vespers was that it
could be depicted as the first successful fight for national independence
against foreign oppression (although it is also worth pointing out that
Amari, Hayez and Verdi all had problems with the undeniable presence of
mob violence in the ensuing massacre of Frenchmen).28 The exceptional
resonance of the Sicilian Vespers was due to its potent combination of
Risorgimento themes: of sexual aggression perpetrated by a foreign
oppressor as well as courage in upholding and defending the honour of the
national community, represented here by the threat to a ‘pure’ woman.
In Risorgimento narratives like the Sicilian Vespers, these themes of
foreign aggression, defiance in the face of oppression, and redemption are
represented and played out in the actions of individual characters or
protagonists. They are the main means by which the reader is drawn into
and identifies with the plot and they are responsible for driving the plot – or
their adventure – forward. The most important of these protagonists is the
hero. According to Mario Praz, romanticism produced a new kind of rebel
hero, a unique and memorable individual who rejects the dictates and
constrictions of society to remain true to his own belief in freedom and
justice, and who is prepared to sacrifice his happiness and even his life for
these convictions.29 This hero takes his place in the romantic novel,
especially in the historical adventure novels favoured by Italian romantic
writers, as a brave and intensely physical individual: ‘prodigies of courage
and endurance, unnatural to us, are natural to him … the hero is a leader …
[with] authority, passions and powers of expression far greater than ours’.30
But the hero can also be the ‘perfect knight’, who embodies older, chivalric
ideals of loyalty, sobriety and perseverance.31 Thus, in Risorgimento
narratives, the hero is a virile man and an attractive lover, and a courageous
soldier who is ready to lead his community against the enemy; he is also an
honourable man who is prepared to die to defend his principles, and in fact
he is nearly always destined for a dramatic death which will save and
‘redeem’ the community. As we will see in the next chapter, this idealised
Italian, a brave, virile and honourable hero, finds a seemingly reallife
counterpart in the figure of Garibaldi.
Two other protagonists are central to Risorgimento narratives. The villain
betrays his community and the hero to the foreign oppressor for glory
and/or for money: he thereby ‘collaborates’ in the decline and humiliation
of the community. The heroine – who represents in some sense the quest or
prize of the historical adventure – is a convinced patriot, a virtuous mother,
a sister and/or a lover, whose honour and sexual purity are threatened by the
villain or the foreign oppressor, and sometimes by both at the same time.
The relationship between the hero and heroine introduces the themes of
romantic love and/or family attachment, giving the hero the opportunity to
appear gentle, kind and sensitive to us rather than merely fearless and
violent.32 This relationship and its opposite – the evil designs of the villain
or foreigner on the virtuous heroine – bring sex into the plot, a device which
clearly attracted audiences, if the success of the Sicilian Vespers is anything
to go by. At the same time, what Alberto Banti calls ‘this figurative triad of
the national narrative’ (hero, villain, heroine) evokes the gospels and relies
heavily on religious references. Thus, the hero can equally be seen as a
Christ figure who fights and sacrifices himself for a holy cause. Moreover,
like Christ, his actions and his suffering save the community from
dishonour and show the way to resurrection (or risorgimento), while the
villain is a Judas figure whose betrayal of the community drives the plot
forward.33
The Vespers, and the use of similar episodes in Italy's past, point us to
what is perhaps one of the most powerful and constant of all Risorgimento
themes, which is that of war and the culture of war. The plot of almost all
Risorgimento narratives involves a battle or series of battles, and the hero is
usually a military man. In Guerrazzi's L'assedio di Firenze, the hero is the
reallife military leader, Francesco Ferruccio, ‘the valiant Ferruccio’ who
fights to the death with a tiny army to defend Florentine (and Italian) liberty
and independence against Imperial and Papal agression. In D'Azeglio's
Ettore Fieramosca, ossia la disfida di Barletta (‘Hector Fieramosca or the
challenge of Barletta’), the young patriotic hero, Fieramosca, leads a duel
between thirteen French and thirteen Italians to defend Italian honour
against the accusation that Italian soldiers are only good ‘for intrigue and
betrayal’ and are ‘the worst soldiers who ever put foot in a stirrup and wore
a breastplate’. But the Italians win the day and return to Barletta, to be
welcomed as heroes by the local population.34
There is, of course, nothing unusual about the emphasis on war in Italian
adventure stories. The history provided in the novels of Scott, Dumas and
other contemporary nonItalian writers is almost invariably a history of war,
armed struggle and violence.35 It is nevertheless worth remembering, since
the Risorgimento and Risorgimento rhetoric are not often associated with
militarism. Indeed, as a foundation story for the Italian nation, war is an
extremely ambivalent one: it is as much, if not more, a narrative of defeat,
of ‘battles lost’, as a story of military success.36 Yet, war is important since
it provides the basic plot of most Risorgimento narratives; it ties together
the themes of oppression, resistance to oppression and redemption even in
defeat, and it produces one of the crucial ingredients of popular success:
identification with, and exaltation of, the valiant hero who defends national
honour. Equally, war provides Risorgimento culture with a crucial – and
otherwise largely absent – link to political rhetoric. In a tradition which
goes back to Machiavelli, the story of battles lost is associated with the
corruption of Italy's rulers, while military victories – such as the ‘challenge’
at Barletta – are linked to the selfless heroism of individuals or small groups
acting on their own initiative, usually without (or despite) government
intervention.37
If Banti is correct in locating the origins of a national–patriotic discourse
in Italy in preexisting narratives – such as the story of Christ or wellknown
military episodes in Italy's history – then the great achievement of Italian
writers and artists in this period was to respond to the challenge of
romanticism by creating a more popular Italian literature, which recast these
stories in an individual and heroic vein, and which linked their plot lines of
love, sex, religion and violence to new ideas of community, association,
independence and liberty. Yet this romantic vision of Italy had no
immediate political objective. An Italy that was past was imagined by the
romantics, and was imagined in suggestive and emotive ways, but in the
postrevolutionary climate of Restoration Italy there were few obvious signs
of Italy's present existence. Many (although not all) romantic intellectuals
were far from interested in politics, preferring to adopt a more melancholy
or nostalgic attitude towards political questions. And however passionate
the readers of romantic novels were about these stories and their heroes,
they were still part of a tiny and restricted – if admittedly expanding –
section of the population, who were actually able to read Italian.38 In this
respect, the Restoration censors were not wrong to ignore romanticism. For
the rest, Italy was precisely what the Austrian chancellor, Prince Metternich,
described it as – ‘a geographical expression’. It had ‘no national traditions
of sacred monarchy’,39 no secular symbols of national ‘belonging’, a
language which was written and spoken by few, and a past which, while it
could be reassigned by romantics to celebrate a cultural italianità, was
equally, if not more, credible as a narrative of ‘division and weakness and
mutual enmity’.40
Risorgimento

It was in his conception of this problem of credibility, and in his answer to

it, that Mazzini's political genius lies. Banti argues convincingly that the
popularity and diffusion of the national–patriotic discourse was due to its
manipulation of religious and historical tropes – to its ‘capacity to evoke
remembered echoes, known images [and] values already recognised’41 –
and to its expression in broad, popular genres such as novels and opera.
But, as an explanation for the rise of a political movement in Italy after
1830, this is surely to confuse the meaning of the nation with the nation as a
cause: it is to reintroduce the nation and a sense of national belonging as the
causal explanation for the rise of nationalist movements. Thus, while the
‘culturalist’ explanation of Banti tells us much about how the idea of the
nation was created in Restoration Italy and what it meant to contemporaries,
it tends to neglect the crucial part played by political activists in extracting
political meaning from, and manipulating and popularising, this cultural
manifestation. It was Mazzini who transformed the idea of Italy expressed
so powerfully in literature into an equally powerful political ideology.
Mazzini perceived, brought out and added a political dimension to Italian
romanticism and tied the romantic idea of Italy to a political mixture of
Jacobinism and romantic socialism. It was he and his followers who made
the connection between the nation as a romantic cultural identity and
nationalism as a democratic political movement. It was they, in turn, who
dedicated all their practical energies and resources to promoting this
ideology to as wide an audience as possible, and sought to construct a
successful political organisation around it.
To understand Mazzini's strategy, and the role he envisaged in it for
Garibaldi, we must also appreciate that he faced an uphill struggle. He had
to make this link between the romantic, nostalgic idea of Italy and his
volunteerist Jacobin ideal of political engagement effective, persuasive and
generally accepted. Probably the clearest expression of Mazzini's
understanding of the difficulties involved was his insistence on the unity of
‘thought and action’. He always argued that the revolution needed
intellectuals who produced art and literature as much as soldiers who fought
wars, and that the revolution in thought and revolutionary action should be
part of the same moment. For Mazzini, art and literature reflected politics.
Cultural decline had followed the extinction of republican freedom in Italy;
renewed creativity would follow its revival.42 But writers, according to
Mazzini, had also to be ‘the advance guard of liberty’.43 He took pains to
encourage political engagement in artists and writers, and was himself a
(politically engaged) critic and writer before he became a political activist;
in fact, his earliest public interventions were in support of Italian
romanticism. Throughout his life he acted as an art critic and literary
reviewer, writing in English, French and Italian, partly for money but also
to maintain a political dimension in cultural debate. Mazzinians, and those
influenced by Mazzini, also experimented with new and popular literary
forms, such as the historical novel and the autobiography–memoir. Others
painted or wrote music, poetry and songs.44 Even Mazzini's most political
writings were suffused with a romantic aesthetic: as we have seen, the
political ‘general instruction’ appealed to the family, to the past and to God,
and used a language borrowed entirely from Manzoni and Guerrazzi.
 On a more immediately political level, writing was part of a broad focus
on the educative action of intellectuals in creating the popolo and indicates
Mazzini's firm belief in the power of journalism and publishing. For
Mazzini, the press with its power to persuade public opinion was a key tool
in the realisation of the Italian nation; as Galante Garrone puts it, ‘to move
and enlighten people … [was] to provoke thoughts and actions’.45 Mazzini
called the press ‘the arbiter of nations’ (‘the ink of the wise is a match for
the sword of the strong’)46 and ‘our only hope’. Journalism was ‘a power;
and even the only power in modern times; because it speaks and insists … it
speaks to all the classes; it discusses all questions; it touches all the chords
which move in the human soul … it is for the intellect what steam is for
industry’.47 Almost from the start (from 1832), Young Italy had a
newspaper – La Giovine Italia – and Mazzini spared no effort in producing
it, and in smuggling it past the censors and into Italy. He also encouraged
the publication of other journals, newspapers and pamphlets by exiles in
France and Switzerland.48 In his own long political career Mazzini acted as,
variously, a founder, director, editor, collaborator, correspondent, printer,
copyeditor and shipping agent in the world of journalism.49
It is in this emphasis on the press and cultural production that Young Italy
most resembles a modern political party, and here Mazzini can justifiably
lay a claim to genuine political innovation. Moreover, Mazzini's interest in
public opinion reached past the sphere of cultural production strictly
defined, and involved the use of politics itself – especially insurrection – as
symbolic action. Mazzini's insistence on insurrection, his apparently blind
faith that a few conspirators would inspire a general revolutionary
conflagration, has long been considered his real undoing, and in a sense it
was, since the constant lack of popular uprisings and the brutal
effectiveness of Austrian repression led to disillusionment and widespread
defection among Mazzini's followers. However, these insurrections must be
understood as part of a broader political strategy. If we take just one
example – the disastrous 1844 insurrection of the Bandiera brothers – this
strategy becomes quite clear. Defying widespread criticism of his role,
Mazzini came out fighting and published a series of articles on ‘martyrs of
Italian liberty’, with the Bandieras in first place. For Mazzini, their
willingness to die, and – as he insisted – to die calmly and happily was the
sign of ‘God fermenting in the heart of a great people’. Men like the
Bandiera brothers, Mazzini wrote, ‘are Apostles; their tomb is an Altar. It
matters little that they have not succeeded. The Appeal of Martyrdom is
brother to the Angel of Victory.’50 They were proof that Italy existed.
The endless litany of botched uprisings organised by Mazzini did not
simply illustrate poor military planning and implementation (which it
undoubtedly did). It may even be a mistake to see the risings as revolutions,
in the sense of rapid regime change. These uprisings were, to borrow a
phrase from Sudhir Hazareesingh, ‘not so much goaldriven as
expressive’;51 they were equally – and sometimes even primarily –
successful symbolic events. As a political romantic, Mazzini believed that
death could be heroic, and heroic failure a form of success. A failed
insurrection was not futile; it could – and indeed did – reveal Austrian
repression to the Italians and, equally importantly, to the restof the world. It
was still a chance to appeal to the public imagination, to assert physically
the existence of a political Italy; it was an occasion for speeches,
proclamations and demonstrations and an opportunity to create heroes and
martyrs. A failed insurrection could also be the opening salvo in a more
general and prolonged assault on public opinion, involving letters to and
articles in the press, the production of commemorative books and
pamphlets, and, to act as a reminder some time later, the publication of
personal memoirs by those caught up in the action or those who had
suffered prison and exile for their convictions.
Conclusion

Mazzini was denounced by Metternich as the most dangerous man in

Europe, while his erstwhile associate, the novelist and activist Guerrazzi,
described Mazzini as a man ‘who disturbed the sleep of kings and terrified
the great powers of Europe’. His British friend Carlyle said he never saw a
more ‘beautiful person … with his soft flashing eyes, and face full of
intelligence’.52 A contentious figure in his own lifetime, Mazzini has often
been judged a failure by historians, an idealist who organised doomed
insurrections or a cynic who must bear his share of the responsibility for the
failure of the democratic movement in Italy and the conservative turn of
Italian and European politics from the late 1850s onwards.53 Even those
historians who don't condemn him admit he is a difficult figure to judge,
‘hard to classify ideologically and politically’, with a life ‘full of ironies and
paradoxes’, who ‘worked on the minds of men rather than through the more
easily studied means of politics, diplomacy or military conquest’.54 Yet
these strong reactions to Mazzini, and the confusion about his
achievements, point us directly to his motives and the real nature of his
success. He was in exile almost all his adult life and had hardly any money
at his disposal; he was at the head of government only once, in Rome in
1849, for a very brief period, and was under attack from his opponents from
the outset. His achievement lies in having provoked such robust responses
and in having established such fame, notoriety and affection for himself, on
the basis of so little.
To attain his ultimate goal of transforming European politics on the basis
of progress and the association of humanity, Mazzini placed great hope in
the militant and military enthusiasm of youth, and he had equal confidence
in the persuasive power of writing, education and example. All of Mazzini's
activities can be seen as an expression of his belief in the unity of thought
and action. As the next chapter will show, his contacts, networks and
personal friendships; the use of newspapers, letters to newspapers and
pamphlets; his own appearance, behaviour and lifestyle and those of his
followers; and the organisation of conspiracies, uprisings and expeditions,
even those doomed to failure – all of these were a means of publicising his
political mission for Italy, of giving Italy a new foundation story and of
creating a new language of politics with the ‘republic’ and ‘nation’ as its
main forms of identification. It is in the context of this task to promote Italy
by every means possible, of the uphill struggle to make the romantic idea of
Italy visible, convincing and successful politically, that Mazzini's comment
about Garibaldi with which we began this chapter can best be understood.
 CHAPTER 2

IN SEARCH OF GARIBALDI

London calling

At the time of his 1843 letter to Cuneo about Garibaldi, Mazzini had been
in exile from Italy for a decade. Young Italy had been more or less wiped
out in Piedmont and elsewhere after the failure of a series of conspiracies
which Mazzini had organised in Genoa in 1833 and 1834. In the harsh
crackdown which ensued, most of his followers – including Cuneo and
Garibaldi – had been forced to flee Genoa, while conditions became so
difficult for Mazzini in Marseille that he had to leave for Geneva in 1833.
In Geneva he founded a new organisation, ‘Young Europe’, to encourage
and assist national revolutions throughout Europe and beyond. But while
this new association partly restored his standing in revolutionary circles it
also attracted the attention of the police, so that soon he was forced to go
underground to avoid arrest and eventually had to leave Switzerland too. He
chose this time to go to London, arriving there in 1837 in time for Queen
Victoria's coronation, and was immediately shocked by the dirt, the fog and
the expense of the city as well as by the drunken behaviour of its
inhabitants. Yet London was to be his home for virtually all of the rest of his
life.1
Apart from the daily and very real material difficulties which he had to
deal with in London, Mazzini had severe problems on the political front
too. Revolution seemed very far away. The conservative regimes in
Restoration Italy had generally never been stronger or enjoyed more
stability, and many were in the process of introducing administrative
reform. Moderate liberals in northern and central Italy, soon to become the
great rivals of Mazzini in presenting an alternative vision to conservatism,
were already starting to voice their opposition to his republicanism and to
his ‘absurd’ unitary vision for Italy. Mazzini's own networks were in
disarray. He faced criticism of his tactics from within his own movement,
notably from the fellow conspirator Nicola Fabrizi who, from his place of
exile in Malta, sought to organise an autonomous legione italica which
would lead a guerrilla movement and would have its base far from Mazzini,
in southern Italy. Fabrizi focused especially on Sicily, where a cholera
outbreak in 1837 had provoked widespread popular disturbances, but
Mazzini feared Sicilian separatism, and suggested that the Sicilian rebels
would break free from Naples and had no interest in uniting Italy.2
All these difficulties are worth stressing because Mazzini, while
temporarily depressed, was ultimately undaunted. In 1840, he reorganised
and relaunched Young Italy from London. This political organisation
reaffirmed his romantic belief in the revolutionary potential of the younger
generation, but this time he placed more emphasis on education and made a
particular appeal to women and to workers. Workers had their own
newspaper, Apostolato Popolare, most of which Mazzini wrote himself and
managed to circulate in the United States and North Africa as well as
throughout Europe. Mazzini also raised a public subscription to set up a free
school in Hatton Garden in Holborn for the families of Italian migrants.3 He
continued to be involved with conspiracies in Italy. In 1844 he initially
encouraged the disastrous mutiny and expedition planned by Attilio and
Emilio Bandiera, two Venetian officers in the Austrian navy, arguing that it
was ‘better [to] act and fail than do absolutely nothing’ and that their
actions would offer Europe proof of the dedication and courage of Italians.4
Perhaps especially important were the lasting friendships he forged with
British writers and radicals. Thomas and Jane Carlyle helped to introduce
him to London literary circles, where he met Dickens, Browning and the
romantic poet Samuel Rogers, and his close friendship with the Carlyles,
with the family of the radical lawyer William Ashurst and with Ashurst's
soninlaw James Stansfeld did much to sustain Mazzini personally while in
exile. Moreover, it was these friendships which served both to revitalise his
own ideas and tactics and, in the longer term, to mobilise British liberal
opinion in favour of the Italian national cause.5
It is hard to overemphasise the importance of the British experience for
Mazzini's fame, political strategy and contacts. Long before the 1848–9
revolutions made household names of Mazzini, Garibaldi and other Italian
and European revolutionaries, London life had helped Mazzini to develop
his own image as a nationalist hero and selfless martyr of the revolution. He
had always been an admirer of Byron, and might have been imagining
either himself or an idealised Mazzinian follower when in 1840 he wrote in
the Monthly Chronicle of Byron's genius ‘as a man and a poet’: ‘He never
deserted our cause: he never betrayed a single human sympathy. Lonely and
unhappy since childhood … slandered … beset by pecuniary problems;
forced to leave his country … without friends …’6 And while Mazzini
could not hope to emulate Byron's flamboyance or overt sexuality, he still
cultivated an air of romantic intensity and passionate dedication by living a
life of extreme frugality, dressing always in black (because in mourning for
his country), never marrying and displaying a general (if by many accounts
false) indifference to sexual passion. He worked all night, lived on coffee
and cigars and gave away what little money he earned or was sent by his
mother; ‘money is shit’ he told his mother in 1843.7 This pose seemingly
held a strong fascination for the middleclass radical men and (perhaps
especially) women whom Mazzini was assiduous in cultivating.
Britain, and London in particular, confirmed Mazzini's belief in the
power of publicity, and especially the press, in politics. By the early 1840s,
Mazzini had established a distinct public profile in London. His contacts
with the Carlyles gave him the chance to publish articles on politics and
literature in journals like The Westminster Review, and he gained additional
publicity and made more useful contacts through his activities at the Italian
school in Hatton Garden. Even the disastrous expedition of the Bandiera
brothers in the end worked in his favour. Although he was blamed when the
brothers were captured in Calabria and executed, it later emerged that his
letters had been intercepted by the British government and passed on to the
government in Vienna. The huge public and parliamentary outcry which
resulted gave free publicity to Italian nationalism and to Mazzini in
particular. Thomas Carlyle wrote a letter to The Times extolling Mazzini's
‘genius and virtue’ and his ‘sterling veracity, humanity, and nobleness of
mind’; Mazzini, he stated, was one ‘of those rare men … who are worthy to
be called martyr souls, who, in silence, piously in their daily life,
understand and practice what is meant by that’.8 Pictures were sold of
Mazzini all over London and Mazzini published an article praising the
Bandieras' ‘martyrdom’ in The People's Journal.
 Mazzini arrived in England at the height of Chartist agitation, and he was
profoundly affected by it and by the whole popular radical tradition in
British politics. His new interest in workingclass politics, expressed in the
reorganisation of Young Italy, clearly reflects the influence of Chartist
associational life.9 He was especially struck by how Chartists successfully
encouraged, and made political use of, popular involvement in radical
issues. During the 1840s, the Chartist press produced newspapers,
periodicals and works of fiction, and these grew increasingly in number and
circulation.10 The behaviour of Chartist leaders – their use of new print
media, of visual images and artefacts, and of clothing and appearance(s) to
promote themselves (and what James Vernon calls the ‘insatiable appetite’
of the British public for such leaders and heroes) – was arguably crucial in
developing Mazzini's understanding of personality and the use of theatre
and performance in popular politics.11 At the opposite end of the political
spectrum, he would have been equally aware of the promotion of Queen
Victoria through popular publishing – through newspapers and the visual
image – as a populist monarch.12 (I discuss these developments in more
detail in Chapter 5.)
Mazzini's interest in Garibaldi as a potential Italian nationalist hero must
be traced in part to his experiences of the British press and British politics:
to his awareness of the successful publicity strategies of British radical
leaders and the use of the press to promote political issues and endorse the
prevailing cult of personality in politics. On a more immediate level, his
interest in Garibaldi can be linked to a series of new political contacts. The
renewal of Chartist contacts with, and commitment to, European radicalism
confirmed Mazzini's own belief in the potential of international
revolutionary networks, and he came increasingly to use London's role as
the centre of European political emigration to meet and often make
longterm friendships with Hungarian, Polish and Russian exiles as well as
with other Italians.13 In 1847, he helped to found the People's International
League, based on a loose network of liberal reformers, Nonconformists,
workingclass radicals and foreign exiles. Its purpose was to mobilise British
public opinion in favour of radical and nationalist causes in Europe.14
Equally, Mazzini began to establish contact with exiles and sympathisers
beyond Europe. He was in contact with some Young Italy exiles among
emigrant circles in New York. He also struck up a correspondence with the
Christian Alliance in the United States, an organisation of Protestant
missionaries who were sympathetic both to Mazzini's anticlerical stance and
to his use of religious language. Particularly useful in the longer term was
the relationship which developed between Mazzini and the American writer,
Margaret Fuller, a prominent member of the Transcendentalists of New
England, who came to London in 1846.15 When she decided to go on to
Italy later that year, Mazzini wrote her a letter of introduction, describing
her as ‘the rarest of women for her love and active sympathy for everything
which is beautiful, great and holy, and, thus, for our Italy’ and encouraging
followers also to ‘convert’ her travelling companions, two prominent
antislavery campaigners from the USA, to the Italian cause.16 In fact, Fuller
met and married a Mazzinian sympathiser, the Marchese Ossoli, during her
Italian journey.
Perhaps especially significant were the contacts which Mazzini
established with Italian migrant workers and political exiles in South
America. These contacts were important because Young Italy had continued
to recruit in the coastal towns of Brazil and the Rio de la Plata during the
otherwise lean period of the late 1830s. By the early 1840s Young Italy in
South America had a leadership, newspapers and something approaching a
mass movement.17 It was here that a group of young and militant
enthusiasts, based in Rio de Janeiro and in the Uruguayan capital,
Montevideo, formed around the journalistic and organisational activities of
Cuneo and another prominent member of Young Italy in South America,
Luigi Rossetti. Many were also involved in the naval and military exploits
led by Garibaldi. And it was for this group – young, active and, as
journalists and soldiers, the living expression of Mazzini's concept of the
unity of ‘thought and action’ – that Mazzini began to make great plans.
A South American romance

After the abortive Young Italy uprisings of 1833–4 in Genoa, both Cuneo
and Garibaldi had gone into exile. Giovanni Battista Cuneo, who was one
of Garibaldi's political mentors during his years in South America, arrived
there earlier than Garibaldi, in 1834, and quickly became involved in exile
politics. In typical Mazzinian fashion, he immediately established a local
branch of Young Italy and a newspaper (also called Young Italy) in Rio de
Janeiro. Moving to Montevideo, he made a series of influential contacts
with the socalled ‘generation of 1837’. These young literary and political
exiles, men such as Juan Bautista Alberdi, Esteban Echeverría, and
Bartolomé Mitre along with another celebrated exile, Domingo Faustino
Sarmiento (based in Chile), had been forced out of Buenos Aires by the
dictator Rosas and had begun to mount a propaganda assault on the Rosas
regime through novels, poetry and journalism. They were also greatly
influenced by Mazzinian ideas and language and originally called
themselves ‘the Association of the Young Argentine Generation’.18
Thanks in part to this connection with the generation of 1837, and
working with them to produce politicially engaged journalism, Cuneo
became increasingly active as a writer and publisher.19 He collaborated on
the papers El Iniciador and O Povo, the latter being the paper of the rebel
Rio Grande republic engaged in a war of independence with the Brazilian
empire, initially edited by Luigi Rossetti. In 1841, he founded and edited in
Montevideo the free weekly newspaper L'Italiano, aimed at Italian workers.
During the height of the war between Uruguay and Buenos Aires, in which
both Cuneo and Garibaldi played an important part, Cuneo published
another free paper, Il Legionario Italiano, which had as its mast head
‘Liberty, Equality, Independence, Unity, Humanity’. The paper quickly
became a mouthpiece for Mazzinian ideas in Montevideo.
Garibaldi, who arrived in Rio at the age of twentyeight some two years
after Cuneo, had a career which was at first much less remarkable. In fact,
despite the efforts of his biographers to suggest otherwise, there had been
little in his early life to indicate anything unusual about Garibaldi. Its
peripatetic nature (he was a merchant seaman) and his shady political
activities seem all too typical of this postrevolutionary generation, to which
both Cuneo and Mazzini also belonged. Nor was there anything especially
surprising about his association with the Young Italy uprisings in Genoa:
Genoa was a hotbed of political conspiracy, and conspiracy provided an
outlet for many disaffected young men during this period. Although
Garibaldi had apparently been recruited for Young Italy (perhaps by Cuneo)
in the Black Sea port of Taganrog in 1833, arguably just as important an
influence on his political development was his encounter earlier in the same
year with a group of SaintSimonian exiles, and especially with their leader
Emile Barrault, whom he transported by ship from Marseille to Turkey.
During the long journey, he talked with Barrault, and Barrault gave him a
book, the Nouveau christianisme by Saint-Simon, which Garibaldi kept
with him all his life.20 It is possible that the ideas of the romantic socialists
– their confidence in the benefits of technological progress; their
spiritualism and especially the faith in a new religion of ‘Humanity’; the
idea of community based on affective ties; a belief in female emancipation;
a nonmonogamous attitude to sex and the rejection of marriage – had as
strong an impact on Garibaldi's political convictions, if not stronger, as the
later nationalist elaborations of Mazzini.21
Garibaldi's motives for going to Rio de Janeiro in the summer of 1835 are
not entirely clear. We know that he had found himself in a very precarious
position. As a sailor in the Piedmontese navy, he had been placed under a
sentence of death for having conspired against the king in the 1833–4
uprising, and during much of 1834 and the first half of 1835 he had been
forced to lead a kind of twilight existence under a false name in Marseille,
and had survived by travelling as a merchant seaman to Odessa and to
Tunis. In 1835 he had apparently been entrusted with a political mission by
Luigi Canessa, a maverick Mazzinian activist in Marseille, to carry out in
South America. But his decision to leave Marseille may simply have been
connected to the terrible cholera epidemic there or to general
disillusionment at the prospects of revolution in Europe. Whatever the
reasons, Garibaldi was given a warm welcome by the revolutionary exiles
in Rio and he quickly made friends with Cuneo, Rossetti and others.22
However, he went on to pursue the fairly typical life of an Italian migrant,
taking up his earlier career as a merchant seaman, and trading along the
coast between Rio and Montevideo in a fishing boat. Then in 1837, and
‘tired’, as he put it, of leading ‘an existence so useless to our country’ and
convinced of a ‘greater destiny’,23 he abandoned commercial life to become
a ‘corsair’ for the Rio Grande rebels, and with his boat Mazzini and an
assorted crew started to attack Brazilian shipping.24 At this stage, however,
there were still few, if any, signs of the fame that was to come.
Garibaldi spent four tough years of fighting on land and at sea, during
which he was taken prisoner and tortured, suffered a tragic shipwreck, and
met and eloped with his first wife, Anita. As the Rio Grande wars petered
out into a bloody guerrilla conflict, Garibaldi decided to move to
Montevideo, where there was a more vibrant community of Italian exiles
and migrants (some 6,000 Italians out of a population of 42,000, as well as
10,000 French and 3,000 Spaniards), including Cuneo and Francesco
Anzani.25 Garibaldi left for Montevideo with his family in April 1841 and
marched overland with 900 head of cattle to sell in the city; but none of the
cattle survived the journey, so he was obliged to eke out an impoverished
existence as a mathematics teacher and salesman. Despite these
inauspicious beginnings, Garibaldi soon began to do well in Montevideo,
and became involved with the complex and prolonged war between the
government of Uruguay, led by General Fructuoso Rivera, and the
Argentine Confederation, under the dictatorship of Juan Manuel de Rosas
(see map 1 on page 40).
This war lasted for over twelve years, and from 1842 involved the
blockade and then siege of Montevideo by the Argentine Confederation; the
siege itself was organised by the deposed Uruguayan president General
Oribe, who had gone over to the Argentine side. The conflict was more
significant than the Rio Grande wars, in that it had consequences for
international trade and specifically damaged the commercial interests of
both Great Britain and France. In 1845, Britain and France organised a joint
naval intervention to prevent the Argentine conquest of Uruguay by
blockading Buenos Aires.26 The conflict was also much more newsworthy
than the Rio Grande wars. Propaganda, of which the Argentine dictator
Rosas was a wellknown master,27 played a major part in the war, with both
the liberal Uruguayans and the Rosistas seeking to persuade the British and
the French that trading interests would be better served by their winning the
war. Both sides conducted lengthy press campaigns in the foreign language
newspapers of the Rio de la Plata as well as in the national newspapers of
London and Paris.28 After the AngloFrench intervention, the Argentine
government sought to present itself as the victim of foreign aggression,29
while Uruguay, helped by its series of talented writers, represented the war
as a great liberal cause, ‘pitting a weak and increasingly defenceless state
against a powerful Argentine adversary in a desperate fight for survival’.
Thus, the defence of Montevideo came to symbolise ‘in the European mind
the virtues of nationalist struggle and political progress’.30

The South America of Garibaldi

The Uruguayan government first placed Garibaldi in command of a naval
squadron. This squadron was sent up the Paraná river right through
Argentine territory, in a daring attempt to bring supplies to the besieged
province of Corrientes and cut off Argentine trade with Paraguay. However,
and perhaps not surprisingly, this expedition ended in failure and Garibaldi
was forced to burn all his ships and escape with the surviving crews. In
1843, Garibaldi raised enough money by public subscription to build up a
new naval force with which he attempted to disrupt Argentine shipping in
the River Plate area. He intensified these activities after 1845 when, as
commander of the Uruguayan fleet, he began to work with the AngloFrench
naval forces, and he helped them to capture the Uruguayan port of Colonia
and the island of Martín García. Also in 1843, Garibaldi decided to continue
the fight on land and he organised an Italian Legion of volunteers to help in
the military defence of Montevideo. This force of around 600 men was
modelled on the much larger French Legion set up for the same purpose,
and which had its own newspaper, Le Patriote Français. Initially, the Italian
Legion met with a mixed reception and had equivocal results. Its members
were accused of cowardice after one engagement, of brutality after another,
and of deserting and going over to Rosas' forces when they reached enemy
lines. However, all this changed in February 1846, when Garibaldi and his
men stood firm against a much larger enemy force at San Antonio del Salto
and won a celebrated victory. Salto marks the real change in Garibaldi's
fortunes. It was after Salto that Garibaldi became famous and a political and
military actor in his own right. A special issue of Il Legionario Italiano was
published which was entirely dedicated to the heroism of Garibaldi and his
men; it included letters from Garibaldi, official decrees and a poem, and
presented the battle as an emblematic moment in Italy's recovery of past
glory.31 It was only after Salto that Mazzini and the Mazzinian press back in
Europe began to take a more active interest in Garibaldi and his men.32
Garibaldi's life and experiences in South America are among the least
known and most mythologised of his entire career. Certain episodes –
Garibaldi's torture when a prisoner at Gualeguay; his meeting with his first
wife Anita; Anita's own flight from the enemy while, variously, pregnant or
with Garibaldi's infant son in her arms; the battles of the Italian Legion in
defence of Montevideo – have achieved a kind of canonical status.
However, much of what we know about Garibaldi's activities in the service
of the Rio Grande rebels we know from Garibaldi himself, from his
memoirs written in the 1850s, and these are not always reliable. Although
his years in Uruguay are better documented, here too it is difficult to
penetrate both the mythology produced by the war itself, of the celebration
of Montevideo as the ‘New Troy’ and of Garibaldi as the defender of
Uruguayan freedom,33 and the use subsequently made of it by nationalist
propagandists back in Italy. So it is hard to establish with any certainty the
real nature and scale of his military achievements in these years.
 A recent study based on British government sources has suggested that,
on their own, Garibaldi and his men ‘achieved very little’ in La Defensa of
Montevideo. Contemporary British reports referred to him not as a hero but
as an adventurer, and they complained specifically about his habit of seizing
and requisitioning private shipping, which disrupted trade and arguably
prolonged the war. Although Garibaldi was popular with the civilian
population, especially in the countryside where the humane conduct of his
soldiers seemed to compare favourably with the brutality of the Argentine
troops, he made himself unpopular with some sections of the government in
Montevideo for his ‘maritime misdemeanours’ and general refusal to obey
orders. The Uruguayan leader, Rivera, was told that Garibaldi had
‘scandalously plundered Colonia and Gualeguaychú’ in 1845, and that his
actions would ‘greatly discredit’ their cause. Some Montevidean leaders
also viewed Garibaldi with suspicion as a ‘foreigner’ whose powerful
position threatened Uruguayan independence. Indeed, it was said to be ‘the
general dislike evinced on the part of all at having an Italian at the head of
the garrison and at having the town completely under the foreign
mercenaries’ which forced his resignation as the commander of the
Uruguayan navy in July 1847.34 All this suggests that Garibaldi's negative
reputation in Buenos Aires as a dangerous ‘adventurer’ was not entirely
unjustified.
Nevertheless, Garibaldi's experiences in these years were crucial for his
own personal and political development; especially important were the
revolutionary contacts and ideals he developed there. It was in Rio de
Janeiro that he first joined the Freemasons, a significant front organisation
for Young Italy in South America,35 and a crucial political network for
much of the rest of his life. What was to become an enduring belief in
biographical writing and journalism as an extension of political action may
owe as much to Garibaldi's direct contacts with men like Mitre of the
Argentine generation of 1837, or to his knowledge of the work of Domingo
Sarmiento, as it did to the arguably more indirect influence of Mazzinian
journalism.36 It was also during the years in Rio Grande that Garibaldi met
his first wife, Anita, a person by all accounts as adventurous, courageous
and unconventional as he, and who remained in most respects his female
ideal for the rest of his life.37 Garibaldi made other important friends in Rio
Grande and in Uruguay. Some of them, like Rossetti, died early (in 1840),
but others – like Cuneo, Francesco Anzani and Livio Zambeccari – stayed
with him much longer; all these friends came to represent a vision of
fraternal friendship and male ‘virility’ which influenced his own behaviour
and which he used as a political model in his later political writings and
speeches.
Anzani (who died in 1848 returning to Italy with Garibaldi) was an older
revolutionary and an exile from the revolutions of 1821. Before fighting for
the Rio Grande rebels, where he met Garibaldi, Anzani had already fought
as a volunteer in the Greek war of independence and in the Portuguese civil
war, and he became a key influence on Garibaldi's military thinking. He
helped him organise the Italian Legion of Montevideo, and was responsible
for main taining discipline and order in the ranks.38 Another Italian exile
who did much to encourage and influence Garibaldi's political and military
career was the intellectual and carbonaro Zambeccari. In the late 1830s he
was the chief propagandist for the Rio Grande rebels.39 He was also the
initial point of contact between Garibaldi and the Rio Grande president,
Bento Gonçalves da Silva, a prominent republican whom one historian has
described as ‘a copybook romantic leader and popular hero … a fine
horseman, picturesque in dress, enthusiastically followed by his men’, and
who, in turn, did much to influence and encourage Garibaldi's political
activities.40 For the rest of his life, Garibaldi maintained friendly contacts
with the Uruguayan leader, Joaquín Suárez. Suárez invited Garibaldi to
return to Montevideo in the 1850s and, at the moment of Garibaldi's
greatest triumph in 1860, wrote to congratulate him and to acknowledge the
great contribution he had made to ‘the independence of my country’.41
Garibaldi was much taken by the land and the people of South America.
In his memoirs, he romanticised the life of the pampas and was especially
enthused by what he saw as the ‘independent’ life of its gaucho inhabitants.
Described as a ‘white savage, divorced from society’, the gaucho was a
‘mounted nomad’ and an important figure on the early nineteenth-century
South American pampas. The antithesis of urban, cultured society, the
gaucho refused settled work or occupation and rejected family, home and
respectability.42 It may be that Garibaldi saw in gaucho society a kind of
embodiment of his romantic socialist ideas. According to Guerzoni,
Garibaldi's friend and biographer, Garibaldi always admired the gaucho as
the ‘ideal type’ of free man. Indeed, Guerzoni writes, Garibaldi brought
back from South America the ‘beliefs’ and ‘personal habits and clothes’ of
the ‘corsairs, soldiers, sailors and cattle ranchers’ he met there: ‘The
Garibaldi who came back to Italy in 1848 was … a gaucho … Time and the
habits of civility would partially change him … but a gaucho he
fundamentally remained all his life.’43 The restlessness and poverty of
Garibaldi's daily life during the South American years display features of
the gaucho. Gaucho values, together with romantic socialist beliefs, may
also help to explain his (for the time) scandalous relationship with his wife
Anita, who was an eighteen-year-old married woman when he met her,
whom he more or less seized from her home and ran off with, and whom he
married only in 1842, two years after the birth of their first child.44
Some of Garibaldi's political ideas, most notably his lasting belief in the
virtue of dictatorships – if only in time of war and for a limited period –
were derived from his observations of politics and the conduct of war in
South America. Many of the battles over the political forms of nation-
building and the struggles between conservatives and liberals which
Garibaldi was to become involved in on his return to Italy, he first
encountered in republican circles in Montevideo.45 He seems equally to
have been affected by the public or theatrical aspects of Rio de la Plata
politics, arguably in much the same way as Mazzini was affected by the
Chartists in Britain. Here too the gauchos would seem to have been
important, in that many features of their rebellious and violent culture were
adopted and adapted as a political style by leaders such as the Argentinian
dictator Rosas.46 John Lynch tells us that while Rosas did little to help the
gauchos in social terms and punished any signs of crime and rebellion with
astonishing rapidity and cruelty, he still ‘identified culturally with the
gaucho’, in part as a means of representing the interests of the interior
provinces against those of the liberal, more European-oriented elites of
Buenos Aires. Rosas was noted for his horsemanship, went about dressed as
a gaucho and his idea of a joke when out riding was to throw a lasso around
a man's neck and drag him along the ground. He also encouraged the
extensive use of brutal rituals and employed a language of politics ‘which
was charged with violence and designed to terrorize’.47 Aspects of gaucho
behaviour were adopted by Garibaldi, although for very different purposes
to those of Rosas. Many of the elements of Garibaldi's public persona which
were to captivate Europeans in 1848 and 1849 – his physical strength, his
long hair and beard, his ‘poncho’ and brightly coloured clothes, as well as
his displays of horsemanship, daring gestures and eccentric manners – were
clearly fashioned during his years in South America. These characteristics
were copied directly from the gaucho militias with – and against – whom
Garibaldi fought. They may also have been adopted by him as a public
means of challenging and subverting Rosista propaganda, of giving Rosas'
violent populist style a revolutionary and democratic ‘twist’ by directing it
to liberal and humanitarian ends.
South America was crucial for Garibaldi in a more practical sense still,
for it was in Rio Grande and Uruguay that he learnt how to fight. As it
turned out, the kinds of battles he fought in South America – commanding
untrained men of mixed background and capabilities; fighting against an
enemy superior in number and resources; relying on mobility and surprise
to gain advantage – were to prove invaluable when he returned to Italy, as
was his newly acquired ability to ride a horse. Perhaps most notably of all,
Garibaldi seems to have discovered in himself at this time the qualities of
an inspiring and talented leader of men. His letters regarding the conduct of
war in Montevideo reveal a professionalism and knowledge of military
tactics which are surprising in someone hitherto entirely untrained.48 Even
allowing, moreover, for the inevitable hyperbole of newspaper reports and
of retrospective accounts designed to exalt his exceptional bravery,
Garibaldi appears to have been increasingly entrusted in South America
with leading what he called – not without irony – ‘chivalrous enterprises’
(as he wrote to Cuneo after the Paraná expedition: ‘Never mind! These
chivalrous enterprises always come down to me’).49 Such daring missions,
whether they failed (as with the Paraná expedition) or succeeded (as with
the conflict at San Antonio del Salto), relied on the energy, enthusiasm and
stamina of the men and their leader, and were designed to confuse and
demoralise the enemy by their sheer audacity and their displays of
individual courage. They also did much to publicise the Uruguayan liberal
cause to the national and international press.
 It was in South America, in other words, that Garibaldi discovered his
true vocation – not as a (failed) merchant sailor nor as an (outlawed)
political conspirator, but as a soldier hero.50 His military experiences
confirmed and clarified his core political ideals, especially his basic
commitment to fighting oppression and upholding liberty and independence
wherever he felt it was threatened. The Italian Legion of Montevideo was a
concrete expression of Garibaldi's belief in the capacity of young,
enthusiastic volunteers, rather than professional or paid soldiers
(mercenaries), to act as the military vanguard and living symbol of a
political idea.51 Garibaldi sought to identify war and soldiering with a
higher moral cause. He told his men to expect no material reward for their
courage or sacrifice; he publicly rejected all promotions and pecuniary
rewards for himself, and after the victory at San Antonio del Salto he
refused the rank of general and the offer of land, and made sure his officers
did the same. As a result, he acquired the reputation – never to leave him –
of a ‘disinterested individual’, as well known for his poverty as for his
courage, and remembered for his kind manners and quiet voice as much as
for his passionate gestures.52
With the help of Cuneo's journalism, the heroism of Garibaldi and the
Italian Legion as a whole was identified with italianità. The Italian Legion
of Montevideo became a powerful symbol of national pride and belonging.
As a result of military success, Italian nationalists in both South America
and Europe were able to use the legion as proof that Italians could fight
courageously; and the legion's refusal to accept rewards was used to show
the moral superiority of Italians, especially vis-à-vis the French (although
they were the accepted leaders of revolutionary action, the French Legion
of Montevideo had received land and money in return for their efforts). The
flag of the Italian Legion drew an explicit parallel between military virtue
and national identity. It depicted an exploding volcano on a black
background, with the black representing mourning for the enslaved
fatherland, and the volcano (Vesuvius) the patriotic fervour and eternal
flame of the legionaries themselves.53 The legionaries wore red shirts, said
to be a ‘job lot’ from a slaughterhouse,54 but also effective on a symbolic
level: as another means of subverting Rosista propaganda (Rosista
federalists used red as their colour), and to affirm the association of red with
liberty, republicanism and the French Revolution. For all these reasons, the
exploits of the Italian Legion in Montevideo and of their leader came
increasingly to be identified with the vision of a ‘resurrected’ – virtuous,
virile and militant – Italian nation.
‘Man of genius’

Garibaldi was at this time in the full vigour of manhood [a British naval officer in Montevideo
later recalled], with a firm wellbuilt frame which sat his horse like a centaur. He wore his hair
and beard long; they were then of a dark brown colour, with a reddish tint in the latter. His
countenance was remarkable for its serenity, and the lips pressed close together denoted a
strong will, whilst his eyes were steadfast and piercing in their gaze. In stature he was of
medium height, and was altogether the beau ideal of a chief of irregular troops. His scarlet
tunic fitted loosely to the body, and round its collar were tied the two ends of a gaudy
handkerchief … His cavalry swordbelt confined the dress to the waist, and in his saddle
holsters were a pair of pistols. On his head was the same description of black felt hat and
feather as worn by all his corps.55

It was in Uruguay that Garibaldi developed a conspicuous and perhaps

exceptional personal allure. His friend Anzani was among the first to record
Garibaldi's appeal, writing enthusiastically not only of his ‘decisiveness’,
‘courage’ and ‘patriotic love’ as a soldier but also of his capacity to win the
affection (‘simpatia’) of the Montevideans.56 Much of this attraction seems
to have been due to his striking physical presence. On the one hand,
Garibaldi is described as strong and physically imposing: he wears
flamboyant clothes, and has abundant facial hair and flowing locks,
piercing eyes (of indeterminate colour, perhaps light brown but often said to
be blue), and a robust, athletic body. On the other, his bearing is graceful
and ‘serene’; and the earliest portraits of him show a man with a kind and
pleasant face, and blue eyes.57 He is a virile ‘white savage’ with a
gentlemanly countenance, and it is perhaps this combination of strength and
mildness, a combination so popular in the romantic literary hero, which best
explains his immediate physical attraction.
Equally importantly, Garibaldi's allure transferred to the broader public
sphere. In Uruguay, Garibaldi developed a clear talent for attracting
publicity. Yet although both Il Legionario Italiano and El Naçional, the
Montevidean liberal paper, made a hero out of him, a great deal of the
publicity was negative. The Rosas propaganda machine emphasised
Garibaldi's activities as a corsair during the Rio Grande years and his
continuing attacks on foreign shipping, and he was depicted as a dangerous,
undisciplined and voracious mercenary. He was accused variously in the
Rosista press of being a ‘cruel and greedy adventurer’, ‘a vile adventurer’
and ‘an unknown adventurer, come … to this land to pursue his personal
profit’. He was also described as a ‘bandit’ and a bucaneer, an ‘Italian
pirate’, a ‘gringo pirate’, a ‘savage Unitarian [liberal] thirsting for gold and
blood’. After the battle for Colonia, he was accused of leading his ‘cruel’
and ‘wicked’ Italians to commit ‘atrocities’ and acts of religious sacrilege;
during the taking of Salto he was said to have set an example in the looting:
‘With his band of marauders he ran from one habitation to another of the
unfortunate families … whence he robbed with his own hands their money
and jewels. He afterwards ordered a general pillage.’58 When two members
of the Italian Legion deserted to Oribe (Rosas' ally in Montevideo), Rosista
papers in both Buenos Aires and Montevideo published their statements
which made personal accusations against Garibaldi. Garibaldi, they
declared, was ‘immoral’ and ‘corrupted’; a spendthrift who never paid his
debts and a ‘pirate’ who had forcibly abducted another man's wife ‘whom
he afterwards married in Montevideo’.59 Moreover, this negative press
spread back to Europe, so that the London Times (quoting a Buenos Aires
paper) mentioned Garibaldi's ‘piratical depredations’ in January 1845. In
1846 the Paris Journal des Débats published an article accusing the Italians
in Montevideo of ‘robberies’ and ‘atrocities’, and the Restauracion of
Lisbon described his men as bandits: ‘Condottieri … [who] eating, drinking
and playing the fruits of their plunder at dice, brought to mind an epoch
fortunately forgotten in Europe’.60
Yet these accusations did little to harm the growing reputation of
Garibaldi and his men. Above all, Mazzini caught on quickly to Garibaldi's
potential both as a military leader and as what he called ‘a moral influence’
in Italy, and was seemingly unperturbed by the prevailing press hostility.61
Cuneo first mentioned Garibaldi to Mazzini in April 1841,62 and by the
autumn of 1842 Mazzini was already expressing high hopes, describing
Garibaldi as ‘Genoese, young and an exile from Italy for the affairs of '33’
and ‘extolled, as a man of genius, by El Naçional’.63 Mazzini had been
enthused by the Paraná expedition and El Naçional's coverage of it as a
heroic defeat.64 It mattered not to him that Garibaldi had failed and lost all
his boats; what was important was the heroic nature of the defence – ‘[h]e
defended a difficult position for I don't know how many days against seven
boats, with him having two’ – and, he said, ‘Garibaldi is all that is talked
about’ in the region.65 As the siege of Montevideo persisted without hope of
relief, Mazzini wrote to his mother that the news was good. ‘Our Italian
Legion and Garibaldi produce wonders: the Italians are loved and respected
by the population as saviours of the city. The Italian national cause is as
loved there as it could be here with us. I would so like you to see the
newspapers of the city.’66
From the outset, in fact, Mazzini was concerned to promote Garibaldi's
standing in Italy and Europe and to create closer links with Garibaldi and
his followers. He asked his friend Giuseppe Lamberti to circulate news
about Garibaldi in Paris,67 and he published reports about Garibaldi's
activities in his London based Apostolato Popolare. ‘[W]e name him
[Garibaldi] with pride to our brothers,’ the paper told its readers, ‘because
we are sure that he considers his career in South America to be merely the
apprenticeship for the Italian war which one day will call him back to
Europe.’68 Mazzini directly encouraged Garibaldi to expect ‘greater
destinies than dying in London or Montevideo’ and asked Cuneo to tell all
the legionaries ‘that the men who knew how to risk their lives for liberty in
a foreign country, must die in their own land’.69
In January 1846 Mazzini decided openly to combat the attacks in the
French press on Garibaldi and the Italian Legion. Mazzini published a letter
in the London Times along with two documents: one from the Uruguayan
leader Rivera offering land to Garibaldi and the legion, and a reply from
Garibaldi rejecting the offer and declaring that ‘it is the duty of all free men
to fight the battles of freedom, wherever tyranny threatens its cause’.
Mazzini was careful to add that the French Legion had accepted ‘a donation
of the same nature as the one declined by my countrymen’, and that when
Rivera's letter was read to the Italian Legion, ‘there arose from the ranks
one unanimous cry, “We are no hirelings – we are no Swiss”’ (i.e. the
legions were volunteers, not mercenaries). In July of the same year, Mazzini
translated his letter to The Times into French and gave it a new introduction.
Republishing it as a pamphlet, he circulated it among the various exile
circles in Europe and attempted to smuggle it directly into Italy as well.70
Both the publicity drive in Europe and Mazzini's contacts with the Young
Italians in Montevideo intensified after Garibaldi's victory in San Antonio
del Salto in February 1846. The fact that Garibaldi had once again rejected
all rewards seems to have been as important to Mazzini as the fact of the
victory itself. As he wrote enthusiastically to his mother: ‘physical courage
and virtue, everything that I admire is in this man, and that I would like my
compatriots to admire’.71 Mazzini had also received a copy of the text of
Garibaldi's letter rejecting rewards in which Garibaldi stated, ‘as the Head
of the Italian Legion, all that I can have deserved by way of recompense, I
donate to the wounded and to the families of the dead. Not only the
benefits, but the honours too, would weigh on my soul, if bought with so
much Italian blood.’72 Mazzini and his supporters were clearly enthused by
the language and content of this letter, and they were to make great use of it
in the months that followed. Mazzini wrote immediately to Lamberti in
Paris, enclosing a copy of Garibaldi's letter rejecting all rewards and
commenting ‘it is a fine moral act on Garibaldi's part, and it would be
useful to create a name for him in Italy’. He asked Lamberti to circulate the
letter in France and to send copies to two Mazzinian writers: Augusto
Vecchi and Filippo de Boni, who was publishing a new Mazzinian journal,
Così la penso, from exile in Switzerland.73
This time, Mazzini's propaganda efforts had a much broader impact than
hitherto. This was because the political climate in Italy was itself changing.
During the early 1840s, public opinion had been mobilised in favour of
Italian nationalism by a series of works written by prominent moderate
liberals, and notably by the publication of Vincenzo Gioberti's Del primato
morale e civile degli italiani (‘On the moral and civil primacy of Italians’)
in 1843 and by Cesare Balbo's Delle speranze d'Italia (‘The hopes of Italy’)
in 1844. In June 1846, a new pope, Pius IX, was elected and he created
something of a media frenzy with a few liberal reforms and an apparent
endorsement of the (moderate) nationalist cause.74 Although Mazzini was
no friend of the monarchically inclined moderates or of the Pope, he was
quite prepared to take advantage of this swing in public opinion, or, as he
put it in a letter to Cuneo, to try to ‘insinuate something National in the
demonstrations [in favour of the Pope]’ and to turn popular hopes into an
expression of antiAustrianism when, as he believed would happen, the
Austrians put a stop to the Pope's reforms.75
For once, Mazzini was swimming with the political tide. A strong
indication of the increasingly nationalist direction of opinion was offered by
the Scientific Congress in Genoa in September 1846, where nationalist
sentiments were openly expressed and, for the first time in Italy, linked
openly to the figure of Garibaldi. There, one of the participants, Odoardo
Turchetti, made a speech calling for aid for the victims of an earthquake in
Lucca. At the end of the speech he suggested that a book honouring the
efforts of the Italian Legion in Montevideo led by the ‘prode [valiant]
genovese Garibaldi’ be produced and its profits given to the earthquake
victims.76 The book, Documenti storici intorno ad alcuni fatti d'arme
degl'italiani in Montevideo (essentially, a collection of the letters offering
rewards to Garibaldi and his rejection of them) was produced and circulated
legally. The author was Cesare Laugier de Bellecour, a soldier – writer
known for his popular melodramas which always had the same hero, a
brave, selfless and patriotic soldier, at the centre of the action; and he wrote
that he wanted in the book to show ‘that the ancient valour of the Italic
people is not dead’.77 A Bolognese newspaper, Il Felsineo, published
glowing reports of the battle of San Antonio del Salto, stressing the
extraordinary welcome given to the legionaries by the women of Salto and
publishing the decree of the Montevidean government praising the
combatants (this information was said to be supplied by Felice Foresti, a
Mazzinian agent in New York). The left-liberal Turinese paper, Letture di
Famiglia, published an article about Garibaldi under the title ‘Italians who
bring renown to the fatherland in foreign lands’ and described him as a
‘renowned Italian who [is] renewing the examples of ancient heroism’.
These papers too were able to circulate legally without government
censorship (and the article in Letture di Famiglia was published in another
paper, L'Eco, a month later).78
Nor was the clandestine press quiet on the subject of Garibaldi. The
Mazzinian journalist Filippo de Boni published a long article in his Lugano-
based monthly, Così la penso, in which he decried the lack of public interest
in the sacrifices made by the Italian Legion of Montevideo. He attributed it
to the fate of Italy more generally – to the fact that ‘Italians have no
fatherland constituted as a nation, [and] because for certain governments the
blood of exiles and generous men is not human blood’. Hoping to inspire
his readers with their ‘noble and worthy examples of military virtue’, he
gave a detailed account – complete with documents – of the Italian Legion,
stressing the victory at Salto and the offer and rejection of honours, and
exalting Garibaldi as ‘a man resolute in his generosity, a man of courage
and intelligence, capable of great deeds, and for this freely elected by the
legionaries as their colonel’.79
An even clearer sign of the changing climate of public opinion, and of
the role it created for Garibaldi, was given by the establishment of a
national subscription in Italy in October 1846 as a tribute to Garibaldi and
his men. This subscription – the brainchild of two Florentine radicals, Carlo
Fenzi and Cesare della Ripa – asked for donations (the amount fixed was
very low) to give a sword of honour to Garibaldi, a gold medal to Anzani,
and silver medals to all the legionaries. Fenzi and Della Ripa wrote a
circular asking for donations in which they specifically mentioned the
legion's ‘noble refusal’ to accept rewards for their actions, and the heroic
efforts of Garibaldi and Anzani. ‘The whole world’, they wrote, ‘should
know of Italy's recognition of the actions of its children’; these ‘brave
brothers’ should know that they are in ‘the thoughts of their distant
Fatherland’ and be encouraged to ‘ever greater and more highminded
deeds’.80 The Parisbased Mazzinian, Lamberti, announcing the opening of
the subscription in France, stated that it would be the means of publicising
‘the name of our brave Italians and the tyrannical injustices of
governments’, as well as ‘tacitly protesting against the slumber of
Italians’.81 The subscription for Garibaldi and his legion met with huge
success. Lamberti collected signatures in Paris, Mazzini did the same in
London and so did De Boni in Switzerland. In Italy itself, it had an
enormous impact.82 Collections were permitted in the Two Sicilies, the
Papal States and Tuscany, while in Piedmont, King Carlo Alberto was
persuaded by the prominent moderate liberal, Massimo d'Azeglio,
personally to authorise the subscription. It was signed by wellknown
liberals and nationalists from all over Italy (names included Carlo Poerio,
Carlo Pisacane, Quintino Sella and Cristina di Belgioioso) and by
December, only two months after the opening of the subscription, it had
been signed by thousands of people and the desired sum of money had been
collected.83
The publicity campaign for Garibaldi was not confined to Europe or to
the political sphere. Also in 1846, a novel was published in New York in
which Garibaldi had a walkon part. The book, Dolores, which describes
itself as a ‘historical novel’, was written by a Danish poet, Paul
HarroHarring, who had been a friend of Mazzini during his Swiss exile and,
since he had acted as a contact and courier of letters and newspapers
between Mazzini and the South American exiles in 1841 and 1842, would
have met Garibaldi, Cuneo and other Young Italians.84 Dolores is set in the
South American wars in which Garibaldi played a part. Although it was a
vehicle for the author's anticlerical, feminist, republican and Mazzinian
ideas, it was also something of a commercial success, since it went into
three editions in New York and London and was translated into Swedish
and German (although not Italian). Harro-Harring's character Barigaldi is
the commander of a Baltimore schooner called Mazzini; he is said to be ‘an
Italian bandit … a famous fellow’ known for his ‘daring heroism’.85 Yet
long scenes underline his gentlemanly qualities and his calm and good
humour even when talking to the stereotypically idiotic Irishman, Patrick
Gentleboy. The novel also offers us a physical picture of Barigaldi – a
‘notorious’ bandit but equally easy to recognise ‘as belonging to the higher
classes of the social world’:

The lengthened form of his face, his pale complexion, sharply defined and somewhat curved
nose, well formed lips, and deep set, dark eyes, with an expressive glance, black hair, and the
peculiarly sonorous sound of a clear breast voice, all marked him as an Italian. He was dressed
in a simple, dark blue uniform, armed with sword and pistols, and wearing on his head a
marine hat, in the form of a shallop … which displayed the same green, red, and white
cockade, that he had worn in Savoy.

When Barigaldi catches sight of his friend Ormur, he greets him by pressing
him to his breast, ‘while the eyes of both appeared to become moist, and
their lips to quiver with the emotions that pervaded their manly hearts’.86
Barigaldi is here an archetypal Italian patriot: a man whose face, voice and
clothes all ‘marked him’ as Italian, and a romantic bandit hero (‘armed with
swords and pistols’) who is distinguished, sexual and sensitive all at the
same time.
During 1847, Mazzinians and journalists sympathetic to Mazzini were
able to take advantage of the relaxation of press censorship in the Papal
States, Tuscany and Piedmont to write even more openly and explicitly
about Garibaldi.87 In April, Mazzini wrote to Cuneo asking him for a ‘short
historical outline’ of the legion, ‘from its formation onwards, with the fine
deeds … without great words, and documented as much as possible’.88 In
the event, Cuneo went further and published the most complete and detailed
account of Garibaldi and the legion to date, which ran across seven issues
of the radical paper Il Corriere Livornese during July and August 1847.89
Cuneo's account followed the already standard lines established by Mazzini
and produced by De Boni and others in the previous year. It was richly
illustrated with (the now usual) documents and claimed to recount all
details of the war in Montevideo, ‘as they happened, without altering any
aspect of them’. In common with the previous descriptions of Garibaldi and
his men, Cuneo made much of the accusations that Garibaldi was a
‘mercenary’ and ‘adventurer’. He commented that ‘the foreigner, ever in
search of new opportunties to heap abuse on our fatherland, invents new
scoops, by altering the facts, and spreads the news’. Announcing that such
‘a terrible insult has made me shake with rage’, he confided that it was this
insult which had inspired him to write the present account. He insisted that
he sought only to defend Garibaldi and that Italians should be proud of
Garibaldi's achievements and the achievements of his ‘slandered brothers’
in the legion.90 Once again, the main proof of ‘the moral qualities of this
unusual man’ and of the ‘noble and lofty character’ of Garibaldi lay, for
Cuneo, in his exceptional courage and qualities as a leader and in his
rejection of all rewards. Hopelessly outnumbered at San Antonio, Garibaldi
encouraged his men by telling them ‘above all to remember the honour of
Italy’, to which his men replied ‘with one voice’: ‘we will fight to win, or
die, Colonel’. Faced with a counterattack, Garibaldi rallied his men ‘with
his voice and with example’, and fought with such enthusiasm and fury as
to scare off the enemy. Like earlier writers, Cuneo also stressed the fame of
the legionaries in Uruguay: they were welcomed as heroes returning to
Salto, the wounded were tended to by the ‘gentle sex’, and public
ceremonies were held to honour their accomplishments.91
Throughout 1847, press interest in Garibaldi showed few signs of
abating. In May, London's Times, which was hostile to the liberals in
Uruguay and hence to Garibaldi, and in 1846 had declined to publish a
second letter from Mazzini detailing the events of San Antonio del Salto,
now mentioned his ‘brilliant victory’ there and described him as ‘brave and
single-minded’.92 Again, in London, a non-Mazzinian Italian exile, the
journalist Antonio Gallenga, wrote an anti-Austrian tract which found space
to express faith in Garibaldi's potential as a military leader.93 In the same
year, the Turin-based liberal publisher Lorenzo Valerio began to produce
regular features about Garibaldi in his papers, Letture di Famiglia and La
Concordia, and these continued to appear during early 1848.94 La
Concordia began a regular pattern of publishing letters from Garibaldi
himself. After he had received his sword of honour, Garibaldi wrote to
Valerio that he would always treasure it, adding – and again here he
established what would become a popular theme – that he had never
expected any reward for his deeds, and all his men were pleased and
surprised by the ‘applause’ given to ‘our small efforts’. Garibaldi thanked
and praised the musician Giuseppe Bertoldi for his ‘robust poem’,
published as a pamphlet that year in Lugano.95 Bertoldi's pamphlet, Alla
legione italiana in Montevideo ed al colonnello Giuseppe Garibaldi, was
published by Valerio, and had included a description of the public
subscription for Garibaldi and various letters about his activities in
Uruguay. The poem itself – a ‘hymn’ – of the same title likened Garibaldi to
David conquering the giant with stones and a sling, and to George
Washington, and it looked forward to ‘the glorious day’ when Garibaldi
would lead the people against the ‘oppression’ of the ‘barbarians’ (i.e.
against Austrian rule). It was a minor publishing success, with repeatorders
for the pamphlet coming in from at least one bookshop, and it was sold in
Bologna and Florence as well as Turin.96
Somewhat more prosaic, but arguably more significant in its connections
and impact, was the article published in October 1847 about Garibaldi in a
moderate liberal Florentine paper, La Patria, owned by Baron Ricasoli. The
author, Stanislao Bentivoglio, was the brother-in-law of the official French
envoy to Uruguay, Count Walewski, and he had personally met Garibaldi in
Montevideo. Bentivoglio explicitly identified his pleasure at an Italy ‘risen
again to new life’ with Garibaldi, ‘who there with his brave companions
puts on such a fine display of Italian valour’. Reflecting his perhaps more
moderate leanings, Bentivoglio stressed Garibaldi's commitment to order as
much as his courage and leadership: ‘Garibaldi bravely fights enemies
much greater in number than he, he represses internal uprisings with equal
vigour, he punishes wicked men who are ever ready for disorder and strife,
and he rouses with energetic words or just by his presence the spirits of
those who otherwise would have been crushed by such a long and
exhausting war.’ And he too looked forward to the day when Garibaldi
returned ‘to his friends and the Fatherland’, commenting that then the
sword of honour given to him by the Italians ‘would be in his hands a
pitiless weapon against our enemies’.97
Mazzini was not slow to realise the potential of this broadening of public
interest in Garibaldi, and sought to turn it to his advantage. In 1847 he
wrote to Cuneo and to another exile in Montevideo, Giacomo Medici, about
sending a painting of Garibaldi to Europe, which he planned to have
lithographed and circulated to raise money for a newly launched National
Fund which, among other projects, would help Garibaldi and his men return
to Europe.98 A painting by Gaetano Gallino, the same Italian artist in
Montevideo who had designed the flag of the Italian Legion, was produced
and lithographed in 1848 by a Turin-based company called Doyen. The
lithograph depicts Garibaldi as a romantic, exotic figure, half turned
towards the viewer. Although his hands rest on a sabre, there the orthodox
military references stop; he wears a long cloak over one shoulder and a
loose dark ‘blouse’ with full sleeves, his hair is flowing and shoulder length
and he has a full beard and sloping, sensuous eyes.99 A similar lithograph
was produced by the same company in the same year as Giuseppe
Garibaldi di Genova (this time he wears a large, sloping beret, and a white
open shirt tied with a tassel), to accompany the text of Bertoldi's hymn to
the Italian Legion.100 The same lithograph – a slightly altered copy signed
‘Delangle’ – was also published in the newly launched illustrated magazine,
Il Mondo Illustrato, of Turin in February 1848 (see figure 2 opposite).101
By early 1848, in effect, engraved portraits of Garibaldi had begun to
circulate in northern Italy.

2 Portrait of Garibaldi published in Il Mondo Illustrato, 1848. This portrait,

of which many versions exist, was the first picture of Garibaldi to be
published in Europe and was produced before he arrived in Italy in June
1848.
However, Mazzini did not have things entirely his own way, and
Garibaldi proved more difficult to control than he had expected. In January
1847 Mazzini expressed genuine alarm and irritation at the rumours that
Garibaldi and Anzani were planning to organise a military expedition from
Montevideo to Italy (‘What a misfortune … for our affairs! So, it's possible
to lose your head in this way!’). By November, however, he had decided to
make their plans his own, and wrote to Felice Foresti in New York to ask
him for help in transporting Garibaldi and a thousand men to Italy and in
supplying them with firearms (he mentioned buying them some of the new
Colt revolvers). Garibaldi, Mazzini told Foresti, ‘is really an exceptional
man for us’: those who met him confirmed his ‘unusual abilities’, and in
Italy his name ‘has begun to carry weight’.102 In the end, Garibaldi only set
sail for Italy from Montevideo in April 1848, with sixty-three of his
legionaries and a dying Francesco Anzani. His wife and children had left for
Europe before him, as had his colleague from the Italian Legion, Giacomo
Medici, destined for London to make contact with Mazzini.
The return of the South American exiles to Italy was strictly supervised
by Mazzini, and was the result of his strategy to hold them in readiness to
fight and die for Italy when he felt the political and military moment was
right. But by late 1847 it had already become difficult to hold Garibaldi
back. Garibaldi was disillusioned with developments in Montevideo and
anxious to return home. He was particularly enthused by the election of the
‘liberal’ pope, Pius IX, in Italy and, unlike Mazzini, believed that he
represented a new opportunity for Italy. Indeed, in October Garibaldi and
Anzani – convinced, as they put it, that a man ‘had arisen in the breast of
our Fatherland’ who understood the ‘needs of the century’ – had written a
letter to the papal representative in Rio offering the military services of their
legion to the Pope.103 In December, the first newspapers arrived in
Montevideo giving details of the reforms taking place in Italy, and a
celebration was held by the Italian community in Montevideo. Garibaldi
and the officers of the legion led a torchlit procession through the streets, to
the sound of musical bands and revolutionary and patriotic songs. Just days
before his departure for Italy, Garibaldi would probably also have heard the
news from Italy that a popular revolution had occured in Palermo, which
had overthrown the rule of the king of Naples.104
Conclusion

The early fame of Garibaldi was the result of a deliberate strategy

conceived by Mazzini and enthusiastically endorsed by his followers,
including Garibaldi himself. As a national hero, Garibaldi represents a
triumph for Mazzini's insistence on the unity of thought and action. His
fame was the result of cultural elaboration and military accomplishment,
and its purpose was to inspire and publicise political engagement in word
and in deed. Especially worthy of comment are the various ‘fits’ between
the first accounts of Garibaldi and the Risorgimento narratives discussed in
the previous chapter: Garibaldi provides a concrete and symbolic link
between the nation as cultural identity and nationalism as a revolutionary
political movement, and there are striking similarities between the way
Garibaldi is described and the qualities of a Risorgimento literary hero. Like
the Risorgimento hero, Garibaldi is virile and attractive: he smoulders in
long hair and flowing clothes. He is of a ‘noble and lofty character’,
personally modest yet rebellious, and defiant in the face of defeat; and he is
exceptionally courageous and daring when it comes to upholding moral
principles and defending the honour of the community. Equally, in these
early accounts Garibaldi is always, and is perhaps above all, a soldier, a
military hero who shows the way forward to the glorious day when Italy
will rise again to a new life. Garibaldi can perhaps best be understood as a
kind of Italian fusion (or bricolage)105 of Walter Scott hero and Mazzinian
genius, of eclectic borrowings from romantic sensibilities and militant
Jacobinism.
It is vital to note that, especially in the accounts written by Mazzinians
like Cuneo and De Boni, Garibaldi does not stand alone. Like the
imaginary/historical heroes of Risorgimento novels and paintings, Garibaldi
embodies the romantic idea of the nation; thus, he is part of a free and equal
fraternity, and he is tied to his ‘brothers’ in the Italian Legion as much by
feeling as by disinterested virtue.106 Garibaldi's greatness lies not only in
his capacity for ‘great deeds’ but also in his qualities as a leader. It is his
leadership of those ‘brave brothers’ who have ‘freely elected’ him as their
colonel, and whom he encourages by his own example and with his own
voice, that is repeatedly stressed in these narratives. Moreover, all the
legionaries fight as bravely as he, and are just as prepared to die for the
honour of Italy. They too are the heroes of San Antonio del Salto, cared for
by the ‘gentle sex’; and when, after the battle, in a clear public gesture
which is underlined in all these accounts, Garibaldi dedicates his honours to
the dead and wounded of the legion, he downplays his own contribution and
emphasises the religious and romantic virtues of martyrdom. So, if
Garibaldi represents the elaboration of an Italian ideal of heroism which
takes its inspiration from a romanticised past, the Italian Legion also
represents a new political ideal – that of fraternity and sacrifice for
fraternity – derived from Jacobinism and the French Revolution. In this
way, Garibaldi's legionaries are a voluntary ‘band of brothers’, whose
association and actions provide a model for the new national community
envisaged by Mazzini and his followers.
Perhaps the most interesting feature of all, and common to nearly all
early accounts, is the juxtaposition of the squalid insults ‘heaped’ on
Garibaldi and his legion by foreigners and the enemies of Italy with the
marvellous truth revealed by Italian patriots and honest journalists. The
starting point for the texts discussed above is broadly the same: the
accusation of ‘mercenary’, ‘adventurer’ or ‘bandit’ and/or the public's
ignorance of the glorious exploits of Italy's exiled ‘children’ far away from
the fatherland. These allegations serve to throw into sharper relief the
magnificent true story of the legion, true because the letters of those
involved and reports about them reveal the full extent of their selflessness,
bravery and heroism in serving a just cause. The structure of these accounts
is remarkable for its closeness to Risorgimento narrative, and specifically to
its stages of decadence, rebellion, death and redemption. As we saw with
D'Azeglio's novel, Ettore Fieramosca (see page 27), attacks by foreigners
on the independence and honour of Italy were a particular theme in
Risorgimento texts, as was the refusal by a few heroes to accept this insult
to national pride. This suggests that the story of Garibaldi in South America
would have been easily recognised and provoked an emotional response in
many readers, and that a clear attempt is being made to identify the
political/military actions of Garibaldi and his men with the general
risorgimento of Italy. Thus, in the narrative structure and in the use of
familiar themes, we see the creation of a story for Garibaldi and his legion
which both resembles those found in the popular novels, poems and
paintings of the period and aspires to be a more general foundation story for
the new Italian polity.
In a very short period of time – between early 1846 and late 1847 –
Garibaldi became a symbol of the ‘new’ Italy, a resurgent Italy no longer
just imagined but being brought to life. That Italy's Restoration
governments were forced to tolerate the circulation of such dangerous
political rhetoric about a revolutionary hero gives us some idea of his
popularity, or of the almost irresistible tide of public opinion running in his
favour. Enthusiasm for Garibaldi was now shared by scientists, diplomats
and artists as well as by the group of dedicated Mazzinians who were his
original friends and promoters. During this period, in other words, Garibaldi
became a sign as well as a lived existence. His life became as important for
what it could symbolise and provoke imaginatively as for what he could
achieve materially. Although not all aspects of Garibaldi's public
personality were evident, a number of key features were already in place
when he set sail for Italy in April 1848. Perhaps most noteworthy is the
remarkably successful – because convincing – combination of moral
rectitude and personal bravery (Mazzini's ‘physical courage and virtue’,
quoted above), personal qualities which were, in turn, identified with an
idealised general concept of italianità. Just as interesting, however, is the
extent to which his ideas and image were formed by experiences away from
Italy. Garibaldi's knowledge of French socialism and South American
politics were as central to his political formation as were his encounters
with the Mazzinians. His defiantly exotic and sensual physical appearance
could hardly have differed more from the austere image carefully cultivated
by Mazzini for himself while in London. In this respect, Garibaldi's
persona, and the strong responses to it, point to his cultivation of a different,
more physical political aesthetic, which was to have a broad international
appeal.
Nevertheless, the fame of Garibaldi was tied to the making of a
specifically Italian public opinion in the years immediately before and after
the election of the ‘liberal’ pope, Pius IX, in 1846. His fame contributed to
and was helped by this broader development. By the end of 1847, Garibaldi
had become a well-known personality in liberal – nationalist circles in Italy.
His character and actions had been created and recorded, and these formed
part of a new narrative which Italians could tell themselves about
themselves, or hold up as an example for others to aspire to. Thus, the two
or so years before the outbreak of revolution in 1848 saw the first
fashionings of a cult of Garibaldi. The building blocks of a story were laid;
a story which, by its power to move, entertain and inspire, helped to create a
stronger, more persuasive and arguably more political sense of an Italian
national community.
 CHAPTER 3

REVOLUTION

The age of the hero

The early fame of Garibaldi was a Mazzinian creation, and its success was
tied up with immediate political events. More precisely, the growing
political cult of Garibaldi reflected and assisted the rapidly changing nature
of Italian politics and public opinion in the early to mid-1840s. These
changes then combined with economic hardship and social transformation
to produce a general revolutionary conflagration in 1848 and 1849. Yet like
the revolutions themselves, which were the product of a long-term crisis
and extended rapidly across Europe, the pace at which Garibaldi's
popularity grew and spread cannot be understood as a short-term or purely
Italian phenomenon. Rather, the development of a Garibaldi cult was part of
a longer European tradition of heroes and hero worship, a tradition which
had a clear, and deliberate, political purpose. This tradition is worth looking
at briefly as it helps us to understand both the success of Garibaldi and the
radical aspects of his image.
The fact that Garibaldi ‘worked’ as a political hero was due to an existing
public familiarity with such figures. Equally, he had to fit in with, or
otherwise appeal to, public expectations. By the time Garibaldi emerged on
the political scene in the early 1840s, the European public's familiarity with
political heroes was already of quite long standing: as with much else in
mid-nineteenth-century revolutionary politics, it dated back to the French
Revolution. The French Revolution had provoked, and thus had to face, a
symbolic as well as a material vacuum at the centre of power. In particular,
the initial desacralisation and the ultimate destruction of the monarchy
through the creation of a republic and execution of the king – the ‘father’ of
the French ‘family’ – had led to a crisis in the representation of power,
spelling the apparent ruin of paternal and religious symbols of royal
authority and the end of deference as the basis for political obedience.1
Power, in the words of François Furet, ‘had lost its moorings’ and ‘was
perceived by everyone as vacant’.2 French revolutionary leaders had
responded to this vacuum by seeking to establish both an alternative
revolutionary discourse of power based on fraternity and a new
‘iconological rubric’ which would represent the Republic and help create a
different sense of political community. This task was not easy, and it was
undermined by the persistence in the popular imagination of the traditional
symbols of power, by the absence of any clear personification of the
abstract ideal of ‘Republic’, and by the sheer scale of the challenge which
revolutionaries had set themselves – ‘to mobilise, engage and galvanise the
masses’ with the second revolution of 1792 and the coming of war during
the same year.3
In the effort to overcome the difficulties of creating a new political
symbolism to reach and inspire the whole of French society, the whole of
society had become the object of a symbolic reinvention. The clothes
people wore and the way they behaved, as well as the structure of their lives
(consumer goods, currency, the calendar), became a sign of revolutionary
belonging and ‘a field of political struggle’ between government and
people.4 Revolutionary festivals sought to create and transmit a new
tradition, and to transform and transfer in people's imagination the sacrality
of the old regime on to the Republic.5 The Greek hero Hercules, the
personification of physical strength and courage, was made an emblem of
the Republic; the lion, a traditional symbol of power, was recast to represent
popular sovereignty; and an invented and idealised woman in a Phrygian
cap – ‘Marianne’ – became first the representation of liberty and later of the
Republic in general.6 Politics became an instrument for reshaping society
and sought to absorb and control all aspects of culture. The Revolution, to
quote Furet again, ‘ushered in a world where mental representations of
power governed all actions, and where a network of signs completely
dominated political life’.7
One of the most evident, and perhaps the most enduring, of the ‘signs’ of
mass politics was the creation and use of personality cults. Jacobin cults are
generally associated with the attempt both to replace the symbols and rituals
of Catholicism and to appropriate them for the new religion of the
fatherland. Leaders introduced new ceremonies and a revolutionary liturgy,
and they promoted a cult of ‘patriot saints’, most famously with the
commemoration and funeral of the assassinated leader Marat and the
celebration of the boy-hero Bara, executed in the Vendée by counter-
revolutionaries for refusing to shout Vive le roi.8 Such ‘martyrs for liberty’
were heroes of the Revolution in much the same way as religious martyrs
can be seen as heroes of God. Hence, the purpose of such cults was to
encourage an emotional identification with, and popular allegiance to, the
patriot saint and, through him, to the source of his greatness – the Republic
itself. Yet it is unlikely that these cults were especially successful in
supplanting traditional religion. Although Marat was a great sans-culotte
hero, there is little evidence that people attributed therapeutic or other
sacralising powers to him, and in so far as the various ceremonies in his
honour did lead to his sanctification in the popular imagination, they may
also have encouraged a resurgence in religious feeling and an affirmation of
Catholic rituals.9
Nevertheless, the promotion of these cults in revolutionary France served
to popularise an ideal of the heroic individual which was tied to a new
political aesthetic drawn from neo-classicism. In the famous paintings by
Jacques-Louis David, Marat at his Last Breath (1793) and The Death of
Bara (1793), the political virtue of Marat and Bara – their selfless heroism
as a model for political engagement – was associated with an aesthetic ideal
of antique Greek art and a political ideal of freedom enjoyed by the Greek
states in antiquity. Beauty was identified with freedom, and personified by a
virtuous, and either dead or dying, male hero. It was in this way that the
male hero – physically beautiful, morally virtuous, personally courageous
and, until Napoleon, never living – came to be a powerful political symbol
both for the revolution and for the heirs of the revolution.10
David's paintings of Marat and Bara are part of a much larger body of
work which celebrated male heroes in antiquity (the Horaces; Socrates;
Brutus), and especially the ideals of male beauty and male
companionship.11 In the earlier part of his career, his artistic production
coincided with, and contributed to, a broader Jacobin cult of antiquity,
where the virtues of republican Rome were promoted as a model of political
behaviour and personal morality as well as of artistic taste. Here antiquity
reinforced a cult of Great Men and marginalised other forms of identity.
With the breakdown of court and aristocratic culture in France, the men of
the revolution self-consciously ‘manufactured … classical identities for
themselves’ and identified with the heroes of classical times; they adopted a
‘Stoic’ role – a physical demeanour of dignity, reserve and authenticity – so
as to personify personally and physically the individual ‘classical’ virtues
which were held to be at the basis of public life.12 Equally, neo-classicism –
whether as personal role-playing or as artistic style – reinforced a prevailing
tendency to exclude women and the feminine as active protagonists in the
revolution. On both a symbolic and material level, women were confined to
the family and to a restricted ‘feminine’ domain of sensibility and emotion;
in revolutionary mythology, according to Dorinda Outram, ‘women react,
relate, perceive, involve; men cling to the heroic moments and postures of
personification’.13 Moreover, in the novels and paintings of the Jacobin
period, as well as in government legislation and the legal system, the
traditional family (not just the father, but also wives and, to a lesser extent,
sisters) was sacrificed or, at best, ignored and subordinated for the sake of
the Republic. The Republic was represented as an alternative family, a
voluntary act of belonging to a non-hierarchical fellowship of men. Thus,
the patriarchal family was replaced by a voluntary fraternity or a ‘band of
brothers’. These brothers, in revolutionary discourse, were the heroes of the
revolution: ‘romantic heroes willing to fight for virtue and the triumph of
the republic … prepared to become martyrs for their cause … [whose] chief
reward was their sense of solidarity with their brothers’, and who reached
true heroic status only with death.14
Napoleon marks a development of, and a change of direction in,
revolutionary symbolism, in much the same way as he does with
revolutionary politics more generally. Under the Jacobins, revolutionary
heroes (ancient or modern) personified abstract virtues such as courage,
dignity and selfless service to the Republic, which were meant to inspire
and encourage popular emulation. With Napoleon, however, revolutionary
symbolism had a more simple purpose: it was used to glorify his personal
power and enhance the process of his self-legitimation. The cult of the hero
was no longer identified with a collective ideal but became a purpose in
itself. Art became a tool in Napoleonic propaganda. Neo-classicism ceased
to have an educative function and was appropriated and recast as a
decorative and architectural style which recalled the florid opulence of
imperial Rome; and history – ancient Rome, along with the Merovingian
and Carolingian monarchies and Renaissance painting – was ‘plundered’ for
sources to represent Napoleonic power. Napoleon himself posed as a man
of literature and learning, a patron of the arts as well as a fierce warrior and
tireless ruler.15 He became a classical hero: cold, reserved but with a great
inner strength.16 The pantheon of dead republican brothers was reduced to
one living ‘Great Man’.
The fusion of authoritarian and traditional symbols of power with those
of revolution, and its concentration into one living ruler (the ‘Emperor’),
filled the symbolic vacancy caused by the French Revolution. Although
foreshadowed in many ways by the aesthetic ideals and totalitising practices
of Jacobinism, Napoleon's shift towards authoritarianism and dictatorship is
generally seen as definitive, marking a decisive rightward turn in the
symbols and rituals of mass politics. Focusing specifically on Germany,
George Mosse traces a general ideal of ‘heroic manhood’ derived from neo-
classicism back to the revolutionary and Napoleonic period, through the
nineteenth century and forward to the authoritarian regimes of the twentieth
century. He argues that an unchanging and public representation of
masculinity as beautiful, courageous and self-controlled was established
during the French Revolution and came to be adopted or ‘co-opted’ by
political movements thereafter, and especially by nationalist movements, as
‘one means of … [their] self-representation’.17 Thus, post-revolutionary
nationalist movements came to use an idealised man – a Greek youth, a
beautiful athlete – as a symbol of the nation. Moreover, through the
experience of war, first the national wars of the early nineteenth century and
then the total wars of the twentieth, masculinity became ever more
identified with a military aesthetic and military values. ‘The modern warrior
now joined the Greek youth and the athlete as a model of masculinity’, and
the military virtues of death and sacrifice became central both to the
masculine stereotype and to images of the nation itself.18
This trope of masculinity as used by nationalist movements in the
nineteenth century (and beyond) was generally regarded as a positive
stereotype – ‘a motor that drove the nation and society at large’19–but
actually worked to constrain and to exclude. Mosse says that it enforced
middle-class notions of sexual respectability and restraint, and may even
have served to de-sexualise the male body: ‘The nation protected the ideal
of beauty from the lower passions of man and helped transform it into a
symbol of self-control and purity’.20 At the same time, the association of
masculinity and nation with war and soldiering helped to make war more
seductive and the nation more aggressive. If fraternity could be expressed
by volunteering (or being conscripted) to fight for the fatherland – by being
part of the arms-bearing brotherhood of citizens – then the idea of the
fatherland in continental Europe was increasingly shaped by military values
and images. The image of the soldier also changed. No longer was it
enough to obey and be brave: the soldier had to sacrifice himself for the
nation. Both in France, as we have seen, and in Prussia during the wars of
liberation, a myth was created of the patriotic hero choosing freely to die
for his country and, in so doing, being elevated to the status of martyr and
immortalised.21 Equally, in the long term, the identification of war with
sacrifice and heroism, and with nation, can explain why nationalists should
have become the main advocates of a much more belligerent and
chauvinistic masculinity in the decades after the French Revolution.22
When Mazzini's friend Thomas Carlyle bemoaned the devaluation of
heroes in contemporary society – the lack of opportunities for ‘Able-man’
and the absence of ‘Hero-worship’ – he inadvertently betrayed his culture's
obsession with them.23 The nineteenth century became the age of the hero.
Fictional heroes like Ivanhoe, D'Artagnan and Ettore Fieramosca captured
the imagination of the nineteenth-century reader, and literary geniuses as
diverse as Lord Byron and Dante Alighieri jostled for the attention of the
public. Whether remembered or imagined as with the Jacobins, or borrowed
and elaborated as in the person of Napoleon, the cult of the hero became a
central part of nineteenth-century nationalism and was celebrated in
monuments, paintings, poetry, novels and history all over Europe and the
Americas. Napoleon survived defeat, exile and death to become a symbol of
France and a far more genuinely popular figure than in his own lifetime.
The cult of the hero also spread to Britain, one of Napoleon's fiercest
opponents, and was expressed in the ongoing public enthusiasm for military
heroes like Nelson and Wellington, and liberal and radical heroes such as
Daniel O'Connell, William Gladstone, and the Chartist leaders Ernest Jones
and Feargus O'Connor. From the 1830s onwards, it is also possible to talk
of a cult of political celebrity, where figures like Queen Victoria and
Napoleon III were actively produced and promoted using the new
technologies of print media.24
Throughout the nineteenth century, the political purpose of the hero
remained broadly that of the French Revolution: to personify a political
idea, to embody an elite or collective movement, and/or to sacralise a
regime. In particular, nationalist heroes seemed to give voice to the nation,
and they lent credibility to claims for the existence of national communities
and the genuineness of nationalist feeling. It was precisely in this way that
Garibaldi embodied and legitimised the claims of Risorgimento Italy, and
he was fashioned explicitly for this purpose. Indeed, he probably represents
the most complete expression of ‘heroic masculinity’ allied with
nationalism in all of nineteenthcentury politics.
However, the example of Garibaldi is also significant because it suggests
real problems with the model outlined by Mosse. Garibaldi points us to a
tradition in democratic thought which directly challenged the authoritarian
symbolism of Napoleon. Thus, Saint-Simonians admired Napoleon, but
they also argued that in removing himself from society – by posing as a
great man and saviour – he had become less effective: a hero did not have
to be a ‘great man’ responsible for exceptional deeds. Historians in post-
revolutionary France – Guizot, Thierry, Michelet – as well as many
democrats, such as Louis Blanc, took pains to question the idea of an
exceptional individual, and argued that greatness resided just as much in a
capacity to identify with the hopes and action of the people.25 As Thierry
put it, ‘the essential aim of [my] history is to contemplate the destiny of
peoples, and not that of certain famous men, to recount the adventures of
social life, and not those of individual life’. For Michelet, genius was ‘the
people’, and the new identity was one of collectivity. ‘How I need to clasp
hold of the patrie,’ he wrote, ‘to know and love France more and more!’26
This critique of the authoritarian hero should also remind us of an older,
American and republican, tradition of hero worship, where the hero was a
man like Washington, uncomfortable with power, and imagined as ‘a
symbol of people's aspirations’ rather than being venerated for his own
achievements.27 Crucially, this critique of the exceptional individual was
taken up by another republican, Mazzini. Mazzini challenged what he saw
as the primacy given to the ‘individual’ (his emphasis) in nineteenth-century
thought and in an essay, ‘On the works of Thomas Carlyle (genius and
tendencies)’, he publicly criticised his friend's belief that ‘[t]he nationality
of Italy is the glory of having produced Dante and Christopher Columbus;
the nationality of Germany that of having given birth to Luther, to Goethe’.
He insisted that these men ‘were only the interpreters or prophets’ of
national thought: they were ‘of the people, who alone are its depositary’.
Thus, for Mazzini, the hero – or what he called ‘genius’ – was a democrat,
whose function was to perceive and represent the collectivity, and he
protested ‘in the name of the democratic spirit of the age’ against the ‘great
man’ thesis:

History is not the biography of great men … The great men of the earth are but the marking
stones on the road of humanity: they are the priests of its religion … There is yet something
greater, more divinely mysterious, than all the great men – and that is the earth which bears
them, the human race which includes them, the thought of God which stirs within them, and
which the whole human race collectively can alone accomplish … The inspiration of genius
belongs one half to heaven, the other to the crowds of common mortals from whose life it
springs.28

Like the Jacobins before them, Mazzinian nationalists were convinced

that politics held the key to cultural transformation – in this case, to
‘making Italians’. But their task differed from that of both the Jacobins and
Napoleon in a number of ways. First, they were not in power, but mostly
outside or excluded from it. Second, they were democrats and were part of a
moment of democratic politics in the middle decades of the nineteenth
century when mass politics was a revolutionary idea and where its signs
were those of opposition and rebellion. Thus, the function of the hero was
to include and to liberate, and to defy the prevailing status quo. Moreover, if
we look at political culture and taste in mid-nineteenth-century Europe,
what is immediately striking is not so much the presence of neo-classicism
as the influence of romanticism. In the Italian case, it is especially worth
remembering that neo-classicism (or simply ‘classicism’) was seen as part
of a cosmopolitan tradition against which romantics specifically and vocally
identified themselves; Italian romantics looked instead to the very different
ideals, traditions and images of medievalism for inspiration.29 For
politically engaged romantics, including Mazzini, classicism was also a
discredited movement as a result of its association with Napoleon and thus
with an older, now superseded, political epoch. And whatever the
importance of classical Rome as a symbol of Italian ‘primacy’, its precise
meaning was equivocal as a result of the inevitable confusion between its
republican and imperial pasts. For all these reasons, Risorgimento
nationalists preferred to refer to the medieval past and to its far clearer
associations with political independence, freedom and community.30
Although there are many artistic continuities between classicism and
romanticism,31 it is also important to stress the break and conflict between
the two traditions. This means that there are strong distinctions as well as
continuities between the neo-classical and the romantic hero. The romantic
hero was a rebel like Byron; he could also be melancholic, transgressive
and even criminal.32 The bandit was an especially common, and not
necessarily negative, hero-figure in many romantic dramas and novels, from
Schiller's The Robbers (1791) to the novels of Walter Scott, and beyond.
The bandit – hero is often a good man pushed outside the law, who scorns
rational civilisation for the passions and energy of nature. Rob Roy
MacGregor, the eponymous hero of one of Scott's most popular stories, has
an appearance which is ‘wild, irregular, and … unearthly’; he is described
as an ‘outlawed robber’ and a ‘celebrated freebooter’, a ‘kind and gentle’
man and loving husband but with ‘ideas of morality’ which ‘were those of
an Arab chief’.33 His ‘commanding’ wife, the cruel ‘virago’ Helen, fights
with him, and teaches his young sons to do the same. Moreover, Rob Roy
rejects the offer to be reconciled with the law because he cannot leave his
native land: ‘the heather that I have trod upon when living, must bloom
ower me when I am dead – my heart would sink, and my arm would shrink
and wither like fern in the frost, were I to lose sight of my native hills; nor
has the world a scene that would console me for the loss of the rocks and
cairns’. Nor can he leave his wife, he adds: she will never leave the
Highlands and he cannot bear the ‘heartbreak’ of being separated from
her.34
Adrian Lyttelton argues that romantic critics of the classical tradition in
Italy proposed ‘the dethronement of the hero or central figure’ and his
replacement by secondary figures who would emphasise the popular and
collective dimension of historical events.35 And while the hero had
eventually to be retained ‘for full dramatic impact’ in romantic narratives,
his character and resonance changed. The Italian romantic hero personified
an idealised Italian past; he was firmly based in a national time and space,
and his function was to be part of, and to inspire, the collectivity. Instead of
being ‘an exemplar of timeless virtue and dignity’ who suppressed all
domestic and affective ties for the public good, the Italian romantic hero's
qualities were, like those of Rob Roy MacGregor, ‘grounded in feeling’. In
line with popular taste, he was driven by passion and enthusiasm; he was
adored by, and adoring of, women, and his love for his family was the basis
for the love for his country. He had always a private, family reason for
action as well as a patriotic one.36 When it came, the clash between family
and ‘fatherland’ was no longer resolved decisively in favour of the latter,
but was instead shown as an agonising and poignant choice with uncertain
outcome.37 All this served to define the appeal of the romantic hero as a
specifically ‘Italian’ figure, a hero who was democratic and of, or with, the
people, and who was more passionate, sensitive and sexual – indeed, more
feminine – than his neoclassical counterpart.
This is not to suggest that there was no trace of the neo-classical hero in
Garibaldi or that the tendency towards authoritarianism identified by Mosse
is entirely mistaken. Rather, it is to argue against the idea of a
straightforward or uncontested political and cultural continuum between the
symbols of the French Revolution and Napoleon and the totalitarian cults of
the twentiethcentury dictators. Like political concepts, the meaning of
symbols can alter while their outward (linguistic or visual) structure
remains the same.38 Heroes too have their history, and what they signified
changed and was subject to challenge. In the course of the nineteenth
century, Napoleon himself went from ‘saviour’ to ‘black legend’ (and back
again) and from dictator to a liberal and to a romantic hero.39 At the same
time, as Lyttelton shows, which symbols and narratives were chosen to
construct the nation had a real political signficance. They could be ‘the
terrain of a vigorous contest’ between political rivals, their meanings could
be challenged and could alter over time, and control over their
interpretation was essential for ‘conveying the desired national message’.
And it mattered who or what ‘was cast as the protagonist of the story’, and
at what time.40
The promotion of Garibaldi as a national hero during the 1840s should be
seen as part of a political struggle to personify and popularise a specific
vision of national community. This vision was tied not so much to an
authoritarian and exclusive form of mass politics as to an inclusive,
democratic ideal of liberty and fraternity. To support this vision, Italian
democrats not only had to identify themselves with romanticism, they also
had to appropriate the revolutionary symbolism of the Jacobins, and to
challenge and subvert the conservative legacy of Napoleon. How these
struggles related to Garibaldi, and how the cult of Garibaldi was fashioned
and elaborated during the moments of democratic initiative and political
power during the 1848–9 revolutions, is the subject of the rest of this
chapter.
The return of the hero

The January revolution in Palermo, which Garibaldi might have heard about
as he left Montevideo, was the start of an extraordinary spring. The
revolutions which followed were the result of a deep and prolonged
economic crisis, which had begun in 1845 with the failure of the potato
crop in much of Europe. With the bad grain harvest in 1846, Europe's rural
population faced near or real famine conditions, which in turn caused rising
prices and food shortages in the towns and cities and produced a downturn
in the business cycle, together with a crisis in the banking sector. In part, the
symptom of larger structural changes in European society, such as
industrialisation, the commercialisation of agriculture and the expansion of
cities, the general economic depression, placed the social, financial and
political structures of Europe under an intolerable strain. Open criticism by
a disaffected middle class and the growth of opposition movements across
Europe (the banquet campaign against Louis-Philippe in France; radical and
constitutional agitation in the German states; the explosion of public
opinion in Italy) challenged and undermined the legitimacy of most
European states. Popular riots and demonstrations in early 1848 then
delivered them an evidently devastating coup de grâce.
 Starting with the revolt in Palermo, governments crumbled and rulers
succumbed to revolution across Europe. The Sicilian revolt spread to the
mainland and a constitution was proclaimed in Naples. In February, both
the king of Piedmont and the Grand Duke of Tuscany were forced to grant
constitutions and, in March, there were successful popular revolts against
Austrian rule in the cities of Milan and Venice, while in Rome the Pope
granted a constitution for the Papal States. Nationalism appeared in the
ascendant when the king of Piedmont, Carlo Alberto, declared war on
Austria and crossed the frontier into Lombardy on 23 March, supported by
a seemingly united coalition of the Pope, Leopold II of Tuscany and
Ferdinando II of Naples. Between March and July 1848, around 300
volunteer corps were organised all over Italy to help in the fight against
Austria; this was a striking indication of patriotic feeling and engagement
among young men, albeit largely from the urban and educated classes.41
These events in Italy encouraged, and were encouraged by, revolts in
France, Germany and the Habsburg Empire, and were paralleled in Chartist
agitation in Britain and, the following year, a Young Irelander uprising in
Ireland. In February 1848, a republic was proclaimed in Paris; this was
followed by street fighting in Berlin and Vienna, and nationalist
demonstrations in Zagreb, Prague, Cracow and Budapest. Rulers –
including Louis-Philippe in France and the Austrian chancellor Prince
Metternich – fled their capitals; the king of Prussia promised a constitution;
and liberal governments were formed in the south German states.
Discussions began in Frankfurt for the formation of a popularly elected
German national assembly. By the time Garibaldi set out for Italy in April,
the revolution had already taken a more radical turn, with a republican
uprising in Baden, riots in Paris and moves toward separatist rule in Sicily
and in the Habsburg Empire.42
So it seemed that Garibaldi's arrival in Italy could hardly have been better
timed. It had been predicted and heralded well in advance by the Turin
paper La Concordia, which was owned by the moderate radical Lorenzo
Valerio and was already supportive of Garibaldi. On 6 March the paper had
announced the arrival of his family in Nice and indicated that ‘the intrepid
warrior’ himself was soon to arrive in Rome. On 10 March Garibaldi was
said to have left Montevideo; on 27 March a position was said to have been
offered him in the Piedmontese army; and on 13 April he was apparently at
sea with twenty-five men and making for Civitavecchia, a port to the north
of Rome.43 Although none of this, other than the arrival of his family in
Nice, was true, it helped to sustain an air of excitement about the ‘valiant’
hero's imminent arrival.
Garibaldi finally arrived in Italy on 21 June, landing at his birthplace,
Nice (until 1860 part of Piedmontese territory), having learnt at Alicante the
news of revolution. The welcome was so enthusiastic that all the passengers
on board his ship, La Speranza, were able to ignore the two-week
quarantine regulations and come ashore at once. ‘Since he is a native of this
city’, the governor-general of Nice reported to the capital, Turin, ‘and his
arrival had been eagerly awaited for over a month, a quantity of people
gathered at the port to see him’ and to welcome him back to the
‘fatherland’. A Milan paper, Il 22 Marzo, noted their arrival by describing
for its readers the appearance of Garibaldi and his men: ‘their uniform is
rather beautiful (red blouse with green patterns; white trousers); they are
armed and parade with great skill; they are chosen men who can serve as a
nucleus to form an excellent regiment’.44 Mazzini's new daily newspaper,
L'Italia del Popolo of Milan, greeted Garibaldi with the words: ‘another
brave man has joined the brave men who are defending the fatherland’; he
had come, the paper told its readers, for:

the final duel between the House of Austria and of Italy; between civilisation and barbarism,
between liberty and tyranny … thus, Garibaldi is among us; with him is his companion
Anzani; and he is followed by a hundred courageous and expert fighting men … We therefore
salute with brotherly love the brave, the long-awaited Garibaldi, and we wish him new glory,
for his glory is our glory, and is Italian glory.45

All Italian nationalists, it seemed, expected great things of Garibaldi.

From Nice, Garibaldi raised around a hundred extra volunteers and after
a week he moved on to Genoa, where his arrival was again the occasion for
nationalist demonstrations and he again recruited more men. Both his
speech from the York hotel to the inhabitants of Nice and his speech at the
National Club in Milan were reported and republished by La Concordia on
23 June, 29 June, 1 July and 6 July; the democratic paper Il Pensiero
Italiano of Genova and the moderate La Patria of Florence also published
his Milan speech on 4 July and 7 July, respectively. In these speeches,
Garibaldi endorsed the war of Carlo Alberto, the Piedmontese king, and
declared himself ready to renounce his republicanism in favour of uniting
all their forces: ‘[t]he great, the only question at this moment is the
expulsion of the foreigner, and the war of independence’.46 After Genoa,
Garibaldi went to the Piedmontese army's front line just outside Mantua,
determined to meet with the king and offer him his services and those of his
men. His movements from there to the War Office in Turin, and then back
to Milan in mid-July, were again reported and celebrated by La Concordia,
which drew attention to his popularity and to his ‘sweetly austere and
martial appearance’; the paper also expressed a hope that Garibaldi would
be ‘quickly, and without bureaucratic cares and delays’ given a mission
which was ‘worthy of him’.47
In fact, Garibaldi had got himself into trouble almost immediately. The
republican groups who had led the famous Cinque Giornate (five-day
uprising) in Milan against the Austrians were far from convinced by Carlo
Alberto's decision to enter their war, ostensibly on their side. Even Mazzini
himself, who had arrived in Italy on 7 April to a ‘triumphal progress’ from
the frontier to Milan, had fallen foul of the republican leaders Ferrari and
Cattaneo when he had attempted to mediate between them and the
Piedmontese monarchists for the sake of Italian unity.48 Cattaneo and
Ferrari were in favour of a federal Italy, and told Mazzini that they feared
Piedmontese ambitions in Lombardy more than Austrian rule; when
Mazzini called them ‘municipalists’, Cattaneo accused him of ‘selling
out’.49 By May, however, Mazzini had been outmanoeuvred by the
Piedmontese king and his ministers, and so was infuriated by Garibaldi's
speeches and actions in their favour. ‘Garibaldi is another disappointment’,
he told his mother; his decision to join forces with the regular army meant
‘he will no longer be the Garib[aldi] that Italy loved and admired’.50 But
Garibaldi was soon to be disappointed too. He was obstructed in his efforts
at every turn by Carlo Alberto's generals, and, although he was eventually
appointed a general by the Milan administration, he was confined to an
office organising the call-up of volunteers. He then caught malaria, and was
forced to stay in bed for several days.51
 The difficulties which Garibaldi encountered upon returning to Italy
reflected serious problems with the revolution itself, and specifically with
the military campaign in northern Italy. Apart from anti-Austrian feeling,
there was little common ground and even less love lost between moderate
liberals and republicans in Milan, and thus between those who sought an
alliance (or union) with monarchical Piedmont and those who refused to
consider the possibility. The republicans were of course sharply divided
between unitarians (like Mazzini) and federalists (like Cattaneo and
Ferrari). In reality, neither side had the support of the countryside, and both
were more or less dependent on the military power of Piedmont. Yet King
Carlo Alberto's ambitions in Lombardy were dynastic more than nationalist,
and his Italian coalition soon fell apart when the Pope pulled out at the end
of April, refusing to countenance war against Austria, another Catholic
state. Moreover, Piedmont was no match for Austria. As David Laven has
remarked, the initial defeat of the Habsburg army in Lombardy and Venetia
was ‘illusory’; it masked the strength of Austria's strategic position within
the famous Quadrilateral fortresses of Mantua, Peschiera, Verona and
Legnano, the resilience of the conservative coalition behind Austria, and the
weakness and divisions within the Italian camp.52 All of this was amply
demonstrated in the crushing defeat suffered by the Piedmontese army at
Custoza on 24 July. Carlo Alberto initially fell back on Milan. But when the
news arrived in the city of the Salasco armistice, in which he had agreed to
abandon Lombardy and Venetia to the Austrians, the king's headquarters
were besieged by indignant crowds and he was forced to flee to Turin, amid
accusations of cowardice and general public derision.53
It was of course entirely characteristic that both Mazzini and the other
republicans – including Garibaldi – saw this disaster as an opportunity. No
sooner had the news arrived of the defeat at Custoza than the republicans in
Milan settled their differences and formed a committee of public safety to
defend the city. Mazzini issued a call ‘to young men’ to volunteer to defend
the revolution, and it was published in a special supplement to his
newspaper, L'Italia del Popolo, at the end of July.54 Garibaldi too launched
an appeal to youth to fight for Italy (‘[r]ush forward: gather round me: Italy
needs ten, twenty thousand volunteers … We will show Italy, Europe, that
we want victory and we will have it’).55 He established a new volunteer
battalion, the Italian Battalion of Death, with the slogan ‘COMPLETE
INDEPENDENCE OR DEATH’.56 At the end of July, he marched to
Bergamo with around 1,500 men to help in the defence of Brescia,
‘acclaimed’, according to L'Italia del Popolo, ‘by the joyful cries of all
Milan’.

Today the Italian man rises as one; strengthened by danger itself, he will rebaptise himself in
battle; who wants to win, will win … The serene fearlessness of their leader [Garibaldi],
whose name is so dear to all of Italy because it represents Italian honour across the ocean, will
inspire faith in victory; obeying his military prowess we will have victory … Follow him with
confidence, oh Lombards; gather round him in every place, blessing and expanding the holy
legion of Garibaldi.57

From Bergamo, where he was joined by around another 1,500 men and by
his comrade from South America, Giacomo Medici, and Mazzini himself,
Garibaldi headed for Como. Mazzini had decided to join the fighting as an
ordinary soldier, but he was unable to stand the physical pace and soon left
for Lugano. Garibaldi and a (dwindling) band of men spent the next three
weeks moving between Varese and the area around Lake Maggiore, acting
as guerrilla fighters and attempting to disrupt the Austrian advance as much
as possible. Early on, Garibaldi seized two boats in Arona, which allowed
him and his men to move easily around the lake and avoid capture. They
also came out on top in their first encounter with the enemy (a Croat unit) at
Luino on 15 August, and succeeded in occupying Varese for two days, but
they were subsequently caught at the small town of Morazzone, and forced
to disperse and retreat across the border into Switzerland. And although
Garibaldi was keen to organise new guerrilla incursions into Italy, he was
dissuaded from doing so by Medici, who was planning a larger (but
eventually abortive) campaign against the Austrian forces with Mazzini.58
In military terms, the Lake Maggiore campaign was a failure. It may not
have been helped by the fact that Garibaldi was sick with malaria for much
of the time – ‘very dejected and discouraged and rather ill’, as one
government official who saw him put it59 – or by the unresolved tensions
over military strategy between Garibaldi, on the one hand, and Medici and
Mazzini, on the other. Yet it is hard to escape the conclusion that, as a
military action, Garibaldi's Lake Maggiore campaign was entirely
unwinnable. Why, then, did he pursue it? The desire to embarrass the
Piedmontese government by breaking the armistice with Austria should not
be discounted, nor should the plan to disrupt the progress of the Austrian
army via surprise appearances and rapid manoeuvres and by generally
making a nuisance of themselves. In both aims, moreover, Garibaldi was
quite successful, if the correspondence between Austrian and between
Piedmontese officials is anything to go by.60 But perhaps a comment made
about Mazzini in an anonymous report to the Austrians provides the real
key to understanding what they were all up to. Mazzini, according to the
anonymous writer, ‘knows that the war cannot bring any great success, but
his idea is to attract the attention of Europe and to get sympathy for the
Republic and for the relentless struggle for freedom’.61 In other words,
Garibaldi's action in Lake Maggiore was part of an ongoing drive to win
support for the struggle through his own valiant example. By remaining as
much as possible in the public eye, he hoped to promote and diffuse
revolutionary and nationalist propaganda.
Arriving in Lugano in early August, Mazzini issued a proclamation ‘to
Italians’, with the memorable opening sentence: ‘The royal war is over; the
war of the people begins.’ It was published as a sixteen-page pamphlet, first
in Lugano and then in Italy; extracts were subsequently published in various
newspapers including the Corriere Mercantile and the Corriere Livornese.
He also published a shorter ‘Protest’, first as a flyer in Lugano and then in a
series of newspapers.62 With an eye on the wider world, he published a
series of articles on ‘Parties and affairs in Italy’ in the London Spectator, in
which he argued that both monarchs and moderates had betrayed their
claims to leadership in Italy and that the republicans were the only true
leaders, capable of enacting and inspiring feats of selfsacrifice and
heroism.63 At his temporary headquarters at Castelletto Ticino, just south of
Lake Maggiore, on 13 August Garibaldi also issued a ‘Protest’ to ‘Italians’,
which began with Mazzini's slogan ‘God and the People’. Rejecting the
‘humiliating agreements’ signed by a king who kept his crown ‘through
cowardice and misdeed’ and affirming that ‘the People doesn't want any
more tricks’, Garibaldi swore that his army would fight ‘without pause and
like lions the holy war, the war of Italian Independence’.64 Both this, and an
earlier manifesto issued at Bergamo, were printed and clearly intended for
mass circulation; the Castelletto appeal was apparently taken with Garibaldi
into action, was posted on walls as the army passed through built-up areas
and made news in Tuscany and Rome, as well as falling into the hands of
the Austrians.65
Although at the time the claims of Mazzini and Garibaldi may have
seemed like wishful thinking, in retrospect they mark a turning-point in the
revolution. Along with the decision of Venice to resist Austrian attack and
the Bologna riots of 8 August, the action in Lake Maggiore and the Ticino
meant that the democratic movement gained the initiative from the
moderate liberals, who had always been frightened of the mass protests and
uprisings in Italian cities and who had no response to Carlo Alberto's hasty
abandonment of Lombardy. Instead, the democrats embraced the collapse of
the Piedmontese front and the defection of the Pope, and they took
advantage of the vacuum left by the royal retreat to introduce a new
language based on ‘people’ and ‘nation’ into Italian political discourse.
Moreover, this initiative produced practical results. Disturbances in Livorno
in October resulted in the formation of a democratic government in
Tuscany, and a month later in Rome popular militancy culminated in the
assassination of the moderate minister, Pellegrino Rossi, after which a
panic-stricken Pius IX fled to the safety of Gaeta in Neapolitan territory.
During the weeks that followed, popular elections for a Roman constituent
assembly were called, and democrats of all types, including talented pro-
Mazzinian propagandists like Piero Ceroni, Antonio Torricelli and Filippo
de Boni, moved to Rome.66
Garibaldi's own fame grew considerably during the summer and autumn
of 1848. While his main concern was military – raising and deploying an
army of young volunteers – his speeches and proclamations at this time are
an interesting reflection of both nationalist rhetoric in 1848 and his own
place within it. On the one hand, Garibaldi sought to project to his audience
an ideal of selfless service to a nation in danger and to identify himself with
a model of humble and disinterested virtue, whose heroic example could
nevertheless inspire others:

He who speaks these words to you has fought as best he could to honour the Italian name in
far-off shores; he has rushed with a handful of valiant companions from Montevideo so that he
 too can help the fatherland in victory, and to die on Italian soil. He has faith in you; young
men, will you have faith in him?67

On the other hand, he offered an extraordinarily eclectic image of national

belonging, which was seemingly conceived to be both as compelling and as
inclusive as possible. Perhaps the best example of Garibaldian bricolage is
the proclamation issued in Bergamo on 3 August, in which he appealed to
Italy's classical and medieval past, to religion, martyrdom and betrayal, to
military aggression and hatred of the foreigner (the ‘cowardly German’), to
sex, the family and local pride in order to encourage the youth of Bergamo
to join him:

When Rome had barbarians at the gate … it sent its Legions to Spain, to Africa, and they made
them march past the besiegers so as to scorn them … Look, for God's sake, at your babies,
who expect from you a life as free people, to your women, to your virgins … I hope that my
words, however weak, will be listened to: that the generous people of the city, of the towns, of
the valleys and the mountains will repeat the echo of the Italian crusade, of the wiping-out of
the foreigner; everyone, looking around himself, will find an arm, a tool to defend the
beautiful land which has nourished him and brought him up.68

Finally, Garibaldi added, in an explicit reference to what was a central

episode for historians, poets, musicians and painters during the
Risorgimento, and was especially important for Lombardy: ‘Bergamo will
be the Pontida of the present generation and God will bring us to Legnano.’
(Pontida was the place where the Lombard cities made an alliance against
Emperor Frederick Barbarossa in 1167, and the battle of Legnano in 1176
resulted in a famous victory for the Lombard League over Frederick.)69
Of course, we can have little idea of the effect of this rhetoric on
Garibaldi's audience. It seems that any initial rush to volunteer in Milan ran
out of steam in the mountains; by all accounts, the people of the Varesotto
were unenthusiastic about his campaign and, even where they cheered his
progress, were reluctant actually to join him.70 Yet there is no doubt about
his growing reputation. When Garibaldi arrived back in the Italian Riviera
at the beginning of September, La Concordia greeted his return as a hero: it
reported that he had been reunited with his wife and children and was
‘physically exhausted’; that ‘[h]e tells of the exploits of his legion with a
moderation and sincerity which has no equal’; and that Garibaldi's ‘strong
constitution and even more his indomnitable spirit will win out and soon he
will go back into battle’.71 Earlier, the governor-general of Nice had asked
Turin for instructions about letting Garibaldi return to his home town. The
governor was concerned about the effect of Garibaldi's presence on the
mood of the people; indeed his popularity was such, the governor worried,
that either a refusal to allow him entry or a decision to permit his return
would be likely to lead to serious disorder.72
Towards the end of September, as his health recovered, Garibaldi decided
to travel to Genoa and to make contact with the democratic clubs there. His
journey was punctuated by halts at San Remo, Oneglia and Savona: these
were occasions for Garibaldi to make speeches and for public festivities
held in his honour, and his appearances were reported as major events in La
Concordia and in Il Pensiero Italiano.73 In San Remo, Garibaldi was
formally greeted by the mayor and by the French and Spanish vice-consuls
(the latter had him to stay in his home). He enjoyed a guard of honour
throughout the night, courtesy of the mayor, was serenaded at 9 p.m. by the
municipal band and was given lunch the next day, again by the mayor and
the officers of the Civic Guard. Yet although the crowd was equally
enthusiastic, there was evidently some confusion about what Garibaldi
represented. On his way to the Spanish vice-consul's house, he was pursued
by an excited crowd shouting ‘Viva Garibaldi. Evviva Pio IX. Evviva
l'independenza italiana’. After the 9 p.m. serenade, when Garibaldi came
out to speak to his public, he was greeted by cries of ‘Viva Garibaldi. Viva
Pio IX. Viva Carlo Alberto.’74 The reaction of the crowd to Garibaldi
suggests that if, as Mazzini had proclaimed, the war of the people was
under way, the traditional presence of royalty and religion was still very
much at hand.
The Third Rome

The revolutions of 1848–9 have generally not been favourably judged by

historians. As Jonathan Sperber tells us, ‘[g]entle mockery, open sarcasm
and hostile contempt have frequently set the tone for narrative and
evaluation’. The political movements of 1848–9 are treated as too poetic
and too romantic, or simply too incompetent, to be taken seriously, or at any
rate to be compared ‘to the real business of 1789 and 1917’.75 In this way,
the failure of the 1848–9 revolutions – the practical reversals suffered as a
result of internal divisions, military weakness and conservative counter-
attack between the summer of 1848 and the summer of 1849 – has tended to
overshadow its more lasting achievement in politicising the people.
In fact, during the eighteen or so months of revolution, a ‘new space
opened up for political activity in Europe’.76 Parliaments provided a forum
for public debate and for political alignment (and realignment) at the centre
of power, and this change also affected society. Petitions offered a means of
dialogue between people and the politicians, and the establishment of
political clubs, both in capital cities and in regional and local centres,
allowed for wide-ranging discussions on a regular basis and the formation
of new associational networks. The revolution saw the affirmation of more
traditional forms of mass political expression, such as riots and popular
festivals, as well as the emergence of more orderly ‘modern’ events like
mass meetings and demonstrations. The revolutionary events themselves
generated a new political culture. Representing, celebrating, denigrating or
just reporting the revolution became central to the whole political process,
and with the end of censorship and the arrival of new technologies –
notably the electric telegraph and cheaper printing machines – there was an
information revolution, expressed in the proliferation of newspapers and a
popular press. None of this, moreover, was confined to the major cities.
Research on France, in particular, has shown how far the politics of rural
life and in the periphery were affected by revolutionary events. So, far from
being a failure, it seems that the revolution should best be seen ‘as a
pioneering venture in mass political mobilization’.77
Events in Italy bear out this interpretation. Although research is relatively
sketchy, it is evident that the Italian revolutions were preceded and
accompanied by newspapers and pamphlets, and marked by popular
demonstrations and the establishment of political clubs.78 During the spring
and summer of 1849, a great deal of this general political activity came to
be centred on Rome, which had been in a state of political flux for some
time, and where a republic was declared in February. Indeed, from the
moment of the first constitutional changes in the spring of 1848, the
unfolding events were discussed, written about, celebrated and opposed by
men and by women, not just in Rome but also in cities, towns and villages
throughout the Papal States, and not just in formal meetings and on special
occasions but in taverns, osterie, cafés, piazzas and the street as well.79
Newspapers, periodicals and pamphlets of every kind proliferated.
Mainstream papers assumed a crucial function as ‘a tool of organisation and
propulsion in public life and as a centre of association for the currents
which faced each other in political life’;80 others were deliberately
ephemeral, openly satirical or concerned with purely local or material
issues.81
During late 1848 and early 1849, and especially after the declaration of a
republic in February, the radicals gained control in Rome and political
mobilisation intensified. The politicial clamp-down in the republican
stronghold of Genoa and in Lombardy – Venetia (outside the republican
enclave in the city of Venice), the increasing strength of reaction in the
Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, and the second resounding defeat of the
Piedmontese army by the Austrians, at Novara in March 1849, led to
increased political interest in Rome and cemented its real importance for the
nationalist cause. Mazzinian activists and propagandists moved to Rome
from northern Italy because they saw an opportunity there, and because
political activity had simply become too difficult at home. Many went first
to Tuscany, but the radical government there was lukewarm about their
unitarian plans, so sooner or later they all moved on to Rome. The elections
in Rome for a proposed Italian constituent assembly in January 1849 also
helped endorse the Mazzinians and Mazzinian policies, and Mazzini
himself arrived in Rome on 5 March and attempted to become its temporary
dictator.82 He was joined by a large and important group of sympathisers
(including famous names of the future like Saffi, Pisacane, Nicotera,
Bertani, Belgioioso, Medici, Mameli, and Garibaldi himself). Other non-
Mazzinians arrived later, notably a group of 600 Lombard volunteers led by
a veteran of the Cinque Giornate in Milan, Luciano Manara. For all these
reasons, by the spring of 1849 Rome had become the main focus of
nationalist aspirations in the Italian peninsula as well as the basis for
republican experiments.
Yet Rome had an importance all of its own, ‘a mystical significance’
which represented a particular political challenge to the revolutionaries in
1849.83 As the capital of Roman Catholicism, it had an unrivalled symbolic
role as the capital of (almost) all Italians, and this was recognised by
Mazzini in his appeal to ‘the Third Rome’ of ‘the people’ (after the ‘Rome
of the Caesars’ and the ‘Rome of the Popes’). The problem, however, was
the same one which had faced the Jacobins in the 1790s: how to replace the
religion of the Pope and the Catholic Church with the new religion of
humanity and the nation as the source of popular identity, and how to do
this without offending or alienating a deeply religious and Catholic
population. Nor was this task made any easier by the pervasiveness of papal
symbols and Catholic rituals in the city of Rome and throughout the papal
territories, or by the existence of a tradition which linked Catholicism to a
sense and expressions of national belonging.84 And although, by the middle
of the nineteenth century, Rome had become a dusty and declining
backwater, surpassed by the size of Naples, the growth of Milan and the
sophistication of Florence, it had an immense cosmopolitan significance,
with a powerful resonance for foreigners as both religious centre and
‘cradle of civilisation’.85 Its fame assured international attention, and this
attention was both an opportunity – to win publicity and support for the
nationalist struggle – and a danger, as the republic was physically isolated
and could easily attract hostile intervention from foreign powers. Finally,
there is evidence that many Roman political leaders – notably Pietro
Sterbini – resented the intrusion of Mazzini and his unitarian ideas into their
revolution. The assembly initially refused his bid to be an emergency
dictator; they also disliked some of his domestic policies and not everyone
endorsed his plans for union with the other Italian republics.86
The importance of Rome on both a practical and a symbolic level for a
whole series of opposing groups and governments guaranteed a bitter
struggle for its future. Although Mazzini soon succeeded in gaining power
in Rome, as one of a triumvirate with Carlo Armellini and Aurelio Saffi,
criticism of him continued and his position was insecure in every other way.
That Mazzini was fully aware of his own isolation is indicated by his
repeated attempts not to offend religious sensibilities: the republican
constitution declared Catholicism to be the official religion, the Pope's
spiritual authority was guaranteed and Mazzini himself attended Easter
Sunday mass at St Peter's. He encouraged popular support for the
government by introducing a series of social reforms – the confiscation and
redistribution of church property; the lowering of taxes; new schools for the
poor – as well as abolishing the death penalty, censorship and the monopoly
of ecclesiastical courts. Mazzini also revived his newspaper, L'Italia del
Popolo, as a tool of propaganda. In late April, he helped organise a huge
republican festival in and around the ancient Roman monuments, which
culminated in the illumination of the Colosseum with the colours of the
tricolour flag.87
Yet it is uncertain whether any of these measures were particularly
successful. Research has shown that this short experience of republican
government and its downfall marks a crucial stage in the politics of the
Papal States, in that it led to the decline of traditional deference to authority
and challenged popular affection for the Pope. It also marked a definitive
break between the Italian nationalist movement and the Catholic world.88
Yet it is much less likely that the republican government succeeded in
transferring the dwindling loyalty to papal government to itself or to the
national idea.89 In any case, the government faced a far more serious
external threat to its existence. In a response to the Pope's appeal for
international aid, Austria, Spain, Naples and France sent armies to intervene
against the Roman Republic. The most dangerous of these – a 12,000-
strong French expeditionary force led by General Oudinot – was allowed to
land unopposed at Civitavecchia, some forty miles north of Rome, towards
the end of April. Confident, according to the famous phrase of one French
envoy, that ‘the Italians do not fight [les Italiens ne se battent pas]’, i.e.
they were too cowardly to fight, they proceeded to march on the capital,
expecting to take it without too much resistance.90
Once again, however, this negative turn of events was seized on by
Mazzini as a propaganda opportunity for the Italian revolution. The French
had sought to present their intervention as a mediation between the Pope
and the Republic, but Mazzini successfully presented it as an unprovoked
attack. It is notable how many foreign writers in Rome got to see Mazzini at
this time, and were confided in by him, probably for publicity purposes.
Already in April, Mazzini had revealed his strategy to the English poet,
Arthur Clough, to the effect that:
 he expects foreign intervention in the end, and of course thinks it likely enough that the
Romana Repubblica will fall. Still he is convinced that the separation of the temporal and
spiritual power is a thing to be, and that to restore the Pope as before will merely breed
perpetual disquiet, conspiracies, assassinations &c.; and he thinks it possible the Great Powers
may perceive this in time.91

The American writer Margaret Fuller saw Mazzini more than once, and
during the fighting he also took time to see the artist, William Wetmore
Story, and told him that he ‘wished that America could give the Republic its
sympathy and adhesion’.92 When Oudinot's forces tried to enter Rome on
the morning of 30 April and met with resistance organised by Garibaldi,
Mazzini found a moment to write to an English contact, Emilie Hawkes:
‘We fight bravely. The cannon is roaring but, as true as I am living, we shall
conquer them or die in a manner that will honour Rome for ever.’93 On the
same day, following the defeat of the French by Garibaldi's forces, he wrote
a proclamation telling the Roman people ‘[o]ur honour is safe. God and our
guns will do the rest. Energy and order. You are worthy of your fathers.’94
Although by June it had become clear that there was no chance of saving
the Roman Republic, Mazzini called on the people of Rome to fight on: for
able-bodied males to rush to the front lines; for women and children to help
the wounded; for civilians to donate their weapons to the army; and for
republican orators to take to the streets ‘to arouse the people’.95 By making
it last so long, he helped to establish the defence of the Roman Republic as
‘the most significant and moving scene of the Risorgimento’.96 Since,
moreover, this action took place in Rome, he was able to convey his
message to a wide national and international audience, and guarantee as
much attention in the press for their resistance to ‘counter-revolution’ as for
the contemporaneous struggles in Hungary, Baden and Bavaria.97
In May 1849, the future Italian prime minister (and long-term enemy of
Mazzini), Camillo Benso di Cavour, expressed his pleasure at being well
away from the news, in his country house outside Turin, since ‘here at least
I will not hear the praises sung about the Mazzinians … by the radicals
because of the defeat imposed on the French’.98 In fact, during June there
was a popular demonstration in Turin with crowds shouting ‘Viva
Garibaldi, Viva la repubblica romana’.99 Outside Italy too, the public was
preoccupied by the action in Rome. In France, George Sand wrote a series
of letters in which she exalted the heroism and sacrifice of the defenders of
Rome; these letters show that she was entirely convinced by the political
significance and the romantic symbolism of the events. ‘Rome makes me
ill,’ she wrote to Pierre Bocage on 7 July, ‘yet Mazzini writes me letters as
great and calm as heaven itself. There are still heroes and saints in the
world.’ Later in the same month, she wrote directly to Mazzini:

you have thought and acted well in all things. You have done well to uphold honour until the
very last … All that you have sought for and accomplished is just. The whole world feels it,
even those wretches who believe in nothing, and the whole world will say so in a loud voice
when the time comes … national communities will not perish. They will overcome this
collapse, so we should be patient; do not cry over those who are dead, do not complain about
those who must still die.100

Public opinion turned strongly against the Pope. Margaret Fuller, trapped
in Rome by the siege with her husband, and now an openly Mazzinian
activist, wrote a series of letters to the readers of the New York Daily
Tribune in May. She predicted that, ‘[s]hould guns and bayonets replace the
Pope on the throne, he will find its foundations, once deep as modern
civilization, now so undermined that it falls with the least awkward
movement.’101 Inspired in part by Fuller and the generally negative press
reporting, American poets like Henry Tuckerman and John Greenleaf
Whittier wrote verses condemning the Pope, where previously they had
praised him. For Tuckerman, Pius IX was the ‘skeleton at Freedom's feast’;
for Whittier, he was ‘the Nero of our times’.102 Even the Rome
correspondent of The Times of London, which at this time was consistently
hostile to the republicans in Italy, pointed out that the French attack on
Rome, and its initial failure, had ‘so excited the minds of the people,
particularly the young, that, where one was ready to serve, and risk his life
for the Republic, there are a dozen eager to do so now’. Since the Pope was
seen as ‘the instigator’ of the attack, ‘the odium has fallen on him’:

It has … united the people to oppose him in a manner no other event could have done, and I
and my friends found many who had declared themselves his staunch supporters, now
 strenuously upholding the Republic and resolute against a return to priestly domination … so
far as Rome is concerned, and the Pope's cause depends on it, I regard it as utterly lost.103

In Paris after the fall of the Roman Republic, the performance of Roma at
the Theatre Porte-Saint-Martin,104 which was meant to be a spectacular
show celebrating Pius IX and the French intervention, was interrupted by
jeering crowds. The audience transformed the play into a pro-republican
demonstration. According to one observer, the Tuscan exile Montanelli:

Pius IX was applauded for as long as he remained a liberal. The French entering Rome in
triumph were hissed at in a terrible way. Oudinot was supposed to ride in on his horse, but the
storm of hissing was so great that they had to lower the curtain. Every word uttered by the
triumvirate was applauded. Garibaldi appeared. They had done everything to make him look
ridiculous. But the applause which greeted him was completely deafening.105

At a certain point, the audience started to chant ‘Down with the Jesuits!
Long live the Roman Republic, long live Mazzini and Garibaldi!’, after
which they broke into a spontaneous rendition of ‘All Peoples Are
Brothers’, the popular hymn of the socialist ‘poet laureate’, Pierre Dupont.
So great was the fear of popular disorder in Paris as a result of these
performances that the (liberal) Minister of the Interior closed the play down
after only four days.106 But the news of the play reached French-occupied
Rome, where one observer noted that at the mention of the Roman
triumvirate and popular struggle the Parisian theatre had erupted into
‘frenetic applause and songs’.107
The ‘man of the occasion’

Like many other Italian democrats, Garibaldi had spent an unsuccessful

winter trying to be of use to the revolution. In October 1848, he had
irritated everybody by deciding to leave Genoa, where both Mazzini and
Mazzini's protegé, Goffredo Mameli (the author of the future Italian
national anthem, ‘Fratelli d'Italia’), had great plans for him. Instead
Garibaldi set sail for Sicily with his wife, Anita, and seventy-two volunteers
to fight in the resistance to the Bourbon reconquest of the island. ‘What
things men are!’ Mameli exclaimed to Mazzini: ‘And I thought you judged
Garibaldi too severely!’108
 This tension with Mazzini and other Mazzinians was to persist during the
months that followed and throughout the siege of Rome. Pausing for
supplies in Livorno, Garibaldi was persuaded to remain in Tuscany, and
spent much of the autumn and early winter in Tuscany and Emilia –
Romagna trying – and failing – to leave for Venice in order to help Daniele
Manin fight the Austrians. In the January elections for the Roman
constituent assembly, he was elected a deputy for the region of Macerata,
and travelled to Rome to tell the assembly they should immediately declare
a republic. He was reproached by Sterbini for his lack of parliamentary
experience, and then sent off to Rieti to organise more volunteers.109
Although he was consistently welcomed by republican groups and public
receptions were arranged everywhere in his honour, the various delays
caused by other republican leaders combined with a severe attack of
rheumatism to cause Garibaldi great frustration and bad humour. In March
1849, he wrote to the Minister of War in Rome that his legionaries were
‘trembling with impatience’ to fight all invaders,110 but he is more likely to
have been referring to himself. On 19 April, he wrote to his wife Anita to
express his disdain for ‘this hermaphrodite generation of Italians’: ‘so often
have I tried to make them worthy of you, little though they deserve it … I
am ashamed to belong to a family which contains so many cowards.’111
Yet, as Garibaldi himself anticipated in the same correspondence, the
coming struggle for Rome would ‘redeem’ them all. ‘Italy has never had
such hope as now’, he told Anita only three days later; ‘Rome has been and
will be worthy of its ancient glories’, he wrote to her after the first day's
fighting on 30 April.112 Garibaldi's famous victory over the greatly superior
French force on 30 April was due to the same elements of surprise and
enthusiasm which had served him so well in Uruguay. It helped that the
French were expecting to enter Rome without resistance. During initial
hand-to-hand fighting on the Gianicolo hill, Garibaldi's men were pushed
back, but the French recruits were then alarmed and put to flight by a
massive bayonet charge led by Garibaldi himself, on horseback, reportedly
holding a sabre high in the air. Despite being wounded in the fighting,
Garibaldi wanted to chase and destroy the retreating French army, but was
prevented by Mazzini, who was at the time seeking an agreement with the
radical groups in Paris to stop the fighting.113 Instead Garibaldi was ordered
to leave Rome with his legionaries and Manara's volunteers to meet an
attack from the Neapolitan army. Once again, this time at Palestrina, he
dispersed a much larger force using the tactics of prolonged close combat
followed by a rapid cavalry and infantry charge. He then won a second
victory at Velletri on 19 May. Here too, however, the engagements were
marked by disagreement over tactics between Garibaldi and the government
in Rome, and with Mazzini in particular.
The second, doomed phase of the defence of Rome opened with the
surprise attack on Rome ordered by Oudinot on the night of 2 June. After
Oudinot's forces captured the vital strategic heights around the Villa
Corsini, Garibaldi counter-attacked, but at the end of an entire day of
prolonged and bloody fighting, and with heavy loss of life, he was obliged
to admit defeat and retreat. Although it was clear at the time that the battle
of 3 June ‘sealed the fate of Rome’,114 the volunteers fought on for another
desperate month, while Oudinot tried to bombard the city into submission.
Finally, on 30 June, after one more assault by the French on the city walls,
Garibaldi (‘[w]rapped in his cloak, sweating profusely and covered with
dust’)115 came to tell the Roman assembly that further defence was useless.
He suggested that they carry the war against the French out into the
countryside, but this was refused. On the evening of 2 July, he left Rome
with his pregnant wife and around 4,000 men and went into the mountains,
in an attempt to cross them and reach Venice and fight there against the
Austrians. Mazzini stayed on for another few days in the French-occupied
city before he too left on 13 July.
Garibaldi's retreat from Rome ended badly. Although the group
succeeded in evading capture, falling morale and physical hardship meant
that Garibaldi gradually lost men until finally, at San Marino, he disbanded
his forces. A remaining few – including Garibaldi and Anita – went on
towards the coast in the hope of reaching Venice. Of these, most were
caught by Austrian troops and later executed. Garibaldi himself escaped and
doubled back across the Apennines towards the Tuscan coast, but Anita died
(of malaria or complications with her pregnancy, or both) and he had to
leave her in a shallow grave in the marshes near Ravenna. In all, between
3,000 and 4,000 Italians were killed or severely wounded in the defence of
Rome, including the volunteer leaders Mameli and Manara. Perhaps some
2,000 French soldiers lost their lives also.116
The credit for the brave if bloody defence of Rome was not Garibaldi's
alone, but was due to the courage of all the volunteers and to the skill of the
other leaders too, perhaps most notably Manara, Bixio and Medici. At the
time, and later, Garibaldi was criticised for disobeying orders and for a
number of tactical mistakes, especially the arguably futile attack on the
Villa Corsini on 3 June, which resulted in such heavy casualties. Garibaldi
was not the only leader who became a popular hero in 1849, either in Italy
or elsewhere in Europe. Yet his ability both to hold off the French attack
and to attract public attention was a winning combination, and it helped
hugely in creating widespread international support and the identification of
the republican defence of Rome with the broader nationalist struggle in
Italy. From 30 April onwards Garibaldi was undoubtedly the ‘man of the
occasion’, to borrow a phrase from the British women's weekly, The Lady's
Newspaper, which published a frontpage portrait of him in May.117 This
achievement was the product of a broad strategy which he had pursued
since his return to Italy the previous year.
A key aspect of this strategy was to get men to volunteer and to fight
bravely in battle, and to persuade women to encourage them to do so. To
this end, Garibaldi made a series of speeches as he moved in late 1848 from
Genoa to Livorno, and on to Florence, Bologna, Ravenna and Rome. He
presented himself as a specifically Italian hero with certain virtuous
qualities – honesty, modesty, bravery – and he called on the audience to
identify with him and with them: ‘In front of you has come a man, who is
with you, an Italian, who has never sold out, never lied’.118 In Livorno, he
likened himself to the celebrated sixteenthcentury republican, Francesco
Ferruccio, also the hero of Guerrazzi's popular novel L'assedio di Firenze:
‘I have touched with my sword the ashes of Ferruccio, and I will know how
to die like Ferruccio.’119 All his speeches were short and persuasive. In
Florence, he flattered the Florentines: they were the first to honour ‘what
little I did for America’, they were ‘the most intelligent and kind of the
Italian peoples’, their city was ‘the Paris of Italy’ and the Italian language
was ‘created in Tuscany’; in Bologna, he thanked them for making him feel
better and for ‘reinvigorating his soul’ with their patriotism; while in both
Livorno and Ravenna he confined himself to expressions of pleasure at
being among ‘strong men’.120
In almost every speech before and during the siege of Rome, Garibaldi
identified the immediate battle against conservative intervention with an
ageold struggle to redeem, with death if necessary, the honour of Italy
against foreign oppression/enslavement:

rise up in the name of unrevenged martyrs, of liberty and the looted fatherland, disgraced by
the foreigner, strong like men prepared to die … Italians after so many years need men who
can teach us to dare and to die. And we have learnt. Viva l'Italia, war on Austria … the whole
population is rushing onward under the standard of redemption … Italian honour, and you
know how important honour is to a fallen nation, Italian honour has been saved by our brave
legionaries.121

To convince his soldiers to fight on the terrible morning of 3 June, Garibaldi

used sex: ‘You are the soldiers who yesterday proudly allowed yourselves
to be kissed by Roman women, as thanks for your heroic actions! What
would they say today if you are not able to retake the casino dei Quattro
Venti? They would push you from their breasts, and throw scornfully in
your faces the name of coward!!’122 A week later, he invoked masculine
pride and the defence of female honour: ‘tomorrow every one of us will
come forward, with his head held high, in front of the beautiful Roman
women who with a sign of admiration and love will say to us: Thanks to
you, brave men, we were not defiled by the barbarian.’123 But he saved his
best, and by far his most famous, speech of 1848–9 for the dramatic
moment on 2 July 1849, when his defeated army left Rome for the
mountains:

Soldiers who with me have shared until now the toils and dangers of patriotic battles, who
obtained rich rewards of glory and honour: all you who now choose exile with me, this is what
awaits you: heat and thirst by day, cold and hunger by night. For you there is no pay but toil
and danger, no roof, no rest, but absolute poverty, exhausting vigils, extreme marches, and
fighting at every step. Who loves Italy follow me!124

As popular political rhetoric, the value of these speeches can hardly be

denied. They were carefully fashioned, and deliberately linked the
immediate military struggle to a higher political and moral ideal which was,
in turn, identified with Italy and brought back to the speaker – Garibaldi.
His speeches aimed at the emotions, at basic feelings of love, hate, pride,
shame and sexual desire. Their sheer theatricality, the constant juxtaposition
of danger and death with glory and honour, the appeal to history, beauty and
‘the looted fatherland’ give us some idea of Garibaldi the performer, and a
sense of his qualities as a charismatic leader. As in 1848, we can only
speculate about the impact of these speeches on his audience. But it is
worth remembering that Garibaldi had by all accounts a compelling and
musical voice: ‘dolce e vibrante’, for Bartolomé Mitre, who met him in
Uruguay; and a ‘masterly’ and ‘frank’ delivery which produced marvellous
results, according to one volunteer who heard him speak in 1849.125
Like other revolutionaries in this period, Garibaldi's behaviour in 1848–9
tends to suggest that he lacked a coherent plan and reacted to political –
military opportunities simply as they arose. His speeches appear
spontaneous and his approach to soldiering energetic and enthusiastic rather
than organised. Yet seen as acts of political communication, Garibaldi's
‘performances’ in 1849 seem far from unscripted. Attention was paid to the
specific demands of a given audience. Time was taken to write his speeches
down, and a remarkable number of them were published more or less
contemporaneously, notably in the Turin newspaper La Concordia. In
particular, his 2 July speech to the volunteers became an instant classic. It
was circulated widely (as a printed ordine del giorno and as a news item in
La Concordia),126 and was republished and translated in various versions
and languages over the next decade. One eyewitness reported that, by early
July, Mazzini's name was ‘generally abhorred’ in Rome for his desire to
prolong the resistance to the French, but those who joined Garibaldi were
applauded.127 The effectiveness of Garibaldi as a military commander was
probably due in no small measure to his oratory: to his short and rousing
speeches which inspired and involved his audience emotionally.128
Contemporary impressions of Garibaldi's behaviour in Rome in 1849
differed, and not all were positive. However, they all concur that his
physical appearance and behaviour played a key role in his political
appeal.129 One Lombard volunteer, Enrico Dandolo, confided to his family:
‘Garibaldi sitting in the simplicity of his costumes is an obvious charlatan
from 10 miles away’, but he admitted that ‘his activity is unparalleled and
he knows how to maintain a constant enthusiasm and trust among his
soldiers’.130 ‘I had no idea of enlisting,’ an Italian artist later told an English
clergyman:

but oh! I shall never forget that day when I saw him on his beautiful white horse in the
marketplace, with his noble aspect, his calm, kind face, his high, smooth forehead, his light
hair and beard – everyone said the same. He reminded us of nothing so much as of our
Saviour's head in the galleries. I could not resist him. I left my studio. I went after him;
thousands did likewise. He only had to show himself. We all worshipped him; we could not
help it.131

A Dutch artist, Jan Koelman, wrote of Garibaldi's remarkable clothes and

firearms, his ‘extraordinary’ expressive eyes, his exceptionally wide nose,
shoulderlength blond hair and ample twopointed beard which ‘gave a
warrior look to his open, oval face, covered in freckles and burnt brightly
by the sun’. Garibaldi's nickname was ‘lion’ and – Koelman tells the reader
– he really did look like one, especially in battle ‘when his eyes flamed and
his blond hair waved around his head like a mane’.132 Another volunteer,
Gustav von Hofstetter, described Garibaldi on horseback, sitting still ‘as if
he had been born there’: small and sunburnt, with long hair which flowed
out from a narrow pointed hat with a black ostrich feather on top, and a
reddish beard which was so full that it hid half his face. With his friend, the
volunteer leader Luciano Manara, he ‘marvelled not a little at such a strange
way of dressing … Manara never got rid of his dislike for those clothes’;
even after Manara became friends with Garibaldi he never tired of telling
him to put on something ‘more modern’.133
Garibaldi's personal behaviour and that of his followers were no less the
subject of comment. Koelman described Garibaldi's soldiers as
‘picturesque’ and was amazed that none of them stirred when Garibaldi
entered his headquarters; even the sentry kept up his position, half sitting,
half lying on the ground.134 Von Hofstetter ‘marvels’ at Garibaldi's
companions: ‘a moor [moro] of vast proportions who had followed him
from America, in a black cloak with a lance garnished with a red pennant’.
This is Aguyar – ‘a Hercules of ebony colour’, in Koelman's words – a
freed slave who accompanied Garibaldi from Brazil, and who astonished
everyone in battle by throwing a lasso over enemy soldiers and pulling
them off their horses.135 Anita was another singular presence, dark and
delicate but an ‘amazon’ all the same, a woman for whom Garibaldi openly
expressed his love (on the retreat from Rome, he also told the men stories of
her courage during their South American adventures).136 The garibaldini
made camp spontaneously and ‘without any order’; soldiers occupied what
space they could find, ‘with the general in the middle’. Horses were left out
to graze freely on long lines; the men went off to kill sheep which were
shared out equally; and whilst there was no bread, everyone had wine.
When Garibaldi relaxed, the ‘spectacle’ was equally engrossing: ‘[u]nder a
makeshift parasol, the general put together a pallet with his saddle and a
tiger skin, he took off his shirt, lay down and went to sleep’.137 A Lombard
volunteer, Emilio Dandolo, described the scene:

Garibaldi and his officers are dressed in red blouses, all kinds of hats, without distinction of
grade … They ride with American saddles, and take care to show great contempt for
everything that is observed and followed with such care by regular armies. Followed by their
orderlies (all people who have come from America), they break up, group together, they run
here and there in a disorganised way, active, reckless, tireless … of a patriarchal simplicity
which is perhaps a bit forced, Garibaldi seems more like the head of an Indian tribe than a
General.138

The performance in the press

In Rome, Garibaldi's military activities come across to us not simply as

bravery in battle but as a series of almost theatrical set pieces: his wild and
passionate appearance in battle; rest and recreation thereafter; the
glamorous companions; and his public interventions at crucial moments in
the fighting. Furthermore, if the press is anything to go by, in 1849
Garibaldi's appeal was no longer confined to political activists or to an
immediate or ‘live’ audience but had begun to reach a broader reading
public. During the fighting for Rome, the Roman satirical daily, Il Don
Pirlone (‘Mr Dickhead’, a paper ‘with often mediocre lithographs … and a
not elevated sense of humour’, in the words of one historian, but ‘the
freshest artistic expression of modern Rome’ according to a
contemporary),139 published two memorable cartoons of Garibaldi. The
first was entitled The heart of Garibaldi and was a simple, but graphic,
depiction of his gigantic heart posed against a wall (‘What a heart! What a
huge heart!’ cried one of the welldressed onlookers); in case readers failed
to understand the association, the cartoon was accompanied by a poem
dedicated to Garibaldi, ‘the lover of good and the hater of evil’. The second
image – Suggestive effects – showed the king of Naples (a ridiculous figure
dressed as Punch) being harassed at the dinner table by a portrait of
Garibaldi placed directly opposite him as well as by everyday objects – the
breadboard and bread, the wine carafe and glass, the tablecloth and table
leg, his chair and the floor – all bearing Garibaldi's name (see figure 3
overleaf).140 Il Don Pirlone also underwent a significant change of attitude
in its commentary on events, moving from detached cynicism to direct
engagement with the defence of Rome, and it came to celebrate Garibaldi:
the ‘valiant Garibaldi’ who ‘knows no defeat’ and who ‘bites those in
power’.141
Another Italian satirical paper, Il Fischietto of Turin, engaged with
Garibaldi only during the retreat from Rome, presumably being stimulated
by his ability repeatedly to evade arrest by the Austrians. On 11 August, the
paper referred to the presence of ‘Garibaldi's tribe’ near San Marino and to
‘General Garibaldi the head of the garibaldese nation’. It also published
two cartoons about Garibaldi during the retreat and its aftermath. The first
was relatively straightforward, and showed him half submerged in the
Straits of Messina struggling between his tormentors France and Naples,
depicted as the two monsters of classical legend, Scylla and Charybdis
(‘Garibaldi shows us that Scylla and Charybdis are not mythical monsters’,
commented the paper). The second one, published in August, was a
comment on Garibaldi's escape from the Austrians after the retreat from
Rome. In the cartoon, Garibaldi – a ‘knavish red devil’ – thumbs his nose at
a group of stupid and ineffectual soldiers who try vainly to bring him to
justice (see figure 4 opposite).142 Both papers, in other words, reflect the
immediate context in which they were published: Il Don Pirlone reflects a
sense of Roman identity and pride, and Il Fischietto, the anti-interventionist
and especially antiAustrian feeling which was prevalent in liberal Turin.
Although we know little or nothing about the sales and circulation of these
papers, they can tell us that by 1849 Garibaldi had become a widely
recognisable public figure, immediately available as a subject of satire to
criticise contemporary politics and political leaders.

3 ‘Suggestive effects’: the king of Naples (‘Punch’) has his dinner disturbed
by Garibaldi's renown. Don Pirlone, the satirical Roman newspaper which
published this cartoon, was one of the earliest to comment on the growing
fame of Garibaldi.

In terms of public recognition, Il Fischietto is especially interesting in

that Garibaldi is identified by his clothes and by his physical appearance. In
the Fischietto cartoons he has long hair and a beard, a large, sloping beret
and a loosely tied blouse with rope and tassel. These visual characteristics
are taken directly from the portrait which was first reproduced in Turin's
illustrated magazine, Il Mondo Illustrato, in February 1848 (it borrowed
from the portrait by Gallino in South America, which had been copied,
subjected to minor changes and lithographed in Turin). In the Mondo
Illustrato portrait, Garibaldi wears a sloping beret and a loose, longcollared
blouse tied with a rope and tassel; his hair is long, wavy and uncontrolled,
he has a thick and flowing beard and large, almondshaped sensuous eyes:
his expression is not overtly threatening but it is fierce, exotic and not
entirely pleasant (see figure 2 on page 54). During 1849, this image reached
London and Paris. In fact, in May 1849, The Illustrated London News and
The Lady's Newspaper of London, and the Paris magazine L'Illustration, all
copied and published the same portrait of Garibaldi, this time with the
subtitle ‘Roman General’ and with minor variations in character and quality
in each one.143 So by 1849 there was something of a publisher's market for
Garibaldi, with his image circulating in illustrated magazines (one of which
was a specifically women's publication) and satirical newspapers across
different countries.
4 ‘Once again the knavish red devil has escaped through hell!’ commented
Il Fischietto on Garibaldi's ability to evade arrest. The paper also made
much of Garibaldi's clothes and rebellious behaviour.

The broadening of interest in Garibaldi and the events in Rome seems

further confirmed by the fact that in June The Illustrated London News went
to the expense of sending to Rome its own artist, who drew a series of
pictures of Garibaldi and his men together with scenes of the fighting which
were subsequently published in the magazine. In a portrait of Garibaldi
produced on the spot by The Illustrated London News artist (‘and’, he
wrote, ‘I have been very particular to get it like him’), Garibaldi has a more
dignified and ‘European’ countenance but – other than his hat, a tall, round
(‘Puritan’) affair with an ostrich feather – his clothes remained more or less
the same, and just as unusual. As the artist commented:

He is a remarkably quietlooking person, but wonderfully picturesque: he wore a white sort of

cloak lined with red, and having a green velvet collar; it had plenty of bullet holes in it. There
was no opening visible in the garment, so I imagine he puts it on like a shirt, over his head,
like the poncho or South American cloak. His trousers were common grey, with a green stripe;
and a black slouched hat and feather complete the picture.

The same picture showed Garibaldi's (‘now dead’) ‘negro servant’ Aguyar
on a prancing horse (see figure 5 opposite). ‘He was a fine fellow,’ the artist
commented, ‘his dress a red loose coat and a showy silk handkerchief tied
loosely over his shoulders.’144 Three other illustrations in The Illustrated
London News offered further information about the appearance and
behaviour of Garibaldi's followers. The first, published on 23 June, showed
Garibaldi's men outside his headquarters at the San Silvester convent: some
stand, some slouch and one sits on horseback; they are all armed and chat
and smoke, and form a series of impromptu and relaxed small groups
around a central group of three, apparently South American, officers with
long hair, blouses and Puritan hats with ostrich feathers (see figure 6 on
page 92). The second picture published on 14 July shows a group of
‘wonderfully picturesque fellows’. The central figure is very young and
again has long hair, a flowing blouse, foulard and a Puritan hat; he smokes a
small cigar and is armed with pistol and dagger. Finally, the same issue has
a picture of a Garibaldi lancer on horseback: a fierce and determined
looking figure dressed in the same flowing clothes and with long hair and
beard, galloping at full tilt down a crowded Roman street.145
Increasingly, during the course of the siege in 1849, the traditional (or
nonillustrated) press outside Italy also took to publishing detailed articles
about the events in Rome. These too emphasised Garibaldi's role in the
siege and its aftermath and his striking personal presence. Margaret Fuller
wrote a series of important and detailed articles for the New York Tribune
about the situation in Rome. Much of her enthusiasm was reserved for
Mazzini (‘a man of genius, an elevated thinker … the most powerful and
first impression from his presence must always be … of his virtue’), and for
the heroism of the Roman people. However, in July, when the fate of the
Republic was entirely sealed, she began to talk mainly of Garibaldi and his
followers. If, she told her readers, Garibaldi and his men were really
brigands and vagabonds, as ‘many “respectable” gentleman’ suggested, then
they were ‘in the same sense as Jesus, Moses, and Eneas were’. When they
left Rome at the end of the siege, Fuller was there to see them go. She gave
her readers an unforgettable description of Garibaldi, the garibaldini and
their departure, in which she outlined a romantic political aesthetic based on
both the unrestrained physical allure of male youth and a broad, if doomed,
vision of political belonging (which included women and the weak: anyone
who ‘wished to go’):
 5 ‘Garibaldi and his negro servant’. This picture from The Illustrated
London News is perhaps the first image of Garibaldi to be drawn and
published directly ‘from life’. Many journalists at this time were fascinated
by the presence of the exslave Aguyar among the soldiers in Rome.

the lancers of Garibaldi galloped along in full career. I longed for Walter Scott to be on earth
again, and see them; all are light, athletic, resolute figures, many of the forms of the finest
manly beauty of the South, all sparkling with its genius and ennobled by the resolute spirit,
ready to dare, to do, to die … Never have I seen a sight so beautiful, so romantic and so sad …
They had all put on the beautiful dress of the Garibaldi legion, the tunic of bright red cloth, the
Greek cap, or else round hat with Puritan plume. Their long hair was blown back from resolute
faces; all looked full of courage … I saw the wounded, all that could go, laden upon their
 baggage cars; some were already pale and fainting, still they wished to go. I saw many youths,
born to rich inheritance, carrying in a handkerchief all their worldly goods. The women were
ready; their eyes too were resolved, if sad. The wife of Garibaldi followed him on horseback.
He himself was distinguished by the white tunic; his look was entirely that of a hero of the
Middle Ages – his face still young, for the excitements of life, though so many, have all been
youthful, and there is no fatigue upon his brow or cheek.

6 This illustration of Garibaldi's ‘headquarters’ is a comment on the exotic,

varied and unconventional appearance and behaviour of Garibaldi's
volunteers. Note especially the officers in South American dress in the
centre of the picture.
Thus, the symbolic moment at the end of the siege was entirely Garibaldi's.
As Fuller commented, ‘[h]ard was the heart, stony and seared the eye, that
had no tear for that moment. Go, fated, gallant band!’146
Garibaldi's physical attraction also found its way into the hostile and/or
right-wing press. In a series of caricatures published by a conservative
Roman paper he appears as a treacherous long-haired brigand, dressed in a
huge cloak and large-feathered hat, and shadowed by a large black man.147
In France, a row broke out in July between, on the one side, the radical
paper, Le National, which translated and published Garibaldi's ‘historic’
proclamation at the end of the siege, and praised him for restoring ‘prestige
to Italian bravery’ after ‘many centuries of servitude’ and, on the other, the
conservative paper, Le Constitutionel, which accused Le National of
making a ‘hero … Napoleon … [and a] petit caporal’ of someone whose
real job was ‘purely and simply that of a highway robber’.148 The Times of
London described Garibaldi variously as a ‘chieftain’ at the head of ‘foreign
freebooters’, and called Garibaldi, Mazzini and Avezzana ‘three strangers of
broken fortune, who … back up their cause by bands of foreign robbers’,
and who had planned ‘a general sack and plunder … when the last hour of
defence has arrived’. But, perhaps troubled by its equal antagonism towards
the Pope and the French, the paper also allowed some half-ironic
admiration of the ‘persevering hero’, admitting that he had ‘shown much
talent’ in the initial defence of Rome and saying that he had been joined by
some ‘fine-looking young fellows’ from Lombardy, and even that his own
men were a mixture of ‘wild and truculent-looking savages’ and ‘heedless
young men of a superior class’ who had been attracted by the call of a ‘free
life’ but whose conduct was ‘as quiet and orderly as any other of the regular
military’.149 Whatever the politics of the reporters, in other words, they all
testified to Garibaldi's capacity to attract publicity, and referred to his
striking physical presence – his clothes, his gestures, his behaviour – as
well as his qualities as a military leader.
Conclusion

The defeat of the 1848–9 revolutions cast a long political shadow across
Europe. In some places, for example in France and southern Germany, the
democratic movement was subsequently decimated by persecution and
exile; elsewhere, including in Italy, it is possible to trace a dwindling of
revolutionary militancy during the 1850s and 1860s back to the crushing of
radical governments in the spring and summer of 1849. Nevertheless, the
revolutions themselves mark a crucial stage in the emergence of mass
politics in Europe. For its supporters and detractors, and for those who took
part in the events or who reported what they saw or simply read about them,
the revolutions represented a transformation of political life and, for many,
a novel experience of political ‘belonging’. The revolutions introduced a
new language, and new rituals, symbols and myths of political mobilisation;
and these changes were extended across Europe and to the Americas, being
experienced at different times directly, through detailed newspaper reports
and/or via the published memoirs and speaking tours of those who had been
involved. For all these reasons, the shadow cast by the revolutions was to
set the political agenda in the years that followed.
In Italy, Garibaldi played a decisive role both in the broader process of
politicisation and in the specific representation and spread of an Italian
national identity. He did this first by virtue of his military successes, most
notably the spectacular and perhaps truly heroic victory over the French of
30 April 1849. These successes built on his practical experiences in Brazil
and Uruguay, and they helped confirm more broadly the Italian revolution's
need for military volunteers. Although volunteers were regarded with
suspicion by the regular Piedmontese army in 1848 and '49, their youth and
enthusiasm was a valuable addition to the nationalist struggle. Moreover,
during the fighting for the Roman Republic in 1849, as well as in the
defence of other cities during the same year, the volunteers had a second
chance, which they took full advantage of. Co-ordinated in part by
Garibaldi, their victory over the French in Rome was arguably one of ‘the
most successful and heroic military engagements of the Risorgimento’;150 it
certainly formed a striking contrast to the utter ineffectiveness of the
Piedmontese soldiers, crushed twice by the Austrians at the battles of
Custoza and Novara. From this point of view, the ultimate defeat of the
Roman Republic seemed less important than the proof in many parts of
Italy of ‘brave resistance and honourable defeat’ by an army of young
volunteers.151 Thus, the formation of volunteer militias in 1848–9, and
especially the role played in them by Garibaldi, seemed to offer a solution
to the twin problems of military weakness and popular apathy which had
dogged the Mazzinian party in Italy since the formation of the movement in
the early 1830s. Although some military strategists – notably Carlo
Pisacane – went on to criticise the tactics used by Garibaldi, a general
strategy of forming a national and popular army was henceforth agreed
upon by the Italian revolutionary movement.152
The defence of Rome by Garibaldi and the volunteer army against French
attack has also been described as ‘a poet's dream’.153 Both in Rome and
earlier, Garibaldi played a leading part in creating a new – living and
contemporary – romantic myth of Italian military heroism. His experiences
had all the ingredients of popular Risorgimento narrative: the brave warrior-
hero; the community in danger; its defence by a defiant band of ‘brothers’;
their sacrifice and the death of the heroine (Garibaldi's wife Anita). Indeed,
the message of national redemption seems to have been all the more
compelling because it was ‘true’: part of politics and the acts of men rather
than something dreamt up by romantic writers. Throughout the events of
1848–9, Garibaldi represented a visible and physical bond between the
romantic vision of Italy and Mazzini's ideal of political engagement. In
Rome, moreover, he helped to damage (if not entirely dissolve) the
symbolic link between the Pope and the nation, an achievement which was
reflected in attacks on him in the right-wing and clerical press. Although, as
we shall see, it took time – roughly the whole of the 1850s – and a series of
writers fully to create this new nationalist formula and establish its close
identification with Garibaldi, the main elements were put in place during
the events of 1848 and 1849. And both the story itself and its references to
the romantic Risorgimento genre were introduced at the time through
Mazzinian editorials, in visual images and, perhaps especially, by
Garibaldi's own speeches and appearance.
It helped enormously that so many Mazzinians in 1848–9, including
Garibaldi, had considerable experience in producing propaganda, in writing
good stories and/or in creating better relations with the press, and had long-
term friendships with writers and journalists. Indeed, for the historian
writing in the twenty-first century, what is most conspicuous, and certainly
most familiar, about these events is not so much the street barricades or the
acts of military valour as the growing, almost self-sustaining, tide of media
interest in them. The ‘explosion of journalism’ in Europe brought about by
the end of censorship in many states in 1847–8 was a clear symptom of
political change and participation.154 The press itself helped to create that
change, to publicise and define the revolution and to establish its memory
during the ensuing years. Even before 1848, while Garibaldi was still in
Uruguay, the press had been a crucial tool in the creation of his fame. In
1848–9, it was the press which launched Garibaldi as a public figure with
an appeal beyond the restricted circles of democratic clubs and associations.
Throughout 1848, Garibaldi was promoted by the press as an Italian hero,
with a clear resonance for the liberal, patriotically inclined elites living in
the towns and cities of northern and central Italy. And it was foreign press
attention in 1849, thanks to the defence of Rome, which gave him an
international reputation both as seductive idol and as dangerous
‘freebooter’.
Still, perhaps the most important aspect of Garibaldi's fame in this period
is less immediately obvious to us, and lies in the message which he
conveys. Of course, most of what we know about Garibaldi's appearances in
1848–9 is mediated through newspaper reports, political commentaries, and
scenes imagined by artists or remembered by participants, so its value as
historical evidence is far from straightforward. What is clear, however, is
the extent to which, as a political symbol, he lies outside any kind of
accepted mainstream. For instance, as a soldier, he looks and behaves less
like an officer and much more like a bandit. As a national icon, he is neither
Jacobin nor Napoleonic; there is little hint of classical beauty or dignity,
even less of controlled masculinity, and not much in the way of saintly
behaviour. For the readers of The Illustrated London News he is
‘picturesque’, a popular term in the nineteenth century which means
natural, exotic and pleasing, and would have reminded the English of
seventeenth-century Italian paintings by artists like Salvator Rosa, who
peopled their landscapes with soldiers, shepherds and bandits.155
Garibaldi seems young, he is sultry, unkempt and hirsute and he dresses
unconventionally in flowing, brightly coloured clothes. He is strong and
fierce and he makes camp ‘like an Indian’; he is sunburnt and he sweats.
His look is not self-controlled and classical but that of a hero of the Middle
Ages; and while his speeches exalt violence and courage, they also appeal
to sex and love. Garibaldi's followers are ill-disciplined, they include strong
women and a black ex-slave, and, when they leave Rome, they are
beautiful, romantic and sad. A female eyewitness longs for Walter Scott to
be alive and see them go. Garibaldi, in other words, is an intensely romantic
figure, rebellious, independent and emotive rather than austere, conformist
and authoritarian. In political terms, he represents a distinctly democratic
and inclusive ideal. He seeks to be a living embodiment of the people's
aspirations, and he is part of the community and the nation rather than a
‘great man’, alone capable of great deeds.
Despite this liberating message, the final legacy of 1848–9 was more
negative, and was to cause great damage to the democratic movement in the
years to come. The revolutionaries' exceptional talent for self-publicity was
not really paralleled by a similar capacity for day-to-day organisation and
co-ordination. They were divided in 1848–9, not simply into democrats and
moderates (who were not revolutionaries at all), but also into unitarians and
federalists; there was a gap between the ‘Italian’, but also cosmopolitan,
Mazzinians and other republican groups with a much more regional or local
focus, and/or between all of them and smaller groups with more radical,
socialist leanings. It was this tension and lack of co-ordination which partly
led to their downfall; it meant that few practical steps were taken to
consolidate the revolution, either in preparing for its defence or in seeking
to reach out to the provinces and countryside, and to the poorer classes of
society.156 Even on a micro-level, in terms of relations between friends and
allies like Mazzini and Garibaldi, the level of discord – especially over the
fundamental question of military strategy and tactics – was often striking. If
only in this respect, historians are probably right to argue that romanticism
provided a flawed and unrealistic basis for political action in 1848–9.
However, such tensions might have been less serious had they not
endured and hardened and, in turn, affected democratic thought and practice
in the decade after the revolution's end. Paul Ginsborg argues that the
republicans learnt the wrong lessons from 1848: ‘They became convinced
that the most important feature of the Risorgimento was the struggle for
independence and unity, to which the[ir] democratic and republican beliefs
… were to be sacrificed.’157 It is also true that after 1848–9 the generation
of Mazzini, Manin and Garibaldi lost much of the intense enthusiasm and
fearless optimism which had characterised their political activity up till
then. For Garibaldi, revolution left a memory of bitterness, frustration and,
after the death of his wife, profound personal grief.158
One effect of the 1848–9 revolutions was to inspire a ‘poet's dream’. The
revolutionaries launched an influential and enduring myth of selfless
struggle for national freedom, and they also publicised a republican idea of
Italy and a compelling model of political engagement. But this dream
worked best for those who had time to read and sleep, or those who came of
age thereafter; it appealed most of all to foreigners, to those too young to
fight or to those excluded by their sex. Not everyone was taken in by the
dream, and those who were not (conservatives, clericals) were often the
most powerful groups in European society, with the strongest hold on its
poorest members. For the protagonists themselves, and perhaps especially
for Mazzinian nationalists, the memory of revolution was more divisive,
and henceforth they seemed less able to live up to the message of fraternity
they had so successfully promoted. Thus, for those already with an idea of
Italy, who had embraced Mazzini's vision of combatant national resurgence
long before the spring of '48, the reality of revolution was one of failure.
The most lasting impact of this failure was the reintroduction of the more
traditional themes of death, decadence and betrayal to the centre of Italy's
national story.
 CHAPTER 4

EXILE

After the fall of Rome

At the beginning of August 1849, having come within fifty miles of Venice,
Garibaldi disappeared for an entire month. The Austrian authorities in
Bologna issued a proclamation on 5 August which warned of ‘Summary
Military Justice’ for anyone ‘who knowingly aids, shelters or shows favour
to the fugitive Garibaldi or to any other individuals of the band led and
commanded by him’.1 Several of the Roman Republic's most celebrated
radicals – the priest Ugo Bassi and the popular leader Ciceruacchio, along
with his two sons – were captured and executed, but Garibaldi himself
managed to escape and went into hiding.
What happened was that following the death of his wife at a farm in
Mandriole on 4 August, Garibaldi and his companion ‘Leggero’ (Battista
Colliolo) first hid from the Austrians in the thick pine forest to the north of
Ravenna. It was there that they abandoned all hope of reaching Venice, and
decided simply to try to get home without being arrested. From the forest
they were taken by local sympathisers to a hut in the middle of the marshes
and, during the night of 7 August, were moved to the outskirts of Ravenna
and on across the Romagna plain towards the Apennines and the Tuscan
border. With Leggero (who was wounded in the leg so could only travel
slowly) and moving carefully to avoid the Austrian troops, Garibaldi spent
some two weeks zigzagging through the mountains between Florence and
Bologna, after which they cut south towards Prato. From Prato, they
travelled by carriage to Poggibonsi and Volterra, and eventually reached the
Tuscan Maremma and the Tyrrhenian coast. In the early morning of 2
September, Garibaldi was moved to temporary quarters at an isolated
farmhouse called Casa Guelfi. Here he apparently smoked a cigar and slept
for a few hours before being taken to the tiny bay of Cala Martina, from
where he embarked for the island of Elba on a fishing boat.2 After Elba he
sailed via Porta Venere to La Spezia, and from La Spezia travelled by land
to Chiavari, which was within the territory of the kingdom of Sardinia. He
arrived there on 5 September. Garibaldi's reappearance was announced by
La Concordia and La Gazzetta di Genova on 7 September, by La Gazzetta
di Milano on 10 September and by The Times of London on 14 September.
But until his arrival in Chiavari, nobody other than his immediate
companions had known where he was or what had become of him.3
Throughout August, there had been intense speculation as to Garibaldi's
whereabouts. The narratives which emerged were mostly false or based on
half-truths at best, reflecting both public interest in Garibaldi and the lack of
any real news about him. The Times, which carried reports from the main
European papers, reported on 17 August that he had escaped but that there
was ‘great uncertainty’ about his movements, and ‘[s]ome say he re-
embarked at La Mesola, with his wife and 30 followers, and reached
Venice’. The Turin paper La Concordia tried to convince its readers that
Garibaldi had reached Venice. It announced on 16 August that Garibaldi had
arrived in Venice together with his wife and had been elected admiral:
‘Manin received him with great affection and exclaimed “Behold a hero,
whom God has sent to save Venice!”’ On 29 August, the paper reported that
Garibaldi had written to his mother from Venice ‘in order to tranquillise her
fears’ and that, on arrival in Venice, ‘he was obliged to keep his bed for a
week’. In Paris, at the end of August, he was said to have reached the coast
of Dalmatia.
The conservative and Austrian papers initially announced Garibaldi's
imminent capture. On 11 August La Gazzetta di Milano reported that
Garibaldi's boats had been intercepted by the Austrian navy. When driven
on to the beach by Austrian guns, Garibaldi had leapt into the waves and
abandoned his ‘trunk of money’; shouting at ‘the few who followed him:
“everybody save himself as best he can”’, he then threw down his sword
and ran off into the woods with his pregnant wife. It was said that she then
comforted him and dried his tears. Other papers concentrated on the alleged
death of his wife. Anita was said to have died at Chioggia, outside Venice,
‘of the excessive fatigue she had endured’; later when her corpse was found
near the Mandriole farm she was said to have been murdered – strangled by
her hosts – for money. In early September, when Garibaldi arrived in Genoa
via La Spezia and Chiavari, a more coherent and persuasive narrative
emerged. La Concordia, which probably received the news from Garibaldi
himself, announced the death of his pregnant wife (‘the unhappy woman,
who loved, oh too much! her passionate husband, and who wanted to go
everywhere with him in his turbulent life’), and described his escape from
the Austrians, his perilous journey across the Apennines and his arrival in
Chiavari disguised as a fisherman.4 Its story closely follows the first-hand
account given by Garibaldi himself and written down by Augusto Nomis di
Cossilla, the intendant of Chiavari. When asked the nature of his business in
Chiavari by Nomis, Garibaldi was reported to have replied as follows:

to have an American passport, under a false name, taken after the surrender of Rome, although
to have never used it, never having been in Venice, to have embarked … on a fishing boat, to
have arrived this morning in Portovenere, without having had anything asked of him, to have
come to Spezia, to have there taken the mail coach, to have come here, having relatives and
friends, to expect to stay a day or two, and then to continue his journey for Genoa and on to
Nice, having there his family, to expect to remain there. All this he said with fine and unusual
frankness … while this listener heard him talk with no small surprise, curious episode in the
very curious history of our time.5

Garibaldi's arrival in Chiavari caused quite a stir. Nomis admitted that

‘all his adherents … make a fuss of him and are preparing a serenade for
him’.6 A Captain Ollandini, the carabinieri commander of Chiavari, wrote
to Genoa that Garibaldi was recognised on arrival and a large crowd
gathered spontaneously to applaud him; in the evening, moreover, ‘the most
excited’ of the national guard put a sentry outside Garibaldi's house and told
government officials that any attempt to arrest Garibaldi would be met with
armed resistance, and ‘they would make the church bells peal’.7 In fact,
Garibaldi's arrest was ordered almost immediately by Alfonso La Marmora,
the general in command of Genoa, on the obviously trumped-up charge of
entering the country illegally (since he had allegedly forfeited his
citizenship by fighting in the defence of Rome, a foreign state).8
Unsurprisingly, this action did little to calm pro-Garibaldi agitation in
Chiavari. When he was taken from Chiavari to Genoa, there was first a
demonstration outside the place where he was staying and then disturbances
around his carriage. As one official put it, after he got into the carriage, ‘the
attitude of the numerous bystanders changed, and some broke out in
applause for Garibaldi, others in shouts of insults against the king, the
government and us, they accompanied us in this way for about a quarter of
a mile, forcing the horses to stop at every step so that they could take the
time to express to Garibaldi the full extent of their sympathy’.9 And
although in Genoa and Nice officials had the situation more under control,
they were still deeply worried by Garibaldi's presence and by his ‘immense
influence on a great part of the population’, and were concerned enough
about the threat of disorder to make sure he arrived in Genoa quietly at four
o'clock in the morning.10 When Garibaldi left for Nice from Genoa, La
Concordia stressed the excited crowds which gathered in boats to watch
him leave, and that when he arrived in Nice he was carried in triumph by
the crowd to embrace his ‘old mother’, his aunt and his children. According
to the paper, Garibaldi was especially moved by the encounter with his
daughter: ‘the loss of his wife distresses him deeply, and everything that
reminds him of her hurts him terribly’.11
Garibaldi's own state of mind is perhaps best summed up by a personal
letter written while he was under arrest in Genoa: ‘I am in this city from
today, having wandered as a refugee around the Romagna and Tuscany for
36 days … I have lost the beloved companion of my life … I think I can
leave tomorrow for Nice to see my babies and my old mother … Love, your
unhappy brother.’12 Repeatedly, the correspondence between Chiavari,
Genoa and Turin stressed the same message from Garibaldi, that ‘his
intention … was to go on to Nice with the aim of returning to the heart of
his family … his only desire is to be able to embrace his mother and
children at Nice … he made known the strongest desire to go to Nice to see
there his old mother and his children’, after which he was quite prepared to
go into exile.13 Initially he refused money (‘a grant’) from the Piedmontese
government, asking only for help for his mother and children.14 As it
happened, this attitude won the sympathy of government officials, who
were also impressed by his ‘prudence’, ‘good sense’ and ‘frankness’, and by
his reluctance to encourage popular demonstrations in his favour. Indeed,
on the journey from Chiavari, Garibaldi even agreed to use what was
termed ‘his astonishing influence’ to control the crowd, ‘which he did to a
good degree talking to them in a loud voice, and urging them to calm
down’.15 After his visit to Nice, the intendant wrote to General La Marmora
that Garibaldi had behaved ‘in the most laudable way’ and that actually no
public demonstrations had taken place.16
It is interesting that Garibaldi managed to make a favourable impression
on a man like Alfonso La Marmora. Already, during the siege of Rome in
May, La Marmora had expressed a confused – and perhaps not untypical –
mixture of patriotic pride and conservative alarm at Garibaldi's
achievements (‘[t]he French have been taught a good lesson … on the one
hand, there is no harm in their being punished for the contempt in which
they hold the Italians, but on the other hand what pride and folly will it
arouse in the republicans?’).17 After their first meeting, La Marmora was
more unreservedly enthusiastic, writing to army headquarters that Garibaldi
‘has attractive features … rough but sincere; I am ever more convinced that
in the right hands we could come to an agreement’. A week later he was
even more explicit about the positive impression made on him by Garibaldi:

Garibaldi is no ordinary man, his features however rough are very expressive. He speaks little
and well: he has much discernment: I am ever more persuaded that he got into the republican
party to fight and because his services had been rejected [by us]. Nor do I think he is now
republican by principle. It was a great error not to use him. If a new war proves necessary he
will be a man to employ. How he managed to save himself this last time is really a miracle.18

Garibaldi's decision to be a calming influence was rewarded by the

Piedmontese authorities. They allowed him to see his family, were anxious
to treat him with respect and gave him a ‘grant’ on condition he leave the
country. Official policy was to play down Garibaldi's arrest, and to try to
pack him off overseas as soon as possible: at first the authorities thought of
Montevideo (where they even considered founding an Italian colony under
Garibaldi's direction), then the United States and finally Tunisia.19 A series
of carefully conciliatory letters and articles were also published in various
newspapers. One such letter appeared in Cavour's paper, Il Risorgimento; in
it Garibaldi thanked the intendant of Chiavari for all his kindness and
support;20 the semi-official paper La Legge also stated that Garibaldi's
‘language has been constantly that of a man who understands the necessities
of the times, and who would not be even an involuntary source of
discord’;21 while the conservative Gazzetta di Genova, in a report
subsequently published in La Gazzetta di Milano, said he had shown ‘much
deference’ to the government on arrival in Chiavari.22
Both Garibaldi's and the Piedmontese government's efforts at conciliation
were, however, countered by the activities of the radical majority in the
Piedmontese parliament. Members included the prominent parliamentarians
Urbano Rattazzi and Angelo Brofferio, the editor of La Concordia, Lorenzo
Valerio, and the deputies for Chiavari and Nice. In its report of 10
September, La Concordia had responded angrily to Garibaldi's arrest:

With our hearts full of joy, we got ready to say to Italy: ‘Garibaldi is safe! He has managed to
reach this faraway branch of Italy where the law rules, and the symbol of national thought, for
which he accomplished and suffered so much, still waves in the wind above the towers of its
cities!’ [But] today a despicable and utterly unexpected event forces our hand to take up the
pen and cry: Oh infamy! Garibaldi is in prison!

The radicals alleged that Garibaldi's arrest was designed to appease the
Austrian government, with which Piedmont was still negotiating peace
terms (although his arrest was more directly linked to concerns about public
order in Genoa, where a major revolt in March had been repressed by a
Piedmontese bombardment). Also on 10 September, Sanguinetti, the deputy
for Chiavari, presented a petition to the Piedmontese parliament protesting
about Garibaldi's arrest, and this was backed up with a lengthy eulogy by
Baralis, the deputy for Nice. Juxtaposing Garibaldi's supposed ‘guilt’ with
the evidence of his accomplishments, Baralis insisted that Garibaldi was
guilty of nothing ‘but his own valour’:

guilty of having left Montevideo with his brave militia … guilty of having offered his sword,
his life to the magnanimous Carlo Alberto … guilty of having maintained unsullied at Rome
the honour of Italian arms, honour which had fallen elsewhere; guilty of having fought against
the foreigner … guilty of having revived in the Latin land a longing for the Camilli, for the
Scipiones; of having swollen the ranks of Carmagnola, of Sforza, of Zeno, of Ferruccio, of
Sampieri … of having linked the force of Giovanni de' Medici of the Bande Nere with the
bravery of his compatriot General Massena … guilty finally of having rejected the dictatorship
of Rome which was offered to him by general acclaim, and of having tried to rescue the dying
Venice, in whose deserted fields, tormented and pursued, he heartbreakingly lost his wife.23
 By identifying Garibaldi with a historical tradition of Italian heroism, and
juxtaposing this with a present vision of Italian decadence (‘dying Venice’)
to make a political point, Baralis’ speech is a striking indication of the
spread of Risorgimento discourse as political rhetoric over the previous four
years. These themes of death and redemption – and with them the
glorification of Garibaldi – were emphasised again, and more succinctly, by
Valerio in the same parliamentary debate:

Garibaldi is a fellowcitizen, he is the first of our fellowcitizens, he saved the honour of Italian
arms, he is martyr and hero of a holy cause, he is the love and pride of the nation, he has the
right to our respect, honourable ministers. Imitate him if you can; if you don't know how to
imitate him, respect him, but don't arrest him. (General applause)24

The next day a similar idea was repeated by Valerio's La Concordia. The
paper warned its readers that the French government had sought Garibaldi's
arrest so as to avenge his great challenge to the French army; it ‘could not
bear to see unpunished the man who had so effectively scorned their insult,
throwing the famous phrase Les Italiens ne se battent pas into the face of
the most distinguished General Oudinot’. In the same issue Garibaldi's letter
to Valerio was published, in which he bemoaned the present political
climate, recommended ‘union and concord’ and hoped that Piedmont might
one day become ‘the bulwark of Italian liberty and independence’.25
The radicals’ immediate purpose was to use Garibaldi to attack the
present government and to bring about a change in its policy towards
France. As the deputy Baralis had put it to the chamber amid general
cheering, ‘perhaps a man blessed with extraordinary courage and integrity
without parallel inspires fear in the government? The fear of an individual is
a fault only of weak, cowardly and tyrannical governments.’ It was also part
of a crucial and ultimately successful struggle to safeguard constitutional
guarantees in Piedmont and assert the independence of parliament. In the
end, after quite lengthy discussion, a motion was passed condemning
Garibaldi's arrest as ‘contrary to the rights consecrated by the constitution
and to the sentiments of Italian nationality and glory’.26
The parliamentary motion condemning Garibaldi's arrest was widely
publicised, thanks largely to Valerio's efforts, and it formed a significant
part of a fairly detailed coverage of the whole episode in the London
Times.27 However, the radical protest provoked a backlash from both the
Catholic and the moderate liberal press. Il Cattolico di Genova criticised the
defence of Garibaldi, implying that he was a shady character who was
complicit in the death of his wife.28 And in an article also published in the
conservative Gazzetta di Milano, Cavour's moderate paper, Il Risorgimento,
condemned the attack on the government. It ‘deplored’ the rhetoric and
tactics used by the parliamentary radicals as merely ‘theatrical’, mocked
Baralis' eulogy as nonsense and accused the radicals of having no serious
interest in the law, in government or indeed in Garibaldi himself. Garibaldi,
the paper insisted, was merely a symbol used to divert public attention from
the pressing questions of the day: ‘Garibaldi is not capable of inciting such
rage as an individual or citizen. Garibaldi is an accident in the majority's
power. He is a name, he is a system, he is a protest, he is a hope, he is one
of many things that destiny prepares and sends out to unlucky peoples,
when it is written up there that they should not benefit from free
institutions.’29
Garibaldi sailed from Genoa bound for exile in Tunisia on 16 September
1849. Although the ten days spent on the Ligurian coast represent a
relatively minor incident in his long political career, they are revealing in
many ways. The behaviour and reactions of all the political groups and
government officials involved are a testimony to Garibaldi's growing fame.
If private letters, newspaper reports and parliamentary debates are anything
to go by, Garibaldi's name was firmly associated with the currently
prevailing, if still partisan, sense of national resurgence, and in particular
with deeds of military valour which were seen as belonging to a specifically
Italian tradition and which could be used as a rhetorical device to hide
and/or belittle more prosaic political realities and interests. It is interesting
that Garibaldi himself did little or nothing in these days to encourage such
reactions. Presumably exhausted and clearly stricken with grief for the loss
of his beloved wife, he played no part in the political furore over his arrest.
Indeed he toed the government line to a conspicuous extent. Yet his
reluctance to do anything but go home meant that he provided a blank space
on which an explicit sense of historical identity and national pride could be
inscribed, as well as being a more immediate focus for the hopes, fears and
rivalries of Piedmontese politicians at a time of political crisis. Indeed, his
disappearance in August, with only brief appearances thereafter, served to
increase political fascination with him. The reported death of his wife, and
his clear desire to see his ‘old mother’ and children, also introduced for the
first time an element of private intimacy and sentimentality into his heroic
reputation.
It became clear in these weeks how difficult it could be to direct or
control Garibaldi's fame. Its effects were unpredictable. Garibaldi himself
suffered as a result of them – being arrested on home territory as an
unlawful immigrant. Subsequently, when he arrived in Tunisia on 19
September, he was refused entry by the Bey, who was frightened of
Garibaldi's ‘great renown’ and feared ‘that the mere fact of Garibaldi's
disembarking could cause the eruption of a disorderly movement and
demonstration in Tunisia’.30
In the weeks and months that followed Garibaldi's arrest at Chiavari, La
Concordia sought to publicise his sad plight, and published letters and
reports on his peregrinations from Tunisia to Sardinia, to Gibraltar (where
he met with a frosty reception from the British governor), and on to Tangier,
where he spent the winter.31 La Concordia announced that, in Tangier,
Garibaldi had found:

a land which welcomed him hospitably, and which gave him a peaceful refuge. There, neither
government officials [intendenti], nor special commissioners, nor carabinieri ask for passports
or are concerned for his security … in the land of the Bedouins, who eat men; and there he
found a friendly and polite welcome, and the kind of peace which Europe and his ungrateful
land have so rudely denied him!

Garibaldi wrote to the paper saying: ‘Here among the Turks I can live in
peace!’32 In reality, Tangier marks Garibaldi's withdrawal from active
politics. In a letter published in La Gazzetta del Popolo on 25 April 1850,
he acknowledged receipt (in Nice) of a sword ‘dedicated to me by the
Italians’, and a letter addressed by him to Valerio at La Concordia in June
1850 was published in that paper. Otherwise he spent his time writing his
memoirs, and hunting and fishing: seeking to calm his soul ‘so
traumatised’, as he put it, ‘by the vicissitudes of a tempestuous life’ and
‘trying to shake off a kind of dreaded melancholy which for a time has
possessed me’.33
 New York

Garibaldi's letters reveal that money – or more precisely the lack of it –

rather than politics was his main concern at this time. He was especially
worried by the need to help maintain his mother and children. Out of his
financial problems a plan developed to travel to New York, procure a boat
and make a living as a merchant seaman.34 Thus, in June 1850, Garibaldi
left Tangier and stopped first at Gibraltar and then at Liverpool, where he
spent a week. He then embarked on the Waterloo for New York, where he
arrived on 30 July.
Garibaldi's brief visit to England received little press attention. The Times
noticed his arrival in New York (‘Garibaldi the celebrated partisan chief in
the late wars of Italy and of Montevideo arrived a few days since’)35 but not
his stay in Liverpool. The Liverpool Mail mentioned his visit to the city, but
only after he left. However, the paper did display a fascination with the
minute, if often inaccurate, narrative of Garibaldi's life and appearance,
which was already becoming a commonplace in public perceptions of him.
In a short passage the paper managed to reveal the following details to its
readers: that Garibaldi's wife had died ‘from fatigue’ in the Apennines; that
he had then reached the island of La Maddalena to be ‘kindly treated and
protected by the Sardinian government’; that ‘his pecuniary affairs are said
to be the reverse of flourishing’; that his mother was looking after his
children in Nice; that he was well educated and spoke many languages
fluently; that he had fought ‘in the war of the Greek revolution, and served
… under Lord Cochrane, at that time admiral of the Greek fleet’; that he
was ‘rather below the middle size, stoutly made, with an erect and
soldierlike air; and that his manner was ‘pleasing and lively, but … his
demeanour … staid and grave’.36
Almost a week after Garibaldi's departure for New York, The Red
Republican, a Chartist paper owned by the ‘Jacobin in an English setting’,
George Harney, and an important vehicle for the views of foreign exiles in
Britain after 1848–9, sought to give publicity to Garibaldi's stay in England.
Introducing Garibaldi to its readers, the paper used the now familiar trope
of denunciation and defence:
 ‘The insufferable domination of Garibaldi and his band’ formed the chosen theme, for weeks,
of the newspapers subsidized by the great political parties. Reading their lucubrations, you
would have imagined that the Roman General was a barbarian of the first order, and that his
followers were little better than halfcivilized savages. Other, and more impartial testimony,
succeeds in proving diametrically the reverse of this. The combined spirit of high chivalrous
honour and selfdenying patriotism never exhibited itself more strikingly than in the case of the
calumniated Garibaldi.

It also published a nineverse poem (‘Lines’) by the Reverend John Jeffrey

about ‘one of the most brilliant episodes of Garibaldi's career, when he …
scattered in “rabble rout” the forces of the King of Naples’. In its way, the
poem was very typical of a growing trend in British radical attitudes to Italy
– a mixture of Protestant antiCatholicism (‘Popery’), simple juxtaposition
of good and evil in the representation of Italian politics, and sheer fantasy in
perceptions of Garibaldi:

Garibaldi! Garibaldi!
Thrills the shout through street and square,
While the legion of the hero
Gathers to its thunder there!
But a handful seems the band,
As with flushing cheeks they stand,
Ardent at their chiefs command,
To rush forward on the foe, –
And to crush the slaves of Naples
By a first and final blow
…
Garibaldi! Garibaldi!
Towering foremost there of all,
Moves he like destruction's Angel, –
Till in circle round him fall,
Moved by his unresting blade,
Those who hoped in gore to wade
One day hence beneath the shade
Of St Peter's giant dome:
‘Romans!’ rings his watchword – ‘hurl them
 To the tyrant's hell, – their home!’37

Unlike his passage through Liverpool, Garibaldi's arrival in New York

was anticipated some time in advance. Hearing of Garibaldi's decision to
come to the United States, a welcoming committee of Italian republican
exiles was formed. The committee consisted of Mazzini's correspondent
from the early 1840s, Felice Foresti (also professor of Italian literature at
Columbia University and the Roman Republic's official representative in
New York), as well as General Avezzana (the exMinister of War in the
Roman Republic), Quirico Filopanti (exsecretary to the Roman triumvirs),
and Antonio Meucci (the scientist and entrepreneur). On 26 July, the New
York Daily Tribune, a leftleaning paper edited by the prominent labour
reformer Horace Greeley, published a statement from ‘[t]he Italians in New
York’ that they accepted ‘with feelings of gratitude the offers from
American, French and other Friends of Liberty, to unite with them in
honoring with a public procession the arrival of Gen. Garibaldi, the heroic
defender of Liberty in the Old and in the New World’. Those who wanted to
take part in the demonstration were asked to inscribe their name and
corporation in a register at the Café de la République on Broadway. After
his quarantine on Staten Island, it was planned that Garibaldi would be
greeted on arrival at the Battery by Mayor Woodhall and that he would be
taken to Astor House, where a ‘splendid banquet’ was to be held a few days
later, with speeches in Italian and English. A committee of German and
French socialists announced its intention to participate in the Garibaldi
demonstrations; ‘socialist citizens’ were asked to gather at the Shakespere
[sic] hotel to collect their red badges, ‘as no other color than the red will be
admitted’.38
There was nothing at all unusual about this kind of welcome. The failure
of the revolutions in Europe had produced a stream of political refugees
during 1850 and 1851, and various fundraising exercises and publicity
drives were held in New York to help them and their political cause.
General Avezzana had arrived some six months before Garibaldi to a great
reception. The Tribune had published a profile of Avezzana's life, he was
presented with a sword, and an enthusiastic ceremony was held in his
honour at the chapel of New York University, after which he was received
in the City Hall by the mayor and his council.39 Only a day before
Garibaldi's arrival, the Venezuelan leader General Paez arrived as an exile
in the city to another organised public greeting. The Tribune told its readers
that he had ‘come to seek, on our shores, the liberty he so vainly sought and
suffered for in his own country’, while the New York Herald dedicated its
entire front page to a ‘Brief memoir’ of his life.40 Moreover, these kinds of
receptions continued to be organised throughout the early 1850s. The most
sensational of its kind was for the Hungarian exile, Lajos Kossuth, whose
arrival in Manhattan in December 1851 was greeted with ‘such a scene as
the world seldom beholds’, according to the New York Times.41 His speech
was interrupted by crowds rushing the podium; there was a huge military
parade on Broadway which echoed the exuberant welcome given in 1824 to
the French ‘hero of two worlds’, Lafayette; street vendors did a brisk trade
in Kossuth souvenirs (‘“Kossuth” everything, from the most delicate lace to
the grossest human food’, according to the Tribune) and detailed
descriptions of Kossuth's life and physical appearance appeared in all the
papers. Kossuth and those with him were put up in a luxury hotel and
enjoyed champagne, madeira and sherry at the expense of the New York
government. He later embarked on a ‘barnstorming’ tour of the West.42
Hugh Forbes, a British radical who had fought with Garibaldi in 1849, gave
lectures on Italy and his experiences, at New York University.43 Finally, the
arrival in early 1853 of the ‘hero-priest’ Father Gavazzi, Garibaldi's former
comradeinarms, was hailed as an important public event. There was great
enthusiasm about his impressive personal appearance: ‘Tall, well made and
well-developed … graceful yet impetuous … [he] seemed the very symbol
of sincerity and power … his eyes flashing the fire of genuine eloquence’.
His lectures in favour of religious liberty and against the Catholic
priesthood also received considerable publicity.44
In other words, the reception planned for Garibaldi in New York was part
of an American political tradition, as was the more general public and
popular adoption of foreign exiles as political heroes. More specifically,
American politicians and publicists were happy to use the 1848–9
revolutions in Europe for domestic purposes. Reactions to the revolutions,
and the greeting given to the exiles, had become a means by which the USA
‘took stock of itself’; public opinion in the USA used events in Europe ‘to
salute US revolutionary origins’ and to consider America's political future at
a time of growing tension over the issue of slavery.45 In Garibaldi's case,
public opinion was already well disposed, thanks to the publicity given to
the Roman Republic by American writers such as Margaret Fuller. All of
this suggested that there was great political capital to be made out of
Garibaldi's stay in New York.
Yet Garibaldi refused to play any part in the celebrations planned for him.
He arrived in Staten Island on 30 July and, after the quarantine, left quietly
for Manhattan, from where he moved to the village of Hastings, some
twenty miles north of the city on the Hudson river. In Hastings he wrote a
letter, published in English in all the New York papers and in Italian in La
Concordia and Il Repubblicano della Svizzera Italiana, in which he
declined the honour of ‘a public reception’. Pleading ill health and a slow
recovery, he insisted that:

No such public exhibition is necessary to assure me of the sympathy of my countrymen, of the

American people, and of all true Republicans in the misfortunes which I have suffered, or of
the cause out of which they have flowed. Though a public manifestation of this feeling might
yield much gratification to me, an exile from my native land, severed from my children, and
mourning the overthrow of my country's freedom by means of foreign interference, yet believe
me that I would rather avoid it, and be permitted, quietly and humbly, to become a citizen of
this great Republic of Freemen, to sail under its flag, to engage in business to earn my
livelihood, and await a more favourable opportunity for the redemption of my country from
foreign and domestic oppression.46

He spent much of September in Manhattan, staying with his fellow exile

Felice Foresti in a friend's apartment on Irving Place, and in the autumn
moved back to Staten Island and into the house of Antonio Meucci. During
the winter on the island, he spent his time hunting and fishing, and trying to
help Meucci by working in his new candle factory (which he said at least
kept him warm).47 He became involved with the affairs of the Italian
committee and in helping Italian immigrants, and tried to mediate in the
rivalries between the Mazzinian and nonMazzinian exiles in New York; he
also attended the funeral of Avezzana's wife and a concert in aid of Italian
exiles. But in none of these activities did he assume a leading role.48
Garibaldi's letters reveal that his greatest problem was boredom and a sense
of idleness, and his major concern was to procure a boat and make a living
as a merchant seaman.49
American politicians and journalists made various attempts to bring
Garibaldi out of his selfimposed obscurity. The veteran politician General
Lewis Cass, Democratic Senator for Michigan, expresidential candidate and
father of the man who had apparently given Garibaldi an American passport
in Rome, wrote Garibaldi a public letter of welcome to ‘the land of
freedom’. He praised Garibaldi for raising ‘the standard of liberty upon the
Capitoline Hill’ and for reviving ‘the sprit of ancient Rome amid the
monuments of her power and glory’. He told him that his ‘glorious
exertions, followed by misfortunes born with equanimity, are a passport to
the hearts and homes of my countrymen’, and invited him to pay a visit to
Washington.50 There were also occasional mentions of Garibaldi in the
newspapers. The Tribune expressed hope in his reemergence, praising the
‘modest and manly dignity’ of his letter of 7 August and anticipating that ‘a
suitable opportunity may be afforded the public to testify their sympathy
with the Italian cause and their regard for its chivalric soldier’.51 The
Evening Post published an article on 10 March 1851 which mentioned a
projected expedition by the Italian exiles to Italy, and took the opportunity
to produce an extended tribute to Garibaldi, whose ‘name is a terror, not
only to his treacherous countrymen, but to the forces of despotic Austria
and disgraced France; [whose] little band of patriots, on every occasion,
performed prodigies of valor, and [whose] brilliant defence of Rome, for
bravery and skill, has seldom, if ever, been surpassed in the military
annals’. According to his friend Foresti, Garibaldi also received ‘frequent
visits from prominent Americans and foreigners, love letters and
expressions of admiration from all parts of the Union, as well as gallant
offerings’.52 Most notably perhaps, he met and impressed the poet Henry
Tuckerman and the editor and writer Theodore Dwight.53
Dwight seems to have been entirely captivated by Garibaldi, and was
keen to publicise his presence in the United States. He persuaded Garibaldi
to give him a copy of his memoirs and to sit for a daguerreotype. With the
help of Garibaldi and other exiles, Dwight produced the first booklength
account of the Roman Republic, which was published in New York in 1851
as The Roman Republic of 1849; with accounts of the Inquisition and the
siege of Rome.54 Although Dwight's main aim was to convince the
American reader of a (somewhat unlikely but increasingly popular) theory
that Italians were espousing Protestantism and were held back only by papal
oppression,55 the real hero of his account is Garibaldi. Garibaldi's exploits
in defence of the Roman Republic take up about half of the book's pages,
and it is Garibaldi who most symbolises all that is worthy of American help
in Italy.56 While Dwight damns Mazzini with faint praise (he ‘has a great
heart and is a pure and enthusiastic patriot: but he seems wanting in
experience of men and things’), Garibaldi was ‘[w]ell fitted by nature to
command, he is loved and respected by all who know him’.57 Thus, in
Dwight's hands, Garibaldi becomes a kind of allAmerican Protestant hero.58
The daguerreotype of Garibaldi (by the wellknown photographer Marcus
Root), reproduced as an engraving for the frontispiece to Dwight's Roman
Republic, is strikingly different to previous representations of Garibaldi (see
figure 7 below). No trace is left of the red blouse, flowing hair and
passionate expression. In the portrait, Garibaldi strikes a quiet, gentlemanly
pose, with a tree and rising sun in the background. He is still goodlooking,
but now well groomed in a dark doublebreasted coat and neatly tied cravat,
with tidy and welltrimmed hair and beard; and he gazes past the viewer
with a calm, almost melancholy look in his eyes. Dwight presses this point
home to his readers: Garibaldi is humble, honourable and physically
attractive, with ‘penetrating eyes, but … mild, gentle and amiable in
address and manners, and frank, animated and winning in conversation’. He
had an energetic and devoted wife and still has a loving family. He is both
brave and steadfast. Garibaldi's ‘bravery, perseverance and success in the
service of his country, especially at Rome’ are, for Dwight, ‘equalled only
by his decision, equanimity and fortitude during his astonishing retreat after
the fall of the city, and the unbroken spirit he still displays after all his
sufferings and afflictions.’59
 7 Garibaldi in New York c.1851. This portrait shows a drastic change of
image from the unconventional figure depicted in figures 2 and 5 above.

None of these attempts at publicity came to anything. In April 1851

Garibaldi left New York for the Pacific Ocean. His friend Carpaneto had
finally found a way to buy a ship for Garibaldi, and they sailed together on
28 April for Central America, arriving first in Nicaragua, after which they
crossed the Panama isthmus and arrived in Peru in October. From
December 1851 to January 1853, nothing more was heard from Garibaldi.60
In late 1851, Mazzini wrote from London asking Garibaldi to lead an
expedition to Sicily, but the letters failed to reach him.61 During this time
Garibaldi crossed the Pacific with a cargo of guano for Canton, and after a
side trip to Manila he returned via Australia and New Zealand to
Peru.62Noting his departure from New York, the Tribune wished him
‘success in the new path he has chosen’, and repeated its admiration for his
‘modesty, simplicity and thorough integrity of character … pure patriotism
and … unflinching bravery’ as well as for his capacity for ‘humble’ work.
Otherwise there was little public interest in his departure. There was not
much more interest in his temporary return to the USA in the autumn of
1853, when he arrived in Boston with a cargo of copper from Chile.63
Garibaldi finally left New York for good in November 1853 and returned
to Europe. Perhaps because the Piedmontese government had suggested he
would be welcome once more on home territory if he agreed not to take part
in politics, he travelled again as a merchant seaman, this time as master of a
ship with a cargo bound for London and Genoa.64From Boston, shortly
before leaving the United States, Garibaldi had written a bitter and
emotional letter to his friend, Augusto Vecchi:

What can I say to you about my wandering life, my dear Vecchi? I thought that distance might
lessen the bitterness in my soul, but sadly [fatalmente] this is not true, and I have dragged out
a tempestuous existence without happiness, and embittered by memories. Yes, I still yearn for
the emancipation of our land … although [I am] now worn out and dedicated, so people think,
more to the stomach than to the soul, and I shudder at the probable idea that I will never again
take up a sword or a gun for Italy.65

He told Cuneo that his physical powers were declining, although he

hoped more than ever to die for his country. ‘At one time’, he wrote, ‘I
sought the affection of men, today I don't care any more, and if I could
remove myself entirely from their company, I would believe myself
happy.’66 His main political concern during his last weeks in America was
to restore good relations among the quarrelling Italian exiles in New York.67
Garibaldi's stay in New York seems a curiously downbeat episode in a
career otherwise dedicated to the pursuit and exploitation of publicity for
political ends. Why did he not make more use of the undoubted
opportunities which New York had to offer? Some of the reasons were
personal. On arrival in New York Garibaldi was crippled with rheumatism,
‘obliged’, in his own words, ‘to disembark … like a package, by means of a
swing hoist’.68 He was devastated by the loss of his wife; his main aim,
repeated often in his letters, was to keep busy and make money to support
his mother and children; and he spoke little or no English. But there were
political reasons for his inaction too. He was by his own account
disillusioned politically, and his presence in New York, and especially the
proposed reception for him, caused controversy. Many of his American
supporters feared the involvement of socialists (or ‘Red Republicans’)
while the Catholic Church in New York and the powerful Irishman, Bishop
Hughes, in particular, were openly hostile to Garibaldi.69 Thus, as had
happened in Liguria at the end of the previous year, pressure may well have
been put on Garibaldi to decline all public ceremonies in order to avoid
public disorder.
It is also worth considering whether Garibaldi's decision to withdraw
from public life was not itself part of a strategy, a ‘performance’ – however
sincere – designed to attract sympathy and increase support for the Italian
cause. His letters at this time, including his public letter to the New York
papers, express a clear sense of mourning for his ‘native land’, for his
‘beautiful and oppressed country’, a mourning which is explicitly identified
with his own lonely existence as an exile, bereaved and ‘severed’ from his
children.70 His 1851 daguerreotype shows a poignant figure in sombre
clothes against a dark background, and he made many efforts to identify his
personal loss with the greater political loss for Italy. The impression he
made on Henry Tuckerman was of a man accompanied by ‘[s]ad memories
… a widowed husband, a baffled patriot, an exile from the land for which
he had so long toiled and suffered, his limbs racked with chronic pains
incident to prolonged exposure; his dearest comrades banished or
executed’.71 In terms of ‘staging’ this sorrow for public purposes, it was
surely more persuasive to refuse rather than entreat publicity and personal
honours.
In order to gauge how effective Garibaldi's performance was, it is useful
to compare his experiences in the USA with those of other contemporary
political heroes, like Kossuth and Gavazzi, who received such great
receptions. Both Kossuth and Gavazzi were fêted at first. However,
Kossuth's speeches alienated abolitionists and his barnstorming meetings
frightened conservatives. Kossuth was quickly abandoned by his supporters
– including Senator Lewis Cass – during a presidential election year and he
left the USA, only seven months after his arrival, amid general indifference
and ridicule.72 Gavazzi's speeches against the Catholic Church caused great
offence; his lecture tour in French Canada led to riots; and even in New
York he was eventually condemned for stiring up hatred among different
American classes and religions.73 Garibaldi, by contrast, won widespread
praise for his ‘modesty’, ‘good sense’, ‘high character’, disinclination for
‘pomp and display’ and willingness to engage – like any other immigrant –
in a ‘humble occupation’ as a candle-maker.74 Both Cass and Dwight
publicly admired the contrast between Garibaldi's glorious exploits in Rome
and the ‘equanimity’ with which he had borne his more recent ‘misfortunes’
and ‘afflictions’. Moreover, all these qualities – modesty, courtesy,
steadfastness – were those exalted by contemporaries as necessary virtues
in American public life.75 Garibaldi's decision neither to take part in any
reception nor to enter the American political arena may well have been
deliberate and was certainly fortuitous. In this respect, Garibaldi's real
achievement during his stay in the USA was to have left American shores
with his reputation intact.
Garibaldi's American exile also marks the moment when he leaves his
bandit persona behind him. Arriving in London in 1854, he described
America to the Russian exile, Alexander Herzen, as the country of
‘forgetting the fatherland’, and he radically changed his image while in
New York.76 The 1851 daguerreotype/engraving of Garibaldi is remarkable
for the respectability of his personal appearance. The Garibaldi who
returned to Europe in 1854 after his ‘second exile’ was a different figure –
older, perhaps sadder and certainly more ‘respectable’ than the youthful
romantic, the exotic and picturesque rebel who had fought on the hills
above Rome in 1849. A portrait of him in The Northern Tribune shortly
after his arrival in England confirms the change in image. An engraving
taken from another photograph, it shows Garibaldi in a more aggressive
pose than in 1851, gazing more firmly beyond the horizon, but the dark coat
remains, as does the tidier hair, as proof of his new, more respectable social
status and his gentlemanly qualities.77
As a political move, the change of image turned out not to be a bad one.
During his years away a great deal had altered on the European political
scene, and the Italian question had itself changed dramatically. A series of
political compromises in the aftermath of the 1848–9 revolutions, together
with an ongoing ‘revolution’ in literacy, publishing and the process of
politicisation, opened up new and different prospects for Garibaldi.
Refusing public honours in New York in 1850, he had said that he preferred
to wait for ‘a more favourable opportunity for the redemption of my
country from foreign and domestic oppression’. The nature and effect of
this opportunity, and the use which Garibaldi would make of it, became
clear after he returned to Europe.
The ‘decade of preparation’

Garibaldi's second exile, and the first real low point in his political career,
coincided with the start of major changes both in Italian politics and in
public opinion. These changes will be examined in detail in this and the
following chapter since they are crucial to understanding all of Garibaldi's
subsequent career, both as a military leader and as a national hero. First,
although the defeat of the revolutions had demonstrated the international
resilience of conservatism, by the mid-1850s the coalition which had
sustained conservatives during 1848–9 was in crisis. Austria, the guarantor
of conservative stability in Italy, suffered a serious blow to its international
standing with the Crimean War of 1854–6; its refusal to stand by its ally,
Russia, during the war broke up the conservative coalition, leading to
Austria's diplomatic isolation and to particular tensions with Prussia and
other members of the German Confederation.78
Austrian weakness might have been less serious had Italian conservatism
managed to stabilise itself and gain consensus but, in the aftermath of
revolution, Italy's conservative rulers made the (arguably understandable)
mistake of shifting to the right. During the 1850s, Ferdinando II of Naples
ignored the clear need for reform, including in the crucial areas of finance
and administration, reimposed press censorship and rejected all compromise
with even the most moderate of liberals, preferring to imprison them or
send them into exile, while the Austrian authorities in Lombardy–Venetia
also brought in censorship and pursued political repression, including
executions, with apparent enthusiasm. In Rome, the restored Pius IX set
himself firmly against liberalism. During the 1850s, he dedicated himself to
matters of Catholic dogma, and left political matters in the hands of his
capable but uncompromising Secretary of State, Cardinal Giacomo
Antonelli, whose personal dictatorship attracted much political criticism
and whose nepotistic tendencies and taste for wealth and luxury encouraged
a series of attacks on papal ‘corruption’. Once again, censorship, in the
notorious form of the Papal Inquisition, was reintroduced. Such high-profile
policies of reaction caused a storm of opprobrium and encouraged
opposition to the conservative regimes both in Italy and from outside the
peninsula. For perhaps the first time, Italian rulers became genuinely, if not
universally, unpopular.79 After the end of the Crimean War, and the shift in
international relations away from Austria, they were also faced with
growing international condemnation of their governments. Most notably, at
the Congress of Paris in February 1856, the British minister, Lord
Clarendon, raised the ‘Italian question’, criticising the Pope and the
Bourbons and expressing sympathy for Italian national aspirations.80
The problems facing conservatism in Italy opened up new opportunities
for the opposition, but the opposition itself experienced some surprising
changes in fortune. Reaction in 1849 had left only one Italian state –
Piedmont – with a liberal constitution, which limited the power of the
monarchy, established an elected parliament based on limited suffrage and
guaranteed important civil liberties, such as equality before the law and the
right of association. There was also a free press. Moreover, in 1849 the
radicals formed a majority in the lower chamber of parliament. But some
two months after the debate on Garibaldi's arrest had caused such a furore,
the king, Vittorio Emanuele II, dissolved parliament and called new
elections, and threaten to revoke constitutional concessions if the radicals'
hostility to the crown was allowed to continue (the proclama di
Moncalieri). In these elections, the radicals suffered a serious defeat. The
moderate liberals, who had fought the election equally as royalists and as
defenders of the constitution, returned with a strong majority and formed a
government. Despite these rather shaky beginnings, the moderates managed
to bring about an extraordinary transformation in Piedmont over the next
ten years. Under, first, Massimo d'Azeglio and, after 1852, Camillo Benso
di Cavour, constitutional government was consolidated, the power of the
Church and the crown was contained, and the Piedmontese economy was
revolutionised through a series of measures which introduced free trade and
improved the country's financial infrastructure and transport system. These
transformations meant that, again for the first time, there existed a real and
successful alternative (a ‘middle way’ or juste milieu) to both conservatism
and revolution in the Italian peninsula.81
Still more worthy of note was the boost which moderate liberal
government gave to Piedmont and to the personal reputations of its
ministers. Cavour used his exceptional political talents to control parliament
throughout the 1850s and, although the scale and stability of his
achievement can certainly be questioned, the great skill with which he
outmanoeuvred his opponents and promoted his policies is undeniable.
During this period, Cavour and his party seized the political and ideological
initiative from both the radicals and the reactionaries in Piedmont. In
particular, by creating what was termed an ‘unlawful union’ (connubio)
between the centre right and centre left in the Piedmontese parliament on
the basis of opposition to left and right extremism, and by establishing an
alliance with the radical leader Rattazzi, Cavour isolated the clerical right
and gave the parliamentary radicals a choice of being either with him and in
power, or opposed to him and powerless. He thereby threw the
parliamentary radical movement in Piedmont into a confusion from which it
never really recovered.82 At the same time, the political and economic
achievements of the moderate government in Piedmont, and Cavour's
capacity to secure a role for Piedmont in European diplomacy especially
after the Congress of Paris in 1856, lent a growing attraction to the
Piedmontese ‘solution’ for liberals and radicals all over Italy. This allowed
Cavour, in turn, to assume de facto leadership of the liberal movement in
the Italian peninsula.
Of course, most moderate liberals, Cavour included, were not Italian
nationalists. They were anti-Austrian and usually sought the expansion of
Piedmontese power and influence; they all despised what Cavour called the
‘deplorable influence’ of Mazzini's unitarian ideals; and they saw Italian
unification as mere ‘foolishness’.83 Yet here, too, a shift took place in the
mid-1850s. Cavour became aware of the political advantages of
encouraging nationalist feeling, while disillusioned Mazzinians formed the
National Society to press for Italian unification under the leadership of the
Piedmontese monarchy. These shifts reflected a great surge of political
immigration, with an estimated 50,000 refugees arriving in Piedmont in
1849 and some 20–30,000 remaining thereafter. Especially in Turin and
Genoa, the impact of these exiles on cultural life was striking and they
helped hugely in making Piedmont the nucleus of a reinvented Italian
nationalism.84 In this respect also, Cavour showed a striking ability to adapt
to changed circumstances, and to create and hold the centre ground. So by
the end of the Crimean War in 1856, Cavour had not only extended his hold
over Piedmontese politics, he had come to influence many aspects of the
nationalist agenda in Italy as well.
The full significance of Cavour's achievement was to become clear
during the climactic years of national unification in 1859–60. Yet already by
the mid-1850s, the effect on the Mazzinians was all too evident. Despite
enjoying enormous prestige among revolutionary exiles and in the Anglo-
Saxon world as the leader of Italian nationalism (perhaps ‘the great Italian
of this century’, according to one Englishman)85 and a triumvir of the
Roman Republic, Mazzini thereafter steadily lost support in Italy and
amongst his own followers. In London, he established the National Italian
Committee to promote nationalist activity in Italy, saying this represented a
‘National Party’ (later, ‘Party of Action’). He continued trying to organise
revolutionary conspiracies, first in Sicily in 1850–1 (which came to
nothing) and more notably in Milan in 1853. But the Milan insurrection was
a catastrophe for Mazzini. It was misconceived, badly led and poorly
supplied, and it severely damaged his image as a revolutionary leader. One
conspirator stole most of the money sent by Mazzini to fund the
insurrection, and in the Austrian crackdown that followed, sixteen
insurgents were executed. When the property of Lombards living in
Piedmont was seized by the government, Cavour, not Mazzini, successfully
posed as their defender against Austrian bullying. Mazzini even fell out
with his fellow revolutionary, Lajos Kossuth, about the use of the
Hungarian's name to encourage the uprising.86
Not all the Mazzinian conspiracies which followed – Lunigiana in 1853;
Massa in 1854; the Bentivegna revolt in Palermo in 1856; Pisacane's
expedition in 1857 – were directly organised by Mazzini, but he was widely
blamed when they ended in disaster. Pisacane's expedition finished
tragically at Sapri on the Calabrian coast with Pisacane's suicide amid the
total indifference of the rural population, and the other conspirators were
killed or imprisoned. Although Mazzini had not been closely involved in
the planning of the expedition but had merely tried to assist Pisacane, the
events at Sapri led to a wave of accusations of cowardice and fanaticism
against him. Even when Felice Orsini became a hero in 1858 after his
attempt to assassinate Napoleon III in Paris, Mazzini, who had deplored
Orsini's action, was publicly condemned for it and sentenced to death in
absentia by the high court in Genoa.87
Throughout the 1850s, there was also growing criticism of Mazzini from
among his own supporters. A series of rival, and increasingly dissident,
organisations were established which challenged his leadership and its base
in London: the Latin Committee in Paris (1851) which argued in favour of a
federal republic; the Military Committee in Genoa (1852) which sought the
military direction of the revolution for itself and which, led by Giacomo
Medici, became increasingly opposed to Mazzini; and most notably the
aforementioned National Society, founded in 1857 by the hero of Venice,
Daniele Manin, in Paris and by two exiles in Turin, Giorgio Pallavicino
Trivulzio and Giuseppe La Farina. In a famous statement published in 1855,
Manin had announced his conditional support of Piedmont (‘Make Italy and
I am with you. If not, not’). The following year, in a series of letters to
‘Caro [Lorenzo] Valerio’ and published in the important new paper, Il
Diritto, Manin openly endorsed the Piedmontese monarchy and advocated
political restraint;88 and in a letter to The Times he seemed to criticise
Mazzinian conspiratorial methods by declaring that the ‘great enemy’ of
Italy in the present time was ‘the doctrine of political assassination or … the
theory of the poniard’.89
Although at the time Manin's attack was disapproved of by many on the
left, his views increasingly became mainstream during the years which
followed. The National Society quickly gained adherents and established
local organisations in Piedmont, as well as important – if inevitably more
clandestine – contacts in Lombardy, the central Italian duchies, Tuscany and
the Romagna. According to its historian Raymond Grew, the formation of
the National Society was ‘the most dramatic sign that republicans were
turning to Cavour, that nationalists would accept unification under
Piedmontese monarchy, that the era of Mazzini was really over’.90 Its
methods of peaceful agitation and propaganda now looked more
convincing, and won more middle-class and widespread support, than
conspiracy and insurrection. In southern Italy, moreover, many began to
look to Lucien Murat, the son of Napoleon's king of Naples, Joachim
Murat, as a possible alternative to the Bourbon kings. Other revolutionaries
continued to follow Mazzini's old rival, Nicola Fabrizi, who was based in
Malta, and still others moved towards a more explicitly anarchist and/or
socialist position. Their increasing emphasis on the South and Sicily as the
new theatre for revolutionary action exasperated Mazzini.91
While Mazzini did retain a loyal core of supporters in Italy and among
exiles abroad (Saffi, De Boni, Francesco Crispi), many more of them were
irritated by his refusal to consult or take criticism, and they distanced
themselves from him even where they did not openly endorse Piedmont.
His old friend Jacobo Ruffini joked that ‘Mazzini thinks he is infallible like
the Pope’; the extremist Felice Orsini called him ‘the new Mahommed’; and
the more moderate Antonio Mordini defined him as ‘the tyrant of our
party’. Others tended to agree with the satirical poet Cesare Giusti that
Mazzini's political clock had stopped in 1848.92 At the beginning of the
1850s, Italian revolutionaries had suffered the demoralising effects of exile,
persecution and financial hardship as a result of their activities. After the
disaster of Pisacane's expedition to Sapri in 1857, they were ‘deserted’ by
what Mordini called ‘wealth and intelligence’, and it became increasingly
difficult to agree on a concrete programme with which to reach out and win
popular support.93
Nor, ironically, did the creation of a myth of revolutionary action do
much to help Mazzini. After 1849, a large number of revolutionaries and
volunteers published their versions of events as memoirs or pamphlets.
These did a great deal to make known what had happened in Rome and
made heroes out of those involved.94 But few were firm followers of
Mazzini and they tended either openly to criticise him or to diminish his
role. Mazzini also received a great deal of unfavourable publicity from ex-
fellow travellers and conspirators. In 1856, the former London exile now
living in Piedmont, Antonio Gallenga, published a two-volume history of
Piedmont in which he revealed the story of a plot hatched by Mazzini in
1833 to assassinate the king, while during 1857 and 1858 La Farina's paper
Il Piccolo Corriere d'Italia published a series of attacks on Mazzini, notably
the letters of Orsini, which recounted details of Mazzini's treachery and
cruelty to his followers.95
The break with Mazzini

Garibaldi's political disillusionment and tendency to seek a compromise

with the Piedmontese government, evident as early as 1849, was thus part
of a broader trend in nationalist circles which developed during the early to
mid-1850s. Before leaving the United States for the second time, in 1854,
Garibaldi had also seemed to support the idea of an alliance of nationalists
under Piedmontese leadership and he expressed equal concern about the
utility of Mazzini's methods and tactics (‘he is full of hope and fire. I would
like him not to act rashly. I am ready to give my life to my country, in any
case. [But] I would like to do this to some profit’).96 After his return to
Europe, Garibaldi increasingly distanced himself from Mazzini. The two
men met in London after Garibaldi arrived there in February 1854, first at a
meal on board Garibaldi's ship, and later with a number of prominent
European exiles – Herzen, Kossuth and Ledru-Rollin, among others – at a
dinner given by American diplomats to celebrate Washington's birthday.
Although Mazzini and Garibaldi were by all accounts friendly to each other,
henceforth they were in serious disagreement. Garibaldi refused once more
to lead an expedition to Sicily.97 In a somewhat garbled draft of a letter to
Mazzini, dated 26 February 1854 (that is, after their first meeting),
Garibaldi made his own position very clear:

…or we can do things on our own, overthrowing foreign and domestic obstacles, or we can
ally ourselves with a government in which we can place our hopes for Italian unity alone. I
don't believe in the first concept, and there are many reasons for my conviction: scarce
resources, the masses who can make a revolution are of no use to an army which can support
it, not having the peasants fully with us; so I am sure that whatever our maxim, it will serve no
other purpose than to make victims, discrediting and weakening the task of redemption.
Allying ourselves to the Piedmontese government is a bit tough, I understand that, but I think
it to be the best solution, and to combine in that centre all the different colours, which divide
us; whatever happens, at whatever cost.98
 Also in London in 1854, Garibaldi spoke to Alexander Herzen of his
differences with Mazzini, and stressed that he was totally opposed to
insurrection at that time.99 Three years later, to his and Mazzini's English
supporter, Jessie White, he reiterated that at the present time insurrections
had ‘no probability of success’, that he refused to support ‘laughable
insurrections’ which would make Italians a laughing-stock, and that in his
view an alliance with Piedmont had great practical advantages.100 More
seriously for all concerned, he repeated the same anti-insurrectionary, pro-
Piedmontese message in public. In London in March 1854 he wrote a
(somewhat) restrained address to his ‘Lombard friends’ which simply
stressed the importance of ‘union … [and] combination of every element …
at any cost, with the sacrifice, if necessary, of any system, however
likeable’.101 However, five months later, in Genoa, he wrote a letter to the
prominent Mazzinian paper, Italia e Popolo, in which he told its readers that
he had no intention of taking part in the current ‘movements of
insurrection’, and that he felt it his duty to warn young people, eager to
fight for ‘the redemption of the fatherland’, ‘not to let themselves be so
easily led astray by the easy insinuations of deceived or deceiving men
[uomini inganni o ingannatori], who push them into untimely attempts
which ruin, or at the least discredit, our cause’.102 In 1855, he wrote an
‘Italian programme’, presumably intended for publication, which started
with the words: ‘First of all we must make Italy’, and which went on to
deplore the factionalism of Italian political life. The choice, according to
Garibaldi, was a ‘combination’ under Piedmontese leadership or being
‘destroyed’ (‘there is no middle way’), and he further recommended that
this leadership be ‘strictly dictatorial’.103
For Mazzini, Garibaldi's attitude was a source of enormous frustration.
Mazzini had been unable to understand Garibaldi's departure for the Pacific
Ocean in 1851 and his disappearance from politics for nearly two years. ‘I
don't know where the devil he is, nor how long he will take to come back’,
he wrote in November 1851, while in June 1853 he complained to Cuneo
that there was still no news of Garibaldi, ‘who is roving on the high seas far
away, and whom I have uselessly tried to contact’.104 He was briefly
cheered by Garibaldi's arrival in London in February 1854, but was soon
disillusioned by what he termed Garibaldi's ‘vacillation’.105 Although
Mazzini hoped that he could control Garibaldi, as we have seen, Garibaldi
refused to co-operate and in private correspondence at least Mazzini
became much more hostile. The turning-point for Mazzini was Garibaldi's
declaration against republicanism and insurrection published in Italia e
Popolo in August 1854. ‘What is this declaration of Garibaldi's?’ he asked
Nicolao Ferrari; to Emilie Hawkes he wrote, ‘Garibaldi … has published a
declaration against our Party. I begin to be like Nimrod, all hands against
me, and I against all'; while to Nicola Fabrizi he described the declaration
as ‘cowardly’.106 Just as ‘shameful’ and ‘sickening’ for Mazzini was the
evidence that his old friend, Giacomo Medici, had encouraged Garibaldi to
make the declaration: ‘It is bad to allow Garibaldi to call us, who taught
him patriotism, “ingannati o ingannatori”: it is bad not to stand up
resolutely for our own creed, for our own old friends’.107
The quarrel between Mazzini and Garibaldi would probably have been
less significant had it not been carried out in public. As it was, the distance
between them was intensified and publicised as part of a strategy of attack
on Mazzinian loyalists in Genoa by the increasingly broad and pro-
Cavourian liberal movement. For example, Antonio Gallenga writing in the
pro-Cavourian paper, Il Parlamento (edited by Sicilian exiles hostile to
Mazzini and with links to Giacomo Medici), immediately picked up on and
wrote about Garibaldi's disagreement with the Mazzinian line on his arrival
back in Italy.108 Garibaldi's declaration against Mazzinian methods in Italia
e Popolo was praised by the moderate papers. However, it met with a
barrage of critical letters in the radical press, notably in the pages of Italia e
Popolo and in the Turin paper, Il Goffredo Mameli. Most damaging of all
was the dispute which erupted in print between Garibaldi and his old
commander from the Roman Republic, Pietro Roselli. Already, in 1853,
Roselli had published a pamphlet about the battle of Velletri (19 May 1849),
in which he had attacked Garibaldi's conduct, accusing him of
insubordination and of responsibility for the failure of this part of the
campaign.109 After Garibaldi's declaration, Roselli reiterated his accusations
of the previous year in Italia e Popolo. Garibaldi, once again suffering from
rheumatism which he acknowledged had put him in a terrible mood, was so
angered by the attack that he challenged both the director of Italia e Popolo,
Francesco Savi, and Roselli to duels.110 In the end, a ‘jury’ had to be
formed to resolve the dispute, with Medici and Enrico Cosenz acting for
Garibaldi. Although it concluded that no offence had been caused to
Garibaldi's honour, clear damage was done to personal relations.111
Garibaldi's behaviour after his return to Italy in 1854 diminished his
standing in Mazzinian circles. As Mazzini put it, commenting on Garibaldi's
declaration in Italia e Popolo: ‘what is he doing? how is he alive to the state
and wants of his country? To his own duties? Why does he not feel that the
hour has come? and that one word from him and the military nucleus [of
Medici] strengthening mine, their names coupled with mine, would be more
than sufficient to rouse the people?’ On the fallout thereafter, he was even
less understanding, writing dismissively to Emilie Hawkes that ‘Garibaldi
has been walking up and down from place to place in search of duels with –
the Italians who protested against his declaration’.112
None of this made good publicity and, even before Garibaldi's return,
Mazzini had sought to promote another hero. The man was Silvino Olivieri,
who had fought in the wars of 1848–9, and who spent the early 1850s
leading an Italian legion in Buenos Aires against the dictator Rosas.
Mazzini had published an article on Olivieri – ‘La legione Italiana in
Buenos Aires’ – in Italia e Popolo of 2 January 1854, which was very
similar in content and structure to the early publicity given to Garibaldi. It
included a long letter comparing ‘the valiant colonel’ to Garibaldi and to the
Bandiera brothers, and a series of ‘official documents’ testifying to
Olivieri's bravery and selflessness, and to his fame and popularity in
Argentina.113 After the events of the summer of 1854, Mazzini wrote to
Nicolao Ferrari in Genoa telling him explicitly to promote Olivieri, as ‘he
will one day perhaps be our remplaçant for Garibaldi’.114 And although
Olivieri was murdered, trying to organise a colony (‘New Rome’) in Bahia
Blanca in Argentina, Mazzini's opinion of Garibaldi did not improve. He
persisted in his hope that Garibaldi could be won back for republicanism,
but was now consistently disparaging about his political abilities: ‘Garibaldi
will never start anything’, he told Cuneo in November 1855; ‘he will follow
us if we make it, the monarchists if they make it.’ To his English friend
Jessie White he was even more forthright:

Garibaldi is good: he loves his country and hates the Austrians; but Garibaldi is weak.
Therefore, changeful. I believe that he has been really ensnared by the Piedmontese Ministry; I
 believe that he feels himself now deceived by them … Moreover, he believes that I distrust
him; therefore, he distrusts me. I do not believe that a cordial understanding can ever take
place between us; still I believe … call me jesuitical for that … even the appearance of such
[an understanding] would do good to Italy.115

Unfortunately for Mazzini, it was the ‘appearance’ of quarrelling and

disagreement which was the most visible aspect of the democratic
movement in Italy in the mid-1850s. Along with Manin's denunciation of
Mazzinian methods, Garibaldi's disagreement with Mazzini and the
Mazzinians was one of the most public manifestations of what had gone
wrong, in terms both of dealing personally with the bitter legacy of 1848–9
and of developing a strategy for responding to moderate liberalism in
Piedmont and to political reaction in the rest of Italy. The first beneficiary
of this disarray, and of Garibaldi's disaffection as a result of it, was the
National Society. Between 1856 and 1859, the National Society largely
filled the political vacuum left in nationalist politics, and in Garibaldi's life,
by the apparent failure of Mazzinianism. Garibaldi was among the first
officially to join the Society by signing its programme, writing to its
president, Pallavicino, that ‘[t]he ideas expressed by you are mine, and … I
am proud to accompany you in any political demonstration’.116 His
presence was to prove ‘in the next two years … one of the Party's greatest
strengths’; for Pallavicino, they had won the name that would ‘add
prestige’.117 Garibaldi also accepted a post as the Society's vice-president,
and he even went so far as to write to one supporter that ‘[t]he National
Society is Italy, it is the whole nation!’118
Garibaldi's relations with the National Society, and especially with its
secretary, Giuseppe La Farina, came to benefit Cavour as well. Cavour was
initially very wary of Garibaldi (as he wrote in 1854, ‘if he is only coming
back to see his family and children, we won't bother him at all; but if he
intends to come here to carry out Mazzini's business, we won't tolerate his
presence here for one minute’),119 but gradually, faced with the more
‘gentlemanly’ Garibaldi and influenced by La Farina, he came to appreciate
the advantages of an alliance with him.120 The two men were introduced by
La Farina for the first time in August 1856, and Cavour was said to have
been friendly and courteous. They met again in December 1858, at which
point Cavour let Garibaldi into some aspects of his plan for provoking a war
with Austria. Cavour and Garibaldi apparently met on more than one
occasion in the months that followed. In March 1859, Cavour also
introduced Garibaldi to the king of Piedmont, Vittorio Emanuele II, and
some kind of trust and sympathy seems to have developed between the two
men.121
Yet despite his friendship with the Piedmontese government, Garibaldi's
own political beliefs were much more ambiguous. He never gave up on the
idea of revolutionary expeditions. In 1854, at the same time as he told
Herzen that he was opposed to insurrections, he extolled the virtues of a
seafaring life where, in his words, he and his followers might sail ‘over the
ocean, hardening ourselves in the rough life of sailors, in conflict with the
elements and with danger … A floating revolution, ready to put in at any
shore, independent and unassailable!’122 Although he refused to take part in
Pisacane's 1857 expedition, throughout 1855 and 1856 he had been quite
prepared to help and even to head another expedition to liberate prominent
political prisoners being held on the island of Santo Stefano off the coast of
Naples.123 He tried to enlist the National Society's support in persuading
Piedmont to pay for three ships in a major campaign which he planned for
the spring of 1857.124 Nor had he abandoned the quintessentially Mazzinian
idea of political sacrifice and martyrdom. Refusing to take any part in
Pisacane's disastrous expedition, he made his own position very clear to
Jessie White:

if Garibaldi was sure of being followed by a distinct majority … and even with a small chance
of success, oh my Jessie! do you doubt that I would throw myself, with a feverish joy, into the
fulfilment of this idea which has been my whole life, even if the only compensation was the
most terrible martyrdom … My life is there, for Italy, and my idea of paradise is to take up
arms for her. Happiness, a wife, children would not be enough to hold me back and nothing
will hold me back when it is a question of the holy cause.125

‘The years have rather worn me out,’ Garibaldi told Cuneo two months
later, ‘but I am proud to tell you that I have kept my soul together.’126
Towards unification
In the 1850s Garibaldi abandoned Mazzini and republicanism for practical
reasons but he remained dedicated to Mazzini's nationalist ideals. As he
never tired of repeating, Garibaldi believed in the alliance with the
Piedmontese monarchy and army but he was equally convinced by
Mazzini's religious vision of the nation and by the idea of revolution
leading to national redemption.
As an ideological choice, this position was extremely ambiguous.
Raymond Grew tells us that, like Garibaldi, the whole of the National
Society felt that ‘the love of the fatherland [was] … a religion’, and that the
men of the Society were convinced they pursued a ‘holy goal’. Pallavicino
wrote that the virtues most valued by this ‘religion’ were a ‘disinterested,
fervent, holy love of public life’, a ‘religion of sacrifice’ of men with the
‘strongest convictions’ and ‘immaculate lives’, and ‘civil heroism … that
faces long martyrdom’.127 Yet by allying themselves to the Piedmontese
monarchy, to an essentially pragmatic, and in many ways conservative,
political tradition, and to Cavour, the most opportunistic of politicians, the
National Society not only relegated revolution to a secondary phase, they
also deprived it of its moral ‘vitality’. As Grew comments: ‘The concept of
the Risorgimento was being changed from a revolution that would remake
society to a merely political change brought about by the force of arms’.128
At the same time, neither Garibaldi nor anybody else ever fully
acknowledged this ideological shift. Instead, national unification became a
vague and generic imperative, postponing all other decisions, and this
catch-all aim obscured all kinds of other political divisions and unresolved
issues. The alliance between religion and pragmatism, however productive
in political terms, was never entirely clear in either its methods or
objectives. Hence, it is not to be wondered at that Garibaldi's involvement
with the National Society, and above all with Cavour and the Piedmontese
state, came to cause a whole series of equivocations, misunderstandings and
betrayals.
Even in practical terms, Garibaldi's attitude could cause difficulties. After
the retreat from Rome and the death of his wife in 1849, Garibaldi had been
very reluctant to commit himself to political action, and this reluctance
persisted following his return to Europe in 1854. In fact, despite his
previous reputation as a man of action, there was a curious passivity and
lack of real initiative in much of Garibaldi's political activity during the
1850s, and this had a longterm impact on perceptions of him in democratic
circles. His attitude was very clear in England in 1854, especially during a
visit to Newcastle which he made to buy coal for transport to Genoa.
Although the British radicals in Newcastle, led by Joseph Cowen, were
keen to hold a demonstration in his honour, Garibaldi refused, and they had
to be content with giving him ‘an address of welcome and sympathy’ and a
sword and telescope. In his introduction to the address, Cowen even
acknowledged Garibaldi's ‘personal dislike’ of publicity and added: ‘We
beg to assure you … that we are not here as vulgar lionizers’.129 Over the
next couple of years, Garibaldi spent a great deal of time travelling
privately as a merchant seaman and away from the political arena. The
death of his brother, Felice, in late 1855 partly resolved the financial
problems which had obliged him to work for a living, and in early 1856 he
used the money inherited from his brother to purchase half of the remote
island of Caprera off the north-west corner of Sardinia, where he would
then retreat for long periods each year. His life at Caprera removed him
from a great deal of the mundane but crucial political activity in nationalist
circles in Turin, Genoa and elsewhere in 1857 and 1858.130
While Garibaldi gradually came out of his self-imposed political
retirement through his involvement with the National Society, he did so on
a sporadic and fitful basis. Indeed, after his purchase of Caprera, he
developed a lifelong habit of suddenly appearing on the political scene and
then disappearing back to Caprera, sometimes disrupting other political
action and processes. In a strange way, therefore, he continued to live in
exile even after his return to Italy. Although the leaders of the National
Society in the 1850s were interested as much in the prestige of his name as
in his physical presence, Garibaldi's distance from the daily grind of
nationalist activities was still unhelpful. It did little to alleviate the ordinary
problems of organisation, assistance and finance which beset many parts of
the broader movement. It also constrained his own ability to manoeuvre
politically, reducing his knowledge of political developments as well as his
capacity to engage in, and influence, political debate or manage events.
Already in 1854, over the dispute with Roselli, Garibaldi's lack of political
expertise had damaged his personal reputation, and he failed fully to regain
the respect of many nationalists thereafter. In 1857, he was only the third
man to join the National Society, and although by so doing he saved the
whole project – since everyone else in Genoa had refused to sign up – he
seemed unaware of this vital fact. Unlike Manin, who managed to maintain
a certain distance from the Piedmontese government, Garibaldi gave his
open and unconditional support to the same. He subsequently allowed
himself to be controlled by La Farina in gaining access to Cavour and, as
we shall see in Chapter 6, by Cavour as well in the lead-up to the war of
1859.131
Garibaldi found personal happiness at Caprera. He began to build a
South-American-style bungalow and went hunting and fishing almost daily.
He started to reclaim and cultivate the land, and he planted trees and raised
livestock. His diaries from Caprera have survived and are proof of his
enthusiasm for, and commitment to, farming the land.132 Various political
friends, like Nino Bixio, came to stay and Garibaldi brought his children
there so they could grow up ‘strong and active like children of the fields’.
His letters speak of the curative powers of gardening, the mild climate and
the crystal-clear water.133 Until it was wrecked in a storm, he also had his
own sailing boat which allowed him to move around the Mediterranean as
he liked. We can speculate that, for Garibaldi, Caprera represented a kind of
ideal romantic socialist community, its inhabitants living in harmony with
nature and bound to each other by the ties of hard work and love. When the
anarchist Michael Bakunin visited Garibaldi in 1863, he pronounced the
little community working in the fields at Caprera to be the prototype of ‘a
democratic social republic’.134
Moreover, Caprera could be said to have served a quite notable political
purpose. At Caprera, Garibaldi could hide from his public, and his manifest
desire to do so is perhaps an indication of the growing personal burden of
his fame. The political importance of privacy, and of the beneficial effects
of the island for his health, should not be underestimated, given how serious
and incapacitating Garibaldi's attacks of rheumatism had already become.
In addition, the neartotal seclusion allowed him to pursue various intimate
relationships with a series of rich, educated women more or less
simultaneously and in complete privacy: first an engagement with the
wealthy British widow, Emma Roberts, then a close friendship with her
travelling companion, Jessie White, and a relationship with an Italian
countess, Maria della Torre (who wrote to him of her pride at being chosen
‘as your companion’). He subsequently had a long love affair with the
German baroness and writer, Esperanza (or ‘Speranza’) von Schwartz, to
whom he proposed marriage; although she rejected him, she continued to
write him passionate letters and to assure him of the ‘unbounded affection
which I feel for you and will always feel for you’. Throughout this time,
Garibaldi also enjoyed a sexual relationship with his housekeeper at
Caprera, Battistina Ravello, with whom he had a daughter, Anita, in the
spring of 1859.135 In terms of an overall strategy of political display,
Caprera was where Garibaldi could go ‘backstage’, where he could relax
and step out of character for a while.136
Arguably just as crucial from a political point of view, at Caprera
Garibaldi could discuss strategy and plan another ‘performance’ without
being observed by outsiders. By living in Caprera, Garibaldi could control
access both to himself personally and to his public appearances and the part
he had to play. As Garibaldi's island home, Caprera soon acquired a
mythical status of its own, and was to become a kind of second, more
privileged, stage in itself.
 CHAPTER 5

THE GARIBALDI FORMULA

Print culture and the performance of politics

It is ironic that the Mazzinian movement suffered its greatest setbacks and
schisms at a time when the propaganda methods which it had pioneered
were being vindicated. Perhaps especially, the changes of the 1850s showed
that Mazzini's faith in writing and the printed word as a vehicle for the
production and dissemination of nationalist ideas had not been misplaced.
In fact, the repression of the 1850s and the restrictions it imposed on press
and other cultural and social activity did not really manage to close the new
space for political action opened up by the 1848–9 revolutions, and one
reason for this was the ‘revolution’ in reading and publishing sweeping
Europe. It was also during the 1840s and 1850s that the market for literature
expanded at an extraordinary rate, and it becomes possible to speak of the
emergence of modern mass-media print. This phenomenon is worth
exploring in some detail as it explains much about public support for
national unification in Italy and about the popularity of Garibaldi in
particular.1
Modern mass-media print developed as the result of a transformation in
both supply and demand. Since the eighteenth century, the industrialisation
of the printing process had, by the 1840s, made ‘the printed word both
cheaper and more readily accessibile than it had ever been before’.2 Supply
was also helped by a general increase in mass communications, and
specifically by a wideranging improvement in transport and distribution
networks. Equally, the expansion of the market was the result of a rapid
extension of the reading public. During the 1840s and 1850s, first in Britain
and the USA, then in France, Germany, and – to a much lesser but still
significant extent – Italy, the market for the printed word grew very quickly.
This growth was due to a series of factors such as popular education, which
led to rising literary rates (for instance, in Britain around 60 per cent of
people could read in 1850, and more than 90 per cent in 1900) among
populations which were also increasing; the concentration of the same
populations in urban areas; the gradual prominence of an educated middle
class and, in many places, the reduction of censorship and/or of government
duties, which helped to reduce prices further on printed works and boost
circulation. The growth in a taste for, and pleasure in, reading is also
suggested by the increasing number of books available; for example, in
France there were 6,739 titles published in 1830; this had risen to 11,905 in
1860 and 14,195 in 1875.3 The number of libraries grew in this period,
especially in the USA and Britain (where some free libraries were
established after 1850), and so did bookshops, which spread throughout
provincial towns and became a feature of railway stations.4 Periodicals
could be sold on the street or by colportage, that is, by travelling salesmen
going from house to house selling subscriptions and making deliveries; by
the same means periodicals, almanacs, pamphlets and flyers (often satirical
or sensational canards) were also sold in rural areas at fairs or in public
spaces in country villages.5
For the first time in the 1850s, all kinds of newspapers and magazines
achieved a true mass circulation. For example, in Britain, the radical
Reynolds's Weekly Newspaper achieved a circulation of around 50,000 in
1855 (and reached 150,000 by 1865); the satirical magazine Punch had a
circulation of 40,000 in the same period. Among daily newspapers, The
Times' circulation figures were consistently between 50,000 and 60,000, but
reached between 90,000 and 108,000 on several occasions, while the
mainstream weekly The Illustrated London News had a circulation of
123,000 in the mid 1850s (up from 67,000 in 1850).6 In Germany, Ernst
Keil's illustrated family magazine, Die Gartenlaube, reached a circulation
of 60,000 within four years of its foundation in 1853, and 180,000 by 1863;
while in France, the anti-clerical, leftwing paper, Le Siècle, achieved a print
run of over 52,000, despite the difficult conditions and censorship
prevailing under the Second Empire.7 All these papers went on to publicise
the ‘Italian Question’ during the 1850s and to give a high profile to
Garibaldi in the years of unification. Circulation figures in Italy itself were,
as we shall see below, much lower but it is worth remembering that
throughout Europe the increase in the reading public was far greater than
these figures suggest. Magazines and newspapers appeared, along with
books, in lending libraries and reading rooms, and they were also to be
found in cafés and other public meeting places and, especially in rural
areas, they were often read aloud. So it is very likely that several people
may have read or otherwise been exposed to a single copy of a magazine or
paper.
An equally significant trend was the diversification in print production.
Of particular importance to understanding the broad appeal of Italian
nationalism for public opinion was the emergence of illustrated news,
popular periodicals, family and/or women's magazines alongside the
expansion of more traditional printed materials like books, newspapers,
pamphlets and learned periodicals. These new magazines offered news
items alongside articles of historical interest, essays on self-improvement,
general interest stories, serialised novels and advice on fashion, taste,
cooking and gardening. A real innovation came from the rapid engraving
techniques pioneered by The Illustrated London News, established in 1842,
which meant that henceforth not only were historical anecdotes or general
features accompanied by images but the latest news items could quickly be
illustrated as well. It was for this reason, as we saw in Chapter 3, that The
Illustrated London News sent an artist to Rome in 1849, and that his
pictures of the fighting and of the garibaldini were rapidly available and
used to supplement contemporary accounts of the siege. Since this format
was accessible to a very wide public, it quickly became popular and spread
rapidly. To give just a few examples: after The Illustrated London News in
1842, L'Illustration of Paris and Die illustrierte Zeitung of Leipzig
commenced publication in 1843, followed by A Illustraçao in Lisbon in
1845, Il Mondo Illustrato in Turin and The Lady's Newspaper and Pictorial
Times in London in 1847, Die Gartenlaube in Leipzig in 1853, and Frank
Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper and Harper's Weekly in New York in 1855
and 1857 respectively.8
At the same time, and for similar technological and cultural reasons,
there was a general expansion in the market for graphic culture. Books were
suddenly full of illustrations, and these could serve a serious scientific or
technical purpose; they could also, along with magazines, inform and
entertain those with enough time and money to read but not quite enough
education to do so easily. Illustrations also led to the diversification of
books, from large-format albums to de-luxe editions and travel guides;
small illustrated books – ‘keepsakes’ in Britain; Taschenbücher in
Germany; physiologies in France – were very collectable and made popular
gifts, especially for women. The vogue for satirical papers, pamphlets and
flyers, such a feature of mid-century political life in Europe, was due in no
small measure to the ease with which drawings and caricatures could be
reproduced. By the 1840s, short story boards or cartoon strips were also
being prepared and printed for mass consumption.9
Another manifestation of this same technological trend, of great
relevance in understanding the fame of Garibaldi, was the mass production
of cheap engravings of saints, historical figures and contemporary
personalities. Portraits of famous people became a common feature of
illustrated magazines and books, and printed portraits were also popular and
indeed became fashionable as individual items: produced and sold in large
numbers, and then altered and re-copied several times over to an apparently
insatiable public. The fashion for portraits of the famous was intensified by,
first, the invention of the daguerreotype (used as the basis of numerous
engravings) and then the commercialisation of photographic portraits as
cartes de visite in the late 1850s. The latter became ‘collectable’, and were
used especially by women in the exchange of gifts and as the basis of
sometimes elaborate, hand-painted albums.10 Some historians talk of the
creation by photography of a ‘cult of celebrity’ from mid-century onwards.
Actors, artists and political leaders came to use photographic portraits of
themselves as a means of self-promotion through the mass circulation of
their image: photography was able to create a sense of immediacy, realism
and familiarity.11 Paradoxically, this kind of fame reflected not just the
ubiquity of the printed image but also the emergence of the actor, artist and
political leader as exceptional or charismatic figures in their own right.
The ‘revolution’ in print culture meant that mass communication was
now possible in practical terms, via a range of print media which offered
different kinds of information in a variety of forms to cater to the diverse
tastes of the reading (and, in the case of visual prints, non-reading) public.
The writing of fiction was especially affected by this change. Although the
price of books seems to have lagged behind the transformation of
production, during the 1850s cheap editions and reprints of popular novels
began to be produced. Moreover, in a format which proved commercially
successful everywhere from the 1830s, much popular fiction was also
issued in ‘parts’ – as ‘story papers’ in the USA, feuilletons in France or
romanzi d'appendice in Italy – appearing in regular weekly or monthly
instalments to be purchased over the course of a year or two. This fiction
was sometimes abridged and/or serialised in the new magazines or popular
newspapers, and a great deal of the more successful fiction was translated
into foreign languages. Not only did part-issues and serialisation greatly
increase the availability and circulation of fiction, they also helped to
change the genre itself. Since the market was constructed around
maintaining a regular supply and demand for fiction, such fiction was based
on conventional narrative formulas which guaranteed sales: thus adventure
stories, historical novels, adventure romances, crime and sensation novels
became extremely successful serial forms in both Britain and France and,
from the 1850s, in Italy as well. Stories which proved commercially
successful were then republished in cheap editions, perhaps most famously
in the ‘dime novels’ which became so popular in the United States from the
1840s onwards.12
Hugely popular too were books on any number of historical subjects. The
memoirs and letters, biographies and autobiographies of famous men like
Nelson, Napoleon and, as we shall see, Garibaldi, proved strong sellers.
Perhaps most noteworthy was Napoleon, who took on a new – more liberal
and more romantic – image after his death, thanks to a series of published
memoirs. These contributed significantly not only to the creation of a
Napoleon myth but also to its constant refashioning during the course of the
nineteeenth century.13 More generally, biographical works of various kinds
took their place alongside, and overlapped with, an equally popular and
widespread religious and morality literature, as well as self-help manuals
and books on cooking, medicine, gardening and so on.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, in other words, publishing in
Britain had become what has been described as ‘a major, multi-million
pound industry that both benefited from and contributed to the more general
economic and technological developments of the Victorian period’.14 In
France, this was ‘the age of the publisher’, when book and newspaper
publishers built empires and came to be among the most powerful and
wealthy figures of middleclass society.15 Best-selling authors of serialised
novels – perhaps most obviously Scott, Dickens, Thackeray and Trollope in
Britain; Hugo, Dumas, Sue and Sand in France; D'Azeglio in Italy – could
also make money and they certainly became well known, often in more than
one language and country. For example, Sue's Les mystères de Paris and Le
juif errant each sold between 50,000 and 70,000 copies between 1841 and
1850, and sales of both were helped by translations into English, German
and Italian. In the four years between 1846 and 1850, global sales of
Dumas’ Le comte de Monte Cristo, Les trois mousquetaires and La reine
Margot together may have reached 90,000 copies.16
Although the audience for much of this literature was predominantly
middle class, a crucial sign of the industry's modernity was its increasing
differentiation according to the reading market, and the emergence of a
number of important new groups with their own dedicated publications
and/or publishers. Especially worthy of note in this period are the growing
number of women readers and the diversification of styles and genres
within the production of specifically women's fiction and women's
magazines. Equally significant in the long term was the gradual
development of fiction and non-fiction books, and school textbooks, for
children and young people.17 Already in 1840s Britain, the working-class
reading public had its own fiction ‘comprising “penny bloods”, plagiarisms
of mainstream fiction … and translations of racy continental fiction’, along
with a number of sensational Sunday newspapers, so much so that by the
1850s there was both intense competition within the popular press, and
official concern being expressed about its corrupting influence on the
reader.18 As noted, printed matter could and did reach the countryside via
travelling salesmen who relied on the sale of ephemeral material and visual
images. The latter in particular can be seen as, in Eugen Weber's words, ‘the
great bibles of the little people’, with a huge impact in isolated rural areas
where people had little other visual material to distract and entertain them.19
All these trends in publishing and reading should not be overestimated,
especially in the case of Italy. The equally revolutionary effect of the
printed word and image on eighteenth-century popular culture and politics
is widely recognised. It is also worth noting that many of the features
described here took full shape only after the 1870s, and that the spread of
the reading public was by no means uniform across any national territory.
There was also a huge practical gap between the ability to sign one's name
(the accepted test for literacy) and reading for pleasure. Nevertheless, the
emergence of a more popular literature is of real significance in
understanding the political changes of the mid-nineteenth century;
specifically, it can help to explain various reactions to the events which
occurred in Italy in 1859–60 and the public resonance of Garibaldi's
actions. First, it was in this kind of literature that the symbols and tropes of
romanticism became part of popular culture. Popular romanticism produced
‘patriotic songs, stormy melodramas, gothic romances, and national
histories’, and it was through this literary and dramatic medium that
Garibaldi reached a broader public.20 Second, as Benedict Anderson points
out and as Mazzini had already understood in the early 1830s, the rapid
expansion of ‘print-capitalism’ played a central role in the fashioning of
national identity, in that reading books, periodicals and printed images
could create a sense of community (however imaginary) by allowing people
who had no knowledge of each other, and who lived in different places, to
share the same experiences and have the same responses to stories and
events in which they had no part.21 As Mazzini also realised after arrival in
England in 1837, the technologies of mass communication could be used to
encourage and spread such feelings of empathy far beyond any ‘natural’
boundaries of national community. By the middle of the nineteenth century,
the effects of this nationalising and internationalising print-capitalism had
become more widespread. It also became evident that the polite and/or
liberal public sphere could no longer be sure of its monopoly of public
debate now that it faced increasing competition from, and overlap with,
radical and popular culture.22
The press – especially newspapers and pamphlets – had always played a
direct role in helping to create public opinion and in mobilising it behind
political issues but, with the change in scale and scope of press activity in
the mid-nineteenth century, relations between press and politics became
closer and more immediate. In many mid-nineteenth-century papers and
magazines, articles with a political content were interspersed with popular
stories or advice on household matters, and in this way politics became
more ubiquitous and part of daily life. At the same time, the language of
popular fiction overlapped with the language of politics. Perhaps most
notably, the narrative structures of fiction lent themselves to – and were
used explicitly in – the construction and sale of a political message. Marilyn
Butler has observed that the French Revolution was ‘told like a story’: it
was represented by its protagonists and adversaries, and received and
understood by the public, as a series of narrative plots through the medium
of reading. In this way, narrative made certain political futures ‘thinkable’,
and excluded or devalued others.23 As a result, the language and
representation of politics changed definitively.
The effect on politics was intensified by a parallel expansion in popular
entertainment. Especially in the major centres like London and Paris, the
number of new theatres and plays grew rapidly (an estimated 260 new plays
were put on every year in Paris during this period), and new popular genres
developed, such as melodrama, vaudeville and historical drama, in which
songs and dance were a prominent feature.24 Popular theatre altered the
nature of the ‘public’ and the performance of politics by making them both
more spectacular and more accessible. It created a new awareness of the
national past by reproducing it as a spectacle for popular consumption and
entertainment: theatre, in other words, acted as a site for the staging of
national (as opposed to classical) history and political ideology. In so doing,
however, it could also become a means of challenging political orthodoxies
and celebrating alternative values.25 The subversive potential of popular
theatre as political expression was demonstrated clearly by the explosion of
protest around the play Roma in 1849, as we saw in Chapter 3 (see pages
80–1), and by the growing popularity of ‘Napoleon plays’ in Paris during
the 1820s and '30s.26 Equally interesting was the development of new
methods of staging and acting, and especially important for our purposes
was the emergence of the author and, in particular, the actor (‘celebrities’
like Frédérick Lemaître and Jenny Lind) as artistic personalities with a
recognised public role and admired for their emotive and realistic
performances. The use of new optical technologies (the wax display, the
Panorama, the phantas-magoria), both inside theatres and as separate
shows, attracted large audiences and ‘spectacularised’ public
entertainement.27 All these new techniques altered the relationship between
performance and audience and came, in turn, to affect the structure and
presentation of relations in the public sphere more broadly.
In the course of the nineteenth century, the alliance between politics and
entertainment was democratised. Political radicals in Britain were at the
forefront of commercial publishing, and made the popular press, and
periodicals in particular, a portal through which ‘non-respectable’
Victorians could enter the public sphere. Radicals like Ernest Jones turned
to publishing, while writers like George Reynolds embraced mass culture
and linked serial fiction to radical politics; ‘[i]n the process … [they]
showed the tremendous potential of popular fiction for shaping and
transmitting a popular political consciousness’.28 New political leaders tried
to seize control of this process, actively offering themselves as the physical
embodiment of a collective identity, and they constructed and publicised
their own life stories as the narrativisation of popular demands.29 They
‘began to be judged as believable by whether or not they aroused the same
belief in their personalities which actors did when on stage’.30 Political
meetings and demonstrations came to resemble popular theatre, with songs,
banners, portraits and the use of elaborate illuminations and other forms of
visual entertainment.31
In Britain, historians have noted the emergence of leader cults, of
‘democratic leading men’ like Ernest Jones, Feargus O'Connor, John Bright
and William Gladstone, who sought to become ‘romantic heroes in a
political melodrama of their own scripting’.32 The process was reciprocal.
That is, in this period, the whole spectacle of politics – elections,
revolutions, mass demonstrations and political leaders – along with the
police, the law, crime and trials, was tapped by writers and dramatists as a
colourful and popular source for fiction and poetry.33 At the same time, the
wide spread of political information, and especially the use of photography
and biography to promote a cult of political celebrity, could induce feelings
of intimacy and indeed ‘voyeurism’ in the public in relation to its leaders.34
Thus publishing and theatre, and especially the new methods and genres of
mass-circulation literature and drama, helped create a new ‘community’ of
political leaders and their public. It is not surprising that, as part of this
transformation of political culture, political events like Italian unification
became occasions for mass entertainment. Conflict in the Italian peninsula
was re-narrativised as popular melodrama, and the main protagonists were
recast to resemble the heroes and villains of historical and adventure novels.
An Italian reading public?

Unfortunately for our purposes, much less is known about reading in Italy
during this period. One probable reason for this lacuna is that Italy lagged
behind northern Europe in terms of both literacy and public education, so
that at the time of unification rates of illiteracy were still high (around 75
per cent of the total population), and there was a considerable and
apparently increasing regional variation (53 per cent in Lombardy–Venetia
and more than 86 per cent in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in 1861; 22
per cent in Lombardy and 79 per cent in Calabria forty years later). Women,
moreover, had much higher rates of illiteracy than men (76 per cent
compared to 62 per cent in 1871, with over 90 per cent illiteracy in the rural
South).35 Although efforts had been made by the pre-unification states to
educate the population, with some positive results especially in Austrian
Italy, it was only in 1859 that the principle of general public education was
established in law, with the Piedmontese legge Casati, which became an
Italian law after unification. Even then there was political disagreement
about the value of mass education, there was a lack of trained teachers and
there were no clear provisions for making education compulsory.36
Still, perhaps the most obvious and serious obstacle of all to the creation
of an Italian reading public was that most people spoke a series of regional
dialects which could (for instance, in parts of southern Italy) be very
different from literary Italian. French or the local dialect were more widely
spoken than Italian in Piedmont (both Cavour and the Piedmontese king
spoke much better French than Italian). According to one estimate, there
were around 600,000 Italian speakers at the time of unification, that is,
about 2.5 per cent of the total population.37 Nevertheless, these figures
should be treated with some scepticism. Dialects spoken in central Italy, and
in Tuscany and parts of the Papal States in particular, were very similar to
literary Italian, so that the actual figure for ‘Italian’ speakers may be closer
to three million people, or between 10 and 12 per cent of the population. In
much of Italy, moreover, Italian was the official administrative language;
the 1861 edition of a Baedeker guide to northern Italy also advised tourists
that in order to profit from their stay, it was ‘essential to familiarise yourself
at least a bit with the Italian language’.38 Hence the presence of Italian as a
language, especially in urban areas, means that a larger percentage of
people would have understood Italian when spoken and read aloud to
them.39
It is evident that many of the conditions that produced mass-media print
elsewhere were relatively lacking in much of Italy.40 High internal and
external barriers to trade impeded the arrival and development of new print
technology, publishers were slow to embrace techniques of mass
production, modern transport networks (notably railways) developed only
bit by bit, and the traditionally rigid division – and thus lack of contact –
between city and countryside persisted right through the nineteenth century.
For all these reasons, reading and the formation of public opinion in Italy
was a more regionally based and elitist affair than in many parts of northern
Europe. These restrictions had a clear impact on the spread of a sense of
imagined community within the peninsula.
Nonetheless, the publishing industry in Italy was at the forefront of
political change. Despite the closed markets maintained during the
Restoration era, publishers (print-capitalists) challenged press censorship,
pressed for the dismantling of internal barriers to trade, and sought
government measures which would create a national market in Italy as a
means of increasing demand for their goods and boosting their profits. For
the same reasons, and even if their distribution networks were
circumscribed, publishers were also probably one of the first groups in Italy
to establish a more or less national network of contacts.41 Furthermore,
writers, journalists and editors – along with some artists and scientists –
effectively constituted a good part of the ‘public sphere’ in Restoration
Italy. From the eighteenth century onwards, it was they who had negotiated
new public spaces and established a degree of autonomy for themselves
from the centres of political power. After 1815, and despite the harsh
constraints of press censorship, it was through the associations and
publications of such autonomous intellectuals, scientists and artists that
ideas of liberalism and national identity were first circulated and debated.
Many of them (Vieusseux, Gioberti, Cattaneo) were publishers as well as
writers. Publishing companies in Florence and especially Milan produced a
large number of newspapers and periodicals;42 and in Milan there was also
a fairly substantial sector devoted to women's magazines.43 Radicals were
not idle either. As we know, Mazzini was a writer and journalist in Genoa
before he became involved in politics, and a constant part of his and his
followers' activity consisted in establishing publishing offices and printing
presses, and engaging with the practical business of publishing, editing,
selling and distributing newspapers, periodicals and books.
Thus, while there may have been no national, liberal public sphere in pre-
unification Italy comparable to that in parts of northern Europe, this
problem was recognised by nationalists and liberals and resolving it became
a political objective which united all sections of progressive opinion.44
Equally, there was a growing, if still restricted, middle-class market for
books in nineteenth-century Italy, and there were publishing ‘crazes’ in Italy
as there were elsewhere. For instance, some political books – Gioberti's
Primato, Balbo's Speranze – became instant sellers, with large numbers of
editions being produced in a short period of time. Banned books – Mameli's
poems, General Pepe's memoirs – could become cult classics; while other
works – the novels of Guerrazzi, D'Azeglio and Manzoni, the poetry of
Foscolo – were constant sellers throughout the whole period. Young
educated Italians, men and women, read just as voraciously as their
counterparts in northern Europe. As Alberto Banti has sought to show, much
of their preferred literature was of a ‘national–patriotic’ inspiration, and the
reading of it united this generation and created among them a sense of
imaginary community.45 Publishing and reading, in other words, helped to
create and define the Risorgimento.
If the creation of an Italian reading public was difficult before
unification, there was a vibrant associational culture. From the end of the
1830s gentlemen's clubs began to open their doors to a wider public and
were joined by a plethora of other associations, such as reading clubs,
scientific and statistical societies, agrarian associations, arts and craft
organisations and traditional coffee houses. Such clubs were concentrated in
the cities of northern and central Italy and they were still quite exclusive
institutions: unlike the salons of the eighteenth century, they did not admit
women; and often they were not interested in philanthropic activities and
did little to reach out to the poor and uneducated. Nevertheless, they
constituted a public sphere of sorts. They provided a space where male
members of the new elite and the traditional nobility could meet, socialise,
read and talk, and they helped to form the basis of a new political class.46
Equally, the importance and popularity of cultural activities which were
less restrictive than reading or joining clubs should not be underestimated.
Theatre, and in particular opera, played precisely the kind of ‘nationalising’
role otherwise largely lacking in Risorgimento Italy. The popularity of
opera and melodrama led to a wave of theatre construction in major cities
and small towns, and these theatres created a recognisable and uniform
public architecture across Italy. Theatres could become alternative civic
spaces where a diverse and otherwise segregated public could mingle, or at
least could come closer to doing so. The music itself was a powerful vehicle
for the popularisation of romantic themes such as oppression, betrayal,
struggle and redemption and – most obviously in the Verdi operas – these
could be linked to episodes or moments in Italian history. And, whatever the
composer's original intentions, during the 1840s and thereafter a section of
the liberal public seized on and publicised such music as an example of the
growing patriotic spirit in Italy. In this way, both the theatres themselves
and the performances in them helped construct an imagined Italian
community. Theatrical performances provided a space where people could
share responses to the same experience, and not just in one theatre but in
repeat performances in theatres throughout the Italian peninsula.47
A great deal also changed in Italy during, and as a result of, the 1848–9
revolutions, and subsequently during the 1850s. Partly through the
publication of newspapers, the revolutions had given a great boost to the
formation of national and nationalist public opinion in Italy. In the
aftermath, the nationalist publishing boom continued through the
proliferation of memoirs and the appearance of pamphlets and other
polemics in print. The centre of public opinion also shifted. As the only
Italian state not to reimpose press censorship, and with the only government
committed both to dismantling barriers to trade and to improving the
transport infrastructure, Piedmont – especially the cities of Turin and Genoa
– began to assume the cultural hegemony in Italy previously enjoyed by
Milan and Florence. The expansion of cultural life in Turin manifested itself
in an unprecedented proliferation of art, literature, clubs, music and theatre,
which gave the royal capital an openness and vitality it had hitherto largely
lacked. But this expansion was most obvious, and most clearly political, in
the publication of numerous newspapers and periodicals. In the fluid and
rapidly changing political circumstances of 1850s Piedmont, it was through
newspapers, as much as – if not more than – in parliament, that political
affiliations were created, altered and maintained. The offices and printing
works of daily papers and other periodical and ephemeral publications
provided political meeting places and a space to make political contacts,
and it was in the pages of these publications that political debate was
carried out, and public opinion was formed and kept informed. An added
stimulus, and a new national character, to the publishing industry in
Piedmont was provided by the influx of political exiles from elsewhere in
Italy, many of whom were writers, journalists and/or publishers seeking
contacts and gainful employment in their new home; and these people were
partly responsible for invigorating cultural life there during the 1850s.
No paper in Piedmont had a large circulation. The daily with the biggest
sales, La Gazzetta del Popolo, had a maximum of 10,000 subscribers in the
early to mid-1850s; La Concordia closed due to financial problems in early
1850 with only 1,500 subscribers; and the explicitly Mazzinian Italia e
Popolo had under 1,000 subscribers. But the sheer number of titles
produced suggests that the sector was dynamic in cultural terms. An
estimated 117 periodicals were published in Piedmont in 1853, of which
fifty-three were in Turin and eighteen in Genoa; in 1854, some thirteen
daily papers were published in Turin alone. These figures are all the more
worthy of note if compared to those in the other states in the Italian
peninsula: in 1857–8, Lombardy–Venetia produced sixty-eight periodicals,
Tuscany produced twenty-seven, Rome only sixteen and the whole of the
South around fifty.48 The expansion of the reading public and the
publishing industry in Piedmont provided a very vivid contrast to the
situation prevailing in the rest of Italy. The openness of Piedmont could be
compared to the closed conditions in the Papal States and the South, where
the Bourbon government's determination to control and isolate its subjects
from the effects of liberalism was equated to enclosing them within a ‘Great
Wall of Naples’, and press censorship was likened to a form of collective
imprisonment.49
 Italy in public opinion

Despite the elitist character of the reading public in Piedmont, the press
affirmed and strengthened Piedmontese leadership in the nationalist
struggle. Just as nationalists looked increasingly to the Piedmontese
government and army for practical help in the 1850s, so nationalist
discourse permeated political debate by identifying itself with the moderate
liberal or Piedmontese leadership. Nationalists sought ever greater contact
with a broader reading public and in the 1850s the political impact of Italian
nationalism grew ever greater, thanks largely to a series of carefully
orchestrated press campaigns in Piedmont and elsewhere. Yet, although the
public sphere became more nationalist, nationalism itself became more
moderate. The political meaning of nationalism was transformed, even as its
metaphors, symbols and rituals remained apparently the same; at least part
of the discourse became less revolutionary, more respectable and more
associated with material progress and the Piedmontese monarchy. Here the
Italian experience provides a striking contrast to that of Britain (and the
USA), where the broadening of the public sphere led to diversification and
radicalisation.
At the centre of this nationalist transformation were the press campaigns
organised by the National Society, which was itself born out of writing,
publishing and other associational activities. Its two leaders, Daniele Manin
and Giorgio Pallavicino, had been brought together by press activity aimed
at raising the profile of the nationalist question. Campaigns included the
‘one hundred cannons’ subscription to raise money for the fortifications of
Alessandria (on the Lombard–Piedmont border); an attack on the presence
of Swiss mercenaries in Naples; and a protest against anti-Italian
stereotypes in George Sand's La Daniella.50 During 1856, from his base in
Paris, Manin developed contacts with some thirty Italian newspapers and
saw to it that articles with a nationalist slant or which discussed national
issues were published; these were then cross-published and/or commented
on in other papers. With Pallavicino, and especially with Pallavicino's
money, he began to publish flyers and pamphlets containing their letters and
essays in print runs of between 300 and 3,000 copies. From Turin, these
publications were posted to friends, sold in shops or simply left at café
tables, clubs and theatres; they found their way in large numbers to Tuscany
and the Papal States, and they were also circulated in Lombardy–Venetia,
among exiles in Switzerland, Belgium and England; they even reached
readers in the USA, Algiers and Malta. In 1857, Pallavicino and Manin
acquired direct control of a newspaper – Giuseppe La Farina's Il Piccolo
Corriere d'Italia – whose news items became dedicated entirely to
promoting the issue of national unification and to persuading nationalists
outside Piedmont of the necessity of endorsing Piedmontese leadership.51
It was this coordination of press activity and journalistic production
which led directly to the formation of the National Society in August 1857.
Thereafter, Il Piccolo Corriere assumed a vital role as the crux of the party's
operations; as Grew puts it, ‘the life of the National Society was centred in
the written word’.52 The Society's secretary Guiseppe La Farina published
instructions for the formation of local committees in the paper, as well as
more sensational articles attacking the Austrians and papal misrule. He also
gave considerable space to Orsini's anti-Mazzinian letters and statements. A
significant portion of each issue was devoted to stories from outside
Piedmont which emphasised how bad life was in the rest of Italy.
Complaints about the repression in Modena, rumours of the wealth of
Cardinal Antonelli in Rome, revelations of the abuse of Jewish children by
clerics (notably the notorious Mortara affair)53 and, most common of all,
details of the atrocities in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies were all regular
items in Il Piccolo Corriere and became part of the accepted narrative of
moderate Italian nationalism. The Society also continued to publish
pamphlets, which stressed more than ever the benefits of unification for
Italy and the need for every Italian to be a nationalist.
Although the evidence is relatively scarce, the Society's message seems
to have been widely advertised. Il Piccolo Corriere reached a circulation of
4,000 and about 12,000 copies of La Farina's Credo Politico were
circulated; the latter was incorporated into student songs in Pavia. More
broadly, the Society's activities – the circulation of pamphlets, posters and
printed images; the promotion and reporting of patriotic slogans and public
demonstrations – seem to have contributed significantly to the wave of
nationalist (and anti-Austrian) enthusiasm which swept the towns and cities
of the Italian peninsula in early 1859. Through its publishing activities, in
other words, the National Society played a crucial part in creating and
maintaining a common nationalist outlook among its members and
adherents, and in presenting ‘a simple picture of Italy on the threshold of
unity, preparing to fight beside Piedmont’.54 It was to have a central
organisational and propaganda role in the events of 1859–60.
The general acceptance of the National Society's assumption that Italy
was a nation, which had simply lost her independence and ‘genius’ to
internal divisions and foreign oppression, shows how far nationalist ideas –
dismissed as foolish a decade earlier – had achieved a wide circulation and
penetrated political debate, even as Mazzinianism declined as a political
movement. Just as striking was the status of this nationalist vision among
the reading public outside Italy. As we saw in the previous chapter, there
had been great, if not unanimous, enthusiasm for the exiles of 1848–9 in the
United States, and American enthusiasm was transformed into broad
support for nationalist demands in Italy during the 1850s.55 In France too,
Italian questions were given greater prominence in the press. Edgar Quinet's
Les Révolutions d'Italie, based on lectures given in the Collège de France,
was published in three volumes between 1848 and 1852. In Paris, Manin
also made great efforts to promote and control discussion of the Italian
question in France. He saw the proofs of all the articles on Italy which
appeared in the progressive paper, La Presse, while the equally progressive
Le Siècle published his essays on Italy. Even after Manin's death in 1857,
his influence continued. There was a well-supported press campaign in
France for a monument to him, and leading French liberals began to use
praise of Manin as a means of expressing public sympathy for Italy and of
seeking contact with the National Society.56
Yet it was in Britain, with its large radical reading public, that Italian
nationalism seems to have had most resonance and had the clearest impact
on political debate. As in France and the USA, sympathy for Italy in Britain
was generated partly by the writings of artists, poets and academics who
travelled to Italy and studied its past. Some of these – Arthur Clough,
Elizabeth Barrett Browning – had witnessed the 1848–9 revolutions at first
hand and published poems about the events. In her famous poem, ‘Casa
Guidi windows’, Barrett Browning praised Italian efforts at ‘redemption’;
Clough, although more openly cynical, still testified to the fascination of
Garibaldi and his followers.57 In the early 1850s, the negative campaign
against Bourbon ‘misrule’ was given a tremendous political boost by the
then High Tory, William Ewart Gladstone, who after a visit to Italy
published a famous denunciation of conditions in Neapolitan prisons and of
the Neapolitan state as ‘the negation of God erected into a system of
government’ (the ‘Two letters to the Earl of Aberdeen’).58 He also helped
publish and partly translated Luigi Carlo Farini's history of Rome in the
nineteenth century.59
Still the single most important reason for the high profile of the Italian
question in Britain was the presence of Mazzini. Following his return to
London as a hero after the events of Rome in 1849, Mazzini enjoyed even
greater fame and influence in Britain than before. His personality ‘was
appropriated by the supporters of radical politics and likened to that of
national radical heroes like Milton or Cromwell’.60 His philosophy of
‘moral regeneration’ helped to revive British radicalism in the aftermath of
the Chartist defeats; he helped William Linton temporarily revive the
republican movement; and his activity in radical circles contributed to the
development of a broad liberal consensus which provided a basis for
Gladstonian liberalism throughout the 1860s and after.61 Mazzini also used
his position to mobilise and organise public opinion in favour of Italy. In
1851, he established the Society of the Friends of Italy, which spanned a
wide section of the progressive middle class and included prominent liberal
reformers, religious Dissenters and leading figures of Victorian literary
bohemia. Although the Friends of Italy disbanded in 1853, during the
fallout from the Milan insurrection, prominent Mazzinians in England –
James Stansfeld, William Ashurst, Joseph Cowen – founded a new
organisation, the Emancipation of Italy Fund Committee, aimed at the
working class, and in 1856 members of the same group set up the Garibaldi
Fund Committee. All of these committees had offices and affiliations in
provincial centres as well as in London.62 The committees raised significant
amounts of money, indicating a considerable level of support. Initial
subscriptions to the Friends of Italy were often as high as £5 and the
Friends eventually contributed over £12,800 to the Italian cause.63
So Mazzini's declining fortunes in Italy were not reflected in the British
public's perception of him. In his first address to the Friends of Italy,
Mazzini urged them to win support for Italian freedom through letters,
articles in the press, pamphlets and petitions. Mazzini himself continued to
write copiously in the new British radical papers of the 1850s. In this
activity, he was assisted by a talented group of collaborators and fellow
exiles whose publications and lecture tours contributed greatly to
publicising the Italian question, and especially the issue of papal and
Austrian opression. As well as touring North America, Father Alessandro
Gavazzi went on a tour of the British Isles to give a series of anti-Catholic
public lectures or ‘orations’ in the early 1850s which were well attended,
while the ex-Roman triumvir Aurelio Saffi in an article in The Westminster
Review argued that Italy should no longer be considered a Catholic country.
Saffi taught Italian literature at Oxford from 1853, and he went on to give
public lectures on Dante and Machiavelli in Manchester, and on the
Risorgimento in conferences in London, Edinburgh and Glasgow. It was
reported that 1,600 people attended his speech in Glasgow. In the same
years Garibaldi's friend Jessie White, who had recently returned from Italy
enthused by Mazzinian ideals, produced a series of articles on Italy for the
Daily News said to have been ghostwritten by Mazzini, and she too went on
a lecture tour of the British provinces. Even those less sympathetic to
Mazzini managed to stir up public enthusiasm over the sufferings of Italy.
Felice Orsini's lecture tour, which took place shortly after he escaped from
an Austrian prison in Mantua, was a sellout. His racy memoirs, published as
The Austrian Dungeons of Italy in 1856, sold 35,000 copies, and a second
edition was published in 1859.64
We must not read too much into British enthusiasm for Italian causes. In
part, sympathy for Italy in Britain, as well as in France and the USA,
masked a distinct sense of cultural and political condescension towards
what was seen as a oncegreat nation, seemingly compromised by
misgovernment and unable to liberate itself without assistance. Thus, for
many Americans in Rome, papal corruption was fascinating precisely
because it seemed so decadent and thus tended to confirm the superiority of
their own political system.65 Having celebrated in print the 1848
revolutions in Florence, Elizabeth Barrett Browning confessed in private to
‘a gentle and affectionate approach to contempt’ at the fickleness of Italians:
‘Poor Rome! Poor Italy! Here there are men only fit for the Goldoni theatre,
the coffee houses and the sunny side of the Arno …’66 Even the historian
Edgar Quinet was primarily interested in the 1848–9 revolutions in Italy as
an example for France of the violence and factionalism which could be
caused by Catholic culture and ideals.67
Likewise, for British political activists the Italian cause was essentially a
‘safe’ and workable way for middle and workingclass liberals to assert their
own identities and beliefs.68 For the vocal and popular anti-Catholic lobby
in Victorian England, incensed by the Pope's appointment of a Catholic
hierarchy in England in 1851, the radical anti-Catholicism of many Italian
exiles in England, with their stories of the Inquisition and papal corruption,
made them extremely convenient allies.69 Gladstone's interest in Italy was
rooted in his study of Dante, and he found in the issue of Italian reform a
means of smoothing his transition from High Tory to Liberal in British
politics. His ‘Two letters to the Earl of Aberdeen’ were in fact ‘eminently
conservative documents’, intended not to support Mazzini (whom
Gladstone abhorred) but as a warning that repression was doing the work of
Mazzini, by, in his words, ‘desolating entire classes upon which the life and
growth of the nation depend, undermining the foundation of all civil rule
and preparing the way for violent revolution …’. Gladstone's ‘Letters’ were
thus not only a plea for reform in Italy, they were also an argument against
Mazzini and revolution.70
Finally, it is worth remembering that not everyone supported the Italian
nationalist cause, either in Britain or elsewhere. Mazzini is said to have
‘ruffled the sensibilities of many sympathisers’ with his attacks on socialism
in Britain. Marx and Engels, as is well known, were especially disparaging
about ‘the rotten Italians’ and their ‘revolution’, and sought to combat
Mazzini's influence in the press with a series of anonymous attacks in the
New York Daily Tribune.71 But during the 1850s it was the right, and
especially the Catholic Church, which did most to contest support for
Italian nationalism. In Rome, the Catholic hierarchy began to mobilise its
own anti-nationalist propaganda machine with the foundation of a paper, La
Civiltà Cattolica. La Civiltà Cattolica had been established by the papal
authorities in Naples in 1850, and after it was moved to Rome it became a
crucial – and all too modern – weapon in the struggle against nationalism in
Italy. It had a much greater circulation than any of its nationalist
counterparts, with 7,000 subscriptions in the year of its launch (1850),
reaching 11,000 in 1853 (with a print run of 13,000 copies). It closely
followed and commented on political events in the peninsula, and it
attacked without distinction Cavour, the National Society and Mazzini. It
also published to great popular success the serialised novels of one of its
founders, the Jesuit priest Antonio Bresciani. Bresciani's writings sought to
combine the appeal of the historical novel with the duties of strict religious
morality: or to entertain readers while teaching them ‘the dogmas and moral
truths of our holy Religion’. His villains were often revolutionaries and
many of the novels had a specifically antinationalist theme.72
The Catholic press had an international reach, and the Church itself had a
call on people's loyalties which could cut across and cancel out the appeal
of Italian nationalism and other liberal causes. Under Napoleon III in
France, the power of Catholicism was unquestionable, and clerical papers
like L'Univers, L'Union and Le Correspondant enjoyed a large
circulation.73 Even in Britain, where the situation was completely different,
support for Italian nationalism and for its attacks on the Catholic religion
was publicly contested by Catholics. The new archbishop of Westminster,
Cardinal Wiseman (whose appointment had caused such a furore of anti-
Catholic feeling in Britain), published a counterattack on Gavazzi,74 and he
went on to make a triumphant tour of Ireland in 1858 to celebrate and
honour the man he called the real victim in Italy – the besieged Pope in
Rome. In Ireland itself, Paul Cullen, archbishop of Dublin throughout this
whole period (1852 to 1878), was a more than able opponent of Mazzini.
He had been a student in Rome in the 1830s and a supporter of the
archreactionary, Pope Gregory XVI, and he had stayed on in Rome at the
Irish College and so witnessed all the events and fighting during the 1849
revolution. From the 1850s onwards, Cullen did everything in his power to
fight what he saw as the alliance between Protestantism, Freemasonry,
revolution in Ireland (led by ‘Orange Catholics’) and Italian nationalism.75
An Irish MP, John Francis Maguire, published a defence of the Pope's
temporal power – Rome, its rulers and its insitutions – to great acclaim in
1856, and this volume was reissued in 1859. Indeed, propapal enthusiasm
can be said to have fuelled Irish nationalism in the 1850s; it also led to
feuds and nearviolence in Clerkenwell in 1853 between Italian refugees
who insulted local Irish priests and Irish Catholics determined to defend
their ‘spiritual father’.76 In the USA too, where the Catholic hierarchy was
dominated by the Irish, Italian nationalists did not have everything their
own way and Catholics were vocal in their defence of the Pope.77 Finally,
from the 1848–9 revolutions onwards, the Catholic press in the southern
German – and traditionally more liberal – states painted an apocalyptic
picture of the threat of Mazzini and revolution, and presented the political
struggles in Italy as the decisive battle between the ‘kingdom of God’ and
the ‘kingdom of darkness’.78
Nevertheless, the fact that so many men and women were, by the late
1850s, ‘passionately concerned with the fate of the [Italian] peninsula’,79
and that the issue of Italian independence had come to eclipse most other
great liberal causes in the international press at this time, is extremely
significant. In this respect, the battle with the Catholic Church was
deliberately sought by the nationalists: it served to sharpen the rhetorical
defences of the nationalists and ensured them wide publicity. Clerical
counterattacks provided them with an occasion to relaunch and restate their
core ideas.80 As the events of 1859–60 were to make abundantly clear, the
pressure of international liberal public opinion also helped to give Italian
nationalists – including Cavour and the moderates – an ultimately
unassailable head start over the Austrians and their allies in the Italian
peninsula.
Yet even before these dramatic conflicts took place, the dialogue between
Italian exiles, on the one hand, and their readership and audiences, on the
other, helped to define the coming struggle and determined perceptions of
it. First, the technological and cultural developments of the 1850s opened
up new possibilities for Italian nationalists. In this decade, both radical
propagandists and the more moderate National Society were able to reach
beyond the secret groups of nationalist conspirators and the elite circles of
their enthusiasts and connect with a much broader – if educated and still
largely middleclass – international reading public. Second, the public
debates among nationalists, their language and slogans, even the
disagreements between them and the attacks upon them, which were carried
out in meetings, lectures, pamphlets, newspapers and books throughout this
period, served to promote the new political idea of Italy. The press and
public debate publicised the Piedmontese ‘solution’ and helped give
nationalists the appearance (if not the reality) of unity and unanimity. Most
of all, the press helped to distil the message of Italian nationalism into a
simple but potent narrative, which presented the liberal public with an
ostensibly unquestionable moral choice: on the one side, Neapolitan
prisons, papal corruption and Austrian repression and, on the other, political
freedom, national independence, and the heroism of a few selfless and
exceptional individuals.
Stories of love, liberty and adventure

The rapid extension of the reading public in Europe, the consequent

broadening of the public sphere and the changes in the language of political
debate, as well as the increasing prominence within this debate of the
problem of Italy's future, help us to understand the presence and impact of
Garibaldi in mid-nineteenth-century European politics. Seen from the
perspective of this new political culture, rather than from the more
traditional and narrow standpoint of high politics, Garibaldi's extended exile
from politics and his political setbacks seem arguably less significant than
the continuing spread of public interest in him, expressed through the
medium of publishing and reading.
As we know, both the radical and the conservative press had made much
of Garibaldi's retreat from Rome. Radical British and American journalists
followed his progress from Europe to North America, and only finally lost
interest in him when he disappeared into the Pacific. In America Dwight
had recast Garibaldi as the ‘retiring’ and ‘noblehearted’ commander and
epitome of Protestant virtue, involved in a ceaseless struggle against what
Dwight calls ‘chronicles’ of papal ‘despotism’.81 In France, during the same
period, the celebrated novelist Alexandre Dumas fashioned Garibaldi as the
passionate, blueeyed defender of Montevideo – physically beautiful,
gracious in his movements, softly spoken – as part of his creation and
celebration of the siege of Montevideo as ‘a new Troy’.82 These foreign
writers were clearly well aware of the pliability and resonance of
Garibaldi's public image. In the aftermath of the revolution, a series of
pamphlets were published in Piedmont which commemorated Garibaldi's
role in the 1848–9 revolutions, and especially the story of the retreat from
Rome.83 Throughout the 1850s, he remained before the Italian public by
means of a series of printed images, as a protagonist in political memoirs, as
the subject of a biography, and via appearances in adventure romances.
These publications produced a narrative formula apparently so compelling
that it structured Garibaldi's political appeal in 1859–60 and thereafter.
In the early 1850s, some of the protagonists in the Roman Republic and
in its defence – the political activists Carlo Pisacane, Augusto Vecchi and
Luigi Farini; the Lombard volunteer Emilio Dandolo and the Swiss
volunteer Gustav von Hofstetter – published their histories and memoirs of
recent events. Dandolo and von Hofstetter had fought together in the
defence of Rome in Luciano Manara's Lombard legion. Their memoirs
aimed and helped to create a romantic memory of the Roman Republic as
one of the most tragic and glorious episodes in the whole Risorgimento; in
their accounts, young men – ‘united by a common sentiment, filled with
fervour and enthusiasm’ – die stoically as martyrs on the walls of the
‘eternal city’, and their deaths reunite the Italian family and establish Italy's
destiny as a warrior nation.84 Interestingly, none of these writers was
entirely on Garibaldi's side, and Pisacane in particular was critical of
Garibaldi's military skills. Yet they were unanimous in praising his bravery
in battle and all acknowledged his personal charisma. Dandolo and von
Hofstetter wrote at length about Garibaldi's captivating physical presence
and radical behaviour, stressing his energy, virility and exotic clothes and
gestures (see pages 85–7). Thus, they helped to create and publicise a myth
of Garibaldi and to link this myth to an heroic ideal of italianità, even while
Garibaldi himself had withdrawn from active politics.
It was a sign of the changing times that these writers were able to take
advantage of the lack of press censorship and publish their work in
Piedmont, and that their work was published abroad as well. Dandolo,
Farini and Vecchi were translated into English from Italian; both Dandolo
and Vecchi's accounts were published in more than one Italian edition; and
von Hoffstetter's was translated from German into Italian. There is
evidence, moreover, that these works were widely read and were influential.
Dandolo, along with his brother Enrico and other volunteers who died in the
defence of Rome, became heroes in their own right as a result of the
memoir (when Dandolo died in 1859 he was given a huge funeral in Milan,
which provided the occasion for anti-Austrian demonstrations). Von
Hofstetter was with Garibaldi on the retreat from Rome, and his memoir
remains an important source on that episode. At the time, it helped inspire at
least one enthusiast, Garibaldi's future lover and biographer Esperanza von
Schwartz, to seek out Garibaldi at his home in Caprera.85
Far closer to Garibaldi than the Lombard volunteers was the journalist
Giovanni Battista Cuneo, a friend and promoter since his South American
days. In 1850, Cuneo published the first real biography of Garibaldi. It was
only a sixtytwopage, cheaply produced book, but it had Garibaldi's
cooperation and full approval.86 Like the memoirs of Dandolo et al., the
biography was to some extent political intervention: part of the process of
creating, promoting and controlling the memory of 1848–9. Yet Cuneo went
a step further and used narrative elements borrowed directly from fiction to
structure the biography, telling the story of Garibaldi's life as a series of
decisively heroic episodes from his early childhood in Nice until his
presentday exile. He adopted a threestage sequential narrative (what
Northrop Frye has called ‘a sequential and processional form’):87 the series
of minor adventures as a young man (when Garibaldi's heroism was already
evident since he saved no fewer than three men from drowning); the
perilous and characterforming journeys across South America; and the
major ‘quest’ – the epic battle for Rome where the hero fights the enemy,
finds his destiny and redeems Italian pride against French accusations of
cowardice. In effect, Cuneo employs a standardised literary formula (the
adventure romance), developed to entertain the reader and encourage
his/her identification with the story's protagonist, and applies it to the
construction of a biography as ‘exemplary life’.88
Cuneo's biography is a striking example of the fusion of politics with
popular fiction. He ties a political (radical, nationalist) message to a popular
narrative formula, he identifies Garibaldi's personal qualities with an ideal
of public virtue, and he constructs his biography so that the life imagined
enhances the appeal of the real. Garibaldi himself is part bold political
leader, part fascinating romantic hero. He is energetic, brave and
adventurous, and his whole life is ‘a continual and not unfruitful sacrifice
for liberty and the fatherland’.89 As a man, he is goodlooking and attractive
(on the book's original cover he gazes seductively at the reader in an almost
languid pose in front of Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome):
 Of medium height, wide in the chest and shoulders, sturdy and relaxed at the same time, he
gives you an idea of strength and agility. At first glance, his face seems severe; and the tawny,
uncut beard, the long blond hair, the large forehead which descends from it and which forms
with his nose a straight line which falls in perpendicular, and his shrewd and piercing look all
give him an imposing aspect; but looking at him more closely, a sweet harmony of line and
form jumps out at you and confirms your expectations, and a feeling of trust and sympathy
spontaneously rises up within your heart, and mixes with the respect which he had previously
inspired in you.

He has a ‘chivalrous heart’ which is open to ‘all displays of beauty’; in

particular, ‘music and poetry have a magic authority over him’. But he is
also strong and steadfast: ‘constancy in the face of adversity, a courage
which grows in relation to obstacles and dangers, a steadiness of purpose, a
flash of the eye which rarely fails to strike in the most dire emergencies,
and a serenity in every moment of life’ are also features of his personality.90
Although it was not until 1859 that publications about Garibaldi achieved
a wide circulation, Cuneo's biography created the political–literary formula
which structured all future approaches to Garibaldi. Elements of this
formula had already arrived in England by the early 1850s, as the short
biography of him published in the radical Northern Tribune in 1854
shows.91 The specific information on his early life – unknown in Britain
before this time – was lifted from Cuneo's biography (and perhaps from
Dwight's Roman Republic), with various elements added from British
newspapers and periodicals, while others are embellishments invented by
The Northern Tribune. Crucially, the biography is structured like an
adventure story, with many of the familiar episodes included. Thus, we are
told that Garibaldi was born in Nice in 180892 of ‘good family’ and that ‘his
love of adventure led him to the sea’. The paper follows Cuneo in
highlighting Garibaldi's dramatic escape after the discovery of the 1833
conspiracy; it has him crossing the River Var in February, and also asserts
that this heroic act provides the inspiration for a similar incident in
Giovanni Ruffini's novel, Lorenzo Benoni, published in Britain the previous
year.93 Like Cuneo, the paper points to Garibaldi's nickname of ‘lion’ – a
medieval symbol of resurrection and a modern euphemism for celebrity –
by reproducing the figure of a lion in the accompanying illustration of
Garibaldi, and by quoting from Joseph Cowen's address of welcome that his
supporters are ‘not vulgar lionizers’.94 The article is proof both of
Garibaldi's personal capacity to inspire flights of literary imagination, and
of the circulation of standardised biographical elements relating to him.
One of the most striking images of Garibaldi during this time is not taken
from a photograph: it is an idealised representation of him, printed in Turin,
as Christ Pantocrator (probably intended for clandestine circulation in the
rest of Italy; see figure 8 overleaf).95 This image provides us with a clue to
one of the great battles of the Risorgimento after 1848–9, which was the
struggle between the nationalists and the Catholic Church. Among the first,
and in some ways most revealing, of all contributions to the cult of
Garibaldi was produced by the stridently antinationalist Jesuit priest, Padre
Antonio Bresciani. His ‘historical novel’, Lionello, first published in the
pages of La Civiltà Cattolica in 1852, was partly set in Rome in the days of
the Republic of 1849. During the revolutionary events, the eponymous hero
takes up with Garibaldi, to the surprise of his friends, who knew Garibaldi
as ‘a highwayman on land and a pirate on the seas, who lays waste to every
place he lands at, throwing out fire and flame under his feet, and making
blood gush from everything he touches with a deadly hand’. But, in a
parody of Cuneo's Biografia, Lionello defends Garibaldi:
 8 Garibaldi as Christ Pantocrator, printed in Piedmont in the 1850s and
circulated clandestinely elsewhere.

he is of medium stature and with a sturdy and compressed figure but … as quick as a lion,
which combines force with agility, solidity with slenderness, the ardent eye with the constant
gaze, a proud and merciful heart; the lion can most easily be said to resemble him, with his
great blond mane which descends to the shoulders, the tawny beard, the high forehead, and the
grave and serious look at first glance, but he who looks at him well sees a generous, open and
serene face, which inspires reverence, trust and sympathy in you.

Garibaldi, according to Lionello, has a soul which is:

 noble, frank, sincere, lofty and entirely harmonious, on which music has a sweet authority, and
poetry carries him off on flights which are as sublime as they are strong … with his sword he
subdued the barbarian, with his pen he sung the triumphs and bravery of Greece, with his mind
he made philosophy, and with his heart he burns for the love of freedom.96

This satire of Cuneo's biography is continued in the pages that follow.

Every episode of Garibaldi's life – his love of Rome, his heroism in South
America, his wife Anita – is recounted by Bresciani in a deliberately
exaggerated and poor imitation of Cuneo's style and episodic structure. In
this way, the real character of the ‘hero’ Garibaldi – the destroyer of Rome,
the insidious conspirator, the perfidious husband – is clearly revealed.
What makes Bresciani's work so interesting for us is his attempt to fuse
the traditional reactionary attack on Garibaldi as a bloodthirsty and
destructive bandit97 with a parody of the nationalist ‘style’ pioneered by
Cuneo and others. That Bresciani should have attempted to do so at all is a
sign of the wider influence and circulation of this style. The literary impact
of Italian nationalism, and of Garibaldi in particular, is also suggested by
his appearance in a number of British novels of the period, part of a minor
‘pulp’ genre which swapped the Italian castles of Gothic romances for the
events and places of Risorgimento Italy.98 The first of these, Angelo, was
published in 1854 and is the story of a love affair between an ex-Jesuit
priest, Angelo Maturin, and the heroine, Leoline, set against the backdrop of
the 1848–9 revolutions in Rome.99Amid a whole host of exotic and violent
characters we find the defender of Rome, ‘the notorious Gariboni’, the head
of a band of mercenaries: ‘a character singularly adapted for the execution
of the bloody work he had undertaken’ and with ‘qualities which strongly
excited the enthusiasm of his followers’.
‘Gariboni’ is not just cruel, he is also selfpossessed: ‘Insensible to the
suggestions either of pity or remorse, he could talk calmly, or even jocosely
with his victim, and motion at the same instant to his attendants to prepare
for his immediate destruction’; but he is a man of principle and honour, if
without feeling or mercy. He is, above all, a sexually attractive outsider; he
is heavily armed and flamboyantly dressed in a green blouse with red
slashed sleeves, red trousers and ‘an embroidered pelisse’ over his
shoulders. His transgressive appearance causes particular excitement among
Rome's nuns:
 many a female glance, long turned from carnal vanities, rested with satisfaction on his clear
blue eye, high forehead, small mouth, luxuriant hair falling in rich curls about his neck, and
graceful moustache; and many a heart that ought to have been lost in dreams of Divine love
and universal charity, hushed its momentary fears at the appearance of so noble and imposing
an invader.100

Two years later, Garibaldi appeared in another novel set in Rome during
the revolutions, this time a more lighthearted adventure following the
journey of an English Catholic family in Italy. In the novel, Modern Society
in Rome, whose British author was a proPiedmontese, liberal Catholic,
Garibaldi appears once more as an exotic ‘banditto’ character, a ‘dreaded
condottiere’, part of ‘as wild looking a party … as ever went a gypsying on
a summer morning’. His dress is described as ‘picturesque’, and includes:
‘Large pointed boots, falling loose round the calves of his legs’, short
breeches, a green silk scarf around his waist, a scarlet tunic, a large cloak
‘with a great capote like that of the Capuchin monks’, a broad South
American hat and the inevitable pistols and daggers stuck into his belt. Yet
despite this alarming appearance, his physical presence is extremely
seductive. He is impressive, athletic (‘a racehorse or a lion’), beautiful,
proud, frank and generous, and his voice is so deep and measured that all
‘felt kindly confidence towards him at once’.101 Anita features in the
narrative too, pretty and sweet but ‘no less striking than … the wild leader
himself’, as do the thousand athletic men brought by Garibaldi to Rome,
‘[t]all, darkvisaged, strong men, all nerve and muscle, with hollow eyes and
long curling clotted hair, that fell down on their shoulders’, who frightened
the Romans with their South American dress and manners.102
In the novel's climax, the fortunes of the English family become
intertwined with those of Garibaldi and Anita, and thus with Italy more
generally. This occurs most notably in an absurd plot twist during the retreat
from Rome. As Anita lies dying in Garibaldi's arms, which in the novel
occurs on ‘perhaps the most beautiful of Italian roads’ near Ravenna, the
two surviving English protagonists – Horace Enderby and Mary Aglethorpe
– pass by in a carriage on their way to the Tyrol:

‘Good heavens, Mary!’ exclaimed Horace Enderby … ‘good heavens, my beloved, it is

Garibaldi and Anita!’ … ‘Oh, for a drop of wine!’ exclaimed Garibaldi, wildly. Horace sprang
 back to the carriage and brought forth a flask. ‘It is all we have. It is cold tea: but it may
refresh her.’

But giving ‘an unmistakable look of love’ to Garibaldi, Anita dies. Mary
bursts into tears. Garibaldi gets up ‘with the dignity of unutterable woe’,
and ‘turning from them to hide the tears that streamed down his sunburnt
cheeks [and] … gently taking the body of his Anita in his arms, he disposed
his cloak over it, and strode off into the broken country’. He mourns over
her until dark, and then buries her in a mound of sand with his own hands,
leaving her in ‘that dear land of Italy, from which he himself must go forth
a wanderer and an exile’.103
One other British novel of the 1850s in which Garibaldi features deserves
our attention. The Exiles of Italy, or Garibaldi's miraculous escapes,
published in 1857, is more openly nationalist than the previous two and is
explicitly anti-Catholic, and it calls itself ‘a novel’ with ‘a strictly authentic
History of the period embraced’. The female author, C. G. Hamilton,
acknowledges the influence of Saffi's lectures on Italy in the formation of
her views; and the preface – which calls attention to the ‘sufferings and
oppression endured by the Italians’ – is essentially a virulent attack on papal
despotism and the conditions in Neapolitan prisons.104 The novel's plot
turns on the adventures of two exiled Neapolitan noblemen but, once again,
significant passages in the novel are given over to Garibaldi. He appears
about a third of the way through the story, during the siege of Rome:

turning an angle of the street … a noble-looking man on horseback appeared. He was

advancing slowly, for the crowd that surrounded him stayed his progress, and as he from time
to time returned their acclamations with courteous acknowledgement, the smile with which he
regarded them was like that of a father blessing his children. He appeared about fifty years old,
of middle stature; his forehead was high, his eyes bright and piercing; the hair of his head and
beard was light; and his whole bearing bespoke the dauntless courage that inspired the
beholders, and the genial kindness which made him the idol of his followers. He was dressed
in a short scarlet cloak, without any insignia of military rank save his cap and sword.105

Apart from his dignified countenance, it is Garibaldi's love for Anita

which is dwelt upon at length and, once again, their relationship parallels
the love affairs of the novel's two heroes and the tragedy of the 1848–9
revolutions. The retreat from Rome is described in considerable, if largely
improbable, detail; Garibaldi calls Anita ‘my life’ and mourns her ‘bright
elastic spirit that in all their wanderings had shed its sunshine over her
husband's perilous and stormy career’. The death of Anita takes place in the
Alps, and not even the arrival of a ‘shaggy’ Saint-Bernard dog who guides
the travellers to a mountain hut can save her. Before she dies, she tells her
husband: ‘I shall be with you, my friend; whether riding by your side, as in
days of yore, or looking down upon you from that bright heaven.’ This time,
he buries her in ‘a green, lonely spot, where the dark fig-trees threw their
shadows on the grass, and the girdling rocks shut out all human eyes’. He
becomes ‘a lonely wanderer on the earth’; excluded even from the comfort
of his blue-eyed, fair-skinned mother and his four beautiful children.106
Garibaldi's emergence as a character in British novels is interesting for a
number of reasons, not least because it parallels the wider enthusiasm for
Italian nationalism which gathered pace in Britain during the 1850s. As a
result, the novels allow us to explore the spread and reception of the cult of
Garibaldi in British public opinion. Although it is impossible to trace with
any accuracy the sources on Garibaldi for these novels, it is likely that
reports in both The Times and The Illustrated London News were used in the
descriptions of his appearance, and that either Dwight or von Hofstetter
could have provided some basis for the otherwise wildly romanticised
stories of the retreat from Rome. Equally revealing of contemporary
attitudes and future trends is the sheer extent of fantasy involved in
representations of Garibaldi and his adventures, a fantasy which is
nevertheless grounded in the repetition of a formulaic, and already familiar,
narrative.
In the three Britis novels published between 1854 and 1857, the shift in
public perceptions of Garibaldi from cruel bandit to picturesque outlaw and
then to older gentleman soldier can be read very clearly. More striking still,
however, is the element of continuity provided by the fascination of
Garibaldi's physical presence. We saw this preoccupation with his personal
appearance and behaviour in contemporary reports throughout 1848–9, and
again in the accounts of Dwight, Dumas, Dandolo, von Hofstetter, Cuneo
and (in negative terms) Bresciani. In the British novels, the sexual
overtones of this fascination are made explicit for the first time. Garibaldi is
a man who excites nuns and engages in orgies, and his whole appearance
‘sends us again to those times, when, by the capture of the senses, reason
could be laid asleep’; he is a husband who likes nothing more than to walk
hand in hand with his wife and admire the view from under the shade of a
chestnut tree; and he becomes a devastated sunburnt lover weeping over the
body of his beautiful dead wife.107 He is not just violent and physically
inspiring, he is also sensitive and loving. Here (and not for the last time),
the fashioning of an imaginary Garibaldi tailored specifically to the
demands of women readers needs to be noted.
Reading Garibaldi

Despite his partial withdrawal from active politics, Garibaldi was far more
committed to publicising himself and his political ideas in these years than
he liked to let on. We know, for example, that he read and approved Cuneo's
biography, and that his help was acknowledged by Dwight in the account of
the Roman Republic. That he, too, was involved in the construction of his
own biography as ‘exemplary life’ is indicated by the fact that during these
years of exile he wrote his memoirs. He first mentioned his memoirs in a
letter to his cousin Augusto in January 1850 (which also referred to an
earlier correspondence about them while he was in La Maddalena in
October 1849). Before he left Tangier in the spring of 1850, he had
apparently completed large sections of his memoirs and a series of
biographical sketches of his ‘dead companions-in-arms’, including an essay
on Anita; and during his voyage from Tangier to New York via Gibraltar
and Liverpool he sent parts of the manuscript to his cousin and to his friend
Francesco Carpaneto in an unsuccessful attempt to get them published.108
Although this original manuscript of his memoirs was lost, during the 1850s
Garibaldi gave copies and authorised publication to a series of friends. He
first gave a copy in 1850 to Dwight, who culled them extensively in
preparing the sections on Garibaldi for his Roman Republic manuscript;
subsequently Garibaldi gave another copy to Esperanza von Schwartz, in
1855; and then in 1860 he made available the text both to the Italian officer
Francesco Carrano and to the French novelist Alexandre Dumas. In the
event, each published a different version in English, German, Italian and
French between 1859 and 1861, and each put in their own additions and
embellishments.109
Written after the tragic end of the retreat from Rome, accompanying
Garibaldi into exile in America and being partially lost along the way, as
well as being rewritten by others thereafter, the memoirs' relationship with
their author is a complex one. Yet it is revealing that during the period when
he was most removed from political life, from late 1849 to 1850, Garibaldi
was preoccupied by writing and publishing his memoirs. He referred
frequently to their preparation for publication; he specified for instance that
the biographical sketches should be published separately from the memoirs,
he noted that the whole text required substantial correction, and he accepted
his cousin's advice that the sketches needed more detail and suggested that
this was also true of his memoirs.110 The fact that at different times during
the 1850s Garibaldi gave four copies of his memoirs to four friends of
different nationalities, and was apparently happy to let them translate the
memoirs and/or add their own narratives and impressions, also suggests a
strong commitment to their promotion and international distribution.
Yet the memoirs in general, and the French version published in 1860 by
Dumas in particular, have always been treated with suspicion by historians.
They are irritated by the significant gaps in the narrative and they find the
mixture of personal memory, partisan polemic and novelistic fantasy an
impediment rather than an aid to establishing the truth about Garibaldi's
actions in the Risorgimento. G. M. Trevelyan says of the Dumas version
that, as there is ‘no ostensible means of distinguishing Garibaldi's
statements from Dumas' romantic inventions’, it is impossible for a
historian to use it as evidence.111 Since Garibaldi went on to revise the
memoirs and wrote a ‘definitive’ and considerably altered edition in 1872,
the large number of different editions meant that it became more, not less,
difficult to separate ‘legend from fact’.112 For the literary critic too, the
memoirs are of little significance as they are undeniably badly written.
Garibaldi's long-winded melodramatic style, which relies heavily on
superlative and bathos, does little to commend his narrative to the reader;
and the structure of the narrative, with its extended battle scenes and
political digressions, can be equally off-putting. Yet most historians do
agree that the memoirs have some value in psychological terms. They can,
it is suggested, inform us about Garibaldi's state of mind and they are said
to offer clear insights into his emotions and ideas; as Trevelyan puts it:
‘Without knowing that he is making “confessions”’, Garibaldi ‘gives
himself away as much as Augustine or Rousseau … [and] the gift is
pleasant’.113
This perception of Garibaldi's memoirs is interesting because, with the
possible exception of the question of their literary interest, it can be
challenged on every count. Broadly speaking, the dismissal of his memoirs
as historical data and their readmission as psychological evidence is based
on a misunderstanding of the nature and importance of memoirs in
nineteenth-century political life. As Pierre Nora has shown convincingly in
relation to France, the memoir genre was not only an immensely prolific
one in the first half of the nineteenth century, but it was also one aimed
specifically at ‘the public’; it was a genre which deliberately evoked and
produced a sense of collective past and national belonging, and it was
‘deeply engaged in politics’.114 Thus, the authenticity and accuracy of
Garibaldi's memoirs should be, for us, of less interest than what they can
tell us about the historical context in which they were produced and about
Garibaldi's own relationship to contemporary concerns. To follow Nora:
memoirs ‘do not construct actions; they create a character. They contribute
only secondarily to history, yet they establish a myth’, and they propose a
strong link between the individual and the course of history.115
In effect, what Nora suggests to us is that Garibaldi's memoirs were
central to the construction of his public persona and to the myth created
around it. Although it would be a mistake simply to place Garibaldi's
memoirs within the French political and literary tradition,116 ‘patriotic
memoirs’ had from the start been a prominent and enduringly popular
feature of Risorgimento literature, building on a strong tradition of
biographical writing in Italy which goes back to the lives of saints and to
the Renaissance works of Petrach, Bruni and Cellini, among others.117 As in
France, memoirs in Risorgimento Italy can be considered a part of political
action, whereby the writer asserted his/her role in history and made a bid to
establish and control the memory of a political event or series of events. In
general terms, Garibaldi's memoirs form one in a series of similar attempts
by Risorgimento writers and activists (or writer– activists) to create a sense
of national identity through the construction of, and appeal to, collective
memory. More immediately, his memoirs were part of the effort, which
gathered increasing momentum after 1848–9, to produce a narrative which
would identify these decades as the ‘Risorgimento’: in other words, to
establish and publicise in narrative form an ideal of national resurgence
apparently so compelling that people were prepared to fight and die for it
and self-evidently so important that it would come to define an epoch.
Finally, Garibaldi's memoirs may well reflect the literary influence on him
of Argentine oppositional culture, which was similarly engaged in the
construction of biography and history for the purpose of creating national
memory.118 Far from giving him away inadvertently, as Trevelyan supposes,
Garibaldi's memoirs were an essential aspect of his self-fashioning as a
nationalist hero after the events of 1848–9; they were a move to assert
himself within the broader Risorgimento myth, and an attempt to establish
himself as the symbol of the Italy which he was dedicated to ‘resurrecting’.
That Garibaldi's memoirs were conceived of neither as personal
autobiography nor as ‘authentic’ history but were, from the outset, intended
as a form of public intervention is suggested by a series of factors. They are
generally concerned far less with minute political recollection than with the
broader question of political reputation. Thus, in August 1850, Garibaldi
referred to the growing disagreements between Italian republicans, telling
one correspondent that he had learnt in New York ‘things about the events
of Porta S. Pancrazio [in Rome in 1849] that I was ignorant of; although I
was quitedevoted to my post there; and it upsets me to see those events
described by people who didn't witness them’. Despite this, he stressed that
he had decided not to write about the 1848–9 revolutions in his memoirs so
as to avoid ‘obscuring’ the ‘fame of certain individuals’.119 In the event,
Garibaldi gives overwhelming prominence in these 1850s versions of his
memoirs to his South American experiences; and although both Dumas and
von Schwartz include in their editions details of the 1849 Roman Republic
and the events of 1859, the official part of the published memoirs ends with
Garibaldi's return to Europe in 1848. Moreover, only the first few pages of
the memoirs are concerned with Garibaldi's early life and journeys to the
Black Sea, and here too he has little to say about his own political
background. He is much more interested in constructing an exemplary life.
He tells the reader of his childhood mishaps and adventures, of his early
dedication to the risorgimento of Italy, and of his joy at first seeing Rome
(‘the Rome of the future … of the regenerative idea of the people!’), but he
says frustratingly little (one paragraph only) about joining Young Italy – he
notoriously omits to tell who recruited him – and still less about the failed
Mazzinian conspiracy which led him to emigrate to South America.120
In this respect, Garibaldi's memoirs reflect the growing tensions in
opposition circles and his own ambivalence towards Mazzinian conspiracy.
The memoirs express a general desire for Italian ‘liberation’ but Mazzini,
along with other living Italian activists, is scarcely alluded to and the
divisive events of 1848–9 are simply excluded from the narrative. Only
those companions of Garibaldi who died in 1848–9 – Daverio, Masina,
Mameli, Manara, Risso and Bassi – are mentioned, and then only in the
biographical sketches published by Dwight in New York in 1859. Instead,
Garibaldi adapts a familiar Risorgimento trope first developed to get past
the censors: he presents the reader with his own idealised past, against
which the situation in ‘our poor Italy’121 can be implicitly compared.
Thus, Garibaldi's South American years resemble a pastoral golden age.
He recalls the ‘immense and undulating fields’ of Uruguay, and his own
reaction, as a ‘25-year-old corsair’, to the first sight of the wild, untamed
‘stallion of the pampas’.122 In an extended passage, he praises the ‘real kind
of independent man’ – the matrero of Uruguay (like the gaucho, he says, but
‘more illegal, more independent … He rules over that vast extensive
countryside, with the same authority as a government, [but] he gives no
orders; he raises no taxes’):

A good horse is the first element of the matrero; his arms normally consist of a carabine, a
pistol, a sabre, and the inseparable knife, without which the matrero could not exist … from
the ox he gets the necessary for his saddle, the maneador to tie his companion while he grazes
… las bolas which catches the bagual (wild horse) in the fury of a race … the lasso … finally
the meat which is the only food of the matrero … the field and the forest are his rooms; the
sky, his roof.’123

His own life there is remembered in idyllic terms. As a ‘buccaneer’ on the

Rio Grande coast, he writes, he had a life full of danger, adventure and
physical pleasure:
 but at the same time beautiful, and very suited to my character … We had saddles, we found
horses everywhere … whenever the situation demanded it – we were transformed into not
brilliant but awe-inspiring knights, and we were feared … Moreover, in almost every place …
maize, legumes, sweet potatoes and often oranges were to be found … The people who
accompanied me, a real cosmopolitan crew, were made up of all colours and of all nations. I
treated them with kindness, perhaps too much kindness … [but] they were not without
courage, and this seemed enough to me.124

If Garibaldi excludes most living Italians from his memoirs, this does not
mean that his pages are unpeopled. He gives lists of those who fought with
him in South America and died there; he praises their heroism, bemoans
their sacrifice and laments that he can't remember all their names.125 He
stresses the great value of the people who fought with him in the South
American wars: the freed slaves, ‘true sons of freedom. Their lances, longer
than the normal length, their dark black [nerissimi] faces, their robust limbs
used to permanent and demanding work, their perfect discipline’; and the
Italian volunteers, who made charge after charge at the battle of Salto
(showing that ‘Italians are no cowards’), and who were ‘glorious’ at the
battle of Dayman, ‘as solid as a bulwark and highly agile, they rushed to
wherever the need took them, and invariably chased away their companions'
adversaries’.126 He pays tribute to the character of Bento Gonçales, his
commander in the Rio Grande Republic, ‘noble warrior … Tall and slim …
Highly courageous … of a moderate and generous heart … [yet] simple … I
shared his meals in the field, with as much familiarity as if we had been
friends from childhood and equals’ (although, perhaps to prevent Gonçales
from stealing too much of his own glory, he points out that he was always
defeated in battle). Garibaldi singles out for special admiration the courage
and ‘purity’ (l'illibatezza) of a Uruguayan comrade, Juan de la Cruz
Ledesma: ‘dark-haired, with an eagle eye, with the noble bearing of a fine
man’.127 Most of all, he eulogises those of his fellow exiles who are now
dead. He bemoans the loss of his childhood friend Edoardo Mutru, ‘the love
of my heart’; he describes meeting Luigi Rossetti: ‘our eyes met … We
smiled at each other and became brothers for life. Inseparable for life!’; he
recalls Luigi Carnaglia (‘another martyr for freedom!’), without a formal
education but with a ‘high’ soul ‘which upheld the honour of the Italian
name everywhere’ and who looked after Garibaldi ‘like his own child’; and
he praises Francesco Anzani, who brings discipline to the volunteers and
who distinguishes himself by his ‘courage’ and ‘cold blood’ under fire.128
Anzani, Rossetti and Mutru all feature in the ‘sketches’ published by
Dwight in New York, as does Garibaldi's closest companion of all, his dead
wife, Anita, ‘the Brasilian heroine’: ‘my treasure, no less fervent than
myself for the sacred cause of the people, she looked on battles as
entertainment and the discomforts of camp life as a pastime.’129
All these passages confirm that Garibaldi's memoirs should be seen as a
continuation or extension of his political action in 1848–9. The similarities
between descriptions of Garibaldi's arresting appearance, behaviour and
companions in Rome in 1849 and his own colourful depictions of the
‘adventurous life’ of the pampas suggest that he not only consciously
modelled himself on the matrero but that he also sought to convey this
image to the public by political action and by the written word. There is in
his memoirs the same attempt at theatrical bricolage that we observed in his
gestures and speeches of the 1840s, and here too it is meant for the purposes
of public consumption. Moreover, the linking in his memoirs of the pastoral
exoticism of his South American exile to examples of individual heroism
has a serious political message, whose eclecticism should not mask its
intended use as political rhetoric. Garibaldi uses the story of his life to
outline a model of nationalism which is international and voluntary.130 It
may not entirely convince us, but his vision of a utopian community is
based loosely on a romantic socialist model of political belonging. Its ideals
are those of rustic selfreliance and republican virtue, it has a virile martial
ethic, and its inhabitants are free and beautiful people: rebellious young
Italians, wise elders, freed slaves and liberated women.
Garibaldi seeks, in short, to offer through his own experiences a vision of
the nation-at-arms which is also a democratic community. This political
vision is conveyed through the actions and appearance of two different but
related groups. Much of the narrative is sustained by his interaction with a
series of captivating companions with whom he shares the dangers,
privations and excitements of a military (and/or seafaring) life. He is careful
to emphasise both the fraternal love which grows between these men of
different ages, backgrounds and nationality or race, and the importance and
glory of their sacrifice (their martyrdom). Here we see outlined in narrative
form his ideal of volunteering as the crucible of a national community
(volunteers were the basis of Garibaldi's military action in 1848–9, and they
were to remain central to his political programme during the 1850s, and in
the wars of 1859 and 1860). Yet in stressing the ties of this new fraternal
family, he also gives prominence to his own natural family. His memoirs
begin with a description of his ‘good parents, whose character and loving
care had such an influence on my education and on my physical activities’:
his father, a sailor, who loved his children, did his best for them despite his
poverty, and did all he could to give the rebellious young Garibaldi a decent
education; and his mother, a ‘model for all Mothers’, who suffered so much
for his ‘adventurous career’, whose tenderness to Garibaldi was perhaps
‘excessive’, whose ‘angelic’ character is responsible for ‘the little of good’
there is in his, and who, he feels, still watches over him after her death.131
There is in Garibaldi's memoirs an attempt to link the republican
principles of voluntary political engagement to the affective ties and
responsibilities of the traditional nuclear family. In this respect, the central
role given to his wife, Anita (‘whom I mourn today, and will mourn all my
life!’), is especially interesting. It is she who most clearly embodies the
Garibaldian fusion of an ideal of intimate love with the ideal of political
virtue, and she is also used to represent the reconciliation of the affective
life with the life of fighting and adventure. Before their meeting (‘one of the
defining moments of my life’), he had been convinced that – despite his
love of women – his ‘independent’ and ‘adventurous’ spirit must necessarily
exclude marriage and children. But one day he sees Anita through a
telescope from his ship, rushes ashore, and desperately looks for her. He
finally finds her, takes one look at her and announces ‘you will be mine!!!’
He hints that there is a scandal involved in their union, but she becomes ‘the
only woman in the world for me!’132 ‘[M]y incomparable Anita’ is, for
Garibaldi, ‘the Amazon … superior to her sex in the discomforts and
dangers of war’. She fought alongside him, loaded and fired cannons in
battle with him and encouraged his men ‘with admirable serenity … with
her voice, with her gestures, while she brandished the scimitar in a
threatening manner’. She is also a loving wife who escaped from enemy
hands and crossed the Brazilian forest alone to rejoin her husband, a
companion who rode across the American desert at his side and ‘consoled
me in hard times’, and a concerned mother, ‘admirable in domestic life’,
who, with Menotti, their infant son (and a favourite with all the soldiers), on
the front of her saddle, endures a disastrous winter retreat across the Serra
mountains.133
When they were eventually published between 1859 and 1861,
Garibaldi's memoirs met with lasting and significant success. Particularly in
the version adapted by Dumas, which added more personal and more
sensational detail and which restructured the narrative as a set of canonical
episodes, the memoirs were an international hit and gave rise to numerous
copies and pirated versions. But even before his encounter with Dumas in
1860, Garibaldi had done his best to make the memoirs attractive to the
reading public. For instance, the episodic feuilleton style used to good effect
by Dumas is a feature of the other versions too. It may not be fully
successful, but the memoirs attempt precisely the episodic structure, the
racy and emotive language, the violent struggle between good and evil, and
the all-powerful love between brave hero and spirited heroine which can be
found in the historical and adventure novels that were commercially
popular at this time. Garibaldi's attention to women (described twice as ‘the
most perfect of all beings’),134 not just to Anita and his mother but to the
whole number of enchanting women who appear in and inspire his
narrative, is typical of the adventure story. It can also be seen as a specific
move to entice the female reader to take up his text. Thus, like Cuneo and
other radicals near him, Garibaldi sought to construct and sell a political
message by the use of a conventional narrative formula. His memoirs are
interesting, neither as authentic history nor as a psychological mirror, but as
proof that Garibaldi used the printed word to fashion himself as the hero of
a political adventure, and sought to reach and extend his public through the
leisure activity of reading.
Conclusion

The changes which affected the Italian peninsula in the 1850s and thereafter
were not merely the result of high politics. The outcome of the Crimean
War, the international isolation of Austria, and the conflicts within and
between political groups in Italy may help explain the rise to prominence of
the Italian Question in European diplomacy. Yet these events explain little
about the public response to the wars of Italian unification or how this
response shaped the actions of political leaders. One of the most important
political developments of the 1850s was the growth of a liberal public
opinion, in Italy and internationally, which was not just sympathetic to
Italian nationalism but passionately concerned with Italy's future. This
development was the result of new trends in publishing and entertainment
which were in turn linked to the emergence of a broader, and more radical,
public sphere across Europe.
Nationalism, as the anthropologist Benedict Anderson has shown and
Mazzini always knew, was dependent on print culture. Without the
expansion of the printed word and image, it was impossible for complex
modern societies to ‘fashion’, ‘invent’ or ‘imagine’ a sense of national
community and belonging. It is no coincidence that the mid-century
revolution in publishing coincided with the first great age of nationalism,
and with the creation and consolidation of nation states in much of Europe.
More specifically, the unprecedented scope and scale of Garibaldi's fame as
a popular leader were largely maintained by the publishing and
entertainment industry. The publicity surrounding him – his actions, his
appearance, his private life – was sustained by the rapid and extensive
supply of information about him, and this was made possible by the
revolution in print culture. At the same time, this wide-scale publicity
created a new relationship between the ‘performer’ and his audience, in
which a sense of familiarity and intimacy combined with one of admiration
and awe.
Content and style also mattered. Like the idea of Italian freedom more
generally, Garibaldi's popularity in mid-century liberal Europe was the
result both of the spread of democratic ideas and of their fit with the genres
of romantic popular fiction. Garibaldi's political appeal was part of a radical
style which was structured and told like a story. Garibaldi and those who
wrote about him sought to reach and capture the public by presenting him
as a romantic hero in his own drama of love, liberty and adventure. Just
how far Garibaldi could take, use and promote this narrative formula for
political ends became clear during the dramatic events of Italian unification.
Here it is important simply to note that the formula itself was established at
an earlier stage (during the 1840s and – especially – the 1850s), that there
was little or nothing unplanned about its construction and dissemination,
and that Garibaldi was responsible for at least part of the final script. One of
the most striking features of this script was the apparently seamless blend of
fact and fiction, of novelistic fantasy and political truth, and this blend
(which could vary, and pick up and discard different elements) seems to
have been at the heart of Garibaldi's public success. It helped Garibaldi's
appeal to become international in reach and eclectic in nature. It combined
the emotive appeal of romanticism with an ideal of republican virtue, and it
proposed a persona in which bravery and sensitivity mingled in equal
measure. Perhaps especially, his image and its popularity offer proof of
what Miles Taylor has called ‘the persistence of romanticism in the
mentalité of mid-nineteenth-century popular politics’, or of the ‘long reach’
of romanticism135 which the Risorgimento contributed significantly to, and
was the beneficiary of.
Finally, it would be a mistake to see the creation – or fashioning – of
Garibaldi necessarily as an imposition from above. In many respects,
Garibaldi was less a sign of the constraining power of political symbols and
more an indicator of their potential to subvert and destabilise. Not only did
Garibaldi represent and promote a movement of political radicalism but the
diffusion of his fame was a symptom of the democratisation of political
culture, a sign of the arrival of ‘non-polite’ society in the public sphere with
a new set of rules and responses. His appeal was tailored to the perceived
tastes and demands of this nascent political culture and he helped to create
it. Those involved in promoting him came partly (if not always entirely)
from outside the traditional establishment. His popularity also reflected a
struggle for control of the public sphere. It contributed to the increasing
hegemony of nationalist discourse but neither Garibaldi nor Italian
nationalism was loved by everyone and his fame only partially masked a
significant divergence between rival political visions of the new Italy.
Hence it is by no means surprising that the bitter conflicts which beset the
Italian peninsula from the 1840s onwards, and which erupted in spectacular
fashion in 1859 and after, involved not just diplomacy and battles but also
meetings, lectures and theatrical performances, and that they focused, with
such remarkable energy, on control over the printed word.
 CHAPTER 6

INDEPENDENCE

The 1859 Campaign

On 10 January 1859, at the opening of parliament in Turin, King Vittorio

Emanuele II made the most important political speech of his life. Much of
the speech was made up of political banalities: the king looked to
Piedmont's future with confidence and spoke vaguely of his love of liberty
and the ‘fatherland’. But one short reference to the ‘cries of grief’ –
reaching him, the king said, from the other regions of Italy and which he
found impossible to ignore – received enormous publicity, and cemented
the king's reputation as a national leader in Italy and abroad.1
The speech was part of a deliberate strategy to provoke a war with
Austria. The vivid phrase – ‘cries of grief’ – was suggested by the French
Emperor, Napoleon III, with whom the Piedmontese prime minister,
Cavour, had concluded a secret agreement the previous year at the spa town
of Plombières. France had agreed to join Piedmont in a war to drive Austria
out of Lombardy–Venetia; and it had also agreed to the creation of four
states in Italy (a powerful kingdom of Upper Italy ruled by the House of
Savoy and comprising Piedmont, Lombardy–Venetia, the central duchies,
and the papal Romagna; a kingdom of Central Italy dominated by Tuscany
but absorbing other provinces of the Papal States; Rome and its immediate
province; and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies). These would form an
Italian Confederation with the Pope as president, ‘to console him’, in
Cavour's words, ‘for the loss of the best part of his States’. In return,
Napoleon asked for the provinces of Nice and Savoy to be ceded to France
and for a marriage between his nephew, the middle-aged and dissolute
Prince Jérôme Napoléon, with the king's pious fifteen-year-old daughter,
Clotilde. Above all, however, the French promise of military assistance was
conditional upon Austria declaring war on Piedmont, so that Austria would
be diplomatically and militarily isolated and thus easy to defeat.2
Everything depended, in other words, on making Italy the victim and
Austria the aggressor in the upcoming war.
During the months following the Plombières pact, both the French and
the Piedmontese leaders did everything they could to precipitate a conflict
with Austria. Initially, it had been hoped to provoke Austrian aggression
through a revolt in the Duchy of Modena; but recognising the danger of
revolution there they concentrated more on encouraging war fever through
a series of inflammatory remarks and actions. Just before Vittorio
Emanuele's speech, at a public reception in the Tuileries, Napoleon III had
told the Austrian ambassador to Paris that he regretted the strained relations
between the two countries: this was widely interpreted as a threat of war.
War seemed ever more imminent when, later in January, the forthcoming
marriage of Jérôme and Clotilde was announced along with a military
alliance between France and Piedmont. However, in February, the British
government, which was horrified at the prospect of a European war, began
successfully to put pressure on both France and Austria to call off the
conflict,3 and in March the Russian government called for a congress to
resolve the differences between the two Great Powers, from which
Piedmont would be excluded. By early April, Napoleon III had agreed to
the congress and to disarm. But Cavour's plan was saved by an ultimatum
from Austria threatening war if Piedmont did not disarm immediately. As
Mack Smith puts it, Cavour's ‘patient work of provocation was dramatically
rewarded when Austria, instead of being grateful for this fortunate respite,
decided to make Lombardy a test for the viability of her multi-national
empire’.4 On 26 April 1859, Piedmont refused the ultimatum and Austria
declared war.5
The war of 1859 was short, messy and violent. Austria was slow to
mobilise and Piedmont had apparently little in the way of a military plan,
relying instead on the French army ‘coming to their rescue’.6 Thus, much of
the military strategy was devised by the French high command, and it was
the French army which won the first significant battle of the war, at
Magenta on 4 June. As a result of Magenta, Vittorio Emanuele and
Napoleon III were able to enter Milan in triumph on 8 June. On 24 June,
amid scenes of the most terrible bloodshed and chaos, the allies won an
impromptu but major battle at Solferino–San Martino. At the same time,
disturbances in central Italy (in Parma, Modena, Emilia–Romagna and
Tuscany), which were partly orchestrated by the National Society, led to the
overthrow of their rulers and to the establishment of liberal governments in
these states. These governments then began actively to seek some kind of
union with Piedmont.7 Subsequently, as a result of both the revolutions in
central Italy and the violence and cost of the war, Napoleon III suffered a
fatal loss of political and military nerve. In early July, and without
consulting Piedmont, he and Franz Josef, the Emperor of Austria, concluded
an armistice at Villafranca which brought the war to an end.
The 1859 conflict was a crisis of major European significance. While
Russia and Britain had sought urgently to keep the peace, the events revived
political debate in the German states after a ‘long post-revolutionary
torpor’.8 German conservatives were horrified by revived French
aggression and the prospect of revolution; neo-conservatives (including
Bismarck) saw advantages in the creation of a strong state south of the
Alps; Catholics were alarmed by the probable threat to the Papal States; and
liberals were enthused by the success of Piedmont and the apparently
declining power of the Catholic Church.9 In the United States too, the
potential for the conflict in Italy to destabilise international relations and
alter the European balance of power was widely recognised.10
Partly as a result of their international significance and of the crucial
military role played by Napoleon III's France, the events of 1859 seem to
indicate ‘the primacy of foreign policy’ in Italian unification, or to
demonstrate that royal armies, diplomacy and secret alliances played a far
more important role than nationalism. Similarly, Cavour's actions – his deal
at Plombières and his provocation of war with Austria – are usually studied
as prime examples of his ‘Machiavellian’ methods and of the use of ‘almost
pure realpolitik’ in international relations.11 Especially after the release of
government documents which showed how little Cavour cared about the
principle of nationality and how far he was prepared to go to aggrandise
Piedmont, the events of 1859 have loomed much larger as a problem in
European diplomacy and statecraft than as evidence of the strength of
nationalist feeling in Italy.12
Yet while the role of diplomacy and armies in 1859 is undeniable, it was
accompanied by a no less important, and arguably just as visible, wave of
patriotic enthusiasm. Much of this was encouraged by the National Society
in a major press campaign. From late 1858 onwards, its publications had
predicted that a war with Austria was imminent, and its propaganda was
picked up by other papers, such as France's La Presse. But although this
campaign was clearly linked to the willingness of La Farina, the National
Society's secretary, to do Cavour's bidding, the closeness of their
relationship should not be over-stressed,13 nor should the ability of the
Society entirely to orchestrate or to control nationalist agitation. The
broader process of anti-Austrian nationalist agitation included a tobacco
boycott in Milan and Parma, the appearance of nationalist slogans and
posters in many northern cities, and patriotic demonstrations in theatres
throughout the peninsula.14 In Pavia, the university was closed down by the
authorities at the end of 1858 as a result of anti-Austrian and pro-
Piedmontese protests by students.15
An especially strong indication of the spread of patriotic enthusiasm was
the rush by men from outside Piedmont to volunteer for the upcoming war.
According to contemporary estimates, around 20,000 volunteers arrived in
Turin between mid-January and the end of March 1859;16 while a more
recent calculation puts the number of those actually enlisted as just under
15,000.17 Subscriptions were opened to which the public gave generously;
horses were even sent to provide a mounted guard.18 The majority of those
who volunteered to fight for Piedmont came from Lombardy, with a
significant number also from the central duchies, and this is a strong
indication of the success of pro-Piedmontese nationalist propaganda in
these states during the previous half-decade. Raymond Grew remarks that
this demonstration of nationalist fervour was especially significant if ‘one
remembers the hazards and expense of the journey’ to Piedmont, which
involved men leaving their families and homes and risking encounters with
police in order to join the army of another state; even more so since many
of those who volunteered were property-owners, professionals, students,
and crafts- and tradesmen who had much to lose and little to gain by
leaving home and interrupting their career or occupation.19 Here too, the
government's hand was obvious. It had been part of Cavour's policy to
encourage the formation of volunteer corps and desertion from the Austrian
army in Lombardy, and he had expected the National Society to oversee
their recruitment. However, both Cavour and the National Society were
entirely surprised by the flood, or the ‘exodus en masse’,20 of volunteers
from neighbouring Italian states into Piedmont from January onwards, and
they had no clear strategy for dealing with them.21 To quote Grew again, if
the ‘movement of volunteers to Turin’ established Piedmont as the centre of
nationalist aspirations and ‘overshadowed the disappointments the SNI
[National Society] had known’, it also ‘left the Society all but swamped by
one of the great demonstrations of the Risorgimento’.22
Cavour and Garibaldi

In retrospect, therefore, the months leading up to war in 1859 were marked

by an evident contradiction between the expansionist ambitions of
Piedmont and the general mood of nationalist expectation and enthusiasm.
Yet the protagonists sought to deny or to mask this tension, which led to
confusion about the means and aims of military struggle. There is no better
expression of this uneasy situation than the alliance which was forged in
late 1858 between the Piedmontese establishment and Garibaldi. In
December 1858, Cavour let Garibaldi in on some aspects of the Plombières
deal, asking him to become involved by organising and training volunteers
and getting them ready for action in the following spring. Agostino Bertani,
a close friend and ally of Garibaldi, reported that after this conversation
with Cavour, Garibaldi came to see him and ‘with a radiant face and a voice
broken with emotion … [said] “At last they have agreed to act … I have
been empowered at the very highest level to tell our friends to get ready.”
… He kept on repeating that we must all be united and all must take arms if
we were going to succeed on our own.’23 Bertani's comments suggest that
Garibaldi initially knew nothing of the alliance with France; he was
certainly unaware of the plan to cede Nice (his home town) and Savoy to
France.
Garibaldi's letters and actions at this time show that his political game
was not entirely clear either. He was very happy to help the Piedmontese,
but just as keen to impose his own more radical programme on them. He
evidently did his best to please the Piedmontese leadership. On more than
one occasion in March 1859, Cavour felt able to reassure those concerned
that Garibaldi ‘made the most explicit declarations, assumed the most
precise responsibilities’ and that ‘[h]e has maintained until now the most
reserved and prudent attitude'; he had even remarked that Mazzini was ‘the
greatest enemy of Italy’.24 At the end of June, despite the fact that relations
between them had grown tense, Garibaldi assured Cavour of his personal
respect and honour, and of his devotion to Cavour, ‘whom I have learnt to
identify with Italy’.25 Garibaldi also tried to endear himself to the king by
telling La Farina that the king should act at the head of the army (‘and don't
mind those who call him incapable’) and that a military dictatorship should
be established to avoid rivalries and ‘stormy uprisings’ (although it is of
course unlikely that this idea would have pleased Cavour).26
Before and during the campaign, Garibaldi's speeches to the volunteers
repeatedly recommended discipline, obedience, order and ‘cold blood’.27
Perhaps the most startling transformation, for those who remembered
Garibaldi from 1848–9, was in his appearance. The changes begun in
America in the early 1850s now reached their logical conclusion. The red
shirt disappeared, although the poncho remained for a while. He was now in
his early fifties and in a photograph taken around this time his figure
appears round and more paternal than athletic, a look which was
accentuated by the presence of his oldest son, Menotti, among the
volunteers.28 His famous red-blond hair was growing grey and thin, and he
wore it more neatly trimmed and with a short beard. After his incorporation
into the army, Garibaldi wore the blue Piedmontese general's uniform with
silver lace on the collar and cuffs. The volunteers too were neatly dressed in
tidy grey clothes, and there was little or nothing ‘picturesque’ about their
appearance.29
Yet it was equally evident that Garibaldi had lost none of his nationalist
verve and military ambition. In late 1858 he tried (but presumably failed) to
reassure La Farina, and indirectly Cavour, by telling him that ‘[t]he
revolutionary elements are all with us'; in the same letter he praised the
student demonstrations in Pavia (‘an event which you could increase at your
will’), and in January 1859 he confidently told La Farina that the
organisation of the volunteers would be on a ‘fearsome scale’. In the same
period, Garibaldi wrote enthusiastically to friends that ‘our affairs are
moving forward with giant steps’, and that ‘our affairs are moving
marvellously and we will show them our fists’.30 He also began to
reconstruct his Roman high command from 1849, most of whom were
former Mazzinians and some of whom had kept in contact with the
revolutionary leader. Thus, Garibaldi invited his old comrade from South
American days, Giacomo Medici, to join him and got him to overcome his
enmity with Nino Bixio, who was also brought into his high command. He
persuaded Bertani (who everyone knew had ‘certain mazzinierie’ in his
outlook and loyalties) to run the ambulance service, as he had done in
Rome in 1849. Many other Roman veterans, such as the Lombard radical,
Giovanni Cadolini, came back to fight with Garibaldi, and Garibaldi
involved the Pavian student radical, Benedetto Cairoli, as a fund-raiser
along with the rest of his family, as volunteers or as support for the
volunteers. Finally, with Medici, he planned the organisation of the
volunteers into a national guard, and he instructed Bertani to buy Colt
revolvers from America for them: ‘they are firearms of great precision …
they have six shots and are lighter than any other firearm’.31
‘Oh my dear friend!’ Garibaldi wrote to one correspondent in April 1859,
‘the day we have longed for for so many years has finally arrived.’32 For
Garibaldi, the war was the political and symbolic moment he had been
waiting for since the failure of revolution in 1849. He hoped that his
volunteer army would, with the help of Piedmont and France, provide the
nucleus and leadership for a revitalised Italy. In February, he approved the
wording of a ‘hymn’ for the volunteers to sing when ‘marching against the
oppressors of our land’, which began ‘The tombs are uncovered, the dead
come from far,/ The ghosts of our martyrs are rising to war!’33 On 24 April
(two days before Piedmont refused the Austrian ultimatum), he wrote a
letter (‘my heart is stirring’) to Giovanni Battista Cuneo, his friend from the
South American days:

I thank Providence which has brought us to the fulfilment of our desires after so many years.
Yes, in a few days we will fight the loathed oppressor of our country. Today Italy offers us a
magnificent picture, the parties have all disappeared. The sole idea of throwing out the
Austrian dominates our spirits. From every province volunteers are rushing forward to ask for
a gun. I have the strongest faith that this blessed land will soon redeem itself.34

The next day, he issued a similar proclamation to his soldiers:

 We have reached the fulfilment of our desires, the object of our hopes; you will fight against
the oppressors of the fatherland. Perhaps tomorrow I will meet the Austrians with a gun in my
hand to ask for satisfaction for the thefts and outrages which it disgusts me to remember.35

Garibaldi's enthusiasm reflected the nationalist excitement in Turin in early

1859; in turn, his presence provided a focus and encouragement for the
great demonstration of nationalist feeling offered by the volunteers arriving
in the city ready for action.
However, Garibaldi's agenda was not shared by the Piedmontese
establishment. By some accounts, the king liked Garibaldi, and Cavour,
Napoleon III and the Piedmontese generals all recognised that Garibaldi
had his uses, but they disliked his political image, feared his political
friends, and were reluctant to cede any freedom of action to him or the
volunteers. Despite Garibaldi's expectations, Cavour had originally
envisaged no more than an unofficial part for Garibaldi in organising
volunteers; for example, in March he told the diplomat Costantino Nigra ‘in
confidence and for you alone’ that they planned to give ‘the deserters to
Garibaldi who will know what to do with them’.36 But he never clarified
what Garibaldi's role was to be in the royal war with Austria and was most
probably far from pleased at Garibaldi's attempts to reconstruct the spirit
and organisation of 1848–9. In reality, Cavour simply wanted Garibaldi and
the volunteers to bolster up numbers for the forthcoming war, and perhaps
by encouraging desertions from the Austrian army to provoke an act of
aggression by the Austrian government; he always intended to keep the
volunteers away from the royal armies and felt that the regular business of
war should be left to them.37 Hence, to a suggestion that Italians living in
America might want to return to Italy and fight for Piedmont, Cavour
advised that:

the Government is not in need of the elements whence to form good soldiers and officers …
What is really needed is not so much military assistance as money. While grateful … for this
offer, and fully appreciating the sentiments that inspire it, the Sardinian government does not
consider it expedient that it should be accepted, as there is already a superabundance of the
military element … The greater part of our countrymen now in America can as effectually
serve the Italian cause by remaining in the United States and using their influence in favor of
our efforts as by returning to Italy.38
This diffidence was more than shared by the army itself and by Piedmont's
French allies. Perhaps unsurprisingly given the experiences of Rome in
1849, Napoleon III had severe misgivings about involving Garibaldi and his
volunteers in the upcoming war.39 The Piedmontese military hierarchy was
equally suspicious of Garibaldi, and they made no attempt to hide their
antipatie towards the volunteers arriving in Turin, treating them in a way
which even a loyal supporter of Piedmont described as ‘contemptible’.40
The army's hostility to the volunteers led it initially to resist the
integration of volunteers into its ranks as distinct units, although some were
accepted as normal recruits. Nevertheless, by March 1859 the stream of
volunteers and their clear enthusiasm for Garibaldi was so significant that
the army was forced to bow to the inevitable, and it was agreed not only to
incorporate Garibaldi into the army as a major-general, but also to organise
three volunteer corps – around 3,000 men as the Cacciatori delle Alpi –
under his personal command. Interestingly, while this decision was taken
with reluctance, the government had in fact pulled off a considerable coup.
As Grew remarks, ‘they had purchased a large gain in propaganda with a
small concession’. They now controlled Garibaldi, who was no longer free
to choose his own men, and he was sent most of the older and less able
volunteers, while the royal army took most of the younger men and those
with more relevant experience.41
Garibaldi's campaign

From the beginning of the campaign, the Cacciatori suffered from constant
problems due to the lack of supplies of food, bedding or basic clothing, and
of any provision for the dead and wounded.42 Garibaldi and his Cacciatori
also fought a largely separate campaign, being sent away from the main
army towards the Alps on Cavour's instructions to disrupt and cut enemy
lines as much as possible.43 ‘They gave him three thousand five hundred
badly armed and badly dressed young men, without artillery, without
cavalry, and they told him: make the best of it’, comments Garibaldi's
biographer, Giuseppe Guerzoni, who fought with him in the war.44 In the
event, the volunteers performed surprisingly well. They were the first to
come into conflict with Austrian forces and defeat them, at Varese in the
Lake Maggiore region of Lombardy, on 26 May. The following day, they
marched down towards Como and met with the main body of General
Urban's army at San Fermo. Although Urban had about twice the number of
men as Garibaldi, Garibaldi decided to charge them in a full-frontal attack –
sending his men ‘down like a torrent’ in Bixio's words45 – and was
successful, after which the volunteers entered Como. After an abortive
attack on the fort of Laveno on Lake Maggiore, Garibaldi was forced to
turn back to Como on hearing that Varese had been re-occupied by the
Austrian army but, following the news of the French victory at Magenta, he
retook Varese and marched eastwards towards Bergamo and Brescia.
At Brescia, his growing band of volunteers finally joined up with the
main army, and went on towards Salò on Lake Garda. In return for their
successes, Garibaldi and his volunteers received military decorations from
the king. However, in mid-June they were sent off again into the mountains,
this time to the Valtellina to flush out a derisory Austrian force holding
Bormio and the Stelvio Pass.46 In fact, such was the bad treatment of
Garibaldi and his volunteers in 1859 that even G. M. Trevelyan, normally
entirely laudatory about the process of Italian unification, admits that the
Cacciatori were unable to play a decisive part in the war of 1859, and that
the decision to send them into the remote Valtellina – ‘to the rear’ of the
army – just when they had become ‘formidable in numbers’ may have been
due to ‘professional jealousy’.47
Much as in 1848–9, however, Garibaldi was not prepared to let official
obstruction hamper his political style. Instead, he used the war and his own
progress through the mountains of northern Italy to raise more volunteers
for the Cacciatori and to promote his nationalist message as widely as
possible. His speeches and proclamations at this time all repeated the same
point: that Italy needed every able-bodied man to volunteer, that it was their
duty to join the ‘holy war’ to drive out the foreigner, and that they had to
fight under both the tricolour flag and King Vittorio Emanuele. Perhaps the
most emblematic of all his speeches at this time was the proclamation at the
beginning of his campaign, ‘to the Lombard people’, in which his appeal to
a sense of national identity combined history, honour and hatred of the
foreigner in a religious call to resurgence:

You are called to a new life and you must respond to the call, as our fathers did in Pontida and
in Legnano. The enemy is still the same, a cruel, murderous despoiler. From every province
 our brothers have sworn to win or die with us. We must revenge the insults, the outrages, the
servitude of twenty past generations, and bequeath to our children an inheritance which is
uncontaminated by the stink of a domineering foreign soldier … [Anyone] who is capable of
taking up arms and does not do so is a traitor.48

Garibaldi's appeals were very successful. Giovanni Visconti Venosta, then a

local official in the Valtellina, described men volunteering every day:
‘people of every circumstance and age, often worn-out and with a tired and
sickly air. There were old people and even children.’49 According to figures
given by Trevelyan, the Cacciatori numbered around 12,000 men (from an
original 3,000) by the end of the campaign; although Garibaldi himself gave
the more conservative figure of 9,500 men.50 Also significant in terms of
what they reveal about the spread of Garibaldi's popularity was the number
of former exiles and/or foreigners who volunteered to fight with him.
Among them were Quirico Filopanti from New York, the Hungarian
Stefano Türr, the English translator of Guerrazzi's Beatrice Cenci and, most
famously of all, ‘the gigantic Peard’ – ‘Garibaldi's Englishman’ – an
Oxford-educated ‘adventurer’ who was immediately useful for his skills as
a sharpshooter.51 One company, observed by a Lombard journalist, included
not only young men ‘generally belonging to the best classes of Italian
society’ but Swiss, French and American volunteers as well.52 London's
Times reported that the exiled Tuscan writer–activist, Giuseppe Montanelli,
had followed his son into ‘this perilous adventure’, along with many
foreigners, including some Spaniards and a man from China.53
Garibaldi's movements and those of the Cacciatori were also greeted
with great scenes of popular enthusiasm. After his entrance into Varese on
26 May, Garibaldi wrote to Cavour that ‘[a]ll the young people rushed to
take up arms and defend the barricades; the population responded with
shouts of viva l'Italia, viva Vittorio Emanuele to the sound of cannon fire.
The church bells rang the tocsin in Varese and neighbouring villages.’54
Others confirmed his account, and were more forthcoming with details. One
officer, Francesco Carrano, described extraordinary scenes in Varese, which
the Cacciatori entered slowly, in the dark and the pouring rain, to find the
town abandoned by the Austrians:
 suddenly a loud shot was heard from not far away, and a large red light was seen to break the
darkness of the rainy night. It was the population of Varese who had come out with hundreds
of torches to meet Garibaldi and his Cacciatori delle Alpi. A thousand cries of joy greeted the
famous Italian leader, the man of miracles … he was carried in triumph through the city, while
men and women came out to shake the hands of the soldiers all dripping with water, and they
embraced them like sons and brothers, and quite a few really were[;] Garibaldi saluted with his
sword on all sides, and encouraged the people to cheer the King Vittorio Emanuele, and to take
up arms against the foreign oppressors, and to come as volunteers to enlarge the ranks of those
who were fighting the holy war…55

On the steps of the town hall, amid a general ‘frenzy’, Garibaldi and the
mayor hugged and kissed each other.56 In Como too, the population was
said to have gone wild. For Giovanni Cadolini, ‘the exultation was such that
it became almost painful … I never saw more impressive scenes of
brotherly love.’ Carrano saw the people of Como dressed only in their
nightclothes and in the rain, unfolding tricolour flags and shouting at the
tops of their voices: ‘“Viva l'Italia! Viva Garibaldi” and they vied with each
other to see the face and to embrace the legs of the famous Italian
warrior’.57
These accounts are clearly partisan and some are written much later, so
the tendency greatly to exaggerate the extent of enthusiasm and the
numbers involved should not be excluded. The weight of evidence suggests
nevertheless that there was widespread practical support for Garibaldi and
his men, and for the idea of Italy more broadly. One of the doctors who
accompanied the Cacciatori remarked on what he termed the ‘generous
support of citizens’ for Garibaldi's soldiers. Indeed, he suggested that the
soldiers survived the cold rain and hardship of the mountains largely thanks
to the general welcome given by ordinary people:

Throughout Lombardy the care lavished on us by both citizens and town councils was all we
could have hoped for. Our soldiers, without packs and with only one shirt and one pair of
underpants would certainly not have been able to keep themselves clean and free of lice if the
citizens had not come to their help with clean linen, nor would they have been able to put up
with the rain for so long were it not for the fact that all the fireplaces in every town and village
were made available to them on arrival so that they could dry themselves.58
That scenes of patriotic fervour were also quite commonplace is suggested
by similar descriptions of the welcome given to the king in cities like Milan
and Brescia, and by other patriotic demonstrations such as the making of
tricolour flags, the composing and publication of songs and other patriotic
pamphlets, and the wearing of tricolour cockades, all of which could
involve broad sections of urban society, and which involved the
participation of women as well as men. Indeed, it is possible to speak of a
wave of nationalist agitation in northern and central Italy during 1859,
which had been prepared by the propaganda efforts of the National Society
and was spread by the war. Nor did the efforts of the National Society cease
during the war; it was its presence in the central Italian duchies during April
and May which encouraged the prevailing sense that the Austrian era was
over, and that the political future lay with Piedmont and Italian
nationalism.59
The great welcome given to Garibaldi in places like Varese and Como
was the result of his identification with a particular political moment, with
his physical affiliation to the nation and to Piedmont; he personally did
much to encourage this identification in his speeches and actions. It is
equally possible to observe a tendency for Garibaldi's charisma to acquire a
life of its own. In 1859, outbreaks of public emotion began to follow his
person as much as his politics. Those who heard Garibaldi speak in 1859
agreed that his ability to focus and excite the crowd, and to persuade men to
volunteer, was extraordinary. ‘One of the characteristic and emotionally
moving spectacles of those days [in early July in the Valtellina]’, according
to Visconti Venosta, ‘was the enthusiasm, the irresistible passion, with
which people rushed to the sign of Garibaldi, or rose up as if pushed by a
turbine if Garibaldi appeared.’ He described the ‘spell [fascino]’ which
Garibaldi ‘cast over the multitude’ as something ‘marvellous’ and ‘almost
unimaginable’ (as well as being worthy of study):

Garibaldi, when he came through a town, and although at that time he did not wear the red
shirt, did not seem to be a general as much as the leader of a new religion, followed by a
fanatical rabble. The women were no less enthusiastic than the men, and they even brought
along their children so that Garibaldi would bless them, or even baptise them!60
 Much of this fascino, for Visconti Venosta, was due to Garibaldi's
speeches and to the way he used his voice, so that his every pronouncement,
even the most insignificant, ‘had an immeasurable effect’ and produced a
‘frenzy’. There was, he speculated, a kind of ‘magnetic current’ between
Garibaldi the speaker and the crowd who heard him.61 The unusual effect of
Garibaldi on his listeners was confirmed by an arguably more impartial
observer, the British military attaché George Cadogan. He described
Garibaldi as a gentle, cautious and rather unrefined man, but with ‘an
influence on his hearers which a more cultivated intelligence might fail to
have. Add to this a voice of singular charm and a manner that brings
conviction with it as to the sincerity of speech, and it can be easily imagined
that it is no exaggeration to say he could make his followers go anywhere
and do anything.’ Thus, for Cadogan, Garibaldi had the common touch. He
had watched as Garibaldi gave a speech to his soldiers at the outposts. ‘It
would be impossible’, he commented, ‘to do justice to the familiar and
paternal, though not undignified, character of the few words thus spoken, or
to the enthusiasm they produced’.62
Villafranca and after

Like so much else in 1859, there was a basic contradiction between these
nationalist demonstrations and the prosaic exigencies of international
politics. As Garibaldi's campaign of recruitment and mobilisation reached
its climax, the tables were turned against him and the entire nationalist
movement by the announcement of the armistice between France and
Austria at Villafranca. The peace terms agreed by the two emperors
recognised the defeat of Austria in Italy, but also tried to save Austria's face.
They sought to downplay the victory of Piedmont, and to deny a triumph to
the nationalists in the peninsula. So the emperors decided that Lombardy
was to be ceded first to France, and only then to be given by France to
Piedmont. Furthermore, all the military fortresses of the Quadrilateral (two
of which were in Lombardy) were to remain in Austrian hands, as was the
entire province of Venetia; and the Habsburg rulers were to be restored to
the duchies of Modena, Parma and Tuscany, from where they had fled at the
start of the war.
 The peace of Villafranca caused consternation among Mazzinian
sympathisers and disappointment among the supporters of Italy abroad.
Cavour too was frantic to continue the war and furious at the frustration of
all his plans; having failed to persuade the king to continue the war without
the French, he resigned as prime minister of Piedmont and temporarily
retired from politics. But, interestingly, La Farina for the National Society
adopted a more conciliatory tone and insisted nothing had been changed by
Villafranca. This line seemed to be endorsed by Garibaldi, who issued a
proclamation on 23 July which acknowledged the help given by Napoleon
and ‘the heroic French nation’ and insisted that Italy's future still lay with
Vittorio Emanuele.63
In private, however, it was clear that Garibaldi did not accept the peace.
He pleaded personally with the king to be allowed to continue the
nationalist struggle; he told the king that he wanted to liberate ‘enslaved’
Venetia and the other fifteen million Italians in the peninsula, and ‘to repeat
your cry of national war along the Appennines and the two seas [the
Tyrrhenian and the Adriatic]’.64 He focused his attention on central Italy,
where it was obvious that the Habsburg rulers could not be restored without
a struggle. On 19 July, he wrote to the Tuscan leader Montanelli that, if
offered, he would accept the command of troops in central Italy, and on 27
July he repeated his commitment to (the pro-Piedmontese but also ex-
Mazzinian) Antonio Mordini, telling him, ‘in any case I think it is
indispensable to arm everyone to the death, to bring everyone together
whenever we can and to close ranks in the most complete harmony’.65
Garibaldi's response to Villafranca – maintaining a public loyalty to the
king while in private rejecting and plotting against the political line
endorsed by the same – represented the continuation of a policy which he
had long pursued, and which had determined his participation in the
National Society and his rapprochement with Cavour before 1859. Still,
there was no doubt that Villafranca revealed cracks in the façade of unity
and ‘harmony’ that he and the National Society had so carefully
constructed. Henceforth, some kind of clash between Garibaldi's heroic
vision of a ‘nation-at-arms’ and Cavour's cynical mix of royalist liberalism
seems to have been inevitable. Garibaldi's own discomfort and frustration
were expressed bluntly in a letter he wrote on 27 July to the founder of the
National Society, Giorgio Pallavicino Trivulzio, ‘I am with you, with
Vittorio and with Italy; I despise all the rest and I hope that before too long
we will rise again on the battlefield and finish it off.’66
From Villafranca onwards, Garibaldi sought repeatedly to force the
government's hand, but he faced difficulties and obstacles at every turn.
First, he agreed to resign his commission in the Piedmontese army and to
accept the command of troops in central Italy where, despite the armistice
agreement, the provisional governments had remained in control.
Immediately he began to make plans for the new army; he wanted the
volunteers to be transferred to central Italy and he invited his closest
officers – Medici, Bixio, Cosenz – to join him.67 However, to his great
irritation, he found himself placed as second in command to General
Manfredo Fanti, or ‘at the third level’, as he put it, also behind Generals
Roselli and Mezzacapo.68
Garibaldi responded by issuing a series of public appeals to the people of
Italy, encouraging them to take arms and calling for military action to drive
out the foreigner. He told the people of Tyrol they had not been forgotten;
he called on ‘our brothers in Naples’ to join their brothers in northern and
central Italy; and he invited the soldiers in the Papal States to fight with
Italy for liberty and unification. These appeals appeared in newspapers and
were published as flyers; according to one report, ‘thousands’ of copies of
his appeal to the Neapolitans were circulated in the capital and its
provinces.69 Most importantly, he opened a subscription for a ‘Million
Rifles’. Its aim was to raise money for a new volunteer national guard,
‘made up of every man able to carry a firearm, divided into three
categories’, or a mass army organised according to physical capacity; the
older and more infirm were to be included but confined to policing the
cities, while the more active were to be organised into mobile columns.70
The fund was an implicit rebuke to Piedmont for its material reliance on the
French military. The Garibaldian programme, Benedetto Cairoli wrote on
25 September, was ‘not local defence but national war’.71
Strengthened by his appointment as president of the revived National
Society, Garibaldi's ‘Million Rifles’ campaign gathered pace. Accepting the
presidency from La Farina (who maintained practical control of the
National Society), he announced that he looked forward to the ‘redemption’
of Italy: ‘we will not lay down our arms while a palm of our land remains
unredeemed!’72 Mazzini arrived in secret in Florence, with money from his
English friends. Although it is not clear that Garibaldi was in touch with
Mazzini, he did not entirely exclude conspiracy, if the recruitment of his
lover, Esperanza von Schwartz, in a highly secret mission to Messina is any
indication.73 Garibaldi also organised an office for the Rifles Fund, with
Enrico Besana as director, and he ordered clothes for the soldiers.74
Committees were formed in Bologna, Milan and New York; money came in
from Tuscany, the Romagna and Lombardy; and Pallavicino of the National
Society ‘supported it vigorously’.75
That Garibaldi's fame continued to grow is indicated by the increasing
number of public demonstrations in his honour in central Italy. ‘Garibaldi is
at last in Florence’, Thomas Trollope wrote to the Athenaeum magazine,
‘[y]esterday he tried hard, but in vain, to preserve his incognito, for brave
“Gallibardi”, as the Tuscan lower classes … invariably call him, is no lover
of noisy demonstration.’ But he was caught by them in the Piazza della
Signoria ‘in a tempest of enthusiastic welcome, and could only extricate
himself at the cost of a short address to his welcomers’.76 Even an
apparently private visit to his wife's grave in Ravenna became the occasion
for nationalist demonstrations, and for a speech in which Garibaldi called
for contributions to the Million Rifles Fund.77 ‘This man [Garibaldi] enjoys
an immense, universal and almost limitless popularity’, the Tuscan leader,
Bettino Ricasoli, wrote in October; ‘[w]e are all aware of the prestige which
the name of General Garibaldi brings with it’, admitted General Farini at
the end of the same month.78
However, in mid-November Garibaldi took a step too far. Stationed on
the frontier with the Papal States, he responded to the false news of an
insurrection in the Marche, and prepared his army to help the rebels. But his
order to invade the Marche was cancelled by the Piedmontese army
(Generals Farini and Fanti), and Garibaldi, summoned to Turin by the king,
was removed from his command in the Romagna. Even this setback failed
entirely to stop him, however. He issued a proclamation ‘to the Italians’ in
which he announced his retirement from the army and referred to
‘underhand tricks and continual constraints’ on his freedom of action; he
announced that the subscription for a Million Rifles remained open, and
told his colleagues in the fund to carry on their activities because ‘[w]hen
the day of battle returns, I will take one of those guns offered to the
fatherland by its loving children and I will rush into battle with my old
companions’. He declined the king's offer to re-appoint him general in the
Piedmontese army because it would deprive him of that freedom of action
‘with which I could still be useful in central Italy and elsewhere’, although
he did accept the gift of a shotgun and he seems to have carried on wearing
a general's uniform.79 As Trevelyan comments, this quarrel in the autumn of
1859 marked the re-emergence of a ‘more dangerous and intractable
Garibaldi’: ‘the long honeymoon of Garibaldi and the cabinet of Turin was
at an end’.80
Relations did not improve thereafter. More than ever before, according to
Raymond Grew, Garibaldi became ‘the symbol of a program which
competed with Cavour's’. In December, he resigned from the presidency of
the National Society. He drew closer to the left deputy Angelo Brofferio,
who had begun to organise an increasingly vituperative campaign against
Cavour, and he endorsed the programme of Brofferio's Liberi Comizii, set
up as a rival to the National Society. When the Liberi Comizii ran into
difficulties at the end of December, Garibaldi set up his own political
organisation, the nation-at-arms (Nazione Armata), with openly military
aims.81 His contempt for Cavour and parliamentary government became
more unequivocal. He confided his view to Pallavicino that ‘our good
Vittorio Emanuele’ should ‘put one of his boots into the head of the
Minister and keep for himself alone the army and the Italian nation, with
which he could accomplish miracles’.82 His public speeches and published
proclamations were equally inflammatory. In a speech published in
L'Unione on 14 December, he recalled past examples of ‘female patriotism’
and asked Italian women to give their ‘surplus’ to Italy; on the 18th, he
challenged the idea of the regular army and called for the national guard to
increase its numbers; and on 24 December he addressed the students of
Pavia University in a barely coherent tirade against ‘a few wicked men’,
priests and ‘the cancer called the Papacy’. Announcing the formation of the
nation-at-arms on 31 December, he looked forward to the day when,
‘[b]ound together in a single phalanx, we will have from that moment but
one enemy, the foreign oppressor, and we will live with one hope, Italian
freedom’.83
Garibaldi's activities seem to have been connected to a plot between the
king and Urbano Rattazzi, Cavour's great rival in parliament, to prevent
Cavour forming a new government. If so, they failed in this objective, as
Cavour was recalled to power in late January 1860. Already, only four days
after its foundation, Garibaldi had been told by the king to dissolve the
nation-at-arms. He announced its dissolution in a ‘Proclamation to the
Italians’ on 4 January, pointing to the fear it aroused among ‘corrupters and
bullies, as much within as outside Italy, [where] the crowd of modern
Jesuits took fright and cried anathema’.84 Even for those on Garibaldi's
side, the whole episode seemed proof of his political clumsiness. The
British ambassador to Turin, Sir James Hudson, described him as a ‘well-
meaning goose’,85 and Pallavicino observed, ‘he is not an eagle but a lion.
The lion is distinguished by his strength, and not by his intelligence.’86 His
close friend Medici lamented that: ‘Our poor friend Garibaldi … allows
himself to be persuaded by discredited men … he ruins himself in times of
inaction; he talks too much, writes too much, and listens too much to those
who know nothing’;87 while the Sicilian revolutionary Francesco Crispi
condemned him for being ‘as weak as a woman … [he] allows himself to be
… taken in by the very first person who comes along’.88 Instead of being a
means of relaunching the military struggle against Austria, as Garibaldi had
hoped, the nation-at-arms had added to his reputation as someone who, in
G. M. Trevelyan's words, ‘did not understand European politics’.89
However, it is worth remembering what Garibaldi had achieved through
this frenetic activity. He had sought, and partly managed, to maintain the
nationalist organisation and promote international publicity for Italy after
the end of the war with Austria. He had established himself as an
unassailable force in Italian politics (‘one of the greatest forces’, admitted
Cavour), and his personal popularity grew after Villafranca. Garibaldi had
‘in his hands the people of Italy’, according to Bertani.90 As one enthusiast
wrote to him from Modena after his resignation from the army: ‘We are
faithfully awaiting Your return, because we hope that our cause will make
its ultimate appeal to the Tribunal of Arms!’91 At the same time, his
reputation for political ineptness could work in his favour, since it added to
his standing as a man of affection and integrity. Garibaldi had a warm and
tender heart, the poet Walter Savage Landor wrote to The Times: he was
brave in battle and careful of his men.92 Most importantly of all perhaps,
and thanks to his tireless publicity efforts, his Rifles Fund amassed
significant amounts of money and significant amounts of goodwill. One
English manufacturer of breech-loading rifles wrote to Garibaldi in
December that to honour the ‘illustrious son Freedom!’ he would
‘cheerfully’ waive all the patent and service charges relating to their
supply.93 These achievements were to prove vital to the success of his
spring expedition to Sicily; the expedition itself was paid for by the Rifles
Fund and other related subscriptions organised during these months.94
From Nice to Sicily

After the failure of the nation-at-arms, Garibaldi withdrew once more from
public life. His political troubles seem to be reflected in his personal life:
during the summer of 1859, at the age of fifty-two, he had fallen violently
in love with Giuseppina Raimondi, an eighteen-year-old girl from a noble
family, and proposed marriage to her.95 However, his passion for
Giuseppina did not stop him from falling in love with another woman, the
Marchesa Paulina Zucchini, in October, to whom he also proposed
marriage; nor did it prevent him from writing fervent letters to Teresa Araldi
Trecchi, the sister of a fellow soldier, or from declaring infatuation to a
Sofia Bettini, whom he had met in Staten Island and who had written asking
for his autograph. Earlier in the year, his housekeeper in Caprera, Battistina
Ravello, had given birth to his child, Anita, and throughout this time his
close relationships with Esperanza von Schwartz and Maria della Torre
continued (although Esperanza was apparently unhappy about his
relationship with Battistina).96 All this sexual activity reached crisis point in
January when he married Giuseppina, only to reject her on the day of their
marriage after he discovered her involvement with another man, and that
she was pregnant. He wrote furiously to Lorenzo Valerio that he wanted
nothing to do with her or her ‘foul and loathsome’ family, and that she
should be prevented from using his name. In February, he wrote again to
Valerio that he and Giuseppina could be divorced, as their marriage was not
consummated: he had had sex (‘copulations’) with her in December, but not
after 20 January, ‘so that since the marriage took place on the 24th and not
having copulated again, I think that the marriage can be considered
unconsummated’.97
It is difficult to know what to make of Garibaldi's behaviour towards
Giuseppina. His treatment of her (he never forgave or acknowledged her
again) is certainly interesting as it reveals to us less attractive aspects of his
private life and personality, otherwise closely guarded ‘off-stage’ at
Caprera. His passionate letters to her, and his violent overreaction to her
conduct when he was doing the same as she was, suggest either personal
confusion or considerable hypocrisy, or both. Equally, and most rarely of
all, his letters to her give us an insight into his own view of his fame and its
purpose:

Adorable Giuseppina! I am divided by two sentiments which trouble me to an unimaginable

extent: love and duty! I love you with all my heart … Here is the voice of duty: I have in the
island a common woman [una donna plebea], and with this woman I have a child; this would
be a minor obstacle, because I can't love her any more …. [but] uniting with you,
mostbeautiful maiden! I would deny that aspect of self-denial which is part of the popularity
which I enjoy and which I can use for the good of the fatherland, when Italian matters call me
once more to lead soldiers they will say of Garibaldi: he has intrigued fortune! … Answer me
quickly! I am in such a state that I can't wait! … For God's sake don't get angry! With someone
who worships you!98

Despite his fears, the newspapers mostly kept quiet about his affair and the
fiasco of his marriage, reflecting a general, if somewhat surprising,
reluctance to comment on the more ‘scandalous’ aspects of his private life.
The New York Times published a letter defending Garibaldi and Raimondi's
characters against ‘a most infamous aspersion’ in ‘one or two of the City
papers’;99 but publicly little more than vague rumours circulated. Yet that
people knew about his disastrous marriage is suggested by the private diary
of Horace de VielCastel, a Bonapartist writer:

Garibaldi … married a young girl, the heroine of a romance … as beautiful as anything etc.
etc. … Garibaldi, although a republican hero, allowed himself to be swayed by every vanity:
the old partisan found it quite normal that a young girl of seventeen should be madly in love
 with him, so he married her. But, oh bitter disappointment, this enchanting young girl ‘was
four months pregnant!’100

His comments suggest that Garibaldi was not wrong to worry about his
romance damaging his ‘noble’ reputation.
Following these personal and political problems, Garibaldi withdrew to
Caprera. ‘You have been forced to renounce the Presidency of the nation-at-
arms as well?!’ one correspondent wrote to him; ‘once again I have
preached in the desert’, Garibaldi wrote to Medici.101 He spent the whole of
February and March at Caprera, refusing all attempts to get him involved
with the nascent rebellion in southern Italy. Although he did what he could
materially to assist the Sicilian revolutionary, Rosolino Pilo, who was
planning a revolt in Sicily, he also felt it necessary to tell him that ‘in the
present time I don't think that a revolutionary movement is appropriate in
any part of Italy, unless it has a really significant chance of success’.102
That he had chosen once more to take up a life of semi-exile and was
planning to pursue politics by another means is indicated by the decision to
work on, and try to publish, his memoirs. After his resignation from the
army, he wrote to Esperanza von Schwartz asking her for the manuscript
back. In January, Alexandre Dumas sought him out in Genoa, and shortly
afterwards Garibaldi sent his memoirs to the French novelist.103 It was clear
that there was considerable public interest in anything written by Garibaldi.
As William Thackeray wrote to him from London in February: ‘We have
500,000 readers. How many more should we have for an article by you?
Biography, Italy, America, military tactics … how grateful our public would
be for any contribution from your pers[on].’104
Everything changed, however, with the news at the end of March that
Cavour had ‘signed away’ the provinces of Nice and Savoy to France.105
The cession of these provinces was the price asked by Napoleon III for
French agreement to Piedmont annexing Parma, Modena, Tuscany and the
Romagna, and was immensely unpopular, severely damaging Cavour's
reputation at home and abroad. Garibaldi's reaction was expressed
succinctly in a letter of 26 March: ‘My native city is in danger of falling
into the claws of the lord protector … Thirty years of service for the cause
of popular freedom: I will only have won the servitude of my poor land!’106
In the general election held shortly afterwards, he was returned as a member
of parliament, and went to Turin determined to speak against the annexation
(which was due to be sanctioned by plebiscite on 15 and 16 April). His
speech was applauded but changed nothing (‘I knew it would be all a waste
of time and breath’, he told an Englishman who had accompanied him);107
and he hatched a plan to travel by ship to Nice, seize the ballot papers and
burn them, thus postponing the plebiscite and giving himself more time to
stir up enough publicity to prevent the annexation from ever taking place.
He decided against this, however, and agreed instead to lead an expedition
to Sicily. Encouraged by Rosolino Pilo, an insurrection in Palermo in early
April had apparently spread to the countryside, and the Bourbon
government faced a serious crisis.108
But Garibaldi remained far from convinced by the revolution in Sicily.
He lost his nerve more than once before the final departure with his
volunteers from Quarto near Genoa in the early morning of 6 May. The
news coming in from Sicily was confused, and increasingly suggested that
the revolution had failed. In mid-April, 12,000 firearms bought by the
Million Rifles Fund for the expedition were seized in Turin, on the orders of
the Piedmontese government. Cavour's general attitude, typically equivocal,
was largely unhelpful.109 More moderate colleagues, such as Giacomo
Medici, also tried to stop Garibaldi from going.
So it is not clear why exactly Garibaldi did decide to leave for Sicily to
help the revolution, although endless efforts at persuasion by Francesco
Crispi played a key role.110 Crispi was helped by the presence of Nino
Bixio and the Sicilian baron, Giuseppe La Masa, both of whom were keen
to go. Garibaldi's decision may also reflect a highly charged emotional
state. The fragment of a letter to ‘a relative’, written on 25 April, gives us
some insight into his feelings:

Everything crushes and humiliates me, my heart is full of mourning. What should I do?
Abandon this place, which suffocates me and disgusts me so much that I feel sick. I will do so
soon, quite soon … But honest patriots will always be able to count on me. I will never ask if
an expedition is possible or not, so as to buy my fame … with success on the cheap. For me it
is enough that it should be an Italian expedition … In any case I have only one remaining
desire: To Die for Italy; and this destiny, these dangers I will risk earlier than I expected…111
The expedition, in other words, followed an established Mazzinian tradition
of commiting acts of martyrdom for symbolic purposes. Once again, it
reminds us of how much Garibaldi's political outlook and practice
continued to be determined by romantic tropes and Mazzinian
assumptions.112
Considerable momentum had been created by the continual arrival at
Garibaldi's headquarters in Quarto of volunteers who had heard about the
expedition and wanted to be part of it. There was a striking continuity
between the social and geographical background of these volunteers, who
eventually numbered just over a thousand, and those of 1859; and many, it
seems, had fought with Garibaldi the year before. They came mostly from
the cities of Lombardy (434 out of a total of 1,089), with significant
numbers from the Veneto and Liguria, and a roughly equal number from
Sicily and Tuscany. There were a few foreigners (notably some Hungarian
officers), and they were mostly, but by no means all, young (i.e. born in the
1820s and '30s). Many were professionals (lawyers, doctors), others were
from the lower middle class (artisans and shopkeepers), and a significant
number were also writers, journalists and artists.113 When it seemed as if
the expedition would be abandoned, some of these volunteers wept, others
swore, and a few sent a deputation to Garibaldi in an attempt to persuade
him otherwise, or at least to give them the money and firearms so that they
could go without him. The Tuscan writer, Giuseppe Bandi, then a young
man at the beginning of his friendship with Garibaldi, later recalled their
disappointment: ‘those poor fellows, who had spent the night singing happy
songs, who were convinced of going on a glorious voyage to the island of
the Vespers, adorned with all the poetry that can dance in the head of young
people’.114 Their presence at Quarto is evidence of what the New York
Times called at this time ‘the magic of [Garibaldi's] name’, around which
had begun ‘to cluster the most passionate hopes and the loftiest aspirations
of the patriots of Italy’. Their enthusiasm for the expedition was a clear
response to Garibaldi's call to the political generation of 1848 and '59, and
proof of their political and emotional engagement with the Risorgimento
ideals represented and pursued by him.115
Finally, during the night of 5 May, a small group led by Nino Bixio
seized two steamships in Genoa from the Rubattino shipping company in
order to transport the volunteers to Sicily (they had already managed to get
hold of some old rifles from La Farina). They took the two ships, which
they had renamed Piemonte and Lombardo, to the nearby rocks at Quarto,
where the volunteers (including Crispi's wife, Rosalie) who had gathered
there during the previous days embarked for Sicily. One of Garibaldi's last
acts before leaving his bedroom at the Villa Spinola to go down to join his
volunteers was to change his clothes. Gone was not just the Piedmontese
uniform but also the dark gentleman's clothes in which his other public
appearances had been made during the previous decade. In their place, he
put on grey trousers and a red shirt and tied a silk handkerchief around his
neck; he came out of his room wearing this outfit, with a poncho over his
shoulders and on his head a black felt hat.116 His reportedly radiant
appearance left no one in doubt that Garibaldi the revolutionary had
returned.
 CHAPTER 7

FASHIONING GARIBALDI

Events were to prove Garibaldi right in one sense. The peace of Villafranca
was by no means the end of the affair; rather, it was just the beginning of a
rapid series of events which culminated in Garibaldi's expedition to Sicily
in the spring of 1860, and which were drastically to alter the political map
of Italy and European diplomatic relations. Just as remarkable was the
public response to Garibaldi and the wars of Italian independence.
Enthusiasm for Garibaldi spread across Europe and to the United States,
and publications about him found a wide readership in France, Britain and
Germany, as well as in Italy itself. A particular feature of these non-Italian
publications was the free mixing of history and invention, and the effect of
these developments was to produce a new image of Garibaldi with a general
European-wide appeal, in which his radicalism tended to be toned down or
at least depoliticised. Yet, as we shall see, this new image produced its own
tensions and political contradictions, and did not go unchallenged.
A media war

The war of 1859 was the most newsworthy event of the year. Following on
from the Crimean War in the mid-1850s, and coming before the American
Civil War of the 1860s, the reporting of the 1859 war in Italy was, like
them, affected by a new public and ‘media’ engagement with warfare. This
‘enormous demand for information and newspapers’ was made possible and
encouraged by the new advances in communication and publishing.1 The
significance of photography in raising public awareness of these wars is
well known,2 but perhaps of more immediate importance in explaining the
wide coverage of the 1859 war in France, Germany, Britain and the United
States, as well as in Italy, was the development of the telegraph. The
telegraph allowed correspondents to send their reports, and officials their
dispatches, to the newspapers on a daily (if not more than daily) basis; here,
the Reuter telegram company (set up by Baron Julius Reuter in 1851),
which sent news of the battles and Napoleon III's dispatches to the
European press, played a crucial role in publicising the war and providing
newspaper editors with regular copy.3 Equally relevant in accounting for the
prominence of the war was the extent to which, in the absence of
functioning copyright laws, papers and pamphlets could use information
and directly reproduce articles from other newspapers, so that any one
episode could be discussed several times in different reports in a single
issue of a newspaper.
From the outset of the war, all foreign eyes were fixed on Italy and each
battle in the war, especially Solferino, was frontpage news.4 The New York
Times correspondent sent back detailed letters about the battle, and the
paper also published a large map of the battlefield;5 the London Times
coverage of Solferino (‘one of the greatest battles of modern days … a
gigantic duel’, according to a correspondent) included Reuter's telegrams,
extracts from French newspapers, official bulletins and reports from all
three armies, and eyewitness accounts sent in from correspondents stationed
on both sides of the conflict.6 Early in the following year, The Illustrated
London News published a special colour supplement on the battle of
Solferino.7 There was also a broad public interest in the war in Britain and
the USA, where it seems to have become something of a spectator sport.
One Italian journalist, Charles Arrivabene, noted the presence of British
tourists visiting the battlefields near Brescia, and states that this was ‘by no
means rare at that time’. Sometimes the men ‘were loaded with all sorts of
projectiles and arms’, souvenirs bought from peasants at the Solferino
battlefield, although the ladies were content to collect ‘stones, flowers, and
even branches of slender trees, in commemoration of the places they had
visited’.8 Public engagement with the war is also suggested by the
production of souvenirs to commemorate battles and the main protagonists;
these included plates, scarves, fans and medals.9
Of course, not all the press was in favour of the war, and some journalists
focused attention on the suffering it caused. For instance, accounts of the
terrible bloodshed (‘carnage’, according to a Times reporter)10 at Solferino,
and of the absence of an adequate medical service to treat the wounded
(most notably in Henri Dunant's Un souvenir de Solférino) were
instrumental in the setting up of the International Red Cross in Geneva five
years later.11 Elsewhere, the war caused considerable political controversy.
Even in France, where Napoleon III was only too well aware of the
potential of new technology to influence public opinion and there were
strict government controls over the press,12 a debate emerged about
Napoleon III's involvement in the Italian war. Alongside the war itself, there
took place what one historian has called a ‘pamphlet battle’ between left
and right in France over the correct line to pursue in Italy: ‘journalists and
polemicists, famous writers, important statesmen and clerical personalities’
became actively engaged in a battle for public opinion which manifested
itself in print, and which extended and intensified in the following years.13
The campaign in Italy led to a deterioration in relations between Napoleon
III's regime and the Church in France, and it probably helped radical papers
like Le Siècle to survive government censorship, since Napoleon III needed
their support for the campaign.14
Le Siècle responded to this opportunity with a blanket reporting of the
war, which included reports from special correspondents, daily bulletins,
articles from other papers and profiles of the personalities involved. In
general and more than in Britain or the USA, in France the immediate
requirements of domestic politics intruded into representations and
perceptions of the war. Not surprisingly, the war was frequently presented
as a positive, patriotic experience, and here political commentaries on the
war were both subordinated to, and indirectly expressed as, public
entertainment. In this respect, the war also provided an occasion for
newspapers and magazines to make money.15
A prominent feature of the reporting of the war in France was the
production of regular supplements to newspapers and other serial
publications, and especially the use of illustrations and other visual
material. As early as April, the Paris magazine L'Illustration told its readers
that it was preparing an atlas of the war and had sent correspondents and
established contacts throughout the likely theatre of war. The following
month, the magazine increased its circulation and gave its readers a
coloured map of Italy and four engravings of the soldiers' departure along
with many other illustrations. The magazine, which emphasised that the
French progress in Italy ‘had been simply one long triumphal march’,
continued to cover the war throughout the summer; the edition of 28 May
dedicated a whole section to a description of the physical landscape of
northern Italy with illustrations of lakes and mountains. In effect,
L'Illustration sought to present the war as a great patriotic adventure and
relied heavily on the travel guide formula.16
L'Illustration's recasting of the war as public entertainment seems to have
been popular, and was adopted elsewhere. Thus, the more modest Journal
pour tous, with poorer reproduction values than L'Illustration, published a
regular illustrated supplement to the war – La guerre d'Italie. Récit
hebdomadaire illustré – which appeared in twenty-six numbers during
1859.17 Perhaps most revealing of how politics and war could be reworked
and presented was the publication of a series of ‘war songs’, Souvenirs de
la guerre d'Italie, by a group of radical poets and song-writers led by Pierre
Dupont. These songs – ‘The departure’,'The Alpine song’, ‘To women
during the Italian war’, ‘The cry of the Zouaves’, ‘The Piedmontese girl’,
‘Garibaldi’ and so on – were published in serial form as part of the weekly
illustrated magazine, Chants et chansons populaires de la France, complete
with sheet music for piano. The accompanying illustrations again included
idealised patriotic representations and detailed depictions of soldiers and
battle scenes in Alpine environments.18 Nor was this type of reporting a
purely French phenomenon; elsewhere, public interest in the war blended
seamlessly with more traditional, ‘picturesque’ perceptions of the Italian
landscape to produce an essentially escapist narrative of events. Much of
the coverage offered by The Illustrated London News resembled a travel
guide to northern Italy. It described the beautiful nature of the local scenery,
and maps, landscapes and cityscapes dominated its reporting, along with
illustrations of French troops departing, French troops arriving, and even
the public receptions held for Napoleon III.19
In Italy too, this pattern of reporting was largely followed in the liberal
press. Cheap maps, lithographs of battle scenes and portraits of the
protagonists were soon produced in large numbers and appeared for sale in
the main cities. Sales of such prints were probably responsible for one of
the most vivid examples of public engagement with the war, which was the
production of higher-quality, illustrated ‘Albums’. These were published in
series form, each instalment featuring an episode or personality from the
war along with an illustration, usually a good-quality portrait or a battle
scene. One Album storico–artistico, published contemporaneously in Turin
and Paris in forty instalments, used reports from the London Times to
produce what the editors called an ‘elegant volume’ with ‘40 beautiful
watercolour drawings of the main battles, drawn from life by the
distinguished Piedmontese artist Bossoli’, along with ‘twenty wonderful
portraits’. We know very little about the commercial success of these
ventures, but a ‘sequel’ was produced the following year, in which the
author referred to the ‘extraordinary approval’ of the 1859 album, which
indicates that, at the least, the format had proven popular.20 That these
albums were indeed popular is also suggested by the publication of another
album on the 1859 war – L'Italia e i suoi difensori. Album storico–
biografico – which used a similar format, this time with a short history of
‘Italian resurgence [risorgimento] in the nineteenth century’, and more
emphasis on the biographies of the main protagonists.21
The General

Given his proven ability to be picturesque and to capture the attention of the
press and the public, it was perhaps to be expected that Garibaldi would
loom large in accounts of the 1859 war. The problem facing journalists and
editors in France, however, was his reputation as a revolutionary and an
enemy of France in 1849. The general response, by the non-clerical press at
least, was to de-politicise Garibaldi, and to present him as a kind of broad,
all-purpose hero, whose bravery was unparalleled but whose loyalty and
discipline were never in doubt. L'Illustration made no mention at all of his
politics and wrote only of his popularity and prestige. Garibaldi was the
‘illustrious leader’, ‘the intrepid general … the indefatigable Garibaldi’, an
‘intrepid soldier of Italian liberty’, and a useful ally of France who, ‘always
driven by his strong love for Italy, and powerfully attached to the cause of
independence’, had also been one of the first to ally himself with the king,
Vittorio Emanuele.22 Le Siècle was notable for its adulation:

Garibaldi! what a man! what prestige! He has the ability to excite everyone who sees him, who
follows him, everyone who comes near him. His name is on everybody's lips, in everybody's
heart … The rich man like the peasant has his portrait, his engraving or his lithograph … Both
 men are happy to see the hero of the day up close, and whose lively, piercing eyes are fixed on
one single point … Italy is his mother and his fatherland, he loves her, he defends her and he
wants her to be free. Danger does not exist for him: he is a soldier of liberty.23

In stressing Garibaldi's wide appeal (‘The rich man like the peasant has his
portrait’) and his overwhelming love for Italy, the publication was able to
dodge his republican past. Interestingly, the British and American liberal
press were also often as keen as the French press to stress Garibaldi's
decency and respectability; and this approach reflects a quite widespread
tendency to present the war, once it started, as a simple struggle for Italian
‘liberation’ and to emphasise the prevalence of political restraint and
moderatism.24
 9 Garibaldi by Gustave Doré. The artist seeks a compromise between
Garibaldi's romantic past and more conventional present by placing a cloak
over his uniform and placing him in a rocky landscape.
The iconography of 1859 departed radically from that of 1849 and
followed the lead given by Garibaldi himself and the Piedmontese in
stressing his ‘gentlemanly’ qualities and officer appearance. Echoes of his
unconventional past lived on. The Illustrated London News, for example,
showed Garibaldi on horseback in poncho and large hat, with a uniform
barely visible underneath, while the French artist Gustave Doré placed a
cloak over his uniform and showed him in romantic pose amid a rocky
landscape (see figure 9).25 His romantic side was particularly marked in
battle scenes, perhaps especially in representations of the battle for Varese:
here Doré produced a spectacular print of Garibaldi standing high on a
rocky peak with a jumble of men and horses rushing past him.26 Still by far
the most widely circulated representation of Garibaldi at this time was of
him in the Piedmontese general's uniform, with neat, welltrimmed hair and
beard: a sterner, stiffer and rather more banal figure than hitherto.
L'Illustration, for example, published a picture taken from a daguerreotype
of Garibaldi in Piedmontese uniform.27 Considerable effort was also made
to place Garibaldi among a figurative pantheon of generals and legitimate
national leaders. He appears in the Italian Album storico–artistico as a
general alongside the other generals of 1859, far down in a hierarchy which
includes the king, Cavour and Napoleon III. On the cover of the slightly
later album, L'Italia e i suoi difensori, he has moved to the head of the
group but is still surrounded by respectable figures (this time he is joined by
the Tuscan moderate leader, Bettino Ricasoli), and he appears inside as a
Piedmontese general identical to the others, using the standard military
iconography of the time (see figures 10 and 11). In a French colour print of
1859, Défenseurs de l'Italie, he stands, ‘Le Général Garibaldi’, with stern
expression and about as unattractive as he ever appears in print. He is below
Vittorio Emanuele in a stiff little group with Cavour and Generals Cialdini
and La Marmora.28 Henceforth, usually the only mention of Garibaldi the
bandit in the press was to remind readers that the Austrians treated him as
one, and this was taken as further proof of Austrian superstition and ill
intent.29
Similar prominence was given to the respectability of Garibaldi's
volunteers. They were presented as the best that Italy could offer, and no
mention was made of the tensions with the regular army. They were ‘the
elite of provincial youth’, in the words of L'Illustration, ‘young people,
robust, brave, enthusiastic, and within a short time, well disciplined’.30 An
illustration in Claude Paya's Histoire de la guerre d'Italie shows a group of
them enrolling; one man wears a beard and rough, rural clothes but the
majority are well dressed in frock coats.31 Among the ranks there were ‘a
large number of gentlemen’, according to a Times correspondent who saw
them in Como:
 sons or themselves small proprietors, farmers, and tradesmen … operatives and working men
from town and country; all men who had worked honestly for their living, or did not require to
do so, decently and comfortably dressed, and all wonderfully tidy after sleeping so long in
their clothes … quiet and orderly … respectable citizens fighting for their country, carrying
into war the same respect for life and property which they showed in peace.

10 ‘Italy and its defenders’: Garibaldi joins a pantheon of royal, military

and moderate liberal heroes. This image was evidently produced after
Garibaldi's expedition to Sicily – note the references to Sicily's broken
chains and the volcano (often used to represent the Risorgimento, especially
in southern Italy).
They sat at cafés to write letters home and, according to the correspondent,
‘some I saw in the handsome Cathedral, admiring it like ourselves’. Such
was ‘[t]he charm thrown by the hero of Montevideo over the whole Italian
population’ that, according to another Times correspondent, he had managed
to enlist ‘young men of the highest classes, artists, literary men, professors,
and scholars, in his ranks as mere privates’.32
Without necessarily denying Garibaldi's physical and personal attraction,
it is tempting to see in this emphasis on his personality a consensus to gloss
over his political beliefs and so minimise the divisions within the anti-
Austrian military coalition. Whatever the reasons, there developed a clear
and mounting press obsession with Garibaldi's looks and background in
1859. So, while both L'Illustration and The Times went ‘behind the lines’ to
Como to obtain interviews with Garibaldi, they sought the personality, not
his politics. The two French journalists – a writer and an illustrator – sent
back to their readers detailed descriptions of the man and his manner: ‘we
were well compensated for our trouble [in reaching Garibaldi],’ the
illustrator wrote, ‘by the friendly welcome of the General. His kindness is
immense; and while resolve is clearly written on his face, benevolence also
reigns there and makes his language and manners most pleasing.’ They
dined with Garibaldi, and drew his portrait, but apparently did not discuss
politics or the war.33
Two long reports from Times correspondents offer striking evidence of
the growing tendency to venerate every detail of Garibaldi's personal
appearance and manner. The first, in the form of a diary sent by an
Australian on a tour of Switzerland, admitted surprise at Garibaldi's looks:
‘From his portraits and warlike exploits I had pictured to myself a very tall
large man, of sallow complexion, with long black hair and beard, with
something of the romantic air of those Spanish guerrilla chiefs, who sung
their songs to the guitar or killed people with equal gusto’, so he could
‘scarcely believe’ that this ‘quiet, unaffected, gentlemanly man who entered
and sat down with us was Garibaldi’.

He is of middle height … a squareshouldered, deep chested, powerful man, without being at

all heavy … a healthy English complexion, with brown hair and beard, rather light, both
slightly touched with gray, and cut very short. His head showed a very fine development,
mental as well as moral, and his face is good, though not remarkable to a casual observer …
 but when he spoke of the oppression and sufferings of his country, the lip and eye told the
deep feeling long suppressed, and the steadfast daring character of the man … He has the calm
manner and appearance of the English gentleman and officer … it was palpable that, strong as
may be his impulses, they are thoroughly under control. Bold and enterprising even to
apparent rashness he is no doubt, but he is also cool and calculating … what impressed me
most was the mental calibre of the man.34

11 Garibaldi as a Piedmontese general, in a typical portrait from 1859.

Strong, intelligent and goodlooking but never overbearing; passionate and

driven but controlled, Garibaldi is idealised here as a typical, if unusually
attractive, English gentleman.
A month later, a Times ‘special correspondent’ started his report with the
following lines: ‘I am not greatly inclined to heroworship … but I have just
now travelled 150 miles to press the hand of Garibaldi.’ He found him ill in
bed, ‘with rather a young and good looking’ lady sitting next to him:

He has a bright, cheerful look; the colour of his skin and hair betoken a sanguine temperament.
There is not one of the bust, lithographs, photographs etc that are sold by thousands
throughout Italy and Europe as Garibaldi's portraits, that gives the slightest idea of the
expression of that noble countenance. There is not the least approach to fierceness or wildness
about the hero's countenance. He looks intelligent, earnest, benevolent, and affable in the
extreme … He has a fine head but not very massive; a large, but by no means broad face …
The hair is brownred, and has been rich and glossy. The eye struck me as light gray, but with a
tint of the lionred in it. His voice is clear, ringing, silvertoned. Nothing can equal the
gentleness, freedom and ease of his address.

Although the correspondent complained loudly of the prevailing tendency

to mythologise Garibaldi (‘it was neither fair justice nor good taste to
represent him as a truculent bandit or as a theatrical hero’), he allowed his
own imagination to run wild, associating Garibaldi with a scene from
Walter Scott's Redgauntlet and attributing to him an innate majesty: ‘I
fancied I saw the lionhearted King lying on his lion's hides, and his lovely
Queen a suppliant at his feet for the life of the Scotch knight. Truly
Garibaldi is one of nature's own kings and leaders to men.’35
An imaginary life

The fascination with, and fantasy about, Garibaldi's personal appearance

extended to his life story. During and after the war of 1859, journalists and
writers rushed to produce biographies of Garibaldi, indeed, no coverage of
the war was complete without an account of Garibaldi's life. For example,
the supplement to Journal pour tous included a serialised biography of
Garibaldi; the illustrated work by Claude Paya, Histoire de la guerre
d'Italie, was little more than a biography of ‘this famous man’; the New
York Times published a ‘Sketch of the life, character, and political opinions
of General Garibaldi’; and Harper's Weekly's account of ‘Garibaldi and his
legion’ was really a short account of his life, with particular emphasis on his
defence of the Roman Republic. The war ‘Albums’ published in Turin and
Florence in early 1860 also contained short biographies.36 By the summer
of 1859, biographies also started to appear in Milan and Florence. These
were mostly short, cheap and clearly rushedout pamphlets; the only
expensive production (a 160-page Biografia with some fine illustrations)
was little more than a pirated version of Cuneo's 1850 biography with
details of the 1859 war attached, and in the copy which survives in the
Biblioteca di Storia Moderna e Contemporanea in Rome the pages are all in
the wrong order, which suggests more haste than care in its preparation.37 In
Britain, a ‘Colonel Exalbion’ produced a substantial biography, Garibaldi:
his life, exploits and the Italian campaigns; while publishing houses in
Berlin, Weimar, Munich, Zurich and Haarlem all produced biographies of
Garibaldi.38 Above all, in Paris a huge number of biographies appeared,
with prominent writers such as George Sand, Alfred Delvau, Pierre Dupont
and Hippolyte Castille, among many lesser-known figures, giving their
versions of Garibaldi's life.39
There was nothing at all unusual about the production of, and public
enthusiasm for, biographies of Great Men in mid-nineteenth-century
Europe. In the case of Garibaldi, the main narrative of his life had been
established some time before, by Cuneo in 1850, and in 1859 English-
speaking readers had the additional benefit of Garibaldi's memoirs which
were published in New York by Theodore Dwight (and in London later in
the year).40 Almost all Garibaldi's biographers followed Cuneo's format.
They stressed his early life and appetite for adventure, his acts of heroism in
South America, the events in Italy in 1848–9 and so on, and some, as we
saw above, directly copied or abridged Cuneo's text with minor alterations.
Most also included a portrait of Garibaldi (always in military uniform),
sometimes associated with an image of Italy such as the tricolour; and
almost all made a great deal of the close relationship between the seafaring
life and his specially passionate nature. Only the references to Garibaldi's
life in Caprera and its symbolism were entirely new. ‘Don't laugh’, Delvau
told his readers, ‘at the sight of a lion turned into a shepherd, this
adventurer become an agricultural expert. Did not Cincinnatus, the Roman
dictator, return to his plough after he had nobly taken up arms to defend the
honour of his country?’41
 Even more than Cuneo's study, these biographies shared a tendency to
hyperbole, and even a kind of catchall hagiography in their approach to
their subject. Colonel Exalbion wrote that from an early age Garibaldi had
‘a spirit bold as that of any of the adventurers recorded in Tasso's pages’;42
while an anonymous French biographer described him as ‘dedicated since
childhood to this noble idea of Italian independence … caring not for
danger nor fatigue, always ready to go into battle, to risk his life at the head
of his plucky companions … how could you not love him?’43 For Hippolyte
Castille, Garibaldi was:

a man of extraordinary bravery … with a handsome countenance, well-built, full of strength

and agility, imposing, proud and theatrical … of a few words and many actions, generous,
tender … [a] blond head, calm, even languid, eyes … His life is but a series of adventures,
travels, loveaffairs, and of great swordfights, just like the novels of Ariosto.44

To his enemies, he was invincible and indeed, according to Castille, perhaps

he really was: hit by a bullet in combat in Rome, ‘[h]e pulled it out with a
smile and, holding it out in his hand, he showed it to his soldiers and
shouted: “They still can't hurt us!”’45 Nor were more serious writers like
Alfred Delvau and George Sand immune to his charms. Delvau wrote that
Garibaldi belonged to that category of ‘tigermen’ and ‘lionmen’: ‘he is the
knight of adventure, the valiant figure of legend, the Don Quixote of
patriotism’.46 Sand saw him as ‘a kind of personification of Italy reborn,
with her painful past, her poignant tragedies, her quiet patience, her vital
genius, and above all her hatred of the foreign yoke which silences in her all
vain pretence and all baneful discord when the hour has come to be or not
to be’.47
Despite the availability and widespread use of Cuneo's biography, a great
deal of what was published as ‘biography’ of Garibaldi in 1859 and early
1860 was pure invention. Many authors used the basic episodic structure
established by Cuneo, and went on to add embellishments, characters and
episodes of their own, additions which were then borrrowed by other
biographers to produce a narrative of Garibaldi's life which was heavily
fictionalised although based on a standard factual chronology. His early life
in Nice and his adventures in South America provided the largest scope for
narrative fantasy. The novelist Louise Goëthe describes Garibaldi's dramatic
birth in a boat in a storm, and this episode was borrowed by the author of
the nicely named Garibaldi et ses hommes rouges (‘Garibaldi and his red
men’) and by a German biographer, Ludwig von Alvensleben. Dupont and
d'Aunay (and later Alexandre Dumas) say Garibaldi was born on dry land,
but ‘in the room where Masséna was born’ (Masséna, a native of Nice, was
a Napoleonic general noted for his victories in Italy).48
Goëthe seems to have been the original source for an entirely new and
substantial episode in Garibaldi's life, after he fled Nice following the failed
conspiracy in the early 1830s. She reminds her readers that, ‘in the time of
which we speak’, Garibaldi ‘was a very handsome young man, of fine and
daring profile, with a look both soft and firm, hair like an eagle, and blessed
with prodigious strength and agility’, and that his life's story should be read
‘at night, in the moonlight, like an Ann Radcliffe novel’.49 Emboldened by
her comparison with this pioneer of the Gothic novel, Goëthe concocts a
Gothic episode for her bandit–hero. She says that Garibaldi, ‘like Rob Roy’
took refuge in the highlands of ‘the Black Mountain’ (presumably an
imaginary version of Montenegro) and became a tutor to Margarita, the
beautiful daughter of the Count of Ransbergue at his château. They read
books together and fell passionately in love, but when the nobleman
discovered them together, he was so infuriated that he struck Garibaldi
across the face with a whip. Garibaldi – ‘like a wounded lion’ – wanted to
stab the count, and was only prevented by Margarita's intervention. Instead,
he left the château and became a patriot–bandit. He returned, burnt the
château to the ground and carried Margarita off into the mountains to marry
her. Although Garibaldi was ‘hunted like a wild beast’ by the Austrians, he
and Margarita were happy and their love grew. Margarita made him a father
and he wrote her poetry: ‘I am King; my kingdom is the deep forest … My
voice, is a hurricane which wakes up nature … I am King, but outlawed,
worn down by the tempest, And I have no shelter to put over your head’.
But Margarita grew ill and died, and Garibaldi buried her in a rocky place
now known as ‘Margarita’. Since then, Goëthe tells her readers, Garibaldi is
a changed man, and seeks adventure and comfort where he can.50
Goëthe's episode appears in various German biographies of Garibaldi51
and even in a French biography by Juliette la Messine, which cites
Garibaldi's own memoirs as its source.52 The episode itself is entirely
emblematic of the mythologising of Garibaldi. There was nothing new
about his casting as a heroic character using tropes and techniques
borrowed from popular fiction; what was new in 1859 was the almost
unrestrained element of fantasy and the subordination of political discussion
when it came to selling his life to the reading public. At the same time, the
appearance of history – in the sense of biographical truth – was always
strictly maintained. For instance, Claude Paya's publisher claimed that his
biography was authentic thanks to the author's close ‘relations … with the
most important personalities in Italy’, although this was rather unlikely
since he had been in prison for ten years (between 1849 and August
1859).53
Historical authenticity was maintained in other ways too. All the
biographies discussed here are careful to give the date and place of
Garibaldi's birth (in Nice in July 1807), and to quote from his speeches and
use newspaper reports. Thus, Colonel Exalbion feels able to condemn the
‘inflated narratives and official falsehoods’ surrounding Garibaldi's part in
the war of 1859, and relies instead on ‘leading journals’ for his account. But
he also gives Garibaldi some extra exotic, and entirely imaginary,
adventures in South America: ‘On one occasion he rolled down a precipice,
and found himself in the embraces of a jaguar at the bottom. On another, he
with difficulty avoided the embraces of a huge serpent, thirty feet long.’ His
wife, Anita, had to confront ‘a body of mutineers’ repeatedly and once
nearly fell with her child ‘into a frightful mountain abyss’ because the rope
bridge she was on became entangled in the middle, leaving her suspended
halfway across.54
In Britain, Garibaldi enthusiasm took on a new guise with the
performance of two plays. The first, a oneact play called Garibaldi's
Englishman, was a satire on political celebrity. The protagonist, John Smith
(‘Garibaldi's Englishman’) is a crook and an impostor: he gives out locks of
hair and calls himself a lion, but his suitcase (with MAGENTA pasted on to it)
is full of pickles and dried sausages and he leaves a trail of dishonoured
cheques in his wake.55 Garibaldi, the other play performed in 1859, was a
more elaborate (fouract) piece which took Garibaldi from South America to
the Austrian war via the Roman Republic. It mixed ‘real’ people – Anita,
Manara, Bertani, John ‘Beard’ (Peard) – with more imaginary stock
characters like Garibaldi's ‘negro attendant’, Procopio, and a villain,
Mancini, who is in love with Anita and betrays Garibaldi. Garibaldi himself
is a bandit who first appears on stage (in Uruguay) carrying a gun and dead
jaguar over his shoulders: ‘Holloa! Procopio! Anita! Dinner for as hungry a
hunter as ever chawed beef! Holloa – Anita – mia! Dinner!’ Anita is
unaware that Mancini has stolen her daughter, also called Anita, and
brought her up as his own. In the play's climax, all the characters (except
Anita, dead at Rome) are reunited on the Stelvio pass in 1859. Procopio
discovers that Mancini's daughter is really the daughter of Garibaldi and
Anita (‘Oh Goramighty, bless you for sure you dat pickaninny. You dat little
Anita’); the daughter, Anita, understands why she has always loved
Garibaldi ‘even when hate of him was inculcated as a duty’; Garibaldi is
reunited with his daughter (‘Oh! Good God! Is this a dream or a delusion!
Anita's self the very face … My child! My child! Long lost – here to this
lonely heart’); and he fights and kills Mancini, whose dying words are: ‘My
curse upon you both through life and death, for ever’.56
The 1859 war helped commodify Garibaldi as public entertainment, and
brought him to the attention of a more popular audience. The main
characteristic of Garibaldi's transformation into popular spectacle was the
free mix of fact and fiction, especially when it comes to describing
Garibaldi's sentimental attachments. Apart from the invented ‘Margarita’
episode and the invention of a longlost daughter, the treatment of his reallife
wife, the ‘Creole’ Anita, is also worth noting. Garibaldi's French
biographers are clear enough about her death (pregnant, on the retreat from
Rome), albeit with embellishments and inaccuracies: Delvau, for example,
has her dying for three days under a blazing sun (‘[t]he Calvary of Christ –
the sublime crucifixion – only lasted one day. And Christ was well weary at
the last station of his Calvary!’).57 Another describes her death in the
mountains before reaching San Marino; while still another says she is killed
‘by the Austrians next to her husband’.58 There is also a general consensus
that she too was something special, ‘a heroine worthy of this hero! … a
great and proud Brasilian creole … who had followed her husband
everywhere, and who followed him to the end’; ‘a virile soul: dressed in
soldiers clothes’; ‘a great and proud creole … with flaming eyes,
magnificent black hair … Throughout the siege of Rome, our bullets
whistled past her ears without disturbing her.’59 Despite this, only a small
minority of them (Delvau, La Messine) get her name right. For the rest, she
is Léonta or Florita, an error whose origin is impossible to trace but which
is repeated in German and Italian biographies as well as in French
editions.60
A particularly fine example of novelist's licence dressed up as historical
fact is Ludwig von Alvensleben's biography of Garibaldi. In the
introduction, he states his aims very clearly. He wants to provide a
‘comprehensive and unbiased … description’ of Garibaldi's life; this is vital,
he tells his readers, because the man provokes such strong feelings and
responses. Thus, he has tried to find ‘as many sources as possible about the
hero of the day’, and took from the sources (which ‘contradicted each other
often in stark contrast’) everything that seemed to allow him to portray ‘the
human being Garibaldi’ (den Menschen Garibaldi), ‘as he is, his
weaknesses, his sins, where he did really commit them, not in a beautifying
sense, but also his better characteristics, amongst which his heroic
braveness’.61 Yet in spite of this admirable statement of commitment to the
German historical method, a great deal of von Alvensleben's Garibaldi is
made up.
For instance, the first meeting betweeen Garibaldi and Anita, a crucial
moment in the reader's emotional engagement with the hero, is pure
makebelieve. Their meeting takes place in a camp, where Garibaldi is being
held prisoner. She is called Florita, and is the daughter of a highranking
officer in Rosas’ army. Florita, in love with Garibaldi from afar, bribes the
guards to get into his hut. When she enters, he jumps up, steps towards her
and grabs her hand, pulls it to his lips and covers it with ‘fiery kisses’.
Before they can say anything, they fall into each other's arms. She tells
Garibaldi that she cannot tolerate the way he is being treated: he can be
free, the guards won't follow him, she has bribed them. He replies,
embracing her, that he won't leave without her, ‘my saviour angel’. She says
she is prepared to follow him, but only as his ‘lawful wife’: will he marry
her when he is free and as soon as a priest can be found? ‘I am not free,’
says Garibaldi, smiling, ‘since I am captivated by you, but to put these
shackles around me, that is my deepest wish.’ Florita ‘sank against his chest
and willingly moved her lips towards his glowing kisses, which she gave
back with the same fire’. They then escape, to the fury of Rosas.62
One other work on Garibaldi, produced somewhat later than the others
(in the spring of 1860) but belonging to the same fictionalised biography
format, is worthy of mention. The book is narrated in the first person and
claims to be Garibaldi's memoirs, written ‘from day to day, in the midst of a
life now as tranquil and serene as a pure and peaceful lake, sometimes as
violent and rough as a vast sea raised by unleashed winds’.63 It is also listed
as a copy of Garibaldi's memoirs in the catalogue of the Bibliothèque
Nationale de France, with the editors given as Pierre Dupont and Alfred
d'Aunay. In reality, it is another invented narrative, presumably the work of
Dupont and D'Aunay. The first fifteen or so pages, describing Garibaldi's
early life in Nice, is lifted from Cuneo. But the bulk of the 156-page
narrative consists of a madeup and complex story, involving Garibaldi's
love affair with the beautiful Lucia (‘thin, frail, elegant, with the proud and
contemptuous look of a duchess’), a famous actress with an extraordinary
background.64
It is Lucia who dominates the narrative of these ‘memoirs’. Garibaldi
meets Mazzini and learns to love Italy in a duel to defend Lucia's honour;
later, in a crucial episode, he sees off four bandits who are threatening her.
After the plot shifts to Venice, Garibaldi and Lucia meet a mysterious
Spaniard called Don Fanello. Upset by his presence, she confesses her past
to Garibaldi at great length. Fanello seduced her when she was fifteen, and
drowned her mother in the Venetian lagoon. Although she escaped, she
ended up in a castle with an old man, Don Fabiani, who (she tells Garibaldi)
‘abused my excessive trust in him … [and] made advances to me’, so she
was obliged to escape from him as well.65 Garibaldi kills Fanello in a duel,
and learns from Mazzini that Fanello was also an Austrian spy. He marries
Lucia and they join forces to fight for Italy.66 This entire, substantial (over-
100-page) account takes place before Garibaldi's departure for South
America in 1834. His adventures there and the events of 1848–9 and
thereafter are then described cursorily.
These ‘memoirs’ are a vibrant illustration of the creation of an imaginary
Garibaldi, along with a new set of adventures and companions, and its
narrative of murder, seduction and mystery is a nice example of the use of a
sensationalist style to reconstruct his life story. The memoirs are typical of
the format as a whole. Especially interesting is the continuing insistence on
the need to tell the truth about Garibaldi, so that even these false and largely
ludicrous ‘memoirs’ make a claim to realism by being narrated in the first
person, and they pretend to disparage the mystification of Garibaldi's
reputation and life:

Some present me as an extraordinary man, a hero, a man of providence; others make me, my
past, my present, my purpose out to be something quite hideous. The truth is that I am neither
that great person nor that bandit. … What I am is this: a patriot who loves his nation, ready to
gowhere the common good may call me, and not interested in private gain.67

Invented is Garibaldi's return to Caprera to see both his mother and father
die (his father's last words are ‘God, Italy, the sea …’); but the death of
Lucia borrows something from the story of Anita. Garibaldi's speech to his
soldiers before the war against Austria is imaginary but also uses elements
of his 1849 speech at the end of the siege of Rome. He tells them to expect
‘thirst and heat by day, cold and hunger by night … You are free to be shot
like dogs by a Croatian platoon, or to die with the sabre in your chest on the
corpses of your enemies shouting: Vive l'Italie!’ The memoirs conclude on
an openended but factual note. Garibaldi tells the reader that he has ‘rien’ to
say about ‘the expedition which I am planning for Sicily … I will soon be
in Palermo.’68
Given such a widely advertised dedication to the ‘facts’, and given that at
least some precise details of Garibaldi's life were generally available, it is
worth asking why these writers chose to invent so much of his biography.
The most obvious answer is that this kind of invention was not unusual.
Indeed, a rejection of conventional distinctions between fact and fiction was
a feature of French romanticism in the midnineteenth century; and the mix
of history and melodrama to produce ‘realism’ was especially prominent in
popular historical dramas and in the historical novel, the genre which had
such a strong influence on the construction of Garibaldi's biography as
exemplary life and which had already been used to great effect by Cuneo.69
In various portrayals of Garibaldi it is also possible to see a free use of the
Gothic style (Goëthe) and the sensationalist (Dupont and D'Aunay); here
historical events and the ‘real’ Garibaldi serve as a background to an
imaginary hero's adventures and struggles, much as they do in the
contemporary novels of Dumas and Hugo. The manifest taste for the more
picturesque and sexual aspects of Garibaldi's story (all the fantasy episodes
and characters serve to emphasise that side of his personality and image)
should suggest to us that many of these authors were simply following and
adapting an already popular romantic style. At the same time, some
biographers, such as Hippolyte Castille (whose biography of Garibaldi was
part of his second series of ‘Historical portraits of the nineteenth century’)
and the anonymous author of ‘Men of today’ (whose other subjects included
Emperor Franz-Josef, Lord Palmerston, General Filangieri and the prince
and princess of Prussia) had to make Garibaldi fit into an established
format, with a standard message, structure and page numbers. Here
historical reliability probably mattered less than the simple observance of a
biographical fashion.
One effect of these biographies is that Garibaldi's personal qualities – his
exotic lifestyle, unrestrained sexual appeal, prodigious strength – become
more immediately important than his politics. In fact, his politics are
seemingly reduced to a dutiful ‘decency’ and a vague commitment to
‘justice’ and ‘liberty’ for an Italy oppressed by Austria. So it may be that,
like the newspaper reporting of 1859, these imaginary biographies
deliberately attempted either to depoliticise Garibaldi or to diminish his
republican past. Perhaps most noticeably in the Garibaldi of Hippolyte
Castille, a liberal who had decided to cooperate with the regime, there is a
move to exalt Garibaldi's personal allure and political actions in order to
dismiss both as rhetorical flourish or as nothing more serious than a
political fashion (‘a man of extraordinary bravery, who seems to combine,
in his perhaps excessive and hyperbolic actions, all the heroic and epic
vigour of the Italian temperament’).70 Castille's political intention is equally
evident in the conclusion to the biography, where he reassuringly compares
the wild hero of Rome to the presentday Garibaldi, now an older, wiser and
much less radical soldier: ‘The Garibaldi of 1859 is not the same man as
1849. His hair has become grey, his spirit has hardened. He has fewer
illusions, and perhaps more ardour … today Garibaldi wears the uniform of
a Sardinian general … This life of devoted heroism has finally been blessed
with victory.’71
 However, the exaggeration of the picturesque can give us a very different
hero from the compliant general in Piedmontese uniform, and in some of
these biographies a more subversive intent can be discerned. A few of the
Garibaldi biographers – Paya, Sand, Delvau and Dupont – were radicals,
bohemian ‘outsiders’ and/or socialists, opposed to Napoleon III's regime.
Sand had socialist sympathies, she had been a friend and supporter of
Mazzini in 1849, while in 1859 she described herself as a ‘young
enthusiast’ for the events unfolding in Italy.72 Her Garibaldi (a sixteenpage
pamphlet) cast him as a popular hero; she claims that the ‘devout peasants
of Velay and the Cévennes’ hang Garibaldi's portrait ‘among the images of
saints’. What makes Garibaldi special, for Sand, is not his appearance but
his ‘personal thought … his moral work’, and here she is careful to define
the moral qualities necessary for political freedom:

he is of a rather delicate nature … he is softlyspoken, of modest air and refined manners, with
a great generosity and immense kindness tied to an inflexible resolve and a sovereign calm. He
is clearly a leader of men, but he leads by persuasion; he can only command free men …
There is a quality of enthusiasm and religion which has no counterpart in regular troops … a
small army of partisans, marching to its own tune with the sole concern to conquer or die.73

By likening Garibaldi's popularity to the appeal of a radical secular religion,

Sand comes close to recommending the original Mazzinian conception of
the democratic hero. Her praise of morality, ‘persuasion’ and voluntary
action can also be seen as a reminder of radical ideals.
Equally, Delvau and Dupont (the former best known for a Parisian slang
dictionary and for a series of bohemian and erotic novels; the latter a
socialist poet forbidden by the regime to talk about politics) seek out the
radical in Garibaldi. Both use fictionalised accounts to emphasise his
transgressive appearance and rebellious actions. There is a striking
similarity between the illustration for Delvau's Garibaldi and the
illustration for the song ‘Garibaldi’, published in Dupont's series Souvenirs
de la guerre d'Italie. Although the song itself was fairly conventional and
nonpolitical, the accompanying illustration was more risky: Garibaldi is
dressed in Piedmontese uniform, but his jacket is loose, even untidy, and his
trousers are baggy. He wears a scarf and braid around his neck, and a sash
tied around his waist; with his hat – a large ‘puritan’ affair with feather – he
waves on his men; and his firearm, complete with long, sharp bayonet, is
almost as large as he is. His beard is long, and in the background there is a
soldier, and a castle which look suspiciously medieval (see figure 12).74
Like Dupont's ‘Garibaldi’, Delvau's hero wears a uniform, but here too the
military iconography is persistently denied: Garibaldi's hair is long and
wavy, his eyes sloping and seductive, his stance more sensual than martial.
Behind him, three volunteers wear the ‘medieval’ outfits of 1849.
There is a great deal in both these pictures which seeks to remind the
viewer of Garibaldi's association with a bandit aesthetic and a medieval
past, and so with the republican and revolutionary ideals of 1848–9. Even
Paya, whose biography closely follows the regime's established text, and
whose illustrations show Garibaldi as a slim and elegant figure in
Piedmontese uniform, dwells at length on his defiant actions in Rome in
1849. There is an especially vivid picture of Garibaldi and his men in 1849,
on horseback and ‘[a]rmed with their lassos’, out catching cattle for their
food.75 In both Delvau's and Dupont's texts, moreover, there is a celebration
of all that is wild, unconstrained and excessive (and medieval) in Garibaldi.
He is Don Quixote, ‘Fra Moreale’, ‘Fra Diavolo’ and Roland/Orlando;76 he
is ‘ardent’, he fights duels and kills villains. It thus seems likely that,
operating within the constraints of press censorship, these writers
deliberately chose to create a transgressive Garibaldi, and that by stressing
the picturesque and romantic they sought to recall more radical forms of
political belonging.
Conclusion

In the London play, Garibaldi's Englishman, ‘John Smith’ has this to say
about his fame:

everybody takes me for Garibaldi's Englishman and stares at me admiringly – I think I could
make a decent thing of it were I to show myself at a shilling a head. It's very agreeable to be so
popular. It's astonishing the attention I get by it. Railway porters actually fight for possession
of me. Landlords, landladys and chambermaids give me the best rooms and the best beds –
waiters do come when they say ‘coming’ and cabmen are actually civil and content with only
twice their legal fare.
The war of 1859 played a central role in fashioning a Europe-wide cult of
Garibaldi. It was a leading part of, and contributed significantly to, a myth
of Italian resurgence, an entire narrative complete with minor characters,
and as much make-believe as historical fact. Garibaldi seemed to symbolise
all that was compelling (fair, heroic, poetic) about the Italian nationalist
struggle, and he developed an appeal sufficient to mobilise sections of
(mostly) urban society behind the idea of an Italian nation.
There seems to be little doubt about the popularity of Garibaldi. We can
perhaps raise questions about the numerous reports of patriotic
demonstrations and enthusiasm in 1859, which were described in the
previous chapter, since many of them were written later and with an
obvious political intent. The large number of articles, books and other
visual representations of Garibaldi is, however, clear proof of the spread of
the cult and of its commercial success; it is estimated that Paya's Histoire
alone had a circulation of 50,000 copies.77 Just as noteworthy is the
international reach of Garibaldi. Biographies and other texts were produced
in the USA, Britain, Holland, Germany, Switzerland and, above all, France,
as well as in Italy itself, and details about Garibaldi were copied and
reproduced by writers across national frontiers and languages. This
Garibaldi literature is a strong sign of the existence in the mid-nineteenth
century of a liberal and cosmopolitan reading community, international in
character but engaged with nationalism and nationalist struggle as an
idealised representation of itself.
12 Garibaldi as the hero of a popular war song: ‘Garibaldi’. This illustration
clearly rejects the traditional military iconography used in most
representations of Garibaldi in 1859.
It should be stressed that this cult of Garibaldi was not gender specific.
Although we know almost nothing about who read these biographies, a
significant number of those who wrote them were women. A woman,
Garibaldi's lover Esperanza von Schwartz, took much of the responsiblity
for the production of his memoirs. It is arguable that at least some of these
biographies were aimed also at women readers; the equal emphasis given in
many to Garibaldi's sensitive and sensual side, to his many romances and to
his love for Anita suggests authorial attention to a readership which, if not
exclusively female, was interested in something else, or more, than battles
and brave deeds. In this respect, the cult of Garibaldi both reflects and
addresses the existence of a female reading public, with its own tastes and
literary genres.
In this chapter, I have outlined the emergence and coexistence of two
Garibaldis: the real and the imaginary. As I have sought to explain,
Garibaldi was politically quite distinctive – someone who knew how to use
his physical charisma to shape and inspire the collectivity – and in 1859–60
he combined this with a great run of military success. These material
successes were helped, celebrated and reinterpreted by his imaginary
counterpart, the product of articles and biographies which followed separate
sets of political priorities and/or literary rules. This kind of coexistence of
the real and the imaginary is, of course, quite typical of myth, and it was
also a feature of mid-nineteenth-century literature, as writers experimented
with first establishing and then dissolving boundaries between fact and
fiction. In 1859 no obvious distinction was drawn between the political
leader and the literary hero. In the descriptions and ‘lives’ of Garibaldi,
documentary sources were alternately used, ignored and embellished to
produce an imagined narrative which was all the more potent by apparently
being true.
By the time Garibaldi sailed to Sicily in the spring of 1860, the original
Mazzinian purpose of creating a hero who would symbolise and publicise
the existence of an Italian people had been fully realised. Yet its extensive
success was not without problems. Politically, what Garibaldi stood for
could never be that clear; Garibaldi's purpose, for Cavour at least, was to
mask the realpolitik of 1859, and it is worth remembering that much of the
moderate leadership in this period rather despised his capacity to attract so
much public attention. Indeed, a deliberate obfuscation of the cult took
place, amply demonstrated in the iconography of 1859 with its endless
versions of Garibaldi looking awkward in a general's uniform. At the same
time, this blander version of Garibaldi never succeeded entirely in
obscuring the picturesque bandit, who reappeared in various guises in
contemporary illustrations and semi-fictionalised biographies, and whose
political message was much more subversive. We can conclude, therefore,
that just as the cult of Garibaldi became more widespread and successful, so
did it become more eclectic and ambiguous.
 It is possible to observe a tendency for the imaginary Garibaldi to ‘float
free’ of the politicians, or to take on a logic and life of its own. The
biographies of Garibaldi produced in 1859 and early 1860 were, after all,
also vehicles of entertainment, dependent on the skills of the individual
writer and the demands of his/her readers. In other words, the cult of
Garibaldi was fashioned and elaborated in 1859 in such a way as to make it,
if anything, more difficult to control from above by Italy's nation builders.
The popular/fantasy dimension to Garibaldi's political appeal was troubling
to Italian moderates and to the Piedmontese establishment, already wary of
him as a military leader. It may also lie behind the emergence of a substitute
element in the Garibaldi cult: that Garibaldi was no good at politics. This
view was to gain force in the years that followed, and involved both a
recognition of the power of Garibaldi and an attempt to belittle, and so
contrast, his significance.
I stress the political purpose of this view – that Garibaldi was politically
inept – because it is not entirely accurate. Garibaldi made political mistakes
in 1859 (he was plainly too trusting of Cavour), and his impatience with
political details and conventions let him down in central Italy during the
autumn and winter. But he was not incapable politically, and undeniably
possessed what we might call natural political skills which enabled him to
connect with individuals and with crowds, and which he used to pursue his
political ideals and place them permanently on the political agenda. His
speeches and behaviour in 1859 were at times overblown, but they could be
very effective, and were the expression of a political leader conscious of his
power and aware of how to use it. After Villafranca, as both contemporaries
and historians acknowledge, it was Garibaldi who provided the real
nationalist counterweight to the stabilisation of Piedmont's deal with
European diplomacy. It was he who helped keep the organisation and
momentum of the 1859 volunteer movement alive.
What Garibaldi made of the imaginary personality being created
alongside him is, unfortunately, not known, but he was certainly attentive to
its political possibilities, careful to foster it in his speeches and anxious to
protect its appearance. Ironically, however, for a reader with twenty-first-
century sensibilities, much of the dramatic tension of the Garibaldi story is
derived from the contradictions within it. We find revealing the clash
between cynical diplomacy and nationalist enthusiasm; we are intrigued by
the contrasts between a military leader and his heroic alter ego; and we are
amused by the gulf which separates the imagined tendernesses of a young
romantic lover from the jealous antics of a lascivious older man. In the last
case, the decision by journalists to suppress, apparently voluntarily, the
salacious details of Garibaldi's private life may now seem the most
interesting aspect of the story. By contrast, what seems to us absurd, and
interests us hardly at all, is the glorification of the 1859 war and of
Garibaldi's role in it. Yet by dismissing the cult, we fail to understand its
impact, and – as I have sought to show in this and the previous chapters –
the cult of Garibaldi was crucial politically. His ‘heroic’ example provided
focus and inspiration for nationalist organisations; his public actions placed
Great Power diplomacy, and the Piedmontese leadership, under significant
pressure; and his imaginary counterpart helped convince a broader
European public that Italy existed politically, and that it must be free and
independent.
 CHAPTER 8

THE THOUSAND

Miracle at Marsala

The expedition which sailed from Quarto for Sicily was ill supplied and
under-manned. This problem reflected the hurried circumstances of its
departure and Garibaldi's equivocal attitude, as well as the confiscation of
its guns by the Piedmontese government. After they left Quarto on 5 May,
Garibaldi's thousand volunteers put in at Talamone on the Tuscan coast.
There, Garibaldi put on the Piedmontese general's uniform which he had
brought along (‘[t]oday these clothes should be useful’, he is said to have
remarked),1 and talked the military commander into giving them some – but
not nearly enough – Enfield rifles and assorted ammunition. They also took
a couple of cannons and some other pieces of artillery of antiquarian value
which Garibaldi found in the old tower at Talamone. At Talamone,
Garibaldi gave a more formal organisation to the expedition – its motto was
proclaimed as ‘Italy and Vittorio Emanuele’ – and he sorted the men into
seven companies and appointed a General Staff which included Bixio,
Crispi and the Hungarian Colonel Türr. In the same days, in a controversial
decision, he sent off a small group of volunteers in an abortive attempt to
invade the Papal States.2
After Talamone, the volunteers set out for Sicily. The larger boat, the
Lombardo, was commanded by Nino Bixio, who seems to have spent much
of the voyage terrifying his men. He hit one of them across the face with a
plate and, according to one memorable description, summoned his men on
deck where he stood ‘stripped to the waist, bare-headed, irascible’, and
announced: ‘I'm young, I'm thirty-seven years old, I've been around the
world. I've been shipwrecked; I've been a prisoner; but here I am and here I
command! Here I'm everything, Czar, Sultan, Pope. I'm Nino Bixio!’3
Those on Garibaldi's Piemonte evidently had an easier time, chatting,
smoking cigars and trying to sing a hymn composed by Garibaldi.4 There
was some doubt about where exactly they should land in Sicily; indeed,
during the night of 10 May the two ships nearly lost each other before they
had decided on a landing place. But the following morning, as they were
sailing past the port of Marsala (a wine-trading area with a significant
British colony) in the direction of Sciacca on the south coast, they saw two
British warships in the harbour and decided to land there.
At Marsala, the expedition met with a real stroke of good luck. The
Bourbon garrison at Marsala had left for Trapani (the provincial capital),
and the Bourbon warships which had been in the harbour had sailed
southwards the previous night. This temporary absence of military defence
enabled the volunteers to make a very hurried landing on the long harbour
wall, even though Bixio had run the Lombardo aground at the entrance to
the port. One Bourbon ship did return in time to prevent part of the
disembarkation. However, its commander was worried by the presence of
British ships in the port and perhaps was also reluctant to fire on the town,
so he fired low, missing all the men who were running ashore with their
supplies. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the only casualties were one man
who was hit in the shoulder and a dog, although a Bourbon missile did
narrowly miss killing the English manager's wife in one of the wine
warehouses.
The first act of the garibaldini who got ashore at Marsala was to cut the
telegraph link with Trapani. The second – organised by Crispi – was to
persuade the town councillors to declare Bourbon rule at an end, and
Garibaldi, as the representative of Vittorio Emanuele, to be the dictator of
Sicily. Some of the councillors obeyed Crispi, but with considerable
reluctance. Generally, the volunteers – the vast majority of whom were
from northern Italy – met with very little welcome and a great deal of
suspicion in Marsala. One of them, Emilio Zasio from Brescia, remembered
their reception eight years later: ‘The people were bewildered, ignorant,
surprised by the news. We tried to encourage all of them, to raise their
enthusiasm with evvivas of every type, but with no sign, no response.’5
Only the Sicilians among them could communicate in (more or less) the
same language as the inhabitants of Marsala – a serious problem when the
expedition lacked even the most rudimentary maps of the territory they had
come to ‘liberate’. There were no great scenes of enthusiasm on either side.
According to the memoirs of another volunteer, the strong wine they were
given by a local man made them all feel ill (Crispi alone could handle it),
and they weren't even able to understand the time from the local clock.6 As
the writer Ippolito Nievo (one of the Thousand) wrote to his cousin, ‘[in]
Marsalla [sic] squalor and fear; the revolution had been put down
everywhere or more accurately had never existed’.7 Six weeks later, he
wrote to the same:

We, the first to land in Marsala, actually brought with us the news of the revolution which had
put us all at risk of drowning – In Lombardy it was said and it was written: Garibaldi has
touched dry land: the expedition is assured, Sicily is free. Instead we all said to each other –
We didn't die at sea, but ridding ourselves of that uncertainty, we have gained the certainty of
dying on dry land.8

This strange mix of political daring, military inadequacy, good fortune

and personal confusion lent – at least in retrospect – a miraculous quality to
the Marsala landing and the ensuing events. The truth is that the volunteers
were extraordinarily lucky not to be shot to pieces as they came ashore.
This luck stayed with them after Marsala. From there, they marched across
the plain towards the hill town of Salemi, where they arrived on 13 May.
Although the Sicilian leader, Giuseppe La Masa, had gone ahead of them to
warn the town of their arrival, it still caused a stir; one observer, Simone
Corleo, described his astonishment at seeing a number of ‘small groups’ of
forty to fifty men who walked up into town from across the plain, ‘without
firearms, a few with sabres, Garibaldi alone in a red shirt, the rest in
military uniforms or civilian dress … Tuckory [a Hungarian officer] in a
Hungarian uniform’.9
At Salemi, Garibaldi once again declared himself dictator of Sicily. He
also began to put together a heterogeneous military force. First, he declared
the military conscription of all-able bodied Sicilian males between the ages
of seventeen and fifty (this decree followed the plans made for the nation-
at-arms at the end of the previous year, and divided the men into three
categories, with the youngest going into active army service, and the older
men being involved with internal policing).10 He received reinforcements of
around a thousand extra men from the surrounding area, organised as
peasant irregulars, or into so-called squadre by La Masa. In addition, he
was joined by a radical Franciscan priest, Fra' Pantaleo, and called on the
‘good priests’ to lead the revolution against the Bourbons.11 At Salemi,
finally, he received the news that the Bourbon army had caught up with
him: a force of around 3,000 men under General Landi had blocked the
road to Palermo at Calatafimi, a few miles north-east of Salemi.
Garibaldi went out on the morning of 15 May to meet the Bourbon
troops, who were waiting for him on the top of a terraced hill outside
Calatafimi. Despite this strategical disadvantage, and being greatly
outnumbered in men and weapons, Garibaldi and the volunteers fought their
way determinedly and in bursts up the hill, using the terraces for cover. As
Ippolito Nievo wrote: ‘We thousand attacked, with the General in the lead:
every last soldier was used without pause, without care, and without
reservation because on that day rested the outcome of the whole
expedition’.12 In a final bayonet charge to the summit, the garibaldini
managed to scare the Bourbon soldiers into a full-blown retreat across the
countryside.
Victory at Calatafimi changed everything. Calatafimi, in Christopher
Duggan's words:

gave the expedition an enormous fillip, an aura of success, even of invincibility, and many
Sicilians who up to this point had been reluctant to commit themselves now threw caution to
the wind and declared openly for ‘Italy and Victor Emmanuel’. Garibaldi was no longer just
the commander of a band of ill-armed insurgents: he was the leader of an alternative
government to that of the Bourbons.13

After Calatafimi, Garibaldi pressed on towards Palermo via the Alcamo

road. When they reached the high plateau of Renda, with its view of the
plain of Palermo (the famous Conca d'Oro) and the city itself below, they
stopped and made camp. From there, Garibaldi and his General Staff began
to plan the invasion of Palermo. It was decided not to go straight down into
the town via Monreale, which was well defended, but instead to stay up in
the mountains and to move through them to Misilmeri, where they could
join up with more of La Masa's peasant squadre and enter the city through
Porta Termini to the south-east. In this way, they evaded capture by the
Bourbon army: they even sent their bags and wounded men south on the
Corleone road so that the Bourbons would believe they were retreating.
 Towards the end of May, the garibaldini had, in effect, disappeared and
the Bourbon army was congratulating itself on having seen them off into the
Sicilian interior. The men were exhausted and debilitated from sleeping out
in the mountains, often in the rain, and most still wore the now ragged
clothes and boots they had embarked in at Quarto.14 However, late on 25
May Garibaldi and his men entered Misilmeri and joined up with La Masa's
forces, and on 26 May they left for Gibilrossa, from where they planned to
descend the narrow path to Palermo. ‘It's Palermo or Hell now!’ Bixio told
his men.15 During the following night, keeping as quiet as possible, they
came down into the city, taking the Bourbon troops guarding Palermo by
surprise (‘total surprise’, Nievo wrote in his diary).16 After a brief skirmish
at the Ponte dell'Ammiraglio, and encouraged by Garibaldi on horseback,
they rushed through to Porta Termini, where they dismantled the temporary
gate under heavy fire and charged into the city as far as Piazza
Fieravecchia, at the time one of the city's main markets and known for its
revolutionary sympathies (the 1848 revolution had started there). From the
market in Piazza Fieravecchia, where they arrived at about four in the
morning and were reportedly greeted with some enthusiasm, Garibaldi's
army fanned out in small groups through the narrow streets. Garibaldi
himself led a group diagonally across the city to take the strategic points of
Piazza Pretorio (the seat of municipal government, from where the Bourbon
troops fled) and neighbouring Piazza Bologni, on either side of the Quattro
Canti (‘Four Corners’) at the centre of Palermo.
There followed three long days of brutal street fighting inside Palermo.
Barricades were erected across the main streets by the garibaldin and their
supporters; the main prison was opened; and the Bourbon warships in the
port fired on the city, causing great damage to property and loss of life.
Throughout this battle, Garibaldi maintained a great public calm. He made a
particular display of his indifference to the Bourbon bombs, and spent much
of these days sitting on the steps of the over-size Renaissance fountain in
Piazza Pretorio by the municipal government (which he had made his
headquarters), receiving guests and giving orders, while the bombs crashed
around him. On 30 May, the Bourbon government requested a truce.
Garibaldi put on his Piedmontese uniform once again, and went off to
negotiate terms on board the British warship Hannibal in Palermo harbour.
After much heated discussion, in which Garibaldi threatened to break off
negotiations and continue the fighting, an armistice was agreed, to last until
the following day; this armistice was subsequently extended until 6 June,
when the head of the government in Sicily, General Lanza, signed a
capitulation agreeing to withdraw all his troops (some 20,000 of them) from
the city.17
There was, and remains, something remarkable about the defeat of a
well-equipped regular army by a mixed group of ill-armed enthusiasts and
untrained peasants: ‘20,000 men capitulating to a handful of ill-armed
adventurers, that's an astonishing thing!’ the French dramatist Prosper
Mérimée exclaimed on hearing the news.18 ‘Garibaldi has achieved
wonderful results’, the philanthropist Lord Shaftesbury wrote in his diary:
‘It seems to me that God's protecting and accompanying power has repeated
for him the miracle of Gideon and his three hundred.’19 Luck played an
obvious role in explaining their success, especially in the landing at
Marsala. Just as important was the major crisis in Bourbon government.
This crisis was partly financial, as the Bourbon state had a huge public debt
by 1860; it was also partly diplomatic, reflecting an increasing international
isolation which had been accentuated by the defeat of its only ally, Austria,
in 1859 (whereas the nationalists were helped by the recent election of a
British government more favourably disposed to Italy).20 Also in 1859, the
death of Ferdinando II and the accession to the throne of the Two Sicilies of
his timid twenty-three-year-old son, Francesco, added a more general
problem of legitimacy and political authority; while in April 1860 the
insurrection in Palermo had expanded into the countryside, causing
widespread revolt, the spread of criminal activity and the breakdown of
local government.21 Put simply, by the time Garibaldi arrived in Sicily, and
although the original insurrection had been put down, the government was
weak, isolated and unpopular: ‘On the one hand was the dissolution of
government; on the other there was a spreading lack of confidence in the
capacity of the Bourbons to keep law and order’.22
This already critical situation worsened with Garibaldi's landing at
Marsala. Conditions in Palermo itself rapidly became so threatening that the
government was obliged to bring its troops into the city to protect itself; and
this action left the provinces dangerously unprotected. Where there were no
soldiers, revolts erupted. There were peasant uprisings in the provinces of
Girgenti (Agrigento), Messina and Catania, as well as in the areas nearer
Garibaldi's forces, and the numbers of criminal gangs – always a problem in
the Sicilian interior – increased rapidly. As Garibaldi advanced on Palermo,
the more liberal cities of Messina and Catania rose in revolt.23 Everywhere
public officials fled their posts, the police forces gave up their jobs,
telegraphic and mail communications were cut, and there was a run on the
banks.24 In effect, the state collapsed in Sicily in the spring of 1860, and
Garibaldi and his volunteers were able to step into this vacuum of power.
The role of good luck and good timing does not mean, however, that no
merit should go to Garibaldi and his colleagues for the conquest of Sicily.
Although I have emphasised the unpreparedness of Garibaldi's expedition
as it left Quarto, some aspects of a military strategy were in place before
they arrived. The most important of these, or the one that played the most
significant role in the immediate success of the Thousand, was the alliance
formed by Sicilian revolutionaries, and notably by Giuseppe La Masa,
Rosolino Pilo and Giovanni Corrao, with the rural squadre. The squadre
acted as a kind of guerrilla force, disrupting and cutting Bourbon supplies
and causing diversions, and they were undoubtedly of crucial help in the
taking of Palermo. Equally, the leadership showed real expertise in evading
capture in the mountains above Palermo. Here too, the local knowledge of
Sicilian revolutionaries, especially Crispi, who persuaded Garibaldi not to
go further into the interior but to stay hidden in the mountains and join up
with La Masa's squadre, was vital.25
The kind of warfare which Garibaldi had learnt in South America and
had always excelled in – travelling light and fast, using surprise to frighten
the enemy, relying on the skill and reckless courage of his officers – was
particularly suited to conditions in the empty Sicilian countryside, and to
conflict with an enemy which, however well armed, had already been
discouraged and dispersed by peasant resistance. Moreover, as Garibaldi
had long realised, motivated volunteers had a huge advantage over more
self-interested mercenaries and conscripts in close-combat situations where
the main weapon was the bayonet. Before the descent into Palermo,
Garibaldi was overheard telling the squadre chiefs ‘for the hundredth time’,
after they expressed concern about their lack of artillery, ‘that it was not
long shots which imposed on the wellarmed Neapolitans, but a determined
rush in advance’.26 The taking of Palermo was, in its way, an equal triumph
of military strategy and local knowledge. Apart from the crucial element of
surprise, the leadership was careful to choose one of the city's least
defended points, leading into a market area known for its revolutionary
sympathies, from where the volunteers could lose themselves in the city, if
necessary, or arrive very quickly at the seat of municipal government in
Piazza Pretorio, if they were more lucky. Finally, great use was made of
Garibaldi's leadership and reputation (and even his Piedmontese uniform)
further to demoralise the enemy. When the situation demanded it, Garibaldi
showed great skill in producing displays of prodigious courage (exposing
himself and his officers to enemy fire at Calatafimi), indifference to danger
(sitting in the open during the bombardment of Palermo), and grim
determination (threatening to break off negotiations for the truce). These
tactics were successful not just in purely military terms but also in helping
to intimidate the Bourbon leadership and its soldiers into surrender.
Problems of government

There was evidence of strategy and forward planning in the organisation of

the new government and its policies. Here the presence of Francesco Crispi
was central. Immediately after the victory at Calatafimi, Garibaldi
appointed Crispi as Secretary of State. Crispi went on to introduce a series
of measures designed both to reestablish administrative authority in the
island and to gain popular support for the regime. First, on 17 May, he
announced the appointment of governors in the twenty-four districts of
Sicily and he abolished the tax on milling grain (the grist tax or macinato);
the next day, he set up military courts to try civilian and military crimes,
and this was followed ten days later by a decree which established the death
penalty for theft, looting and murder. Finally, on 2 June, after the armistice
with the Bourbons, he declared that common land should be divided among
the peasants, with special privileges given to those who volunteered to fight
with Garibaldi. These measures were followed up by other popular reforms,
such as the abolition of the title of Eccellenza and of the baciamano (‘hand-
kissing’ as a sign of social respect). Also on 2 June, the setting up of a
civilian government was announced. It was to consist of six ministries: War
and Navy; Interior and Finance; Justice; Education and Culture; Foreign
Affairs and Commerce; and Public Works.27 There were also decrees aimed
more specifically at the liberal middle class. These included a programme
of public works (especially railway construction); the abolition of
restrictions on the labour market; investment in education (notably in the
universities); and the expulsion of the Jesuits from Sicily along with the
confiscation of their wealth and property.28
Crispi's aim, as he later explained, was ‘to disrupt the enemy's economic
resources and win over the masses in any way we could … all the decrees
of [this] period bear this stamp’.29 He and the other Sicilians in government
remembered only too well the political fallout caused by social disorder
during the 1848–9 revolutions.30 Accordingly, they sought to organise and
control the peasantry, to liberate the government from its dependence on the
armed irregulars or squadre (this by the decree of mass conscription
announced before Calatafimi), and to reassure the propertied class on the
question of law and order and the protection of its economic interests. There
was a widespread recognition of the social hardship and economic problems
caused by the prevailing system of land tenure in Sicily and of the pressing
need for land reform.31
Yet how successful Crispi was in attaining his objectives remains an open
question. The decree of land reform – the partition of common land among
the peasantry – remained unenacted in many areas, and the disappointment
this provoked produced a wave of land occupations and peasant unrest
across much of Sicily. Peasant protest was paralleled by a sharp increase in
urban crime and rural violence: Alcamo in the province of Trapani was said
to be experiencing ‘kidnapping, destruction, arson, looting, robbery and
homicide’ on a daily basis,32 while in Corleone in the Palermo uplands a
bandit named Santo Meli conducted a reign of terror from June onwards.
Conscription – through the creation of a national guard as well as an army –
was meant to combat the problem of banditry, but even where national
guards were set up they were often infiltrated by the bandits themselves.
Just as serious were the difficulties in organising provincial and local
government. Efforts to set up functioning administrations were persistently
undermined by local officials; they were motivated either by old loyalties to
the Bourbon regime or more simply by the pursuit of private interests,
rivalries and material gain. Increasingly the government was obliged to rely
on military force and simple repression to maintain control in the
countryside.33
The political situation became extremely complex and beset by bitter
internal wranglings, particularly when it came to the question of union
between Sicily and Piedmont. There were huge issues about Cavour's
attitude to the new situation in Sicily. He had done little to help the
expedition of the Thousand; indeed his chief contribution may have been
‘in not absolutely vetoing the expedition’.34 Thereafter, Cavour became
concerned about the influence of Mazzinians like Crispi in the Sicilian
government and by the threat of Garibaldi uniting Italy from the South,
which would jeopardise both Piedmont's alliance with France and the
moderate liberals' overall direction of Italian politics. Increasingly,
therefore, he concentrated on annexing Sicily so as better to control
Garibaldi's and the Mazzinian activities there. Cavour's main agent in Sicily
was another Sicilian, Giuseppe La Farina of the National Society. However,
La Farina rapidly fell out of favour in Palermo's political circles by
pursuing an openly pro-Cavourian, pro-annexation programme, and he
quarrelled especially badly with Crispi. But Crispi, in turn, made himself
equally unpopular in Palermo by his contempt for Sicilian separatism and
by his generally abrasive attitude. At the end of June he was forced to resign
from the government and, in early July, Garibaldi, who was furious at the
treatment of Crispi, expelled La Farina from the island.35
This political disarray – which both La Farina and Crispi contributed to,
and to which they both fell victim – reflected, and was accentuated by, the
political divisions within Sicily itself. The three main Sicilian political
groupings – democrats, moderate liberals and autonomists – had long
disagreed amongst themselves. In 1860, they could not agree on a clear
policy on the question of annexation by or autonomy from Piedmont, or
about precisely how, under what conditions and when Sicily should unite
with Piedmont. Even within these three groups there was great
disagreement on the question of annexation (as well as other issues: for
instance, the democrats were divided between Mazzinians and a smaller
socialist party). Moreover, regional splits (most obviously, democrats in
Catania; autonomists in Palermo) and rivalry (general resentment of
Palermo's dominance within Sicily) added significantly to the factionalism
of Sicilian politics.36
From Palermo to Naples

What was never in any doubt was Garibaldi and Crispi's intention to
continue the struggle against the Bourbons in Sicily, and to use Sicily as a
springboard for the war on the mainland. After the departure of Garibaldi
and his volunteers for Sicily in early May, a series of organisations in
northern Italy – the National Society, the Million Rifles Fund and Bertani's
Central Committee in Aid of Garibaldi – continued the work of organising
volunteers and raising money for the campaign (and at first for the parallel
campaign in the Papal States). It seems that Cavour also sent significant aid,
either directly through the National Society or by covering its and/or the
Rifles Fund's deficits, presumably in an attempt to influence the conduct of
the war in Piedmont's favour.37 The first small ship carrying guns,
ammunition and a few men left Genoa in late May; this was followed some
two weeks later by a much larger expedition led by Giacomo Medici
consisting of two ships and some 2,500 men and 800 firearms, and in early
July by another large expedition under Enrico Cosenz of 2,000 men. An
expedition of 800 men was also sent from Livorno, and throughout July
smaller expeditions continued to leave Genoa for the campaign in Sicily; in
all, an estimated 21,000 men joined Garibaldi between late May and early
September.38
After Palermo, Garibaldi's attention was fixed on capturing the Bourbon
bridgehead at Messina. Accordingly, the new arrivals were sent out of
Palermo into the country in three groups (under Medici, Bixio and Türr)
with orders to repress Bourbon resistance and then to converge on Messina.
Türr's men went across the interior, and had by all accounts the most
‘picturesque’ experience,39 while Bixio and his men proceeded along the
south coast and then east towards Catania. At Catania, Bixio's forces
became embroiled in peasant land occupations and violence (what the
Englishman, Forbes, called ‘a small dash of communism’)40 in the area
around Bronte, on Mount Etna. Apparently to reassure Sicilian landowners
that Garibaldi's revolution did not represent a threat to their property and
that he knew how to impose law and order, Bixio brutally crushed the revolt
in Bronte and executed the leaders, in a wave of repressive violence.41
Finally, Medici's column of 2,000 men – which was moving along the north
coast between Palermo and Messina – met with a much larger Bourbon
force under General Bosco at Milazzo. Although Medici managed to trap
the Bourbons temporarily into and around the fortress on the promontory of
Milazzo, he called for reinforcements from Palermo in order to prevent
Bosco from breaking out and defeating his smaller army. Helped by the
arrival not just of fresh troops but also of Garibaldi himself, the next great
battle of the 1860 campaign began: the battle of Milazzo of 20 July. Once
again, it was an unplanned battle and, once again, Garibaldi's forces won
the day against all the odds.
At Milazzo, Garibaldi was as enthusiastic a leader of his men as he had
been at Calatafimi. By all accounts, he led and encouraged them from
within the thick of the fighting, and sought to inspire them with examples of
fearless courage. In one celebrated incident, he found himself standing
alone on a road with his aide, Missori, facing a cavalry charge; and, instead
of retreating, he stood his ground facing the galloping horses. As they came
close, Missori shot the horse from under one officer, while Garibaldi leapt
up to cut the same man's throat with his sabre. Missori then continued to
shoot at the horses, and Garibaldi went on attacking their riders with his
sabre, so terrifying the soldiers that those who were still unharmed fled
back to the safety of the fortress. In the afternoon, with his forces
established on the bridge to the town, Garibaldi took to a ship and
bombarded Milazzo from the sea. By the end of the day, after eight hours of
bitter fighting under the Sicilian sun, he had taken possession of the town.42
Five days later, General Bosco surrendered the last of the Bourbon forces
at Milazzo fortress and, on 28 July, Medici led the volunteers into Messina,
riding Bosco's horse. Although Clary, the Bourbon general in charge of
Messina, had 15,000 men and an ‘impregnable fortress’ at his disposal, he
had preferred to sign a treaty whereby Messina would be held by the
garibaldini and the fortress by the Bourbons, and all hostilities between
them were declared at an end. This meant that Garibaldi's ships could cross
the straits of Messina ‘under the muzzles of the king's cannon to invade his
Calabrian provinces’ without the Bourbons firing a single shot. Shortly
afterwards, most of the soldiers in the Messina fortress were withdrawn to
the mainland.43
After the defeat at Milazzo, the Bourbons seem to have decided to
abandon Sicily in order more effectively to stop Garibaldi on arrival on the
mainland. Perhaps aware of this, Garibaldi hesitated for some three weeks
before crossing the Straits of Messina into Calabria. On 8 August, he sent a
small exploratory force under the Calabrian revolutionary, Musolino, and a
trusted officer, Alberto Mario, across to capture the fort at Scilla on the
Calabrian side. They failed, and were forced to flee into the Aspromonte
mountains. As a result, Garibaldi tried a different tactic, and on 18 August,
along with Bixio and a force of some 3,500 men, he crossed the sea to
Melito in southern Calabria from a secret embarkation point on the beach
below Taormina. They immediately marched inland, away from danger. On
22 August, after some fierce fighting, the combined forces of Garibaldi's
and Cosenz's men took Reggio Calabria, and on 26 August met up with
Medici's men at Nicotera. Also on the 26th, the town of Catanzaro declared
itself for Garibaldi. As Trevelyan comments, ‘[t]he race to Naples had now
fairly begun’.44 From Nicotera, Garibaldi's army marched north to
Monteleone, which the Bourbon garrison of 10,000 men under General
Ghio had already abandoned.
By now Garibaldi and his General Staff were on horseback and moving
so fast that they ‘were acting militarily as their own scouts, politically as
their own heralds’.45 Much of Garibaldi's army was left behind, and the
journalists following him were unable to keep up: Charles Arrivabene of the
London Daily News and Frank Vizitelly, the artist for The Illustrated
London News, were obliged to cross much of Calabria on foot because
Garibaldi and his men had taken all the donkeys and carriages in the area.46
On 29 August Garibaldi caught General Ghio's men in the high mountains,
where they had been blocked by armed bands holding the pass at
Agrifoglio, and captured all their weapons and cannons. Garibaldi kept on
moving, by carriage and on horseback; he entered the provincial capital of
Cosenza on 31 August, and from there descended to the coast and took a
boat to Sapri. From Sapri he crossed the mountains of the Cilento, and in
Casalnuovo he and his staff got into open carriages and drove into Salerno,
just a short train ride away from Naples, on 6 September.
 They were met in Salerno by cheering crowds and prolonged
celebrations. Garibaldi's arrival had been announced in advance by the
English volunteer Colonel Peard, whom many mistook for Garibaldi, and
Garibaldi preceded his nearest troops, some 1,500 men under Colonel Türr,
by two days' march.47 The British envoy in Naples, Sir Henry Elliot, was
told that ‘the whole of the southern part of the kingdom … has been
conquered by Garibaldi single-handed and without an army at all, for he
seems all along to have been from thirty to sixty miles in advance of it, the
people rising and the troops falling back or capitulating as he advanced’.48
‘The royalists dispersed like the dust which followed their flight’,
commented Marc Monnier, a French resident in Naples, who witnessed
these same events.49
When the Bourbon garrison left Palermo at the beginning of June,
Garibaldi had been there to see them go. ‘Au revoir, à Naples!’ he was said
to have told the soldiers, and apparently they all believed them.50 During
the events which followed, the Bourbon army had become utterly
demoralised. ‘Bewilderment and terror was written on every face’ according
to Alberto Mario, who saw the soldiers in one town: ‘to their overstrained
imaginations, Garibaldi had gradually assumed the nature and the form of
Fate’.51 Their king too seemed paralysed by fear and anxiety. As early as 4
August, Monnier in Naples wrote of ‘reaction on one side, revolution on the
other: the king in the middle, helpless and abandoned, the government
industriously idle, the population restless … a sickening spectacle, inspiring
shame and pity’.52 By the end of August, aware that the city of Naples was
almost indefensible militarily, King Francesco II's advisers persuaded him
to withdraw from the capital, and to retreat with his army to the fortress of
Capua north of Naples. From there they planned to concentrate their forces
and launch a counterattack against Garibaldi.
Thus it came about that Garibaldi was able to enter Naples unopposed on
7 September. He took a train from Salerno in the morning. W. G. Clark, the
public orator of Cambridge University, out from England on his annual
vacation, went with him from Salerno, and wrote that Garibaldi was sent off
to ‘the roar of vivas’. One member of the crowd collapsed in a convulsive
fit, Garibaldi was accompanied by vocal enthusiasts singing ‘interminable’
songs (‘We are Italians/ Fresh young men/ Against the Germans,/ We will
fight’), and at every station there was ‘a mob of curious people … who
exchanged cheers with the occupants of the train’.53 The AngloItalian
journalist, Charles Arrivabene, who had also ‘squeezed’ on to the train,
wrote that ‘[f]rom Torre del Annunziata to Naples, we saw nothing but a
succession of triumphal arches, festoons of flowers, hangings and flags …
An interminable scene of movement and gaiety was everywhere visible
along the line; a continual shouting of “Viva Garibardo!” [sic] “Viva
l'Italia!” filled the air.’54 Garibaldi arrived in Naples itself at lunchtime, and
immediately got into a carriage with some of his men. He was driven
through an impromptu but reportedly vast crowd, as the streets rapidly
filled with ‘waving hats and handkerchiefs, hands raised in salute, and a
deafening frenzy of shouts and cries’.55 Garibaldi sat through all this,
according to one spectator, ‘apparently unmoved, but from time to time he
lifted his hat, and smiled, as it were, with the eyes rather than the lips’.56
Later, on the waterfront, he stood up in the carriage, removed his cap and
gazed at the crowd, before retiring to his lodgings at Palazzo Angri.
For two days thereafter, the festivities in Naples continued. In the words
of the English follower of Garibaldi, Charles Forbes, an active if not very
sympathetic eyewitness: ‘the entire population roused themselves into a
state of frenzy bordering on madness, which ofttimes became ridiculous,
and at others unfortunately dangerous … Night and day the entire
population were in the streets … Bands of ruffians in red shirts invaded
hotels and cafes, and forced, arms in hand, every one to join in their
orgies.’57 A correspondent for the Italian radical paper, Il Movimento,
offered a more positive, if less coherent, description:

the whole city in lights, like nothing ever seen before; the long via Toledo just wonderful, with
more than 4 thousand carriages going up and down full of beautiful ladies wearing tricolour
flags and scarves, the enthusiasm impossible to describe, the shouts in favour of Vittorio
Emanuele, of Italia una, to Garibaldi, to Venezia … Thousands of radiant faces, every window
covered with flags and flowers in the same way; I never saw a more enchanting party.58

Unification

After Naples, Garibaldi's attention turned to Rome, and at first he planned

immediately to continue the campaign so as to arrive in the papal capital
before the winter rains came in November. It was at this point that he learnt
about the invasion of the Papal States by the Piedmontese army. Although at
first he seems to have believed that Piedmont was on his side, he soon
realised that the invasion was part of a Cavourian design to frustrate his
plans and prevent him taking Rome. This design also entailed Cavour's
plotting to take over the government in Naples and his pressing for
immediate annexation by Piedmont of Naples and Palermo. In the middle of
September, the differences betweeen Garibaldi and Cavour became publicly
irreconcilable, when Garibaldi openly condemned Cavour and asked the
king to replace Cavour and Farini in the government. Cavour was under
attack from the radicals in Turin, and had become increasingly alarmed by
the continuing presence of Mazzinians like Crispi and Bertani close to
Garibaldi. He was especially horrified to learn that Mazzini himself had
arrived in Naples on 17 September.59 He spoke of marching on Naples, ‘to
bring Garibaldi to his senses and hurl that nest of red republicans and
socialist demagogues that has grown up around him, into the sea’.60
Also during September, the Bourbon army dug in along the River
Volturno with some 50,000 men, led by Marshal Ritucci (Garibaldi's army
was by now some 20,000 men strong), and prepared to counter-attack for
Naples. On 1 October, following a minor victory against Garibaldi's army at
Caiazzo, Ritucci attacked Garibaldi's lines between Sant'Angelo and Santa
Maria and forced Garibaldi to fight, for the first time in the campaign, a
defensive batttle. The battle of the Volturno lasted two days, and although
initially the Bourbons had all the advantages, in the end Garibaldi's army
were victorious, and saved Naples. According to Trevelyan, the victory at
Volturno was due to Garibaldi's great talent as a military leader, and
specifically to three factors: ‘the personal inspiration of his presence at so
many of the important points, the combined caution and vigour of his
offensive–defensive tactics and … a sound strategy governing the
disposition of his men over the whole region of conflict’.61 Although
subsequently played down for political reasons, in reality Volturno was, in
Mack Smith's words:

one of Garibaldi's finest military ventures, in which he defied the pundits by showing himself
a master of defensive strategy, and in which he proved fully able to control a larger force of
 men than the Piedmontese regulars had numbered at Castelfidardo [against the papal army in
the Papal States] or indeed in the whole of the Crimean War.62

The presence of mind which Garibaldi showed at Volturno is worth

stressing because of the fatal political mistake which he also made at this
time, and which to an extent overshadowed the rest of his career. Faced
with the Piedmontese advance through the Papal States and towards
Garibaldi at Naples (rather than towards Rome, as he had hoped), and
burdened with the conflicting pressures of radicals and moderates in Naples
and Palermo, Garibaldi simply vacillated and did nothing. He seems to have
become bored and demoralised by the endless discussions in Naples. As
Bertani wrote from Naples to Mordini (the pro-dictator in Palermo) on 28
September:

On the political side, matters go from bad to worse. The dictator has been struck down by
moral paralysis. We can't get anywhere with him, he won't sign anything, he won't be
completely on our side and it disgusts him to be with the other side … We can't form a
government, but no decision is taken to dissolve it. And our enemies profit from this paralysis
… We are assailed by hate on all sides. Garibaldi is not fully aware of his strength in Italy –
discouraged and irritated at the same time.63

‘[N]othing can be done without him – very little, I fear, with him’, Mazzini
commented to his friend Caroline Stansfeld on 2 October.64
Garibaldi may have become discouraged about the practicalities of
continuing the war without Piedmontese help; in any event, he gradually
became convinced that there was no longer any alternative to falling in with
Turin, and began instead to place his hopes in a new military campaign for
the following summer. During the second week of October, amid scenes of
political agitation in Naples and the spread of peasant resistance to the new
government in the Abruzzo and Molise mountains, Garibaldi went against
the advice of the radicals. Instead of setting up an elected assembly to
negotiate the terms of union with Piedmont, he agreed to hold an immediate
plebiscite to decide on the question of annexation by Piedmont. Shortly
afterwards, pro-Dictator Mordini in Sicily was forced to follow suit.65
The decision to hold plebiscites was a decisive victory for Cavour and his
supporters in the South. It meant that annexation by Piedmont would be
unconditional and immediate. Garibaldi, with this decision, handed over his
dictatorial powers to Vittorio Emanuele. ‘Cavour has won’, complained
L'Unità Italiana on 17 October: ‘the first act of the drama ended at
Villafranca, the second is now ending at Naples. God help Italy!’66 The
plebiscites took place on 21 October, and the entire adult male population
was asked to vote ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to whether they wanted ‘to form an integral
part of Italy one and indivisible under Victor Emanuel as their constitutional
King’. The result was an overwhelming (over 99 per cent), and
unsurprising, vote in favour of unification. The vote was in public, and in
most places there was tremendous pressure for a ‘yes’ vote; moreover, as
Mack Smith points out, ‘[t]o vote no … had no meaning at all, for the only
alternative to Victor Emanuel was Francesco, and the clock could not have
been put back short of a bloody counter-revolution’. There was also little or
no sense among the population that Garibaldi represented a different
political ideal from the Piedmontese king.67
Garibaldi stayed on at Naples for three weeks after the vote. On 25
October, he rode north to Teano to meet the king. Although later glorified as
a happy and dignified occasion, many contemporary accounts suggest the
meeting was a tense and melancholy affair full of bad omens, and that the
king became upset when peasant onlookers shouted Viva Galibardo [sic]!
and ignored the king.68 On 6 November, the king failed to show up for a
review of Garibaldi's troops at Caserta. The next day, after some bitter
discussion, the two men rode together in a carriage into Naples during a
thunderstorm, both looking sullen and gloomy. ‘Garibaldi smiled amidst the
storm’, a British onlooker remarked, although he seemed ‘pale and
anxious’, while the king ‘rolled his eyes and stared in a vacant way quite
peculiar to Kings of Italy’.69 Garibaldi asked to be made viceroy of
southern Italy and was refused; the king offered once more to make
Garibaldi a general in the Piedmontese army, but his offer was rejected.70
Although the two men had once liked each other, the king at least was cross
with Garibaldi, writing to Cavour some two weeks later that Garibaldi was
‘neither as docile nor as honest as people say and as you yourself think’.71
Finally, in the early morning of 9 November, Garibaldi left Naples
quietly, taking with him only some beans and seedlings for his farm at
Caprera. Before departure, he stopped at the British warship Hannibal to
say a private (but again subsequently celebrated) farewell to Admiral
Mundy, the man who had helped negotiate the truce in Palermo. While he
told Mundy of his plans to take Rome and Venice, and to put ‘a million of
men under arms’ the following year, Mundy noticed that Garibaldi was
gloomy and dejected ‘and his whole manner was that of a man who was
suffering under a poignant grief’.72 He was then escorted to the steamer
Washington, which would take him to Caprera, by what Marc Monnier
called ‘a simple entourage of intimate friends’ who were all in tears (‘it was
really simple and sad’).73
Garibaldi also left behind a number of broken-hearted women. A British
resident in Naples, Carlotta Roskilly, expressed her ‘profound grief’ at his
refusal to live ‘for a few days in your room prepared by me’, and blamed
herself personally for his decision to leave; while another British woman,
signing herself simply ‘Your Sauvage’, wrote him letter after passionate
letter complaining of the ‘endless’ wait for him, and of her desire to sleep
until the moment she awoke and, ‘with my hand in yours, I can squeeze it
and say “Never apart again”’.74 The king stayed on for a while longer in
Naples. In December he visited Sicily and met with an elaborate reception
at Palermo, which included a huge monument to Garibaldi in the Piazza
Marina.75 He then returned home to Piedmont. Italy was officially united
the following February, with Vittorio Emanuele II as king, its capital in
Turin, and Venice and Rome still under the control of ‘foreign oppressors’
(Austrian and papal rulers) (see map 2 on page 225). So ended the story of
the Thousand.
Conclusion

The year 1860 was, as Denis Mack Smith has observed, the ‘annus
mirabilis’ of the Risorgimento. Garibaldi's actions brought about the
collapse of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, and led to the political
unification of the Italian peninsula. These changes seemed all the more
momentous because they were so unexpected and so rapid. For a short time
in the summer of 1860, the small army led by Garibaldi – and with him
Italian nationalism itself – seemed unstoppable. Yet, as Mack Smith has
also shown, 1860 was also a ‘complicated and controversial passage of
history’, involving civil war, diplomatic struggle and peasant unrest.
Moreover, in the end, ‘[f]ew people were more surprised’ by Italian
unification than Cavour, ‘its chief architect’, and ‘few more disappointed
than Mazzini and Garibaldi, the two men who had looked forward to this
moment most keenly and who had sacrificed most for its attainment’.76
Garibaldi was helped greatly in his campaign by the severe political crisis
in southern Italy. He was also able to take advantage of a diplomatic
situation, and especially a sympathetic British government, which worked
in his favour. Equally, Garibaldi showed considerable military talent in
1860, both in his ability to surprise and improvise – he continually wrong-
footed the enemy – and as a leader of his men. As an administrator, with the
able assistance of Crispi, he was not unimpressive, especially when the
government's lack of resources, the extent of rural unrest, and the scale of
the previous government's collapse are taken into consideration. As I will
explain in the next chapter, he also proved particularly good at giving his
revolution a positive appearance, at making it seem a dramatic and inspiring
turning-point in history.
He was much less successful at sustained political negotiation. He
provided little leadership during the political crises in Palermo over the
summer, and, while he supported Crispi, he seemed unable to stop La
Farina. Anecdotal evidence also suggests that Garibaldi became impatient
and bored during the prolonged discussions over the question of annexation.
If only in this respect, it is clear that he was ‘no good at politics’. While his
attitude may be understandable, it was also deeply problematic in a
revolutionary leader and it caused problems for the democratic movement,
as it had done on various occasions during the late 1850s. In 1860,
Garibaldi's reluctance fully to resist the Piedmontese solution of immediate
annexation led to his defeat by Cavour. This meant that all the political
advantages gained in the spring and early summer were thrown away by the
autumn. ‘Never tire of repeating to the General [Garibaldi]’, the Lombard
federalist Carlo Cattaneo wrote to Crispi in July, ‘that it is not sufficient to
know how to take, one must also know how to hold.’77 In the end, Garibaldi
quietly handed over power to the king and Cavour, and slipped off
‘backstage’ to Caprera.
It is of course clear that the defeat of Garibaldi's revolution had, to an
extent, been determined in advance by the subservient position long taken
by many democrats in the alliance made with Cavour's Piedmont. This
subservience is clear in 1860, both in the slogan – Italia e Vittorio
Emanuele – adopted by the Thousand and in succession of decrees which
adopted the Piedmontese constitution, legislation and administration in the
newly ‘liberated’ provinces of southern Italy. We might- also agree that
Garibaldi was unlucky to have been faced with an opponent as endlessly
resourceful as Cavour. It is also possible to argue that Garibaldi's real
achievement in 1860 was to have forced Cavour's hand, to have obliged him
to unite Italy under Piedmont and Vittorio Emanuele, an act which Cavour
had never considered seriously before July 1860. Certainly, Cavour's
reaction to the expedition reflected the now unstoppable appeal of Italian
nationalism and of Garibaldi, its main symbol. Garibaldi's withdrawal to
Caprera may also have made good sense militarily and personally, and it
definitely worked on a symbolic level. There was no campaigning to be
done in the winter, Caprera was good for Garibaldi's rheumatism, and the
retirement to his farm added to his mystique as the Cincinnatus or
Washington of Italy (both of whom had done the same at the end of their
campaigns). For those opposed to the government, Garibaldi's lonely retreat
also pointed to a form of internal exile and thus highlighted his shoddy
treatment by the Piedmontese.
In the longer term, however, Garibaldi's actions made much less political
sense. On the one hand, they left his army without a general, and the
democrats without one of their most powerful, and certainly their most
popular and famous, representatives during the crucial period between the
plebiscite and the consolidation of unity in the spring of 1861. Southern
Italy lost the leader of its revolution. Garibaldi's departure for Caprera was
essentially an abdication of power. On the other hand, his behaviour offered
a political basis for endless recriminations between moderates and
democrats, gave rise to a personal bitterness which was to become a
destabilising feature of the new Italian politics, and struck a symbolic pose
which laid the foundation for a fractured and divisive national memory. In
this way, an expedition conceived of in the name of liberty and unity and
carried out in the most dramatic form imaginable, ended – in much the
same way as the war of 1859 – in a political compromise which satisfied
nobody.
The Unification of Italy, 1859–70
 CHAPTER 9

MAKING ITALIAN HEROES

Much has always been made of the unexpected nature of Garibaldi's

triumph in Sicily in 1860. Yet his successes were surprising only in terms of
the initial disorganisation and the sheer scale of the task which the men had
set themselves. In other respects, he and his leadership did have a military
strategy which was well suited to the unstable situation in the rural South.
They also had a political and social strategy which reflected a clear
awareness of the need to get ordinary Sicilians – and, subsequently,
Neapolitans – materially on their side.
As is well known, the economic and social measures introduced by
Garibaldi's dictatorship ran into problems.1 Still, these reforms were only
one aspect of a general strategy to encourage popular support. In fact,
attention to the material aspects of the Sicilian revolution was paralleled by
a powerful appeal to people's emotions, and by a series of attempts to put
the revolution on display through festivals and other ceremonies of national
‘belonging’, in order to encourage popular identification with the new
regime, and with the idea of Italy more generally. Here what is most
striking is the attempt to be inclusive – to appeal to as many sectors of the
population as possible – and the use of religious iconography. In particular,
Garibaldi and his administration made repeated efforts not to offend the
Church and clergy in Sicily, and many of their actions show an explicit
recognition that they could accomplish little in the South without the
support of the Church.
The religion of revolution

As in 1848–9 and 1859, Garibaldi's progress through Sicily and in Naples

was marked by a series of stirring speeches and proclamations. Just as he
had done at the start of the campaign in Lombardy in 1859, he issued a call
to the population to join him. This time, however, Garibaldi referred not to
the northern Italian myths of Pontida and Legnano (see pages 74, 172) but
to the central episode in Sicily's ‘national’ history, the Sicilian Vespers (a
thirteenth-century revolt against French rule).2 ‘Everyone to arms! and
Sicily will teach us once more the way to free a country from its
oppressors.’3 Throughout the rest of the campaign in Sicily, he alluded to
the Vespers and to Sicilian pride. At the end of the fighting for Palermo, he
told the crowd assembled at the Palazzo Pretorio that ‘my companions and I
rejoice that we can fight alongside the children of the Vespers, in a battle
that will smash the last link in the chain which has bound this land of genius
and heroism’ (this speech was published in the Giornale di Sicilia on 2
June).4 Some time later he told the ‘citizens of Palermo’ that during the
fighting for the city ‘I understood that I had in my presence the descendants
of the Vespers’.5 Sicilians were ‘a great and generous people … in this
classical land, the citizen rose up in disgust against tyranny, broke his
chains, and with his shattered prison irons turned into daggers, fought the
hired assassins’.6 More than once he thanked them for their enthusiasm, the
‘brothers of the city’ who had fought alongside the ‘strong and courageous
sons of the countryside’, for the support of the priests (‘what a change from
the dissolute priest of Rome’) and for the defiance of women, ‘beautiful in
their rage and their sublime patriotism’.7 ‘Sicily is a country’, Garibaldi
wrote in a ‘Proclamation to Sicilian Women’:

which has no need to look to foreign history for examples of civic virtue by both sexes. In this
island blessed by God, the fair sex of all ages has offered proof of such courage to amaze the
world … The Vespers, a unique moment in the history of nations, also saw the charming
women of this island take their place alongside those fighting for the independence of the
fatherland.

‘Dear and charming women of Sicily,’ Garibaldi continued, ‘hear the voice
of the man who genuinely loves your beautiful country and to whose love
he is tied for the rest of life’, a man who had never asked anything for
himself, only for ‘the common Fatherland’. Holding up the example of
Adelaide Cairoli of Pavia (‘the richest, dearest, kindest woman [matrona]’),
who had sent her four sons to fight and die for Italy, he urged them:
‘Women, send us your sons, your lovers!’8
 Garibaldi's speeches and proclamations to the Sicilian people are
interesting because they follow an established Risorgimento formula – with
their references to innate heroism, a glorious history and national
‘resurgence’ – while also being tailored to flatter and to excite a specific
audience, whether Sicilians in general, women, peasants or priests. As in
1859, moreover, these speeches had two related purposes. They aimed to
represent and popularise an ideal of virile, popular and inclusive italianità
and, in so doing, they sought to make the thought of volunteering to fight
for this ideal attractive and emotionally appealing; equally, others (women)
were encouraged to participate by giving their material and moral support to
Garibaldi's campaign. In this way, political consent was transformed into
active political engagement. Especially worthy of note, because very
unusual, was the attention paid to priests and the encouragement given to
them to join Garibaldi. Indeed, one of Garibaldi's earliest proclamations,
issued at the beginning of the campaign at Salemi (or possibly even
Marsala), had been an appeal to the ‘good priests’ to follow ‘the true
religion of Christ’. He gave specifically to priests the leadership in the war
‘to fight the oppressors’ and the task of liberating Sicily (‘our land … our
children … our women … our inheritance and … us!’) from the domination
of foreigners.9
Garibaldi's Marsala proclamation re-used one of the most vivid phrases
from his May 1859 call to the ‘people of Lombardy’: ‘Anyone who does
not take up arms is a coward and a traitor to the fatherland.’10 In Palermo,
he repeated the message: ‘So, all to arms, and armed, smash your prison
irons and prepare every means of defence and offence … All to arms and
armed, I repeat … Who does not take up arms in these three days is a traitor
or a coward.’11 As Garibaldi moved towards the Straits of Messina and then
Naples, his proclamations began to address the ‘Neapolitans’: ‘I would like
… to avoid the spilling of blood between Italians, and so I turn to you, sons
of the Neapolitan continent. I have seen that you are brave, but I don't want
to see this again. Our blood, we will spill together over the corpses of Italy's
enemies, but between us … truce!’12 ‘We will win without you; but I would
be proud to win with You’, he wrote to the ‘Neapolitan Soldiers’ in a printed
flyer with a political manifesto attached. The manifesto called on them to
revolt against the king (‘destiny is in your hands, oh soldiers of Naples!’)
and appealed to their sense of pride and religion. ‘Tomorrow you could be
respected as soldiers of the world's first nation, as Italian soldiers’, the
programme stated; but if they resisted, they would be fighting against Italy,
France and England, and against a Providence which had protected Italy,
put Napoleon on the throne of France, and ‘saved Garibaldi from a
thousand deaths’.13 The (uncommonly) positive references to France and
Napoleon are worth noting here: they are presumably an acknowledgement
of Neapolitan nostalgia for Bonapartism, and especially for Napoleon's
brother-in-law, the king of Naples, Joachim Murat.
Garibaldi's dictatorship also appealed to the people through the figure of
Garibaldi himself. In 1860, Garibaldi was not just the political dictator of
Sicily (and later Naples), he also became the symbol of revolution in the
South and, with the Piedmontese king, of Italian Risorgimento. As a letter
to the radical Movimento paper put it: ‘the Sicilian revolution triumphed
with him and in him’.14 Following on from the practice established in towns
like Varese and Como during 1859, Garibaldi's public appearances and
other commemorative occasions associated with him became the occasion
for great public festivities. As in 1859, of course, we know about these
festivities and the other scenes of enthusiasm for Garibaldi largely through
the descriptions of partial observers, who had an interest in exaggerating the
extent of popular involvement and the size of the crowds. Nevertheless,
they can tell us something about the frenetic atmosphere in 1860 and the
ways in which a cult of Garibaldi was publicly encouraged and staged.
The first great Garibaldi celebration came in Palermo after the armistice
with the Bourbons at the end of May. Here Garibaldi made a speech to the
crowd telling them of the terms, and of his determination to fight on. ‘I can
find no words to describe the crowd's reaction’, Giuseppe Abba, a volunteer
from Bergamo, writes:

At the terrifying yell that broke out from the Piazza my hair stood on end and my skin went all
goose-flesh. People kissed each other, embraced, almost suffocated in their passion. Women,
even more than men, demonstrated their desperate readiness to face all dangers. ‘Thank you,
thank you!’ they cried, stretching out their hands towards the General. From the end of the
Piazza I, too, blew him a kiss. Such a radiant face had never, I believe, been seen before as on
that balcony at that moment. The very soul of the people seemed transfused in him.15
The next day, Garibaldi made a tour of the city. Ferdinand Eber, a
correspondent of the London Times and a huge Garibaldi enthusiast, told his
readers:

I was there, but find it really impossible to give you even a faint idea of the manner in which
he was received everywhere. It was one of those triumphs which seem to be almost too much
for a man … the popular idol, Garibaldi, in his red flannel shirt, with a loose coloured
handkerchief around his neck, and his worn wideawake [hat], was walking on foot among
those cheering, laughing, crying, mad thousands … The people threw themselves forward to
kiss his hands, or at least to touch the hem of his garment, as if it contained the panacea for all
their past and perhaps coming sufferings. Children were brought up, and mothers asked on
their knees for his blessing; and all this while the object of this idolatry was as calm and as
smiling as when in the deadliest fire, taking up the children and kissing them, trying to quiet
the crowd, stopping at every moment to hear a long complaint of houses burnt and property
sacked … giving good advice, comforting, and promising that all damages should be paid for.

‘Anyone in search of violent emotions’, Eber advised, ‘cannot do better

than set off at once for Palermo.’16
An interesting feature of these descriptions is the reference to religion
and to religious feeling. In his speeches and appearances in 1860, Garibaldi
seemed to develop an ability to adopt a dignified pose (‘calm and …
smiling’) while provoking (or recreating) impromptu scenes of popular
religious fervour. His use of a religious vernacular to communicate with the
people was alluded to by Charles Forbes, the English volunteer, who saw
Garibaldi arrive in Messina: ‘There is a sort of intimate communion of
mind between Garibaldi and the masses which is perfectly electrifying.
They look up to him as a sort of link between themselves and the Deity – as
a sort of father who would pardon their most venial crimes.’ ‘I have been
many times told,’ he wrote later, ‘in all sincerity by the peasants, that he is
the brother of the Redeemer.’17 Marc Monnier, observing Garibaldi in
Naples, made very similar comments: ‘Garibaldi is a saint for the common
people [les lazzarones] … It is God who has sent him to save the country;
several call him Jesus Christ; his officers are the apostles. Alms are asked
for in Garibaldi's name.’18 Moreover, Garibaldi's religious appeal was not
confined to the Neapolitan lazzaroni. An English Protestant woman, Harriet
Meuricoffre, wrote to her father from Naples in August of his extraordinary,
and for her inexplicable, charisma (‘You have only to look into his face, and
you feel that there is, perhaps, the one man in the world in whose service
you would, taking your heart in your hand, follow blindfold to death’), and
of his ‘devotion to and faith in a holy cause’ which were ‘written in letters
of light’ on his face.19
That the identification of the cult of Garibaldi with religious cults was
deliberate, and created from above, is suggested not just by his speeches
praising priests and the use of religious language, but also by his direct
participation in religious services and celebrations. As we will see, he also
managed to get a significant proportion of the southern clergy on his side.
One of his first acts after the battle of Calatafimi was to receive a blessing
in the cathedral of nearby Alcamo. On 15 July, for the festa di Santa
Rosalia (the patron saint of Palermo), he sat on the high throne of Palermo
cathedral, in the role of royal defender of the faith and of the Church, and
followed the traditional religious ceremony which affirmed the power of the
Pope's representative in Sicily.20 The day after he arrived in Naples, 8
September, was the popular religious festival of Piedigrotta, traditionally
attended by the Bourbon monarchs, and Garibaldi made a point of
participating in the religious service and celebrations. According to the
journalist Charles Arrivabene, Garibaldi was accompanied by a great
procession along the seafront to Piedigrotta: ‘lofty green, white and red
poles were fixed in a double row in the ground, with flags waving from the
summit. Hundreds and hundreds of carrozelle, gaily dressed with hangings
and banners, and crowded with more people than the half-starved horses
could well pull along, followed our carriages.’ He was cheered by the
fishermen and lazzaroni, and women shouted ‘May the blessed virgin be
with you, Eccellenza!’21 In the tiny church of Piedigrotta, Garibaldi was
trapped by the crowds: one of his entourage described ‘the frenzy of the
people to reach Garibaldi, who passed by, speaking brief words of love’.22
On 19 September, Garibaldi went to the cathedral and presided over the
liquefaction of the blood of San Gennaro, the patron saint of Naples. This
ceremony was a central date in the city's religious and political calendar,
and the fact that the saint's blood liquefied in the presence of Garibaldi was
celebrated as a good portent for the new regime. As the British envoy,
Henry Elliot, commented: Garibaldi treated ‘St. Januarius’ with ‘the
greatest respect’, so that ‘the liquefaction came off last week with the usual
éclat’.23 During all these celebrations, Garibaldi took great care to observe
and pay his respects to local cults and sensibilities. In so doing he accepted
the power of the Church, and identified himself with it in the role of a
traditional monarch.24
Yet if Garibaldi in his public appearances was careful to follow or borrow
elements from traditional religious and royal rituals, he also achieved a
familiarity, freedom, and even ordinariness which was entirely democratic
(in Forbes’ words, he was both ‘one of themselves’ and ‘immeasurably
above them all’).25 On the throne in Palermo, he wore his red shirt and
scarf: he epitomised, according to one supporter, the ‘son of the people’ and
the ‘alliance … between altar and law, between religion and reason,
between the gospel and progress’.26 He also took to walking on foot among
the people. When in Naples huge crowds greeted Garibaldi, he responded
with a great show of friendliness and intimacy. Before his arrival in the
capital, in the town of Rogliano, he had allowed himself to be ‘almost
devoured by kisses’, and he had been ‘ubiquitous’: ‘seated on a sofa amidst
a bevy of young ladies and children, evidently charmed with the variety of
their stupid questions, as he fondled a baby one minute, wrote a few words
in an album the next, and from time to time gave orders to the civil and
military authorities’.27 After he arrived, according to the French writer
Louise Colet who was in Naples, Garibaldi was ‘accessible to everybody,
and appreciative of applause and public demonstrations’. He excited the
people with his public speeches ‘just like in a kind of Greek democracy’
and ‘was their ideal of a sovereign’. He showed himself frequently on the
balcony of his hotel, he came out for walks through the streets and along the
seafront, and he greeted, and was greeted by, everyone. ‘He conquered this
town,’ Colet comments, ‘not so much by force as by sentiment and real
human warmth.’28 Both Marc Monnier and Harriet Meuricoffre, who had
noted his exceptional charisma, stressed equally his ease, openness and
‘simplicity’. Meuricoffre wrote of his face ‘in which the whole character is
written, simple, grand, and loving’;29 while Monnier noted that ‘[h]e greets
all intruders with the patience of a martyr; he does not keep them at a
distance; he does not speak to them sententiously. He is simple and kind …
He is a child of the people, and adored by the people.’30
 This eclectic mix of the sacred and the everyday – the union of ritualised
authority with the casual intimacy of the democratic leader – may explain
the popular success of the cult, and in particular help to account for the
spontaneous emotional response to Garibaldi's presence. Such spontaneity
should not obscure the extent to which popular enthusiasm had been
prepared beforehand by nationalist propaganda, and further stirred up by
Garibaldi on arrival, through his speeches and behaviour. Even if to a
limited extent, Garibaldi's public appearances were planned and
choreographed in advance. By 1860, moreover, Garibaldi had the advantage
of being very famous. Already he embodied an heroic story of national
pride constructed over the preceding two decades and which needed only to
be adapted for the conditions of 1860; various tried and trusted mechanisms
– such as the press and public appearances and speeches – were already in
place to promote a popular cult. To this image was simply added a religious
and especially a miraculous vocabulary which seemed particularly suited to
the popular culture of Sicily and southern Italy, where there were local
traditions of popular festivities for saints from which Garibaldi could
benefit. What really distinguished the cult of Garibaldi in 1860 was that, for
the first time, he was in power. This major difference meant that the cult
could be elaborated in new ways and circulated on a scale which had never
been possible before. In short, the cult of Garibaldi in 1860 became official.
An indication of the government's determination to encourage an official
cult of Garibaldi can be found in one of the first meetings of the new town
council of Palermo on 17 June 1860. To applause, the members agreed on
an address to the ‘Supreme Italian, General Garibaldi’: ‘a man from the
heroic age, your name hardly had to be uttered and the Sicilians were freed,
and became citizens of the great fatherland. The city of Palermo raises a
unanimous cry of gratitude to the liberator of Sicily, and from its smoking
ruins … salutes the Italian hero.’ They proclaimed him ‘the first among
Palermo citizens’; and they decided that Porta Termini should be renamed
Porta Garibaldi (and that the via Toledo – one of the two main streets of
Palermo – should be renamed via Vittorio Emanuele).31 More important
perhaps than names and speeches was their decision to pay for a birthday
celebration in Palermo in honour of Garibaldi.32 This expenditure was
especially significant since the government's lack of money was a serious
problem; so serious that, by early August, the town council risked
bankruptcy and considered reinstating the unpopular grist tax.33
The celebrations for Garibaldi's birthday took place in Palermo on the
evening of 19 July (unfortunately without him, as he had been forced to
leave Palermo at the last moment for the battle of Milazzo). They were
extremely elaborate. According to one report, the church bells started to
peal early in the morning;34 and this was followed by a popular
demonstration. L'Unità Italiana reported that a children's choir moved
around the city singing hymns, and that a group of lively young men carried
around an effigy in black (representing perhaps a Jesuit) which they
periodically hit with a stick.35 Thereafter, the official celebrations took over.
All the shops were closed and public and private buildings – including the
archbishop's palace, the university and the municipal government – were
covered entirely in decorations: ‘All the balconies crammed full of Chinese
lanterns and party decorations, with busts, portraits and flags’, commented
one newspaper. The decorations on Palazzo Riso attracted particular praise
(it was one of the main noble residences in the city, facing Piazza Bologni):
‘decorated with magnificent tapestries, of gold and silver braid, along with
prestigious military trophies of ancient date … brocade cloth with gold and
sliver braid and numerous candelabra on the balconies. In the middle, an
ancient military trophy with a painting of Garibaldi.’ Another imposing
residence, the Palazzo Sant-Elia, was decorated in lights, flowers and flags,
with an image of Garibaldi in the centre and an inscription reading: ‘To
Giuseppe Garibaldi – Angel of divine justice – Powerful expression – Of
eternal Italy.’ The various gentlemen's clubs were ‘transformed into rooms
of A thousand and one nights’, according to a newspaper.36 The ‘caffè di
Sicilia’ on the corner of Piazza Bologni and via Toledo displayed the
following inscription: ‘For Giuseppe Garibaldi – Example of rare modesty
– The Italians of Sicily – Celebrate his 53rd year’.37
A striking feature of the celebrations was the hanging of large illuminated
‘transparent canvases’ featuring episodes from Garibaldi's expedition to
Sicily and other nationalist allegories. Four of these were hung at the four
sides of the Quattro Canti at the centre of the city: representing the arrival
at Marsala (with ‘800 Italians’; see figure 13 overleaf), the battle of
Calatafimi, and two moments in the battle for Palermo. There were two
other canvases, one on the via Toledo and another on the via Maqueda.38
The via Maqueda canvas showed Sicily ‘in the form of Ceres [the goddess
of grain and harvests, and a symbol of the cycle of death and rebirth] with a
white dress, green scarf and red shawl’, standing hand in hand with
Garibaldi who, as in all the canvases and the portraits, was ‘painted with the
classic red shirt and scarf around his shoulders’ (see figure 14). Underneath
was written a short verse: ‘Come child of the sun, you know you must come
– Since you are engaged to the King Vittorio.’39

13 ‘Landing in Marsala of General Garibaldi with 800 Italians’: this version

of one of the most emblematic episodes of the Thousand is a copy of a large
 transparent canvas hung in the centre of Palermo.

There were parades and processions all over Palermo. Troops paraded in
Piazza dell'Olivella, and in other squares too, complete with transparent
canvases and statues of Garibaldi. The climax of all the celebrations was a
general procession, led by a choir and orchestra, and followed by huge
crowds, down the via Toledo towards the sea. The procession stopped at
various strategic points to sing hymns to Garibaldi. The message of all the
hymns was the same and was simple: they presented Garibaldi as the
saviour of Sicily, and encouraged Sicilians to fight with him:

Oh child of the Alps, terrible warrior … you unite in joy an entire people/ How sacred is the
day you were born … Brave boys the cry of war/ Encourages us to renewed virtue/ It reminds
us that this is the land/ Of Guinarde and Procida [a reference to the Vespers] … You are the
father, the friend, the husband,/ The Redeemer of your Sicilian children,/ You are that great
man, who … stole us from cruel servitude.40

On the same day, there was a huge festival in Marsala (which lasted five
days, according to one paper),41 with a gun salute, military parade, and Te
Deum in the cathedral. In the evening there were illuminations, and a
transparent canvas of Garibaldi's landing was hung over the gate by which
he had entered the town (although an English observer commented that the
painter ‘had given rather a stretch to the imagination when he portrayed the
people of Marsala receiving them with open arms amid a perfect shower of
shot and shell from the Neapolitan ships’).42 The following day, 20 July,
there was another – seemingly impromptu – demonstration in Palermo to
celebrate Garibaldi's victory at Milazzo, with more illuminations, singing
and flag-waving: ‘The bells rang out in celebration from every street and
district, the crowd vomited into via Toledo with frenzied evvivas to
Garibaldi, to Italy, to Vittorio Emanuele’.43
 14 ‘Garibaldi hands Sicily over to the gentleman King’: another copy of a
transparent canvas hung in Palermo shows Sicily as the goddess Ceres; both
figures were dressed in the colours of the Italian tricolour.
There seems little doubt about the political intention of these
celebrations. Indeed, they appear to be an archetypal example of nation-
building from above, of an official attempt to elaborate and utilise a
political aesthetic through festivals and visual representations to encourage
a sense of national belonging, to foster an emotional attachment to the
regime, and to Italianise the public spaces of Palermo.44 Specifically in this
case, we can observe an effort to establish Sicily as part of Italy, identified
with the Piedmontese monarchy, through the celebration of the figure of
Garibaldi. Yet there was nothing very new about the production itself: the
Bourbons had pioneered the use of transparent canvases and elaborate
temporary stages and displays for popular festivals (although their origins
lie in revolutionary and post-revolutionary France);45 and although the
technology was modern, the spectacle itself was heavy with traditional, and
especially religious, symbolism. Garibaldi himself was represented as a
saint, responsible for the miraculous liberation of Sicily. In fact, the
celebration itself – its timing in the middle of July, the organisation and
placing of the procession in the via Toledo and around the Quattro Canti,
the iconography of Garibaldi as saint – bears an overwhelming resemblance
to the popular procession traditionally held in mid-July to commemorate the
festival of Santa Rosalia in Palermo. This festival was not celebrated in
1860, allegedly because the Bourbons had stolen the saint's effects and part
of her statue from the cathedral.46
There were still other official attempts at ‘making Italians’. Throughout
the summer of 1860, public commemorations sought to establish an official
narrative of the events of 1860, or to create and control a nationalist
memory of what had occurred. The departure of the Bourbon garrison from
Palermo was turned (unsurprisingly) into a general festival of italianità, as
was the defection of a Bourbon warship, Veloce, to the nationalist side: ‘you
now belong to our family’, Garibaldi told the crew.47 One of the boats
which had brought the Thousand to Marsala was refloated and taken to lie
in the harbour at Palermo for all to see: ‘[it's] a wreck,’ commented one
volunteer, ‘but the intention is to remind people of the great event’.48
Towards the end of June, the final symbol of Bourbon power in Palermo,
the fort of Castellamare, was taken by Garibaldi's army. The fort was then
demolished (or – more accurately – an attempt was made to demolish it) as
part of a great public celebration, involving all the non-combatant groups of
Palermo society: priests, women, children, young and old, rich and poor.
They reportedly marched together down to the fort shouting ‘Evviva
all'Italia, evviva al nostro Re e al Dittatore’, carrying flowers, refreshments
and the tools of the job to destroy it; and the fort became an open-air site for
the staging of italianità, visited by prominent political figures, including
Garibaldi himself and the archbishop of Monreale, Benedetto d'Acquisto.49
 The public demolition of the fort at Castellamare was indicative of a
more general policy to stage and to encourage public performances of
nationalist zeal. Public funerals and other commemorative events were
organised to celebrate those ‘martyrs’ who had died in the Sicilian
campaign. Foreigners who had come to fight in Sicily were commemorated,
and the biggest funeral of all was ordered personally by Crispi, for his
friend, Rosolino Pilo (who had arrived before Garibaldi and was killed in
the mountains above Palermo), along with the erection of a monument to
him. Pilo's funeral service lasted three hours and took place in the Church
of San Domenico, the ‘pantheon’ of Palermo, on 24 August.50 Crispi also
used the press to make Italians. The two government papers in Palermo, Il
Giornale di Sicilia and Il Precursore, were masterminded by Crispi, and
both emphasised the exceptional stature of Garibaldi and sought to glorify
specific moments in the revolution. The Giornale di Sicilia's main purpose
was to publish the decrees of the dictatorship, but much of its first number
was taken up with establishing a detailed, if largely tendentious, narrative of
the revolution from the departure at Quarto to the arrival in the mountains
above Palermo. Garibaldi, according to the paper, the ‘noble Leader
[Duce]’, was a ‘genius’ with a ‘radiant look’, whose light shone ‘like the
brilliant halo of the Italian flag’ among the devastation of the Bourbon
bombardment and the horrors of a civil war.51
This lead was taken up by Il Precursore (whose name referred to Pilo).
The celebrations for Garibaldi's birthday, the battle of Milazzo, his arrival in
Calabria, and other nationalist events: all these gave Il Precursore the
opportunity to rewrite the idea of the nation in a popular religious
vernacular and to hold up Garibaldi as its main interpreter. Reporting on the
victory at Milazzo, the paper asked: ‘Who can resist the sword of the Hero
of Varese and Calatafimi, if his sword is that of the avenging Angel?’52
‘Where did he go?’ it asked after Garibaldi left for Calabria, ‘nobody knew,
and our answer to those who ask is his: when you come with me you don't
ask where we are going’.53 After Garibaldi returned briefly to Sicily in
September, Il Precursore indulged in an extended hagiography which ran
over two issues (‘Oh how beautiful it was to see the liberator of Italy, the
greatest hero of our day …!’). As Garibaldi departed from Porta Felice, the
paper reported that ‘a thousand kisses’ were exchanged, while those who
could not kiss him ‘began to kiss his red shirt, his arms, his legs, his feet,
with the same ardour as they would have kissed a saint’. He was carried to
the boat by the people, crying: ‘long live the great liberator of Italy, long
live our father, long live the Saviour – why are you leaving, why are you
abandoning us?’54
At a time of political uncertainty and war (for instance, during the battle
of Milazzo for Garibaldi's birthday; during Garibaldi's march on Naples for
the funeral for Pilo), the amount of attention and resources given to displays
of national belonging by Garibaldi's dictatorship is surprising. Indeed, it has
never been taken seriously by historians. Yet these kinds of patriotic display
in Palermo in 1860 – the role of funerals and the exaltation of death in
battle; the promotion of heroes (Garibaldi, the king, Pilo); and the
establishment of patriotic rituals and symbols associated with religious
practices and vocabularies – represent a significant attempt to sacralise the
nation, and to make political action the subject of a religious cult.55 The
patriotic displays of 1860 also tell us that Mazzini's concept of a political
religion found official and practical expression before national unification,
and well before Francesco Crispi, as Italian prime minister, introduced a
programme of ‘making’ and educating Italians two decades later.56
Many of these celebrations were also politically astute. Not only was a
great effort made to be as inclusive as possible (only unrepentant Bourbons
and Jesuits were excluded from Garibaldi's revolution), but enormous care
was taken not to offend the Church. Moreover, since most of these
festivities required a significant amount of expenditure and practical
organisation, they presumably served to provide employment for artisans,
and so to revitalise the city's economy after the fighting and bombardment
and appease this crucial section of Palermo society.57 The creation of
employment opportunities could serve other purposes too. The painters
responsible for the large-scale canvases at Garibaldi's birthday celebrations
and Pilo's funeral were highly experienced in producing religious and
theatrical art, and could therefore be relied upon to produce something
spectacular. But they – Giuseppe Bagnasco, Luigi Lo Jacono, Giovan
Battista Basile – were also prominent figures known for their liberal
sympathies, and it seems very likely that the government sought to reward
them for their loyalty and to show other artists and artisans the material
advantages which official patronage could bring.58
The myth of the ‘Mille’

From the outset, Garibaldi's dictatorship had a very keen eye for self-
publicity. These publicity efforts were not, however, confined to Sicily; the
expedition, and later the government, were extremely attentive to public
opinion both in northern and central Italy and internationally. Positive
publicity was vital to the success of the expedition, in part because it could
translate into the supply of money and men. Widespread and positive
publicity was also crucial because, at the outset at least, the expedition to
Sicily was part of a broader military strategy which included an attack on
the Papal States.
The day before leaving for Sicily, Garibaldi wrote a series of letters,
destined for publication in the main democratic newspapers such as
Valerio's Il Diritto, L'Unità Italiana and Il Movimento.59 These letters
represent a manifesto for the expedition, in which he justified his action and
announced his aims. One of the most important and widely circulated was
his 5 May letter to Bertani (who had stayed at Genoa), which asked for
practical support in the name of Italian independence:

Try to make Italians understand that if we are duly helped, Italy will be made quickly and at a
small cost … That for an Italy freed today, five hundred thousand soldiers must take up arms,
and not a hundred thousand … With such an army, Italy will no longer need foreign masters
who will eat her up bit by bit on the pretext of freeing her. That wherever there are Italians
who are fighting the oppressor, there we must incite all the brave men to go and provide them
with the necessary for the journey.60

That this letter was intended not so much for Bertani as for the rest of the
world is suggested by its publication in Il Diritto on 9 May, and its
translation and circulation to many foreign newspapers, including the
London Times and the New York Times (the latter commented that it was ‘in
better taste than many of the guerillero's late effusions’).61 A proclamation
addressed to Italiani!, and which began: ‘Sicilians are fighting against the
enemies of Italy, and for Italy! It is the duty of every Italian to help them,
with word, with money, with firearms and above all with their hands’, was
also printed and distributed as a flyer.62
Arguably the most important sign of Garibaldi's concern with public
opinion was the public letter he wrote to the king just before sailing to
Sicily. In it, Garibaldi both reiterated the link between nation, monarchy
and democracy that he had tried so hard to promote during the previous
year, and recast his initially reluctant decision to go to Sicily in a much
more conclusive light:

The cry of torment which arrived at my ears from Sicily has moved my heart, and the heart of
a few hundred of my old fellow-soldiers. I did not encourage the insurrection by my brothers
in Sicily; but from the moment that they rose up in the name of Italian Union, of which Your
Majesty is the personification, against the most vile tyranny of our times, I did not hesitate in
placing myself at the head of the expedition. I am well aware that I am embarking on a
hazardous enterprise, but I have faith in God, and in the courage and devotion of my
companions. Our war cry will always be: Viva l'unità d'Italia! Viva Vittorio Emanuele, her first
and bravest soldier!63

In other words, Garibaldi was not responsible for the insurrection, but it
was justifiable against such an evil regime; and the expedition itself was a
heroic and generous endeavour carried out for Italy and in the name of the
king. In this way, Garibaldi sought to establish and control the symbolic
representation of the expedition, and to legitimise it by appealing both to
revolutionary nationalism and to monarchical devotion.
Garibaldi was also careful to write a letter to the director of the Rubattino
Steamship Company in which he justified the theft of his two ships by
reference to the ‘service to a holy cause’, and this letter was published not
only in Il Diritto and L'Unità Italiana, but also in foreign papers like the
London Times, the New York Times and Le Siècle.64 Further evidence of
Garibaldi's commitment to getting material and moral support for the
expedition is provided by a private letter to Giacomo Medici, asking him to
stay behind and organise men and arms: ‘Tell the Italians that they should
follow you in complete faith, that the hour has finally come to make this
Italy that we all yearn for and that by God! they should understand that if
we are many we will finish them off quickly and that our enemies draw
strength from our fears and our indifference’.65 This effort did not let up
after departure. On 13 May, the Movimento published Garibaldi's orders to
his troops:

the mission of this corps will be, as it was heretofore, based upon the most complete
abnegation with the object of regenerating our country. The brave Chasseurs have served and
will serve their country with the devotion and discipline of the best troops in the world without
hoping for any other reward than that of an unspotted conscience. They are attracted to the
service by no offer of rank, honors or rewards. When the danger is over they will retire to their
simple private life; but now that the hour of combat has come, Italy beholds them in the front
rank, joyous and determined, ready to shed their blood.

Everything in these orders was intended for wider dissemination (and,

indeed, they were published as far away as New York's illustrated Harper's
Weekly).66 Garibaldi's troops were already on board the ships bound for
Sicily and committed, for better for worse, to the expedition. It was the
young men at home reading about the Thousand in the newspapers that
Garibaldi sought to reach, and to encourage to join his volunteers in Sicily.
For these readers, the expedition was constructed in heroic terms, mixing
religious and military metaphors. The expedition was a matter of individual
conscience, a decisive moment to choose bravery and express devotion to a
greater cause. Moreover, the expedition's attention to the world outside
Sicily did not stop on arrival at Marsala. Indeed, as they sailed into the port,
Nino Bixio – perhaps knowing they would have to cut the telegraph wire at
Marsala – tried to throw dispatches wrapped in bread to a passing English
sailing boat and, when he failed, shouted at them to give out the news that
Garibaldi had landed at Marsala.67
Immediately after Calatafimi, Garibaldi wrote two other letters, to
Bertani and to Rosolino Pilo, which were published in Il Diritto. Both
began with the same simple but powerful words, ‘Yesterday we fought and
won’, and both emphasised the demoralisation of the enemy, the enthusiasm
of the population and the pressing need for volunteers.68 From Palermo,
Garibaldi sent other letters for publication which asked for arms and
ammunition,69 and a series of his letters addressed to British public figures
and other groups was published: these thanked the British for their support
and asked ‘quick’ for ‘arms, ships, guns and material’.70 His first
proclamations to the Sicilians and Neapolitans reached the New York Times
on 30 May, and his address to ‘Sicilian women’, encouraging them to send
their sons and lovers, was also intended for a wider audience of women; it
was made as Garibaldi prepared to relaunch the expedition by crossing the
straits to Calabria, and it was published in L'Unità Italiana on 13 August.71
The published letters of Garibaldi aimed at maximum publicity, and at
gaining material and moral support for the expedition. The letters
constructed the expedition to Sicily as a narrative of selfless courage and
military daring, where the odds against the expedition – a thousand men
against a royal army – added to the miraculous and heroic quality of the
final outcome. They were accompanied by a propaganda effort in northern
Italy which continued throughout the summer: by speeches, poems and
other celebrations. A Sicilian professor, Giacomo Oddo, made a speech in
early July to the Institute of Popular Education in Milan which was
subsequently published as a pamphlet. In it, he spoke of the joy of being
Italian (‘allow me to become inebriated on the single idea of being born
Italian, and I say to you, oh gentlemen, rejoice, because your fatherland is
Italy, and however great were the misfortunes of this unhappy nation, so
were its glories, and they are and will always be infinite’) and of the
greatness of Garibaldi (‘the shining star of Italy … the man of Providence,
the angel of our Italy’). The real purpose of this florid speech was to raise
arms and money.72 The novelist and political activist Francesco Domenico
Guerrazzi joined the effort, penning a speech to celebrate the volunteers on
the second expedition to Garibaldi and publishing an article in L'Unità
Italiana and Il Precursore in which he praised Garibaldi (‘Garibaldi is the
people, who go forward sword in hand’) and criticised Cavour.73 Bertani
was active in this area too; he helped to circulate a poem, ‘The guns’, which
called for volunteers and arms, and in August he organised an elaborate
commemoration in Milan – ‘Funerals for the martyrs of Milazzo’ – which
was, above all, a publicity drive and fund-raising activity.74
Perhaps most of all, the campaign relied on newspapers to publicise its
activity.75 Around a hundred of the volunteers with the Thousand were
writers and/or painters, some of whom (Nievo, dell'Ongaro) had already
published poems about their experiences in 1859.76 A deliberate choice
seems to have been made to use their personal accounts, particularly their
letters and diaries, to give immediacy and intimacy to the political events
being described. In this way, the appeal of first-hand experience was tied to
the more abstract, and political, ideal of Italy. That this epistolary formula
was perceived as attractive to the reader is indicated by its frequent use in
the months that followed, and by many participants and by journalists in
1860 (often the line dividing these two groups was not clear, as many of the
journalists were huge Garibaldi enthusiasts). Above all, these letters and
diaries stressed the emotional intensity of the events their writers were
living through.
A fine example of the use of the epistolary formula to encourage personal
identification with Garibaldi's expedition is found in L'Unità Italiana of 12
May. The paper published a letter from one volunteer to his mother, in
which he asked forgiveness for abandoning her ‘to go and help heroic
Sicily, but I hope you have forgiven me and will also be a mother to Italy’.
He then explicitly identified the love of his own mother with the love of,
and need to defend, the Italian family: ‘how close it is to my heart … dear
mother … to think you will bless my departure, it gives me greater courage
to go and defend other unhappy mothers deprived of their sons, wives
deprived of their husbands, and children orphaned by fathers in exile,
imprisoned or extinguished by tyranny, because they felt they were
Italian’.77 On 11 May, Il Movimento published a similarly intimate letter
from another volunteer, but this time an ‘[o]ld soldier of the fatherland’. He
also made a definite link between the personal and the political. He had, he
told his readers, seen many ‘marvellous events’ in his career:

but the sensations I feel today have something new, so sweetly inexplicable that I have no idea
how to define it in words. Alone, in the middle of the wide sea, led by the brave and among the
brave, with a great principle as our guide, a glorious flag to defend, we feel ourselves to be
great men … My sentiments, my impressions I hear repeated around me in all the dialects of
Italy. Old conspirators with penetrating eyes and hollow faces mix with the blond and
beautiful youngsters sent to us by strong Lombard mothers.78

The expedition here is represented as something dramatically important,

perhaps the culmination or realisation of Italy's Risorgimento. To belong to
the Thousand is seen as a moment of personal fulfilment, and of being part
of a microcosm of heroic and beautiful italianità (‘Alone, in the middle of
the wide sea, led by the brave and among the brave … we feel ourselves to
be great men’).
That this glorification of the Thousand was part of a deliberate strategy is
further suggested by attempts to do the same for subsequent expeditions to
Sicily led by Medici and Cosenz. Long letters from two volunteers with
Medici, published in L'Unità Italiana and the Florentine paper, La Nazione,
described their experiences on board and on arrival, along with intimate
details of the various personalities: Medici who was seasick; the
Englishman Peard, ‘a handsome man with long grey hair and beard … he
adores Garibaldi’; and the welcome given to them by Garibaldi and their
‘brothers’ in Palermo.79 A volunteer on the Cosenz expedition, which left
Genoa in early July, remarked on the ‘solemn silence’ of the departure, and
the unity and national inclusiveness of the occasion: ‘Here and there a
sister, a mother, a wife, a lover, tied in close embrace with their dear ones,
the tears flowing at such a love scene. All the dialects of Italy could be
heard, almost like a prelude to the unity which the nation has longed for
through so many years.’ The journey itself was ‘felicissimo,
tranquillissimo’, and the men on board were:

Animated by a flame which even death would extinguish with difficulty, the flame of Italy …
There were doctors, surgeons and chaplains. Everyone … well-behaved … the son of the
people with hands rough from daily work, and the son of the rich aristocrat, on whose finger
precious rings still shone … lively and varied groups, with different attitudes, and united
together by a single sentiment: Italy.80

Both for ideological reasons and because of practical considerations and, as

we have seen already, in attempts to ‘make’ Italians in Palermo, Garibaldi's
expedition is represented in the democratic press as an idealised Italian
family and a model of democratic inclusiveness.
As the expedition progressed through Sicily, took Palermo and became
an army, an increasing amount of emphasis came to be placed on the
heroism of those involved, and on the listing of those individuals who had
suffered in the struggle. L'Unità Italiana set the tone in late June with a
letter from Pietro Ripari, a surgeon and veteran from Garibaldi's 1848–9
and 1859 campaigns, which created a pantheon of heroes – those brave and
still untouched, and those wounded but determined to fight on:
 our men are real heroes – I won't talk to you of Garibaldi – the first in any danger, uncaring,
disdainful, fully convinced that he cannot die … of Sirtori, I tell you that there is no one who
exceeds him in fearlessness and cold-bloodedness … Bixio, the real live wire of war, he too
wounded in the chest … he will not take off his uniform until victory is assured. Cairoli,
another generous man who accomplished prodigious tasks with his chosen company. Mosto,
whose brother was killed … is also a hero…81

Readers were encouraged to follow the convalescence of their wounded

heroes: ‘Canzio is better, but he has suffered greatly. Damele is much better.
Evangelisti is better. The two Cairoli brothers are better, but for the older
one it is going to take a long time … the younger one is much better.’82
L'Unità Italiana published on 15 July, ‘to satisfy … the demands’ of its
readers, a list of all the dead and wounded garibaldini, complete with their
name, origin, age and type of wound sustained.83 On 28 July, Il Diritto
published a letter from one of Garibaldi's medical corps (probably the
English Mazzinian, Jessie White Mario), stating that none of the wounded
volunteers ever complained: ‘“We have come here to die for Garibaldi”,
they say, “and we still hope to do so”.’84
The nationalist press also followed a style of reporting established during
the Crimean War, and took a great interest in the heroic doctors and nurses
who cared for the wounded and dying. The above letter was followed by
another, from a volunteer, which shifted the focus directly on to the medical
services. The volunteer praised the doctors and especially the ‘signora
Mario White’ for ‘that care which could be called maternal, which is rarely
found away from one's own family’. Jessie White was ‘the consoling angel
of the sick’, according to yet another volunteer, with a ‘maternal care’ for
her patients. She was matched only by the ‘fatherliness’ of the doctor, and
the kindness of another nurse who soothed their brows, helped them in their
‘most vulgar needs’, talked to them ‘about our mothers and our
countryside’, and read them the victory bulletins.85
If these letters sought to stress all the suffering, gentleness and
consolation of the good Italian family, other letters written from the front
line publicised the triumphant progress of Garibaldi's army through Sicily
and beyond. On 4 June, Il Diritto published Garibaldi's letter to Bertani
saying they had arrived in Marsala and were ‘welcomed with enthusiasm’
by the crowd, who ‘joined up with us in large groups’.86 Letters in L'Unità
Italiana, Il Diritto and L'Opinione stressed (equally inaccurately) the
enormous welcome given to Garibaldi at Marsala, ‘with cheers for the
liberator, for Italy and King Vittorio’; ‘The enthusiasm of the people is
immense … the cry of everybody is “Viva Vittorio Emanuele our King”’.87
With somewhat more justification, newspapers stressed the audacity and
courage of Calatafimi: ‘to describe the marvellous enthusiasm and the
miracles of bravery of our young men would be impossible,’ Il Diritto told
its readers on 3 June.88
All the epistolary evidence suggests a general consensus to construct and
promote a story of the Thousand as an exemplary Risorgimento narrative.
After Palermo was taken, all practical and political press restrictions on
reporting were lifted, and an information explosion occurred around
Garibaldi's expedition. The struggle for Palermo was described in great
detail in lengthy letters, as were the city and its inhabitants,89 and the
volume of letters grew still further once Garibaldi had left Palermo for
Milazzo, in mid-July, and his intention to cross to Calabria and take Naples
became clear. More than ever, the letters glorified the campaign and
reflected on its miraculous impact and outcome. ‘Dear Papa!’, one letter
began, which described the bravery of the soldiers at Milazzo but added:

we must also admit that there is something heaven-sent which protects them in their holy
enterprise. Not just enthusiasm for the national cause which makes them capable of those
miracles which have amazed Europe, but its influence extends also over the population which
throngs around us and produces a kind of dizziness amongst our enemies.90

The welcome Messina gave the garibaldini was said to have been
‘something from another world!’91 After Garibaldi reached Naples, letters
to the papers spoke of nothing but the festivities surrounding his arrival
(‘for three days we had an ovation which no other story or people has ever
received’), and marvelled at what had been achieved, and how quickly:
‘they [Garibaldi and his soldiers] did not come but they were, if you like,
pulled to Naples by a rapid, all-powerful, marvellous current … It is really
something to make your head spin: it exceeds the wildest imagination,
spoils the tactical calculations, and makes all diplomatic ventures
redundant.’92
 Of course, the real centre of attention was Garibaldi: his leadership of the
expedition guaranteed publicity, and his soldiers’ letters from the campaign
of 1860 glorified him above all else. This was clear from the beginning.
From their stop in Talamone, a volunteer wrote to Il Diritto on 7 May that
they were all seasick but ‘the General is in great form, he does not suffer at
all and inspires courage and confidence in everyone’.93 From the front,
other letters repeated the same message, broadly reflecting the official cult
of Garibaldi being constructed in Palermo. He was their adored and trusted
leader, with powers far greater than their own, but he was also gentle and
kind with his followers. From Calatafimi, a volunteer wrote that Garibaldi
‘was present at every position; the fear of seeing him hit by enemy fire
made us double our efforts’;94 from Messina, another confessed that ‘[w]ith
him command is sweet, and we would go with him to the end of the
world’.95 There was an especially joyous letter sent by a volunteer who had
shared a boat trip with Garibaldi from Palermo to Messina at the end of
August: ‘the brave Italian, affectionate with everyone, he never puts on an
heroic act or pretends to be a great man’. Garibaldi, the volunteer told his
readers, had eaten his meals with the men, he had joined them in singing
patriotic songs on board, and he had even taught them a song they didn't
know already:

You cannot imagine what ran through my mind … my heart beat at a furious rate. That man
responsible for miraculous acts, whose name is enough to rout whole enemy legions, that man
whose name is spoken with respect throughout the entire world, was there sitting on a barrel of
fresh water … singing along with us, while the boat steamed along the coast, where an entire
population worships him … oh! it really was something quite incredible.96

Once again, the epistolary formula is used to great effect here. Contrasting
the intimate experience with the public pose, the humility of the man with
his political fame, the letter serves only to intensify the reader's response to
Garibaldi's personal greatness.
As if all this was not enough, Garibaldi was joined in June by Alexandre
Dumas. Dumas was in the process of editing and embellishing Garibaldi's
memoirs for publication, and had been enjoying a lengthy tour and cruise of
southern Europe and the Mediterranean. He apparently decided to join
Garibaldi in order to get more material.97 He had an agreement to publish
his letters and reports in the French liberal papers, Le Constitutionel, La
Presse and Le Siècle, and later, in Naples, he told Garibaldi that he had a
‘great ambition … to lend my activity to the profit of your popularity’.98 In
effect, Dumas became the first, and self-appointed, historian of the
Thousand, and he brought to the task the right blend of journalistic realism,
poetic licence and narrative skill. As a clearly envious correspondent of The
Illustrated London News put it:

[Dumas] is engaged in writing the history of the revolution, which will in reality be a Sicilian
romance, with all the information gleaned right and left, and from opposite sources, crammed
into it. No offence to our neighbours across the Channel, but they have a most extraordinary
fashion of relating actual occurrences.99

Although Dumas was indeed to write a book about his experiences,100 of

more immediate importance in 1860 was a series of published letters from,
about, and after the battle of Milazzo. These letters were addressed to the
wounded volunteer, Giacinto Carini, but were clearly intended for a much
wider national and international readership.
Remarkable both for their intense immediacy (he pulled up anchor at
Messina, Dumas tells his readers, and arrived in the Gulf of Milazzo when
‘the battle had begun’) and intimacy (‘the General has opened his eyes, he
has recognised me and is looking at me’), it was Dumas' letters which
instantly established the battle of Milazzo as a canonic moment in
Risorgimento history. The letters were published as a supplement to the
Italian paper, Il Movimento, in the National Society's Piccolo Corriere
d'Italia, in the Sicilian La Forbice, and in the French La Presse. The
London Times published two official bulletins about ‘the battle of Melazzo
[sic]’ on 1 August, together with a lengthy excerpt from Dumas' first letter.
In this first and most important letter, Dumas highlighted the drama of the
occasion. Milazzo was a ‘battle of the giants’; a ‘[g]reat battle, a great
victory; 7000 Neapolitans have fled in front of 2500 Italians’. The
garibaldini fought like heroes: Medici was at the head of his men, and his
horse was killed under him; Cosenz fell to the ground with a bullet in his
neck, ‘we thought he was mortally wounded, but then he leapt up shouting:
Viva l'Italia!”’ Of course, the greatest hero of the day was Garibaldi, ‘at the
head of his men, directing the fire; while twenty paces away the cannon fire
rattled’; he was persuaded to pull back only when he had his shoes and
stirrups blown off and his wounded horse became uncontrollable.
It was Dumas who made famous the incident of Garibaldi and Missori's
reaction to the cavalry charge. Blocked on the road by the Bourbon cavalry:

The General leapt at the bridle of the officer, shouting: surrender. By way of reply, the officer
swiped at him with a downward blow: General Garibaldi parried the blow, and with a
backhand strike cut his throat … Three or four sabres were drawn on the General, who
wounded one of his aggressors with the point of his sword. Missori killed another two and the
horse of a third with three pistol shots.

Finally, it was Dumas who gave the reader a memorable – and again
intensely personal – description of Garibaldi sleeping on the steps of a
church after the battle, in which the private and intimate became a sign of
immeasurable historical greatness:

surrounded by his staff … lying on the vestibule, with his head leaning on his saddle, worn out
with tiredness: he slept. Next to him was his supper, a piece of bread and a jug of water. My
dear Carini, I was taken back to 2500 years ago, and I found myself in the presence of
Cincinnatus. May God protect him for you my dear Italians, because if some misadventure
were to take him from you, the whole world could not give you another like him.101

Journalists and their public

The involvement of Alexandre Dumas best symbolises the remarkable

fusion of politics and theatre, news journalism and popular fiction, and the
public and the personal which characterised the way the story of the
Thousand was accomplished, narrated and remembered. It can hardly be
over-stressed how important winning the sympathy of journalists was to
Garibaldi. Most obviously, press sympathy was crucial to combat any
criticism of what Garibaldi had done. We should remember that at the outset
of the expedition Garibaldi's volunteer army had no legal basis whatever,
that they had stolen two ships, and that they had attacked without
provocation the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, a recognised and legitimate
state, from a base in Piedmont, a non-enemy state. All these actions gave
ample opportunity to his right-wing and clerical enemies to attack Garibaldi
for being a pirate and a bandit.
 In fact, the Bourbon government immediately denounced Garibaldi on
this basis, and was quickly followed by the rest of legitimist and reactionary
Europe, and especially by the French press. The Neapolitan minister Carafa
published a diplomatic note which accused Garibaldi of leading ‘a fact of
the most savage piracy’ with a ‘horde of brigands’ (as well as saying the
British had helped him disembark at Marsala).102 La Gazzetta di Napoli
called Garibaldi ‘a monster in human shape’ and La Gazzetta di Roma an
‘Antichrist’.103 On 10 May, Le Pays, a Bonapartist paper in France, wrote
that ‘[the] expedition of Garibaldi carried out without a tie to any
nationality, without a flag, without a right of any kind, should simply be
treated as an act of piracy’; and it was followed on 22 May by the legitimist
Le Correspondant, which said that Garibaldi had attacked a state he was not
at war with, ‘at the whim of his fancy and his ambitions’. Also in France,
L'Union on 2 June called Garibaldi ‘an adventurer … a bandit, a pirate
acting for his own ends … a buccaneer’, and on 10 June described his
volunteers as ‘barbarians of the modern age … Saracens of the
revolutionary idea’.104 The author of a pamphlet Halte-là Garibaldi!
described him as a ‘bandit-chief subsidised by the foreigner’, and repeated
the accusation against the British.105
Some inkling of how the expedition could be interpreted even by the
friends of Garibaldi was provided by The Illustrated London News,
normally very well disposed towards him. However, on hearing the news of
his arrival in Sicily the paper found it impossible to deny that ‘the famous
partisan General in his present expedition is acting the part of nothing more
or less than a buccaneer; that he is guilty of simple piracy’, and criticised
his ‘characteristic impetuosity’.106 And even though a writer for the New
York Times hoped ‘fervently’ for the success of Garibaldi's expedition, he
feared ‘that the end of the heroic Garibaldi is nigh. Disappointed and heart-
sore [a reference to Giuseppina Raimondi], he has, it is said, a desire to
meet a glorious death, and it is likely that his fancy will be indulged.’107
Garibaldi, according to a leader in London's Times on 22 May (reprinted in
the New York Times on 4 June), ‘is either a hero or a brigand, all men of his
stamp divide the world in admiration or execration’.
As the campaign wore on, however, and Garibaldi went from victory to
victory, there was a marked shift in his favour in the attitude of the press.
This shift was especially noticeable in France, and probably reflected
Napoleon III's view that Garibaldi's conquest of Sicily was a fait accompli.
The liberal Journal des Débats wrote on 23 May that it now seemed
impossible ‘to prevent the unanimous explosion produced in favour of
Garibaldi’, and described his progress as ‘a serious victory’. ‘All eyes are
fixed on Garibaldi’, the paper proclaimed at the end of May.108 On 7 June,
the radical Le Siècle felt able to publish an extended tribute by Louis
Jourdain to the ‘miracle’ brought about by Garibaldi: ‘Condottiere,
adventurer, officer of fortune, even a brigand … what does it matter!
Garibaldi is above all a hero, even better, an apostle of liberty and
independence … he has just won his place – and what a place! – among the
greatest and most heroic figures of this century, of all centuries. All honour
to this brave captain!’ Reflecting and adding to the publicity surrounding
Garibaldi, the exiled novelist Victor Hugo made a speech from Jersey in
June which was reported, translated and reprinted across the European
press:

Garibaldi! What is Garibaldi? He is a man, nothing more. But a man in the most sublime
meaning of the word. A man of liberty; a man of humanity … Does he have an army? No. A
handful of volunteers. Does he have weapons of war? Not at all … So where does his force
come from? … What does he have with him? The people's soul.

Hugo's speech was also reprinted and published in a Brussels edition of

Dumas’ Mémoires de Garibaldi, with an introduction by George Sand, and
the flurry of press activity around his speech can be seen as a furtive
political discussion of French policy in Italy.109 In fact, throughout the
summer the Revue des Deux Mondes dedicated significant amounts of space
to in-depth discussion of the Italian revolution. By the end of the campaign,
one of the French artist–writers who had followed Garibaldi in 1860
described the attitude of the French press as follows:

For some, the famous native of Nice is an adventurer, a seawolf … his companions a heap of
bandits and buccaneers … For others, the erstwhile defender of Rome is a hero, a character
from the book of Plutarch, almost a new Messiah surrounded by a phalanx of martyrs and
liberators. But there is one point on which the whole world is in agreement, and that is the
integrity and unselfishness of the hermit of Caprera.110
In Germany too, the press began to express admiration of Garibaldi's
courage and ability as a soldier, even while it disagreed with his politics.111
Karl Marx, never a fan of the Italian nationalists, wrote in the New York
Tribune on 14 June that Garibaldi was ‘the prevailing topic of discussion’ in
Germany.112
In the end, there was no doubt in the international press that 1860 was
Garibaldi's year. The Illustrated London News wrote about the prince of
Wales’ visit to Canada and the growth of a volunteer movement in Britain,
and L'Illustration faithfully followed the tours of Napoleon III and his
family to his new provinces in Savoy and the south of France, but there was
little really to rival Garibaldi. On 9 June, New York's Harper's Weekly
proclaimed that: ‘There are conjunctures in every age when the triumph or
defeat of great principles hinges on the fortunes of individuals’. Thus, ‘the
course of civilization and human freedom depends … upon the success of
Garibaldi’. For the London Times on 15 June, Garibaldi was the
‘Washington of Italy’ who ‘descended among a people whose spirit was
broken by long oppression, and whose trust was broken by frequent
treacheries … [he] has made war like a Christian gentleman. He has spoken
and he has fought in the old spirit of chivalry.’ The British satirical paper,
Punch, published a cartoon the next day, Garibaldi the liberator: or the
modern Perseus, showing Garibaldi (Perseus/‘Garibaldi to the rescue’)
chasing off Francesco II (the serpent/‘Bomba junior’) while Sicily (the
beautiful maiden Andromeda) lay chained on the rock behind him (see
figure 15). Women's illustrated magazines like The Lady's Newspaper and
Pictorial Times also published pictures of Garibaldi. This fascination
continued throughout the summer. ‘No such feat’, commented the New York
Herald in September, ‘is recorded in history, nor even amongst the deeds of
mythological heroes.’ ‘It was truly a most daring and extraordinary
enterprise’, wrote the New York World: ‘an enterprise unparalleled in
modern times, whether it is viewed in relation to the paucity of the force by
which it was achieved, the formidable strength of the potentate against
whom it was directed, or the tact, audacity, and military skill of the hero
who projected and executed it.’113 In France, the satirical paper Le
Chiarivari poked fun at the prevailing obsession with Garibaldi: a middle-
class husband criticised by his wife for not caring for the garden replies that
it is true, he had forgotten that they had their house to see to and their
garden to cultivate, but ‘la campagne de Garibaldi me fait oublier la
mienne’.114

15 ‘Garibaldi to the rescue’ comments Punch. This cartoon was produced

shortly after the details of Garibaldi's conquest of Palermo had become
known.

In this way, the longterm assault on national and international public

opinion, prepared by Mazzini since the 1830s, produced a press-led
‘Garibaldimania’ characterised by massive press attention, most of which
was entirely positive. In Italy itself, press reporting in 1860 represents an
apogee for Risorgimento rhetoric. Nationalists of all political persuasions
came to echo each other in praising what had been accomplished, and
concurred in emphasising the glorious example set by Garibaldi. Raymond
Grew points out that, while the attitude of the National Society and La
Farina to Garibaldi's expedition had been ‘uncertain’ and hesitant, its
newspaper – Il Piccolo Corriere – ‘played happily to the hero-worship of
Garibaldi’, comparing him to El Cid, a medieval knight, and Napoleon, and
complimenting him for the enthusiasm he had engendered in a ‘skeptical
and materialistic’ age.115 A left-moderate deputy in the Piedmontese
parliament, Pier Carlo Boggio (‘the enfant terrible’ of the Rattazzi party,
according to The Times), who had opposed Garibaldi in the parliamentary
debate over Nice in April 1860, and after the campaign was over was to
attack Garibaldi again,116 had nothing but praise for him during the
summer. He wrote a short biography of Garibaldi (Da Montevideo a
Palermo) which was decidedly conventional both in its narrative structure
and in the praise which it heaped on him. Boggio differed only in the
portrait which he used of Garibaldi (showing him in his dark civilian garb
of the 1850s), and in the suggestion – couched in very positive terms – that
the hero was an enigma:

the most extraordinary man! An unresolved and perhaps irresolvable Enigma! … he brings
alive the fiction of Homeric songs, and of the Round Table … the contrast between his
physical form, which is quite delicate, and the unyielding energy of his moral gifts – between
the sweetness of his gaze and the toughness of his will – everything contributes to endow this
man with a prestige which is easier to sustain, than to understand or explain.

Otherwise, he followed entirely the nationalist formula in praising

‘Garibaldi, the most powerful, the most marvellous personality that Italy,
and perhaps the world, boasts in the field of action.’117
More broadly, the moderate press followed the democrats in exalting
Garibaldi as a new nationalist saint. He was a ‘heroic son of Italy’, ‘the
redeemer of Italy’, the ‘Genius of Italy’ and the ‘Archangel Gabriel …
appeared in human shape on earth’.118 The Turin illustrated paper, Il Mondo
Illustrato, which was relaunched on 7 July probably in response to the
events in southern Italy, fully embraced Garibaldi and the story of the
Thousand. In its first number, it began a two-part history of ‘Garibaldi in
Sicilia’ by F. Botto. Botto's history, along with similar accounts in the
foreign illustrated press, helped to create a narrative of the campaign as a
series of emblematic and picturesque moments. The departure from Quarto,
‘They arrive in Sicilia’, ‘Calatafimi’, were followed by ‘They win’, ‘Within
sight of Palermo’, ‘Entrance’, and so on until Garibaldi's entry into Naples
and the defence at Volturno. All these episodes and characters were
constructed as a pictorial history of the events of 1860, with a beginning
(Quarto), climax (Naples), and happy ending (the king and Garibaldi at
Teano).119
There was nothing casual about the involvement of the press with
Garibaldi in 1860. Indeed, Garibaldi and those around him consistently did
their utmost to endear themselves to journalists. Garibaldi, in particular,
used his personal charm to win over journalists, and he encouraged them
along with other writers and artists to join his campaign and report on it
from the inside. Other than his friendship with Dumas (which predated the
departure from Quarto), perhaps the most striking example of Garibaldi's
closeness to journalists, and the blurred line between journalism, camp
following and soldiering, is his relationship with the Times correspondent
Eber, a Hungarian officer who had come out to Sicily to fight with, as well
as write about, Garibaldi. Eber's articles for The Times are among the most
vivid contemporary accounts of the experience of being with Garibaldi, but
what is most interesting for us is how Garibaldi treated him. Unlike the
Bourbon army, Eber had no problem in finding Garibaldi in the mountains
above Palermo; he joined up with some American and British sightseers and
was taken quickly to Garibaldi's camp at Gibilrossa, on the day before the
volunteers were due to go down to Palermo. Garibaldi received the visitors
‘with that charming, quiet simplicity which characterizes him, lending
himself with great complaisance to the invariably recurring demands of
autographs, and answering the numerous questions which were naturally
put to him’. Only after the other visitors had gone did Garibaldi resume the
pressing business of organising the descent to Palermo and, if the report is
to be believed, he immediately let Eber in on all his plans and included him
in the invasion party.120
Garibaldi's courtesy towards Eber was not at all unusual, and reflects his
awareness that the press had become an integral part of modern warfare. As
The Times pointed out on 8 June 1860:

Battles are now fought in an amphitheatre with the eager public of a hundred nations, in a
figurative sense, looking on … The duel between Garibaldi and the Neapolitan Viceroy is
being fought out under eyes of newspaper correspondents, tourists, artists, and English or
American sympathizers, as well as … more official spectators.

According to Henry Adams, an American journalist who met Garibaldi

shortly after the taking of Palermo, Garibaldi was careful to greet, and
shake hands with, every member of his party: ‘He talked with each of us,
and talked perfectly naturally; no stump oratory and no sham’. When
Garibaldi learnt that Adams had come all the way from Naples to see him,
‘he turned around thanking me as if I had done him a favor. This is the way
he draws people.’121 Vizitelly of The Illustrated London News agreed. He
wrote: ‘I shall never forget as long as I live the courteous reception given
me by the General. He advanced to meet me from his group of officers, and,
shaking me by the hand, welcomed me to his roof, which at any time might
be splintered into fragments above our heads.’122 Later on, after the crowds
grew too insistent and Garibaldi retreated from the Palazzo Pretorio to the
more protected Palazzo Reale, he was still careful to keep his door open to
journalists; and he made a great display of the simplicity of his apartments
and the beauty of their setting on top of the Porta Nuova, with a splendid
view of the city below.123
By the time he left Palermo in July, Garibaldi was accompanied by a
substantial, increasing, and loyal press entourage. Apart from Dumas and
Eber, two Italian journalists based in London – Gallenga and Arrivabene –
came to Sicily, as did Texier and Paya from France, and the artists Vizitelly,
Nast (a German–American who joined Medici's expedition and worked for
Harper's Weekly and The Illustrated London News),124 and Devaux and De
Fonvielle (for the Paris Illustration). Two photographers – Sevaistre and Le
Gray – also travelled to Palermo to photograph the war and its
protagonists.125 Later, they were joined by the writers Maxime du Camp
and Marc Monnier (who wrote for the Revue des Deux Mondes), and by the
poet Louise Colet (‘Flaubert's muse’).126 All of these people published
articles and books about their experiences.127 Some stayed with Garibaldi,
others moved around more: a significant number in Sicily, for instance,
seem to have followed General Türr into the wild interior, and sent reports
back from there on their activities. These writers were joined by a broader
group of political sympathisers or simple admirers: Englishmen like Forbes,
Clark and Bucknell, who followed Garibaldi's campaign, sometimes at the
front of the army (Forbes was with Garibaldi at Milazzo; Clark on the train
with him into Naples). They too sent letters to the papers and published
reminiscences – often written as travel books but with their political
adventures included – describing, glorifying and promoting their
experiences.128 One of the Italian volunteers, Giulio Adamoli, described the
atmosphere in Türr's headquarters as a ‘Babel’ full of foreign journalists and
volunteers, whose only common language was German: ‘A caravanserai of
the Orient, with all his guests of different races, fashions, colours, can only
give some idea of our headquarters and of the respectable or vulgar,
pleasant or grotesque, renowned or unknown people who sat at our table
during those fantastic months’.129
There was never any question about the support of these writers, artists
and fellow travellers for Garibaldi. They were also very good at creating a
sense of excitement and adventure. Forbes, the British volunteer, thought
the members of the press who crowded around the first boat to leave
Messina for Calabria as eager as the troops themselves ‘for business’, and
commented that they were ‘a plucky lot and going in for the fun of the
thing; amongst their number is a French lady, who writes for the Débats. All
… will no doubt fight as well as any one if circumstances require; for they
are all out-and-out Garibaldians.’130 Many of them did get directly involved
in the fighting. Ulric de Fonvielle, like Eber, went to Sicily primarily to
fight with Garibaldi, and probably saw his painting as a means of paying his
passage. A fervent republican and bitterly opposed to Napoleon III (‘I hear
that liberty is awakening in a corner of the world, I run there … come what
may!’), he arrived in Sicily in time to fight at Milazzo.131 Even the
politically moderate Charles Arrivabene, less engaged with Garibaldi than
most of the others, managed to get caught up in the fighting at Cajazzo
(north of Naples), and was wounded and briefly taken prisoner.132
The foreign illustrated press, in particular, tended to depict Garibaldi's
campaign as an adventure, in which the correspondent himself figured as
something of a star. This motif was established by Frank Vizitelly, the
writer– artist for The Illustrated London News (‘a big, florid redbearded
Bohemian’ who later covered the American civil war, and was killed during
the war for Sudan).133 Before Vizitelly's arrival in Palermo, when little was
known about events in Sicily, The Illustrated London News – like the other
papers, Harper's Weekly and Illustration – published general articles and
descriptive illustrations featuring the geography of Palermo and its principal
monuments, along with accounts of Bourbon torture (Application of the
Tourniquet to a political prisoner was reproduced in The Illustrated London
News and Harper's Weekly).134 Vizitelly's arrival shifted the emphasis to
war as escapist entertainment, where the difficulties of getting accurate
reports became part of the overall excitement. His first article consisted of a
lengthy account of his adventures getting to Sicily, while the next began:
‘Garibaldi is fighting in the town. I am going to chance the shots. Lots of
sketches and a long letter by the next ship. One is now leaving the harbour.
Whiz! all the dust dashed up near me. In great haste.’135
While the war in 1859 had been reported as a conventional military
struggle, with picturesque illustrations and descriptions attached, the events
of 1860 were described as a revolution, and could be much more
spectacular and fantastical for that. Vizitelly's reports and illustrations gave
sensational details of the fighting and disorder in Palermo: pictures included
Defence of the barricade at Porta Felice; Catching a goverment spy in the
streets of Palermo; and the most violent of all, with smoke billowing, troops
shooting and lots of dead people: Massacre of people by the royal troops at
the convent of the white Benedictines, Palermo (this picture was also
published in Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper in New York).136 As
Türr's troops moved out of Palermo and into the wild Sicilian interior,
Vizitelly went with them, sending back to London pictures of Our first
bivouac at sunset, near Villafrati; A march through Sicily with the centre
column of the national army; and, most vividly, and almost obligatorily, the
Narrow escape of our special artist from bandits: the picture showed
Vizitelly and his driver escaping in a carriage through a mountainous
Sicilian landscape under gunfire (see figure 16 below).137 Other scenes of
local colour included Breakfast-hunting at Roccapalumba, A Sicilian
village, an ‘amusing’ scene of volunteers stealing poultry in the village
while the locals screamed in horror, and Street scene in Naples after the
arrival of Garibaldi: this illustration by the American artist, Nast, showed
an urchin with an olive branch; an old, fat matron in a tricolour sash with
flag; a younger, amazonian female with a dagger; and a man in a uniform,
all cheering amid a larger, also cheering crowd.138

16 This illustration by Vizitelly in The Illustrated London News is part of a

series on the Sicilian landscape, and indicative of the artist–journalist's self-
promotion as the hero of an adventure story.
Through the publication of portraits, the foreign illustrated papers also
helped to define the revolution's protagonists as political celebrities. There
was a standard image of Garibaldi, more mature than in his previous
incarnations, but still instantly recognisable, an attractive figure in (red)
shirt and trousers, with beard, hat and sword. Only the German Die
Gartenlaube persisted in showing Garibaldi in Piedmontese uniform,
recycling an Illustrated London News portrait from 1859.139 Equal care was
taken to produce portraits of the other combatants (a ‘cacciatore of the
Alps’; a ‘Tuscan volunteer’; ‘one of the squadri’ [sic]).140 The Illustrated
London News was especially interested in British involvement with the
events in Sicily. It published a portrait by Vizitelly of Mr Edwin James QC,
‘the honourable and learned member for Marylebone’: a portly middle-aged
man in flat cap and with two pistols stuck in his belt, who had taken
advantage ‘of the leisure afforded to him by the close of the Parliamentary
Session and by the long vacation’ to go to southern Italy and join Garibaldi;
and it also published an illustration (from a photograph) of four British
volunteers (one dressed entirely in tartan), just arrived from Harwich.141
The French Illustration, by contrast, specialised in vivid illustrations of the
general volunteer experience: one picture showed all the volunteers
barefoot, another showed a large, vigorous group cheering Garibaldi on a
crescent beach with Palermo's Monte Pellegrino in the background, while
still another showed a disorderly but enthusiastic bunch of men, riding oxen
and mules (see figure 17 opposite).142
 17 British ‘excursionists’ in Sicily in 1860, from The Illustrated London
News. These volunteers posed problems for Garibaldi's army, and the
‘Major Styles’ depicted here (second from left) was a very shady character.
On his activities as ‘Captain Styles’, see pages 301–2 below.
Towards the end of the campaign, as the fighting and spectacular street
scenes wound down, some papers began to lose interest in the campaign.
Others, however, responded by producing various forms of commemorative
literature. Harper's Weekly began to produce poems and cartoons. It
celebrated Garibaldi's arrival in Naples in a rousing poem which was the
opposite of serious: ‘Viva, viva Garibaldi! – Saver of his native land –
vogliamo, l'Italia, Una – una – una – viva!= '; and it praised him (entirely
erroneously) for ridding Naples of religious ‘rubbish’, by publishing
another poem and a satirical cartoon which was first published in Punch:
The saint and the hero – Garibaldi driving St. Januarius [complete with his
bottle of blood] and the winking picture out of Naples (see figure 18 on
page 257).143 Later on, and although the paper did venture some criticism
of the treatment of Garibaldi by the Piedmontese government, it did this
again through popular verse: ‘The two Kings at Teano’ (which said
Garibaldi's throne was ‘far higher’ and ‘nobler’ than King Vittorio
Emanuele's), and ‘Two entrances and two exits’:
 18 This cartoon of Garibaldi driving St Januarius out of Naples was
published in Britain and the USA. The representation of the saint as a stupid
and repellent figure is characteristic of the anti-Catholic rhetoric which
circulated among Garibaldi enthusiasts in both countries. Note also the
saint's bare feet, a common shorthand for Neapolitan poverty and ignorance
at this time.

King Garibaldi to never a crown

Or royal robe was born.
He marched to his throne in an old red shirt,
And a pair of trousers torn.
No priest at his coronation stood,
 Twixt him and the Power above…
And simple and shabby as he came,
So shabby and simple goes;
Back to Caprera's cabbage-beds,
And early potatorows.144

As part of its Christmas edition, The Illustrated London News offered its
readers a twopage spread of the meeting at Teano: the king and Garibaldi
loom large in the foreground shaking hands on prancing horses, and they
entirely fill the page (the paper generally preferred enthusiastic crowd
scenes with the protagonists as small figures).145 Readers were told that a
colour portrait of Garibaldi would be presented (‘GRATIS’) to all
subscribers for the following year.146
On the whole, therefore, attempts to persuade journalists that the
revolution in southern Italy was a heroic act of justice and a marvellous
piece of political drama, and not a violent episode of illegal piracy, were
entirely successful. As a rightwing pamphleteer in France complained,
Garibaldi's ‘principal military talent … consists of knowing how to open,
without shame, the great publicity cashtill’.147 The coverage of Garibaldi's
campaign in the press was remarkable for the sheer amount of visual and
textual detail which the reader could choose from. Yet the illustrated press
in particular preferred to steer clear of politics and instead offered its
readers a fairly light-hearted view of events in southern Italy, one in which
they could follow vicariously the adventures of their fearless reporters,
marvel at the exploits of the soldier heroes, and be alternately shocked and
amused by scenes from the war and its surroundings. In this way, the
illustrated press ensured that a section of the reading public would engage
with Garibaldi's revolution as a form of entertainment.
This approach loosened the political link between the campaign and its
reporting which Garibaldi had sought so hard to establish. Moreover,
although spectacular, the illustrated coverage was uneven, and relied on a
mixture of styles and authenticity. Some illustrations (notably of the
barricades at Palermo and many portraits) were lithographed from
photographs; some (the scenes of fighting in Palermo, the battle at the
Volturno) were drawn ‘from life’; and others (the departure from Quarto,
Calatafimi) were entirely imaginary. Thus, careful readers of The Illustrated
London News must have been surprised by Garibaldi's transformation from
the dark, romantic (and imaginary) figure, dressed in flowing robes, leaving
Quarto in the paper's 2 June edition, to the blond, more rotund
‘gentlemanly’ character, wearing tuckedin shirt and trousers, drawn ‘from
life’ on the paper's front page on 23 June. Just as often, it is impossible to
tell the imaginary from the authentic. L'Illustration and The Illustrated
London News included detailed illustrations of the battle of Milazzo, and
both reproduced a picture of the hand-to-hand combat between Garibaldi
and the Neapolitan cavalry – ‘Garibaldi cutting down the Captain of the
Neapolitan cavalry in the charge made by the latter near the bridge of
Melazzo’, read the caption in The Illustrated London News – but whether
this was really drawn ‘from life’ or simply a visual rendering of Dumas’
account is hard to tell.148
The recasting of war and revolution as semi-fictionalised popular
entertainment was most manifest in the commemorative Album storico–
artistico, which was issued in parts from September 1860, and was
modelled on the war Album from the previous year. The album, whose full
title was Historical–artistic Album. Garibaldi in the Two Sicilies or the
Italian war of 1860. Written by B.G. with drawings from life, the Palermo
barricades, portraits and battles, lithographed by the best artists, came out
every two weeks, and was made up of sixty illustrations along with a
historical and geographical account of Garibaldi's adventures.149 The
narrative took second place to the illustrations: these were large and
detailed (each occupying a whole folio page), and of higher quality than
anything else in 1860. The artists also seemed more experienced and more
talented (and, one assumes, more expensive). Everything about the album,
including its publication which spread over two years, was intended for the
collector, and seems to have been designed to make it an object of status
and consumption.
The album followed the established illustrated formula. It focused on the
protagonists, with twentyfour portraits clearly reflecting the cult of political
celebrity which developed around the events of 1860. Most of these were
taken from photographs; and especially worthy of note is the portrait of a
virile Garibaldi on the frontispiece (a copy of a photograph taken in
Palermo by the French photographer, Gustave Le Gray), and the portrait of
‘Frate Pantaleo’. Pantaleo is a masterly mix of religious and revolutionary
iconography, a hirsute, romantic figure in crusading monk's clothes, his
right hand raised in exhortation, his left hand grasping a sword.150 The war
scenes were an eclectic mix of fact and fiction which transformed the recent
events into a popular spectacle. There were the usual street scenes taken
from photographs, and other images lithographed ‘from life’. However,
‘from life’ could mean many things. The departure of the volunteers from
Quarto was a version of the painting by the participant Induno, and was a
remarkable combination of the realistic (full of historical detail) and the
romanticised (replete with melodramatic gestures: it also became the
historical source for all subsequent representations of this episode; see
figure 19 above).151 Yet most of the key battle scenes (Calatafimi, Milazzo,
Volturno) and the entrances of Garibaldi into cities (Palermo, Messina,
Naples) have very little historical or geographical detail and seem entirely
theatrical. Milazzo, for example, is represented by a palm tree and a huge,
broken, fortified gate. In all of them too, Garibaldi is an exemplary figure:
sword always held high, always surrounded by fiercelooking fighting men
with fixed bayonets (see figure 20 opposite).
 19 ‘Garibaldi's departure from Genoa for Sicily’: the standard
representation of this event drawn ‘from life’ by Girolamo Induno. The
romantic farewell scene involving women and children on the right of the
picture would seem to be wholly invented.
 20 ‘The taking of Milazzo’: Milazzo was a key moment in the story of the
Thousand in which Garibaldi's heroism was rarely more spectacular –
elements which are clearly reflected in this illustration of the episode.

Arguably, the most vivid picture of all is drawn entirely from

imagination: the Arrival of Garibaldi at Marsala (Sbarco di Garibaldi a
Marsala). This episode, one of the most dangerous of the whole campaign
and marked by more or less open hostility towards the volunteers, is recast
(as it is in almost all the other illustrated accounts of the Thousand) as a
festive occasion for a popular hero. Garibaldi, wrapped in a dark cloak,
steps calmly off a small rowing boat on to a rocky, mountainous shore
(Marsala is flat and has a large jetty), and the crowd hold out their hands
towards him in exultation and acclamation. Garibaldi claims Sicily for Italy,
and the crowd – a mixed and exotic group of men, women, children, rich
and poor – immediately recognise him as their leader. Indeed, one of them
has already unfurled a tricolour flag.152 The whole scene bears a remarkable
resemblance to contemporary representations of Christopher Columbus
arriving in America (see figure 21 overleaf).153
The lives of Garibaldi

The huge, and largely favourable, press coverage of Garibaldi and his
campaign in 1860 was accompanied by a fresh wave of histories and
biographies dedicated to him and his exploits. These publications are
interesting not so much for what they add to our knowledge of events and
the man, but for what they can tell us about public interest in him.
 21 ‘Garibaldi's landing at Marsala’. This almost entirely fictious
representation of the expedition's arrival contains a number of typical
elements, notably the cheering crowds and the depiction of Marsala as a
wild and rocky shore.
A series of histories of the Thousand came out in 1860 and immediately
thereafter. They differed in size, quality, and the amount of narrative detail
offered; in the number, quality and/or inclusion of illustrations; and in the
endpoint of the narrative (that is, the early histories came out in June, and
ended with the taking of Palermo). Some, such as the Storia della
insurrezione siciliana by the ex-carbonaro and Mazzinian journalist,
Giovanni La Cecilia, were extremely ambitious and aimed at a kind of ‘total
history’. Published in different editions in Milan and Palermo, La Cecilia's
history ran into two substantial volumes. It offered its readers an effusive
description of the Sicilian landscape; a lengthy account of Sicilian history
complete with a detailed account of the Bourbon oppression; a detailed
narrative of the events from the outbreak of revolution in April 1860 until
the arrival of the king in Palermo in December; a large number of
Garibaldi's proclamations and personal letters; a series of illustrations and
portraits, and a map of Sicily.154 By contrast, the Storia popolare della
rivoluzione di Sicilia, by the prolific Milanese writer, Franco Mistrali, was a
shorter (160-page), cheaper and less industrious enterprise. But he still
managed to cram an enormous amount of material into its pages: a history
of Sicily, a number of proclamations, a map and some rather basic
illustrations (including a front cover showing Garibaldi in uniform holding
sword and flag high above Palermo (see figure 22 above), and the arrival of
the volunteers at Marsala to the joyous greetings of its men, women and
children).155
22 Garibaldi as a cover hero. The cover itself is a cheap blue affair and the
illustrator relies on a standard – but now out-of-date – representation of
Garibaldi as a Piedmontese general.

On the surface, therefore, these two books seemed quite different. La

Cecilia was a political writer, who from the 1820s had dedicated his
journalistic activity to the Mazzinian cause and had been agitating for an
expedition to Sicily since the mid-1850s.156 Mistrali, while clearly also
from the left, produced ephemeral pamphlets and was eclectic in his choice
of subject matter. For example, as well as repeatedly recycling and creating
new versions of his history of 1860,157 he produced a vast range of
writings, ranging from The inhabitants of the moon to The life of Jesus and
The death and testament of Urbano Rattazzi.158 La Cecilia was more
critical of Cavour and Piedmontese policy, and less overblown in his
exaltation of Garibaldi (Garibaldi's life, according to Mistrali, was ‘a poem
of triumph and virtue’).159 Yet the narrative structure of the two books was
remarkably similar. The choice of detail and the propensity to praise every
aspect of the expedition's history and protagonists was a feature of both. It
is hard to avoid the conclusion that both writers were adapting the same
narrative formula, combining historical accuracy with romantic invention,
and were seeking to make their history as compelling and entertaining as
possible to readers.
Apart from the spectacular story of the Thousand itself, writers now also
had Garibaldi's memoirs to work with. Dumas had a version ready by June,
and they were immediately serialised in Le Siècle as part of its coverage of
Garibaldi's campaign.160 The memoirs met with instant success, going into
numerous French editions and versions in the early 1860s, and (unlike
Dwight's English version of 1859) were widely translated. By 1861, the
memoirs had appeared in Italian (published in Palermo and Livorno),
English, Norwegian, Dutch, German (in Zurich, Berlin and Stuttgart),
Spanish (in Barcelona and Montevideo), Portuguese, Romanian and
Russian.161 They were serialised in the German illustrated magazine, Die
Gartenlaube, and in Italy in the Neapolitan paper, Il Nomade, and the
Palermo paper, Il Garibaldi. Also in Italy in 1860, a cheap abridged (and
presumably illicit) version was produced – Vita del prode vincitore di
Varese – as well as a different version by Francesco Carrano, a Garibaldian
officer, this time on the basis of a manuscript given to Carrano by Garibaldi
and published as part of his own memoirs of the Cacciatori delle Alpi.162
The versions by Carrano and Dumas were only partly the memoirs of
Garibaldi. Both men had decided to take the narrative beyond 1848 (where
Garibaldi's memoirs had stopped), and to use other published sources and
their own recollections and conversations to bring them up to date. Dumas,
in particular, embellished the South American episodes and the personality
of Anita to great dramatic effect. Again, the interest of these memoirs lies
not so much in any new autobiographical details which they reveal about
Garibaldi, as in the timing of their publication and fact of their immediate
diffusion and multiple translation. The memoirs are a further indication of
the continuing and growing appeal of Garibaldi's life to a national and
international reading public.
That the expedition of the Thousand had sparked further interest in
Garibaldi's life is confirmed by the proliferation of new biographies,
alongside the publication of his memoirs. Some of these, like the Vita di G.
Garibaldi narrata al popolo by Giuseppe Ricciardi,163 Louis de la
Varenne's Vita del General Garibaldi (an Italian abridgement of the same
author's Chasseurs des Alpes, with four pages added about the Sicilian
expedition),164 and Balbiani's Storia illustrata della vita di Garibaldi,165
were written by those close to Garibaldi and/or to the sources. Ricciardi's
volume aimed explicitly at historical accuracy (he filled his work with
published speeches, letters and decrees), although he too was keen to
exaggerate Garibaldi's charms (Garibaldi's life was ‘the most marvellous
life that has ever been lived on this earth … more of an epoch than
history’). He also added embellishments of his own and glossed over
political disagreements.166 If Ricciardi's biography suggests the problems of
maintaining biographical objectivity, Balbiani's Storia shows how
commercially viable Garibaldi's life could be. Aimed broadly at the same
market as the Album storico–artistico (every copy was signed by the
author), there was again nothing special about Balbiani's narrative, which
was little more than a lengthy (817-page) hagiography (indeed, Balbiani
specificially compared Garibaldi to Jesus Christ in his looks, background
and actions).167 Much more compelling were the book's high-quality colour
prints, which made great use of green, white and red (the colours of the
tricolour flag) and which illustrated every key episode in Garibaldi life,
with a particular emphasis on the battle scenes of 1859 and 1860. That this
illustrated formula worked is suggested by the book's numerous editions (at
least five between 1860 and 1866), and the fact that the colour illustrations
seem to have been produced, or at least have survived, as historical
documents entirely separately from the book.168 At the same time,
alongside these more significant works appeared a huge amount of cheaper,
more emphemeral material.169 These too suggest the circulation of a
Garibaldi narrative in a broader mass market, and the growth of a Garibaldi
cult in a more popular culture.
 There was an equally ready market for Garibaldi biographies and other
material outside Italy. In the United States, O. J. Victor published a
biography as the first number in the series ‘Beadles Dime Biographical
Library’. Victor made great claims for his book: no ‘complete and authentic
biography’ existed, and ‘the disjointed “autobiographies” of Dwight and
Dumas’ were full of shortcomings. He, on the other hand, had used records
in the Astor Library in New York, and the publisher's blurb claimed his
book to be ‘The only correct and reliable life of Garibaldi; the Washington
of Italy’ (the volume was also praised by the New York Herald on 22
December as ‘a well written and carefully compiled biography of the
modern Washington’). In reality, however, Victor relied heavily on
Garibaldi's memoirs for his narrative, and was just as happy as everyone
else to invent new details. For example, he felt able confidently to assure
his readers that Garibaldi had royal blood: ‘Garibaldi was Duke of Bavaria,
AD 584 – his ancestors having discarded the title of King. Garibaldus …
was King of Lombardy, AD 673 … The blood of l'ancinne [sic] noblesse,
then, courses in his veins, and he may consort with kings by “divine right”
as well as by right of his own greatness.’ Victor also revealed that, while in
the United States, the hero had opened a cigar store in Cincinnati.170 In
Britain, Paya's biography written in 1859/60 was translated into English,
without acknowledgement, complete with illustrations;171 and in France, O.
Féré and R. Hyenne published a new illustrated life (Aventures, expéditions,
voyages), where once more the illustrations were as significant as the
largely recycled, if very detailed, narrative.172 New biographies were
published in Germany173 and in the Netherlands,174 and a biography based
largely on Cuneo was also published in Spain.175
‘I like Garibaldi's expedition because I love novels and adventure
stories!’ the dramatist Prosper Mérimée wrote to his friend Antonio Panizzi,
the director of the British Museum Library, in May 1860.176 Alongside
biographies and histories, Garibaldi inspired a plethora of poems, plays and
novels. In Milan, Vittorio Ottolini published a melodramatic novel,
Cacciatori delle Alpi, centred around the adventures of a group of Lombard
liberals and volunteers in 1859. The novel opens with them drinking a toast
to the liberty of Italy, and one of them recites at length the biography of
Garibaldi from birth to the present day.177 Innumerable poems, hymns to
Garibaldi, and musical marches for piano were also written and published
as fly-sheets or as pamphlets in northern Italy. These included P. Giorzia's
Garibaldi a Palermo: marcia trionfale (Milan, 1860); G. Predazzi's
L'entrata di Garibaldi a Napoli: marcia per pianoforte (Genoa, 1860); or
more simply E. La Croix, Garibaldi: marcia: invito all'Italia (Milan, 1860).
In June, G. Azzi published in Ferrara Garibaldi in Sicilia. Canto nazionale:

He arrrived – waving in the wind

Is the sign of the cross;
‘Viva Italia!’ he cries, and ten million
Rise up to the sound of his voice.
‘Victory or the tomb
Is my proclamation to you’…
A hundred fires are lit
On the Sicilian hills;
A hundred brave men load
Their terrible rifles.
‘The Italians don't fight’
A foreigner said one day:
While the protector of our despots,
Pours his last glass away.178

This poem, with its emphasis on heroic example, sacrifice and the rejection
of foreign accusations of cowardice, confirms the almost instant
establishment of the Thousand as a standard story within Risorgimento
discourse.
Nor, again, was this literary production confined to Italy. In Madrid,
Manuel Gil de Salcedo published a ‘historical novel’ – Garibaldi y Procida,
ó las Pasquas Sangrientas de Sicilia – set in Palermo during the 1848
revolutions, with a biography of Garibaldi attached, and the meeting of
Garibaldi and the king was marked by two poems, published cheaply in
Barcelona as broadsides with an accompanying illustration.179 In Paris, a
satirical play, L'Ane et les trois voleurs, set in Naples and with Garibaldi,
Mazzini and Cavour as its main protagonists, was performed. In it Garibaldi
complains about the attention of foreign correspondents: ‘responsible for
letting Europe know every time I blow my nose’.180 The indefatigable
Pierre Dupont published a chant rustique: ‘Sicilienne à Garibaldi’; an ‘E.
Atgier’ published a robust defence of his hero (‘O dear Garibaldi! whoever
hates you/ Belongs body and soul to the deadly caste’);181 while after
Garibaldi's return to Caprera, M. Barthélemy published a sevenpage poem,
‘Garibaldi or the waking of the lion’:

Such is Garibaldi! … His hand holds the oriflamme;

He is the God of battle, throwing everywhere his flame!
Tremble, tyrants, tremble! Don't irritate the God…
He takes but one step, and Europe is on fire!182

In Britain too, the expedition of the Thousand was celebrated in novels and
poems.183 Two plays were performed – Garibaldi the Italian liberator and
Garibaldi's excursionists – in the course of 1860.184
The narratives of Garibaldi's expedition in 1860 and the new biographies
published in the same year follow a trend established in 1859, and
concentrate on selling Garibaldi to as broad a readership as possible. This
trend was immensely popular, in that the material was relatively cheap and
readily accessible, even to those with a limited reading ability.185 Moreover,
this kind of cultural production gave the public in Italy and elsewhere a
choice of reading material. Readers could follow Garibaldi's progress
through volunteers’ letters and detailed commentaries in the daily press; and
they were able to enjoy them again, with accompanying pictures, in the
illustrated weekly and satirical magazines. If this was not enough, they
might follow up their interest in an illustrated biography or in the great
man's memoirs. They could read (or indeed write) a poem dedicated to him,
play a tune to him on a piano or even go to the theatre to watch a Garibaldi
play. What was significant about the story of Garibaldi in 1860 was the vast
extent, pace and variety of its circulation.
Conclusion

There are different memories of the Thousand and its aftermath. The first is
a Risorgimento tale of triumph and tragedy: a small group of heroic men
overthrow oppression and liberate their enslaved ‘brothers’, only to be
betrayed and defeated by a number on their own side. The second sees the
events of 1859–60 as a single, happy continuum: the story of Garibaldi
being ‘the right man in the right place at the right time’, and of opposing
political views compromising and coalescing at the right point and with the
right objective – Italian unification.186 Finally, there is the more recent
interpretation of the events of 1860 by historians. For them, 1860 was a
form of civil war, a moment of intense political conflict and social
instability, the results of which were actually damaging to national unity.
The first view is represented by the democrats and told in Garibaldi's
memoirs;187 the second was officially sanctioned after unification; and the
third was outlined by Marxist historians, and by Denis Mack Smith in
Britain, during the 1950s and after.188 All are useful in explaining and
understanding the myth of Garibaldi which developed in and from 1860.
Recent historians are correct to argue that behind the scenes the events of
1860 were driven by a bitter three-way struggle for political control of
southern Italy, between conservatives, moderate liberals and democrats/
republicans, in which the moderate liberals eventually emerged victorious.
The key to understanding what drove this struggle forward lies in the
immense ambitions of those democrats who left for Sicily in May. The
volunteers – a tiny group of ill-armed men – aimed to overthrow an entire
kingdom with a powerful army, and to impose their democratic vision of a
future Italy on Piedmont. The leaders then tried to create, in the space of a
few months, a new kind of mass volunteer army (the nation-at-arms) based
on a revolutionary ideal of active political engagement. They also sought to
create a model of national belonging which would exclude as few as
possible, and to persuade diverse groups (including priests), classes and
regions that their identity was Italian. Garibaldi's government spent
considerable time and effort in publicising itself and putting Garibaldi on
display. In turn, in his published letters, speeches and personal appearances
in southern Italy, Garibaldi himself did a great deal directly to popularise
and endorse the idea of Italy. In effect, an official cult of Garibaldi was
encouraged in the South, using a potent mix of religious rituals and
democratic discourse, of traditional symbols and modern methods, in an
effort to persuade its inhabitants to become ‘national’. These ambitions
predated the expedition to Sicily, and all were traceable – in one way or
another – to the political ideas and propaganda methods of Mazzini.
 It is not surprising that Garibaldi's actions provoked Cavour's hostility. In
the light of its ambitions, Cavour's dislike of the revolution in southern Italy
was not at all unexpected. Brilliant politician that he was, he tried
consistently to hide his horror at the threat it posed to his domination of
Italian politics. Yet it is evident in retrospect that he had little, if any,
enthusiasm for Italian nationalism, no interest whatever in southern Italy,
and a deep antipathy to the idea of the nation-at-arms. Nor was he much
reassured by the use of the king's name to justify the expedition. Cavour
was a politician whose strength came from parliament and from resisting
the power of the crown, so Garibaldi's royal dictatorship was equally a
threat to him.189 Cavour also had a long-standing antipathy to the Church,
and practical experience of bitter Church–state conflict during the
parliamentary struggles in Piedmont during the 1850s, so he would hardly
have been pleased by Garibaldi's friendliness towards priests.190
As we have seen, Cavour was able to trap the democrats and push them
politically out of southern Italy. However, he was far less successful in
challenging Garibaldi's appeal and the religion of the Italian nation which
the southern dictatorship in Sicily had promoted with such skill and
dedication. In the end, Cavour managed only temporarily to control
Garibaldi and neutralise the threat of Italian nationalism, and he did this by
acting as the defender of Italy. In order to control the apparent inevitability
of national unification, Cavour was forced to become its main architect. It is
in this way that Italian unity was the product both of political conflict and
of nationalist feeling. It is also in this light that Garibaldi's achievements –
militarily victorious, politically defeated and publicly celebrated – can best
be assessed.
In the next chapter, I will assess the evidence of popular support for
Garibaldi's expedition and of enthusiasm for him as a heroic figure. The
point to note here is how widespread it was imagined to be. Publicity was
part of the expedition from its outset, and part of its political ambition.
Garibaldi and others with him went to Sicily with a narrative strategy, and
they sought to promote the expedition as a popular and morally justified
venture, destined for a glorious outcome if only Italians would join them.
This aspect of the story of the Thousand was in place even before the
volunteers arrived in Marsala, and it follows established Risorgimento
discourse. Thereafter, life began to imitate art. Put simply, the lived
experiences of the Thousand and the representation of these experiences
seemed for a time to converge, a fusion perhaps best illustrated by the
heavy use of the epistolary formula in newspaper coverage of the events.
The publication of volunteers' letters from the front added a touch of
intimacy to these otherwise public affairs. As the expedition faltered with
the arrival in Naples of the Piedmontese army, writers – particularly
Garibaldi – fell back on an initially oblique rhetoric of disappointment and
betrayal. The use of fictional techniques to describe and justify ‘real’
political activity was immensely effective: it gained Garibaldi and his
expedition unprecedented fame and had a powerful impact on public
opinion.
Palermo and Naples may never have become the democratic power base
that Cavour so feared, but they did become the centre of (‘global’) press
attention in the summer of 1860. What happened in these cities provided the
basis for spreading the nationalist message to the rest of Italy and beyond.
In fact, more surprising than the reliance on democratic publishers and
writers, and as notable as the process of official nation-building within
southern Italy, was Garibaldi's capacity to get substantial sections of the
European and American press on his side. Such support had been prepared
well in advance, and it reflected a prevailing sympathy with the Italian
Question felt by much of liberal Europe. Garibaldi succeeded remarkably
well in charming journalists. Press support was reflected in the exceptional
amount of printed material produced about him in 1860 and, along with the
tendency of journalists to chase copy and copy each other, it produced an
elaborate mythology of the man and his actions which drowned out any
conservative/clerical criticism. It also became, for a while, self-sustaining.
Most of all, the rapport which developed between Garibaldi and his press
followers helped construct an image of the expedition with a very broad
appeal, in which politics became a form of public entertainment. Thus,
however equivocal and divisive the political outcome of Garibaldi's
expedition to Sicily, its representation was no less than a propaganda
triumph.
By 1860, Garibaldi's story had acquired a powerful fictional element and
became a kind of collaborative effort with a structure and logic of its own.
Dumas, who has always been taken to task for inventing and embellishing
episodes in Garibaldi's life, was anything but unusual, and is really the best
example of a much wider fashion. Popular biographies and fictionalised
histories were not simply a significant – if inaccurate – way in which news
of Garibaldi's expedition reached a broader reading public in 1860. They
also became a means through which the public could engage with Garibaldi
on an imaginary level. Writers used a novelistic style, or they embellished
events and invented episodes and, helped by the spectacular nature of the
events they were describing, produced a narrative of revolution which read
like an adventure romance. Artists too produced a heavily romanticised
visual narrative of the Thousand. In short, the appeal of Garibaldi relied on
a strong call on the imagination and emotions. Political principles were not
absent, but they were treated as only one aspect of a life which was at once
exemplary and entertaining.
To many contemporaries, the events of 1860 seemed miraculous, and
even to us they still seem surprising. For Trevelyan, who wrote about them
some fifty years later, the ‘Garibaldian legend’ was true. In his view,
Garibaldi's claim ‘on the memory of men’ lay both in his abilities as a
revolutionary soldier and in ‘his appeal to the imagination’: He is perhaps
the only case … of the poet as the man of action’.191 This judgement is not
entirely misplaced. In 1860, Garibaldi was both sign and lived existence: he
was both a practical instigator of political change and an imaginary symbol
of the excitement it could provoke. However, the ‘legend’ cannot usefully
be called ‘true’. It appeared spontaneous because it provoked a broad and
passionate response. It seemed unrehearsed because its production threw up
such a dramatic smoke-screen, and because the motivations, purpose and
methods of its creation and diffusion were cloaked in established nationalist
rhetoric. Yet the cult of Garibaldi was quite carefully conceived, constructed
and publicised; and its purpose was to assist, push through and justify a
process of violent and rapid regime change. In short, the cult of Garibaldi
was part of the political conflict in 1860, and it contributed to, and
reflected, the broader struggle for power.
 CHAPTER 10

THE GARIBALDI MOMENT

The year 1860 was Garibaldi's ‘moment’. Despite a disastrous personal and
political start to the year, he went on to overthrow a kingdom and help
construct another. He also achieved a remarkable level of fame: he was
cheered by crowds, pursued by journalists and made front-page news
throughout the summer, and across the world. The purpose of this celebrity,
as we have seen, was political communication. Garibaldi embodied and
promoted a political ideal, and he symbolised – and aimed to construct – a
sense of national identity which could be transformed into active political
consent. The popularity of Garibaldi was meant to convert into support for
the Italian nationalist cause. How successful was this process of
communication? This is an important issue because by now we know a
great deal about the cultural sources and political reasons for Garibaldi's
fame, and the various means through which it was produced and expanded.
However, there are aspects of the impact and reception of his fame which
can still be further investigated.
My purpose in this chapter is to explore possible answers to the difficult
question of what the public thought of Garibaldi. I look at the responses of
three separate (and loosely defined) groups who were the main audiences
for political communication during the events of 1860: the Sicilian public,1
Italian volunteers, and foreign enthusiasts. We have already noted the
tendency, during the events of 1859 and 1860, for an imaginary narrative to
emerge and float free of the politics that produced it. In what follows, I
assess how the broader public engaged with the cult of Garibaldi.
Concentrating on (re)elaborations of the Garibaldi story, and on reactions to
the Garibaldi story expressed by associations, in letters and orally, I
consider whether the public understood his message, or what specifically
they understood from it. In particular, I analyse how far Garibaldi's
presence and popularity helped to create or increase a sense of national
belonging in Sicily, and to what extent appeals to, or from, Garibaldi
boosted practical and political support for the nationalist cause both within
and outside Italy. In so doing, I hope to shed some light not just on the
process of making Italians, but also on what Italians and others made of this
process.
‘In the Italian way’

Towards the end of the campaign in southern Italy, a committee in Naples

organised a public subscription to honour Garibaldi. The plan was to offer
him a ceremonial sword, which was to be made of gold and set with jewels,
along with a sabre and a revolver, and to give him any money that was left
over to support his future campaigns in Rome and Venice. A design was
commissioned, replete with nationalist symbols and epigraphs, and
Garibaldi accepted the offer, replying in characteristic terms that ‘although
superior to my merits I accept the gift with pleasure’. But this subscription
met with very little success in Palermo. The substantial volume (with space
for 1,440 names) created to record the subscribers in Palermo remained
empty: only eleven people signed their names, and four of those came from
outside Sicily.2
The flop of the Garibaldi subscription in Palermo seems symptomatic of
a broader material indifference to the revolution in Sicily. As the naval
minister in Palermo in 1860 grumbled to Agostino Bertani: ‘I try to do my
best for this country, but what can you do when the country does not
respond to the pressing needs which present themselves? How can we go
forward with this feeble country, without resources and without the will to
obtain them?’3 This problem was put even more bluntly by the British
consul in Palermo, John Goodwin, who wrote that ‘the reception of
Garibaldi in Palermo has been everything the heart could wish, in so far as
cheers go, but at “cheers” it stops short. Very little money has been given …
Manifestos and addresses make a grand show in the papers but the money
and materials are wanting.’4 In many areas of Sicily, people refused to pay
taxes, adding to the financial problems of a government already burdened
by tax cuts, the cost of the war and the promise of public works (‘[t]he
truth’, according to the democrat Angelo Bargoni, was ‘an incredible lack
of funds’).5 Equally serious, and seemingly indicative of a lack of patriotic
feeling, was the failure of military conscription. As early as the beginning
of June, the new governor of Girgenti warned Crispi that conscription had
caused ‘discontent’ in his province,6 while in Catania the British vice-
consul reported that the copies of the published decree had ‘been torn from
the walls’.7 In fact, faced with widespread public hostility, the government
was forced to modify the decree: it introduced the principle of substitution,
allowed a whole series of exemptions (for only sons, married men and
priests), and granted a delay to rural communities until after the harvest was
brought in.8 These modifications involved an acceptance that the immediate
campaign in southern Italy would have to be fought largely by men from
the North, thus dealing a serious blow to Garibaldi's project for the nation-
at-arms.
This fragile situation suggests that Sicilian enthusiasm for Garibaldi was
indeed entirely superficial, based on ‘cheers’ and ‘addresses’ but signifying
nothing. Faced with this, many of the garibaldini became disillusioned with
Sicily, where the welcome was not what they had expected and the culture
and geography were so very different from their own. For example, Ippolito
Nievo contributed to the myth of the Thousand in public, but was privately
very critical of the country and its experiences, identifying the lack of
military enthusiasm with feminine weakness: ‘Sicilians are all women,’ he
told his mother in July, ‘they have a passion for appearance and uproar’, but
they had done little, materially, to liberate themselves from the Bourbons.9
Sometimes, this disappointment was expressed openly in the papers, and
again it used a gendered discourse to depict the lack of enthusiasm among
Sicilians for the revolution. Women too were included in these criticisms:
‘not one of them has a healthy, blooming look’, one volunteer letter
complained about Sicilian women; ‘[at] Calatafimi I saw the faces of
begging women which had no human form’.10 This disillusionment with
Sicily is of great interest in that it both reflects and anticipates a broader
discourse about the problems of the southern ‘character’. For our purposes,
it is also important in suggesting a process of distancing between the
garibaldini and the Sicilian people, involving a recognition of their failure
to get Sicilians on their side.11
The dictatorship's inability to persuade Sicilians materially to support
their own liberation was a considerable failure. It points to the essentially
elitist, urban and middle-class nature of the Risorgimento as a whole, based
as it was on an appeal to those who had the time and ability to read Italian,
and perhaps also reflects the waning of democratic revolution by the late
1850s, as Mazzinians and others on the left looked increasingly to Cavour
and the Piedmontese monarchy for a partial solution to their political
demands. It reminds us that the dictatorship had little understanding of
conditions in the countryside and among the poor, that it had largely failed
to bring in an effective measure of land reform, and that, when faced with
peasant revolt, it sided with the property-owning classes, and harshly
restored order. At the same time, by undermining the dictatorship's practical
capacity to bring about change in the region, the lack of mass support
contributed to the weakness of Garibaldi's revolution and so to his ultimate
defeat by Cavour.12
It would nevertheless be a mistake to focus exclusively on this failure
and its outcome. First, the lack of soldiers and subscriptions from Sicily is
not that surprising. Militarism and war was not a major founding myth in
Sicilian elite identity (for instance, the Vespers was an act of rebellion
rather than war), and exemption from military service was a long-standing,
and sometimes jealously guarded, privilege of the Sicilian people: ‘better to
live as an animal than as a soldier’ was one popular saying.13 Moreover,
there was little political tradition of voluntary subscription or association in
an island whose modern political identity had been forged both in
opposition to, and in material dependence on, the state.14 Time and a
carefully structured policy were needed to transform these deep-rooted
attitudes and practices, so their persistence in 1860 does not necessarily
mean that there was no real support for Garibaldi in the towns, or even in
the countryside. Indeed, where local knowledge and influence was used, as
was done by Governor Perroni Paladini in the south-eastern district of
Castroreale, men did come forward to volunteer, national guards were
formed, and conscription was supported by local communities.15
We should recall that, at the start of the campaign, volunteer forces had
been successfully formed by sympathetic landowners, into rural squadre of
so-called picciotti (‘kids’). These were quite numerous (around 700–1,000
men at Calatafimi, at least 3,000 before the descent to Palermo, and perhaps
7–8,000 by the time they crossed the Straits), and they were extremely
helpful to Garibaldi's forces. The problem was that most garibaldini –
including the Sicilian, Crispi – viewed these volunteers with suspicion, and
feared they would prove as violent and uncontrollable as similar peasant
bands during the disastrous expeditions of the Bandiera brothers and
Pisacane in Calabria, and in the 1848 revolutions. Thus, they abolished the
squadre as soon as they could decently do so.16 In other words, political
considerations and organisational problems on the part of the government
may have played just as important a role in the failure of men to come
forward as any popular or elite indifference to the revolution had.
It is also possible that historians have been looking in the wrong place for
evidence of support for Garibaldi. As I explained in the previous chapter,
the regime's social and administrative policies were part of an ambitious
programme of Mazzinian origin, which aimed to ‘regenerate’ Italy, and
which, by encouraging popular identification with the idea of the nation,
proposed to unite government and people in a new political religion. The
cultural policy of Garibaldi's government was especially interesting because
it sought a democratic basis: it differed from some other kinds of
nationalism, and especially from the forms of nationalism which developed
later in the century, in its inclusive appeal. The vision of national belonging
proposed by Garibaldi was aimed not just at intellectuals, or just at the
literate, middle-class male, but also at those (women, peasants) who were
often given a secondary role in the nationalist hierarchy, or at priests, who
were often excluded entirely. The question that we need to address here is
whether this policy actually worked. Did Garibaldi gain the support of
Palermo intellectuals, and how far did the sphere of culture endorse the
project of ‘making Italians’? Did priests approve his campaign? Did the
new political religion have any impact on popular consciousness? In short,
did the cheers of Sicilians mean anything?
Although problems of evidence mean that it is hard to give an accurate,
or even certain, answer to any of these questions, a number of
developments in Sicily during 1860 and afterwards are significant. In terms
of understanding the elite response to Garibaldi, the most important of these
was the rapid growth of (often ephemeral) newspapers and the flurry of
press activity in Palermo and elsewhere after the lifting of Bourbon
censorship: ‘Actually more than twenty little papers fill every street corner’,
wrote one Palermo observer on 19 June.17 This development was not
always seen in a positive light, even by the papers themselves. ‘Oof! I can't
take any more!!’ complained one paper, Il Vessillo Italiano, on 15 June:
‘Papers here, papers there, high papers, low papers … oof! I can't take any
more … all of them assume the stance of a periodical without any idea of
actual politics, and the benefit of Italian freedom.’ ‘Mercy! a new paper!’
announced La Frusta as its opening line of the first issue, ‘the Frusta too!
and so what? Are all those others not enough, which drown the country
every day without pity, scrounging our pennies, without the shadow of an
idea of useful education?’18 Despite such (self-)accusations of disloyalty
and irrelevance, all the new papers endorsed the lead given by the main
government papers: Il Giornale di Sicilia and Il Precursore. A glance at
some of the titles – The Constancy and Supremacy of Italy; Redeemed Italy;
Italian Unity; The War; The New World; The Italian Preacher; Liberty; and
Garibaldi19 – reveals much about the press's desire to proclaim its
adherence to the new political order and its principles. Moreover, their
articles, letters and editorials consistently followed an established discursive
line in glorifying both Garibaldi and the idea of a new, national religion.
Il Garibaldi, as its name suggests, was dedicated to the subject of
Garibaldi. It published a version of Garibaldi's memoirs, and along with two
other papers (Il Gazzettino della Sera and the L'Unità Italiana) reprinted
Louis Jourdain's fervent tribute to him in the French paper, Le Siècle.20 Il
Corriere di Sicilia offered its readers a physical portrait of Garibaldi from a
‘correspondent’: this was really a modified extract from Cuneo's
biography.21 Although La Forbice (‘The Scissors’) promised to be more
lively and interesting than Il Giornale di Sicilia, it went on to describe
Garibaldi in well-worn terms as the ‘brave Garibaldi’, ‘the new
Washington’, and repeated Cuneo's assertion that ‘[h]is life is a continual
sacrifice in favour of the Italian nation; [he has] a generous and chivalrous
soul’; although it did show some originality in mid-June when it referred to
him as the ‘new Hannibal of war’.22 Perhaps the best example of the
broader diffusion and acceptance of Risorgimento discourse, and of
Garibaldi's role within it, by the Palermo papers is the extended tribute to
Garibaldi paid by L'Italia Redenta in its first number, of 20 June.
Proclaiming its programme as the redemption of Italy, ‘the beautiful
country, source of all knowledge, perpetual theatre of war and civil
discord’, its main article, entitled ‘The sword of Garibaldi compared to the
great men of antiquity’, concluded that Garibaldi was better than any of
them. Charlemagne was a possible comparison, and the paper cited a
pantheon of famous Italians:

Here is the heroic sword of Garibaldi which never fails, and which at the head of the
movement routs, beats and conquers the enemy, and hoists the standard of Italian freedom …
What Dante did for the leadership of Italian thought; what Macchiavelli practised, by seizing
the sceptre of politics in Italy; and finally what Galileo discovered, by establishing the
movement of the heavens in yearly cycles around the sun, the valiant victor of Varese and
Como could properly compete with, as part of the current Italian movement.

‘Our admiration is reserved for one man alone, Giuseppe Garibaldi’,

proclaimed La Mola in its first number, and in a rough echo of Mazzini's
instructions to Young Italy: ‘for the leadership of armed democracy, which
liberated us, for the greatest lover of the peninsula, which he believes in and
which will be; one Italy, one fatherland for all the people from the
mountains to the sea who speak and feel in the Italian way’.23
The Palermo press was also very quick to pick up and pursue the regime's
proposal of Garibaldi as the leader of a new religion. In various issues of La
Forbice, Garibaldi was ‘our heroic Liberator … our immortal Dictator’,
‘this genius created by God in a moment of divine enthusiasm for the
longed-for regeneration of Italy’, and the ‘destroying angel of tyranny’;24
for Il Garibaldi, he was ‘the armed missionary of Italian liberation’ at the
head of a ‘holy cause’;25 while for La Cicala Italiana he was ‘the Holy
Man’: ‘He is life, he is liberty with a lightening glance, with a pure and
undefiled soul, with a lofty and extensive mind, and an invincible arm’.26
Finally, in L'Unità Italiana, the new editor, Ignazio Lombardi, told his
readers in his first editorial that Garibaldi was the symbol and saviour of
Italy, ‘the Redeemer of the Ausonian provinces [i.e. Sicily], the Nazarene of
Italy … the Archangel of wrath … the Angel of health and comfort … the
Man of providence on whom rests the guardian eye of God’.27
The papers were equally keen to encourage acts of patriotism, and
especially exalted the idea of war and volunteering, making little reference
to the problems of conscription. Only Il Garibaldi noted that the arrival of
volunteers from the continent ‘was a tacit and bitter rebuke to those few
who still don't understand the inestimable advantage of conscription’, while
La Forbice criticised the ‘feebleness’ of ‘idle young men’.28 However, La
Frusta expressed confidence in conscription and praised the idea of the free
soldier: ‘the symbol of civic virtue and military heroism … he lives only for
the fatherland and knows how to die with honour for it; but his name will
live on in all our hearts … because there is nothing more fitting and more
glorious for a man than to die for the fatherland and for its free
institutions’.29 Almost every issue of Il Garibaldi included a call to arms.
‘[C]ome, come …. come to Palermo,’ it told its readers, ‘and be inspired by
the scene, truly worthy of Italy, and see how the rich, the poor and the
aristocrats compete with each other to crown their sons, laying them down
on the altar of the fatherland.’30 La Guerra, perhaps unsurprisingly given its
name, also encouraged volunteering, and in a short article entitled ‘The
soldier of Garibaldi’ summarised the aesthetic, military and political ideal
on which it was based.

The soldier of Garibaldi is dressed in a red shirt and wide trousers – he has an easy gait … he
is used to hardship, he can withstand the sun, ice, and fatigue – he sleeps little, and mostly on
straw or the bare earth … in battle his law is to go ever onward; a garibaldino dies, he does
not flee – he never hides from fire, but faces the bullets with his chest exposed, he fires one or
two shots and then uses the bayonet – he adores his general, and is enchanted by him, he
would lay down for him not one but twenty lives.31

The press also promoted the virtues of martyrdom, and was particularly
keen to encourage the cult of local martyrs like Francesco Riso and
Rosolino Pilo, as well as those – Tuckory, the Bandiera brothers (‘the first
heroes of Italian freedom’)32 – who had come from afar to die for freedom
in southern Italy.33
Such fidelity to the government line is not altogether surprising, since we
already know that the regime cultivated the press, but it is worth noting as a
cultural contrast to the relative lack of material support. Praise of Garibaldi
and of his government was almost unanimous. Moreover, the language in
which it was expressed, and the symbols referred to, are proof of the full
acceptance of the national–patriotic discourse in Palermo, a city which was
traditionally the centre of Sicilian autonomy rather than of Italian
nationalism. The Palermo press made ample use of existing Risorgimento
tropes like degeneration, regeneration, heroism and martyrdom, and
emphasised almost daily both the virtues of a military life and volunteering
and the idea of Garibaldi as the saviour of Sicily. So, if nothing else, the
government succeeded in getting its patriotic message across to the press.
Indeed, there is little difference in attitude between the Palermo press and
the liberal press elsewhere in Italy during the events of 1860: both
unquestioningly accepted Garibaldi and his dictatorship as representative of
the Italian nation, and opposition was almost entirely silent. Only in
October was some cynicism expressed in Palermo, and then by two
nationalist papers, about the elaborate absurdity of the commemorations of
the ‘martyrs for liberty’ in the Church of San Domenico.34 However, this
was an isolated moment of dissent; otherwise the papers concurred in
praising government-sponsored celebrations such as the demolition of
Castellamare fort and Garibaldi's birthday.35
Furthermore, journalists and intellectuals were not content merely to
echo government propaganda, but also came up with their own associative
activities and their own ways of celebrating the revolution. Many of the
plays and other performances put on in Palermo at this time had a
nationalist theme and/or enacted a nationalist narrative. Thus, the play
Salvatore Maniscalco (the hated Bourbon chief of police) was immediately
followed by Vittorio Emanuele's entrance in Palermo at the Teatro
Nazionale. The same theatre staged a reading of a new poem ‘Garibaldi in
Sicily’ by the editor of L'Unità Italiana, Ignazio Lombardi. The paper was
(understandably) keen to stress the success of the event and reported that
the author was called back on stage and encouraged to read another poem,
‘Il Cacciatore delle Alpi’: ‘And now to the Vespers – on its fiery earth – We
will fight with you – the same war’. At this, the paper wrote, the audience
erupted in applause, waved their handkerchiefs and, tying them together in
a long chain, sang a nationalist song, ‘then shouts, cheers, hands raised and
everything else you can imagine from a people enthused for its freedom’.36
The Teatro San Cecilia organised a huge patriotic celebration. The
performance included musical staples of the Risorgimento canon – the
overture to William Tell, the duet from I Puritani, and an aria from Norma –
as well as specially composed hymns to Garibaldi and Vittorio Emanuele
and some ballet. The theatre was decorated with elaborate sets: one was
simply a mass of flags, swords and soldiers; another was a recreation of the
recent battle scene around the royal palace and Porta Nuova, complete with
fortifications and tricolour flags.37
On a less spectacular level, literally hundreds of ephemeral publications
were produced. These included patriotic flyers, such as a Garibaldi version
of the ‘Pater Noster’ and ‘Ave Maria’:

Our father who art in Sicily, glorious and content from the liberation of the Italian land,
hallowed be thy name, because your love for Italy is as great as your glory, because you came
down to earth from heaven for love and to deliver your children with your precious blood …
Virgin Italy, mother of Garibaldi, pray for your children, now, and until the hour of death of
the last tyrant…38

Poems and songs proliferated, published mostly in newspapers but also

separately as pamphlets, and these too followed a standard patriotic
formula. One of the most productive writers was Ignazio Lombardi, editor
of L'Unità Italiana. He responded to the political crisis of early July with
the triumphant national–religious hymn, ‘Garibaldi and Italy’, which
imagined Garibaldi as the ‘new Archangel’ resurrecting the glories of Italy's
past (‘now the new heroes embrace the ancient heroes’).39
This nationalist poetry used an eclectic, arguably even blasphemous, mix
of religious, mythological and patriotic vocabularies. It proposed Garibaldi
as the saviour of Sicily by referring to him almost simultaneously as a
saintly or even Christ-like figure, a classical hero and a mythological
creature. ‘The Angel of Italy has touched our shores’, wrote Pietro Chiara;
while, in the words of the liberal priest Carmelo Pardi, Garibaldi was ‘sent
by heaven’: he was the ‘lion of Caprera’, with ‘the soul of Cincinnatus and
the heart of Brutus’.40 One liberal writer, the author of ‘Il Torquato Tasso’,
‘Procida’ and the previously banned ‘Jacopo Ortis’, wrote a tribute to
Garibaldi in five canti, and told his readers that they could expect thirty-five
more:

Hail immortal Genius, warrior spirit…

you will have at your side
The sword of Archangel Michael.
He seemed a brave knight from olden times
 An enchanted being, a God who reigned
Over nature, and much more besides.41

Perhaps the most complete expression of the reception of the Garibaldi cult
in Sicilian culture was an extended dramatisation of a Sicilian legend, in
which Garibaldi is imagined as the offspring of an angel (Elim) and a young
girl. In the final canto of the play, Elim gives Garibaldi his mission on
earth, which is to follow the model of Christ and save Sicily (‘in the midst
of so much exhaustion and agitation, of so much life and decay, You will
shine, Alone, like the guiding star …’).42
It is extremely significant that the Church in Sicily, for the most part,
tolerated the blasphemous use of its own vocabulary to promote an
alternative religion of ‘humanity’ with strong Saint-Simonian overtones. Its
attitude is all the more surprising when we remember the considerable, and
growing, rejection by Rome of everything that Italian liberalism and
nationalism represented in these years. ‘Here in Palermo, as in the rest of
Sicily, the clergy is truly national’, Nino Bixio wrote to his wife in early
June: ‘what a difference from our lot.’43 In many cases, moreover, the
clergy openly endorsed the nationalist message. ‘What is most striking’,
according to another commentator:

is the zealous support given by the Sicilian clergy for the insurrectionary cause: priests and
monks go through the streets preaching a new crusade against the Bourbon government, and
encouraging the enthusiasm of the islanders for the fight; they fight alongside them in the most
awful and bloody frays, raising their spirits with word and deed.44

This unusually sympathetic standpoint can be explained both by the

careful policies of Garibaldi's regime and by the Sicilian clergy's own
ambivalence towards the ecclesiastical hierarchy. Especially in the isolated
rural communities of the Sicilian interior, priests lived very close to the
people; they were thus well aware of the severe social problems caused by
the exploitation of the workforce and by land hunger, and of the pressing
need for social reform. They too had often suffered the effects of economic
dislocation and poverty, and might feel deep resentment of the bishops and
religious bodies like the Jesuits, who had enjoyed enormous wealth and
privileges under the Bourbon regime. It was these radicalised priests who
responded to Garibaldi's call to ‘good priests’. They fought with him,
helped organise the peasants into squadre on his arrival, encouraged
Palermo to revolt, and seized key points in the city during the fighting for
the city at the end of May. One of them, Paolo Sardo, even tried to organise
a separate ‘Ecclesiastical legion’ in Garibaldi's army (this was something
quite ‘extraordinary’ according to a northern volunteer, who noted that its
stated aim was to ‘encourage the fighting men’ for the ‘great needs of the
Italian cause’).45
In the weeks that followed the seizure of Palermo, some priests publicly
rejected their archbishop's official instructions to protect the Pope and his
temporal power. A few of them openly condemned the Pope's policy on
nationalism and accepted that the abolition of his temporal power was
necessary, as it had no spiritual basis. Many lent their symbolic support to
the regime. Dominican monks hoisted and blessed the tricolour flag during
the fighting for Palermo; and others decorated a main barricade with the
figure of Christ surrounded by candles and numerous images of the
Madonna.46 Fra’ Pantaleo, the most famous of these radical priests,
organised Garibaldi's blessing in the cathedral in Alcamo and adopted
aspects of the Crusader's dress, and he went with Garibaldi both to fight and
to encourage support for his campaign. The eyewitness, Forbes, observed
him in Messina in ‘cowl and crucifix’, preaching to the people ‘in their own
patois’, and finishing the sermon with ‘three vivas for Garibaldi, three for
Victor Emmanuel, and three for the Madonna Sanctissima, who is supposed
to have taken the Messinese under her especial protection’.47
There is evidence that nuns were equally enthusiastic for the revolution.
In volunteer memoirs, nuns become a compelling symbol both of female
purity and of the seductive power of the nationalist cause. Alberto Mario
commented that ‘the romantic figure of Garibaldi had turned the heads of
the saintly sisterhood, who were one and all piously enamoured of him’.
Fruits, preserves and sweets arrived every day at Garibaldi's residence,
wrapped in ‘curiously-wrought baskets’ with flowers, banners and
inscriptions: ‘“To thee, Giuseppe! Saint and hero! Mighty as St George!
Beautiful as the seraphim! Forget not the nuns of ———, who love thee
tenderly; who pray hourly to Santa Rosalia that she may watch over thee
…!”’ On one visit to a convent, ‘the tables spread for breakfast resembled a
fancy fair – sugar castles, cupolas, temples, palaces and domes; and in the
centre a statue of Garibaldi, in sugar’. The nuns (young and of noble birth)
became so excited by Garibaldi's resemblance to ‘our Lord’ that they
queued up to kiss him on the lips, including the abbess, ‘who at first seemed
scandalized’.48 At another convent, Sette Angeli, they got down on their
knees to pray before him.49 One volunteer, Giovanni Nuvolari, even admits
to an affair with ‘a simpatica young nun, an angel of beauty’, while another,
Abba, sees the nuns as both sexual and unobtainable: ‘their lily hands’ reach
out to him, and he is so aroused by their ‘odour of chastity’ that he kisses
the grille separating the convent from the outside world.50
Above all, of course, this evidence reveals much about the sexual
attitudes and expectations of the volunteers, but it does also suggest that
some Sicilian women were passionate admirers of Garibaldi. We know very
little about the general attitude of women to Garibaldi's dictatorship,
although there is some limited evidence of support and enthusiasm. There
were women's committees which collected money for the dead and
wounded,51 and letters from at least two young educated women express
active engagement with the nationalist cause. Felicità Benso di Verdura
seems to have known Garibaldi personally: she signed herself La
Garibaldina and sent best wishes from her mother, father (‘Babbo’) and
sister.52 A young intellectual, Eloisa Abramo, aligned herself explicitly with
the Palermo liberals, and expressed happiness at the liberation of ‘my
country’. ‘Sicily … has shown herself worthy of that liberty which she was
made immense sacrifices to acquire, and the Sicilians of '60 are braver than
those of the Vespers … the hour of redemption has already rung, and this
great task, dreamed of by the divine poet, is about to be achieved after 6
centuries’. She responded with enthusiasm to the news of the victory at
Milazzo (‘Garibaldi constantly in the line of fire for 12 long hours … It is
the hand of God which guides this man in the line of fire’).53
The help given by the Sicilian clergy to Garibaldi was not without
controversy. There were, for example, dire warnings of the spread of
Protestantism to Sicily, and attempts were made to denigrate Pantaleo and
others.54 On the whole, however, the support of radical priests and nuns can
be considered one of the dictatorship's great achievements. It meant that,
whatever went on behind the scenes, in public the government could
proclaim its message with one voice. At the same time, the clergy helped to
publicise the government's attempts to sacralise the nation; and there is
plenty of anecdotal evidence, as we saw in the previous chapter, that these
attempts produced a wave of quasi-religious celebration in Sicily, which
saw the revolution as the people's ‘saviour’. Perhaps the most well-known
and documented example of a popular cult of Garibaldi is his identification
in Palermo with the city's patron saint, Santa Rosalia. He was said to be
related to her and to come under her special protection. The anthropologist,
Salvatore Salomone-Marino, who researched these and other legends about
Garibaldi (‘from the mouths of Palermo women, Bourbon soldiers, the
lazzaroni of Naples’), summarised the Santa Rosalia legend as follows:

under her personal protection, he received a gift from her, during the journey from Quarto to
Marsala, of that rough belt in white leather which he always wears and with which, by waving
in the air, he chases away all the bullets and bombs which are aimed at him in the awful
moments of battle. And he withdrew every evening to a secluded place, indeed he disappeared
completely, because every evening he conferred with the Saint, who taught him the right
movements and actions to take and gave them those vivid words with which he provoked
fanaticism in his followers and terrified his enemies.55

This legend was still in circulation when the historian G. M. Trevelyan

visited the city in the early 1900s; according to Jessie White Mario, it was
originally created by the nuns of Santa Caterina convent, who observed
Garibaldi's fearless behaviour during the bombardment at Piazza Pretorio.56
It is possible that Garibaldi was famous among the peasants and urban
poor even before he arrived in Sicily. Trying to stir the population to revolt
in April 1860, Pilo and Corrao found that their ‘only hope’ was Garibaldi –
‘the man who does not lose battles’ – and that his promised arrival spurred
the squadre leaders into renewed activity.57 That the arrival of Garibaldi in
Sicily had a considerable impact on popular culture and popular memory is
suggested by a number of studies undertaken by Salomone-Marino and
Giuseppe Pitrè, in the decades after 1860. Pitrè's and Salomone-Marino's
interest in folklore and the new discipline of anthropology led them to
collect and record Sicilian popular songs: long narrative poems
(cantastorie) which were passed orally from one generation to the next, and
one place or region to the next, often with substantial variations.58 They
found that nationalism and national unification left a strong trace in popular
songs and legends, in rural communities as well as in the main cities, and
that most of them were still actively in circulation over twenty years later. A
large number of these cantastorie praised the revolution of 1860 and its
aims, and narrated its various episodes and details in ways that were
remarkably similar to the official version of events produced by the
regime.59 One song, the work of an illiterate peasant from Etna, was said by
him to have been composed after hearing read aloud the letter of Dumas to
Carini about the battle of Milazzo; and it repeats its key episode of
Garibaldi killing the cavalry captain, with a violent embellishment of its
own (Garibaldi kills not one but five soldiers).60
Song after song celebrated Garibaldi: ‘the Liberator – In his heart there is
no place for fear';61 ‘Garibaldi seemed like a God to us – He shouted: Oh
my people! Onwards!’62 ‘How handsome Garibaldi is’, another song began,
repeating the idea of Garibaldi as an eclectic hero bringing together the
qualities of the archangel Saint Michael, Jesus Christ and Charlemagne:

…who seems to me
Saint Michael [San Micheluzzo] the archangel in person,
He has come to liberate Sicily
and avenge those who died,
his look is that of Jesus Christ
his command is like Charlemagne.63

Songs depicted Garibaldi as brave and invincible: ‘his thunderous voice is

frightening … he disappears, flies off, and reappears’;64 ‘with that horse he
rides ever onward and laughs in the midst of gunfire’.65 His arrival and
conquest of Sicily were miraculous: the Bourbon troops had only to see his
red shirt to run away, according to one song, while others proclaimed that
‘he took control of Palermo in a flash’, and that ‘when Garibaldi went into
battle even the trees and leaves trembled’.66
Palpably, these songs share a taste for warfare and violence. One long
cantastoria recorded by Salomone-Marino delights in the fighting for
Palermo and the bravery of all those on Garibaldi's side:

Old men and young men, and everyone

 Gave a hand against those bad guys…
And huge bombs, from the air they came
And fell on the ground in their hundreds;
Our Squadri, they were all in their place,
Stern under fire, no one was scared…
From the barricades we fired
With a terrible fire like no other,
And – Viva Garibardi! – we cried,
With a shout which terrified our enemy.67

Other songs glorified the volunteer experience: ‘Bella, I'm off with
Garibaldi, under his flag to make war – off to make war against the
Bourbons’;68 ‘We are young men – We have no cares – And if Garibaldi
comes – We'll go off with him’;69 or ‘Vittorio Emanuele, do me a favour, –
Make us a force of Sicilians – Since we must fight the Germans’ (this last
song, which refers to the Austrians, was an adaptation of a Tuscan volunteer
song).70 And in many songs there were references to liberty, Italy and the
fight against ‘tyranny’: ‘Viva la libertà! Which scares them away – Viva
l'Italia [la Talia]! Which does not let them escape’;71 ‘Viva la Talia e
Garibaldi amicu!’;72 or more directly: ‘Sicily mourned, now she laughs –
she broke the chains of tyranny – and Garibaldi brave and true – has told us
– Now you are free.’73
Commenting on the return of Garibaldi to Palermo in September, and on
the scenes of popular enthusiasm which greeted his arrival, Il Precursore
proclaimed, ‘Oh how sweet it is to rule not with the bayonet and cannon,
but with the love of the people!’74 The evidence available suggests that the
population was not as unmoved by the call of Garibaldi as the new political
elite in Palermo privately believed. Now, while ‘the love of the people’
could not resolve all the problems of men and money, it does point to a
degree of political authority and consensus which is relatively unusual in
nineteenth-century Italy, and which has been overlooked by historians more
interested in explaining the ultimate disappointment of Garibaldi's
campaign. From the limited evidence available, the current picture of
relations between government and people under Garibaldi's dictatorship,
often said to be characterised by political indifference, needs revision.
Indeed, it seems likely that the vision of national belonging proposed and
promoted by Garibaldi in Sicily did have a broad appeal and impact. In
certain circumstances, Sicilians fought with Garibaldi. Garibaldi's patriotic
message was endorsed and elaborated both by the press and by the priests,
so it reached different, and significant, sections of the population. If popular
songs are anything to go by, the story of Garibaldi's expedition, the military
and political ideals which it sought to represent, and the images and
symbols through which these ideals were expressed, were incorporated into
popular culture and reproduced in a local vernacular. Moreover, this story
evoked a popular response: at the very least, the songs remained in wide
circulation and helped to construct a popular memory of the events of 1860.
So, Garibaldi may not have persuaded Sicilians to join up with him en
masse, but he does seem to have laid some foundations for a state-
sponsored religion of the nation.
The nation-at-arms

One of the most remarkable aspects of the war of 1859 was the rush of
young men from Lombardy and central Italy to volunteer to fight against
Austria. They did so amid broader scenes of nationalist enthusiasm, such as
patriotic demonstrations, the formation of associations and the organisation
of public subscriptions. Garibaldi's war against the Bourbons in 1860
provoked a very similar reaction. In fact, his calls for volunteers and
material assistance in 1859 had carried on, as we saw in Chapter 7,
throughout the winter of 1859–60 and had culminated in his plans for the
nation-at-arms in early 1860. These military plans were halted by the
Piedmontese government, but the popular appeal of volunteering and
otherwise offering aid to the nationalist cause did not cease. The
phenomenon of volunteering in 1860 is worth looking at in some detail as it
can tell us much about the nature of support for Garibaldi and the national
idea which he represented.
One strong indication of public support for Garibaldi was the money
given to his Million Rifles Fund during 1860. The Thousand sailed to
Sicily, and financed itself until arrival in Palermo, with 90,000 Piedmontese
lire from the Rifles Fund (roughly $400,000 in present-day figures).75
Figures given by Agostino Bertani (who stayed behind in Genoa after
Garibaldi's departure for Sicily and was responsible for organising new
expeditions)76 indicate that money continued to be donated thereafter, the
fund ‘[p]rofiting’, as Raymond Grew puts it, ‘by its association with the
General’.77 In all, the Rifles Fund was able to give a total of 2 million lire
(c. $9 million) to the expedition, along with thousands of rifles and
muskets. Some of this money came from the Piedmontese government, and
some from patriotic municipalities (the city of Pavia donated 37,000 lire
and Cremona 130,000 lire to the Thousand); in the latter case money was
raised both from municipal funds and via new loans and public
subscriptions. Similarly, the National Society received around 450,000 lire
(c. $2 million) for the campaign from a combination of official and private
sources. Outside these channels, the Sicilian exile, Count Amari, collected
around 200,000 lire (c. $900,000); a separate central fund (cassa centrale)
set up by Bertani collected over half a million lire (c. $2.25 million); and
Garibaldi himself donated approximately 36,000 lire (c. $160,00),
apparently from money sent directly to him by his admirers.78
The issue of which political groups funded Garibaldi's expedition and
campaign is a tricky one, and is connected to the bitter rivalries between
moderates and democrats which rumbled on throughout the summer of
1860. For the purposes of assessing both the nationalist response and the
popular reaction to Garibaldi, however, these rivalries matter less than the
fact that money was given, and from these different sources. The list of
sponsors in Bertani's central fund shows a mix of public subscriptions,
private donations and municipal funds. One letter to Bertani also suggested
opening a bazaar in Genoa to collect money for Garibaldi's expedition. It
refers to the frenetic fund-raising activity during May: ‘balls are organised
… flower shows are opened, and the price of the ticket is donated to
Garibaldi’. Newspapers had opened subscriptions; and the committee in
Bologna had already set up a shop, the letter revealed.79
As impressive as the fund-raising was the constant stream of men
wanting to volunteer to fight with Garibaldi, or to return to battle with him.
In March 1860, a man who had shaken Garibaldi's hand in Rimini wrote
him a letter of commendable nationalist orthodoxy:

Yes, my General, send me wherever you think my few military studies and my limited
knowledge can be put to use for the Italian cause: I have no unrestrained ambitions; My
 profession of faith is this: my life, and that of my two dear sons … must end in honour
defending the regeneration of our Italy: I, and they, desire nothing else.80

Risorgimento rhetoric, and enthusiasm for Garibaldi, reached many during

1859 and early 1860. An English observer, Laurence Oliphant, who was on
a train with Garibaldi shortly before the departure for Sicily (but while the
expedition had been shelved in favour of defending Nice), was struck by his
capacity to provoke a popular response. On the train, Garibaldi read his
morning's mail, an ‘enormous correspondence’ which after reading he tore
into small pieces; and the letters were so many that, in Oliphant's words, ‘by
the time we reached Genoa, the floor of the carriage was thickly strewn
with the litter, and looked like a gigantic waste-paper basket’. Oliphant later
learnt that these letters were responses to Garibaldi's call for volunteers to
Sicily.81
Even if it had achieved nothing else, the expedition of the Thousand
would have been proof of enthusiasm for the idea of Italy. Indeed, the
expedition must be seen as the continuation of a much longer Mazzinian
tradition, which began with the Bandiera brothers in the early 1840s and
continued through the 1850s, and which has been identified by Paul
Ginsborg as a central element in the romantic conception and realisation of
Italy as a nation.82 But it is equally significant that the departure of that
expedition from Quarto was part of a much broader movement. Bertani's
central committee, and a number of local committees in the Lombard cities
of Milan, Bergamo, Cremona and Brescia, and other cities like Modena,
Bologna, Florence and Livorno, had the task of encouraging and organising
volunteers; and it was to these committees that letters were addressed, from
those ‘imploring’, in G. M. Trevelyan's words, ‘to be allowed to serve under
Garibaldi’. Cremona, a city of 30,000 inhabitants, alone sent nearly a
thousand volunteers.83 Moreover, from the very day (9 May) when
Garibaldi's call for volunteers was published in the papers, but long before
the outcome of the expedition was known, offers started to pour into
Bertani's central office.
One of the earliest letters in Bertani's files, written on 9 May by an N.
Palazzini of Milan, protested bitterly that the expedition had left without
him: why, he asked Bertani, was he considered ‘unworthy’ to serve his
country? He accordingly demanded to be reassured that ‘on the very next
occasion, I will be called on to be part of the elect and given the honour to
claim freedom for our Italy’.84 Another, an officer from Piacenza, begged to
be included in the ‘other expedition being prepared’, adding that he was
ready to keep his involvement a secret, to leave immediately, to be accepted
in any grade, and to bring other soldiers with him, if only he was allowed to
go to Sicily to fight with Garibaldi.85 Others expressed themselves as ‘very
anxious to take part quickly in that noble expedition’;86 ‘fervent’ to offer
their lives ‘for the patriotic love of Italy’;87 ‘fervent … to join Garibaldi in
any place and to share their destiny with him whatever that may be’.88 As
one man wrote:

desiring fervently to follow the brave General Garibaldi in any event and in any danger for
Italy my fatherland, and to put at your disposal my feeble hand, I turn to you sir … begging
you to do me the favour of telling me, if or if it is not true that the volunteers are being sent
back, and if it is not true, I can tell my companions so that they are convinced and we can
leave.89

Girolamo Guglielmetti, already in Genoa from Domodossola, expressed an

equally ‘fervent desire’ to go with a new expedition. If Bertani would only
let him go, he wrote, he would be ‘grateful for ever’, adding: ‘if in these
days you have any need of my person for any purpose whatsoever, I am at
your disposal, and I will do what little I can with great pleasure’.90
The statements made and questions asked by these volunteers suggest the
extent to which bits of information and other rumours rapidly circulated
about Garibaldi's expedition in early May, as well as the enthusiasm with
which many responded to the news and letters which formally announced
his departure. ‘Desiring to join up with General Garibaldi as soon as
possible’, a volunteer wrote in a pompous style on 22 May:

and not having had from your committee any precise indication, I have taken the liberty of
asking you [i.e. Bertani] directly that if I come to Genoa will I be able to leave quickly for
Sicily, and how should I regulate myself? I will not seek to hide from you how fervent is my
request: but I hope that you will forgive such fervour and the cursive style of my letter, as I
care for nothing but the idea which has inspired my resolution.91
Some people simply dropped everything and came directly to Bertani's
headquarters at Genoa, ‘hoping’, as two volunteers put it, ‘that with your
means you can realise our golden dream by taking us to Sicily’.92 One
group of Italians left their homes in ‘the centre of Africa’ and wrote to
Bertani from Algeria asking for advice on how to get to Sicily.93 Many
relied on references from friends or elders with more experience or
influence, in an attempt to be accepted by Bertani.94 Others joined together,
and proposed to come as groups of students, artists, enlisted soldiers or
from a particular locality. One typical letter of 11 May spoke for a ‘few
young students from Saluzzo, equally ardent in their patriotic love for
Italy’, who ‘with no other means of dedicating themselves to the same, offer
her their lives'; and this group persisted with their offer, writing again on 15
May, and as ‘a force of fearless and determined young men’ on 6 June.95
Often, it is the individual offers that tell us most about the depth of the
emotional reaction to the news of Garibaldi's expedition and subsequent
campaign. One man wrote a breathless letter – entirely without punctuation
– to Bertani asking to be taken on as a volunteer: ‘in short how can I be
useful to my Fatherland which is my whole life all I have is willing’.
Although he was poor, he insisted that if he was accepted as a volunteer he
could bring his horse and two saddles.96 A young Genoese girl wrote to
Bertani, stating that: ‘Genoa and the world weary me, so far from the heroes
of Italy … My parents may perhaps be averse to my decision to go to Sicily,
but you who are, like Garibaldi, the incarnation of the Italian mind and
heart, can find means to persuade them.’97 That she is not an isolated case,
and that some women were desperate to fight with Garibaldi, is suggested
by various anecdotes of women dressing as men in order to join his army.98
A father, a veteran of 1848, offered his son – ‘my only son not yet twenty’ –
to Garibaldi;99 and a sixteen-year-old told Bertani, ‘I want to devote myself
because I love Italy, one free independent under the sceptre of King Vittorio
Emanuele, and because I adore Garibaldi. And for Italy, for Vittorio
Emanuele and for Garibaldi I would be torn to pieces.’100 Several boys
defied their parents and ran away to join Garibaldi. One letter wrote of a
sixteen-year-old ‘runaway’ who had left home ‘with the intention of joining
the glorious standard of the intrepid Garibaldi’;101 a father asked for the
whereabouts of his seventeen-year-old son, ‘my only hope’, who had
managed to leave ‘without my knowledge’ with Garibaldi and from whom
nothing had been heard since Marsala;102 an uncle asked for news of his
nephew, a fifteen-year-old student from Varese, who had run off ‘with other
young lads … full of youthful fire to join up in the ranks destined for
Sicily’;103 while still another letter decried the foolhardy actions of two
boys from good families but of a lazy disposition (‘idle, very idle’), who
‘[i]n the land of sun will quickly end up as food for misfortune, lost in
idleness or pleasure, or they will be shot, at the best …’.104 Towards the end
of June, a woman, Giulia Tonelli, wrote to Bertani asking for help. Her
husband had abandoned her to go to Sicily, leaving her alone with a child;
without financial assistance from Bertani's committee, she wrote, she would
be ‘obliged to beg for a living’.105
Thus, Garibaldi's call for volunteers provoked a great rush to join him.
Enthusiasm for his expedition was not confined to the young, reckless or
feckless: doctors, pharmacists and government officials all wrote to Bertani
asking to be enrolled. Two brothers, both customs officers, wrote before
Garibaldi's departure was made public, asking for confirmation of the news
so that they could resign their posts to follow him (they wrote again later in
the month repeating their offer).106 A pharmacist who had worked for five
years in ‘one of the main pharmacies in Turin’ was willing to abandon his
job ‘just to be as useful as I can to the holy cause’;107 and a postal clerk
offered his services to the postal office in Sicily but added that he was also
prepared to fight as a soldier: ‘I too would rush to take up arms to fight for
the independence and union of Italy.’108 A lawyer from Alessandria, an
employee in the local government, proposed himself (twice) for a post in
the Sicilian administration, but said he was equally prepared to go there as a
‘simple soldier’;109 and a professor of chemistry at the University of Pavia
wrote that while it was difficult for a man in his position to join the
volunteers in the normal way, ‘nonetheless I have a strong desire to get
myself down there’. ‘Don't be discouraged and stay in Pavia’, was Bertani's
kindly reply to this last request for a place.110
A large number of offers came from officers, ex-officers and soldiers.
One man, an ex-officer in the Ottoman army (or, as he put it, an officer ‘for
the Tyrant I hope that the above will soon disappear like mist in the sun’)
wrote directly to Garibaldi from Constantinople offering his services, and
asking him to ‘love me as much as I love you’.111 Another ex-officer, from
the Austrian army, wrote that volunteering for Garibaldi would ‘cancel out’
his past actions.112 Although Bertani had been instructed by Garibaldi to
reject men from the regular Piedmontese army, many refused to be put off
and were convinced they could go. A sergeant asked Bertani for advice
about being released from the army ‘in order to give a helping hand to the
Fatherland … Viva Garibaldi Viva il Re Viva l'Indipendenza Italiana’.113 A
lieutenant requested three days' notice so that he could ask for his release
along with his three brothers (‘a fourth one is already with the General’).114
‘Having read about the glorious battles of our brave general in Sicily,’
another lieutenant wrote, ‘and feeling that it is really there that the Battles
of the Fatherland are being fought, and seeing that here we are kept in
shameful idleness – while other Brothers are dying in battle, unless you tell
me otherwise I will go to Turin and resign my commission.’115 From
Modena, a veteran with twenty years' service wrote furiously, first to La
Farina and then to Bertani, about his various efforts to be released from
military service and accepted as a volunteer:

I would have happily given half of my blood in order to be with him and the other half I would
happily have shed on to Sicilian soil for the Holy Cause. I am resigned to the fact that I cannot
be among the first, but I hope … I will not be among the last … to offer his arm and his mind
to the brave Sicilians, for my fervent desire to do my duty, the duty of every Italian, to give my
all, and to all, and with all my moral and physical faculties for the maximum benefit and the
progressive tendency of the common Fatherland, within the limits of honest Justice.

All this passion did not convince Bertani, who rejected his offer of
service.116
Just as significant was the number of offers coming from men who had
previously served as volunteers in other wars. There were one or two sad
stories of returning veterans: a Neapolitan, Vincenzo Masi, had fought in
1848 and '49, and after ten years of exile – ‘a whole odyssey, an entire
Dante's inferno’ – he had returned to be rejected as a volunteer in 1859 and
imprisoned for ‘sedition’ in Tuscany; beset by debt and with his wife dying,
he asked Bertani for money so that he could come to Italy and take part in
the ‘heroic expedition’ to Sicily, and find ‘at least an honourable death on
the field of battle’.117 Another veteran from Napoleon's Russian campaign
and the 1821 revolution in Piedmont wrote pathetically to Bertani, twice
offering his services ‘with all my heart’, and asking for ‘the day, the time,
and the place where I can join myself up with you’ (but without success).118
However, these stories are unusual: the majority of those who wrote to
Bertani had had their combat experience during the wars of 1848–9, and/or
had been enrolled as Cacciatori with Garibaldi or regular soldiers in the
war of 1859, and seemed to see these events in an entirely positive light.
Their enthusiasm for the fight in Sicily suggests that, for many,
participation in the wars of 1859 and 1860 was part of a single struggle for
the liberation of Italy.
Overall, these letters offer vivid confirmation of a huge popular response
to Garibaldi, at least among the literate urban population of northern and
central Italy, and they prove that the Thousand were a fraction of a much
more substantial group. We know that at least 21,000 men eventually made
it to fight with Garibaldi;119 Bertani's correspondence reveals that many
more sought to go and were turned down. Offers continued to come in to
his committees throughout July and August, and were still arriving as late as
November and December.120 The first major expedition to follow Garibaldi
to Sicily, which was led by Medici and took around 2,500 men to Sicily on
9 June, was already full by the end of May.121 On 23 May, after Garibaldi's
calls for volunteers had been published in the northern papers but before the
news of the victory at Calatafimi was known, a sympathiser in Milan wrote
to Bertani asking him what to do with the ‘numerous young men’ wanting
to join Garibaldi: ‘around two hundred of them and they besiege me every
day … Until now I have been trying to calm them down by telling them to
wait and that the moment will come and they will be told … [but] these
brave boys are very impatient and … their only aim is: to join Garibaldi.’122
On 6 June, Giovanni Cadolini, who was helping in Cremona to organise the
Medici expedition, told Bertani: ‘I am now tired of holding on to these
young men, who are impatient with the uncertainty of leaving from one
hour to the next’; indeed, if he had not treated with caution the official
instructions to encourage volunteers, ‘I would have here several hundred
men from the provinces without knowing where to send them’.123 In
Tuscany too, the pressure of volunteers was so great that a Florentine
activist telegraphed Garibaldi asking him to send ‘two or three steamships’
to Livorno in order to move them south.124 Later in June, doctors,
pharmacists and other employees had to be told that all further expeditions
were full: ‘that we already have lots of doctors’; ‘we don't need
pharmacists’; or ‘you can be of use to the Fatherland where you are’.125 But
many volunteers did not take no, or no reply, for an answer, and repeated
their offers, sometimes more than once; and they wrote to Bertani of their
disappointment – ‘We had everything ready’126 – or insisted on their
patriotic zeal: ‘we are ready to leave at any moment … if I had to walk day
and night … I am ready for that sacrifice’.127 Others blamed their local
committee for their failure to be accepted.128 The strain on Bertani, who
was already suffering from nervous exhaustion, was seemingly immense: he
was ill with a cough for most of June, and unable to eat or speak properly.
So, when a complaint came in from Mantua about the failure to take
volunteers from this Austrian-held town, it is no surprise that he scribbled
crossly on the back of the letter: ‘not everyone can go to Sicily: they should
adapt themselves to the sacrifice which the fatherland requires’.129
The number and enthusiasm of volunteers in 1860 suggests that Garibaldi
had succeeded in at least one of his political objectives in 1859–60. His
speeches, appearances and actions from 1848 onwards had established a
volunteer tradition in northern and central Italy; that is, he had created and
publicised a national–military ethos and ideal to which (some) people now
felt a passionate and practical commitment. That participation in the war in
Sicily was perceived by many as an act of national belonging and political
identification is confirmed by the language which they use. Writers don't
just beg to join Garibaldi, they seek to put their familiarity with nationalist
discourse on display. Thus, Sicilians are ‘unhappy’ and ‘our brothers’,
whose cry for liberation must be answered (and by late June, Sicily is the
‘land of Heroes’); the Bourbons are ‘cowards’, the ‘tyrant oppressors,
enemies of our nationality, and independence’; and Garibaldi is ‘our
General’, ‘our Leonida’, ‘the brave’ and ‘illustrious’ ‘Hero of Varese’ and
‘of Italian freedom’. The writers, as we have seen, are ‘fervent’, seeking
nothing less than to offer their lives for the ‘sacred’ or ‘holy’ cause of
Italian freedom.130
One of the earliest letters, addressed to Garibaldi and written by someone
who had already tried twice to join him (in Tuscany in 1859), spoke of the
need to ‘help rise again to freedom’ the ‘sister … provinces’ (i.e. Sicily),
and of his desire to fight, ‘even as a simple soldier to be worthy of the
esteem of the greatest General, an esteem which I would jealously guard,
and to be able to distinguish myself with great acts or to die’. All he wanted,
he added, was to serve his country ‘and to have from you, illustrious
General, a word which I seek above all others, a bravo!’131 The use here of
Risorgimento tropes and symbols – the fight to recover liberty; the nation as
family; the virtues of martyrdom; heroism as its own reward – may be
crude, but it is also exemplary. ‘It is better to die than to see our brothers
oppressed by the Bourbon yoke’, one volunteer told Bertani at the end of
May;132 ‘if I was rich I would offer you gold, to amass firearms, and with
that my life, but I am poor and for the fatherland I can offer only my arm
and my blood’, another one wrote two weeks later.133 A philosophy student
from Alessandria even quoted Garibaldi at Bertani: ‘every time that the
saying of the Valiant Man of Como and Varese comes to mind, that is: that
he who is capable of carrying arms, and does not do so, is a coward and a
traitor, I feel myself going red, so for this reason I have a great desire to
serve my Fatherland’.134 The language of these letters tells us that those
writing had read the letters and propaganda put out by Bertani et al. The
letters offer us clear proof of the circulation and use of nationalist discourse
in northern and central Italy, and demonstrate a broad engagement with its
symbols and ideals.
As ever, however, we must be careful about what we read into the
evidence offered by the volunteers' letters. A degree of self-interest or just a
simple desire to fight on the part of the volunteers in 1860 can never be
entirely excluded. It is clear from the letters that many saw the war in Sicily
as part selfless act of national heroism, part adventure with some violence
thrown in, and part economic prospect. Some, indeed, openly requested a
job in the administration, or in the work of fortification and reconstruction;
most of the officers wanted to keep their grades; and as many asked for
financial help in getting to Genoa as actually paid for their passage. And it
may well be that this combination of emotional resonance and material
opportunity best explains the appeal of the whole experience in Sicily. In
this respect, the volunteers seemed able to embrace and repeat the
propaganda put out by Garibaldi, who presented the war as an inclusive
adventure which would glorify all those who participated in it, while
ignoring his insistence that they should expect no reward for their actions.
Furthermore, while the volunteers' letters show passionate commitment
to the nationalist cause, and a clear identification of the enemies of Italy,
there are few hints in them that the volunteers saw Garibaldi as in any way
a distinct symbol, different from the Italy represented by Vittorio
Emanuele.135 Indeed, it is hard to see how they could have done, given that
the expedition made persistent appeals to the idea of national integration,
and had Italia e Vittorio Emanuele as its slogan. Moreover, these letters
wrote repeatedly of ‘liberty’ and ‘independence’; but there are far fewer
references to the need for political unification, even less mention of Rome
and Venice, and none at all of the Republic. We can conclude then that the
soldiers of 1860 heard the call, identified the enemy and even learnt the
language of nationalism, but that they were plainly unable to grasp the
details of the democratic message, as these were never made clear, or were
never clearly distinguished from the ideals embodied by the king and
Piedmont. With the benefit of hindsight, it is hard not to see in these letters
also a significant slip in political communication. On a discursive level, and
especially if we look at the reception of the nationalist discourse in 1860,
we can still observe the reliance of Garibaldi on Piedmont, and foresee his
eventual defeat at the hands of Cavour.
The enthusiasm of foreigners

After the expedition to southern Italy was over, the owner of The Illustrated
London News wrote personally to Garibaldi. She sent him ‘two volumes
containing pictorial representations of your wonderful progress from
Melazzo to Naples’, and remarked that her late husband, the previous
owner, had ‘never omitted an opportunity of despatching Artists to follow
you and record in pictures your bold and patriotic deeds’. These pictures
had been sent all over the world, she added, and she assured Garibaldi that
‘the Artists and Correspondents of this paper will be found wherever your
sense of patriotism leads you in future’.136 Garibald's success with the press
was discussed in the previous chapter, and we have also seen the extent to
which press reports and illustrations were picked up and elaborated in
poems, plays, histories and memoirs in the course of 1860 and afterwards.
But the enthusiasm of foreigners for Garibaldi did not stop at plays and
publications. Many also expressed their support for him through practical
means – namely, the sending of men and money – and by writing directly to
Garibaldi to state their admiration for his person and approval of his
actions.
Figures suggest that the amount of money sent by the British to Garibaldi
was substantial: between them, the Emancipation of Italy Fund and the
Garibaldi Fund raised some £30,000 (just under £2 million in present-day
figures) between 1856 and the end of 1860.137 That Garibaldi became a
public cause for British liberals in 1860 is also suggested by various
displays of gift-giving. Both Florence Nightingale and Charles Dickens
gave money (along with the duke of Wellington's son; however, his
donation was anonymous), and the Athenaeum, a gentleman's club in
London, raised £300 (c. £19,000) in one night. In Darlington, a Garibaldi
Fund Soirée was organised, with the profits from ticket sales going to the
Garibaldi Fund; and in Glasgow, a special Working Men's Fund for
Garibaldi was set up by John McAdam to consider ‘how we can best
support the Middle Class Friends of the Cause, who have already remitted
to Italy and are preparing for another still larger remittance’.138
In fact, Garibaldi's campaign provided the occasion for a host of
associative activities. Meetings were held, money was collected and
addresses composed in support of Garibaldi. In Staffordshire, some
inhabitants of the potteries town of Burslem got together to open a shilling
subscription for Garibaldi, and they raised £500 by the end of the year
(which suggests that a possible 10,000 people contributed); they also wrote
him a letter in which they expressed both their pleasure that the Italians
were rejecting Roman Catholicism and ‘despotism’ and their ‘profound
admiration’ of ‘the heroic and statesmanlike qualities displayed by the
generous and gallant Garibaldi’.139 A group in Blackburn sent him £5, and a
carefully composed address which described Garibaldi as:

the noblest of nature's Sons, and the greatest Prince among her Peoples … whose heart is set
on ‘Liberty’ whose sympathies are even with the oppressed, whose sacred hand is never raised
save in vindication of rights … ever ready to face danger and death for the overthrow of
despotism, and the defence of the just liberation of the People.140
‘[T]he men of Sheffield assembled in the Town Hall’ on 11 June simply sent
a letter to Garibaldi in which they told him of their ‘great interest’ in events
in Italy, expressed their suspicion of ‘grasping ambition’ and diplomacy,
and expressed their sympathy ‘with the oppressed people of Italy, who have
shown themselves so patient, and so faithful, so prudent and so brave in this
great crisis’:

we hail, with all humane and free-minded men, the success of the brave attempt that has, so
far, made Sicily free: and we are anxious to tell you that hundreds of thousands of Englishmen
think that the course that you have taken was as wise as it was brave, and that it will be as
really useful as it was most truly great … and we pray that you may outlive the storm, and sit
down at last, in the cool of the day, with a free and united Italy to teach the people the arts of a
lasting peace as faithfully and as well as you have taught the arts of a just and manly war.141

William Johnson, the secretary of the Southampton Athenaeum, wrote on

behalf of its members – ‘the loving and loyal subjects of our devoted and
beloved Queen Victoria (under whose beneficient reign we enjoy perfect
freedom)’ – to offer Garibaldi ‘their most hearty congratulations’ for his
liberation of the people of Italy ‘from a cruel and oppressive tyranny’ (this
latter phrase was underlined in red pen).142
There was similar activity in New York, from where an estimated
$100,000 (c. $2.3 million in presentday figures) was sent to Italy between
1859 and 1860.143 Two Italian committees (one under Garibaldi's old
colleague, General Avezzana) were set up there in late 1859 and
successfully organised subscriptions and other fund-raising activities for the
Million Rifles Fund; these were joined by a third committee of prominent
Americans which convened with great publicity in the City Assembly
Rooms in February 1860. During the summer, publicity for Garibaldi was
widespread. There was a concert in aid of Garibaldi in New York in July, to
which artists and musicians donated their services free, and mass meetings
of support for ‘the immortal Garibaldi’ were held in Cincinnati, Ohio and
Newport, Rhode Island. From Philadelphia, Henry Roney wrote directly to
Garibaldi to tell him that he and his friends were members of a secret
society and they wished to make a donation to his campaign, while Thomas
Schaffer wrote to inform Garibaldi that he had been elected an ‘Honarary
[sic] member of the Franklin Library Institute of Centenary College of
Louisiana’.144 Money was sent from San Francisco, and from Italian groups
in Montevideo and Valparaiso, Chile.145 A letter also reached Garibaldi
from ‘The Committee of the Fraternity of all Nations’, signed by various
exiles whose current location was not stated:

From the land of exile, we send to you, Dear General, our sentiment of respect and admiration,
for your glorious achievements, and of those who have nobly shed their blood for the cause of
humanity. We all look at you as the noble initiator of the emancipation of all the different
peoples of Europe, and we fervently hope that you will fulfill to the last your heroic
undertaking.146

Volunteers and other kinds of practical assistance also arrived from

Britain and America. The Americans lent their particular support by
providing ships to transport volunteers: the Charles and Jane, the Franklin,
the Washington and the Oregon were American, or bought with American
money, while the British supplied the Amazon.147 In July, the New York
Herald led a public outcry after the Charles and Jane was briefly seized by
the Bourbon navy; when the ship's first mate, Watson, refused to allow her
to be boarded he became something of a hero, and was offered (and
acccepted) a post in Garibaldi's navy. Other American volunteers, most of
whom were attached to General Avezzana's staff and arrived with him in
time to fight at the Volturno, included two surgeons studying in Paris, two
generals who had fought in the Mexican war during the 1830s, and the
nephew of Senator Jefferson Davis.148 John Litchfield offered himself and
his men in the Volunteer Rifles – ‘strong hands with willing hearts’ – from
Kingstown, Canada.149 Britain sent more than its share of colourful
characters. Apart from ‘the gigantic Peard’, who had already fought with
Garibaldi in 1859, and went with a small group of other British volunteers
to Sicily with Medici's expedition in July, there was Colonel John Dunne,
who arrived in late May on a secret mission from Cavour, formed a peasant
squadre of his own with which he entered Palermo during the fighting, and
stayed on to form an English ‘regiment’, which was made up mostly of
adolescent street boys from the ‘Garibaldi foundling hospital’.150 In mid-
October, a second group of British volunteers arrived in Naples: these so-
called ‘excursionists’ were around 600 strong and they fought with the army
at Capua.151 Finally, there is also evidence that British sympathisers, and
notably the Glaswegian John McAdam, helped encourage and materially
assist Hungarian volunteers for Garibaldi.152
In France, government restrictions prevented such open expressions of
support. However, liberal newspapers like Le Siècle and L'Opinion
Nationale did manage to receive and distribute funds for Garibaldi
throughout the summer. A group in Marseille also sent a small sum to
Garibaldi via Alexandre Dumas, and an attempt was made in September to
circumvent political restraints by setting up a fund for a monument to Paul
de Flotte, a Breton socialist and volunteer for Garibaldi killed in Calabria at
the end of August. A list of seventeen subscribers (who had each donated
between two and ten francs) was published in Le Siècle and L'Opinion, but
the fund was quickly suppressed by the police.153 Similar restrictions
probably affected the formal organisation of a French volunteer legion for
Garibaldi. Nevertheless, between 300 and 500 men made it to southern Italy
via Genoa to fight with Garibaldi, and in July the French consul in Sicily
was sent several complaints from parents whose young sons had run away
to join Garibaldi (there was particular concern about boys from Nice, now
under French control). The same Paul de Flotte organised a group of around
fifty men who stayed with him from Genoa onwards, and after his death,
towards the end of the campaign, Garibaldi ordered the formation of a
French legion: the légion de Flotte.154 Also towards the end of the
campaign in October, Johann Becker, a former member of Young Germany,
arrived in Naples to form a corps of German volunteers to fight with
Garibaldi.155
Alongside these more organised efforts, many individuals wrote privately
to Garibaldi offering material support, their services, or simply their fervent
admiration. At the beginning of August, Alexander Andrews wrote to
Garibaldi from East Bengal of his longing ‘to join the banner of liberty
under the heaven Conferred destroyer of Tyrants’, and offering his services
as a subaltern. An American surgeon, William Holcome, wrote offering his
and his wife's services (‘we will both come to any place you may mention
and work heartily for your cause which is an immortal one’); while William
Forster wrote from Newcastle that he had been training ‘for a soldier's life’
in the hope that ‘I might aid in the great work of Redemption’.156 Some
writers sent Garibaldi their own music and poems. A woman signing herself
‘Violet’ wrote from High Wycombe to express her ‘deep and earnest
admiration’; and she sent Garibaldi a bookmark: ‘although it is a very
humble offering yet it comes from one who has a warm and patriotic
heart’.157 ‘Although I am a stranger to you, I will not be happy unless I
express in a letter the feelings of admiration which I feel for you, for the
real nobility, and the pure generosity of your character’, another English
woman, Fanny Blews from Birmingham, wrote to Garibaldi (in Italian).
This sentiment, she claimed, was shared by all ‘English women’: ‘The eyes
of women were full of tears on reading about the glorious and intrepid
actions of Garibaldi and his devoted band; and many prayers were offered
to almighty God to look after the head of the general on the field of battle
and glory’. She had followed his progress since 1848: ‘your name was a
guiding star for me … in this time it has become the symbol of a man who
is more honourable and more loved than all the heroes of antiquity’.158
Others wrote with requests. Thomas Watson asked Garibaldi for his
autobiography (‘it would gladden … [ my] heart to look on the lines traced
by the gallant hand that has so often led to victory. Don't refuse me
General’);159 a Swiss baroness sent Garibaldi a copy of his own portrait and
asked him to sign it and return it to her;160 while George Barker (‘a plain
Englishman’) asked Garibaldi for an autograph to add to his collection
(which included those of Wellington and Nelson), as did a writer from
Melbourne, Australia, on behalf of his seventy-five-year-old mother who
had told him to ‘ask the General not to delay in sending it’.161
Many of these letters are especially interesting for the sense of a personal
relationship and of intimacy, as well as political involvement, which their
authors convey to their hero. Some had met Garibaldi, and wrote to renew
their acquaintance. Sarah Barfield, who had met Garibaldi in Messina and
published an account of their meeting in the Daily News, wrote: ‘May God
long preserve your valuable life and when you visit England I hope you will
come and see me’.162 The wife of the British consul in Tangier in 1850
wrote to remind Garibaldi of ‘the quiet and happy times’ they had spent
together: ‘no one has followed your career with more interest and pride than
I have done’; and an American who had met him in 1853 wrote with a
message of political support, a lengthy account of his own life, and an
invitation to visit in Boston.163 More usually, however, such confidence was
entirely imagined. As one passionate supporter of Garibaldi wrote angrily to
Joseph Cowen, Mazzini's great supporter in Newcastle: ‘Garibaldi,
remember, is THE man of action at the present moment, and he deserves all
the support we can collect. I have nothing to do with the Italian Committee
here … I work for and with Garibaldi & no one else at PRESENT. The
money that I receive shall be sent to HIM direct if possible.’164 A fifteen-
year-old, ‘F. Keel’ from Birmingham, sent two letters to Garibaldi asking to
be allowed to join him:

I hope that you will allow me to come to you now for I love you as I did my parents … [I] can
stand or go through any danger or hardships for those I love, as I do you, I will do every thing
in my power to please or enjoy you I will be unto you as a son should be to a father. do not
think that this step is without due consideration … I hope you will send a letter as soon as
possible for I am impatient to come to you. Please do not say no. for I shall be obliged to
disobey this one request for my determination is fixed to come & serve you [sic].

‘Hoping you are quite well and happy … Goodbye till we meet’, the boy
ended the letter.165 By way of contrast, but still displaying this sense of
personal closeness, William Cobbit sent Garibaldi a nine-page diatribe
about taxes and government spending in September, along with a similar
letter to a newspaper, from a debtors' prison.166
Many letter-writers saw in Garibaldi an expression of their own religious
beliefs, especially their faith in Protestantism and their horror of Roman
Catholicism.167 Margaret Davis from Aberdare in Wales, a ‘profound
admirer of Garibaldi’, wrote to him both of her desire to go as a nurse ‘to
his wounded soldiers’ and of her ‘involuntary’ ability to do so, and of her
conviction that Garibaldi would help in ‘opening the door of that blessed
gospel of Jesus Christ which alone makes nations as well as individuals’.168
Religious fervour also inspired another Welsh writer, William Rayner from
Swansea, to write a long letter in which he compared Garibaldi to
Cromwell, and assured him that:

prayers from my heart and thousands of Christian hearts and pulpits in this country are
constantly ascending on your behalf and for your preservation in every danger until your work
is done. Oh! may it be done in your own humane and loving way and not by blood … My dear
friend your little island [Caprera] is your throne and your work the Crown set not in polished
 jewels or diamonds but with great and worthy deeds that shall sparkle through the distant mists
of time and nothing but the great conflagration shall obliterate its light.169

John Spear, ‘a staunch friend of Italian freedom’, wrote from Dublin of his
disgust at the formation of the Irish brigade to defend the Pope. They were,
he assured Garibaldi, only ‘400 misguided fanatics’ and should not be
allowed to colour his attitude to Ireland. ‘Now your Excellency, is a great
nation to be answerable for such a paltry piece of papal intrigue? I almost
hear a determined negative, thundering from your lips, and grasp the
auspicious moment, to implore of you, not to listen to the voice of those,
that say “my country is your foe”.’ He accordingly asked permission of
Garibaldi to organise a band of excursionists, ‘a noble Irish Legion’.170
That so many of these letters come from British or Anglo-Saxon sources
suggests that British support for Garibaldi was especially strong. However,
this may not necessarily be the case, since it may be that only the British
letters to Garibaldi have survived, or were kept, while others were lost. In
general, the most striking aspect of foreign support for Garibaldi was its
international or cosmopolitan character, and it is possible to speak of a wave
of international enthusiasm for Italy and for Garibaldi: along with Britain,
the USA and France, Hungary, Poland and Germany sent volunteers to
Sicily and the South. Moreover, throughout 1860, expressions of foreign
support for Garibaldi, and the presence of foreign volunteers in his army,
received huge attention and publicity. Foreign backing added force to the
prevailing feeling that Garibaldi's campaign was both just and unstoppable,
and it formed part of his government's selfimage and propaganda.
Such enthusiasm is further evidence of the success of Mazzini's
international publicity campaign for Italy, which had begun some twenty-
five years previously. It also shows us the effect of the press and publishing
in creating a community of readers with shared interests and common
sentiments. Subscriptions, letters and the act of volunteering suggest the
extent to which readers in Paris, London and New York had become
personally and emotionally involved with Garibaldi and his fate, and they
tell us that some were inspired to become more than mere spectators to
political events and had decided to invest materially in their result.
As before, however, we must be careful lest we too are drawn into, and
convinced by, the powerful nationalist rhetoric of 1860. The appeal of
events in Italy for the British public lay in the apparently simple triumph of
good over evil, and their enthusiasm reflected a sense of national
satisfaction at being on the right side (and ‘subjects of our devoted and
beloved Queen Victoria’, as the secretary of the Southampton Athenaeum
wrote). It is evident from their letters and statements that many people were
as transfixed by Bourbon ‘tyranny’ as they were fascinated by the heroism
of Garibaldi. For example, a visit to, and description of, the Bourbon
prisons in Naples (condemned by Gladstone in the mid-1850s) became a
seemingly obligatory ritual for all the British writers who made it out to join
Garibaldi in 1860.171 So all this enthusiasm should be treated with some
scepticism: a taste for morality tales and the spectacular did not always
translate into lasting political engagement. Internal politics and preferences
had always played a significant role in defining foreign support for
Garibaldi: resistance to Napoleon III in the case of France; and a strident
Protestantism (characterised by ‘extraordinary wildness and nastiness’,
according to one of its historians)172 in the case of Britain and the USA.
Most important of all, we must note that – with the exception of one or
two officers with previous military experience – the foreign volunteers for
Garibaldi were never a huge help to him and were, on occasion, a positive
hindrance. There was jealousy between the French and Italian volunteers
and the French men were allegedly difficult to control.173 The British
‘excursionists’ caused very serious problems. These started before they
even left Britain, and were created by a fake garibaldino, ‘Captain Styles’,
who convinced the committee in London he was an agent of Garibaldi (see
his picture in The Illustrated London News, figure 17 on page 256). He
went about selling commissions but kept the money for himself, so that
when the men arrived in Italy to find that their commissions were not
recognised by Peard, their new commander, they were understandably
furious. Further difficulties were caused by the Foreign Enlistment Acts,
which forbade the recruitment for foreign armies on British soil. Although
this problem was avoided by calling the volunteers ‘excursionists’, the
published announcement read like a tourist advertisement, and many who
went to join Garibaldi were ready for adventure and little else.174 One
journalist, who published a highly fictionalised account of his experiences
as an ‘excursionist’, wrote of his decision to go to Sicily with friends: ‘we
all loved adventure, were sick of the dull routine of idle bachelor's life in
town, and thought “it would not be such bad fun after all” … And thus it
was we three friends became Garibaldini’.175 Some were what Trevelyan
calls ‘roughs’ from Glasgow and London, ‘who considered that they were
out on a holiday at other people's expense’ and, although they were happy
to fight, ‘expected a maximum of food and good quarters and a minimum of
discipline’.176 They got drunk on the cheap wine, a group of them robbed a
peasant on the Volturno, and there were real problems involved in getting
them home when the campaign was over.177 Even medical volunteers were
not immune to criticism. One of them, a Dr Wolfe who went out in July
with drugs and medical instruments, fell out so badly with Garibaldi's
doctors (and with Jessie White Mario in particular) that he was arrested and
placed in Caserta prison.178
Finally, while much of the material looked at in this chapter would
suggest that the whole world loved Garibaldi, this was actually not the case.
As we saw earlier, the right-wing press in France attacked Garibaldi in
newspapers and pamphlets: they argued that Britain was the true instigator
and economic beneficiary of the collapse of the Two Sicilies, and that the
real victim was Francesco II.179 One of the most passionate of all the letters
to Garibaldi came from ‘a patriotic Frenchman, a friend of truth, [and]
enemy of falsehood’, who wrote to condemn his actions (‘What have you
done, brigand!’) and who was entirely unconvinced by the attempts to
justify his attack on the Two Sicilies:

what is the good of adding hypocrisy to all the horrors of your life? … no! Everyone will
understand what they already know: and what your apologists also know: that your aim is to
bring disorder to humanity … and that were your desires to be fulfilled, Europe and perhaps
the universe, would be nothing more than a vast sewer of mud and blood in which you and
those like you would crawl until Judgment Day.180

Even in Britain, the Garibaldi committee was sued more than once by an
anti-Garibaldi group which objected to its recruitment for the nationalist
cause.181
Most importantly, the combination of Piedmontese expansion into the
Papal States and Garibaldi's expedition to the Two Sicilies put Catholics
everywhere on the defensive against Italian nationalism. In 1859, Pius IX
had adopted a visible public stance of no compromise with the Piedmontese
state and this had produced ‘a wave of emotion’ which ‘drew the hearts of
Catholics towards Rome’ across Europe and America.182 Huge amounts of
money were sent, in the form of a revived ‘Peter's Pence’, to help the Pope
defend Rome and the Papal States against attack, and a wave of addresses
were sent to the Pope, totalling over five and half million signatures.183 In
1860, the French General, Lamoricière, issued a proclamation: ‘The
revolution now menaces Europe as once Islam used to menace it. Today as
in old days the cause of the Pope is the cause of the civilization and liberty
of the world’; he then went to Rome to raise an army of volunteers for the
Pope.184 French bishops responded to his call and encouraged young men to
join what would be called ‘the ninth crusade’. In Catholic Ireland,
Archbishop Cullen launched a massive pro-papal agitation, and between
February and July 1860 he organised a collection which raised a
‘prodigious’ £80,000 (or c. £5 million in present-day figures) for the
Pope.185 A brigade of over 1,000 Irish volunteers formed and went out to
join the 500 French zouaves and 600 Belgians, and they fought at the
battles of Spoleto, Castelfidardo and Ancona against the Piedmontese army.
In Catholic Ireland, in other words, Garibaldi's campaign was not seen in
a positive light at all, but as a threat to the Pope's temporal power.
Moreover, the defence of the Pope contributed to the formation of an Irish–
Catholic consciousness which could distinguish itself neatly from
proItalian, Protestant, British identity.187 In general, 1860 saw the
mobilisation of the Catholic Church against Italian nationalism, broadly
associated with the revolution and perceived as a threat to European
civilisation. As one French zouave wrote: ‘Nowadays the forces of Hell are
known by a name that incorporates them all: the Revolution. Italy is the
battleground where the great armies of Christian civilization and barbarism
meet.’ This campaign was extremely successful, producing a popular
response on a scale which in many ways surpassed support for Italian
unification. Appeals to the Catholic community were made via pamphlets
and newspapers, the organisation of subscriptions, and networks of
voluntary associations; and some of the French zouaves attached the Sacred
Heart insignia to their uniforms, using a symbol of Catholic identity
developed during the French Revolution as protection against the sign of
‘Marianne’.188 Hence the Catholic war on ‘Italy’ relied on propaganda
methods which were all too clearly ‘artefacts of political modernity’.189
Conclusion

Although support for Garibaldi in 1860 was not unanimous, he was

definitely hard to ignore. In Sicily, he had the support of an intellectual elite
and of sections of the Church, and his government was celebrated in
newspapers, plays and poetry. He enjoyed considerable mass popularity,
even if this popularity was tough to define and control. In the rest of Italy,
his expedition to Sicily resulted in subscriptions and associations, and he
quickly amassed a large and enthusiastic volunteer army. Throughout the
summer, he was inundated with offers of foreign support and expressions of
admiration. He posed as the ‘saviour’ of Sicily, and was seen as the
‘Redeemer’ (Saint Michael, Jesus Christ and/or Charlemagne). His calls to
the nationatarms were reflected in volunteers’ letters to their ‘father’ at the
head of a ‘holy cause’. His careful cultivation of foreign support was amply
repaid by the declarations of support for the gallant (Protestant) General,
fighting for the benefit of humanity (and against Rome and the Papacy).
The response of volunteers to Garibaldi's call can also be seen as a
triumph for Mazzini's ideas and methods. Mazzini's propaganda strategy
finally came good in 1860 and produced practical results on a significant
scale. ‘Garibaldianism’, according to his British follower, Charles Forbes,
was for Garibaldi's troops in 1860 ‘as completely a religion as was
Mohammedanism with the fanatical followers of the prophet in the earlier
days of the Koran’.190 His statement reflects the steps taken in 1860
towards establishing nationalism as a political religion. Just as striking is
the variety of understandings of Garibaldi's message. Above all, it is clear
that the radical and republican aspects of the revolution were submerged
beneath a more generic discourse of national revival, whose broad appeal
masked a variety of sometimes selfinterested and contradictory motives.
Equally, we should not suppose, as many of his supporters seemed to in
1860, that Garibaldi carried all before him, or that his conquest of southern
Italy represented the inevitable defeat of political conservatism and the
Roman Catholic religion.
In August 1860, as Garibaldi prepared to relaunch his war against the
Bourbons on the Italian mainland, he made the following speech to his
officers and soldiers:

Among those qualities which must prevail among the Officers of the Italian Army, apart from
bravery, there must also be kindness, which will attract and keep the affection of the soldier …
A strict discipline can be obtained with severity; but it is preferable to obtain it with affection
and leadership … It would be impossible … for a soldier in the field of battle to abandon his
dear officer, who has treated him kindly, who has smiled at him in times of need, and with
whom he has shared the trials and glories of a campaign. For this reason an officer must take
special care to stay with his soldiers, and to look after them, as if they were his own family.191

In this passage, Garibaldi recognises the importance of affective ties to the

functioning of his army and, more broadly, of appeals to emotion as the
basis of his popularity. It was a sense of belonging (to a ‘family’) and
affection for the national ‘community’ which lay at the root of the decision
of so many men to leave their homes and fight with him for ‘Italy’ in 1860.
These emotions offer powerful evidence for the formation of a national
community in Italy, however complex, contingent or constructed.192
Although I have stressed caution in approaching much of the evidence
presented in this chapter, it still suggests that the achievement of Garibaldi's
dictatorship in creating a passionate sense of political identity in 1860 was
quite considerable. These elements of a nationalist religion created by
Garibaldi were neither especially authoritarian nor entirely oneway. The
reactions to Garibaldi which I have looked at here point to his appeal being
based on a fusion of authoritarian and democratic symbols. It was his
capacity to be both magnificent and humble to which people responded; and
it was the juxtaposition, beloved of democratic iconography and used so
frequently in the letters and stories of 1860, of political achievement and
private simplicity which seemingly made the most impression on the public
imagination. Although, by 1860, he had left his more dangerous bandit
persona far behind, Garibaldi still appealed to radicals, or to those who
sought political, religious and social change, and to those who sought, more
simply, an alternative form of political identity or a means of social escape.
Equally, Garibaldi fashioned himself, but he was not the only source of
the cult which surrounded him. In the vast theatre which characterised the
production of the Garibaldi cult in 1860 – the symbols and associations,
speeches and newspapers, the memoirs, novels, plays and letters – it is not
always clear who is controlling whom, or who is the ‘transmitter’ and who
the ‘receiver’ in this process of communication. The creation of the cult of
Garibaldi can perhaps be more accurately defined as, in Marjan
Schwegman's words, ‘a dynamic, highly international, interactive work of
art created by many different men and women’, a product which was
political because it publicised and inspired adherence to a political project
‘that the public was supposed to act out in their own life’.193 This
‘interactive’ nature of Garibaldi's appeal can explain why such a wide range
of groups found in him something to react to. It may also help to account
for the intensely emotional response to Garibaldi (the feelings of personal
involvement with his programme, or of intimacy with and confidence in
him) which is typical of the correspondence of those, like volunteers or
foreign women, who had never actually met him or known the places he
fought for. So, while Garibaldi's message in 1860 may seem somewhat
equivocal and his charisma artificially constructed and promoted, its
reception was in many ways spontaneous and creative, and the responses to
him were genuinely felt.
 CHAPTER 11

UNIFICATION

Caprera

Garibaldi threw away a huge political advantage when he agreed to hand

over power to Piedmont and retired ‘backstage’ to Caprera in November
1860. At least initially, however, he was not aware of the scale of his defeat.
On 18 October, he wrote simply to Mazzini that ‘if one must concede it is
better to do so with good grace’.1 He was careful to thank everybody who
had helped in the expedition, which may suggest he was planning to call on
their support another time. He wrote a public letter to the Garibaldi
committee in New York, in which he thanked them and the ‘generous
American people’, and told them that ‘the enterprise is not completed.
There is a part of our family still oppressed by atrocious despotism … you
must not abandon your work for us.’2 He explicitly told the Italian
committee, in another public letter, ‘don't disband. Do not abandon the
enterprise halfway. What you did in the name of Sicily and Naples, you
must also do for Rome and Venice.’3 He wrote to the Polish émigré Ludwik
Mieroslawksi that ‘my withdrawal to Caprera is not a desertion of the cause
of the people to which I have dedicated my whole life.’4 Finally, he even
wrote as much to the king, telling him that he was going to Caprera in order
to get himself ready, that ‘soon Your Majesty will be called to finish that
great task for which Providence has destined you’, and that, in this case, ‘I
would consider myself very fortunate to be numbered among your
soldiers.’5 With his generals, Garibaldi also envisaged the creation of five
armed divisions – the Cacciatori delle Alpi – made up of his southern army,
foreign volunteers, and any other volunteers not subject to the national
conscription laws; and these were to be stationed in various regions of Italy
in readiness for the next war against Austria.6 Everything suggested, in
other words, that Garibaldi left for Caprera planning another campaign for
Venice and/or Rome over the following summer, and did not consider that
the struggle for Italy was over.
The winter spent in Caprera did little to alter his expectations and
ambitions. Fundraising activities continued, and in January Bertani
relaunched the 1860 ‘committees of aid’ as ‘committees of assistance’ for
Rome and Venice with Garibaldi as president. Accepting the appointment,
Garibaldi wrote to the committee that they must have ‘as the password for
every day, every moment, repeated incessantly to every committee and tried
by every other means to be absorbed into the minds of every Italian: – that
in the forthcoming spring of this year 1861 Italy must, without mercy, put a
million patriots to arms’. To that end, he recommended that they set up a
newspaper, Roma e Venezia.7 At this point, he still saw Austria – rather than
the Pope – as the main adversary. His letter to Mieroslawksi, in which he
also stated his support for ‘our brave Poles’, was redated and published in Il
Diritto.8 To Mazzini he wrote that he would prefer to fight for Venice first:
‘We have a vast theatre of operations: – that is from the mouth of the
Danube to the mouth of the Po’.9 ‘I am sure that Italy can fight its war of
redemption again this year’, he wrote to the British political leader ‘John
Russel’ [sic], in London in early March.10
Garibaldi had good reason to be confident. His prestige in early 1861 was
immense: ‘dominating the picture we have the gigantic figure of Garibaldi
growing bigger and bigger on his rock at Caprera and casting his enormous
shadow even at this distance’, the diplomat Costantino Nigra wrote to
Cavour from Naples in March.11 In the national elections of January 1861,
Garibaldi won seats in several constituencies, and chose to represent Naples
(although he did not travel to parliament when it met in February). Letters
of support and various honours were sent to Garibaldi by many municipal
governments, including those of Pavia and Turin, the Workers’ Club of
Parma and a women's group in Como.12 The Council in Lodi declared 11
May (the date of arrival in Marsala) a ‘citizens' holiday’, with money to be
given to the families of those who had fought with Garibaldi.13 At the end
of March, the Italian Unitary Association in Milan made him their president
(his letter of acceptance was published in the main nationalist papers); and
in early April he received a delegation from the workers’ clubs (società
operaie), and the speeches made on that occasion were published in Il
Diritto.14 In Palermo, a new version of the paper Il Garibaldi was published
in January and February; a collection of poetry appeared in Catania to
celebrate his name-day (San Giuseppe);15 and the priest Carmelo Pardi gave
a published speech to commemorate the first anniversary of the April revolt
which had brought Garibaldi to Sicily.16
Caprera itself was the centre of intense activity. Apart from his children,
Teresita and Menotti, there was Fruscianti, who looked after the farm, the
Deideri couple, who had acted as Teresita's parents when she was a child,
and various other semi-permanent residents, including Specchi, Carpeneto
and Basso, who worked as his secretaries. Moreover, Garibaldi's celebrated
solitude was, in his own words, ‘shattered by visitors’.17 His close political
friends, Bixio and Vecchi, came to stay for extended periods; a number of
artists came to paint and sculpt him; and Timoteo Riboli, a phrenologist,
came to study his skull. The latter became a friend of, and physician to,
Garibaldi, and made a public announcement that his head was ‘remarkable
… the craniology of the head … offers an original phenomenality of the
rarest kind, one might even say unprecedented: the harmony of all the
organs is perfect … a marvellous, organic, faultless head’.18 Johann Becker,
the ‘German Garibaldi’, came to Caprera to discuss his plans for an Italian–
German alliance against Austrian and French ‘despotism’.19 The Scottish
radical, John McAdam, arrived (after a terrible journey in midwinter) with
money from the Glasgow Ladies Sick and Wounded Fund, and conceived
an elaborate plan to set up a salmon hatchery on Caprera.20 A stream of
uninvited admirers also arrived almost continuously and were seemingly
always welcomed. Vecchi remarked that ‘the presence of the General in
Caprera’ was a ‘god-send’ to the neighbouring village of La Maddalena: a
‘sort of inn’ even opened to put up the tourists.21
Garibaldi's home at Caprera became an integral part of his fame. This
process had begun in 1860, when Garibaldi's sometime lover, Esperanza
von Schwartz, published an account of her visit a few years earlier, in
German, English and French. She described the wild beauty of Caprera,
where ‘the Cincinnatus of our time has withdrawn himself from the world
and its delusive hopes [in 1858]’, as well as offering a host of details about
his private life: the design of his house; the well-kept garden; his books; his
children and the family's lifestyle on Caprera; and his love for his late
wife.22 Thereafter, Garibaldi's simple life on Caprera became a form of
public display. However genuine his own commitment may have been to
farming the land and making a personal life for himself, the image of a
‘modern Cincinnatus’ captured the public imagination and made Caprera
anything but a private place. Frank Vizitelly of The Illustrated London
News went specially to Caprera on his way home at the end of the campaign
‘to close my correspondence with a few illustrations of the island home of
the modern Cincinnatus’. Although he warned his readers not to expect
intimate descriptions (‘I visited General Garibaldi as a friend … and
doubtlessly, he will expect from me but gentlemanly treatment in whatever
I may write respecting him and his home’), he offered them exhaustive
details of the house, and of Garibaldi and his family's behaviour, along with
seven illustrations of Garibaldi at home.23 These included General
Garibaldi spearing fish by night off Caprera (‘it is impossible to conceive
anything more picturesque’, see figure 23 opposite), and The farmyard,
which showed a bucolic scene of Garibaldi feeding his dog with his horse
‘Marsala’ impatiently pawing the ground next to him.
23 This illustration by Vizitelly of Garibaldi spearing fish both reflects, and
contributed to, the mythology of his life at Caprera.

From Caprera, Vizitelly's prose and pictures took up the juxtaposition of

the public figure and the private man which had already been a potent
feature of journalism in 1860, and turned the glimpses of Garibaldi's
intimate life into a form of popular theatre:

here am I, sitting peaceably under the roof and partaking of the hospitality of the man who
seven months since … raised the standard of freedom on the shores of Sicily, and threw his
gauntlet at the feet of Francis II and his legions. As I write this I can see Giuseppe Garibaldi,
the undoer and maker of Kings, trundling along a barrowful of roots that he has grubbed from
 the rocky soil … Little dreamt I when, nearly seven months ago, I shook hands with that
daring revolutionist, the morning after his entry into Palermo, that seven months later I should
congratulate him on his complete success in his cottage at Caprera.

The iconographic fascination of Caprera persisted into the following year,

and thereafter. In May 1862, a colour print of Garibaldi in his island home
was published in Newcastle ‘and dedicated to the People of United Italy’.
Garibaldi's pose was copied from a famous photograph, but the landscape
was pure invention: a mix of classical and romantic references featuring a
stormy sea, an overhanging rock, and two goats grazing nearby.24 The same
attraction can be observed in the first numbers of a serialised Italian Album,
published by Terzaghi of Milan. This took up the story of Garibaldi's life
after his departure from Naples; and illustrations included The hermit of
Caprera (Garibaldi with spade, surrounded by farm animals, looking tired
and downcast, see figure 24 below); the happier and openly patriotic
Garibaldi in the heart of his family (Garibaldi sits on a sofa in front of a
map of Italy and reads Il Diritto, surrounded by his personal and political
family); and the more sensational A young Spaniard who prefers to kill
himself than leave Garibaldi (the accompanying text explains that the man
‘had made an idol of Garibaldi, and no longer being able to live with him,
had decided to die where he lived’; see figure 25 opposite).25 In 1866, the
German illustrated paper, Die Gartenlaube, published an article on ‘the
Cincinnatus of Caprera’, with the usual details of his happy family life.26
These publications also helped define a new phase in the cult of Garibaldi,
in which interest in his private life and character competed with awareness
of his political concerns and objectives.
 24 ‘The hermit of Caprera’: a popular representation of Garibaldi at
Caprera. Contemporary prints made much of his solitary existence, his
work in the fields (suggested by the spade) and his relationship with the
farm animals.
 25 ‘A young Spaniard who prefers to kill himself than leave Garibaldi’.
Note also Garibaldi's white house in the background here and in figure 24:
an essential element of the established iconography of Caprera.

In turn, however, Caprera acquired a political significance as the physical

representation of Garibaldi's reputation. Engaging loosely with a symbolism
inherited from the American and French revolutions, where public greatness
was matched by private virtue, Garibaldi's lifestyle on Caprera seemed
proof that he was a ‘genuine’ hero, whose personal modesty was unaffected
by his political fame. Each writer used this juxtaposition in different ways,
but the rhetorical point remained the same. ‘All eyes are turned at this
moment on a little, almost inaccessible and completely barren island, lost in
the heart of the Mediterranean’, the French volunteer Emile Maison wrote,
praising Garibaldi's military talent and his personal diffidence. Riboli
published his description of Garibaldi's exceptional head and ordinary life
in the French radical paper Le Siècle.27 A British visitor described
Garibaldi's friendliness to him at Caprera: ‘I was soon impressed with the
belief that the General was not only the bravest of warriors and the purest of
patriots, but also the prince of gentlemen.’28 In Modena, an Abate Bazzani
dedicated an Ode ‘To Garibaldi in Caprera’, in which he praised equally his
greatness and his selflessness; and in Naples, a priest, Domenico Jonata,
wrote a ‘political constitutional catechism’ designed to teach ‘the people’
democratic principles, and dedicated it to the ‘immortal Giuseppe
Garibaldi’ on his ‘humble … home, the happy island of Caprera’.29
The person who probably did most for Caprera was Colonel Vecchi,
whose book, Garibaldi a Caprera, was translated into English, Dutch,
French (published in Holland presumably to avoid censorship problems),
Swedish and German.30 Like the others, Vecchi made a great deal of the
simplicity of Caprera and the dedication of Garibaldi to his farm; like the
others, he described in detail his frugal but happy private life, the feminine
talents of his daughter, Teresita, and the names of his animals (notably the
fact that one donkey was called Pius IX). He too stressed Garibaldi's
greatness (‘[t]he days that I passed by the side of my General are like a
fugitive but brilliant dream’) and his gentleness (there is one passage in
which Garibaldi searches all night for a lost lamb).31 But Vecchi went one
step further, and sought to sacralise Caprera and, with it, the man who had
made his home there:

Who can visit Caprera without emotion? … He is about to step on a shore made illustrious by
the highest human excellence, and he feels his thoughts softened, elevated and enchanted.
Even at the distant point where the boat lands, perched amid great lumps of granite rock, that
little white house is visible, an object of deep affection to how many human creatures! Within
dwells an exceptional, I might say an almost superhuman being. It is the den of the Italian
Lion. It is the refuge of the friend of mankind. It is the fountain-head of all that is noble,
generous and holy. It is the oasis of peace of Giuseppe Garibaldi!32

In reality, Garibaldi spent most of the winter engaging in a vast

correspondence: ‘there were three people employed in answering the heaps
of letters that arrived daily for the General’, according to Vecchi, who also
helped out with answering letters.33 John McAdam noted that Garibaldi
worked incessantly on his correspondence, continuing to write after supper,
dictating to his secretaries in bed, and getting up before dawn to work with
them again.34 ‘My correspondence quite exceeds my capacity, and the
capacity of those who assist me in writing’, Garibaldi admitted to
Mazzini;35 and many of his letters of this period are written in another hand
and bear just his signature.
As in 1860, it was foreign letters which filled Garibaldi's postbag. For
example, Elisanter, the editor of Die Deutsche Zeitung, wrote from Berlin
of the support of his paper (which showed, he said, that not all Germans
thought like the Austrians), and to invite him to the city.36 Many were
content to send Garibaldi gifts or expressions of their admiration. A
company in Milan sent him ‘the proverbial Panettone’ for Christmas 1860;
a garibaldino sent him nougat and jam from Cremona; Zeffira Levi made
him a flag (‘what an Italian woman who can't do more must do’); while
Margherita de Sanctis, of the Institution Dolet in Naples, composed a verse:
‘Napoli calls you, Palermo desires you. Your brave men invoke your name.
The whole world admires you! … Venezia cries sighs and waits for you.
Rome quivers, but hopes. Only Caprera is happy. The heavens bless and
protect you. The fair sex adores you, and I hold you carved in my heart.’37
One group wrote from Brussels to tell Garibaldi that they had ‘woken his
spirit’ in a seance: the spirit had told them that he had landed in Catania
with two friends disguised as him, and that his soul ‘was that of
Hannibal’.38 Manfred Warmund wrote enclosing a song and expressed his
great esteem for Garibaldi (‘Believe me, 100,000 young Germans think like
me’); and an anonymous fan letter arrived from Bremen written in Latin.39
A French writer sent a letter from Aix-en-Provence to tell Garibaldi: ‘You
are great! you are noble! … I admire you, I envy you … Heaven has elected
you to change completely the destiny of beautiful Italy … so Courage …
Courage, Courage!’;40 while a professional female companion, ‘E.
Birkardt’, wrote to Garibaldi from Nice to ask if she could come and live
with him in Caprera.41
Perhaps excited by the prospect of a war for Rome, British Protestants
were especially frequent correspondents. Few were as colourful as Paul
Doig, who from Stirling sent Garibaldi a handwritten extract from the Book
of Revelation: ‘Fall of Rome by Fire’ (‘[t]he great whore spoken of (as you
will observe) is a city, and that city, terrible Rome’), but all were hugely
enthusiastic. Another Scot, Julia Lees, wrote from ‘poor, Priest-ridden
Ireland’: she filled eight dense pages with religious fervour and sent him a
copy of the New Testament, ‘not too large, I hope, to be easily carried
about, so as to be your friend, a companion’.42 Culling Eardley, the
president of the Evangelical Alliance, asked for Garibaldi's help in the battle
against Catholic intolerance, and William Ashley, of the same, sent him a
copy of the ‘Polyglot bible’.43 Thomas Scott, secretary of the Reformed
Romanist Priests Protection Society (whose motto was ‘Christ and not the
crucifix all over the world’), wrote from Dublin to invite Garibaldi to speak
in Ireland, and assured him (rather implausibly) that he would be given a
good ‘Irish welcome’. A final indication of the strength of these religious
associations with Garibaldi comes from a Charles Turner in London, who
wrote nine detailed pages to tell him of the error of his ways: ‘you have
gone forth with the deadly sword against your Brothers in the same faith’.
In the letter's climax, the author asked Garibaldi:

Can you obtain Mercy, can you be forgiven, can you repent, can you humble yourself in dust
and ashes. Can tears run down like a river before God. Can you lift up your eyes to Christ …
Sir, you have sent many down to death … You Sir are grievously sinning against God, against
men and against your own Soul … Sir tremble at his Majesty – go not forth again with the
Sword of war.44

Parliament

Garibaldi's remarkable stature in this period, and the strong public reaction
to him, are worth stressing because they masked less happy political
developments and, to an extent, prevented serious discussion of them.
During 1861, divisions began to open up in the democratic movement, as
activists took stock of the new political situation. In particular, they had to
respond to the extension of a parliamentary system throughout almost the
whole Italian peninsula, and to reconsider their policy on revolutionary
action. Alessandro Galante Garrone has identified three main currents
which emerged within the democratic left immediately after unification: the
first, led by the Tuscan democrat, Antonio Mordini, which concentrated
entirely on parliamentary activity; a second led by Francesco Crispi, who
insisted that ‘we must remain within the law’45 but also pursued
extraparliamentary agitation and associations; and a third, more ‘extreme’
left, headed by Bertani, which, while not excluding parliamentary action
(and thus disagreeing with Mazzini), remained fully committed to the idea
of revolution in Italy. Garibaldi leaned mostly towards Bertani's line, and
even grew closer to Mazzini in these months, but part of his leadership in
1860 – Medici, Bixio, Türr and Sirtori – moved towards a compromise with
the Piedmontese government, and accepted positions in the Piedmontese
army. Garibaldi himself continued to believe that King Vittorio Emanuele
could in some way lead the revolution.46 Effectively, therefore, the
democrats lacked a clear policy or an agreed single response to the
achievement of national unification; or as Garibaldi wrote to Mazzini: ‘In
terms of projects – I have none. I limit myself to gathering the means.’47
Cavour was less charitable, writing (in late September 1860) to one close
colleague that ‘Garibaldi has not a single clear political idea’. Yet
Garibaldi's prestige meant that these problems were rarely discussed openly,
and that members of the left felt obliged publicly (if not privately) to unite
behind him.48
The confusion in the democratic camp gave Cavour a great advantage. In
the first elections following the October plebiscites in January 1861,
government candidates won a major victory, while leading democrats were
defeated. At the same time, Cavour and his allies began to move against the
garibaldini in southern Italy, determined both to oust them from their
positions in government and administration and to prevent Garibaldi's
volunteer army from being incorporated into the Piedmontese military.49
Particularly ruthless was the decision, planned and put through by General
Fanti, essentially to liquidate Garibaldi's army. By a decree of 16 November
1860, all his officers and soldiers had to pass before a special commission,
and this commission excluded huge numbers of them, notably all foreign
volunteers (apart from a few Hungarian officers) and the volunteers from
southern Italy.50 In January 1861, the national guards in southern Italy were
also disbanded and replaced with the much more elitist Piedmontese
model.51 By the spring of 1861, it was clear that very few of Garibaldi's
officers or soldiers had been transferred into the regular army and, in April,
new regulations were introduced putting an absolute limit on the numbers
that could be admitted.
However, the action against the democrats in the South was a disastrous
mistake. It removed a relatively sound basis of political support and
material force for the government, and created in its place a large pool of
disaffected, displaced young men, to add to the security problems of crime
and brigandage and to create a series of political threats (reaction and
republicanism) in southern Italy.52 The mistake was even recognised by the
king who, unlike Cavour, had seen the enthusiasm of the volunteers in
Naples and wrote that their dissolution was ‘bringing with it a great hatred
… has done grave damage, and may yet do more’.53 Its more immediate
effect was to infuriate Garibaldi. He decided to leave Caprera in early April
and travel to the new capital of Italy, Turin, to take his seat in parliament
and there protest publicly against the treatment of his volunteers and oppose
the measures for the national guards. He wrote a letter to Urbano Rattazzi,
the president of the Chamber of Deputies, in which he decried ‘[t]he
deplorable conditions in southern Italy and the unjust abandonment of my
brave companions-at-arms’ and expressed his distaste ‘towards those who
are the cause of so much disorder and injustice’. The letter was widely
publicised: it was read out by Rattazzi in parliament and published in Il
Diritto.54
Garibaldi followed the letter up by his first public appearance since his
departure from Naples in November 1860, this time at the parliament in
Turin. His appearance was delayed by a few days due to an attack of
rheumatism, during which Garibaldi added to general speculation by
refusing to speak to members of the press (although he did find time to
seduce two British women, who subsequently wrote him letters filled with
passionate personal and political prose).55 His arrival at parliament on 18
April caused enormous media and public interest: ‘such a multitude as I
never saw assembled at this place … an unusual swarming, even in the
square before the Palace and the adjoining streets’, the Times correspondent
commented.56 Garibaldi entered the chamber to the wild applause of a
packed gallery (full of women, according to one account) but to the ‘cold
silence’ of most of the deputies, and he took his seat on the extreme left. His
political attitude was expressed clearly in his clothes. Instead of wearing a
suit like all the other politicians (as he had done in parliament during the
previous session), he had put on what one French diplomat called ‘his usual
dress, his immortal red shirt with a grey overmantle … [which] made him
look like a prophet – or, if you prefer, like an old vaudeville actor’.57 His
appearance was obviously theatrical and intended to mark his political
distance from parliamentary proceedings. If there had been any doubt about
his meaning, it was dispelled by his speech. He began slowly and
fumblingly, only to launch swiftly into a tirade against Cavour. First
rejecting any hope of reconciliation with a man ‘who has made me a
stranger in Italy’ (both a specific reference to the cession of Nice, and a
wider appeal to a standard Risorgimento trope),58 he then caused uproar in
the chamber by accusing Cavour of provoking a ‘fratricidal war’ in his
treatment of the volunteers.59 He repeated the accusation, at which point, in
the words of the Times correspondent: ‘the din of voices became terrific …
The mêlée in the centre of the hall … was truly appalling. In the midst of it
all Crispi was seen bawling, gesticulating like a maniac. Chaos reigned for
15 or 20 minutes.’60
The political fallout from Garibaldi's speech was considerable. Widely
reported in the press, it made public and visible, almost for the first time,
the real disagreement about Italy's future which divided Garibaldi and his
followers from the moderate liberals. The parliamentary debate which
followed was less violent than Garibaldi's opening salvo, but, in the
discussions of the treatment of his volunteers in 1859 and his management
of the campaign of 1860, the depth of bitterness and contempt on both sides
was plainly revealed. At the time, Nino Bixio tried to cover up the cracks by
telling the chamber that ‘Garibaldi's words should not be taken too literally
or be given the same weight as if they were written’, but he seems to have
convinced no one.61 Moreover, the dispute continued in the press. Two days
after these events, General Cialdini wrote a public letter to Garibaldi – ‘You
are not the man I thought you were’ – criticising his attitude to the king and
his ‘outlandish costume’ and stating that the Piedmontese army had saved
his volunteers at the Volturno.62 Garibaldi, of course, replied in print
defending his military and political conduct (and adding, ‘[a]s for my way
of dressing I will continue to wear [those clothes] until I am told that I am
no longer in a free country where anyone can dress as they please’), and his
letter was published in Il Diritto, L'Unità Italiana, La Nuova Europa and Il
Popolo d'Italia. The quarrel was halted only by a meeting between the main
protagonists, brokered by the king but, at the meeting, ‘I did not shake
Cavour's hand or seek a reconciliation’, Garibaldi confirmed to his
secretary, Guerzoni.63
This particular episode was brought to a close by Cavour's sudden death
of a fever in early June, but the clash between Cavour and Garibaldi had a
long-term significance. First, it offered vivid evidence of a substantive
struggle for power between moderates and democrats, which focused on a
central issue for the new Italy: control of the armed forces. Second, the
public staging of the struggle – Garibaldi's theatrical appearance; the debate
in parliament; and the detailed personal and political accusations – points us
to the importance the antagonists placed on establishing and controlling the
public memory of recent events. Finally, Garibaldi, and the left in general,
came off rather the worse in the struggle. Garibaldi succeeded admirably in
displaying his contempt for Cavour and the parliamentary hierarchy, but it
is difficult to see what else he achieved. By late April, it was really too late
to save his southern army; and Garibaldi himself seems to have recognised
this fact by leaving the chamber before the crucial vote, and writing to
Cavour some weeks later of the need once more for them to work
together.64 Moreover, while Cavour won considerable praise and sympathy
for his dignity during the parliamentary debate,65 nobody sought to defend
Garibaldi's behaviour (as we saw, even Bixio told the deputies not to take
him seriously; and Sir James Hudson, the British minister in Turin, called
him a ‘wild amphibious creature’).66 Thus, while unquestionably
spectacular, Garibaldi's first foray into Italian politics after national
unification cannot be considered a success. It did little to solve the problems
of leadership, organisational unity and policy-making which beset the
radical movement as it confronted the changed circumstances of national
unification.
Aspromonte

After the clash in parliament, Garibaldi returned to Caprera, and seems to

have accepted that there would be no military action that summer. For a
while, he considered going back to the United States, where civil war had
broken out, and taking up a command in the Union army.67 There were
rumours that he would lead an expedition to Montenegro; the Austrian
government feared he would organise an uprising in Dalmatia to coincide
with one in Hungary; and the French government heard that he was
planning to land in Catalonia to provoke a revolution in Spain.68 However,
the real initiative came much closer to home. In the course of 1861,
Agostino Bertani worked furiously to bring together the various workers’
clubs, democratic committees and patriotic associations into a single,
broadly based radical movement. ‘This’, as Bertani wrote to Crispi, ‘will
give us freedom of action, put Garibaldi in his place, and allow us to direct
him to wherever our fatherland needs him.’69 In December, these groups
met in Genoa and agreed to form a single organisation: the Italian Freedom
Association (Associazione Emancipatrice Italiana), which held its
inaugural meeting in March 1862. Garibaldi attended as president, and he
made the opening speech calling on the left to unite their forces (like the
‘Roman fasces’) and focus on Rome and Venice.70
This conference coincided with important shifts in government policy at
Turin. King Vittorio Emanuele saw in Cavour's death an opportunity to
involve himself more directly in politics and, as a result of his political
machinations, a new government was formed in March 1862 by the king's
ally, Urbano Rattazzi. The responsibility for what happened next was
denied by the king and by Rattazzi. However, it seems likely that they both
contacted Garibaldi in the hope of bypassing parliament and gaining a
political advantage over their opponents. The king seemingly sought to
involve Garibaldi in two different schemes for the Balkans: first, to attack
Austria somewhere in Dalmatia as a means of gaining control of Venice;
and second, to put pressure on Greece so that the government there would
accept the king's second son as the country's new monarch. Rattazzi made a
million lire available to Garibaldi for purposes which remained deliberately
vague.71
Throughout this time, Garibaldi remained as popular as ever. He was
inundated with letters from every group and every corner of Italy and
abroad: by men and women offering their services, pleading with him to
liberate Rome and Venice, sending him poems and gifts, and asking for his
autograph or for permission to dedicate a book to him.72 Altogether, they
testify to Garibaldi's continuing capacity to encourage multiple forms of
political ambition and attract an intense sense of personal belonging. For
example, a Spanish general, a veteran of the Peninsular war, wrote offering
his ‘feeble services’ as a soldier (‘old officers are ever young, when the
hour comes to do their duty’);73 while Victor Clément, a Parisian cobbler,
wrote a poem to him as a fellow artisan (‘Leave futile joys to others,
Garibaldi only needs truly useful things’).74 ‘Some women’ from
Brandenburg saw in him a way of becoming public. They asked him for a
piece of his red shirt so that they could match the colour and make shirts for
themselves, and in this way ‘pay you homage in the face of the whole
world, not just in an intimate way, but also in our external clothing’.75 A
radical priest in Genoa sent Garibaldi his publications on popular education
(for ‘both sexes to distribute also in the countryside’), and assured him that
‘in my small way with my voice and my pen, I will not cease being a priest
of God and of the people’;76 and someone wrote from Livorno simply to
tell him that Italy and the world were ready for his call: just the smallest
sign would be enough to show that ‘the Lion of Caprera is returning … to
the field of action … ’.77
It was in this mood of popular and political expectation that Garibaldi
embarked on a government-sponsored tour of Lombardy. The aim of the
tour was to promote the new rifle clubs (Società del tiro a segno); and,
while royal control of these clubs was obvious from the start (Crown Prince
Umberto was the president), Garibaldi saw in them the possibility of
reviving his military idea of the nation-at-arms and of linking it to the new
political initiative made by the democratic Freedom Association. The tour
was a publicity triumph. It was the occasion for speeches and
commemorations, for a celebrated meeting in Milan with the novelist,
Alessandro Manzoni, and for huge public demonstrations in support of
‘Rome and Venice’.78 During all these events, Garibaldi used his
personality to recruit men and raise money for Venice, as well as to promote
the idea of the nation-at-arms to a very wide cross-section of the population.
He personally sought to establish local clubs in every town and small
village that he visited.79 Through his indefatigable correspondence, he tried
to reach an even larger audience. In innumerable letters he encouraged the
recruitment of peasants (‘[j]oin up, my good friends of the fields, most
noble class of agricultural workers; come together in fraternal maniples’);
accepted the presidency of workers’ clubs and local patriotic associations
throughout Italy; welcomed priests; and sought to involve women's groups
from all over Italy.80 The results reflect the tangible impact of Garibaldi's
presence, and the continuing appeal of his name. Letters of support for the
rifle clubs followed his route through the provinces of Bergamo, Brescia,
Cremona and Parma. From the South and Sicily, letters of support also
arrived from local governments and other groups anxious to identify
themselves with this new initiative and the ‘already legendary figure of
Garibaldi’.81
But this spectacle of patriotic unity was brought to an abrupt halt in early
May. A group of volunteers, led by the garibaldino Francesco Nullo, was
arrested by the Italian army at Sarnico on Lago d'Iseo, near the Austrian
border. The government claimed that they had been preparing to attack
Austria in the south Tyrol. A popular demonstration in favour of the arrested
men took place in Brescia, but was broken up by the police, who fired on
the crowd killing some of them. Garibaldi published a letter condemning
the ‘massacre of Brescia’ in Il Diritto.82 Crispi and Rattazzi clashed
dramatically in parliament. Crispi accused Rattazzi of inventing a plot for
his ‘personal advantage’: Sarnico was ‘a fairy tale, a phantasmagoria, one
of those dramatic incidents orchestrated by the government’ and designed to
discredit Garibaldi.83 For the left, Sarnico raised again the dilemma of
choosing between parliamentary action and revolution. All hope for Venice
seemed lost, and Garibaldi took himself off to Caprera.
In Caprera, however, events took an entirely new turn. Towards the end
of June, Garibaldi left Caprera, but this time he sailed south to Sicily,
apparently once more with the support of the government.84 His plans at
this stage were quite unclear: ‘yes … we will go to Palermo and there we
will see’, he is said to have remarked to his companions as they approached
the coast of Sicily.85 He was greeted by the prefect of Palermo, his old
friend Giorgio Pallavicino Trivulzio, and was taken to the royal palace,
where he was given the same rooms in the ‘pavilion’ above the Porta Nuova
which he had used in 1860. The sense of unfinished business was palpable.
To Crispi, Garibaldi wrote on 8 July: ‘things are going well, although I don't
know what we will do next. In any case, we must get out of this mud, with
the same programme and the right men.’86 A week later he wrote to the
British journalist, James Stuart, asking him to raise a loan of £20,000 in
England ‘for Rome’ (‘[i]n Italy this can't take place without compromising
the secrecy which is necessary for my plans’).87 He wrote a series of letters
to Masonic lodges asking for their help in taking Rome (‘[s]tupid and
wicked are those who do not rush to the defence of their own mother’).88
And on 23 July, he wrote a lengthy address to ‘Roman women’ (published
in Il Diritto and L'Unità Italiana) in which he told them:

Women [Matrone] of Rome, Rome or Death has rung again in the land of the Vespers. Have
hope! In this land of volcanoes a flame leaps which will burn the throne of tryants! Rome or
Death! … Rome, the mother of Italian greatness! … Rome, oh Rome! He who pronounces
your name and is not moved to take up arms and redeem you did not deserve the gentle touch
of his mother, or the ardent kiss of his lover … I am with you until death, oh women.89

So Rome it was to be. In Sicily itself, where Garibaldi was followed

closely by the press, he made speech after speech, and created a new style
of impromptu dialogues with his audience. From the Hotel Trinacria, the
town hall, the Teatro Garibaldi, and the Convento della Gancia in Palermo,
he travelled to Cefalù, Termini Imerese, Corleone, Misilmeri and Trapani,
making short, emotive statements and establishing dialogues with the crowd
(‘You know I am a friend of the people, yes, friend, of the people, and
above all of the Sicilian people … People of Palermo … Rome is ours [the
crowd: Ours, ours] … out, out with Napoleon! [Out, out]’). Finally at
Marsala, he raised the cry which was to set the tone for the expedition, and
which he used again and again: ‘Rome or Death’.90 In rhetoric and in
practice, Garibaldi's attempt to raise a volunteer army in Sicily in 1862 and
seize Rome from the Pope followed a familiar Risorgimento formula. In
order to gain momentum, he relied heavily on the force of his own appeal to
the people and on publicity in the press; and the absence of any detailed
planning suggests that he hoped, once again, to wrongfoot his opponents,
rush to Rome with his men and present the government with a seemingly
spontaneous fait accompli. At the very least, by his actions he hoped to gain
publicity, and maintain the questions of Rome and Venice as issues on the
political agenda.
 For this plan, he had certainly chosen the right place to start. Apart from
the evidence of Rattazzi's collusion with the campaign, the security forces
in Sicily had very little control over the island. Local officials lacked proper
instructions about how to deal with Garibaldi, and even senior members of
the administration believed – quite understandably – that he had the full
support of the government. Volunteers later questioned about their motives
for joining Garibaldi claimed to have been convinced that ‘everything
would go like it did in 1860’.91 For all these reasons, Garibaldi was allowed
to pass south-eastwards and unimpeded through the interior of Sicily,
raising the cry of ‘Rome or Death’ and encouraging men to join his
campaign. In August, he and his volunteers (now some 4,000 men)
converged in three columns on Catania, which they entered at 2 a.m. on 19
August and were ‘met by an immense crowd’.92 Although on the following
day the government finally responded by declaring martial law in Sicily and
the mainland South, on 25 August Garibaldi was allowed openly to cross
the Straits of Messina with his men, and to land on the shores of Calabria.93
Having done up to then remarkably little to stop Garibaldi, the
government now cracked down with considerable force. On 26 August, the
arrest of all those ‘who were part of the band of Garibaldi or took part in
any way in the rebellion’ was ordered. On 28 August, three left-wing
parliamentarians were arrested in Naples. On the same day, emergency
powers were introduced in Catania, which included a general disarmament
and a ban on the wearing of red shirts and berets.94 On 29 August, Garibaldi
and his volunteers were halted by Italian troops in the mountains of
Aspromonte. In the resulting confusion, firing broke out and Garibaldi was
badly wounded in the foot. Another group of garibaldini, left in Sicily in
the hills above Acireale, was also caught by the army, which shot dead
seven of them. General Cialdini, who had arrived in Messina on 27 August,
issued a decree stating that ‘all those who are caught armed and vagrant in
the countryside and villages … [should] be considered and treated as
brigands’. During the same days, the government took advantage of martial
law to suspend the freedom of the press, and to dissolve the Societies for
Freedom, set up by the democrats in Genoa during the previous March.
There followed a general military crackdown throughout Sicily which
lasted until mid-November.95
 ‘Aspromonte’, as the whole episode came to be known (the name
coincidentally means ‘sour mountain’), was a disaster for all concerned. In
the South, it was just the beginning of a violent campaign of military
repression and emergency legislation which lasted throughout 1863, and
which then dragged on more or less unsuccessfully until late 1866.
Aspromonte hugely discredited the government, and prime minister
Rattazzi in particular. Stories of his involvement were heard everywhere,
and in December 1862 his government was forced to resign. Many on the
left, including Crispi and Bertani, had been against Garibaldi's expedition
and advised him against it; so Aspromonte revived the divisions with the
democratic movement and halted the steps taken in early 1862 towards the
construction of an effective political party. During 1863, efforts were made
to reconstruct this alliance around resistance to the government's campaign
in the South, but in the end these came to nothing. Bertani tried to
orchestrate a mass resignation of deputies from parliament in protest at
government policy in Sicily (‘I have no faith left in your system’, he
announced), but this was not a success.96 The majority, led by Crispi and
Mordini, chose to remain in parliament, while only a small minority, which
included Garibaldi, resigned their seats in protest.97 The great divergence in
political attitudes on the left was also obvious in the reaction to the split of
1863. Crispi wrote of Garibaldi that ‘God did not endow him either with
Cromwell's mind or Napoleon's ambition … his arena is not parliament but
the public piazza and the field of battle’, while Mazzini was delighted by
Garibaldi's decision, and urged all those who had resigned to turn to the
masses, ‘who must learn to see in you the future leaders of a revolution, that
cannot fail to break out sooner or later’.98 Thus, Aspromonte and its
aftermath deepened the divisions in the democratic movement, and did
nothing to resolve the political crisis on the left.
Garibaldi suffered great and lasting pain from the wound to his foot.
After the skirmish at Aspromonte, he was arrested and taken with his family
and immediate associates to the fortress of Varignano near La Spezia, and
for a while it seemed he would be put on trial. However, at the end of
October he was allowed to leave Varignano, and moved to La Spezia and
then Pisa; he had an operation to remove the bullet from his foot, and
finally in late December he was able to return to Caprera. After
Aspromonte, he was physically never the same. He spent the winter with
his leg strapped in bandages and could move only in a bath chair or on
crutches; and he failed to recover full mobility thereafter, walking almost
always with a limp and the help of a stick.99 Despite the outbreak of revolt
in Poland, which attracted great public sympathy and to which a group of
Garibaldi volunteers rushed to fight, he was unable to move from Caprera
during the whole of 1863. In truth, his health was already compromised by
chronic rheumatism, but hitherto this had been relatively well hidden; now
Aspromonte marked the permanent and public loss of Garibaldi's physical
vitality.
Aspromonte seemed at first to deal a major blow to Garibaldi's political
reputation as well. The Turin satirical paper, Il Fischietto, immediately
published a large cartoon of Mazzini depicted as death – an ‘insatiable
Saturn’ – eating his children, the last of whom was Garibaldi (see figure 26
above).100 The episode was also seized on by the right-wing and clerical
press in France. L'Union described Garibaldi as ‘a bandit in a comic opera’
caught in a mountain gorge by ‘a handful of bersagliers’, while Augustin
Cochin in Le Correspondant announced: ‘The redeemer descends again to a
scoundrel’,101 and claimed his defeat was the result of divine intervention.
For the main government paper, Le Constitutionnel, Aspromonte was ‘the
victory of order over anarchy’, while the liberal press remained largely
silent on the subject.102 Even The Times in London saw Aspromonte as a
major defeat for Garibaldi, writing as soon as the news came in:
26 Mazzini is an ‘insatiable Saturn who devours his children big and small
indiscriminately one after the other’, according to Il Fischietto in the
aftermath of Aspromonte.

What made Garibaldi an idol to his friends … was the prestige of his invulnerability, the
conceit of his omnipotence, his certainty of success, his faculty to peform miracles in
everything he undertook … But now blood has been drawn from the veins of the charmed man
… the hero sinks to the level of mere mortals … He has tempted Providence, and his star pales
in heaven; his final defeat may be deferred, but his fall is no less inevitable.

Four days later, the paper had not changed its mind: ‘Garibaldi is on the
ground, never again to rise. Whatever events the future may have in store
for Italy, Garibaldi's game is played out. He is old, prematurely old, broken
in health, worn by fits of excessive activity … The gout tortures and
paralyses his limbs, sorrow will soon gnaw into his very soul.’103
Despite all these setbacks, Aspromonte became something of a
propaganda success for the left in Italy. However politically divided by this
episode, the left responded with a public show of support for Garibaldi, and
this was accompanied by a major publicity exercise intent on showing
Garibaldi, the hero of Italy, to be the victim of government brutality and
duplicity. This effort began as soon as his men got him off the mountain at
Aspromonte, and it was instigated by Garibaldi himself. On board the ship
taking him to Genoa, he wrote a long letter to Il Diritto in which he
defended his actions. In a dramatic opening sentence, he pushed the blame
on to the government. ‘They were thirsty for blood! And I sought to save
it.’ He had told his men not to fire and, although wounded and unable to see
the whole conflict, ‘I am … assured in all conscience that … from the lines
under my command and the command of my adjutants, not a single shot
was fired.’ He even went so far as to praise the conduct of Colonel
Pallavicini, the commanding officer at Aspromonte, in order further to
express his contempt for Rattazzi's government. He concluded the letter
with a brief, but masterly, piece of Risorgimento rhetoric which contrasted
his and his men's voluntary martyrdom for Italy with the apathy of its
official representatives:

What pains me most is the fatal mistrust (by the head of State) which contributes in no small
way to the non-fulfilment of Unity. But however it may be, this time too I can present myself
to Italy with my head held high, sure that I have done my duty. This time too, my indifferent
life, and the more precious life of so many generous young men, was offered as a sacrifice to
the most holy of causes, untouched by cowardly self-interest.104

Garibaldi's letter to Il Diritto, cast as a defence of national honour, was

widely published and translated. It was followed up by another open letter,
this time to the ‘English nation’ and written from prison in Varignano, in
which he denounced the ‘immoral monstrosity which is called the Papacy’
and acclaimed England as the land of liberty.105 In Italy itself, press
restrictions seem to have muted the immediate response. However, a series
of pamphlets was produced semi-clandestinely in order, as they put it, to
combat the ‘lies’ put out by Rattazzi and to defend the selfless heroism of
Garibaldi. One anonymous author wrote from prison to back up Garibaldi's
account written from ‘his bed of pain’: they had done everything they could
to avoid a conflict with their ‘brothers’ in the army.106 An officer, R.
Maurigi, also wrote from prison to give more details of the episode. Forced
by his wound to sit down, Garibaldi had continued shouting viva l'Italia,
and in the end the regular soldiers cried viva Garibaldi and they had all
exchanged ‘fraternal embraces’.107 Alexandre Dumas, who claimed to have
obtained an eyewitness account from a Hungarian officer, told his readers
that Garibaldi had continued smoking while he was hit, and his face never
changed expression;108 while a volunteer, another eyewitness, observed that
Garibaldi was hit in front of all his men, implying that he had been fired at
deliberately. The volunteer quoted the Book of Genesis at his readers: ‘and
it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel
his brother, and slew him’.109
Thanks to these propaganda efforts, Aspromonte ceased to be seen as the
defeat of Garibaldi. Instead, it was recast as one more painful event in
Italy's national history, a tragic example of civil strife (another writer
quoted Manzoni: ‘brothers have killed brothers’),110 and an emblematic
illustration of the nation's betrayal by the perfidy of a few Italians (Rattazzi)
and the tyranny of its foreign oppressors (Napoleon III).111 At the centre of
this tragedy was the treatment of Garibaldi, and his suffering acquired
conspicuous religious overtones. Two French writers explicitly compared
Garibaldi's pain to that of Christ on the cross. One pamphlet, by Felix Pyat (
a French political exile, and later member of the Paris Commune), spoke
directly to Garibaldi:

Your sacrifice … seems a Transfiguration. All of you that was earthly has disappeared with
your blood. Your wounds render you divine. Aspromonte recalls the peaks of Calvary, your
martyrdom recalls the Passion. Your glory becomes a cult. The people loved you, now they
adore you. They glorified you, now they deify you. You were great, now you are a saint …
‘Behold the Man!’112

A. Mancel called on the whole Christian world in verse:

World, cover your head in mourning!– Garibaldi,

 your earthly Redeemer has fallen.
Cry! – his wounds bleed.
Pray! – his heart suffers…
By his death, the heavenly Redeemer re-ascended
to the throne of his father.
By his fall, the earthly Redeemer has only increased
his glory:
It is a station on his Way of the Cross!113

Objects relating to the affair at Aspromonte were collected and conserved as

‘relics’. These included the wooden stretcher used to carry him down the
mountain; the blanket with which he was covered after he was wounded;
and the boot he was wearing with the bullet hole in the ankle.114 Garibaldi
was photographed, in prison at Varignano and subsequently, with his
wounded foot displayed like a stigma; these photographs were heavily
retouched (some were simply photo-montages) to emphasise his
imprisonment, pain and sacrifice, and they were widely circulated as cartes-
de-visite and lithographed copies.115 The final illustrations of the pictorial
album, Giuseppe Garibaldi da Caprera ad Aspromonte, represented
Aspromonte in three key episodes. The first was the conflict itself, defined
by the caption, ‘“Don't fire!” cried Garibaldi’; the second, The
transportation of Garibaldi to Scilla, showed him being carried down the
mountain by his loyal volunteers; and the third was Garibaldi on his bed of
pain. The album made Rattazzi the villain of the drama, and Garibaldi the
sacrificial victim.116 ‘To the greatness of the hero’, in Alexander Herzen's
words, ‘was added the crown of the martyr.’117
 27 ‘Cain and Abel’, comments the satirist Adolfo Matarelli. Italy, flanked
by Rome (the wolf) and Venice (the winged lion), reproaches Rattazzi for
wounding Garibaldi. This casting of Rattazzi as the villain of Aspromonte
became standard, and was agreed upon by left and right on the Italian
political scene.

Images of the martyred Garibaldi were especially popular with

caricaturists, and it is in satirical papers and flyers that we find the strongest
reaction to Aspromonte. The artist Matarelli, working mostly for the
Florentine satirical paper, Il Lampione, produced a long series of comments
on the events of 1862. An early sketch by him, The trial of Garibaldi, was
published on 12 September and reflects a legal concern about his arrest and
possible trial; but by 10 December the same artist had picked up on the
religious theme: in Cain and Abel, Abel (Garibaldi) lies wounded in a
loincloth, while mother Italy reproaches Cain (Rattazzi) for his violence
(see figure 27 opposite). Many of the outstanding caricatures from this
period rely on religious references to produce an anti-clerical message. One,
The Calvary of Garibaldi at Aspromonte, represents Garibaldi as Christ on
the cross, surrounded by weeping women (Italy), while his tormentors (the
Pope, Napoleon II) dance in the background (see figure 28 below).
Garibaldi is also the ‘Sacred Heart’ and a saint in various guises who kills
the serpent; Rattazzi, Napoleon III and/or General Cialdini are Judas and/or
Pilate. A particularly effective anticlerical religious allegory can be found in
a colour calendar for 1863, which shows a bust of Garibaldi as the saint on
an altar, surrounded by guns and cannons in the place of candles and
candlesticks (‘These are your candles and this is your saint’ reads part of the
caption).118
 28 Garibaldi's ‘Calvary’ (‘Aspromonte 28 August 1862’) is the most
explicitly religious comment to come out of the events of Aspromonte.

Other caricatures dating from this time pursue the idea of Aspromonte as
the final trial of an exemplary life. The popular pictorial Life of Garibaldi
represents his life in thirty-five patriotic pictures from birth (breast-fed by
‘mother’ Italy), through exile and adventure to Aspromonte (two dark
images of Napoleon's hat and a leg wrapped in bandages); and culminating
in his victory in the arms of a winged lion: a personal triumph over physical
suffering and the oppression of crown and altar. Rather more sophisticated,
but still depicting Garibaldi's life in visual and exemplary terms, is the
colour lithograph, The 12 labours of Hercules, which represents Garibaldi
as the mythical hero Hercules, who overcomes the obstacles of human
greed and folly by virtue of his superior (moral and physical) strength.119
These last two prints, and the colour calendar, are especially significant in
that they carry a positive political message. They make explicit an attempt
to reconcile Garibaldi the victim with Garibaldi the personification of
strength and courage, and to emphasise his role as the redeemer of Italy
who will show the people the way to the promised land (Rome and Venice).
It is just as clear that Aspromonte did not lead to the loss of Garibaldi's
popular support. From the moment that the news came out, men and women
wrote to Garibaldi with money, messages of support and poems, and, as
well as from Italy, they wrote from Britain, France, Belgium, Holland,
Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Greece, Latvia and Russia (and often
received replies).120 If anything, Aspromonte served to increase religious
fervour among Garibaldi's supporters. ‘The people of Italy’, according to
the 1863 journal of a British tourist, ‘idolize Garibaldi, they have tabooed
him, and no one ventures to touch him.’121 Emilio Ferrari sent him a poem,
written for the ‘wounded of the Italian Calvary’, and added: ‘I kiss your
holy hand tortured in the new world [a reference to his torture while a
prisoner in Brazil], and your holy foot tortured in the old world.’122 An
anonymous poem in French, sent to ‘Joseph Garibaldi. Prisonnier’, assured
him that he was not defeated because through his rejection of glory ‘[y]ou
have taken on the Man God's fatal inheritance’.123 A group of men and
women wrote passionately if falteringly from Rovigo, in Austrian Venetia,
to tell him that ‘We cannot describe to You, oh General, our feelings of
supreme hope, of unexpressible anxiety, then of profound heartache, which
agitated our hearts, during the days in which you carried out your glorious
attempt, which from the place, which witnessed your sublime sacrifice, took
the name of Aspromonte’. ‘Oh!’ they went on: ‘You are so great, that every
expression towards you falls short: so great, as to form the pride, not just of
your brothers in the fatherland, but of an entire generation.’124
Moreover, for many, Aspromonte added another element – namely,
concern about his health and comfort – to their sense of personal intimacy
with Garibaldi. Public subscriptions paid for surgeons to come from France,
Germany and Britain to visit Garibaldi in Varignano (although the twelve
doctors that attended him could not agree about the correct treatment).125
George Burney wrote on behalf of a meeting in Tower Hamlets (London) to
tell him with ‘how much pain [I] have followed the accounts of your serious
illness; which pain is shared by every truly English heart’.126 Thomas
Stevens sent Garibaldi a portrait he had painted of him, with wishes for a
speedy recovery.127 On a single day, 10 November, Carl Weidlich wrote
from Neu Rappen near Berlin to ask about his health and to tell him that the
11,000 people of Neu Rappen loved him and his son Menotti; a fifteen-
year-old girl from Switzerland wrote in great concern about his health; and
a set of enthusiasts in Lake Constance, who had built a club house in their
village and called it Garibaldiburg, told him they were feeling his pain and a
great ‘contempt’ for his ‘persecutors’.128 As Garibaldi recovered, huge
interest was taken in his convalescence. The ‘Fratelli Hauser’ wrote to
invite him for a cure at their Swiss spa: ‘You will find our spot to be a calm
and alpine village which will certainly not displease you’, and one man
wrote from Brussels to invite him to a performance of Les Misérables.129
One of the most widely distributed and copied images of Garibaldi in this
period is of him in bed, writing letters with a studious expression.130 In fact,
Garibaldi's correspondence shows that Aspromonte did little to diminish his
political energy. While he was still in prison at Varignano, workers' clubs
and other political associations from all over Italy sent money to him for
those wounded at Aspromonte, and they continued to do so after he was
transferred to La Spezia and Pisa and operated on; they all received signed
replies from Garibaldi and sometimes personalised notes of thanks.131 In
Palermo, a new pro-Garibaldi paper was published, called L'Aspromonte,
and Garibaldi wrote a letter to the editor, saying that ‘[t]he cry of Rome or
Death which they tried to destroy, has risen like a giant after
Aspromonte’.132 Although poor health did oblige Garibaldi to remain in
Caprera for the whole of 1863, he continued to maintain a huge
correspondence. He wrote to the group from Rovigo, assuring them that
‘[i]f the foreigner continues to trample over our fatherland, thousands of
brothers will keep their arms at the ready for the complete liberation of Italy
… And I am confident of being among you before too long’ (the letter was
published in L'Unità Italiana).133 He revived his project for a Million Rifles
Fund, and sent out a circular letter calling for donations.134 He sent
messages of support to Poland, and attempted to link the Polish revolt to the
struggle in Hungary;135 and he took a particular interest in Sicilian politics,
and seemed for a time to see in Sicily a real hope for revolutionary action.
Indeed, some of his letters to Sicilian revolutionaries show clear signs of the
shift to the left and towards sympathy with socialism which was to mark the
latter stages of his political career (it was over Sicily that he resigned his
seat in parliament in December 1863).136
London

In the spring of 1864 Garibaldi left Caprera. His departure caused

consternation among Italian governing circles, or, as one British
representative in Turin put it:

The activity with which the party of action had been labouring in conjunction with the
Hungarian refugees to bring about a combined movement in Hungary and Venetia, and
Garibaldi's own addresses to the Italians calling upon them to be ready for action, sufficed to
render his sudden departure for Caprera the occasion for innumerable conjectures.137

To the ‘evident relief’ of the government, Garibaldi went instead to

England. Still, there were concerns about this visit. Emanuele d'Azeglio, the
minister in London, argued that Garibaldi's visit could be used to encourage
British public opinion in Italy's favour, and that he could be presented as
‘the most distinguished Italian who has however spoken and committed the
most distinguished nonsense’. The king, however, was less convinced,
instructing D'Azeglio ‘not to become involved in Garibaldi-type
[Garibaldesche] banquets and grand demonstrations to make the British
government aware that those kinds of great parties don't amuse me nothing
myself personally [sic]’.138
Garibaldi's reasons for travelling were not entirely clear. He may have
hoped to put pressure on the British government in the war between Prussia
and Denmark, or to establish closer links with the National League for the
Independence of Poland, whose members were also supporters of Italian
nationalism.139 We know that since 1860 he had been subjected to a
relentless round of invitations from his British admirers.140 He may even
have seen his visit as a mostly private affair, or at least as an opportunity
simply to thank his supporters on the various Garibaldi committees, and to
visit his many old and new friends in Britain. Indeed, on arrival in England
he issued a press release calling for calm: ‘Dear Friends, I do not want
political demonstrations. PS. – Above all, don't incite riots.’141
In fact, the idea for the visit seems not to have come from Garibaldi at
all, but from the Mazzinians Aurelio Saffi and Agostino Bertani. They were
in no doubt at all about its purpose. ‘I am ever more convinced that
Garibaldi's visit to England would help to sway English public opinion in
our favour and so push the Government to support public opinion’, Bertani
wrote as they hatched this plan. He had very specific ideas about how
Garibaldi should be used, and this purpose realised: ‘Garibaldi must not
hold meetings – he must not shake money boxes – He must place in the
papers a few words which explain the aim of his journey … say a couple of
words in a public place to the people, get them published in the papers –
create a committee and leave having seen no more than 3 or 4 cities.’ The
precise message of Garibaldi was also to be clear. ‘From his mouth the cry
of Rome will be a bolt of lightning amongst those Protestants and
Francophobes … Garibaldi should appear twice at the most – say little and
appeal to the English people as the embodiment of a young nation, resolved
to take up its place in the world and finish its achievements …’142 Much as
Mazzini had done twenty years earlier, Bertani saw in Garibaldi the silent
symbol of a political idea which had itself changed little in those twenty
years. Garibaldi was to represent, promote and encourage a distinct vision
of Italy, but he was not himself to become involved in any separate political
activity.
What happened thereafter confounded all their expectations. Far from
being either a private visit or an orchestrated propaganda exercise,
Garibaldi's stay in England became a political ‘moment’, an extraordinary
demonstration of ‘radical chic’,143 trade union pageantry, popular
Protestantism and private passion, ‘given’, in the words of a Times
correspondent, ‘with such an earnestness and goodwill as has seldom been
equalled, and probably never excelled’.144 From the moment his ship
arrived in Southampton on 3 April, Garibaldi was mobbed by journalists,
fans, politicians and other official representatives, many of them wearing
red shirts or jackets, and tricolour ribbons. He was taken off to a civic
reception and a huge parade (‘such a sight’, one reporter wrote, ‘has never
been witnessed here before’).145 From there, Garibaldi went to the Isle of
Wight, where he stayed for eight days at the home of Charles Seely, a
radical MP. He paid a visit to the poet laureate, Alfred Tennyson, and
planted a tree in his garden (they recited Italian romantic poetry to each
other and Tennyson advised Garibaldi not to discuss politics in England).
Tennyson's wife and sons were greatly taken by Garibaldi; in her diary Mrs
Tennyson described him as ‘a most striking figure … His face very noble
powerful & sweet, his forehead high & square. Altogether he looks one of
the great men of our Elizabethan age.’146
After the Isle of Wight, Garibaldi and Seely, along with a small
entourage, travelled by train to London on 11 April, where a reception had
been arranged to welcome him. The organisers were very lucky with the
weather: ‘The day was magnificent,’ D'Azeglio commented, ‘as hot as a
summer's day’.147 Huge crowds greeted Garibaldi's arrival at Nine Elms
station in Vauxhall. After a series of welcoming addresses, he got into a
carriage with the duke of Sutherland, and they tried to drive through the
vast crowd filling central London in order to reach the duke's home in St
James's. The writer and parliamentarian, John Morley, wrote that London
had ‘seldom beheld a spectacle more extraordinary or more moving … vast
continuous multitudes, blocking roadways, filling windows, lining every
parapet and roof with eager gazers. For five hours Garibaldi passed on amid
tumultuous waves of passionate curiosity, delight, enthusiasm.’148 ‘Call it
bad management, or call it the irrepressible excitement of the people,’
commented The Times, ‘the fact is that the General's carriage could hardly
make any progress at all … the multitude … closed round the General,
holding out their hands to be shaken, and testifying with rude cordiality
their admiration for the hero of the day.’149
An estimated 500,000 people had turned out to greet Garibaldi. They
formed an ‘impassably dense’ crowd mostly from ‘the lowest classes’, in
the words of the government clerk, Arthur Munby, who stood happily
among them: ‘a very shabby and foul smelling crowd; and the women of it,
young and old, were painfully ugly and dirty and tawdry’. Garibaldi's
carriage was preceded by a long trade union procession, and when he came
in view, the crowd, which had until then ‘behaved with the utmost good
humour and peacefulness’, erupted with excitement:
 when this supreme moment came, it resulted in such a scene as can hardly be witnessed twice
in a lifetime. That vast multitude rose as one man from their level attitude of expectation: they
leapt into the air, they waved their arms and hats aloft, they surged and struggled round the
carriage, they shouted with a mighty shout of enthusiasm that took one's breath away to hear
it: and above them on both sides thousands of white kerchiefs were waving from every
window and housetop … And He … sat aloft … sitting quiet and gazing around and upwards
as if he could scarcely believe that this great greeting was meant only for him.150

People climbed on railings, lampposts, signs and trees to get a view of

Garibaldi; and at Trafalgar Square they hung from the plinth of Nelson's
column and the equestrian statue of Charles I. As The Times put it:

For five hours did the acclamations of the people last and the acknowledgements of Garibaldi
answer them. It was half-past 2 when the first cheers greeted his ears on the arrival of the train,
and it must have been nearly 8 o'clock when he reached the hospitable shelter of Stafford
House [the duke of Sutherland's London residence].151

Lord Palmerston wrote that ‘Garibaldi met with such a reception as no one
ever had before’.152 ‘This’, according to Alexander Herzen, ‘is Carlyle's
hero-worship in real life.’153
Garibaldi stayed for twelve more days in London. He attended a
reception at St Pancras, and two receptions in his honour at the Crystal
Palace. Around 25–30,000 people came to the first Crystal Palace reception,
which was organised by the social and political elite and was a celebration
of all things Italian (Italian music, flags and speeches in favour of Rome
and Venice). The second was equally well attended, and was billed as ‘the
people's reception’, designed, in the words of the Annual Register, ‘to give
the humbler classes in various parts of the country an opportunity of
enjoying the presence of the great object of their admiration’. The price of
admission to the reception was fixed at one shilling, special trains were laid
on from all over Britain, and Garibaldi was presented with ceremonial
addresses from organisations like the Temperance Society, the
Emancipation Society, the Young Men's Christian Association, and the
‘Garibaldi reception Testimonial Fund and Working Men's committees’.
The duke and duchess of Sutherland put on an elegant social gathering for
him at Stafford House (depicted in The Illustrated London News); he went
to the opera at Covent Garden (where he heard Norma and Masaniello and
was mobbed by women ‘delirious with excitement’);154 he attended a
banquet at the Reform Club; he was given the Freedom of the City of
London, followed by a banquet and reception; and he visited Ugo Foscolo's
tomb in Chiswick. In addition to these public occasions, Garibaldi went to
smaller private functions in his honour and received guests who called on
him at Stafford House. He met Lord Palmerston, Lord Russell, Lord Derby
and Gladstone (‘[t]hey have all lost their heads’, commented Emanuele
d'Azeglio; ‘both Whigs and Tories are disgraced for ever’, wrote the
Catholic archbishop of Dublin, Paul Cullen).155 He also met ‘stars’ like
Florence Nightingale, Lord Shaftesbury and the prince of Wales, and old
friends, including Colonel and Mrs Chambers, Alexander Herzen and
Mazzini.156
 29 This full-page cartoon in Punch is a sign of the media excitement
surrounding Garibaldi's arrival in England. His casting as a ‘noble Roman’
is typical of the eclectic response to him, and may reflect concurrent
celebrations for Shakespeare's tercentary and/or be an antipapal comment.
30 This brightly coloured Staffordshire figure of ‘Garibaldi at home’ in his
red shirt was one of a series, and it points to the enduring fascination with
his life at Caprera. Note the presence of his spade (see also figure 24 on
page 310).
Garibaldi's visit to England in 1864 is one of the most closely
documented and studied episodes in his political career, and it is justifiably
famous. Above all perhaps, it is significant as an unusually successful
example of ‘spectacular politics’:157 hugely well attended, seemingly
spontaneous and with a visible impact on elite and popular culture.
Coverage of Garibaldi saturated a wide section of the press. The Times, The
Illustrated London News, The Scotsman, Reynolds's Newspaper and The
Bee-Hive gave huge amounts of column space to his arrival and welcome.
Punch proclaimed him the ‘noblest Roman of them all’ on 9 April (see
figure 29 on page 333); and before his arrival The Operative Bricklayers'
Trade Circular instructed its readers to give ‘a working man's welcome’ to
this ‘great, good and honest patriot’.158 Staffordshire figures, Wedgwood
china and decorative biscuit tins were produced to commemorate his visit
(although the famous ‘Garibaldi biscuit’ probably dates from 1860–1); in
1865 a new football club, Nottingham Forest, adopted red as its colour in
honour of Garibaldi and, dressing its players in red-tasselled caps, won
fame as the ‘Garibaldi reds’. Streets and pubs were named after him; and
both men and women went about wearing red shirts, red jackets and
Garibaldi ‘aprons’. The number of Staffordshire figures of Garibaldi – at
least fifteen were produced in the early 1860s – is especially interesting.
These brightly coloured earthenware ornaments, which were usually
collected and placed on Victorian mantelpieces, represent Garibaldi in
various movements and activities: Garibaldi and his horse (in three sizes, a
copy of an 1861 Illustrated London News engraving); Garibaldi and Vittorio
Emanuele at Teano (also from The Illustrated London News); Garibaldi
paired with his ‘Englishman’, John Peard, with General Napier and with
William Shakespeare (whose tercentenary was in 1864); and Garibaldi at
home. The latter showed him sittting bareheaded in shirt and trousers,
holding a spade between his legs with his left hand (see figure 30
opposite).159 Hyam & Co. of Leeds advertised ‘The Garibaldi, a new over-
coat’ as part of its ‘leading styles for the present season’.160
Garibaldi's visit also prompted the proliferation of Garibaldi sheet music
for piano: tunes included ‘Garibaldi's hymn arranged as a march’,
‘Garibaldi's popular march’ and ‘The Garibaldi polka’. One tune,
‘Garibaldi's hymn’, had a solo piece (‘He fought not for self, all his thought
was for others, All earth was his country, Th'oppresst were his brothers, yet
dear to his heart was the land of his father, And freely his life for his
country he gave’) as well as a final chorus (‘Come forth sons of freedom
Come join in our welcome! The cry's “Garibaldi” who lives but to save’).
Popular verse published in 1864 ranged from ‘London's latest citizen’ to
‘Garibaldi: why we welcome him’, and a collection of songs entitled ‘A
wreath for Garibaldi’. These songs contained no surprises. The first line of
one 1864 song, ‘The red shirt’, is ‘Garibaldi, Italia's saviour, for ever’, and
its chorus goes

The red shirt, the red shirt, the red shirt, for ever,
The red shirt henceforth will be famous in story,
The red shirt with Freedom is one now and ever,
Hurra, for the red shirt! Garibaldi and glory.161

Janet Hamilton, ‘the radical bard of the Glasgow workers’, may have sung
her welcome to Garibaldi in ‘Auld Scottish’ (‘The warm bluid's swalling’
like the tide – Through my auld heart’), but the sentiment – ‘Blest among
women was the mither – That bore thee, Garibaldi!’ – was entirely
standard.162
A Garibaldi fashion was created in 1864, and the British public's
enthusiasm expressed itself in clothes, china and songs. What makes these
ephemera interesting is their sheer repetition and banality: quality or
novelty was not nearly as important as conformity to the style. Equally,
Garibaldi's visit provided the occasion for a new round of biographies
which closely followed the established formulas. Titles from 1864 include
the illustrated Garibaldi: his life and times. Comprising the revolutionary
history of Italy from 1789 to the present time. Illustrated with numerous
engravings, and a coloured portrait of Garibaldi; the reformatted
Garibaldi: his career and exploits, reprinted … from the ‘Morning Star’ of
April 2, 1864; E. H. Nolan's The liberators of Italy (a serial, which came out
in twenty-five parts); and The life of Garibaldi … Interspersed with
anecdotes illustrative of his personal character. Compiled from authentic
and original sources, a fairly straightforward cull of existing accounts from
The Times and from Vecchi. None of these writers took any chances with
their approach to the subject. ‘There is no man of the present day whose life
abounds in more stirring incidents than that of the hero of Italian freedom,
Giuseppe Garibaldi’, began The life of Garibaldi; ‘[n]ever has the muse of
history or song touched a nobler theme than the soldiership and manhood of
the patriot hero who lands to-day on English soil’, proclaimed the Morning
Star.163 The 1860 biography, Garibaldi, by O. J. Victor of New York, came
out in a London edition in 1864. Perhaps the only 1864 biography with any
pretence to originality was Garibaldi and Italian unity, written by
Garibaldi's close friend, Colonel Chambers (‘the writer being convinced
that there was much unknown in the history of General Garibaldi’), which
claimed to tell the story of Aspromonte ‘for the first time … to the world’.
In reality, Chambers' study was more overtly political but equally
tendentious in its approach to Garibaldi, and just as formulaic in its
methodology and sources as the other 1864 biographies.164
So Garibaldi's visit to London was a broad and spectacular confirmation
of the success of the Garibaldi cult. At the time, as we have seen, there was
a general consensus that the welcome given to him was unique, or at least
unprecedented in the history of London. How can this enthusiasm for
Garibaldi be explained? The first point to make is that however novel it
may have seemed, the welcome given to Garibaldi was part of a longer
tradition. Only a year before, the prince of Wales had passed through
London with his bride-to-be in front of a huge cheering crowd (indeed,
Queen Victoria complained that Garibaldi had received the kind of honours
‘usually reserved for Royalty’).165 In 1851–2, the arrival of the Hungarian
revolutionary, Lajos Kossuth, had provoked an ‘ecstatic reaction’: ‘London
has never … witnessed such a sight as it has seen today’, commented one
paper; in Birmingham, his reception was said to have ‘eclipsed all the great
occasions of public note since 1832’, and 500,000 people were reported to
have turned out to see him.166 The obvious similarities between Kossuth's
and Garibaldi's receptions tell us that a kind of radical choreography had
already been created for welcoming democratic heroes to England, and that
this choreography was being practised in 1864. Equally, the vast crowds
were not amorphous: each had its own banners, speeches and rituals, and
their presence reflects a political culture based around an existing
associational life.167
The British enthusiasm for Italian revolution (and for Kossuth) reflected
British concerns and a British sense of identity. British support for Italy was
closely connected to evangelical Protestantism and, as in 1860–2, many
Garibaldi admirers in Britain saw him as above all an opponent of ‘Popery’,
the ‘Lord's battleaxe’ against the Roman ‘Babylon’.168 One British man
even wrote to Garibaldi at this time to suggest a new tricolour flag for his
volunteers: red, orange (signifying antipapal Protestantism), and blue (‘the
colour of the Scotch covenanters’).169 Admiration for Garibaldi was often
expressed in terms of approval of his ‘English’ or ‘gentlemanly’ virtues.170
This identification of Englishness was also literary and romantic. Mrs
Tennyson's reaction to Garibaldi as an ‘Elizabethan’ hero has already been
mentioned. Shakespeare and Garibaldi were manufactured as a pair of
Staffordshire figures. A biographer likened Garibaldi to a litany of native
heroes: to Raleigh, Frobisher, Drake, ‘Blake the admiral’ and Rob Roy; he
also speculated that Garibaldi had Scottish or Irish ancestry (‘Baldy
Garrow’ = ‘Garret Baldwin’ = ‘Garibaldi’), and compared the ‘horrors’ of
the retreat from Rome in 1849 to ‘the disasters and miseries which attended
the flight of the Young Pretender after Culloden’.171 The Times was keen to
show that the welcome given to Garibaldi was better than any foreign
‘pageant’:

in every country of the Continent there may be seen brilliant pageants and well drilled
battalions. It is in England only that associations of workmen could conduct a revolutionary
hero, through a capital thronged with their own class, and yet not excite a fear in the mind of
any politician … With not a soldier visible, and with only a few police to clear the way, that
wonderful combination of order and disorder, an English crowd, conducted Garibaldi … to the
mansion of his noble host.172

Thus, for The Times, Garibaldi's welcome became a sign of English

superiority: of the country's social cohesion, native liberty and freedom
from political interference. That this impression was at least partly
intentional is suggested by Palmerston's comment to the queen: contained
by the aristocracy, he told her, Garibaldi's visit would afford ‘great pleasure
to the bulk of the nation, as a proof of the community of feeling among all
classes of the nation’.173
Yet perhaps unsurprisingly, behind the official façade of one nation lay a
divided response to Garibaldi. Even before he arrived in England,
aristocratic enthusiasts, middle-class radicals and working-class activists
had disagreed about what Garibaldi represented and who was to welcome
him. The great social diversity in the British and Italian committees who
greeted and celebrated Garibaldi in London, and the organisation of
separate receptions to honour him, is as suggestive of political competition
for control of his name as it is of any class unity in enthusiasm for him.
Although his entry into London was a celebration of social belonging, the
readings of it varied. Middle-class publications tended to downplay the
prominent presence of trade unions in the ceremony, whereas the working-
class press stressed the presence of labour associations, as well as
highlighting a speech by Garibaldi in which he identified himself as
working class. Both groups united when Garibaldi was ‘captured’ by the
aristocrats and kept under the duke of Sutherland's control. They were
particularly angry that Garibaldi was allowed only occasional visits to
radicals like Cowen and McAdam, and a dinner in Chiswick with the
foreign exiles Mazzini, Herzen and Karl Blind.174
In Italy and elsewhere, Garibaldi caused controversy by his association
with the radicals. His dinner with Herzen, more specifically his widely
publicised toast to Mazzini as ‘a man who has performed the greatest
services both to my native land and to freedom in general … the counsellor
of my youth … my friend, my teacher!’, was criticised in the moderate and
clerical press.175 King Vittorio Emanuele was said to be equally offended –
‘angry and sore’ – because he resented Garibaldi's English reception ‘as an
ovation to a rival’.176 In turn, Mazzini and the radicals were angry with
Garibaldi for allowing himself to be hijacked by the British elite. As
Minghetti, the Italian prime minister, had foreseen: ‘Garibaldi is rather
unyielding to the designs of others; so he prefers to initiate his own plan:
and this plan will probably not be that of Mazzini.’177
All these disagreements probably account for the unexpected conclusion
to Garibaldi's visit. Pleading ill health, Garibaldi abruptly cancelled his
plans to visit Manchester, Newcastle and Glasgow, and paid only brief visits
to Cliveden (the duke of Sutherland's country house), Eton College and
Cornwall (to see his friend, Colonel Peard, and he was given a huge public
welcome). He then left for Caprera on 28 April in the duke of Sutherland's
yacht. It was widely felt that illness was not the reason for his sudden
departure. Instead it was alleged that the British government, and Gladstone
in particular, had put pressure on Garibaldi not to undertake a tour of the
provinces for fear of stirring up radical agitation and popular disorder.
There were also rumours that the government had been subject to pressure
from the French and Italian governments to contain him.178
Whatever the real reasons for Garibaldi's departure, the struggle to
manage him and his visit suggests that he had a political significance in
Britain that went beyond (even as it depended on) a popular taste for his
‘style’. Emanuele d'Azeglio and many others noticed the predominance of
the poor and working class in the crowds that welcomed him, and of radical
symbols and leaders in the ceremonies of welcome.179 In fact, Garibaldi's
presence in 1864 helped to bring about a major shift in British radicalism.
As Margot Finn argues, the great resentment felt by radicals at Garibaldi's
departure served to mobilise a popular movement for domestic reform and,
in particular, an extension of the franchise which was to culminate in the
Second Reform Act of 1867. Agitation over his visit brought to prominence
new radical leaders ‘capable both of expressing class interests and of
bridging them’, who used their sympathy with continental nationalism ‘to
gain admittance to the public sphere of politics and economics’.180 As well
as the extension of the franchise in 1867, this political coalition brought
about a change in the language of radicalism, introducing new definitions of
national belonging and a debate about women's suffrage.181
Garibaldi provoked an equally vigorous response among those opposed
to him, and they saw him as a real threat to British society. Queen Victoria
was in no doubt about what had happened. ‘Garibaldi – thank God! – is
gone!’ she wrote to her daughter: ‘It has been a very absurd and humiliating
exhibition and was becoming very dangerous by the connection with
Mazzini and all the worst refugees.’182 British conservatives denounced
‘the fumes of this intoxication’ and wrote that the working-class celebration
of Garibaldi represented a coded threat of ‘revolution’ and ‘socialism’.183
Catholics were infuriated by Garibaldi's visit, as they had been two years
previously by the outcry over Aspromonte, which had led to riots in Hyde
Park between Irish supporters of the Pope and pro-Garibaldi
demonstrators.184 ‘What a degrading and disgraceful exhibition of English
feeling in favour of Garibaldi’, Archbishop Cullen wrote from Dublin on 14
April (it had ‘offended everybody in Rome’, Odo Russell confirmed).185
Only two political figures in Britain professed indifference to Garibaldi.
Disraeli refused to meet him for fear of alienating Irish Catholic MPs, while
Karl Marx mocked the popular enthusiasm for ‘a pitiful … donkey’.186
So we can explain a great deal about the reaction to Garibaldi's visit by
contextualising it in British politics and by reference to prevailing British
sensibilities. However, the emotional intensity of people's responses to him
should perhaps be reflected on further. Everyone who saw him in London
seemed touched by the experience. Arthur Munby did not get close to him
but, as he wrote in his diary, ‘one would have known that heroic face
among a thousand’. A friend of Munby, who was nearer Garibaldi's carriage
when it passed, was ‘instantly converted’, and told Munby that Garibaldi's
face was ‘by many degrees more beautiful than any face he ever saw’.187
‘We who then saw Garibaldi for the first time’, Gladstone remarked, ‘can
many of us never forget the marvellous effect produced upon all minds’ by
his presence.188 Even the prince of Wales professed himself ‘much pleased
with him … nobody who sees him can fail to be attracted by him’. Lord
Granville noticed that both Lord Shaftesbury and the duchess of Sutherland
had been driven ‘temporarily a little out of their minds’ by the company of
their hero.189
Lord Granville was not wrong: the duke of Sutherland's wife, Anne,
seemed to have fallen fervently for Garibaldi. As Garibaldi prepared to
leave England, and after his departure, she wrote him a series of despairing
letters (in French). ‘Have you really not understood, my General?’ she
wrote on 24 April, ‘that I have given you everything I have – a real cult for
your beautiful life, your noble actions – a veritable and profound affection,
made holy by my admiration for your great character.’ ‘You have filled my
thoughts since I left you this morning’, she wrote on another occasion: ‘I
love you with an affection which will last forever. I so wanted to kiss you
when saying goodbye … Let me believe that you are coming now, and for
the future, into our life.’190 Her mother-in-law, the dowager duchess, wrote
(also in French) on 27 April to tell Garibaldi of ‘all my regrets for your
departure, and to tell you of the void you have left. Come back, dear
General.’191 She evidently had a close and intimate sense of identification
with him. She was concerned for his happiness (‘I think so often about your
sad words on life! How I would like to bring it some consolation! Can you
give me the friendship of your beautiful spirit?’); and worried incessantly
about his health. ‘Do you remember the day that you took my finger and
placed it on the deep scar of your wound. Dear General, how you have
suffered in your noble life, and I worry so, and often, that I did not express
all the sympathy [sympathie] that I felt and will always feel.’ She also told
him that she kept his portrait with her always: ‘It is next to me and looks at
me with great indulgence.’192
There was, moreover, nothing unusual about the passion that the two
duchesses felt for Garibaldi. Mary Seely, who with her husband Charles had
entertained Garibaldi for a week on the Isle of Wight, wrote him letter after
letter filled with adoring prose. ‘Beloved General’, one letter began:

When, alas! you had left me yesterday, and my heart was heavy with grief – I went to your
little bed – full of emotion – and sorrow, that your dear and revered head, would not rest there
again – for long. I stood – so sad – and from below the quilt there was the corner of a
handkerchief that you had used. Oh! dearest Garibaldi, it was there to comfort me! I cannot
send it away! I may surely keep it, to love, and to delight in – it is the grey one, that used to
hang around your neck … and I have helped to cover your dear head with it … I had longed to
possess that handkerchief, but could not frame the expression of my wish – and now it is here
– do say it may be mine.193

‘Your visit has been the great glory of my life’, she told him in another:
‘Dearest General, when will you return to England?’ ‘Do you know that
since your visit I find everything that is not associated with you, has ceased
to interest me. If you have not used a room, I do not care to enter it, if your
portrait is not in a collection, I do not care to look at it. If people do not
speak of you, I wish them to be silent.’194 As well as the handkerchief, she
kept a half-cigar and a lock of his hair as ‘treasured mementoes’. She sent
him a Stilton cheese, and she kept on writing to him:

Dearest dearest General, who can tell how deeply you are beloved? or how justly? … The
room you occupied is sacred ground, no one shall sleep in it again … except those who love,
and honour and revere Garibaldi … I was telling Charles last night, that if our house was ever
on fire – I would save your letters first, of all my possessions.195

Everyone shared her passion, she told Garibaldi. ‘My husband and I, sit at
nights talking of your probable return, and of our true love for you – and we
never tire’; and after Garibaldi had kissed her daughter, Fanny, ‘she told her
husband never to touch that little part of her cheek! And then she wept
long’. Even her baby grandaughter knew Garibaldi's portrait (‘[s]he kisses
her darling little hand to it, and dances with pleasure’). Tennyson's sons had
sent Garibaldi seeds, and ‘[m]any people beg of me to send you Odes in
your honour and verses without end’. Even the police, apparently, had
declared their work for him ‘a labour of love’.196
Fame itself can help to explain this passion for Garibaldi. He came to
London as a cult figure and, as Munby noticed, he enjoyed instant public
recognition. This was largely due to the wide circulation of papers, books
and printed images of him, so that people felt as if they knew him
personally, and identified emotionally with his life story (or, as an American
woman who had met him once wrote: ‘I forget … that it is not an old and
intimate friend I address so long have you had a home in my heart’).197
What captivated mid-Victorian Britain most of all was the contrast between
the greatness of Garibaldi's reputation and his ‘simplicity’ as a man;
enthusiasts saw this kind of charisma as an innate quality or defined it as a
form of moral ‘character’ (something ‘English’, as we saw above),198 and
never wondered if it might be staged. In Mary Seely's words, he seemed
‘the grandest, gentlest, most beloved and admirable of men’.199 There was,
to quote Munby again, ‘in his bearing and looks … a combination utterly
new and most impressive, of dignity and homeliness, of grace and
tenderness with the severest majesty’.200 Gladstone selected ‘from every
other quality’ his ‘seductive simplicity of manner’: ‘the union of the most
profound and tender humanity with his fiery valour … one of the finest
combinations of profound and unalterable simplicity with self-
consciousness and self-possession’.201 Trying to explain Garibaldi's
fascination to a hostile Queen Victoria, Lord Granville told her that he had:

all the qualifications for making him a popular idol in this country. He is of low extraction, he
is physically and morally brave, he is a good guerilla soldier, he has achieved great things by
‘dash’, he has a simple manner with a sort of nautical dignity, and a pleasing smile … His
mountebank dress, which betrays a desire for effect, has a certain dramatic effect.202

In this way, and as Granville partially perceived, Garibaldi actually added to

the personal impact of his fame by appearing to deny or distance himself
from it.
The passionate reaction of many women to Garibaldi is especially
interesting. This passion was surely due in part to his physical allure, or to
his apparent skill at using sexual attraction to personalise his political
appeal. Garibaldi's capacity to attract women through a powerful mix of the
personal and the political was already evident in the 1850s (in his relations
with von Schwartz and Jessie White), and continued through the early
1860s. Although sex is never openly discussed in any of these letters, we
can perceive sexual desire in the constant allusions to Garibaldi's body, his
bedroom and/or his bed. Like Mary Seely, Florence MacKnight (who met
Garibaldi in Turin in 1861) also wrote to him of her ‘lonely pilgrimages’
around his bedroom, and of the ‘caresses’ given to his bed and pillow; and
of her love for ‘you – just you … for the real, loyal, and tender man’; while
another woman, ‘Sauvage’, wrote of her insatiable ‘hunger’ for a letter from
him (‘I devour any writing of yours in the papers with an avidity which is
perfectly frightful, as I feel more hungry and wish for more the instant
after’).203 Sex, or at least feelings of intimate physical passion, was thus
one basis of Garibaldi's personal charisma. As Mary Seely said to him: ‘You
free the body, and enchain the mind’.204 Of course, women were by no
means alone in responding to Garibaldi's powerful physical magnetism, but
since they felt able to express their feelings for him in more openly
sentimental ways, it is much easier for us to recognise this aspect of their
response.
It is also apparent that Garibaldi's special relationship with women was
the result of a conscious and long-term political strategy to get them on his
side. He had begun addressing women directly in Rome in 1849 and, as we
have seen, a huge number of his speeches and public letters were addressed
specifically at the patriotic woman during Italian unification and in the
years that followed. Equally, it is more than likely that he encouraged the
personal displays and expressions of affection described above. He certainly
replied more or less scrupulously and tenderly to all their letters. To Mary
Seely he wrote: ‘Allow me to kiss your beneficent hand and to express the
immense gratitude I owe to you, angelic woman! … believe me that my
heart will remain with you all my life’; and he later wrote of his joy at
receiving her letters: ‘recalling the angelic support of your arm in ascending
and descending the stairs, the gentle care you took of me … and your face
which I carry with me in my soul, I forget all my sorrows and I am
happy’.205 He wrote the same, but more delicately, to the duchess of
Sutherland (‘I kiss your beneficent hand; and … I thank you for your
generous hospitality … Never so well as with you, in any corner of the
world’);206 while to another admirer, Julie Salis Schwabe, he confessed: ‘I
can never repeat enough, how much I owe to your kindness, and will be
more than happy every time you demand [anything of] me.’207 When
reading these words, however, we must be careful to remember that
Garibaldi's relationships with these women were not purely personal. All of
them were well connected politically to different currents of radicalism
(Schwabe was a rich German widow, and a friend of Cobden and Bright;
MacKnight was the daughter of a British peer favourable to Garibaldi), and
all of them were recruited to do his political bidding in one way or another.
It is also clear that these women were conscious of their role in his life;
indeed, when the emotional demands of Julie Schwabe on him became
especially insistent, Garibaldi put her off by referring to the ‘terrible
responsibility’ of his political position, and to his ‘anxious concern to
complete’ his life's mission, and she wrote to him that she entirely
understood.208
Presumably, the tactics used by Garibaldi worked as well as they did
because he had little competition. No one else, except perhaps Mazzini
before him, made political use of British women in quite this way at this
time. It is also worth noting what participation in the moral and material
struggle for Italian liberation offered to middle-class and aristocratic
women in Britain. While we should be clear that involvement with Italian
patriotism never fully challenged the ideology of separate spheres (women
usually worked as nurses or fund-raisers), through this work they could
nevertheless acquire a personal autonomy and public authority that they did
not enjoy elsewhere.209 As a result, many of these women became what
Julie Schwabe described as Garibaldi's ‘sister[s] for life!’: their enthusiasm
for Garibaldi's politics inseparable from their interest in his private welfare
and emotions. MacKnight wrote to Garibaldi of her unhappiness at having
to stay in Turin without him but concluded, ‘but I'll be brave [allons
courage]! I'm a soldier too.’210 Schwabe told Garibaldi that she acted for
him out of ‘pure, unselfish, loving interest in you and the cause you
represent’; and in 1864 she fought hard (if unsuccessfully) to have him stay
in her house in Manchester: ‘I have overcome all female dignity and
modesty and tell you frankly that for your and your party's personal ease
and comfort, as well as for your public interests you can be at Manchester
not in better hands than mine.’211 Along with her expressions of undying
affection, the duchess of Sutherland sent Garibaldi a bible, and lengthy
analyses of religion;212 her mother-in-law wrote seriously to him about
slavery and the American civil war;213 and another ‘sister’, Caroline
Gifford Philipson, offered him her reflections on Protestantism as well as
poetry and a jacket for his rheumatism.214 They all helped organise
subscriptions, meetings and press campaigns in aid of the Italian cause.
Thus, for these women, and perhaps especially for Schwabe (a relative
outsider), love for Garibaldi and support of Italian liberation were
indivisible, and both can be seen as a strategy to assert a public identity of
their own.
Conclusion

In the final version of his memoirs, written between 1871 and 1872,
Garibaldi dedicates very little space to the years immediately following
Italian unification. Only Aspromonte is mentioned and it is given eight terse
pages; and he describes his life in its aftermath as ‘idle and useless.’215 Yet
this is not entirely fair. In Italian politics, the period between 1860 and 1865
was one of transition, and Garibaldi played a central role in establishing the
direction of political life. Through a prodigious correspondence and
relentless publicity in the press, he did an enormous amount to keep the
issues of Rome and Venice alive, and constantly in front of the Italian and
European public. He continued to attract huge popular support, and reached
out to a broad cross-section of society. As well as the literate, male middle
classes, he encouraged peasants, priests, workers and women to become
involved in political action; he maintained political contacts with groups all
over Italy, in the South as well as in the North; and he worked hard, and not
unsuccessfully, to establish reciprocal links between the nationalist struggle
in Italy and similar political struggles all over Europe and beyond Europe.
He helped set the political agenda for liberal Italy in the years after
unification, and made sure it would be a radical nationalist one. He also
developed a mass political style, unique in Italy at this time, of using open
spaces and theatres to make short speeches and hold impromptu dialogues
with the crowd.216 For all these reasons, a study of Garibaldi's activity after
unification can add considerably to our understanding of the ideas and
political opportunities of the democratic movement in the period between
the defeat of traditional conservatism in the late 1850s and the rise of mass
socialist parties some twenty years later.
Garibaldi's career is equally revealing of the problems which faced the
democratic movement. In Italy, and like their socialist counterparts later in
the century, democratic activists had to choose between the parliamentary
route to achieving their political ambitions or reliance on revolution; and, as
their socialist counterparts were also to find out, this choice was an
extremely divisive one, leading to lasting bitterness which their opponents
were quick to take advantage of. Here, Garibaldi was no help at all. In the
changed circumstances of a united Italy, his continuing loyalty to the crown
and persistent belief in revolutionary action were incompatible; so his
political attitude merely mirrored the left's dilemma rather than offering a
solution to it. Moreover, some of his activities – his withdrawal to Caprera,
his sudden appearance in parliament, Aspromonte – contributed
significantly to the disarray on the left, and further stunted its capacity for
practical political action. Although he was involved with political
discontent in the South, his encouragement helped create a vast and diffuse
southern opposition rather than an organised movement of democratic
opposition to government policy.217 Even his behaviour in England –
allowing himself to be controlled by liberal aristocrats and then leaving
with the tour half done – was typical of a disdainful attitude to practical
political activity which was very obstructive. In this respect, Garibaldi's
political career prefigures the disconnection of the democratic movement
during the early 1870s.
The immediate years following 1860 are equally interesting in terms of
the representation of politics. Garibaldi's function as a symbol of Italy
probably revealed more than it should have about Italy after 1860. His
withdrawal to Caprera, and his behaviour there and elsewhere, indicated a
deep dissatisfaction with the outcome of national unification. His image
was used satirically to attack the prime minister as well as the Pope; and his
reception in London both embarrassed the Italian government and irritated
Italian radicals. On the left, there was a growing tendency to sanctify
Garibaldi, even as political criticism of him grew, to place him on a rocky
island, altar or cross, away from or above the struggles and setbacks of
daily politics. After Aspromonte, this strategy was useful for rhetorical
purposes; it helped turn a political disaster into a propaganda triumph and it
probably helped greatly in the popular dissemination of his image. Yet this
heavy use of traditional symbolism did little to clarify what Garibaldi really
stood for in political terms. As we saw, during his visit to London Garibaldi
could be made to represent a vast range of different characters: a ‘noble
Roman’, a working-class radical, an English gentleman and a romantic
Italian lover. So in Britain too he seems to have represented a style or a
‘look’ as much as a real set of political issues.
In fact, part of Garibaldi's activity in these years should be understood as
a struggle by him to direct his own role, to invest it with a political meaning
of his choosing, and to use it to further his own programme – namely the
nation-at-arms, and union with Rome and Venice – rather than simply to
endorse the programmes of political colleagues like Crispi or Bertani. Still,
in the end, neither he, nor the left, nor the government entirely controlled
the use of his image. Indeed, the need to fashion and manage the political
image of Italy, which had occupied Mazzini since the early 1830s,
continued to trouble political leaders in the years after national unification;
so, as such a potent symbol of Italian identity, Garibaldi started to become a
reflection of its problems. Hence, a study of Garibaldi's function as a
political symbol in this period can shed light on the broader difficulties of
directing the process of political communication in liberal Italy, now that its
metaphors and ambitions had become fully visible and its mechanisms
freely available.
Equally interesting is the public reception of, and reaction to, Garibaldi.
Although it is difficult to calculate accurately the extent of his support, it
was undoubtedly considerable. It was not unique. Indeed, as I have sought
to show, public enthusiasm for Garibaldi can best be explained by reference
to a wider European and American cult of ‘hero worship’, which was a
prevalent feature of support for democratic leaders like him. However, its
scale, duration and intensity was unusual. As historians, we should cast a
sceptical eye on descriptions of the crowds in London and elsewhere, and
we can deconstruct the language and purposes of letters to Garibaldi.
Nevertheless, they still offer us glimpses of an intense individual response
to Garibaldi, and of a passionate engagement with the ideals which he was
held to represent; and this response is all the more interesting as the voices
of support for Garibaldi were often marginal to, or excluded from, the
political system. Equally, we can perceive the presence of political acting in
Garibaldi's humble home on Caprera, and see his simplicity as deliberate or
staged. Yet our understanding of his private life as political statement
should not obscure the importance of it to him as a model of democratic
identity and behaviour, or lead us to ignore his audience, who found it so
appealing and convincing. All the evidence, in other words, points not to the
loss of support, but rather to the continuing vitality and potency of the
popular cult of Garibaldi in the years immediately following the unification
of Italy.
 CHAPTER 12

CULTURE WARS

Rome and death

Garibaldi lived for twenty more years after his defeat at Aspromonte, and he
was involved in three more military campaigns. The first of these was in the
summer of 1866 when he fought with his volunteers on the side of the king
and the royal army, who had joined Prussia in the war against Austria. Once
again in this war, his volunteers were armed at the last minute, and they
were sent away from the main action around the Po and Mincio rivers, up
into the mountains of the Tyrol. There they engaged in two battles, at Monte
Suello and Bezzecca, neither of which was a clear victory; at Bezzecca,
Garibaldi was incapacitated by a thigh wound and had to direct the fighting
from a carriage, and his army had heavy casualties.1 The war itself was a
dramatic failure. Indeed, the Italian army was so poorly prepared, and so
badly co-ordinated and directed, that it stumbled into a major defeat at
Custoza against an army which was less than half its size and before most
of its divisions were engaged. Shortly thereafter, the Italian navy suffered
an equally bad defeat at the island of Lissa by a smaller Austrian naval
force. Italy's humiliation was completed by its ally, Prussia, which made a
separate armistice with Austria. By the terms of the peace settlement, and in
an echo of 1859, Austria ceded the Veneto to France, which only then
handed it over to Italy, and the Tyrol remained in Austrian hands.2
The war of 1866 was considered a national disaster. Venice was taken
without any great scenes of popular enthusiasm, although the population
dutifully voted in a plebiscite for union with Italy. Although the numbers of
Italian casualties were relatively small (600 dead at Lissa and 750 at
Custoza),3 the poor performance of the military was a terrible
embarrassment. ‘To be Italian was something we once longed for,’ Crispi
wrote to Bertani in August, ‘now, in the present circumstances, it is
shameful.’4 Pasquale Villari, a respected intellectual and politician of the
right, asked ‘Whose fault is it?’ and pointed to ‘our colossal ignorance, our
multitudes of illiterates, our machine bureaucrats, childish politicians,
ignoramus professors, hopeless diplomats, incapable generals, unskilled
workers, primitive farmers, and the rhetoric which gnaws our very bones’.
‘Never again’, he announced, ‘can we look at ourselves quite as we used to
do.’5 If this was not bad enough, in mid-September, a week-long rebellion
resulted in the seizure of the city of Palermo. Police and government
officials were assaulted and murdered; the prefect and mayor of Palermo
barricaded themselves into the royal palace; a political committee was
formed to direct the revolution; and the revolt spread to the outlying
provinces. The government declared martial law, and took three days of
bitter street fighting to restore its authority in the city, and an even longer,
equally violent campaign to do so in the countryside. During the official
inquiries which followed, the extent of elite disaffection, popular
deprivation and government incompetence in this part of Sicily was vividly
revealed.6 ‘The result is dispiriting,’ the academic and literary critic
Francesco de Sanctis announced a few years later in a lecture on Mazzini,
‘Italy is as it always was.’7
The war of 1866 and its aftermath represent a turning-point of sorts for
the new state and the idea of the Italian nation. It marks the public
emergence of a mood of national disillusionment, a sense of moral
disappointment with Italy as a nation, and the first explicit use of
disappointment as a rhetorical device in political debate after the
achievement of national unification. At the end of the war, Garibaldi both
accepted the peace publicly and expressed his displeasure with it in a
celebrated oneword telegram to the king – ‘Obbedisco [I obey]’ – and
retired to Caprera. The government fell in early 1867 following a vote of no
confidence, and a more left-leaning government under Rattazzi was formed.
However, this mood of disillusionment was not confined to feelings about
the government, but stretched beyond it to encompass the opposition. The
old democratic left of Mazzini, Bertani and Crispi found itself under attack
for political failure from a younger generation of revolutionaries influenced
by socialist and anarchist ideas; some also revived the criticisms which
Pisacane had made of Garibaldi's military tactics in the 1850s, and criticised
him for accepting the peace terms with Austria rather than continuing the
war in the Tyrol. Meanwhile, the divisions within the democratic left
remained unresolved. Although Garibaldi and Mazzini grew closer during
this period, Crispi had broken very publicly and definitively with Mazzini
over the question of the monarchy (when Crispi accepted the monarchy,
Mazzini loudly accused him of opportunism). In turn, Crispi and Bertani,
despite repeated efforts to work together, grew further apart. They
collaborated to produce a new paper of the left, La Riforma, and although
the paper was an important one (and a mouthpiece for Crispi), it had
financial problems and not very many readers, and it proved unable to
maintain a single editorial line on the main political issues facing the left,
notably its attitude to the monarchy.8
It was in the midst of this unstable political situation that the attention of
both Garibaldi and the government turned to Rome. Some two years
previously, the government had concluded a treaty with France: the so-
called ‘September convention’ of 1864, whereby the Italian government
recognised and guaranteed papal Rome and moved its capital from Turin to
Florence, and Napoleon III agreed to withdraw his troops guarding the Pope
in Rome. This treaty, which seemed to represent a relinquishment of Rome
as the capital of Italy, was unpopular and caused a wave of protest, and
there were riots in Turin over the loss of its status as capital city. However,
the arrival of Rattazzi as prime minister in 1867 seemed to add new life to
the idea of winning Rome for Italy. In fact, Rattazzi and the king hatched an
essentially nefarious plan secretly to encourage Garibaldi to invade the
Papal States. They gave him money and arms, but seemingly intended to
use his invasion as ‘an excuse for the Italian army to cross the frontier in
pursuit, so that the temporal power and the forces of radicalism could be
destroyed in one blow’. Suspecting this, and fearing a second Aspromonte,
many on the left advised Garibaldi against any such action.9
Nonetheless, in the early months of 1867 Garibaldi left Caprera and
embarked on a frenetic bout of political activity. He came first to the new
Italian capital, Florence, and went on a triumphant tour via Bologna and
Rovigo to Venice, where he arrived to a great welcome in late February. He
made a series of violently anticlerical speeches, in which he also put
pressure on the government for action on Rome.10 He then stayed on the
mainland throughout the spring and summer. During this time, his son,
Ricciotti, raised money in Britain for a new Roman campaign, and the
campaign received a large donation from the Tuscan democrat and
financier, Adriano Lemmi (a former secretary of Kossuth's, and active in
anti-clerical and Masonic circles in Britain and the USA).11 Garibaldi also
established a series of contacts with a committee of Roman exiles in
Bologna (an anti-clerical city), and a Centre of Insurrection in Rome; the
latter appointed him their ‘Commander-in-Chief’ in April. During the
summer, Garibaldi toured a series of towns – Pistoia, Siena and Orvieto –
which brought him ever closer to the frontier with the Papal States. He
issued a call to the Masonic lodges of Palermo and Naples to unite, and
published a statement supporting radical proposals for compulsory free lay
education and the extension of equal civil and political rights to women. In
September, he travelled to Geneva to speak at the Congress of the
International League of Peace and Liberty, and called not just for peace but
also for an end to the Papacy.12 He then went back to Florence, where he
began final plans for the invasion of the Papal States, and travelled south
towards the frontier at Orvieto. It is clear from his activities in 1867 that
Garibaldi saw the seizure of Rome not just as a nationalist objective but
also, and above all, as the destruction of the Papacy and the liberation of
‘humanity’ from priestly oppression.13
At this point, however, the king and Rattazzi, who were under great
pressure from Napoleon III over the threat to Rome, lost their nerve and
arrested Garibaldi, who was taken back to his home on Caprera.14 Yet even
the arrest of Garibaldi was not the end of the story. Rattazzi, now in contact
with Crispi, apparently still had designs on Rome. Instead of a direct
invasion of Rome, which would have been an open breach of the September
convention with France, they hatched a new plan to encourage a popular
insurrection in the Papal States, which they hoped would appeal to Italian
(and international liberal) public opinion, and make it seem that the
government had no choice but to invade Rome. Accordingly, large sums of
money were passed to clandestine volunteer groups and a committee of
assistance to encourage insurrection; Crispi mounted an intense nationalist
campaign in the press; and in mid-October Garibaldi was allowed to escape
from Caprera and come to Florence. However, two days before his arrival
the French government announced its decision to send another
expeditionary force to Rome to protect the Pope; and on the day of his
arrival Rattazzi resigned as prime minister.15 Nonetheless, in the delay
before the formation of another government, he continued to assist
Garibaldi, who finally managed to enter papal territory on 24 October and
join up with other volunteers (including his son, Menotti) at Monterotondo.
On 3 November, Garibaldi's volunteers met with papal troops at
Mentana. Although Garibaldi had experienced problems of morale and
discipline with his forces, they gradually gained the upper hand and, by the
afternoon, had forced the papal troops into a retreat.16 The arrival of the
French expeditionary force cancelled this advantage. The French were
equipped with the new chassepot rifle, which enabled them to fire
repeatedly from a long distance; and Garibaldi's tactics of enthusiastic
charging with a large body of men were simply no match for this weapon.
By the evening, his volunteers had fled the battlefield in confusion and
Garibaldi was defeated. The next day, he retreated with part of his army
across the border to Italy and was immediately arrested and placed once
again in the fort at Varignano. During the same days, a Mazzinian-inspired
insurrection had started in Rome, but was quickly suppressed by papal
troops amid the general indifference of the population.17
‘Mentana’, as this episode now came to be called, was even more
disastrous for the government than the war for Venice. ‘Ill-designed, badly-
conceived, and miserably executed’, was the comment of the American
consul in Rome.18 Mentana made the king unpopular at home; it showed
how many of Italy's politicians were, at heart, conspirators rather than
statesmen; and it not only failed to achieve its objective but also offered,
again, the humiliating spectacle of Italy as the territory of foreign (French)
invasion. The government's action in failing to protect the integrity of the
Papal States was condemned in Berlin, Vienna and Paris; and the British
politician, Lord Clarendon, remarked on the ‘universal agreement that
Victor Emanuel is an imbecile … a dishonest man who tells lies to
everyone’.19 Much like the war for Venice, in other words, Mentana pointed
to the failure of the new Italy. On the one hand, it represented the public
betrayal of the Risorgimento promise while, on the other, it added to Italy's
reputation as a weak power and unreliable ally.
 Mentana also led to further shifts on the left. Some younger radicals
distanced themselves from Mazzinianism and Garibaldi; and the Neapolitan
radical paper La Situazione pronounced Garibaldi dead at Mentana: ‘and
history will say of him that, born of the people, he neither understood nor
fought for them; he lived an immensely glorious but fatuous life, and died
consumed by the tabes dorsalis of the party system: [a mixture of]
incapacity and utopia’.20 A new anti-clerical paper, Libertà e Giustizia,
criticised those who joined Garibaldi for their inability to understand
popular religious sentiment.21 At the same time, Mentana helped to define
the left's opposition to the government. Bertani (who had opposed the
expedition but had followed Garibaldi into battle) spoke openly against the
monarchy in parliament: ‘[at] Mentana something solemn and serious
occurred; at Mentana was ruptured the solidarity … between the volunteers
and the monarchy’;22 Lo Zenzero, a Florentine radical paper, proclaimed:
‘Italy was born from revolution; and the day that Italy deviates from its
revolutionary policy will be the last day of its greatness … General
Garibaldi has always been the personification of revolutionary politics in
Italy, from 1848 to this time.’23 The kind of political and popular fallout
Mentana could cause is demonstrated clearly by the case of Bologna, an
anti-clerical city where, until this time, there had been very little left-wing
opposition to the moderate liberal hegemony over the local administration.
However, in the aftermath of Mentana, the refusal of the City Council to
give a public funeral to two ‘martyrs’ of the campaign caused days of street
protests and a public row. Indeed, so angry was the crowd that Bologna's
leading moderate politician, Marco Minghetti, had to be protected by
bodyguards and hurredly left the city. So, for Bologna's ruling elite,
Mentana marked the end both of a post-Risorgimento consensus and its
division into openly hostile political camps.24
Garibaldi's motives for trusting the king and Rattazzi in 1867 are not
entirely clear. He never trusted them again and became, henceforth, an
outspoken critic of the monarchy and the political system in liberal Italy.
After his arrest, he agreed to return to his home on Caprera and, although he
was obliged to stay only for six months, in the end he remained there in a
kind of internal exile for almost three years. He resigned as a deputy in the
national parliament. These decisions reflect his political disillusionment and
may also have been made partly for personal reasons: he was now in his
sixties, and suffering badly from rheumatism. He also had a new family in
Caprera, this time the result of a relationship with his daughter's wet-nurse,
Francesca Armosina, with whom he had two daughters, Clelia in 1867 and
Rosa in 1869, and a son, Manlio, in 1873. He wanted to marry her but,
since he was still married to Giuseppina Raimondi and could not divorce
her, he was unable to do so (and, indeed, they only married in 1880, when
the Court of Appeal finally accepted Garibaldi's argument that his marriage
to Raimondi was unconsummated).25
Nevertheless, Garibaldi's decision to remain on the island was also
political; it represented an ‘abstention’ rather than a retirement.26 As we
shall see, he continued to write in abundance, publishing a multitude of
comments on national politics, addresses to clubs and meetings, and letters
to newspapers; and all of these pronouncements were uncompromisingly
radical and anti-clerical. He followed the lead of his Neapolitan colleague
Giuseppe Ricciardi and endorsed the formation of an anticoncilio in
opposition to the convocation of the first Vatican Council in Rome.27 He did
not see Mentana as the end of his military career. At the end of December
1867, he wrote an address to the Mentana veterans: ‘A woman has sent me
the following motto: Perseverance wins. I hope that the Italians will remind
the world of this next spring.’28 On the anniversary of the departure from
Quarto (in 1860), he wrote to the Sicilian veterans of Milan: ‘Yes! I know
that not all the brave men in Italy are dead and I hope that with your help,
the priests, mercenaries and traitors will know this soon. To another 5th of
May!’29 He also wrote two novels while at home in Caprera, Clelia and
Cantoni il volontario (both published in 1870), which represent, among
other ambitions, a forceful attempt to publicise his anti-clericalism, and
which express his personal and political frustration at the conditions
prevailing in Italy.30
In 1870, France declared war on Prussia. The war was the final stage in a
protracted diplomatic stand-off between Bismarck and Napoleon III and in
it France suffered a series of swift losses and a crushing defeat at the battle
of Sedan on 1 September. After Sedan, Napoleon III abdicated and left
France as a German prisoner. Shortly before, he had withdrawn all his
troops from Rome and, on 19 September, the Italian army (led by General
Cadorna but without Garibaldi) made a breach in the Roman walls at Porta
Pia and seized Rome from the Pope. In France, a republic was declared and
a Government of National Defence was formed, which then set about
creating a new army to defend the nascent republic. As part of this
programme, an auxiliary army was created, in which all non-regular troops
– mobiles and francs-tireurs operating as guerrilla forces – could be given
commissions and appointed to any rank. These francs-tireurs were a
popular success: their numbers quickly reached over 55,000, and volunteers
came from Spain, Poland, America, Britain and Italy to fight for the new
French republic. Garibaldi decided to join them. Encouraged by Philippe
Bourdon or ‘Bordone’, a French ‘disciple’ (and a volunteer from 1860),31
he wrote to the provisional government: ‘What remains of me is at your
service. At your command.’32 He then left Caprera and came to Tours,
France's temporary capital during the siege of Paris. There he was
appointed commander of the Army of the Vosges, a force of some 15,000
francs-tireurs and mobiles in eastern France.33
The radical press (notably Le Siècle)34 welcomed Garibaldi, and a
journalist in besieged Paris published a paper, ‘Garibaldi, the defender of
oppressed peoples’, which declared: ‘Garibaldi does not belong to Italy; he
belongs to the whole world.’35 But the French authorities were not pleased
to see him. His reception was not helped by the presence of Bordone, who
was widely considered an unsavoury character and had a criminal record.36
Garibaldi had annoyed everyone before arriving by writing two letters to Il
Movimento in Genoa: one in which he proclaimed the historic independence
of Nice, and another where he praised his ‘brothers in Germany’ for having
rid the world of that ‘incubus of tyranny’ which was Bonapartism (this pro-
German stance was not uncommon at the time).37 The Catholic right was
openly furious, and the archbishop of Tours lamented: ‘I thought that divine
Providence had reached its fill of the humiliations which it had heaped on
our country; I was wrong: one supreme humiliation was kept back for us,
that of seeing Garibaldi arrive here, having given himself the mission of
saving France.’38 According to an English commentator, French civilians
considered Garibaldi to be ‘a presumptious intruder, who felt that, because
he had beaten a few miserable Neapolitans in a little enterprise that had
become famous for the mere romance of it, he could conquer the great
armies of Germany, before which so many French generals had been
compelled to retreat in disaster’.39 All the commanders of the regular
French divisions in eastern France were said to despise and resent
Garibaldi. There was also no denying that Garibaldi was now old and
suffering from ill health; plus he had no experience of fighting in a northern
European winter. So there were real doubts about how much help he and his
‘collection of revolutionaries’ could really be.40 As one hostile French
historian of the war put it a few years later: ‘Garibaldi, this so-called
saviour of France, was nothing but an invalid in body and spirit, who
constantly let himself be dominated by his entourage and above all by his
favourite, Bordone. In return, he always refused to submit to government
orders.’41
In the event, Garibaldi's campaign in eastern France was not a success.
His son, Ricciotti, won a brief victory over a German command in
Châtillon-sur-Seine, but Garibaldi himself proved repeatedly unable to
recapture Dijon for the French. Only at the end of December, after the
Germans had evacuated the city, did he prepare to move; but then he
delayed the troops' departure from their base in Autun due to the lack of
trains and, after arrival, he was incapacitated by an acute attack of
rheumatism. And, although his army was able to fight off a German
counter-attack for Dijon on 21 January (commanded from a carriage by
Garibaldi), they later abandoned it to the Germans after the armistice. They
also did nothing to help General Bourbaki's army at Besançon, which now
collapsed or fell into ‘a kind of instanteous decomposition’ and started to
surrender to the Germans; later they were interned in Switzerland.42
The French government surrendered Paris to the German army at the end
of January, and brought the war to a close. Garibaldi stayed on after the
armistice, and was elected as a deputy in the new National Assembly for
Dijon, Paris, Nice and Algiers. Although he announced his intention of
resigning his seat(s) and returning to Caprera, he first travelled to Bordeaux
(where the assembly was temporarily located) to cast his vote in favour of
retaining the Republic. Garibaldi's arrival, ‘in a red jumper, with his large
felt hat, [and] the rough, calm air of a soldier’ (according to the eyewitness
Emile Zola), caused a terrible uproar in the chamber, which was dominated
by conservatives and monarchists who despised him as a republican and
had accused him of military insubordination during the war.43 They argued
that, as a foreigner, he could not be elected, and the president of the
chamber told him he could not speak as he had just resigned his seat.
Garibaldi repeatedly tried to speak but was shouted down. Eventually he
left the chamber, and Bordeaux, for Marseille, from where he travelled to
Caprera in the middle of February. A popular demonstration took place
outside the chamber to protest at his treatment, but it subsided after
Garibaldi's departure became known. Three weeks later, Victor Hugo
caused another uproar in the French assembly when he sought to defend
Garibaldi (‘I don't wish to be offensive,’ he told the deputies, ‘but I must
say that, among all the French generals fighting in this war, Garibaldi alone
did not suffer a defeat’); he too was shouted down.44 If nothing else, this
bitter episode at the end of a deeply divisive war showed just how intensely
French public opinion was divided over Garibaldi.45
The years 1870–1 were a major turning-point in nineteenth-century
history. The defeat of France by Prussia, following the defeat of Austria
four years earlier, and the creation of the German Empire marked the
emergence of Germany as the dominant power in continental Europe, and a
new phase in international relations. These years also saw an important shift
on the democratic left. Two events dominated political life in Italy: the
capture of Rome from the Pope in the autumn of 1870, and the revolution in
Paris (the Paris Commune) of spring 1871. By removing any further reason
for insurrection, the capture of Rome seemed to eliminate the tensions
between the ‘loyal’ parliamentary opposition and the ‘extreme’ left
(Estrema). But the Paris Commune separated them again, pushing some
towards greater political compromise and the formation of the Historic Left
(Sinistra Storica), which four years later took power in the parliamentary
‘revolution’ of 1876, and pushing others (a series of radical organisations,
and various socialist and anarchist groups) further to the left. Within this
radical left, a crucial division emerged. Mazzini utterly condemned the
Paris Commune as a socially divisive mistake, and sought to regroup the
workers’ clubs to combat the danger of socialism.46 However, many other
radicals in Italy followed the socialist lead and mythologised the Commune
as a social revolution (‘the glorious harbinger of a new society’ in Karl
Marx's words).47
 As a result, the Paris Commune allowed a significant section of the
radical left, especially a younger generation of radicals led by the poet and
satirist Felice Cavallotti and grouped around the newspaper Il Gazzettino
Rosa, to break openly and decisively with both Mazzini and the principles
and methods of Mazzinian politics. Il Gazzettino Rosa praised Mazzini as
the ‘saviour’ and teacher of Italy but insisted:

We have no more idols, we don't accept abstruse, incomprehensible formulas … What we

object to in Mazzini is not his opinion in itself, as much as his opinion erected into a system
and a political dogma. We are materialists, but we don't make a political school out of our
materialism. To us it does not matter if one believes or does not believe in God … instead
Mazzini wants to impose a new religion on us.48

The emphasis by younger radicals on the ‘social question’ was paralleled

by an increase in what was called ‘internationalist’ or socialist activity
(mostly Bakuninist anarchism) throughout northern and southern Italy,
which was given a big boost by the Paris Commune. The rise of socialism
represented a genuine challenge to Mazzini and the Mazzinian emphasis on
politics and culture; and Mazzini's death early in 1872 only served to
underline the prevailing sense that his political era was over.
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 pioneered 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:
 33 Garibaldi at the Augustus Mausoleum in 1875. The occasion was a
banquet for workers’ societies and, despite his gravely ill appearance, was
part of a renewed bout of political activity.

It is sad to tell of these last years: sad, like the spectacle of greatness which declines and lives
beyond itself. Garibaldi was now but the ghost of a giant, obliged to drag across the earth the
weight of his past greatness … fortune, which had bestowed so many favours on our Hero,
refused him the greatest one of all: that of resting on the last trace of his victories and dying at
the right time.90

A crucial aspect of the later legend of Garibaldi is that, as Daniel Pick

writes, he ‘found … little solace and contentment in old age’; he suffered
‘political marginalisation’, and he was self-destructive, prone to melancholy
and inclined to obsessive behaviour.91
As I have sought to show here, Garibaldi was not politically marginal,
and there is another way of interpreting his obsessive behaviour. Although
Garibaldi was severely ill and visibly frustrated in his final years, it seems
likely that at least some of his melancholy and neurosis was staged for
public consumption and for political purposes, and that this was a tactic
ably supported by artists, writers and his first serious biographers, men like
Guerzoni, most of whom were also his political colleagues.92 I would
suggest that, since Garibaldi was no longer able or willing to press his good
looks and physical energy into the service of the national cause, personal
sadness became for him an alternative form of political display. In the
context of postunification political disillusionment, it seems evident that
Garibaldi's ill, tired and broken body served as a symbol of national
suffering, and was a very effective means of publicly personifying the
social injustices of liberal Italy, the ‘sickness’ of Rome, and the betrayal of
the Risorgimento.
The politics of memory

National unification posed many problems for Italy's rulers. In the 1860s,
the political divisions and clerical opposition caused by the circumstances
of unification combined with economic depression and widespread poverty,
social disorder (especially brigandage in southern Italy) and the
humiliations of foreign policy to create a clamour of opposition to the
rightwing government. After 1876, the disillusionment caused by the
meagre political record and trasformismo of the new left government
produced a climate of political and social instability. The increasingly
visible issue of Italy's regional diversity, notably the political, economic,
cultural and geographical difference between North and South, added to
these problems and seemed to offer clear proof that unification had still not
been achieved. National unification was meant to resolve Italy's difficulties,
not increase them, and the inability of Italy's new governing class to solve
these problems undermined its legitimacy, and provided both the radical
movement and the Church with ample opportunity to attack its legislative
record and the conduct of political life. Crucially, these practical problems
of unification were paralleled by problems with nationalism itself. As we
have seen, Italy lacked national symbols such as the monarchy and the
army, the Italian language was spoken by a minority of the population, and
illiteracy rates were extremely high. Unification, by profoundly alienating
the Catholic Church, neutralised (at the very least) the role of traditional
religion as a source of Italian national identity. In this way, nationality could
not unite Italians; it became another one of liberal Italy's disappointments.
It is now a commonplace that the rulers of Italy were faced after
unification with the prodigious task of ‘making Italians’. Involved was a
process both of nationbuilding (what Umberto Levra calls a process of
‘amalgamating’ and ‘homogenizing’ Italians) and of organising political
consent through the invention of Italian national traditions, and the creation
of symbols of italianità.93 As part of this process, the Risorgimento was
quickly appropriated and recast as the latest episode in Italy's foundation
story, or as a recent heroic past which could inspire and consolidate a sense
of national community and belonging.94 There has been an enormous
amount of scholarly interest in this political project. Research has focused
on a number of related themes and issues, but especially on the moment of
nation-building after the broadening of the suffrage in 1882 and thereafter
(the construction of monuments to dead heroes like Garibaldi and King
Vittorio Emanuele; commemorations, anniversaries and museums of the
Risorgimento; educational policies; and the writing of a national history).
The prevalence of personality cults (the glorification of Garibaldi and
Vittorio Emanuele; and the promotion of historical heroes of italianità like
Dante, Columbus and the boy insurgent Balilla) was also a characteristic
feature of the late-nineteenth-century process of nation-building in Italy.95
Francesco Crispi, in particular, used Garibaldi to promote his own
nationalising agenda. He assiduously fostered the cults of both Garibaldi
and Vittorio Emanuele in the 1880s, and sought specifically to turn
Garibaldi into ‘a sacred symbol … of the unity of the nation, of the people
bound in selfless faith and duty to Italy and to its main political incarnation,
the monarchy’. In speeches, articles and in his paper, La Riforma, Crispi
presented Garibaldi as a ‘divine’ and ‘exceptional being’; a man devoted to
the king and even an antisocialist, as well as a nationalist and anticlerical.96
At the same time, and as Crispi's language suggests, attempts were made to
sanctify Garibaldi and his work in the construction of the Italian nation
state. These were part of broader efforts to create a new civic religion in
Italy, by simultaneously promoting secular moral values through institutions
such as schools and the army, and appropriating and recasting the symbols
and rituals of the Catholic Church.
Yet despite the evidence of so much effort, most historians of the period
have found that the process of making Italians had little impact either on
Italian culture, which remained largely local and regional in character, or on
popular ignorance (illiteracy rates remained high). They have also
concluded that many of the new symbols and rituals of the nation were
unpopular or failed largely to affect popular emotions or otherwise ‘impact
upon the collective imagination’.97 Hence, historians tend to stress the
difficulties, narrowness and ultimate failure of the nationalising project in
Italy, especially compared to similar programmes in France and/or
Germany.98
 34 Garibaldi in a more mature incarnation, on the occasion of the war in
1866.
In the rest of this chapter, I will look at the role played by Garibaldi and
his radical colleagues in making Italians and in the construction of national
memory before his death in 1882, which was also the year that the suffrage
was widened. Although there has been much less interest in the period
before 1882, there was little that was qualitatively new about the late
nineteenth-century attempts to make Italians; indeed, remarkably similar
policies were tried out in Sicily in 1860. Many of the problems which
frustrated the process of making Italians in the 1880s and after were either
caused by, or prefigured in, the political stance taken by Garibaldi during
the last years before his death. Furthermore, the clash for control of his
image and its symbolic associations involved more protagonists than has
hitherto fully been recognised. A study of this earlier conflict can tell us
much about the obstacles to nationbuilding in later nineteenth-century Italy,
and the equivocal outcome of this process.
An important, if obvious, point to remember is how famous Garibaldi
had become by the 1860s and '70s. The potent combination of media
interest and popular enthusiasm established in 1859–60 did not desert him
in his old age. Pictorial albums were produced to commemorate the war of
1866 and the Franco-Prussian war of 1870–1, and the coverage of the
former war, in particular, continued to propose Garibaldi as an emblem of
manly vigour and Italian military success, while admitting that he had
grown older (see figure 34 opposite).99 ‘So the star of Garibaldi still
shines’, was the comment of Le Siècle.100 His efforts to destroy the Papacy
in 1867 attracted huge international attention. Le Siècle continued to
support him, and if The Times in London was openly concerned about the
diplomatic consequences of his actions, and was a strong advocate of
Franco-Italian understanding, even it could not entirely contain its
excitement at his escape from Caprera, and at the prospects of the
‘Garibaldi movement’ thereafter.101 His actions were widely applauded in
the American press as proof of the resolute power of republicanism. The
Philadelphia Inquirer used the Roman Question to press home its
republican message: the king had no desire for Rome, the paper insisted,
but Garibaldi did, and the king ‘is not nearly so beloved as Garibaldi’.102
Harper's Weekly described Garibaldi as a

simple hero … [who] inspires a nation with a word and confounds the astutest politics of the
most experienced statesmen … it is Garibaldi who plays the first part in Italian regeneration …
No King could grasp by sympathy the popular heart like Garibaldi, and the character and life
of the present monarch chill the national ardour…103

The events around Mentana also inspired popular demonstrations and

poetry. John Greenleaf Whittier's ‘Garibaldi’ instructed him to ‘Rejoice’, as
one day his aims would be realised: ‘All men shall be priests and Kings –
One royal brotherhood, one church made free – By love, which is the law of
liberty!’104 The Times reported that Mentana had even revitalised Guy
Fawkes Day (5 November) in London: ‘At the East End a large
representation of the Pope was carried on poles, Garibaldi, with uplifted
sword, being about to strike him down’.105
As the example of Guy Fawkes Day suggests, Garibaldi's ability to
appeal to the crowd was equally undiminished by political failure and
physical infirmity. Indeed, the political events described in the previous
section must be imagined against the backdrop of cheering crowds and
mass celebrations:

He came at last, the commander, the most romantic hero of our century, the most famous
human being on the planet, the leader most sure of living in the hearts of future generations, a
living man whose legend is already as firmly implanted as that of Wallace or William Tell [an
Englishman wrote of Garibaldi's arrival in southern France in 1870] … this hero came
amongst us, and [as he] walked through the station to his one-horse carriage we saw his face
very clearly in the gaslight. It was a pale, grave face, much more like that of a student and
philosopher than a hero of great exploits. We cried ‘Vive Garibaldi’ with some energy, but he
answered with a tone of extreme gravity and sadness ‘Vive la République Française!’

‘It is finished’, wrote the correspondent of the Daily News, when

Garibaldi left some five months later: ‘Garibaldi has quitted the soil of
France … I think the entire population of Marseilles was on foot at dawn …
“There”, cried a working man, “there goes our last hope!” … All is blank
and tame, and void of interest. I never felt so forlorn.’106 An English
woman who saw Garibaldi arrive in Rome in 1875 was astonished by his ill
appearance (‘his face corpselike … carried like an infant in the strong arms
of his son Menotti’) but also by the ‘wild yell of love’ which rose from the
crowd on his arrival, ‘so shrill and piercing in its intensity that it could be
heard half over the city’.107 His arrival in Palermo in 1882 was an even
more remarkable spectacle: almost entirely immobilised by rheumatism,
Garibaldi had to be carried on a specially designed bath chair through a
crowded but hushed city (the crowd had been told to welcome him with a
‘religious silence’ for the sake of his health).108 For Harper's Weekly, his
arrival was ‘inexpressibly pathetic’: ‘As the train rolled into the dépôt, a
shout was raised, which was quickly hushed when his illness was
announced. He lay like a dead man on the couch, which was placed in an
open carriage, and followed by a mourning, silent crowd.’109
 I can't begin to understand, even today [Garibaldi's daughter Clelia wrote in 1948], how that
enormous flood of people managed to control the enthusiasm in their hearts and succeeded in
obeying the orders [to be quiet] … The carriages passed between two wings of people
gathered together around Garibaldi, in great silence … so many shining eyes, so many kisses
blown from women's, men's, children's hands, from every social class! Papa was moved too,
[and] with a sign of his hand responded to the greeting of that huge crowd gathered around
him.110

Surrounded by this heady fusion of political radicalism (‘Vive la république

française!’) and popular religiosity, Garibaldi expired gradually but
publicly in front of his audience; in contrast to these emotional scenes, his
funeral at Caprera represents the victory of secular officialdom, and of a
much more hierarchical vision of national belonging.
Indeed, we should not be surprised at the scale and persistence of
Garibaldi's celebrity, which was the fruit of almost forty years of unrivalled
publicity. More interesting is the use which he and the radicals made of this
fame to score rhetorical and symbolic points against their political
opponents.
One way in which Garibaldi sought to undermine the government's
legitimacy was by promoting a specific kind of Risorgimento memory, and
he did this through his presence and speeches at commemorative events.
Garibaldi's presence at any public event tended to evoke a more splendid
past and better leaders, thus serving as an implicit rebuke to the
government, or he could directly remind the audience of the government's
betrayal of the Risorgimento. His 1880 speech for the monument to
Mentana had all of these ingredients; and is a skilful piece of Risorgimento
rhetoric in which he explicitly juxtaposed reminiscences of revolutionary
glory with evidence of government treachery:

Legnano and the Five Days show that this people will not suffer tyranny. You have kindly
asked me to assist at the erection of a monument to our heroic martyrs of Mentana, fallen
under the sword of Bonapartist soldiers [soldatesche] who had joined up with the cops of the
papal monster, and were assisted and guaranteed by an immoral government to the misfortune
of Italy.111
 In the later years of his life, Garibaldi's speeches and public
announcements were rarely, if ever, occasions for self-congratulation or
satisfaction, but were usually treated as opportunities for political attack, as
moments of high emotion directed against Italy's enemies. ‘Italy is not
made’, he told the crowd in Orvieto in August 1867. ‘Who prevents us from
finishing our task are first the priests, then Bonaparte … We must go to
Rome; without Rome Italy cannot make itself. We must remove that cancer
from the middle of our country.’112 To the president of a workers’ club
which had made him honorary president, he advised: ‘tell the brother
workers from me not to believe the priests … because the priests are the
greatest obstacle to Italian redemption’;113 and to the editor of the French
paper, Le Rappel de Provence, he declared: ‘The truth above all, my friend,
and let's call everything by its name: the priest is the murderer of the
soul’.114 In 1870, he told the inhabitants of Trieste (still part of the Austrian
Empire) that ‘a priest, in whatever name or guise he presents himself, is an
impostor, and an enemy of God.’115
‘Who will deny’, he wrote in an English magazine in the same year

that the prime cause of brigandage in Italy is Bonaparte, with the priests for his myrmidons
and the Italian government for his accomplices? Does not this son of Hortense, with his
crocodile's devotion, bring about the misery of my country by maintaining in the heart of Italy
that den of assassins [the Papal States]…?116

The main focus of Garibaldi's attack in his later years was the Church. His
novels, in particular, offer us a fascinating glimpse into the culture of anti-
clericalism in the early years of liberal Italy. As he wrote to Edgar Quinet
(the French translator of Cantoni), ‘by writing Novels … I sought to make
my ideas on Papal Theocracy (the plague of the World) more accessible …
because I believe – every honest man must contribute … with word – and
deed – when he can – to overthrowing such disgusting – and corrupting
obstacles to human progress’.117 Each of his novels, moreover, had the
same plot: ‘in each a priestly villain conceives an illicit passion for the
young heroine, and the novel tells of his attempts to satisfy that passion, the
eventual foiling of his schemes, and en passant reveals a considerable
amount of hypocrisy and moral corruption within the Church’.118 This basic
plot allows Garibaldi to press into service one of the favourite tropes of
radical anti-clericalism, which is the illegitimate, uncontrollable sexuality
of the clergy.119 In Clelia, Cardinal Procopio (‘the factotum and favourite of
His Holiness’) instructs an aide to procure him the eponymous heroine: ‘Go
Gianni … go and procure this gem for me at any cost. I can no longer live if
Clelia is not mine. Only she can relieve my boredom and bless the stupid
existence which I drag out alongside that old imbecile [i.e. the Pope].’120 In
I Mille, one of the heroines, Marzia, is the daughter of a priest, Monsignor
Corvo, who, having stolen her from her mother and then abandoned her,
fails to recognise her when they meet so rapes her, after which he places her
in a convent (and kills himself when she reveals her true identity later in the
novel). Although Cantoni has a slightly less racy plot, the heroine, Ida, does
have to fight off the Jesuit priest (‘the Jesuit! the Jesuit! another human
anomaly’), Fra Gaudenzio, who tries to rape her when she is unconscious
and a prisoner: ‘he bent his snake's face over Ida's gagged mouth and tried
to kiss her’. It also has a lengthy description of the horrors of the papal
dungeons (‘that filthy bastion of priestly tyranny’), including a diabolic
scene where Cantoni's gaolers die in a drunken stupor amid the ruins of the
burning prison.121
Garibaldi's diatribes against ‘priestism’ (pretismo) are set against the
background of real episodes in the Risorgimento – 1849 (Cantoni), 1860 (I
Mille) and 1867 (Clelia) – in which he figures personally and in which he
intervenes to make explicitly contemporary political comments. The wars
described here are all moments of high national drama where the volunteer
fights heroically against ‘priestism’ (the volunteer can say, ‘with his head
held high … I have served no one but my country!’),122 but is let down by
the politicians. In both Cantoni and Clelia the hero dies defending national
honour. Thus, Garibaldi takes Italy's recent history – the Risorgimento –
and restructures it as a canonic Risorgimento narrative. In the process, he
uses the plot to turn the government into something like a Judas figure who
betrays the nation for personal gain. ‘I consider it absurd to deny that the
Monarchy supported national aspirations for unification out of its own
interests’, Garibaldi comments at the start of I Mille. ‘Your misdeeds are too
many, the hate too great which the population in all justice feels for you:
tricked, humiliated, plundered, betrayed by you!’123 he tells Italy's
monarchs later in the novel. In Cantoni, even the Bourbons are victims of
Piedmontese hypocrisy (‘[t]he inexperienced Francesco II, betrayed by the
northern fox’).124
'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 will 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 death
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
Rival Romes

In assessing the achievements (or otherwise) of the cultural process of

nation-building in early liberal Italy, we should keep in mind that the
radicals were not alone in being one symbolic step ahead of the Italian state.
The Church too was well on its way to challenging all secular conceptions
of italianità and offering an extremely successful rival form of identity.
With national unification, all liberal hopes of compromise with the Church
had faded drastically. In 1861, Cavour had tried to reach an agreement with
the Church on the basis of ‘a free Church in a free state’, but these
negotiations had come to nothing and, thereafter, the Pope rejected all
possibility of conciliation. Loyal Catholics were even urged to follow a
policy known as non expedit, that is, they were told to abstain from either
standing or voting in any political elections in Italy. There followed a series
of much-publicised battles between Church and state: over Church property,
control of education, and the appointment of bishops. After the Italian army
seized Rome in 1870, Pius IX withdrew behind the walls of Vatican City
and declared himself a ‘prisoner’. Although the government passed a law of
guarantees, giving the Pope the effective status of an independent sovereign
power, the Pope continued to play the part of the hostage, and never again
left the Vatican (and, once elected, none of his successors set foot outside
the Vatican walls until 1929).163
During the same period, the Pope assumed an ever more aggressive
stance towards the wider liberal world, and worked tirelessly to reassert his
traditional authority over the Church. In 1861 he issued an allocution
refusing to compromise with ‘modern civilisation’; and in 1864, an
encyclical Quanto Cura together with a Syllabus (list) of the eighty errors
of modernity (the eightieth stated, ‘It is wrong to believe that the Pope can
and ought to reconcile himself with progress, liberalism, and modern
civilisation’). The Syllabus of Errors was followed by the summoning of a
General Vatican Council, attended by some 700 bishops, and in 1870,
shortly before the arrival of Italian troops in Rome, it declared the dogma of
papal infallibility, which stated that when the Pope spoke ex cathedra (in an
official capacity and on matters of doctrine) he was ‘possessed of that
infallibility with which the divine Redeemer willed that his Church should
be endowed for defining doctrine concerning faith and morals’.164 The
dogma of papal infallibility confirmed the victory of ultra-montanism, so
that the Church which emerged at the end of the political upheavals in Italy,
and after the loss of the Pope's temporal power, was ‘more uniform, more
centralised and more “Roman”’ than its predecessor.165
Pius IX called on loyal Catholics for their support in his intransigent
stance, and met with a great and enthusiastic response. In fact, the cultural
conflicts of this period in Italy can be better understood if we remember that
the growing authoritarianism of the Pope was justified as a popular defence
of Catholic liberty against political interference, and that the clerical
activism inspired by Rome converged with a period of popular religious
revival, especially with the growth of extra-sacerdotal expressions of
popular piety (pilgrimages, miraculous encounters and other acts of
devotion).166 Women, in particular, began to find in the Church a space for
themselves which was closed off by the state.167 From the 1850s onwards,
Pius IX embarked on an intense programme of sanctifications and
beatifications, of religious commemoration and festivals, in a way which
was quite different from that of his predecessors, and which can be seen as
an attempt to combat (or, indeed, pre-empt) the creation of secular heroes in
Italy and elsewhere.168 He also made a direct appeal to the faithful. He
identified modernity, liberalism and secularisation with the all-
encompassing enemy – revolution – and developed a personal cult based on
his own suffering and victimhood at the hands of this enemy. As
Christopher Clark tells us:

Catholics were encouraged to see in the suffering, despoliation, ‘imprisonment’ and

‘martyrdom’ of the pontiff the embodiment of the troubles currently afflicting the church. The
Pope's intransigence in negotiations with the Kingdom of Italy was likened to Christ's
steadfastness in the face of Satan's blandishments. There was even a widespread tendency to
equate the Sacred Heart of Jesus with the person of the ‘suffering’ pontiff.169

Pius IX was a new kind of pontiff. His image was ‘more personal’ and
less regal; ‘the office was lent a magic by flesh, and speech, and smile, and
greeting, and blessing’; anyone who talked to him ‘felt that at that moment
he cared about him or her more than about anyone else in the world’.170
Part of his appeal lay in the contrast with the Piedmontese monarchy. After
1870, there were two courts in Rome: one at the Quirinale, presided over by
Vittorio Emanuele, an essentially foreign sovereign who missed his native
Piedmont and ‘was bad at public functions’; the other in the Vatican, with a
pope-king ‘who was superb with crowds’. The Quirinale was ‘cold and
formal’; the Vatican ‘warm and emotional’.171 When both men died, within
three weeks of each other in 1878, three times as many people turned out
for the funeral of the Pope in St Peter's as had turned out for the king
(although, when the Curia tried to move the Pope's body across Rome to its
burial place in San Lorenzo in 1881, there were riots and the coffin was
nearly thrown into the Tiber by a hostile, anti-clerical crowd).172
While the divisions between Church and state were far from monolithic,
and there is evidence of de facto co-operation and agreement, especially
over the threat of socialism,173 it is undeniable that both sides competed for
the rhetorical high ground. Moreover, the Pope's resolute stance against
modernity did not include a rejection of its technology. As we saw earlier,
Catholic mobilisation against the unification of Italy involved the very
successful use of modern methods of mass communication, notably
newspapers and prints. Railways also made pilgrimages to Rome much
easier. Pius IX's warm personality combined with modern transport to alter
the quality of his audiences with the faithful and of their response to him.
He was the first pontiff to be photographed, and people's sense of personal
intimacy with their Pope was encouraged by photographic portraits, and by
reports and other pictures of him in the Catholic press. Thus, the use of the
new mass media defined the so-called ‘culture wars’ between Catholics and
anti-clericals, and between Church and state, which broke out all over
Catholic Europe in the latter decades of the nineteenth century. These were,
above all, ‘wars of words and images’,174 or a ‘communicative
phenomenon’ where ‘the bugles and drums of the media spectacle’ were as
crucial to both sides in the conflict ‘as the heavy guns of legislative or
police action’.175 There was a striking similarity between the
communicative methods of Catholic Europe and those used to promote
Garibaldi, which I have described in the course of this book.
Unfortunately, there has been relatively little research on the role of the
Catholic media in the struggle for Italy and to ‘make Italians’ in this
period.176 What is clear, nonetheless, is that its presence made the struggle a
three-way process, in which the monarchy's efforts to represent and unite
the nation were undermined as much by the clerical right as by the radical
left. Ironically perhaps, one of the most popular targets of the Church's
counter-attack on the kingdom of Italy was Garibaldi, another of the
kingdom's adversaries. Rome had always been hostile to Garibaldi, but in
the aftermath of Mentana it felt able to launch a major new assault on his
reputation in the press and by publication of numerous pamphlets and
histories of the recent events. For La Civiltà Cattolica, Garibaldi was a
coward, a hypocrite and, increasingly, a clown. The paper mocked his fame:

Wherever Garibaldi goes he has been accustomed to be met with cheers, drums, trumpets,
bells and frantic applause. Fashions of dressing alla Garibaldi have given work to tailors, and
makers of hats and shoes. Cafés have been called after him. His sulky face was shown in shop
windows, and his pictures figured on the walls of taverns and public lavatories.
But at Monterotondo (before Mentana), he was just ‘a comic hero’ who had
‘sneaked off under cover of night’:

Why did you turn tail, O hero? … Surely it is better to die bravely than to run away like a
coward. You yourself had given the watchword ‘Either Rome or death’, and no one would
have imagined that you had a third alternative up your sleeve – flight! … Poor Garibaldi! Until
now he has been the hero of Marsala. Henceforward he will be the coward of Monterotondo.

‘It is not our fault if mention of his name makes soldiers of any regular
army burst out laughing’, the paper went on, warming to its subject: ‘We
too, it must be confessed, have also been tempted to laugh when studying
this “legendary epoch from Montevideo to Marsala”’:

This valiant lion, this Achilles, this Hercules, this Mars, this Jove – the more you try to force
him into the light of day, the more he retreats into the shadows, the more he melts before your
very eyes. Finally he is no bigger than a puppet – gross, bearded, redshirted, made to dance by
other people without him ever perceiving the fact.

‘[N]o puppet is more obedient than Garibaldi’, the paper wrote, seeking to
deflate his heroic reputation by revealing its empty substance. For the
Church, in this representation, Garibaldi was ridiculous – a mere performer
in a drama directed by the Savoy monarchy.177
For the majority of the Catholic press there was no difference between
the Italian nationalists: they were all in it together and as dangerous as each
other. Garibaldi was ‘the armed hand of Mazzini’, both had a ‘marriage’
with Vittorio Emanuele, and Rattazzi was behind all their actions.178
According to General Kanzler, who led the defence of Rome and published
his report to the Pope, the events of 1867 were a political scandal. ‘A
government, which calls itself legitimate, favoured a treacherous invasion: a
General of this government dared, with the cry of Rome or Death, to order a
war against the most August of Thrones.’179 In the Catholic version of
Mentana, Garibaldi was a coward (leaving Mentana, he changed ‘the
godless cry: “Rome or death” with the other “get out if you can”’) but he
was also a dangerous fanatic – ‘a modern blasphemer’ who promised to
‘demolish all the altars of the living God, in order to replace them with the
abominable orgies of the she-god reason, and convert St Peter's into a grand
Masonic lodge’.180
In one history of Mentana, Garibaldi is reinvented once more as the
brutal bandit of 1849. He rides on horseback into a church:

his head was covered with a round grey cap with a wide brim … with flowing locks; the blond
beard mixed with white hair fell down to his chest: a bright red tie edged in black was tied
around his neck: an old overcoat came down to his knees … With a lit cigar in his mouth, with
a fine whip in his hand, he let his gaze fall to this side and that: and since from every side his
followers cheered him to the skies; now and then he slowly bent his head, showing them that
he enjoyed the applause, or signalling that it was now time to quieten down.181

He was accompanied by ‘a proud Amazon in a garibaldi skirt’, and his

followers were violent, undisciplined and sacrilegious: a ‘revolutionary
horde'; a ‘furious revolutionary phalanx’; a ‘garibaldish torrent’; ‘new
Muslims’; and ‘children of Satan’.182 All of the histories of Mentana
recounted the actions of the garibaldini in gruesome detail: confessionals
were destroyed, churches burnt and sacred images defamed. In one convent
‘they vandalised and sacrilegiously cut an arm off the image of Saint
Anthony; they rolled down the stairs an image of the Baby Jesus; they stole
the holy Pyx from the holy ciborium; they irreverently squandered the
sacred communion wafers, and gave themselves over entirely to sack and to
pillage’.183 Sermons were preached to the ‘God Garibaldi’; a pulpit was
used as a latrine; his men stole and drank the communion wine and they
used the churches as brothels: ‘they committed outrages against women’.184
The worst insults were said to have been aimed at the Madonna: ‘their most
usual blasphemies were against the Holy Madonna and against her
inviolable Virginity, using such shameful and disgusting words that the pen
shakes just to think of them!’185
In general, the Catholic representations of Garibaldi and his followers
follow a well-defined stereotype of the revolutionary as a dangerous and
savage ‘other’. The events of Mentana had, in the words of General
Kanzler, shocked ‘the entire civilised World’.186

It is clear that future generations will be astonished [another writer confirmed], nor will they
be able to understand how, in the heart of this Italian land, mother to so many famous heroes,
 creator of so much noble genius, masters of every science, seat of every virtue, there could
emerge men of such savagery and excess as to emulate the terrible bondage of the Goths and
Saracens.187

Yet this juxtaposition of Catholic ‘civilisation’ with revolutionary

‘barbarism’ bore a striking rhetorical similarity to the terms of Garibaldi's
opposition between revolutionary ‘virility’ and corrupt ‘priestism’. It used
the same demonisation of the enemy and, notably, the same identification of
the enemy with degenerate or ‘incontinent’ sexuality; and each accused the
other of offending the native genius of Italy. Both appealed to Italian
identity by referring to a remarkably analogous sense of family, place and
model of heroism, and both recognised the affirmation of Italian-ness in the
heroic defence of a holy cause.
More than one clerical writer described the victory at Mentana using
topoi which we tend to associate with Risorgimento discourse. The papal
soldiers were an invincible ‘handful of heroes’ led by courageous leaders;
and they defended Catholicism against ‘a formidable army … that
enormous mass of garibaldini’.188 One writer, Paolo Mencacci, wrote of
‘the heroism of Papal soldiers, a heroism which placed them at the front of
the most hardened armies in the world’.189 Those who died were martyrs,
whose biographies were published along with letters of tribute from priests
and other clerical dignitaries. An obituary for an English zouave, Julian
Waits Russell, was published first in the Rome periodical, Il Divin
Salvatore, and then translated into English and published as a pamphlet. His
father was said to be consoled by the heroism of his son's death, and
announced: ‘If I had ten sons, I would willingly sacrifice them for God in so
holy a cause.’ Readers were assured that there were many more like Julian:
‘all were chosen victims and glorious heroes, whose memoirs, if collected,
would read like a page out of the history of the crusades, or even the Acts of
the Martyrs’.190 In Rome, General Kanzler was given a triumphal welcome,
and both the Pope and the king and queen of the Two Sicilies (in exile in
Rome) made a great show of caring for the wounded. The dead were given
‘splendid’ funerals, and Pio IX ordered a monument to be erected to the
‘martyrs’ of Mentana in the Church of San Lorenzo (where he was
eventually buried).191 Catholics were told that ‘[t]he sect will make still
more gigantic efforts, but in vain. The Hand of God hangs visibly over it
and the defeat of Mentana has brought about its fatal Downfall.’ The victory
at Mentana revived memories of the historical victories of Catholicism,
notably its triumph over the Ottoman Empire at the battle of Lepanto.192
Although the absence of research permits us to do little more than guess
at the popular reception of papal propaganda, we do know that it had a wide
international reach. In London, Father Beste of the London Oratory called
Garibaldi a ‘cruel blasphemer [who] has dared to call a Pope the vampire of
Italy, and Rome its plague spot … he, too, has cursed his Father and his
Mother – he, too, will die the death!’193 In Catholic Ireland, the capture of
Rome in 1870 as well as Mentana was marked by the publication of songs
and pamphlets celebrating the ‘Downfall of Garibaldi’, ‘The Pope's triumph
over Garibaldi’, ‘The sorrowful lamentation of Garibaldi’ and ‘A new song
on the capture of Garibaldi’. Archbishop Cullen of Dublin held what he
called ‘a grand high mass’ in a crowded church for the papal soldiers killed
at Mentana. He delivered the funeral oration which lasted for an hour, and
did, in his words, ‘all I could to extol the Zouaves, but I think I succeeded
better in assailing Garibaldi. I told … [the] story of … how he got into the
church of the conventuals, and hid himself in the confessional – the poor
Catholics were delighted to hear the scoundrel so well abused.’194 Above all
in France, where there was a vibrant group of Catholic publicists well used
to tackling any sign of sympathy with Italian nationalists, the Catholic press
attacked Garibaldi. Catholic writers belittled Garibaldi, pointed out his lack
of military skill and the slightness of his achievements; while other
publications stressed the involvement of the Italian government and of
Rattazzi in particular.195 As for Garibaldi's wicked reputation, there was no
doubt that it was true: he was a ‘brigand … who has spent his life
conspiring and fighting in the two worlds’; a ‘Wandering-Jew of the
revolution’; and the ‘master’ of Italy who ‘declares war at will; and is
stopped every time he runs any kind of risk’.196 The French volunteers were
all selfless heroes, ‘beautiful souls’ and glorious martyrs.197
Furthermore, if the government was embarrassed and silenced by its
casting as a national villain at the hands of Garibaldi after 1867, the Church
had no such problem. Indeed, after the death of Pius IX in 1878, when there
seemed to be a possibility of better Church–state relations in Italy, a
renewed clerical assault was mounted on Garibaldi's reputation. In 1878,
the Catholic historian Cesare Cantù judged Garibaldi's legacy to be a
divisive and destructive one. Garibaldi was an arrogant and vulgar man,
Cantù insisted, who ‘[a]lways … gave himself airs as though he were
another Washington … He could destroy, but did not know how to
build.’198 La Civiltà Cattolica initiated a major attack on Garibaldi in 1879,
‘maximum idol of the Italian Revolution’, at the time of his organisation of
the League of Democracy. Calling him the ‘hero of two millions’ (a
reference to a government pension he had accepted in the mid-1870s), the
paper mocked his physical incapacity, his political ideas and his literary
pretensions.199 It took the side of his estranged wife, Giuseppina Raimondi,
and protested against ‘the shameful insinuations circulated about her’ in
Garibaldi's ongoing attempts to divorce her. Giuseppina was the victim of
Garibaldi's self-interest, and ‘the hero of two millions’ wanted simply to ‘get
rid of Giuseppina, so that Francesca is able to enjoy the pension rights of a
General's widow and of that General’. All this was proof, the paper wrote,
that ‘the rotten source’ of the proposed divorce law in Italy was
Freemasonry.200
Most of all, La Civiltà Cattolica issued dire warnings about Garibaldi's
republicanism and socialism, all the while glorying in any evidence of bad
feeling among the nationalists. In a review of the anonymous pamphlet
Garibaldi politico, one of the few liberal publications openly hostile to
Garibaldi in this period,201 the paper likened the revolution to Saturn
devouring his own offspring (recycling a Piedmontese comment on
Aspromonte in 1862).202 The Italian revolution ‘has been until now a great
devourer of its children’, and while the monarchist party had been eaten by
the democrats it was now trying for a ‘return match, helping others to
devour its devouring party’. This ‘spectacle’, concluded the paper, was
inevitable: ‘all that is done against God and his Church is foolish and
transient … in this world the eternal justice of the Almighty frequently
punishes the sect which hates Christ’.203
Conclusion

In this chapter, I have sought to show that there is a great deal of political
and symbolic interest in the last years of Garibaldi's life. He was a more
successful, and much less marginal, figure than is often assumed. His
perception of the economic, social and political problems affecting early-
liberal Italy was not wholly misplaced, nor were his unstinting efforts to
establish a broad-based radical movement with as wide an appeal as
possible. For somebody so established and successful, he showed a
remarkable ability to reinvent himself, and to adapt to the different political
circumstances prevailing after Mentana; and in his willingness to risk his
fame and defy infirmity by continuing to campaign for radical change we
should recognise an impressive display of physical and intellectual courage.
Much of what we perceive as disappointing in Garibaldi's later career is a
product of the political conflict in this period: of his convincing attempt
(ably reinforced by his colleagues) to pose as the victim of political betrayal
and of official efforts to marginalise him or to deny him a serious political
role.
A study of Garibaldi in this period can also tell us a great deal about the
broader process of nation-building in liberal Italy, and especially about its
problems. First, Garibaldi and his radical associates claimed to represent the
Risorgimento, and they appropriated its symbolic system. They spoke for
the ‘real’ Italy which had been betrayed and excluded by a dishonest and
feeble government, and in so doing they pre-empted and challenged
government attempts to symbolise the nation and inspire a more official
sense of national belonging. Second, in his attacks on the Church, identified
as the true enemy of the nation, Garibaldi also placed part of the blame on
the government for failing to combat clericalism, and for collaborating in its
policy to mislead and corrupt the Italian people. At the same time, the
Church was far from idle. In the person of the Pope and through its control
of the Catholic press, the Church entered the modern battle for the hearts
and minds of Italians. It set up the Pope as the victim of Italian aggression,
it mocked all efforts to construct a secular sense of community, and it
identified Garibaldi as the symbol of demonic ‘Revolution’. In effect, the
task of nation-building in liberal Italy was not just frustrated by the
persistence of regional and local loyalties or the prevalence of popular
ignorance; nation-building was also undermined by disagreements among
the nationalists, and by the Church, which proposed and promoted a very
potent, rival version. In the process, both the radicals and the Church
adopted extreme rhetorical stances and forced the governing party to
occupy a weak and unconvincing middle ground.
 The struggle to invent official symbols of Italian national identity was
more than just a stand-off between the king, Vittorio Emanuele, and the
General, Garibaldi. It was also a three-way fight between these two figures
and the Pope. It is unfortunate that we know relatively little about the
impact of this struggle on public opinion, although it might help to account
for the perception of failure long associated with the Italian experience of
nation-building. It is even hard to say who came out in front at the end of
the culture wars, although it is very unlikely that it was the new state and its
official version of national belonging. Not only had the state suffered a
preventative propaganda strike at the hands of Garibaldi and his associates,
but it was also faced with the charisma of Pius IX, who had ‘the Hand of
God’ and a significant section of international public opinion on his side.
The extent of the radical victory can also be questioned. One aspect of
the Italian national discourse which emerges very clearly from a study of
Garibaldi's efforts in these years is the rather narrow range of discursive
options open even to the radical nationalists. Until the early 1860s, the
radicals proved unable (or unwilling) to distinguish their language and
symbols from those of the moderates; and increasingly thereafter, a kind of
linguistic convergence occurred around the symbols and metaphors of the
Catholic religion. Although we have seen in this book that the means of
production and dissemination of the nationalist discourse were modern,
linked to the expansion of print culture, popular theatre and associational
life, at least part of the content and structure of this discourse was deeply
traditional, based on biblical narrative and on the use of religious metaphors
and symbols which divided the world into heroes, villains, victims and
martyrs. This mixture of the secular and religious can explain both the
emotional reach of Italian nationalism and its equivocal political impact. We
have seen that Garibaldi was a master of the technique of modern politics –
the short speech and the striking look – but there was also much in his
presence which was pure ancien régime. As Garibaldi grew older, he left his
bandit role far behind, and it became increasingly difficult to separate his
image from that of a suffering saint. This elaboration worked rather well as
an anti-government metaphor, but it was a weak weapon against the rhetoric
of the Church, and it laid him particularly open to the kind of scornful
attacks and political mockery which became a feature of the Catholic press’
approach to him. There are some striking similarities in the representations
and descriptions of Garibaldi and Pius IX, but we should not assume that
Garibaldi was always the more convincing public personality.
The view of Italy as a weak and failed nation is a persistent one and, in
the years after national unification, Italy's foundation story was recast as a
tragic romance. Yet, as I have suggested in this chapter, this narrative is in
part the product of political embellishment. That is, the ‘failure’ of Italy
reflected the significant economic, social and political challenge of national
unification but it was also the result of a polemic, in which the political
loser(s) sought to denigrate and diminish the achievements of the victorious
side. The effect of this polemic on the national discourse was to maintain at
its very centre the persuasive contrast between a poetic vision of national
belonging and the prosaic disenchantment of Italy's governments; in this
way, the contrast which had been such a powerful weapon in the hands of
the political opposition during the Risorgimento was to remain in place
after the unification of Italy. On the radical side, few used it with more skill
or to greater lasting effect than Garibaldi.
The crucial point to recognise, however, is not so much that Italy was an
unsuccessful nation as that it was a politically divided one. In many ways,
the emphasis on a failed Italy in this political conflict, the strong focus on
national heroes and national martyrs, on national ‘resurgence’ and national
betrayal, points us to the overwhelming victory of the Italian nationalist
discourse. Its success is shown by the dominance of patriotic language in
political debate and the great capacity of the nationalist imaginary to
provoke a passionate sense of political involvement. Perhaps what emerges
most clearly from a study of the culture wars of early-liberal Italy is the
absolute centrality of ideas of the nation to an increasingly bitter struggle
for political power.
 CONCLUSION
THE MYTH OF GARIBALDI

We only believe in a romance when we see it in a newspaper.

Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone

When Garibaldi died in 1882, The Times expressed its shock at the loss of a
man who had ‘fascinated two hemispheres for thirty years’. He had,
according to the paper, accomplished ‘a miracle of national regeneration …
To him … Italy is indebted for an ideal of manliness and individual self-
reliance.’ ‘A nation is better for an ingredient of romance in its history’, the
paper concluded, and Italy had ‘that ingredient copiously in the entire
career of Garibaldi’.1 These words sum up neatly the combination of
political wonder, literary fantasy and physical excitement which Garibaldi's
name evoked for the nineteenth-century reader. In the conclusion, I want to
reflect further on the ingredients of his ‘fascination’.
In the course of the preceding chapters, I have shown how a political cult
of Garibaldi as an Italian hero was conceived of, fashioned and promoted
during the crucial transition years of the Risorgimento and Italian
unification. The original purpose of the cult was to embody and publicise a
political sense of italianità, to identify an imaginary narrative of romantic
heroism with a living, military leader, and to encourage Italians to
‘regenerate’ themselves. The cult was prepared and executed with
remarkable precision by Mazzini and his followers and, in the long decade
of 1848–60, it combined with a broader campaign in the press and
accompanied a programme of political–military action. By unification, the
cult of Garibaldi had helped make visible and convincing a heroic (‘manly’)
ideal of Italy which had hitherto existed in literature, music and the visual
arts, or only in the closed, underground circles of political conspirators.
After the unification of Italy, the heroic image of Garibaldi was at once the
most prominent and persuasive symbol of the new Italy, and a constant
reminder of its varied disappointments.
I have suggested that a study of the Garibaldi cult can show us how
nineteenth-century revolutionary and radical leaders, without a hold over
government, administration or public finance, and long before the
organisation of mass political parties in the 1880s, made use of the new
technologies of mass communication to reach, constitute and persuade a
substantial radical public. During the events of 1859–60 the cult became a
myth in and of itself, based on a narrative which was at least partly
invention and which embodied key themes and ideas of Risorgimento
culture. A striking feature of this myth was the free, and outwardly flawless,
mix of fact and fiction, and the recasting of political struggle as popular
entertainment. There seems little doubt that Garibaldi's image was
something manufactured and ‘managed’, which borrowed the tropes of
adventure romances, harnessed the techniques of theatrical performance,
and took on the liturgical and ritual aspects of religious practice.2 In this
way, the creation of the myth of Garibaldi reflects both the political
possibilities of modern communication techniques and the scavenging
tendencies of nationalist rhetoric, which seeks to construct a popular and
persuasive political ideology by appropriating and manipulating pieces of
existing discourse and practice.
Yet the process of political communication did not flow in one direction
only, and the nationalist scavenging was far from random. First, the
political ‘fascination’ of Garibaldi was very carefully staged for particular
and/or different audiences: Garibaldi and those around him strove to
establish a fit between his image and the fashionable tastes for fictional
heroes, and much of his popular success was due to an acute sensitivity to
the narrative demands of his public. So we should not assume that his
audience was passive, and must recognise instead that they played an active
role in creating the hero they desired. Second, Garibaldi's style was not
entirely eclectic, but drew on three main sources. It was based on an
established set of republican rituals, it pressed into service romantic
metaphors and narratives of rebellion, and it made great use of his personal,
and physical, attraction. Garibaldi's charisma was artifically fashioned, but
it also fitted the man, his politics, and his audience's expectations.
 Garibaldi represents an alternative, and democratic, tradition of political
heroism often overlooked by historians more interested in the origins of the
authoritarian personality cults of the twentieth century. His popularity also
reflects changes in the public sphere, from an elite-dominated world of
letters to the more democratic world of popular or ‘low’ literature enjoyed
by both men and women. By looking at press reports, popular biographies,
prints and songs about Garibaldi, and at reactions to them, we can trace the
popularisation of romanticism, and its partial fusion with political culture.
In attacks on Garibaldi, we can also follow the struggle for control of the
new, popular (although not yet ‘mass’) culture produced by this union.
Perhaps most importantly, through the creation of a cult of Garibaldi we can
gain an understanding of how activists tried to connect with cultural change
and direct it to specifically political ends. Garibaldi reminds us that in our
attempt to understand the formation, language and impact of nationalist
movements in modern societies we cannot just focus on cultural production
but should also seek to analyse political action, and that we should also
consider the role of political struggle in creating a language of nationality
and the public response to it.
In my view, the cult of Garibaldi was the product of a vibrant movement
of political radicalism which flourished in the mid-nineteenth century, and it
was part of radicalism's attempt to promote, and insert itself into, an
international mood of popular romanticism. The mix of romanticism and
radicalism anticipated and helped to form a new, more spectacular style of
political communication, characterised by the cult of personality, the
borrowing of techniques developed for literature and the theatre, and the
use of the press. This style, and the political symbolism which it produced,
represents an early and in some respects defining stage in the emergence of
mass politics in the nineteenth century.
Since this ‘radical moment’ has been relatively neglected in recent
research, we can only speculate about the reasons for its decline or, more
accurately, for its diversion into the more antagonistic and chauvinistic
political symbolism of the later-nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Nevertheless, if we look at Garibaldi we can observe a tendency for the
charismatic construction to float free from its political moorings. The
biography of Garibaldi was something of a collaborative effort, and while
this ‘interactive’ aspect of Garibaldi's celebrity helps to explain its success,
it also means that its political significance could be disputed. Garibaldi's
image was always vulnerable to manipulation. Although the reworking of
his legend occurred mainly after his death, along with the gradual defeat of
radicalism, it was foreshadowed in Garibaldi's controversial attempts to
maintain control over the use of his image in the years before he died. Just
as radicals had been able to contest and reshape the public sphere by
appropriating new methods of communication, so could conservatives and
clericals wrest control from them using the very same techniques.
Long before his death, control of Garibaldi's image had become a
powerful instrument of political propaganda and political authority, and this
was because popular identification with him could reach fanatical levels.
The cult of Garibaldi was very successful. The creation of his heroic
reputation owes a great deal to existing cults of hero worship, but it had a
reach and a resonance which was almost unprecedented, especially when
we remember that he was excluded from political power. It was
international (he really was a ‘hero of two worlds’), visually spectacular,
and it worked; Garibaldi was immensely famous, his presence could
provoke mass demonstrations of popular enthusiasm, and from the late
1850s his name guaranteed large donations of money and encouraged a rush
of volunteers to fight with him. Garibaldi's charisma provoked intensely
passionate feelings of political belonging. Men and women felt personally
involved with Garibaldi and were emotionally touched by his experiences.
They not only supported his political aims but also identified their own
romantic sensibilities, radical ambitions and/or religious hatreds with his
struggle to ‘free’ Italy from foreign or ‘priestly’ oppression.
This unusual achievement comes down largely to timing and to place.
Garibaldi's emergence and definition as a popular hero was a symptom of
political modernisation. It coincided with a popular revolution in publishing
and reading, which helped writers, publishers and readers to challenge elite
control of the public sphere, and made it possible to promote him – a
revolutionary outsider – on a hitherto unparalleled scale. Garibaldi reached
much of his public through the leisure activity of reading and other forms of
visual entertainment, and the public's response to him was conditioned by
these media. Mazzini and Garibaldi were among the first to seize this
development for political purposes, so that lack of competition also helps to
explain the unrivalled nature of their publicity triumph. At the same time,
the popular resonance of Garibaldi owed much to the persistence of
tradition. That is, his appeal as an exceptional leader made sense to a
culture where notions of the superhuman and (especially) the sacred still
had a real political and social significance, and where people believed in
kings, saints and miracles, or were at least nostalgic for them. This is
perhaps most obvious in the case of Italy itself, with its strict religious
hierarchy built around the charismatic figure of the Pope and popular faith
in the miraculous power of saints,3 but it is also evident, if sometimes
expressed more obliquely, in the press reactions to Garibaldi's successes in
Britain and the United States. It is perhaps this nineteenth-century mix of
tradition and modernity, and of democracy and dictatorship, which best
explains the political reach and emotional impact of Garibaldi.
But how special was Garibaldi? To what extent was his charisma also the
result of genuine political or personal achievement? In an age when fame is
ubiquitous and we no longer believe in Great Men, this is an especially
tricky question to answer. Nevertheless, throughout this book I have sought
to stress Garibaldi's singular importance as a political actor. He remained in
the public eye for nearly forty years, and his life spanned the shift from
nationalism as a revolutionary movement to nationalism as the official
ideology of an established regime. In particular, I have contended that
Garibaldi's military ideas, and especially his vision of volunteering, were
both politically innovative and broadly popular, and that his military
successes played a key role in the construction of his political appeal. I have
also suggested that the period of dictatorship in Sicily in 1860 was a more
significant political experiment than is often assumed, and that his later
political career contains much that is noteworthy. Primarily, I have argued
that his outstanding talent for political communication should be taken
seriously. If the reports and letters about Garibaldi are to be believed, he
learnt (or he naturally possessed) great dramatic timing: he knew how to
strike a pose, he knew how to use his voice, his body and his smile, he
knew when to be brave and when to be humble, and he knew (perhaps too
well for his colleagues) when to abandon the stage and distance himself
from the public furore created by his presence. He applied what was by all
accounts a powerful physical and sexual magnetism to the purpose of
political persuasion, and he followed this up with an unparalleled display of
modesty and openness. He seems instinctively to have understood that, in
the extended imaginary communities created by mass print culture and
entertainment, nothing succeeded so well as the personal, intimate touch.
Historians have long struggled to distinguish between fact and fiction in
the making of Garibaldi, to find the man behind the mask, and to destroy or
confirm Garibaldi's heroic reputation by revealing the truth about his
military failures, his political mistakes and/or his private obsessions. In a
sense, however, this is to miss completely the point about his life. With
Garibaldi, image and reality were effectively indistinguishable. Both were
part of a prolonged process of political display which took in South
America and Caprera, his political battles and his private life, which
became part of a public memory that defined an ‘epoch’ (the Risorgimento),
and which seemingly only ended with his death (and even then, as we have
seen, not entirely).
In conclusion, the myth of Garibaldi may not be true, but it was
uncommonly effective. Garibaldi showed how Italians could be ‘made’, and
his presence helped to create, encourage, and greatly increase support for
political radicalism and nationalism. In turn, the popularity of Garibaldi
offers us insights into the general role and function of myths in nationalist
movements. It tells us that successful nationalist myths are neither genuine
nor invented but a compelling blend of both; and that they are neither
spontaneous nor imposed, but can far better be characterised as an intricate
process of negotiation between actor and audience where the author (or
source of authority) is difficult to discover. Most of all, it suggests that, in
the complex and contingent processes which go into making a national
community and in the political struggle to control and use this sense of
belonging, there are few symbols more potent and more plastic than a
living, breathing man.
 NOTES

Author's Note

All emphases in the text are in the original unless otherwise stated.
List of Abbreviations

ACS Archivio Centrale dello Stato, Rome

ASM Archivio di Stato, Milan
ASP Archivio di Stato, Palermo
ACP Archivio Comunale, Palermo
BL British Library, London
Epistolario Epistolario di Giuseppe Garibaldi, 11 vols, Rome, 1973–2002
MCRR Museo Centrale del Risorgimento, Rome
MRG Museo del Risorgimento, Genoa
MRM Museo del Risorgimento, Milan
NA The National Archives (Public Record Office), London
SSSP Società Siciliana per la Storia Patria, Palermo
Scritti Scritti editi ed inediti di Giuseppe Mazzini, Imola, 1906–86
Scritti e Edizione nazionale degli scritti di Giuseppe Garibaldi, vols 4–6. Scritti e discorsi
discorsi politici e militari, 3 vols, Bologna, 1934–7

Introduction
1. J. Butler, In memoriam Harriet Meuricoffre, London, 1901, p. 50; also in D. Mack Smith (ed.),
Garibaldi. Great lives observed, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1969, p. 130.
2. Minuta di proclama agli Italiani, Genoa, 5 May 1860 (or Talamone, 8 May 1860), in Garibaldi,
Scritti e discorsi, 1, pp. 239–41.
3. There is a huge number of popular and academic biographies of Garibaldi. Among the most up to
date are, in English, D. Mack Smith, Garibaldi. A great life in brief, London, 1957 and J. Ridley,
Garibaldi, London, 1974; and in Italian, G. Monsagrati, ‘Garibaldi Giuseppe’, Dizionario
 biografico degli italiani, 52, Rome, 1999, and A. Scirocco, Garibaldi. Battaglie, amori, ideali di
un cittadino del mondo, Bari and Rome, 2001.
4. M. Amari, Carteggio di Michele Amari, ed. A. d'Ancona, 3 vols, Turin, 1896, 2, p. 134.
5. G. C. Abba, The diary of one of Garibaldi's Thousand, trans. E. R. Vincent, London, 1962, p. 77.
6. Quoted in D. Beales, ‘Garibaldi in England. The politics of Italian enthusiasm’, in J. A. Davis and
P. Ginsborg (eds), Society and politics in the age of the Risorgimento. Essays in honour of Denis
Mack Smith, Cambridge, 1991, pp. 188, 190.
7. C. Duggan, Francesco Crispi. From nation to nationalism, Oxford, 2002, pp. 426–50; idem,
‘Francesco Crispi, “political education” and the problem of Italian national consciousness, 1860–
1886’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 2/2, 1997, pp. 141–66.
8. On the burial, see B. Tobia, ‘Una forma di pedagogia nazionale tra cultura e politica: i luoghi della
memoria e della rimembranza’, in Il mito del Risorgimento nell'Italia unita, Milan, 1995, pp. 194–
207; U. Levra, Fare gli italiani. Memoria e celebrazione del Risorgimento, Turin, 1992, pp. 110–
13. On the 1884 pilgrimage, see B. Tobia, Una patria per gli italiani. Spazi, itinerari, monumenti
nell'Italia unita, Rome and Bari, 1991, pp. 100–42.
9. I. Porciani, La festa della nazione, Bologna, 1997.
10. Tobia, Una patria per gli italiani, pp. 143–8.
11. M. Baioni, La ‘religione della patria’. Musei e istituti del culto risorgimentale (1884–1918),
Treviso, 1994.
12. The most thorough study of the Vittoriano is C. Brice, Le Vittoriano. Monumentalité publique et
politique à Rome, Rome, 1998. On the official political iconography of nineteenth-century Italy,
see S. von Falkenhausen, Italienische monumental Malerei im Risorgimento, 1830–1890, Berlin,
1993.
13. See E. Gentile, The sacralization of politics in fascist Italy, trans. K. Botsford, Cambridge MA,
1996, pp. 1–18; idem, Le religioni della politica. Fra democrazia e totalitarismi, Rome and Bari,
2001; M. Ridolfi, C. Brice and F. de Giorgi, ‘Religione civile e identità nazionale nella storia
d'Italia: per una discussione’, Memoria e Ricerca, 13, 2003, pp. 133–52.
14. On the ‘national pantheon’ of great Italians, see E. Irace, Italie glorie. La costruzione di un
pantheon nazionale, Bologna, 2003, pp. 121–208. See also Levra, Fare gli italiani, pp. 27, 153–4,
and M. Isnenghi, L'Italia in piazza. I luoghi della vita pubblica dal 1848 ai nostri giorni, Milan,
1994, pp. 24–7.
15. Isnenghi, L'Italia in piazza, p. 25. For a comprehensive list of the monuments to Garibaldi in
Italy, see G. Massobrio and L. Capellini, L'Italia per Garibaldi, Milan, 1982.
16. Levra, Fare gli italiani, pp. 153–4.
17. Duggan, Francesco Crispi, pp. 693–4; the quote by Crispi is on p. 294.
18. E. Garibaldi (ed.), Qui sostò Garibaldi. Itinerari garibaldini in Italia, Fasano, 1982; J. Grévy,
Garibaldi, Paris, 2001, pp. 160–2.
19. One survey of commemorative pamphlets and patriotic ephemera published in this period has
found that those dedicated to Garibaldi almost outnumber those of all other Italian national heroes
put together. F. Dolci, ‘L'editoria d'occasione del secondo Ottocento nella Biblioteca di storia
moderna e contemporanea di Roma’, in Il mito del Risorgimento, p. 146.
20. Grévy, Garibaldi, pp. 146–60.
21. J. Woodhouse, Gabriele D'Annunzio. Defiant archangel, Oxford, 1998, p. 196.
22. Grévy, Garibaldi, pp. 183–201; M. Isnenghi, ‘Usi politici di Garibaldi dall'interventismo al
fascismo’, in F. Mazzonis (ed.), Garibaldi condottiero. Storia, teoria, prassi, Milan, 1984, pp.
533–40; M. Brignoli, ‘Bruno, Costanzo e la presenza garibaldina nella grande guerra’, in Z.
Ciuffoletti et al. (eds), I Garibaldi dopo Garibaldi. La tradizione famigliare e l'eredità politica,
Manduria, 2005, pp. 155–64.
23. C. Fogu, ‘“To make history”: Garibaldianism and the formation of a fascist historic imaginary’,
in A. Russell Ascoli and K. von Henneberg (eds), Making and remaking Italy. The cultivation of
national identity around the Risorgimento, Oxford, 2001, pp. 203–40.
24. On the film, see D. Forgacs, ‘Nostra patria: revisions of the Risorgimento in the cinema’, ibid.,
esp. pp. 257–63. For a general discussion of the uses of the Garibaldi myth during Fascism see
Grévy, Garibaldi, pp. 202–12; Isnenghi, ‘Usi politici di Garibaldi’, pp. 540–4.
25. M. Isnenghi, ‘Garibaldi’, in idem (ed.), I luoghi della memoria. Personaggi e date dell'Italia
unita, Rome and Bari, 1997, pp. 41–3; Grévy, Garibaldi, pp. 212–18.
26. On which, see S. Gundle, ‘The “civic religion” of the Resistance in post-war Italy’, Modern Italy,
5/2, 2000, pp. 113–32.
27. Grévy, Garibaldi, pp. 223–9, 241–56.
28. On the role and purpose of the ‘exemplary life’ in modern politics, see G. Cubitt, ‘Introduction:
heroic reputations and exemplary lives’, in idem and A. Warren (eds), Heroic reputations and
exemplary lives, Manchester, 2000, esp. pp. 7–9.
29. Among the most important of these biographies of Garibaldi are G. Guerzoni, Garibaldi, Firenze,
1882; J. White Mario, Garibaldi e i suoi tempi, Milan, 1884; G. E. Curàtolo, Giuseppe Garibaldi,
Rome, 1925; and G. Sacerdote, La vita di Giuseppe Garibaldi, Milan, 1933. The Garibaldi
‘trilogy’ published in England by G. M. Trevelyan between 1907 and 1911 takes an equally
reverent attitude towards its subject matter, but for less immediate (although no less evident)
political reasons.
30. On this trend in the political arena, see M. Marsili, ‘De Gasperi and Togliatti: political leadership
and personality cults in post-war Italy’, Modern Italy, 3/2, 1998, pp. 249–61.
31. A. M. Ghisalberti, ‘Di una buona bibliografia e di alcuni discutibili giudizi’, Rassegna Storica del
Risorgimento, 58, 1971, pp. 629–30.
32. Idem, ‘Ancora sulla partecipazione popolare nel Risorgimento’, ibid., pp. 31–3, 1944–6, p. 6, his
emphasis.
33. Idem, Momenti e figure del Risorgimento romano, Milan, 1965, p. 183.
34. Ibid., p. 189. The titles of the essays included here are themselves revealing: ‘Among the minor
figures of the Roman Risorgimento’ (‘Fra i minori del Risorgimento romano’) and ‘Pietro
Rosselli, a forgotten figure of '49’ (‘Pietro Rosselli, un dimenticato del '49’).
35. Quoted in D. Mack Smith, Cavour and Garibaldi. A study in political conflict, Cambridge, 2nd
edn, 1985, p. x.
36. L. Riall, ‘Rivoluzione, repubblicanesimo e Risorgimento: Roma e i suoi storici, 1798–99 e 1849’,
Roma moderna e contemporanea, 9/1–3, 2001, pp. 291–2.
37. For a discussion, see Grévy, Garibaldi, pp. 229–41. A partial exception to this rule, as Grévy
argues, is the work of Denis Mack Smith, but this is hardly surprising since he comes from a
different (Anglo-Saxon) historiographical tradition with different institutional constraints (and
Mack Smith himself stresses his position as an outsider in Cavour and Garibaldi, pp. xi–xii).
38. A. Gramsci, Il Risorgimento, Turin, 1949.
39. The literature on Gramsci's analysis of the Risorgimento is very substantial. In English, see, in
particular, J. A. Davis, ‘Introduction: Antonio Gramsci and Italy's passive revolution’, and P.
Ginsborg, ‘Gramsci and the era of the bourgeois revolution in Italy’, both in J. A. Davis (ed.),
Gramsci and Italy's passive revolution, London, 1979. For a brief summary, see L. Riall, Sicily and
the unification of Italy. Liberal policy and local power, 1859–1866, Oxford, 1998, pp. 8–14.
40. Riall, ‘Roma e i suoi storici’, p. 290.
41. See Ghisalberti's remarks in the premessa to Momenti e figure del Risorgimento, pp. x–xii, and
the comments of Franco della Peruta about Morelli in ‘Il Mazzini di Emilia Morelli’, Rassegna
Storica del Risorgimento, 82/4, 1995, pp. 513–14.
42. A. Gramsci, Selections from prison notebooks, ed. and trans. Q. Hoare and G. Nowell Smith,
London, 1971, pp. 61, 204.
43. For a summary of the findings of Italian social historians, see L. Riall, The Italian Risorgimento.
State, society and national unification, London, 1994, esp. pp. 20–49.
44. E. Gellner, Nations and nationalism, Oxford, 1983; E. Hobsbawm, Nations and nationalism since
1780, London, 1990; B. Anderson, Imagined communities, London, 1991 edn.
45. See the comments by Hobsbawm on why in general ‘historians should address their attention to
such phenomena’ in E. Hobsbawm, ‘Introduction, inventing traditions’, in idem and T. Ranger
(eds), The invention of tradition, Cambridge, 1983, p. 12.
46. A. M. Banti, La nazione del Risorgimento. Parentela, santità e onore alle origini dell'Italia unita,
Turin, 2000. He discusses and lists the ‘canonical’ texts on pp. 44–55.
47. See I. Porciani, ‘Stato e nazione: l'immagine debole dell'Italia’, in S. Soldani and G. Turi (eds),
Fare gli Italiani. Scuola e cultura nell'Italia contemporanea, Bologna, 1993, 1, pp. 385–428.
48. See the analyses in Grévy, Garibaldi, pp. 139–267 and Isnenghi, ‘Garibaldi’.
49. F. della Peruta, ‘Il mito del Risorgimento e l'estrema sinistra dall'Unità al 1914’, in Il mito del
Risorgimento, pp. 32–70.
50. Fogu, ‘To make history’, pp. 206–15.
51. M. Agulhon, ‘Le mythe de Garibaldi en France de 1882 à nos jours’, in idem, Histoire
vagabonde, vol II. Idéologie et politique dans la France du XIXe siècle, Paris, 1988, pp. 85–131.
For the myth of Garibaldi in England, see Beales, ‘The politics of Italian enthusiasm’, and M.
Finn, After Chartism. Class and nation in English radical politics, Cambridge, 1993, pp. 189–223;
and in Germany, C. Dipper, ‘Helden überkreuz oder das Kreuz mit den Helden’, in Jahrbuch des
Historischen Kollegs, Munich, 1999. For a general discussion, see Grévy, Garibaldi, pp. 93–138.
52. Scirocco, Garibaldi; D. Pick, Rome or death. The obsessions of General Garibaldi, London,
2005; M. Schwegman, ‘In love with Garibaldi: romancing the Risorgimento’, European Review of
History–Révue européene d'Histoire, 12/2, 2005, pp. 363–81. Grévy, Garibaldi, looks directly at
the myth of Garibaldi but focuses largely on the period after his death.
53. C. Crocella, ‘La storiografia su Garibaldi militare’, in Mazzonis (ed.), Garibaldi condottiero, p.
481.
54. R. Villari, ‘La prefigurazione politica del giudizio storico su Garibaldi’, Studi Storici, 23/2, 1982,
pp. 261–4.
55. In his 1954 study, Cavour and Garibaldi, Denis Mack Smith observed Garibaldi's capacity for
political realism, while in 1963 Virgilio Titone made a plea for historians to look more seriously at
Garibaldi's political strategy (‘Garibaldi’, in Quaderni Storici, 2, 1963, pp. 52–65, with a translated
extract published in Mack Smith (ed.), Garibaldi, pp. 168–73). Both Rosario Villari and Franco
della Peruta have suggested that Garibaldi was both more representative and more politically
astute than traditional Risorgimento historiography would have us believe (Villari, ‘La
prefigurazione politica’; F. della Peruta, ‘Garibaldi fra mito e politica’, Studi Storici, 23/1, 1982,
pp. 5–22). However, none of these useful suggestions has given rise to more in-depth research.
56. For a comparison, see Alan Forrest on Napoleonic strategy: ‘Propaganda and the legitimation of
power in Napoleonic France’, French History, 18/4, 2004, pp. 426–45; and, for an earlier period, P.
Burke, The fabrication of Louis XIV, New Haven, CT, and London, 1992.
57. D. Cannadine, G.M. Trevelyan. A life in history, London, 1992, p. 67.
58. A. D. Smith, ‘National identity and myths of ethnic descent’, in idem, Myths and memories of the
nation, Oxford, 1999, p. 58.
59. See the comments of R. Girardet, Mythes et mythologies politiques, Paris, 1986, pp. 13–14.
60. On the use of symbols in the construction of political authority, see D. Kertzer, Rituals, politics
and power, New Haven, CT, 1988; and G. Schöpflin, ‘The function of myth and a taxonomy of
myths’, in G. Hosking and G. Schöpflin (eds), Myths and nationhood, London, 1997, pp. 19–35.
R. Gewarth, The Bismarck myth. Weimar Germany and the legacy of the Iron Chancellor, Oxford,
2005, B. Schwartz, George Washington. The making of an American symbol, New York, 1987, and
I. Kershaw, The ‘Hitler myth’. Image and reality in the Third Reich, Oxford, 1987, have been of
particular help to me in understanding the political function of hero cults.
61. On this point, see most obviously G. Mosse, The nationalisation of the masses. Political
symbolism and mass movements in Germany from the Napoleonic wars through the Third Reich,
New York, 1975, esp. pp. 6–12.
62. M. Weber, Economy and society, 2 vols, Berkeley, CA, 1978, 2, pp. 241–2.
63. E. Shils, ‘Charisma, order and status’, American Sociological Review, April 1965, p. 200; C.
Geertz, ‘Centers, kings and charisma: reflections on the symbolics of power’, in J. Ben-David and
T. Nichols Clark (eds), Culture and its creators. Essays in honor of Edward Shils, Chicago, 1977,
p. 171.
64. Shils, ‘Charisma’, pp. 200–1.
65. This is a feature of political charisma in Italy more generally. See S. Gundle and L. Riall,
‘Introduction’ to ‘Charisma and the cult of personality in modern Italy’, Modern Italy, 3/2, 1999, p.
157.
66. For instance, C. Lindholm's interesting study, Charisma, Cambridge, MA, 1990, focuses entirely
on right-wing dictators and violent cult leaders like Charles Manson. Kertzer, Rituals, is one of the
few studies which considers revolutionary movements as well as rulers in analysing the uses of
political symbolism.
67. Weber, Economy and society, pp. 246–54.
68. Kershaw, The ‘Hitler myth’, pp. 4, 253; R. Tucker, Stalin in power, New York, 1992, p. 171; J.
Gottlieb, ‘The marketing of megalomania: celebrity, consumption and the development of political
technology in the British Union of Fascists’, Journal of Contemporary History, 41/1, 2006, pp.
35–55.
69. See, by way of contrast, the comments of Nell Painter that the nineteenth-century American
preacher and feminist, Sojourner Truth, ‘remains more sign than lived existence … like other
invented greats, Truth is consumed as a signifier and beloved for what we need her to have said.’
N. W. Painter, ‘Representing Truth: Sojourner Truth's knowing and becoming known’, Journal of
American History, 81/2, 1994, p. 480.
70. G. Eley, ‘Nations, publics, and political cultures: placing Habermas in the nineteenth century’, in
C. Calhoun (ed.), Habermas and the public sphere, Boston, MA, 1994, pp. 289–339.
71. J. Smith Allen, Popular French romanticism. Authors, readers and books in the nineteenth
century, Syracuse, NY, 1981, pp. 6–12.
72. This point is also recognised by Schwegman, ‘In love with Garibaldi’, pp. 370–2.

Chapter 1: Nation and Risorgimento

1. 22 Oct. 1843, in Scritti, 24, p. 316. Mazzini was referring specifically to an argument between
Cuneo, Garibaldi and another ‘Young Italian’, Rossetti, which had caused temporarily what
Mazzini called ‘a kind of separation’ between the two friends.
2. On the Italian secret societies, see A. Lehning, ‘Buonarotti and his international secret societies’,
International Review of Social History, 1, 1956, pp. 112–40; R. J. Rath, ‘The Carbonary: their
origins, initiation rites and aims’, American Historical Review, 69, 1964, pp. 353–70. On Mazzini's
involvement with the Carbonari see E. Hales, Mazzini and the secret societies: the making of a
myth, London, 1956.
3. F. della Peruta, ‘Mazzini della letteratura militante all'impegno politico’, Studi Storici, 14/3, 1973,
p. 546.
4. On SaintSimon, see J. Hayward, After the French Revolution. Six critics of democracy and
nationalism, London, 1991, pp. 65–100.
5. Quoted in R. Sarti, Mazzini: a life for the religion of politics, Westport, CT, 1997, p. 60. For
Mazzini and Saint-Simonianism, see ibid., pp. 58–60.
6. 16 Dec. 1846, to Carlo Fenzi, in Scritti, 30, p. 308.
7. F. della Peruta, Mazzini e i rivoluzionari italiani. Il ‘partitio d'azione’ 1830–1845, Milan, 1974, p.
70.
8. Sarti, Mazzini, p. 60.
9. On Buonarotti and conspiracy, see E. L. Eisenstein, The first professional revolutionary: Filippo
Michele Buonarotti (1761–1837), Cambridge, MA, 1959, and more generally J. M. Roberts, The
mythology of the secret societies, New York, 1972.
10. Quoted in Della Peruta, ‘Mazzini’, pp. 508, 552; the hero in Italian political culture is discussed
in more detail below, pp. 59–67.
11. Mazzini was strongly influenced by the pamphlet published in 1830 by the Piedmontese exile
Carlo Bianco di Saint Jorioz, Della guerra nazionale d'insurrezione per bande, applicata all'Italia.
For a discussion and the text, see F. della Peruta (ed.), Democratici, premazziniani e dissidenti,
Turin, 1979; on Mazzini, V. Parmentola, ‘Carlo Bianco, Giuseppe Mazzini e la teoria
dell'insurrezione’, Bollettino della Domus Mazziniana, 2, 1959, pp. 5–40.
12. Sarti, Mazzini, p. 54.
13. Extracts in A. M. Banti, Il Risorgimento italiano, Rome and Bari, 2004, pp. 189–92.
14. E. Gentile, The sacralisation of politics in fascist Italy, Cambridge, MA, 1996, p. 4.
15. There is a substantial literature on this subject: on the ‘ethnic’ and historical origins of nations,
see A. D. Smith, Nationalism and modernism, London, 1998, and A. Hastings, The construction of
nationhood: ethnicity, religion and nationalism, Cambridge, 1997; on nationalism and
modernisation, E. Gellner, Nations and nationalism, Oxford, 1983; and on the ‘invention’ of
nations, see J. Breuilly, Nationalism and the state, Manchester, 1993 edn; B. Anderson, Imagined
communities. Reflections on the origins and spread of nationalism, London, 1991 edn; and E.
Hobsbawm, Nations and nationalism since 1780, Cambridge, 1990.
16. A. M. Banti, La nazione del Risorgimento. Parentela, santità e onore alle origini dell'Italia unita,
Turin, 2000, p. 150. Similar points are made by A. Lyttelton, ‘Creating a national past: history,
myth and image in the Risorgimento’, in A. R. Ascoli and K. von Henneberg (eds), Making and
remaking Italy: the cultivation of national identity around the Risorgimento, Oxford, 2001, esp. pp.
27–9.
17. See e.g. F. Venturi, Settecento riformatore. I. Da Muratori a Beccaria, Turin, 1969; also D.
Carpinetto and G. Ricuperati, Italy in the age of reason, 1685–1789, London, 1987, p. 89; and S. J.
Woolf, A history of Italy 1700–1860, London, 1979, pp. 75–80.
18. R. Grew, ‘Culture and society, 1796–1896’, in J. A. Davis (ed.), Italy in the nineteenth century,
Oxford, 2000, p. 206.
19. Perhaps the best short summaries of the impact of the French on Italy are A. Grab, Napoleon and
the transformation of Europe, London, 2003, pp. 152–75 (which despite its title has useful
information on the revolutionary period as well), and idem, ‘From the French Revolution to
Napoleon’, in Davis (ed.), Italy in the nineteenth century, pp. 25–50. See equally J. A. Davis,
Naples and Napoleon, Oxford, 2006.
20. Grew, ‘Culture and society’, pp. 207–10.
21. Banti, La nazione, pp. 3–29.
22. There was remarkable continuity in those aspects of the revolutionary and Napoleonic traditions
which modernised government administrations and strengthened the power of the state, as well as
a fairly ambivalent attitude towards restoring the ancien régime privileges of Church and nobility.
For a general discussion, see D. Laven and L. Riall, ‘Restoration government and the legacy of
Napoleon’, in Laven and Riall (eds), Napoleon's legacy. Problems of government in Restoration
Europe, Oxford, 2000, pp. 1–26; and on the specific policies of Restoration Italy, see D. Laven,
‘The age of Restoration’, in Davis (ed.), Italy in the nineteenth century, pp. 51–73.
23. For the text of De Staël's essay and the debate between ‘classicists’ and ‘romantics’ which
ensued, see E. Bellorini (ed.), Discussioni e polemiche sul romanticismo (1816–1826), Bari, 1943.
24. E. Raimondi, Romanticismo italiano e romanticismo europeo, Milan, 1997; C. Springer, The
marble wilderness: ruins and representation in Italian romanticism, Cambridge, 1997; see also
Grew, ‘Culture and society’, pp. 211–15.
25. Banti, La nazione, p. 29.
26. On the Italian version of the historical novel, see S. Pinto (ed.), Romanticismo storico, Florence,
1974; for a more general discussion, see B. Hamnett, ‘Fictitious histories: the dilemma of fact and
imagination in the nineteenth-century historical novel’, European History Quarterly, 36/1, 2006,
pp. 31–60.
27. Quoted in Banti, La nazione, p. 69. Lyttelton notes that L'assedio di Firenze was in fact
considered too inflammatory to be published in Italy when it first appeared in 1836: ‘Creating a
national past’, p. 59.
28. Ibid., pp. 52–8.
29. M. Praz, The romantic agony, London, 1933, esp. pp. 58–69. See also P. Ginsborg, ‘Il mito del
Risorgimento nel mondo britannico: “la vera poesia della politica”’, in Il mito del Risorgimento
nell'Italia unita, Milan, 1995, pp. 386–7.
30. N. Frye, The anatomy of criticism, Princeton, NJ, 1957, pp. 33–4.
31. G. Mosse, The image of man. The creation of modern masculinity, New York, 1996, p. 18.
32. G. Dawson, Soldier heroes. British adventure, empire and the imagining of masculinities,
London, 1994, pp. 69–74.
33. Banti, La nazione, p. 123.
34. On both these novels, see ibid., pp. 93–6.
35. For a discussion of images of war in Scott's poetry, see S. Bainbridge, British poetry and the
revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. Visions of conflict, Oxford, 2003, esp. pp. 120–47, 159–70.
36. I. Porciani, ‘Der Krieg als ambivalenter italienischer Gründungsmythos – Siege und
Niederlagen’, in N. Buschmann and D. Langewiesche (eds), Der Krieg in den Gründungsmythen
europäischer Nationen und der USA, Frankfurt and New York, 2003, pp. 193–212.
37. D. Laven, ‘Machiavelli, italianità and the French invasion of 1494’, in D. Abulafia (ed.), The
French descent into Renaissance Italy, 1494–95. Antecedents and effects, Aldershot, 1995, pp.
355–69. I discuss this theme in ‘Eroi maschili, virilità e forme della guerra’, in A. M. Banti and P.
Ginsborg (eds), Il Risorgimento, Turin, forthcoming.
38. This issue is discussed in more detail below, Chapter 5, pp. 135–6.
39. Lyttelton, ‘Creating a national past’, p. 31.
40. D. Laven, ‘Italy: The idea of the nation in the Risorgimento and liberal era’, in T. Baycroft and
M. Hewitson (eds), What is a nation? Europe 1789–1914, Oxford, 2006, p. 269.
41. Banti, La nazione, p. 150.
42. Lyttelton, ‘Creating a national past’, p. 42.
43. Della Peruta, ‘Mazzini’, p. 507.
44. See G. Pirodda, ‘Giuseppe Mazzini e il romanticismo democratico’, in La letteratura italiana.
Stori e testi, 7, pt. 1, Bari, 1970–80, esp. pp. 252–9.
45. A. Galante Garrone, ‘I giornali della Restaurazione’, in idem and F. della Peruta, La stampa
italiana del Risorgimento, Bari, 1976, p. 141.
46. Sarti, Mazzini, p. 54; Della Peruta, ‘Mazzini’, p. 507.
47. Galante Garrone, ‘I giornali della Restaurazione’, p. 156.
48. Ibid., pp. 157–64.
49. Ibid., p. 156.
50. Scritti, 34, p. 29 (the whole article is at pp. 27–48, and was first published in the London radical
weekly, the People's Journal, in 1846).
51. S. Hazareesingh, ‘Memory and political imagination. The legend of Napoleon revisited’, French
History, 18/4, 2004, p. 476.
52. D. Mack Smith, Mazzini, London, 1994, pp. 31, 40, 65.
53. D. Laven, ‘Mazzini, Mazzinian conspiracy and British politics in the 1850s’, Bollettino Storico
Mantovano, nuova serie, 2, 2003, pp. 267–82.
54. Sarti, Mazzini, p. 3; Mack Smith, Mazzini, p. 2.

Chapter 2: In Search of Garibaldi

1. On Mazzini's experiences in England before the revolutions of 1848, see E. Morelli, L'Inghilterra
di Mazzini, Rome, 1965; R. Sarti, Mazzini. A life for the religion of politics, Westport, CT, 1997,
pp. 95–126; D. Mack Smith, Mazzini, London, 1994, pp. 20–48.
2. For the disagreement between Mazzini and Fabrizi, see F. della Peruta, ‘Le teorie militari della
democrazia risorgimentale’, in F. Mazzonis (ed.), Garibaldi condottiero. Storia, teoria, prassi,
Milan, 1984, pp. 67–9.
3. See M. Finelli, ‘Il prezioso elemento’. Giuseppe Mazzini e gli emigrati italiani nell'esperienza
della Scuola Italiana di Londra, Verucchio, 1999.
4. Cited in Mack Smith, Mazzini, p. 41.
5. See below, pp. 139–46.
6. ‘Byron et Goethe’, Scritti, 21, pp. 233–4.
7. Quoted in Sarti, Mazzini, p. 112.
8. Mack Smith, Mazzini, pp. 42–3.
9. E. Yeo, ‘Some practices and problems of Chartist democracy’, in J. Epstein and D. Thompson
(eds), The Chartist experience: studies in working-class radicalism and culture, 1830–60, London,
1982, pp. 345–80.
10. I. Haywood, The revolution in popular literature. Print, politics and the people, 1790–1860,
Cambridge, 2004, pp. 139–61.
11. J. Vernon, Politics and the people: a study in English political culture, c.1815–1867, Cambridge,
1993, p. 258; the whole chapter, pp. 251–91, is a useful analysis of the creation of British radical
 heroes (including Garibaldi). For a discussion of the British popular radical tradition over a longer
timespan, see J. Brewer, Party ideology and popular politics at the accession of George III,
Cambridge, 1976; J. Belchem, Orator Hunt. Henry Hunt and English working-class radicalism,
Oxford, 1985, and R. McWilliam, Popular politics in nineteenth-century England, London, 1998;
and on the influence of British thought on Mazzini, G. Monsagrati, ‘Garibaldi e il culto vittoriano
dell'eroe’, Studi Storici, 42/1, 2001, pp. 165–80.
12. J. Plunkett, Queen Victoria. First media monarch, Oxford, 2003.
13. On European exiles and their impact, see S. Freitag (ed.), Exiles from European revolutions.
Refugees in mid-Victorian England, Oxford, 2003; see also M. Isabella, ‘Exile and nationalism: the
case of the Risorgimento’, European History Quarterly, 36/4, 2006, pp 493–520.
14. See G. Claeys, ‘Mazzini, Kossuth and British radicalism, 1848–1854’, Journal of British Studies,
28/2, 1989, pp. 225–61.
15. Sarti, Mazzini, p. 116; idem, ‘La democrazia radicale: uno sguardo reciproco tra Stati Uniti e
Italia’, in M. Ridolfi (ed.), La democrazia radicale nell'ottocento europeo, Milan, 2005, pp. 140–4.
16. 24 Dec. 1846, to Enrico Mayer, in Mazzini, Scritti, 30, p. 321.
17. On Italian communities in the Americas during this period, see the general discussion in D.
Gabaccia, Italy's many diasporas, London, 2000, esp. pp. 45–52, and M. Sanfilippo,
‘Nationalisme, “italianité” et émigration aux Amériques (1830–1990)’, European Review of
History, 2, 1995, pp. 177–91. Before the arrival of Mazzinian ideas with the emigrations of 1833–
4, many Italian political exiles had made their home in Latin America. A. Scirocco, Garibaldi.
Battaglie, amori, ideali di un cittadino del mondo, Rome and Bari, 2001, pp. 29–30.
18. M. A. de Marco, Bartolomé Mitre, Buenos Aires, 1998; W. H. Katra, The Argentine generation of
1837: Echeverría, Alberdi, Sarmiento, Mitre, London, 1996; N. Shumway, The invention of
Argentina, Berkeley, CA, 1991. More generally on the development of Argentine oppositional
culture in this period, see C. A. Román, ‘Caricatura y politica en El Grito Argentino (1839) y
#ibMuera Rosas! (1841–1842)’, and E. J. Palti, ‘Rosas como enigma. La génesis de la fórmula
“civilización y barbarie”,’ both in G. Batticuore, K. Gallo, J. Myers (eds), Resonancias románticas.
Ensayos sobre historia de la cultura argentina (1820–1890), Buenos Aires, 2005, pp. 49–84.
19. See S. Candido, ‘L'azione mazziniana in Brasile ed il giornale “La Giovine Italia” di Rio de
Janeiro (1836) attraverso documenti inediti o poco noti’, Bollettino della Domus Mazziniana, 14/2,
1968, pp. 3–66; idem, ‘La “Giovine Italia” a Montevideo (1836–1842). Contributo alla storia
mazziniana nelle Americhe’, ibid., 21/1, 1975, pp. 53–76; idem, La rivoluzione riograndese nel
carteggio inedito di due giornalisti mazziniani: Luigi Rossetti e G.B. Cuneo (1837–1840).
Contributo alla storia del giornalismo politico di ispirazione italiana nei paesi latinoamericani,
Florence, 1973.
20. T. Olivari, ‘I libri di Garibaldi’, Storia e Futuro, 1, 2002, pp. 1–16, see www.storiaefuturo.com.
21. Both Mazzini and the carbonari were also influenced by Saint-Simon and the romantic socialists.
For recent reassessments of the Saint-Simonians and romantic socialism, see L. Sharp,
‘Metempsychosis and social reform: the individual and the collective in romantic socialism’,
French Historical Studies, 27/2, 2004, pp. 349–79; P. Pilbeam, ‘Dream worlds? Religion and the
early socialists in France’, Historical Journal, 43/2, 2000, pp. 499–516; J. Beecher, Charles
Fourier, Berkeley, CA, 1986, pp. 409–30; E. Berenson, Populist religion and leftwing politics in
France, 1830–52, Princeton, NJ, 1984.
22. According to two letters which Garibaldi wrote from Rio in January 1836: to Canessa on 25 Jan.
and to Mazzini on 27 Jan. In Epistolario, 1, pp. 6–10.
23. 27 Dec. 1836, to Cuneo, ibid., p. 12.
24. There is a substantial literature on Garibaldi as a ‘corsair’. See in particular S. Candido, Giuseppe
Garibaldi. Corsaro riograndese (1837–1838), Rome, 1964. Also important is R. Ugolini,
Garibaldi. Genesi di un mito, Rome, 1982, pp. 93–124, while Scirocco, Garibaldi, pp. 28–74 and
J. Ridley, Garibaldi, London, 1974, pp. 47–104 have useful accounts both of Garibaldi's activities
and of the broader context of the war between Brazil and the fledgling republic of Rio Grande do
Sul.
25. Ibid., p. 133.
26. D. McLean, ‘Garibaldi in Uruguay: a reputation reconsidered’, English Historical Review, 113,
April 1998, pp. 351–5.
27. J. Lynch, Argentine caudillo. Juan Manuel de Rosas, Wilmington, DE, 2001, pp. 83–6.
28. Ridley, Garibaldi, pp. 109, 127, 133, 140–1, 181, 201.
29. A. Saldías, Historia de la confederacíon Argentina, 9 vols, Buenos Aires, 1929, 7, pp. 20–2.
30. McLean, ‘Garibaldi’, p. 351.
31. 15 March 1846.
32. On Garibaldi in Uruguay, see McLean, ‘Garibaldi’; also Ridley, Garibaldi, pp. 94–206; Ugolini,
Garibaldi, pp. 125–41; Scirocco, Garibaldi, pp. 83–124; and S. Candido, Giuseppe Garibaldi nel
Rio della Plata, 1841–1848, Florence, 1972.
33. A. Dumas, Montevideo ou une nouvelle Troie, Paris, 1850; S. E. Pereda, Garibaldi en el Uruguay,
3 vols, Montevideo, 1914–16; idem, Los extranjeros en la guerra grande, Montevideo, 1904. On
the myth of Garibaldi in Brazil, see A. Boldrini, ‘Il mito di Garibaldi nella letteratura del Rio
Grande do Sul’, Quaderni Storiografici dell'Istituto internazionale di studi Giuseppe Garibaldi, 8,
1993, pp. 3–25.
34. Quoted in McLean, ‘Garibaldi’, pp. 360–6.
35. Ridley, Garibaldi, pp. 47–9.
36. On Sarmiento: T. Halperín Donghi et al. (eds), Sarmiento. Author of a nation, Berkeley, CA,
1994.
37. There is a large hagiographic literature on Anita, about whom comparatively little is known. For a
recent biography, see A. Valerio, Anita Garibaldi. A biography, Westport, CT, 2001.
38. Ridley, Garibaldi, pp. 139, 159.
39. On Zambeccari, see the special issue ‘Tra il Reno e la Plata: la vita di Livio Zambeccari studioso
e rivoluzionario’, M. Gavelli, F. Tarozzi and R. Vecchi (eds), Bollettino del Museo del
Risorgimento, 46, 2001.
40. D. Mack Smith, Garibaldi: A great life in brief, London, 1957, p. 19.
41. 9 March 1851, in Epistolario, 3, pp. 38–9; McLean, ‘Garibaldi’, p. 366.
42. The quotation is from D. F. Sarmiento, Facundo, La Plata, 1938, p. 59, quoted in J. Lynch,
Caudillos in Spanish America, 1800–1850, Oxford, 1992, p. 412. For the typology of the gaucho
see ibid., pp. 10–13.
43. G. Guerzoni, Garibaldi, Florence, 1882, 1, pp. 211–13. The quotations are translated in D. Mack
Smith (ed.) Garibaldi, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1960, p. 95.
44. It is not known when, or whether or not, Anita's first husband had died, or why the couple
decided to get married when they did. Ridley, Garibaldi, pp. 106–8.
45. For a discussion, see A. Filippi, ‘Simón Bolívar e la nascita delle nuove repubbliche
ispanoamericane nel pensiero politico italiano dell'Ottocento’, Pensiero Politico, 18, 1985, pp.
182–207; see also Lynch, Caudillos, pp. 6–9.
46. Gaucho culture has also been used as a social and cultural explanation for the establishment of
the ferocious dictatorships established by Rosas and others. See Lynch, Caudillos, pp. 412–16.
47. Idem, Argentine caudillo, pp. 45, 83. For a discussion of the Rosas ‘style’ and its purpose, see
ibid., pp. 44–52.
48. G. Monsagrati, ‘Garibaldi’, in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, 52, Rome, 1999, pp. 317–19.
49. 18 Oct. 1842, in Epistolario, 1, p. 43.
50. On the concept of the ‘soldier hero’ in British literature, see G. Dawson, Soldier heroes. British
adventure, empire and the imagining of nationalism, London, 1994.
51. C. Jean, ‘Garibaldi e il volontariato nel Risorgimento’, Rassegna Storica del Risorgimento, 69/4,
1982, pp. 399–419.
52. According to Lord Howden, who knew Garibaldi in Montevideo. Quoted in Mack Smith (ed.),
Garibaldi, p. 87. See also the comments of William Gore Ouseley, who knew Garibaldi during the
same period, ibid., p. 93.
53. E. Feraboli, ‘Il primo esilio di Garibaldi in America, 1833–1848’, Rassegna Storica del
Risorgimento, 19/2, 1932, p. 264.
54. H. F. Winnington-Ingram, Hearts of oak, London, 1889, p. 93.
55. Ibid.
56. Feraboli, ‘Il primo esilio’, pp. 264, 266.
57. In MRG, there are two paintings of Garibaldi from 1841 and 1842, and another, executed by
Gaetano Gallino in Genoa in 1848.
58. From Gaçeta Mercantil 13 July 1843; British Packet and Argentine News 2 Jan. 1846, Ridley,
Garibaldi, pp. 125, 148, 167, 180, 191, 217; Scirocco, Garibaldi, p. 126.
59. Ridley, Garibaldi, p. 167.
60. The Times, 1 Jan. 1845, ‘Seizure of the Argentine squadron’; Ridley, Garibaldi, p. 181.
61. The emphasis is Mazzini's, to Cuneo, on 20 Oct. 1846, in Scritti, 30, p. 235.
62. Both Cuneo's letter and Mazzini's reply (8 Aug. 1841) are in Scritti, 23, pp. 274–82.
63. To his mother, 4 Oct. 1842, ibid., pp. 290–1. Garibaldi is almost always referred to as coming
from Genoa rather than Nice in this early correspondence.
64. On which see Saldías, Historia, 6, p. 18.
65. To his mother, 19 Nov. 1842, Scritti, 23, pp. 335.
66. 9 May 1845, ibid., 27, pp. 274–9.
67. 7 Oct. 1842, ibid., 23, p. 293.
68. 25 Nov. 1842.
69. 22 June 1845, Scritti, 28, p. 36; 23 Dec. 1845, ibid., p. 240.
70. ‘The Italian legion in the service of Montevideo’, The Times, 30 Jan. 1846; on his efforts to
circulate the pamphlet in Europe, see Scirocco, Garibaldi, p. 130.
71. 2 Oct. 1846, Scritti, 30, p. 199.
72. The text of the letter is in Scritti e discorsi, 1, pp. 79–81.
73. 6 Oct. 1846, Scritti, 30, pp. 208–9.
74. On this period of Pius IX's Papacy, see O. Chadwick, A history of the Popes, 1830–1914, Oxford,
1998, pp. 61–77.
75. 20 Oct. 1846, Scritti, 30, pp. 238–9.
76. On Turchetti's speech, see the note to Mazzini's letter to Lamberti of 18 Oct. 1846, ibid., p. 231.
77. The book was published in Livorno (a town well known for its liberal leanings), in 1846. On
Cesare de Laugier, see N. D. Vasoli, ‘Cesare de Laugier e la figura dell'eroe militare italiano tra
l'età napoleonica e la prima guerra d'indipendenza’, in J. Joly (ed.), Mythes et figures de l'héroisme
militare dans l'Italie du Risorgimento, Caen, 1982, pp. 37–49.
78. On the spread of publications and interest in Garibaldi see Scirocco, Garibaldi, p. 133.
79. F. de Boni, Così la penso. Cronaca, 1, Lugano, 1846, pp. 367, 369, 370 (the whole article was
some twenty pages long, and is at pp. 365–84).
80. The text of the circular is in Feraboli, ‘Il primo esilio’, p. 270.
81. Ibid.
82. See the series of letters from Mazzini in November and December in Scritti, 30, pp. 272, 278,
312, 318–20, 279, 300, 308.
83. Scirocco, Garibaldi, p. 133.
84. Mack Smith, Mazzini, p. 157, describes Harro-Harring as ‘slightly unbalanced’. See also the
exchange of letters between Cuneo and Mazzini in which Harro-Harring's name is mentioned as
the contact, 8 Aug. 1841 and 18 March 1842, in Scritti, 23, pp. 277, 286–97.
85. P. Harro-Harring, Dolores. A historical novel. With an introduction to Mazzini, New York and
London, 3rd edn, 1853, p. 95.
86. Ibid., pp. 100–2.
87. A. Galante Garrone, ‘I giornali della restaurazione’, in idem and F. della Peruta, La stampa
italiana del Risorgimento, Bari, 1976, p. 233.
88. 13 April 1847, in Scritti, 30, p. 108.
89. Cuneo's account is in nos 9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 and 16, and reprinted in G. B. Cuneo, Biografia di
Giuseppe Garibaldi, Rome, 1932 edn.
90. Ibid., pp. 72, 88.
91. Ibid., pp. 71–3, 81, 83, 85–8.
92. 6 May 1847, ‘The River Plate’.
93. L. Mariotti [pseud. of A. Gallenga], Latest news from Italy, London, 1847, pp. 13–14. On
Gallenga's relations with Mazzini, see T. Cerruti, Antonio Gallenga. An Italian writer in Victorian
England, Oxford, 1974, pp. 100–8.
94. A. Viarengo, ‘Mito e politica. Lorenzo Valerio e Giuseppe Garibaldi’, in A. Trova and G. Zichi
(eds), Cattaneo e Garibaldi. Federalismo e Mezzogiorno, Rome, 2004, pp. 271–300; also
Scirocco, Garibaldi, pp. 134–5.
95. Garibaldi's letter, dated 8 Aug. 1847, is in Epistolario, 1, pp. 239–41, and published in
Concordia, 5 Jan. 1848.
96. G. Bertoldi, Alla legione Italiana in Montevideo ed al colonello Giuseppe Garibaldi, Lugano,
1847; on the pamphlet, see Valerio's letters to Giacomo Ciani, 14 April, 5 May, 12 May 1847, in L.
Valerio, Carteggio (1825–1865), vol II (1842–47), ed. A. Viarengo, Turin, 1994, pp. 449, 458, 460.
97. La Patria, 28 Oct. 1847.
98. To Cuneo, 13 April 1847, Scritti, 32, p. 109; to Medici, 7 Nov. 1847, ibid., 33, p. 52. On the
English-based National Fund, see Mack Smith, Mazzini, pp. 54–5.
99. Pereda, Garibaldi en el Uruguay, p. 15. For a discussion of this early portrait, see Garibaldi. Arte
e storia, 2 vols, Florence, 1982, 1, p. 58.
100. In MCRR, and published ibid., cat. II, 28, p. 27.
101. 5 Feb. 1848.
102. To Lamberti, 29 Jan. 1847, Scritti, 32, pp. 31–2; to Foresti, ibid., 33, pp. 106–7.
103. 12 Oct. 1847, in Epistolario, 1, p. 245.
104. For details of Garibaldi's last year in Montevideo, see Ridley, Garibaldi, pp. 224–33, and
McLean, ‘Garibaldi’, pp. 363–6.
105. On the concept of bricolage applied to the ‘opportunistic appropriations’ of Napoleonic
propaganda, see C. Prendegast, Napoleon and history painting. Antoine-Jean Gros's La bataille
d'Eylau, Oxford, 1997, pp. 8, 32, 78.
106. See A. Lyttelton, ‘Creating a national past: history, myth and image in the Risorgimento’, in A.
Russell Ascoli and K. von Henneberg (eds), Making and remaking Italy. The cultivation of
national identity around the Risorgimento, Oxford, 2001, pp. 33, 36.

Chapter 3: Revolution
1. L. Hunt, The family romance of the French Revolution, London, 1992, esp. pp. 17–52.
2. F. Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, Cambridge, 1981, pp. 46–7.
3. M. Agulhon, Marianne into battle. Republican imagery and symbolism in France, 1789–1880,
Cambridge, 1981, pp. 13, 16.
4. L. Hunt, Politics, culture, and class in the French Revolution, London, 1986, pp. 54, 72–83.
5. M. Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution, Cambridge, MA, 1988, esp. pp. 8–11; see also
foreword by Lynn Hunt, pp. xi–xii.
6. On Hercules, see Hunt, Politics, pp. 94–113; on the lion and on Marianne, see Agulhon, Marianne,
pp. 14–32.
7. Furet, Interpreting, p. 48. See also the discussion in Hunt, Politics, esp. pp. 11–15, 24 and for a
critical analysis, R. Spang, ‘Paradigm and paranoia: how modern is the French Revolution?’,
American Historical Review, 108/1, 2003, pp. 119–47.
8. A. Soboul, ‘Religious feeling and popular cults during the French Revolution: “patriot saints” and
martyrs for liberty’, in S. Wilson (ed.), Saints and their cults. Studies in religious sociology,
folklore and history, Cambridge, 1983, pp. 217–32; A. Potts, ‘Images of ideal manhood in the
French revolution’, History Workshop Journal, 30, 1990, pp. 1–21 (on Bara).
9. Soboul, ‘Religious feeling’, pp. 221–9, Ozouf, Festivals, pp. 262–7.
10. Potts, ‘Images’, esp. pp. 1–6. For a discussion of the relationship between the classical revival
promoted by Johann Joachim Winckelmann and revolutionary art and politics see G. Mosse, The
image of man. The creation of modern masculinity, Oxford, 1996, pp. 28–39; A. Potts, Flesh and
the ideal. Winckelmann and the origins of art history, New Haven, CT, 1994; and H. Honour, Neo-
classicism, London, 1977 edn, pp. 69–80.
11. T. Crow, ‘Patriotism and virtue: David to the Young Ingres’, in S. F. Eisenmann, Nineteenth-
century art. A critical history, London, 2002 edn, pp. 18–23, 26–38.
12. D. Outram, The body and the French Revolution. Sex, class and political culture, New Haven,
CT, and London, 1989, pp. 78–9.
13. Ibid., p. 82, author's emphasis. For a more detailed discussion see J. B. Landes, ‘Republican
citizenship and heterosocial desire: concepts of masculinity in revolutionary France’, in S. Dudink
et al. (eds), Masculinities in politics and war. Gendering modern history, Manchester, 2004.
14. Hunt, The family romance, p 81, see also pp. 28–42, 53–75.
15. On Napoleon and history, see A. Jourdan, Napoléon. Héros, imperator, mécène, Paris, 1998. See
also the discussion of Napoleon's use of the arts in N. Petiteau, Napoléon, de la mythologie à
l'histoire, Paris, 1999.
16. P. G. Dwyer, ‘Napoleon Bonaparte as hero and saviour’, French History, 18/4, 2004, p. 385.
17. Mosse, The image, p. 7.
18. Ibid., p. 51.
19. Ibid., p. 6.
20. G. Mosse, Nationalism and sexuality. Middle-class morality and sexual norms in modern Europe,
Madison, WI, 1985, p. 16.
21. K. Hagemann, ‘A valorous Volk family: The nation, the military, and the gender order in Prussia
in the time of the Anti-Napoleonic wars, 1806–15’, in I. Blom et al. (eds), Gendered nations.
Nationalisms and gender order in the long nineteenth century, Oxford, 2000, pp. 186–91.
22. Mosse, Nationalism and sexuality, pp. 50–3. See also Potts, ‘Images’, pp. 4, 15, and for the
twentieth century, A. Caesar, Taking it like a man. Suffering, sexuality and the war poets,
Manchester, 1993, pp. 1–3.
23. T. Carlyle, On heroes, hero-worship and the heroic in history, Lincoln, NB, and London, 1966
(1841), esp. pp. 12–13, 198–9.
24. On military heroes, see J. MacKenzie, ‘Heroic myths of Empire’, in idem (ed.), Popular
imperialism and the military, 1850–1950, Manchester, 1992, pp. 109–38. On Napoleon's image in
Britain, see S. Semmel, Napoleon and the British, New Haven, CT, and London, 2004, and S.
Bainbridge, Napoleon and English Romanticism, Cambridge, 1995, and on other celebrity cults,
below pp. 130–2, 134–5.
25. L. Mascilli Migliorini, Il mito dell'eroe, Naples, 1984, pp. 10–15, 148–9.
26. Both quoted in C. Crossley, French historians and romanticism. Thierry, Guizot, the Saint-
Simonians, Quinet, Michelet, London, 1993, pp. 55, 230.
27. B. Schwartz, George Washington. The making of an American symbol, New York, 1987, pp. 50,
179. Of course this model too was beset by political tensions: I am referring here to an ideal type.
28. Scritti, 29, pp. 92–4.
29. See above, pp. 24–6.
30. Adrian Lyttelton, ‘Creating a national past: history, myth and image in the Risorgimento’, in A. R.
Oscoli and K. von Henneberg (eds), Making and remaking Italy. The cultivation of national
identity around the Risorgimento, Oxford, 2001, pp. 31, 33.
31. Honour, Neo-classicism, pp. 184–90; T. Crow, ‘Classicism in crisis: Gros to Delacroix’, in
Nineteenth-century art, pp. 55–81.
32. On Byron and the ‘anti-heroes’ of romanticism, see M. Praz, The romantic agony, London, 1933,
pp. 58–69.
33. W. Scott, Rob Roy, Boston, MA, 1956 (1817), pp. xxxiv, 218, 285, 300. See also the comments of
A. Welsh, The hero of the Waverley novels, Princeton, NJ, 1992 edn, pp. 40–8.
34. Scott, Rob Roy, pp. 296, 305, 308–9, 354.
35. Lyttelton, ‘Creating a national past’, pp. 33.
36. Ibid., p. 36.
37. Ibid.
38. J. Farr, ‘Understanding conceptual change politically’, in T. Ball et al. (eds), Political innovation
and conceptual change, Cambridge, 1989, pp. 24–49.
39. J. Tulard, Napoleon. The myth of the saviour, London, 1985; see also R. Gildea, The past in
French history, New Haven, CT, 1996, pp. 89–111 and S. Hazareesingh, The legend of Napoleon,
London, 1994.
40. Lyttelton, ‘Creating a national past’, p. 29; see also pp. 46–61.
41. C. Jean, ‘Garibaldi e il volontariato italiano nel Risorgimento’, Rassegna Storica del
Risorgimento, 64/2, 1982, pp. 401–3; C. Cesari, Corpi volontari italiani dal 1848 al 1870, Rome,
1921, pp. 1–84.
42. There is a vast literature on the 1848–9 revolutions; the best and most up-to-date general survey
in English is J. Sperber, The European revolutions, 1848–1851, Cambridge, 1994.
43. See Scritti, 35, pp. 140–1.
44. Both reports are reprinted in A. Cavaciocchi, ‘Le prime gesta di Garibaldi in Italia’, Rivista
Militare Italiana, 6, 1907, pp. 5–87.
45. L'Italia del Popolo, 28 June 1848.
46. Scritti e discorsi, 1, pp. 87–8.
47. 11 July and 15 July 1848, in Scritti, 35, p. 248.
48. D. Mack Smith, Mazzini, London, 1994, pp. 58–9.
49. R. Sarti, Mazzini. A life for the religion of politics, Westport, CT, 1997, pp. 132–3.
50. 2 July and 8 July, 1848, in Scritti, 35, pp. 239, 246.
51. J. Ridley, Garibaldi, London, 1974, pp. 242–3.
52. D. Laven, ‘The age of restoration’, in J. A. Davis (ed.), Italy in the nineteenth century, Oxford,
2000, pp. 67–9.
53. Mack Smith, Mazzini, p. 62; on ‘the first war of independence’ in 1848, see P. Pieri, Storia
militare del Risorgimento. Guerre e insurrezioni, Turin, 1962, pp. 197–263.
54. Scritti, 35, p. 260.
55. 27 July 1848, in Scritti e discorsi, 1, pp. 89–90.
56. Its printed programme is reproduced in Edizione nazionale degli scritti di Garibaldi, vol. 1. Le
memorie di Garibaldi in una delle redazioni anteriori alla definitiva del 1872, Bologna, 1932, pp.
80–1.
57. 31 July 1848.
58. There is a useful chapter in Ridley, Garibaldi, pp. 243–54, on the 1848 campaign. See also, P.
Pieri, Storia militare del Risorgimento, Turin, 1962, pp. 337–43 and Garibaldi condottiero, Rome,
1932, pp. 63–85. Both Cavaciocchi, ‘Le prime gesta’, and L. Giampolo and M. Bertolone, La
prima campagna di Garibaldi in Italia (da Luino a Morazzone) e gli avvenimenti militari e politici
nel Varesotto 1848–1849, Varese, 1950, have an extensive selection of original documents relating
to Garibaldi in 1848 (the latter includes correspondence of the Austrian army).
59. 13 Aug. 1848, the communal clerk of Castelletto Ticino to the governor of Novara, in
Cavaciocchi, ‘Le prime gesta’, p. 20.
60. See ibid., esp. pp. 35–8, 48–50; Giampolo and Bertolone, La prima campagna, pp. 313–49.
61. Giampolo and Bertolone, La prima campagna, p. 348.
62. The protesta is in Scritti, 38, pp. 207–9. ‘Agli Italiani’ is also published in F. della Peruta (ed.),
Giuseppe Mazzini, Scritti politici, 3 vols, Turin, 1976, 2, pp. 314–19.
63. In Scritti, 39, pp. 3–70.
64. Scritti e discorsi, 1, pp. 92–4.
65. Ridley, Garibaldi, p. 246; Giampolo and Bertolone, La prima campagna, p. 317 has a copy of the
manifesto conserved in the Kriegs Archiv, Vienna.
66. G. Candeloro, Storia dell'Italia moderna, 3. La rivoluzione nazionale, 1848–49, Milan, 1960, pp.
271–343.
67. 27 July 1848, in Scritti e discorsi, 1, pp. 89–90.
68. 3 Aug. 1848, ibid., pp. 90–2.
69. See P. Brunello, ‘Pontida’, in M. Isnenghi (ed.), I luoghi della memoria. Simboli e miti dell'Italia
unita, Rome and Bari, 1996, pp. 15–28 and Lyttelton, ‘Creating a national past’, pp. 46–50.
70. Pieri, Storia militare, p. 331.
71. 11 Sept. 1848, republished in Scritti, 35, p. 321.
72. 9 Sept. 1848, to the minister of war and navy, Cavaciocchi, ‘Le prime gesta’, pp. 81–2.
73. Scritti, 37, pp. 33–5. Garibaldi's speeches in Nice and Oneglia are in Scritti e discorsi, 1, pp. 95–
6.
74. 28 Sept. 1848, from the military commander of San Remo to the governor of Nice, in
Cavaciocchi, ‘Le prime gesta’, pp. 82–3.
75. Sperber, The European revolutions, p. 1.
76. Ibid., p. 148.
77. Ibid., p. 165. There is a substantial literature on the process of politicisation in the 1848–9
revolutions: see especially M. Agulhon, The republic in the village: the people of the Var from the
French Revolution to the Second Republic, Cambridge 1982; P. McPhee, The politics of rural life.
Political mobilisation in the French countryside, 1846–1952, Oxford, 1992; and J. Sperber,
Rhineland radicals: the democratic movement and the revolution of 1848–1849, Princeton, NJ,
1991.
78. On newspapers in 1848–9, see F. della Peruta, ‘Il giornalismo dal 1847 all'Unità’, in A. Galante
Garrone and F. della Peruta, La stampa italiana del Risorgimento, Rome and Bari, 1979, pp. 331–
465.
79. S. La Salvia, ‘Nuove forme della politica: l'opera dei circoli popolari’, Rassegna Storica del
Risorgimento, 86, 1999, pp. 227–66; R. de Longis, ‘Tra sfera pubblica e difesa dell'onore. Donne
nella Roma del 1849’, Roma Moderna e Contemporanea, 9/1–3, 2001, pp. 263–83; R. Balzani,
‘Consenso “patriottico” o consenso “repubblicano”? La Repubblica Romana a Forlì’, in S.
Mattarelli (ed.), Politica in periferia. La Repubblica Romana del 1848 fra modello francese e
municipalità romagnola, Ravenna, 1999, pp. 11–27; F. Rizzi, La coccarda e le campane. Comunità
rurali e Repubblica Romana nel Lazio (1848–1849), Milan, 1989; A. de Clementi, Vivere nel
latifondo. Le comunità della campagna laziale fra ‘700 e ‘800, Milan, 1989, pp. 167–87.
80. Della Peruta, ‘Il giornalismo’, p. 421.
81. F. Fonzi, ‘I giornali romani del 1849’, Archivio della Società Romana di Storia Patria, 72, 1949,
pp. 197–220.
82. Sarti, Mazzini, pp. 137–40.
83. H. Hearder, ‘The making of the Roman Republic, 1848–49’, History, 60, 1975, p. 171.
84. L. Naste, Le feste civili a Roma nell'Ottocento, Rome, 1994; C. Tacke, ‘Feste der Revolution in
Deutschland und Italien’, in D. Dowe, H.-G. Haupt and D. Langewiesche (eds), Europa 1848.
Revolution und Reform, Bonn, 1998, pp. 1045–88.
85. A. M. Ghisalberti, ‘Il marzo romano di Mazzini’, in idem, Momenti e figure del Risorgimento
romano, Milan, 1965, pp. 149–50. On the broader international and historical significance of
Rome, see C. Edwards (ed.), Roman presences: receptions of Rome in European culture, 1789–
1945, Cambridge, 1999; N. Vance, The Victorians and ancient Rome, Oxford, 1997; W. L. Vance,
America's Rome, 2 vols, New Haven, CT, and London, 1989.
86. Ghisalberti, ‘Il marzo romano’, pp. 146–7, 156–8, 174–9.
87. Mack Smith, Mazzini, pp. 67–9; the description of the festival (‘Very queer you will say; but it
was really fine’) is in a letter of 23 April 1849, in A. H. Clough, The poems and prose remains of
Arthur Clough with a selection from his letters and a memoir, 2 vols, London, 1869, 1, pp. 143–4.
88. Some historians argue that the years 1848–9 are the real watershed in Church–state relations in
Italy, rather than the later date of 1870 (when Rome became the capital of united Italy): G. Battelli,
 ‘Santa Sede e vescovi nell stato unitario. Dal secondo ottocento ai primi anni della Repubblica’,
Storia d'Italia. Annali. La chiesa e il potere politico, Turin, 1986, pp. 809–10.
89. Rizzi, La coccarda; see also D. Demarco, Una rivoluzione sociale. La repubblica romana del
1849, Naples, 1944; N. Roncalli, Cronaca di Roma, 1848–1870, 2 vols, Rome, 1997, 2, esp. pp. 9–
22.
90. Mack Smith, Mazzini, pp. 69–70. The origin of the phrase is not entirely clear, and great capital
was made of it by the nationalists after they had beaten the French. See G. Belardelli, ‘Gli Italiani
non si battono’, in idem et al., Miti e storia dell'Italia unita, Bologna, 1999, pp. 63–9.
91. Clough, The poems, 1, pp. 143–4.
92. Vance, America's Rome, 2, p. 132; H. James, William Wetmore Story and his friends, Boston,
MA, 1903, p. 157.
93. In Scritti, 40, p. 75.
94. Ibid., p. 73.
95. Sarti, Mazzini, pp. 144–5.
96. G. M. Trevelyan, Garibaldi's defence of the Roman Republic, London, 1907, p. 2.
97. On the European-wide wave of repression against the radical governments of 1849, see Sperber,
The European revolutions, pp. 225–36.
98. 9 May 1849, published in M. Castelli, Il Conte di Cavour. Ricordi, Turin and Naples, 1886, p.
132.
99. According to The Times, 18 June 1849.
100. P. Vermeylen, Les Idées politiques et sociales de George Sand, Brussels, 1984, pp. 149–50.
101. 27 May 1849, reprinted in A. B. Fuller (ed.), At home and abroad. Or things and thoughts in
America and Europe, Boston, MA, 1874, p. 382.
102. Vance, America's Rome, 2, pp. 128–9. See also T. Roberts, ‘The United States and the European
revolutions of 1848’, in G. Thomson (ed.), The European revolutions of 1848 and the Americas,
London, 2002, pp. 88–9.
103. 24 May 1849.
104. On this popular Parisian theatre, famous for its melodramas, see J. McCormick, Popular theatre
in nineteenth-century France, London, 1993.
105. 30 Sept. 1849, to Lorenzo Valerio, in Carteggio di Lorenzo Valerio (1825–1865), 4 (1849), ed.
A. Viarengo, Turin, 1994, p. 348.
106. C. Bouneau, ‘Opinion publique parisienne et question romaine, novembre 1848–novembre
1849’, Université de Paris, I, Centre de Recherches en Histoire du XIXe Siècle, Mémoire de
Maîtrise, 1982, pp. 311–21.
107. Roncalli, Cronaca, pp. 232–4.
108. 25 Oct. 1848, Scritti, 37, p. 83; see also Mazzini's letters to Emilie Hawkes, 15 Nov. 1848, and
to George Sand, 16 Nov. 1848, ibid., pp. 118–25; 127–30.
109. On Sterbini's comment, see Roncalli, Cronaca, p. 84; in general, see Ridley, Garibaldi, pp. 256–
62.
110. 27 March 1849, in Epistolario, 2, p. 116.
111. 19 April 1849, in D. Mack Smith (ed.), Garibaldi, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1969, p. 20; also in
Epistolario, 2, p. 144.
112. 22 April 1849 and 1 May 1849, ibid., pp. 147, 152.
113. On the agitation in Paris, see J. Beecher, Victor Considerant and the rise and fall of French
socialism, Berkeley, 2001, pp. 246–9.
114. Trevelyan, Garibaldi's defence, p. 187.
115. According to the eyewitness Gabussi, in Mack Smith (ed.), Garibaldi, p. 21.
116. Various estimates are given in Trevelyan, Garibaldi's defence, pp. 342–3, and Trevelyan's book
still remains one of the most complete accounts of the fighting for Rome. See also Ridley,
Garibaldi, pp. 270–307, and there is a shorter account in D. Mack Smith, Garibaldi. A great life in
brief, London, 1957, pp. 43–52.
117. The Lady's Newspaper, 19 May 1849.
118. 24 Feb. 1849, in Scritti e discorsi, 1, p. 111.
119. 30 Oct. 1848, ibid., p. 98.
120. 30 Oct., 3 Nov., 12 Nov., 20 Nov. 1848, ibid., pp. 97–103.
121. 18 Oct., 30 Oct., 12 Nov. 1848, 24 Feb., 20 May 1849, ibid., pp. 97–8, 103, 111, 127.
122. 3 June 1849, ibid., p. 136.
123. 11 June 1849, ibid., p. 139. For an analysis of this and the previous speech, see M. Isnenghi, Le
guerre degli italiani, Milan, 1989, pp. 55–6.
124. There are two versions in Scritti e discorsi, 1, pp. 147–8; see also Trevelyan, Garibaldi's
defence, pp. 231–2, who gives another version and refers to other variants and their sources.
125. B. Mitre, Ricordi dell'assedio di Montevideo (1843–1851), Florence, 1882, p. 13; G. von
Hoffstetter, Giornale delle cose di Roma nel 1851, Turin, 1851, p. 29.
126. La Concordia, 24 July 1849; the ordine del giorno of 4 July is in Roncalli, Cronaca, p. 197.
127. Ibid., pp. 190–1.
128. See Isnenghi, Le guerre, pp. 12–16; Winston Churchill's words in his famous speech to the
House of Commons on 13 May 1940: ‘I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat’ were
seemingly borrowed from Garibaldi.
129. For a discussion of personal appearance as political sign, relating to the French Revolution, see
R. Wrigley, The politics of appearance. The symbolism and representation of dress in
 revolutionary France, Oxford, 2002; also Hunt, Politics, p. 53 and idem, The family romance, pp.
76–82.
130. M. Bonsanti, ‘Una generazione democratica: amore familiare, amore romantico e amor di
patria’, in A. M. Banti and P. Ginsborg (eds), Il Risorgimento, Turin, forthcoming.
131. Quoted in Trevelyan, Garibaldi's defence, p. 119.
132. J. P. Koelman, Memorie romane, 2 vols, Rome, 1963, p. 245.
133. Von Hofstetter, Giornale, pp. 28–9.
134. Koelman, Memorie, pp. 245–6.
135. Von Hofstetter, Giornale, pp. 29; Koelman, Memorie, p. 331.
136. Von Hofstetter, Giornale, pp. 327, 355.
137. Ibid., pp. 32–3.
138. E. Dandolo, I volontari ed i bersaglieri lombardi, Turin, 1849, pp. 176–7.
139. Della Peruta, ‘Il giornalismo’, p. 426; Vance, America's Rome, p. 127.
140. 16 May, 29 May 1849.
141. 18 May, 21 May 1849.
142. 31 July, 21 Aug. 1849.
143. The Illustrated London News, 19 May 1849; The Lady's Newspaper and Pictorial Times, 19
May 1849; L'Illustration. Journal universel, 26 May 1849; Il Mondo Illustrato, 5 Feb. 1848.
144. 21 July 1849.
145. 23 June, 7 July, 14 July 1849.
146. Fuller, At home; the comment about Mazzini is on 20 March, p. 367, and the letter describing
the departure of Garibaldi and his men, on 6 July 1849, pp. 413–14.
147. Garibaldi. Arte e Storia, 2 vols, Florence, 1982, 1, cat II, 7. 1–4.
148. Quoted in P. Gut, ‘Garibaldi et la France, 1848–1882. Naissance d'un mythe’, Rassegna Storica
del Risorgimento, 74/3, 1987, pp. 299–300. The ‘petit caporal’ refers to Napoleon.
149. 12 May, 16 May, 24 May, 29 May, 14 July 1849.
150. Mack Smith, Mazzini, p. 69.
151. F. della Peruta, ‘Le teorie militari della democrazia risorgimentale’, in F. Mazzonis (ed.),
Garibaldi condottiero. Storia, teoria, prassi, Milan, 1984, p. 73.
152. Ibid., pp. 72–9; Jean, ‘Garibaldi e il volontariato’, pp. 404–5; L. Riall, ‘Eroi maschili, virilità e
forme della guerra’, in Banti and Ginsborg (eds), Il Risorgimento.
153. Trevelyan, Garibaldi's defence, p. 3.
154. Sperber, The European revolutions, p. 151.
155. See the discussion in N. Moe, The view from Vesuvius. Italian culture and the Southern
Question, Berkeley, CA, 2002, pp. 2–3, 16–19.
156. For a discussion, see P. Ginsborg, Daniele Manin and the Venetian revolution of 1848–49,
Cambridge, 1979.
157. Ibid., p. 376.
158. For an attempt to link some of Garibaldi's subsequent political actions to his personal loss, see
D. Pick, Rome or Death. The obsessions of General Garibaldi, London, 2005.

Chapter 4: Exile
1. Quoted in J. Ridley, Garibaldi, London, 1974, p. 336, emphasis in the original.
2. On the legend which grew up around Casa Guelfi, and especially the ‘relic’ made from the cigar
smoked by Garibaldi, see G. Guelfi, Il sigaro di Garibaldi, Genoa, 1992.
3. On Garibaldi's escape from the Austrians across the Apennines, the most detailed source is G. M.
Trevelyan, Garibaldi's defence of the Roman Republic, London, 1907, pp. 288–321.
4. All these reports are also summarised in The Times, 17,18, 22, 23, 29 Aug. and 17 Sept. 1849.
5. 5 Sept. 1849, in C. di Biase, L'arresto di Garibaldi nel settembre 1849, Florence, 1941, pp. 76–7.
6. Ibid., p. 76.
7. 5 and 6 Sept. 1849, ibid., pp. 75, 82.
8. 6 Sept. 1849, ibid., pp. 79–81.
9. 7 Sept. 1849, from Captain Basso, ibid., p. 88.
10. 7 Sept. 1849, from Major Ceva di Nuceto, ibid., p. 90.
11. 11 and 17 Sept. 1849; also reported in The Times, 19 and 24 Sept. 1849.
12. 7 Sept. 1859, in Epistolario, 2, p. 197.
13. 5, 6 and 7 Sept. 1849, in Di Biase, L'arresto, pp. 75, 84, 91.
14. 8 Sept. 1849, from La Marmora, ibid., pp. 94–6.
15. 6 and 8 Sept. 1849, pp. 82, 87–8.
16. 13 Sept. 1849, in Di Biase, L'arresto, p. 116.
17. H. Nelson Gay, ‘Il secondo esilio di Garibaldi (1849–1854)’, in idem, Scritti sul Risorgimento,
Rome, 1937, p. 196.
18. 8 and 15 Sept. 1849, in Di Biase, L'arresto, pp. 96, 118.
19. See the correspondence of 6, 7, 10 and 15 Sept. 1849, ibid., pp. 79, 100–3, 107, 117.
20. 22 Sept. 1849, ibid., p. 85.
21. As reported in The Times, 20 Sept. 1849.
22. 7 and 10 Sept. 1849.
23. Atti del parlamento subalpino. Camera dei deputati. Discussione, 10 Sept. 1849, p. 375.
24. Ibid., p. 379.
25. 11 Sept. 1849; this letter was also reported in The Times of 17 Sept. and, according to Di Biase,
L'arresto, p. 121, a whole series of versions of this letter exist, suggesting that it was widely
 circulated.
26. Atti del parlamento, pp. 375, 382–3.
27. See Valerio's letter of 10 Sept. 1849, in Di Biase, L'arresto, pp. 105–6, and the coverage in The
Times, 17 Sept. 1849.
28. Ridley, Garibaldi, pp. 346–7.
29. La Gazzetta di Milano, 15 Sept. 1849.
30. 21 Sept. 1849, from the Piedmontese consul in Tunis, in Di Biase, L'arresto, p. 126.
31. On Garibaldi's movements in 1849–50, see Ridley, Garibaldi, pp. 347–57 and Gay, ‘Il secondo
esilio’, pp. 197–205. The main source for his time in Morocco is D. Guerrini, ‘Giuseppe Garibaldi
da Genova a Tangeri (1849)’, Risorgimento Italiano, Rivista Storica, 1/4, 1908, pp. 588–607.
32. 27 Dec. 1849.
33. 14 Oct and 10 Nov. 1849, Epistolario, 2, pp. 205, 209; ibid., 3, pp. 11, 20. On Garibaldi's
memoirs, see below, pp. 154–61.
34. See his letter to his cousin, Augusto, 12 Jan. 1850; to the American consul in Tangier, 22 Feb.
1850; and others to Francesco Carpeneto, 7 May and 22–23 June 1850, ibid., pp. 3–4, 6–7, 15–16,
22–3; see also Gay, ‘Il secondo esilio’, p. 203.
35. 8 Aug. 1850.
36. 29 June 1850.
37. 6 July 1850.
38. Tribune, 26, 27 and 29 July 1850.
39. H. R. Marraro, American opinion on the unification of Italy, 1846–1861, New York, 1932, pp.
165–6.
40. Tribune and Herald, 29 July 1850.
41. D. S. Spencer, Louis Kossuth and Young America. A study of sectionalism and foreign policy,
1848–1852, Columbia and London, 1977, pp. vii, 7.
42. Ibid., pp. 7–9, 121–4; T. Roberts, ‘The United States and the European revolutions of 1848’, in G.
Thompson (ed.), The European revolutions of 1848 and the Americas, London, 2002, p. 93; Gay,
‘Il secondo esilio’, p. 206.
43. Marraro, American opinion, p. 207.
44. Ibid., pp. 169–71; on Gavazzi, see L. Santini, Alessandro Gavazzi, Modena, 1955.
45. Roberts, ‘The United States’, p. 77.
46. Tribune, Herald, Evening Post, 8 Aug. 1850 (the letter is dated 7 Aug.); La Concordia, 2 Sept.; Il
Repubblicano della Svizzera Italiana, 5 Sept. The Italian version of the letter is published in
Epistolario, 3, pp. 27–8.
47. ‘Next to the oven there is an almost Cuban heat’, to Eliodoro Specchi, 10 Feb. 1851, ibid., p. 36.
48. Ridley, Garibaldi, pp. 360–5; Gay, ‘Il secondo esilio’, pp. 207–11.
49. See his series of letters to Carpaneto, 12 and 23 Aug. and 7 Sept, and to Carpenetti, 11 Sept.
1850, in Epistolario, 3, pp. 28–9, 31–3; and the letter from Foresti in Gay, ‘Il secondo esilio’, pp.
207–9.
50. Herald, 27 Aug. 1850.
51. Tribune, 8 Aug. 1850; see also 17 Feb. 1851.
52. Quoted in Gay, ‘Il secondo esilio’, p. 209.
53. Garibaldi's other American publicist, Margaret Fuller, had died in a shipwreck off Long Island in
early 1850, returning to the USA with her husband and child.
54. Tuckerman also published his impressions of Garibaldi: see his anonymous article ‘Garibaldi’ in
North American Review, 92, 1861, pp. 15–56.
55. G. Spini, Risorgimento e Protestanti, Naples, 1956, pp. 323–5.
56. W. L. Vance, America's Rome, 2. Catholic and contemporary Rome, New Haven, CT, 1989, pp.
135–8.
57. T. Dwight, The Roman Republic of 1849; with accounts of the Inquisition and the siege of Rome,
New York, 1851, pp. 93–4.
58. Vance, America's Rome, 2, pp. 137–8.
59. Dwight, The Roman Republic, pp. 94, 96, 197.
60. In fact, remarkably little is known about this period of his life. One firsthand account exists: E.
Reta, ‘Ricordi del viaggio di centro America’, which includes a pencil sketch of Garibaldi, in
MRG.
61. See Scritti, 47, 14 and 25 Nov. 1851, pp. 87–9, 116; see also D. Mack Smith, Mazzini, London,
1994, p. 80.
62. Ridley, Garibaldi, pp. 365–73; Gay, ‘Il secondo esilio’, pp. 211–12.
63. Tribune, 30 April 1850; Gay, ‘Il secondo esilio’, p. 212.
64. Ridley, Garibaldi, pp. 373–4.
65. 19 Sept. 1853, in Epistolario, 3, p. 51.
66. 21 Sept.1853, ibid., p. 53.
67. 19, 21, 22 Sept 1853, ibid., pp. 51, 53, 55–6.
68. To Carpaneto, 12 Aug. 1850, ibid., p. 28.
69. Evening Post, 28 June 1859; Marraro, American opinion, pp. 166–8.
70. See his letter of 7 Aug. 1850, and his letter to L. J. Cist, 23 Aug. 1850, Epistolario, 3, p. 31.
71. Tuckerman, ‘Garibaldi’, p. 34.
72. Spencer, Louis Kossuth, pp. 145–70; Roberts, ‘The United States’, pp. 94–7.
73. Marraro, American opinion, pp. 170–3.
74. Tribune, 8 Aug. 1850 and 28 April 1851; Herald, 27 Aug. 1850; Evening Post, 28 June 1859;
Dwight, The Roman Republic, p. 94.
75. For a discussion, see M. S. Miller, ‘Rivoluzione e liberazione. Garibaldi e la mitologia
americana’, in Giuseppe Garibaldi e il suo mito. Atti del LI congresso di storia del Risorgimento
italiano, Rome, 1984, pp. 220, 229; more broadly, C. Smith-Rosenberg, ‘The republican
gentleman: the race to rhetorical stability in the new United States’, in S. Dudink, K. Hagemann
and J. Tosh, Masculinities in politics and war. Gendering modern history, Manchester, 2004, pp.
61–76; B. Schwartz, George Washington. The making of an American symbol, New York, 1981,
esp. pp. 127–30, 149–92, and D. Wecter, The hero in America, New York, 1941, esp. pp. 11–15.
76. A. Herzen, My past and thoughts, 6 vols, London, 1924–7, 3, p. 77.
77. Northern Tribune, I, Jan.–July 1854, p. 151; W. Settimelli, Garibaldi. L'album fotografico,
Florence, 1982, p. 35, fig. 3.
78. On the diplomatic context, see P. Schroeder, Austria, Great Britain and the Crimean War. The
destruction of the European concert, Ithaca, NY, 1972; W. Baumgart, The Crimean War, 1853–
1856, London, 1999, pp. 34–42, 211–17.
79. On the Italian states during the 1850s, see A. Scirocco, L'Italia del Risorgimento, Bologna, 1990,
pp. 320–37; on Antonelli, see F. Coppa, Cardinal Giacomo Antonelli and papal politics in
European affairs, New York, 1990.
80. D. Mack Smith, ‘Cavour, Clarendon and the Congress of Paris, 1856’, in idem, Victor Emanuel,
Cavour and the Risorgimento, London, 1971, esp. pp. 81–2.
81. There is a vast literature on Cavour, Piedmont and ‘the decade of preparation’. The most
exhaustive study is R. Romeo, Cavour e il suo tempo, 3 vols, Rome and Bari, 1969–84, and see the
same author's Dal Piemonte sabaudo all'Italia liberale, Turin, 1963. A. Cardoza, ‘Cavour and
Piedmont’, in J. A. Davis (ed.), Italy in the nineteenth century, Oxford, 2000, pp. 108–31, is an up-
to-date summary in English.
82. The work of Romeo offers a very positive assessment of Cavour's achievement, but there is an
important historical debate about its broader implications and problems. For a much more negative
judgement see, for example, D. Mack Smith, Cavour, London, 1985; and for a critical assessment
of the connubio see P. G. Camaiani, La rivoluzione moderata: rivoluzione e conservazione
nell'unità d'Italia, Turin, 1978.
83. Mack Smith, Mazzini, p. 78; R. Grew, A sterner plan for Italian unity. The Italian national society
in the Risorgimento, Princeton, NJ, 1963, p. 45.
84. G. Candeloro, Storia dell'Italia moderna, 4. Dalla rivoluzione nazionale all'unità, Milan, 1964,
pp. 211–15.
85. Quoted in Mack Smith, Mazzini, p. 111.
86. G. E. Curàtulo, Il dissidio tra Mazzini e Garibaldi. La storia senza veli, Milan, 1928, pp. 125–8.
87. There is a detailed discussion of Mazzini's activities during this period, ibid., pp. 77–128; see also
R. Sarti, Mazzini. A life for the religion of politics, Westport, CT, 1997, pp. 147–79.
88. Grew, A sterner plan, pp. 28–30, 36–7.
89. 28 May 1856; see also ibid., pp. 37–8.
90. Ibid., p. x; see also pp. 38–41, 89–98.
91. G. Berti,$I democratici e l'iniziativa meridionale nel Risorgimento, Milan, 1962, pp. 539–740.
92. Curàtulo, Il dissidio, p. 154; Ridley, Garibaldi, p. 380.
93. Mordini's remark is in A. Scirocco, I democratici italiani da Sapri a Porta Pia, Naples, 1969, p.
15; see also A. Scirocco, ‘Le correnti dissidenti del Mazzinianesimo dal 1853 al 1859’, in Correnti
ideali e politiche della Sinistra Italiana dal 1849 al 1861, Florence, 1978, pp. 49–69; and C. Lovett,
The democratic movement in Italy, Cambridge, MA, 1982, pp. 157–86.
94. E. Dandolo, I volontari ed i bersaglieri lombardi, Turin, 1849 (London, 1851; Milan, 1860); L. C.
Farini, Lo stato romano dall'anno 1815 all'anno 1850, Turin 1850–1 (London, 1851–4); C.
Pisacane, Guerra combattuta in Italia negli anni 1848–49, Genoa, 1851; C. A. Vecchi, La Italia.
Storie di due anni, 1848–9, Turin, 1851 (2nd edn 1856).
95. Sarti, Mazzini, pp. 175–6; Grew, A sterner plan, pp. 103–4.
96. 22 Sept. 1853 and 9 Jan. 1854, in Epistolario, 3, pp. 56, 59–60.
97. Mack Smith, Mazzini, pp. 106–7; 119.
98. Epistolario, 3, p. 62.
99. Herzen, My past and thoughts, 3, p. 77.
100. 3 Feb. 1857, in Epistolario, 3, pp. 150–1.
101. 4 March 1854, ibid., p. 66.
102. Dated 4 Aug. 1854, ibid., p. 80.
103. Ibid., Appendice 4, p. 202.
104. 25 Nov. 1851, in Scritti, 47, p. 116; 8 June 1853, ibid., 49, p. 224.
105. 24 Feb. 1854, ibid., 50, p. 282.
106. 9, 10, 13 Aug. 1854, ibid., 53, pp. 51, 59, 64.
107. Ibid., p. 64; 2 Feb. 1855, ibid., 54, p. 36.
108. For a discussion, see ibid., 52, pp. 5–6, and on the Parlamento, F. della Peruta, ‘Il giornalismo
dal 1847 all'unità’, in A. Galante Garrone and F. della Peruta, La stampa italiana nel Risorgimento,
Rome and Bari, 1979, pp. 484–6.
109. P. Roselli, Memorie relative alla spedizione e combattimento di Velletri avvenuto il 19 maggio
1849, Turin, 1853.
110. Curàtulo, Il dissidio, pp. 131–9; and the documents pp. 345–52. Garibaldi's letters of 28 Aug.
and 2 Sept. 1854 are also in Epistolario, 3, pp. 82–3.
111. A. Scirocco, Garibaldi. Batttaglie, amori, ideali di un cittadino del mondo, Rome and Bari,
2001, pp. 205–6.
112. 1 and 26 Sept., 1854, in Scritti, 53, pp. 97, 160.
113. Mazzini's article on Olivieri is in Scritti, 51, pp. 175–85. On Olivieri, see G. Bernardi, Un
patriota italiano nella repubblica Argentina. Silvino Olivieri, Bari, 1946 [1861].
114. 20 Dec. 1854, ibid., p. 297.
115. 8 Nov. 1855, in Scritti, 56, p. 44; 12 March 1856, ibid., Appendice, 5, p. 112 (part of the original
letter is missing).
116. 20 May 1857, in Epistolario, 3, p. 157.
117. Grew, A sterner plan, pp. 84, 90.
118. 15 June 1858, Epistolario, 3, p. 171; Grew, A sterner plan, pp. 83–4, 90; Scirocco, Garibaldi, p.
210.
119. 4 April 1854, in Cavour e l'Inghilterra. Carteggio con V. E. d'Azeglio, 1, Bologna, 1933, pp. 22–
3.
120. Grew, A sterner plan, p. 117.
121. See the series of letters from Garibaldi in Dec. 1858 in Epistolario, 3, pp. 191–8; on Garibaldi's
relation with the king, see D. Mack Smith, ‘Victor Emanuel and the war of 1859’, in idem, Victor
Emanuel, pp. 92–3.
122. Herzen, My past and thoughts, 3, p. 77.
123. D. V. Reidy, ‘Panizzi, Gladstone, Garibaldi and the Neapolitan prisoners’, Electronic British
Library Journal (eBLJ), 2005, pp. 7–12.
124. Grew, A sterner plan, p. 49.
125. 3 Feb. 1857, Epistolario, 3, p. 151.
126. 23 March 1857, ibid., p. 155.
127. Grew, A sterner plan, pp. 154–5.
128. Ibid., p. 143.
129. See the report in the Northern Tribune, 1854, pp. 173–6.
130. A. Falconi, Come e quando Garibaldi scelse per sua dimora Caprera, Cagliari, 1902.
131. Grew, A sterner plan, pp. 83–4, 117–18.
132. G. E. Curàtulo, Garibaldi agricoltore, Rome, 1930.
133. To Speranza von Schwartz, 17 June 1858, Epistolario, 3, p. 173; to Cuneo, 27 Nov. 1858, ibid.,
p. 188.
134. E. H. Carr, Michael Bakunin, London, 1937, p. 301.
135. On Roberts and White, see E. Daniels, Jessie White Mario. Risorgimento revolutionary, Athens,
1972, esp. pp. 5–10, 33; Della Torre's letter, 4 Aug. 1856, in MRM, Garibaldi Curàtulo, f. 364;
Schwartz's letter, 24 Jan. 1858, ibid., b. 693; on all of them and Ravello, see G. E. Curàtulo,
Garibaldi e le donne, Rome, 1913.
136. On the concept of ‘backstage’, see E. Goffman, The presentation of self in everyday life,
London, 1969, pp. 109–40.
Chapter 5: The Garibaldi Formula
1. What follows is an attempt to contextualise the growing support for Garibaldi as part of the rapid
expansion of the reading public in Europe and North America. The literature on this process is
very large and increasing, although more restricted for Italy. Useful and uptodate surveys for
Britain and France, which also give an idea of the very different approaches now prevailing in the
two countries, are: J. Plunkett and A. King (eds), Victorian print media. A reader, Oxford, 2005; I.
Haywood, The revolution in popular literature. Print, politics and the people, 1790–1860,
Cambridge, 2004 (which concentrates on popular readers and radical publishers); P. Brantlinger
and W. B. Thesing (eds), A companion to the Victorian novel, Oxford, 2002; and the encyclopaedic
R. Chartier and H.-J. Martin (eds), Histoire de l'édition française. Vol 3. Le temps des éditeurs, du
romantisme à la belle époque, Paris, 1990 edn.
2. R. D. Altick, Victorian people and ideas, New York, 1973, p. 64.
3. M. Crubellier, L'Elargissement du public’, in Chartier and Martin (eds), Histoire de l'édition
française, p. 31; E. Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen. The modernisation of rural France, 1875–
1914, London, 1977, p. 453.
4. F. Barbier, ‘Libraires et colporteurs’, in Chartier and Martin (eds), Histoire de l'édition française,
pp. 256–302.
5. See the description in Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen, pp. 452–63.
6. R. D. Altick, The English common reader. A social history of the mass reading public, 1800–1900,
Chicago, IL, 1957, appendix C, pp. 394–5.
7. K. Belgum, Popularizing the nation. Audience, representation and the production of identity in Die
Gartenlaube, 1853–1900, Lincoln, NB, 1998, p. 10; C. Charle, Le Siècle de la presse (1830–1939),
Paris, 2004, p. 96.
8. J. Watelet, ‘La presse illustrée’, in Chartier and Martin (eds), Histoire de l'édition française, pp.
369–82; P. Anderson, The printed image and the transformation of popular culture, 1790–1860,
Oxford, 1991.
9. M. Merlot, ‘Le Texte et l'image’, ibid., pp. 329–55 (see also ‘les keepsakes’, pp. 507–8); Weber,
Peasants into Frenchmen, pp. 455–9. On caricature, see J. Watelet, ‘La Presse illustrée’, pp. 369–
73; and R. J. Goldstein, Censorship of political caricature in nineteenth-century France, Kent,
OH, and London, 1989.
10. P. di Bello, ‘The female collector: women's photographic albums in the nineteenth century’,
Living Pictures, 1/2, 2001, pp. 3–20.
11. J. Plunkett, Queen Victoria. First media monarch, Oxford, 2003, pp. 244–65, 338–63; P. Burke,
Eyewitnessing. The uses of images as historical evidence, London, 2001, pp. 17–28; H. K. Henisch
and B. A. Henisch, The photographic experience, 1839–1914. Images and attitudes, Philadelphia,
 PA, 1993, pp. 244–65, 338–63. On actors, see R. Sennett, The fall of public man, London, 1986,
pp. 195–205.
12. M. Lyons, ‘Les Best-sellers’, in Chartier and Martin (eds), Histoire de l'édition française, pp.
422–3; A.M. Thiesse, ‘Le Roman populaire’, ibid., pp. 509–19; Brantlinger and Thesing (eds), A
companion to the Victorian novel, chs 13–15; M. Denning, Mechanic accents. Dime novels and
working-class culture in America, London, 2nd edn, 1998; L. James, Fiction for the working man,
1830–1850, London, 1963.
13. S. Hazareesingh, The legend of Napoleon, London, 2004, esp. pp. 151–208; N. Petiteau,
Napoléon, de la mythologie à l'histoire, Paris, 1999; R. Gildea, ‘Bonapartism’, in idem, The past in
French history, New Haven, CT, and London, 1994, pp. 89–111. On the ‘memoirs tradition’ in
France see P. Nora, ‘Memoirs of men of state: from Commynes to De Gaulle’, in idem (ed.),
Rethinking France. Les lieux de mémoire. Vol 1, The State, Chicago, IL, 2001, esp. pp. 403–14,
and below, p. 156.
14. K. J. Mays, ‘The publishing world’, in Brantlinger and Thesing (eds), A companion to the
Victorian novel, p. 12.
15. R. Chartier and H.J. Martin, ‘Introduction’, in idem (eds), Histoire de l'édition française, pp. 5–6.
16. Lyons, ‘Les Best-sellers’, pp. 422–3; see also the analysis of reading tastes in mid-century Britain
in J. Rose, ‘Education, literacy and the reader’, in Brantlinger and Thesing (eds), A companion to
the Victorian novel, pp. 39–44.
17. H. M. Schor, ‘Gender politics and women's rights’, ibid., pp. 172–88; L. C. Roberts, ‘Children's
fiction’, ibid., pp. 353–69; A. Sauvy, ‘Une Littérature pour les femmes’, in Chartier and Martin
(eds), Histoire de l'édition française, pp. 496–507; J. Glénisson, ‘Le Livre pour la jeunesse’, ibid.,
pp. 461–95.
18. Haywood, The revolution in popular literature, pp. 139–40, 237–42; M. Taylor, Ernest Jones,
Chartism and the romance of politics, 1819–1869, Oxford, 2003, pp. 137–94.
19. Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen, p. 458; J. Rose, The intellectual life of the British working
classes, New Haven, CT, and London, 2001.
20. J. Smith Allen, Popular French romanticism. Authors, readers, and books in the nineteenth
century, Syracuse, NY, 1981, pp. 5–6.
21. B. Anderson, Imagined communities, London, 1991 edn, pp. 37–46; see also the discussion in
Belgum, Popularizing the nation, pp. xvi–xx.
22. G. Eley, ‘Nations, publics and political cultures. Placing Habermas in the public sphere’, in C.
Calhoun (ed.), Habermas and the public sphere, Cambridge MA, 1992, pp. 289–339.
23. M. Butler, ‘Telling it like a story’, Studies in Romanticism, 28, Fall 1989, pp. 345–64.
24. C. Molinari, ‘La guerra dei teatri da Napoleone a Victor Hugo’, in R. Alonge and G. D. Bonino,
Storia del teatro moderno e contemporaneo, 2, Turin, 2000, pp. 467–511; J. McCormick, Popular
 theatres of nineteenth-century France, New York, 1993.
25. S. E. Wilmer, Theatre, society and the nation. Staging American identities, Cambridge, 2002, pp.
1–3.
26. M. Samuels, The spectacular past. Popular history and the novel in nineteenth-century France,
Ithaca, NY, 2004, pp. 106–50.
27. Ibid., pp. 26–62; on Lemaître, see Sennett, The fall of public man, pp. 204–5.
28. Haywood, The revolution in popular literature, pp. 140–1, 172; R. McWilliam, ‘The mysteries of
G. W. M. Reynolds’, in M. Chase and I. Dyck (eds), Living and Learning: Essays in honour of J.
F. C. Harrison, Aldershot, 1996, pp. 182–98.
29. Although this too had roots in the eighteenth century. See John Brewer's comment about Wilkes
that he ‘not only made politics commercial; he made it entertaining and sociable’, in Party
ideology and popular politics at the accession of George III, Cambridge, 1976, p. 191.
30. Sennett, The fall of public man, p. 196.
31. S. Gundle, ‘Le origini della spettacolarità nella politica di massa’, in M. Ridolfi (ed.),
Propaganda e comunicazione politica, Milan, 2004, esp. pp. 17–22.
32. P. Joyce, Democratic subjects. The self and the social in nineteenth-century England, Cambridge,
1994, p. 214, and for a broader discussion see ibid., pp. 147–223; see also J. Belchen and J.
Epstein, ‘The nineteenth-century gentleman leader revisited’, Social History, 22/2, 1997, pp. 174–
93; E. Biagini, Liberty, retrenchment and reform. Popular liberalism in the age of Gladstone,
1860–1880, Cambridge, 1992, pp. 369–425; J. Vernon, Politics and the people: a study in English
popular culture, c.1815–1867, Cambridge, 1993, pp. 251–91.
33. J. R. Reed, ‘Laws, the legal world and politics’, in Brantlinger and Thesing (eds), A companion to
the Victorian novel, pp. 155–71.
34. Plunkett, Queen Victoria, pp. 144–98.
35. R. Romanelli, L'Italia liberale, 1861–1900, Bologna, 1979, p. 436.
36. B. Tobia, ‘Una cultura per la nuova Italia’, in G. Sabbatucci and V. Vidotto (eds), Storia d'Italia,
2. Il nuovo stato e la società civile, Rome and Bari, 1995, pp. 427–34.
37. T. de Mauro, Storia linguistica dell'Italia unita, Rome and Bari, 1979, p. 40.
38. K. Baedeker, Italie septentrionale, Coblenz, 1861, p. xv.
39. A. Castellani, ‘Quanti erano gli italofoni nel 1861?’, Studi Linguistici Italiani, new series, 8/1,
1982, pp. 3–26. See also the discussion in D. Beales and E. F. Biagini, The Risorgimento and the
unification of Italy, London, 2002 edn, pp. 74–80.
40. For the background, see R. Pasta, ‘The history of the book and publishing in eighteenth-century
Italy’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 2/10, 2005, pp. 200–17.
41. L. Perini, ‘Editori e potere in Italia dalla fine del secolo xv all'unità’, in C. Vivanti (ed.), Storia
d'Italia. Annali 4. Intellettuali e potere, Turin, 1981, pp. 838–46; A. Lyttelton, ‘The national
 question in Italy’, in M. Teich and R. Porter (eds), The national question in Europe in historical
context, Cambridge, 1993, pp. 89–90.
42. M. Berengo, Intellettuali e librai nella Milano della Restaurazione, Turin, 1980; U. Carpi,
Letteratura e società nella Toscana del Risorgimento. Gli intellettuali dell'Antologia, Bari, 1974.
On journalists, see G. Ricuperati, ‘I giornalisti italiani fra poteri e cultura dalle origini all'unità’, in
Storia d'Italia. Annali 4, pp. 1085–132.
43. P. Landi, ‘Non solo moda. Le riviste femminili a Milano (1850–1859)’, in N. del Corno and A.
Porati (eds), Il giornalismo lombardo nel decennio di preparazione all'Unità, Milan, 2005, pp.
221–39; S. Franchini, Editori, lettrici e stampa di moda, Milan, 2002.
44. Tobia, ‘Una cultura’, pp. 428–32.
45. A. M. Banti, La nazione del Risorgimento. Parentela, santità e onore alle origini dell'Italia unita,
Turin, 2000, pp. 37–53.
46. There is a very substantial literature on associational life in Risorgimento Italy. See M. Meriggi,
‘Società, istituzione e ceti dirigenti’, in G. Sabbatucci and V. Vidotto (eds), Storia d'Italia, 1. Le
premesse dell'unità, Rome and Bari, 1994, pp. 190–217; and the special issue of Quaderni Storici,
77, 1991, ‘Elites e associazioni nell'Italia dell'Ottocento’. Two useful case studies – from different
ends of Italy – are A. Signorelli, A teatro, al circolo. Socialità borghese nella Sicilia
dell'Ottocento, Rome, 2000, pp. 105–209; and M. Meriggi, Milano borghese. Circoli ed élites
nell'Ottocento, Venice, 1992.
47. C. Sorba, Teatri. L'Italia del melodrama nell'età del Risorgimento, Bologna, 2001; Signorelli, A
teatro, pp. 9–104; on music, see S. Pivato, La storia leggera. L'uso pubblico della storia nella
canzone italiana, Bologna, 2002, pp. 7–65; and R. Monterosso, La musica nel Risorgimento,
Milan, 1948.
48. F. della Peruta, ‘Il giornalismo dal 1847 all'Unità’, in A. Galante Garrone and F. della Peruta, La
stampa italiana del Risorgimento, Rome and Bari, 1979, pp. 319–20, 468.
49. M. Petrusewicz, Come il meridione divenne una questione. Rappresentazioni del Sud prima e
dopo il Quarantotto, Catanzaro, 1998, pp. 113–16.
50. R. Grew, A sterner plan for Italian unity. The Italian national society and the Risorgimento,
Princeton, NJ, 1963, pp. 52–61.
51. Ibid., pp. 67–77.
52. Ibid., p. 104.
53. D. Kertzer, The kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, New York, 1997.
54. Grew, A sterner plan, p. 105; for a complete description of the National Society's propaganda
activities, ibid., pp. 101–23.
55. H. R. Marraro, American opinion on the unification of Italy, 1846–1861, New York, 1932, pp.
206–21.
56. Grew, A sterner plan, pp. 68, 100–1.
57. Barrett Browning's poem was written in 1848 (with an additional section on Garibaldi written in
1851); Clough's poem ‘Amours de voyage’ first appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in 1858. For a
discussion of the context, see L. Riall, ‘Rappresentazioni del Quarantotto italiano nella storiografia
inglese’, in R. Camurri (ed.), Memorie, protagonisti e rappresentazioni del 1848 italiano
(forthcoming); on the link between their poetry and nationalism: M. Reynolds, The realms of
verse, 1830–1870. English poetry in a time of nation-building, Oxford, 2001, pp. 27–48.
58. ‘Two letters to the Earl of Aberdeen on the state prosecutions of the Neapolitan government’,
London, 1851; see also D. M. Schreuder, ‘Gladstone and Italian unification, 1848–1870: the
making of a liberal?’, English Historical Review, 85, 1970, pp. 475–501; O. Chadwick, ‘Young
Gladstone and Italy’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 30, 1979, pp. 243–59.
59. The Roman state from 1815 to 1850, 4 vols, London, 1851–4.
60. M. Isabella, ‘Italian exiles and British politics before and after 1848’, in S. Freitag (ed.), Exiles
from European revolutions. Refugees in mid-Victorian England, Oxford, 2003, p. 71.
61. Ibid., pp. 71–3. See also M. Finn, After Chartism. Class and nation in English radical politics,
1848–1871, Cambridge, 1993, esp. pp. 62–81; Biagini, Liberty, pp. 41–50, G. Claeys, ‘Mazzini,
Kossuth and British radicalism’, Journal of British Studies, 28/3, 1989, pp. 228–44, 255–61.
62. Isabella, ‘Italian exiles’, p. 74; Finn, After Chartism, pp. 166–72; M. O' Connor, The romance of
Italy and the English political imagination, London, 1998, pp. 79–91.
63. Finn, After Chartism, p. 166; O'Connor, The romance, p. 90.
64. Isabella, ‘Italian exiles’, pp. 74–7; on Jessie White's activity, see E. Daniels, Jessie White Mario.
Risorgimento revolutionary, Athens, OH, 1972, pp. 41–54.
65. W. L. Vance, America's Rome, 2. Catholic and contemporary Rome, New Haven, 1989, pp. 110–
22.
66. Quoted in J. Pemble, The Mediterranean passion. Victorians and Edwardians in the South,
Oxford, 1987, p. 138; for a broader discussion see Riall, ‘Rappresentazioni’.
67. C. Crossley, French historians and romanticism. Thierry, Guizot, the Saint-Simonians, Quinet,
Michelet, London, 1993, pp. 173–4.
68. Isabella, ‘Italian exiles’, p. 78; Biagini, Liberty, p. 372; Finn, After Chartism, pp. 203–25.
69. S. Matsumoto-Best, Britain and the papacy in the age of revolution, 1846–1851, London, 2003,
pp. 137–71.
70. Schreuder, ‘Gladstone’, p. 480. On Dante, see A. Isba, Gladstone and Dante: Victorian
statesman, medieval poet, London 2006.
71. Claeys, ‘Mazzini’, pp. 231–2, 253.
72. A. Coviello Leuzzi, ‘Antonio Bresciani Borsa’, in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, 14, Rome,
1972, pp. 182–3.
73. J. Godechot et al., Histoire générale de la presse française, 2, Paris, 1972, pp. 259–60.
74. N. P. Wiseman, Recollections of the last four Popes and of Rome in their times; first published in
London without date (but before or in 1857), then in 1858 and 1859.
75. C. Barr, ‘Giuseppe Mazzini and Irish nationalism’, in Proceedings of the British Academy
(forthcoming); D. Bowen, Paul Cardinal Cullen and the shaping of modern Irish Catholicism,
Dublin, 1983.
76. S. Gilley, ‘The Garibaldi riots of 1862’, Historical Journal, 16/4, 1973, pp. 700–1.
77. Marrao, American opinion, pp. 48–63, 166–8; Vance, America's Rome, pp. 129–30.
78. J. Petersen, ‘Das deutsche politische Italienbild in der Zeit der nationalen Einigung’, in idem,
Italien-Bilder–Deutschland-Bilder, Cologne, 1999, pp. 61–5.
79. D. Laven, ‘Mazzini, Mazzinian conspiracy and British politics in the 1850s’, Bollettino Storico
Mantovano, 2, 2003, p. 278.
80. For example, Gavazzi used Wiseman's attack to give a new lecture, and publish it as a reply to
Wiseman: My recollections of the four last Popes and of Rome in their times. An answer to Dr.
Wiseman, London, 1857 and 1858.
81. T. Dwight, The Roman Republic of 1849; with accounts of the Inquisition and the siege of Rome,
New York, 1851, pp. 94, 209–23.
82. A. Dumas, Montevideo ou une nouvelle Troie, Paris, 1850, pp. 84–5.
83. Ultimi fatti dei Croati in Lombardia con un soneto improvvisato in lode del Gen. Garibaldi, n.d.
but after 1848; G. Scarpari, L'addio di Garibaldi e morte di sua moglie Racconto storico, Turin,
1850; E. Ruggieri, Della ritirata di Giuseppe Garibaldi da Roma. Narrazione, Genoa, 1850.
84. E. Dandolo, I volontari ed i bersaglieri lombardi, Turin, 1849, p. 32; G. von Hofstetter, Giornale
delle cose di Roma, Turin, 1851, p. 13.
85. Dandolo, I volontari, was also published in London in 1851 and Milan in 1860; von Hofstetter
was originally published as Tagebuch aus Italien 1849, Stuttgart, 1851. Also: L. C. Farini, Lo stato
romano dall'anno 1815 all'anno 1850, Turin, 1850–1 (and London, 1851–54); C. Pisacane, Guerra
combattuta in Italia negli anni 1848–49, Genoa, 1851; C. A. Vecchi, La Italia. Storie di due anni,
1848–9, Turin, 1851 (2nd edn 1856). A short account of Dandolo's life is in G. Mariani (ed.),
Antologia di scrittori garibaldini, Bologna, 1958, pp. 240–1. Von Schwartz mentions von
Hofstetter in Garibaldi at home: a visit to the Mediterranean Islands of La Maddalena and
Caprera, London, 1860, p. 231.
86. G. B. Cuneo, Biografia di Giuseppe Garibaldi, Turin, 1850; see Garibaldi's letter to Cuneo which
acknowledges the receipt of the biography and praises it, 12 March 1850, in Epistolario, 3, pp. 9–
10.
87. N. Frye, Anatomy of criticism. Four essays. Princeton NJ, 1957, pp. 186–7.
88. J. G. Cawelti, Adventure, mystery and romance: formula stories and popular culture, Chicago,
1976, pp. 6–9.
89. Cuneo, Biografia, p. 73.
90. Ibid., pp. 19–23.
91. The Northern Tribune. A periodical for the people, 1, Jan.–July 1854, pp. 150–7.
92. He was born in 1807.
93. G. Ruffini, Lorenzo Benoni or passages in the life of an Italian, Edinburgh and London, 1853
(Genoa, 1834).
94. On the original photograph, see above, p. 114. In the copy, Garibaldi stands leaning on a
mantelpiece with a lion pedestal. The Chartist leader Feargus O'Connor was known as the ‘lion of
freedom’: see J. Epstein, The lion of freedom: Feargus O'Connor and the Chartist movement,
1832–1842, London, 1982.
95. In Garibaldi. Arte e storia, 2 vols, Florence, 1982, 1, cat II/3, 67, p. 220.
96. A. Bresciani, Lionello, Rome, 1852, pp. 73–4.
97. This did not let up after 1849, see e.g. the pamphlet Saggio di stile epistolare e di sapienza
politico-civile-militare di parecchi personaggi che furon la gloria della quinimestre Repubblica
Romana con opportune annotazioni, Rome, 1850.
98. See also, for example, H. Geale, Ernesto di Ripalto. A tale of the Italian Revolution, London,
1849; M. Roberts, Mademoiselle Mori: a tale of modern Rome, 2 vols, London, 1860; and, above
all, G. Meredith, Emilia in England, London, 1864, and Vittoria, London, 1897.
99. Anon., Angelo. A romance of modern Rome, London, 1854.
100. Ibid., pp. 232–5.
101. J.R. Beste, Modern Society in Rome, 3 vols, Rome, 1856, 2, pp. 78–81.
102. Ibid., pp. 81, 91–2.
103. Ibid., 3, pp. 282–4. The departure from Rome and the retreat is described on pp. 257, 266–7.
104. C.G. Hamilton, The exiles of Italy, or Garibaldi's miraculous escapes. A novel, London, 1857,
pp. v–viii, xxxi.
105. Ibid., p. 71.
106. Ibid., pp. 100–30, 177–83, 247–8.
107. Anon., Angelo, p. 234; Modern Society in Rome, 3, pp. 143–5, 283–4; Hamilton, The exiles of
Italy, pp. 99–100, 120–9. Elizabeth Barrett Browning had also dwelt on the death of Anita and her
unborn child in the second part of ‘Casa Guidi windows’, written in 1851.
108. 12 Jan., 6 April, 21 and 31 May, 15 and 22/23 June, 12 Aug. 1850, in Epistolario, 3, pp. 4, 13,
17–19, 21–3, 29.
109. The life of General Garibaldi written by himself with the sketches of his companions in arms,
New York, 1859; F. Carrano, I Cacciatori delle Alpi comandati dal generale Garibaldi nella
 guerra del 1859, Turin, 1860 (pp. 9–86 are Garibaldi's memoirs); Mémoires de Garibaldi, Paris,
1860; Garibaldi's Denkwürdigkeiten nach hand-schriftlichen Aufzeichnungen desselben und nach
authentischen Quellen bearbeitet und herausgegeben von Elpis Melena, Hamburg, 1861.
110. 31 May, 15 and 22 June 1850, in Epistolario, 3, pp. 19, 21–2, 23.
111. G. M. Trevelyan, Garibaldi's defence of the Roman Republic, London, 1907, p. 354.
112. M. Thom, ‘How I made Italy’ (review of G. Garibaldi, My life), Times Literary Supplement, 17
June 2005, p. 8.
113. Trevelyan, Garibaldi's defence, p. 354.
114. Nora, ‘Memoirs’, pp. 405–6, see also G. Egerton (ed.), Political Memoir, London, 1994.
115. Ibid., p. 434.
116. An obvious referent is Napoleon's Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène, on which see D. Le Gall,
Napoléon et le Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène: analyse d'un discours, Paris, 2003.
117. M. McLaughlin, ‘Biography and autobiography in the Italian Renaissance’, in P. France and W.
St Clair (eds), Mapping lives. The uses of biography, Oxford, 2002, pp. 37–65. On Risorgimento
memoirs, see G. Trombatore, ‘Introduzione’, Memorialisti dell'Ottocento, I, Milan and Naples,
1953, pp. ix–xxv; Banti, La nazione del Risorgimento, pp. 54–5; M. Petrusewicz, ‘Giuseppe
Ricciardi, ribelle, romantico europeo’, Archivio Storico per le provincie Napoletane, 117, 1999,
esp. pp. 244–6.
118. G. Fitzpatrick and F. Masiello, ‘Introduction’, and R. Piglia, ‘Sarmiento the writer’, both in T.
Halperín Donghi et al. (eds), Sarmiento. Author of a nation, Berkeley, CA, 1994, pp. 1–16, 127–
44.
119. 12 Aug. 1850, in Epistolario, 3, pp. 29–30.
120. Le memorie di Garibaldi in una delle redazioni anteriori alla definitiva del 1872, Bologna,
1932, pp. 9–10, 12.
121. Ibid., p. 150.
122. Ibid., pp. 16–17.
123. Ibid., pp. 112–13.
124. Ibid., pp. 29–30.
125. Ibid., pp. 35, 40–2.
126. Ibid., pp. 64–5, 136, 143.
127. Ibid., pp. 28, 113.
128. Ibid., pp. 13, 22, 41, 102, 121.
129. Ibid., p. 53; ‘Anita’, ibid., Appendice A, p. 365.
130. This point is made by Thom, ‘How I made Italy’, p. 8.
131. Memorie, pp. 5–6.
132. Ibid., pp. 37, 44–6.
133. Ibid., pp. 51, 52–3, 74–5, 365, 367, 370–2, 375.
134. Ibid., pp. 11, 45.
135. Taylor, Ernest Jones, pp. 9–10.

Chapter 6: Independence
1. D. Mack Smith, ‘Victor Emanuel and the war of 1859’, in idem, Victor Emanuel, Cavour and the
Risorgimento, London, 1971, p. 93.
2. According to Cavour's correspondence with the king, 24 July 1858, in Il Carteggio Cavour–Nigra
dal 1858 al 1861, 1, Bologna, 1961, pp. 103–14.
3. On British policy in this period, see D. Beales, England and Italy, 1859–60, London, 1961, pp. 36–
92.
4. D. Mack Smith, ‘An outline of Risorgimento history, 1840–1870’, in idem, Victor Emanuel, p. 29.
5. For detailed descriptions of the origins of the 1859 war, see F. Coppa, The origins of the Italian
wars of independence, London, 1992, pp. 74–91; A. Blumberg, A carefully planned accident. The
Italian war of 1859, London, 1990, pp. 27–104; M. Walker (ed.), Plombières: secret diplomacy
and the rebirth of Italy, New York, 1968.
6. Mack Smith, ‘Victor Emanuel’, p. 95.
7. See R. Grew, A sterner plan for Italian unity. The Italian National Society in the Risorgimento,
Princeton, NJ, 1963, pp. 193–217.
8. J. Petersen, ‘Il mito del Risorgimento nella cultura tedesca’, in Il mito del Risorgimento nell'Italia
unita, Milan, 1995, p. 454.
9. Ibid., pp. 454–62; idem, ‘Das deutsche politische Italienbild in der Zeit der nationalen Einigung’,
in idem, Italien-Bilder–Deutschland-Bilder, Cologne, 1999, pp. 73–80. See also F. Valsecchi,
Italia ed Europa nel 1859, Florence, 1965, pp. 121–69 (and, for a broader discussion on Great
Power politics and the Italian Question in 1859, see pp. 52–84).
10. H. R. Marraro, American opinion on the unification of Italy, 1846–61, New York, 1932, pp. 225–
35.
11. D. Beales and E. Biagini, The Risorgimento and the unification of Italy, London, 2002 edn, pp.
114–20.
12. An example of this kind of approach is in Coppa, Origins, who pays hardly any attention at all to
the role of nationalism in the Italian wars. But even an organisation as pro-nationalist as the
Istituto per la Storia del Risorgimento at Rome sees the war of 1859 purely in terms of
international relations: see the essays in Nel centenario del 1859. Atti del XXXIX congresso di
storia del Risorgimento italiano, Rome, 1960.
13. Grew, A sterner plan, pp. 111–22.
14. Ibid., pp. 122–3.
15. A. M. Isastia, Il volontario militare nel Risorgimento. La partecipazione alla guerra del 1859,
Rome, 1990, p. 103.
16. These figures are given in L. de la Varenne, Les Chasseurs des Alpes et des Apennins. Histoire
complète, Florence, 1860, p. 307 and are used in the official government publication, La guerra
del 1859 per l'indipendenza d'Italia, vol 1. Narrazione, Rome, 1910, p. 117.
17. See the breakdown of figures in Isastia, Il volontario, pp. 189–242.
18. De la Varenne, Les Chasseurs, pp. 302–5. He reports that money also came from overseas and
from as far away as the USA.
19. Grew, A sterner plan, p. 178. Isastia suggests that the movements of these men can be seen as a
kind of political and economic ‘migration’, but offers little evidence to substantiate this claim. Il
volontario, p. 14.
20. Ibid., p. 101.
21. Grew, A sterner plan, pp. 174–5.
22. Ibid., p. 170.
23. D. Mack Smith (ed.), Garibaldi, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1969, pp. 31–2.
24. Cavour to Nigra, 6 & 7 March 1859, in Cavour–Nigra, 2, pp. 61, 64. See also his comments on 9
March, p. 74.
25. 30 June 1860, in Epistolario, 4, p. 85.
26. 22 Dec. 1858, ibid., 3, p. 195.
27. See speeches nn. 113–16, 128, 133–4, in Scritti e discorsi, 1, pp. 164–6, 176–7, 181–2.
28. Epistolario, 4, facing p. 80.
29. See the report in The Times, 20 June 1859. The writer also says that the volunteers still wore no
uniform, ‘just a small tricolour cockade’, although G. M. Trevelyan says they ‘dressed after the
ugly, conventional patterns of the line regiments’. Garibaldi and the Thousand, London, 1908, p.
90.
30. Epistolario, 3; see also his letters of 20 Dec. 1858 to Deideri and Specchi, ibid., pp. 191–3, and to
La Farina, 30 Jan. 1859, in ibid., 4, p. 7.
31. See esp. 21 Dec. 1858, in Epistolario, 3, p. 193, and 8 and 30 Jan, 15 March, 4 and 17 April
1859, in ibid., 4, pp. 3, 6–7, 14, 19–20, 27. For Cairoli's accounts, see ibid., pp. 277, 229–30, 238–
9.
32. To Planet de la Faye, 23 April 1859, ibid., p. 31.
33. 26 Feb., 7 March, 10 April 1859, ibid., pp. 11, 13, 22. Translation in G. M. Trevelyan, Garibaldi
and the making of Italy, London, 1911, pp. 299–300.
34. 24 April 1859, ibid., p. 33.
35. 25 April 1859, in Scritti e discorsi, 1, p. 164.
36. 9 March 1859, Cavour–Nigra, 2, p. 74.
37. Isastia, Il volontario, pp. 97–101.
38. In L'Eco d'Italia, 16 Feb. 1859 and New York Evening Post, 21 May 1859. Quoted in Marraro,
American opinion, p. 241.
39. J. Ridley, Garibaldi, London, 1974, pp. 402–3.
40. Luigi Carlo Farini to Cavour, 28 March 1859, quoted in Isastia, Il volontario, p. 10. For a
discussion of the differences between volunteering and the regular army as a military model, see L.
Riall, ‘Eroi maschili, virilità e forme della guerra’, in A. M. Banti and P. Ginsborg (eds), Il
Risorgimento, Turin, forthcoming.
41. Grew, A sterner plan, p. 175; Isastia, Il volontario, finds that the vast majority of those enrolled in
the royal army were aged between eighteen and twenty-six, while over 40 per cent of those in the
Cacciatori were twenty-seven years of age or older, pp. 212–13, 239.
42. Isastia, Il volontario, pp. 10–12.
43. See Garibaldi's letter to Cavour, 21 May 1859, in Epistolario, 4, pp. 52–3.
44. G. Guerzoni, Garibaldi, 2 vols, Florence, 1882, 1, p. 471.
45. Quoted in Trevelyan, The Thousand, p. 99.
46. There are a number of contemporary sources for Garibaldi's part in the 1859 war. See, in
particular, F. Carrano, I Cacciatori delle Alpi comandati dal Generale Garibaldi nella guerra del
1859 in Italia, Turin, 1860, and W. Rüstow, La guerra d'Italia del 1859, Turin[?], 1859. Other
sources are: La guerra del 1859, 1, pp. 116–21, 275–96; A. Rocca, ‘La campagna del 1859’,
Garibaldi condottiero, Rome, 1932; and there are useful shorter accounts in P. Pieri, Storia
militare del Risorgimento, Turin, 1962, pp. 621–3; and Trevelyan, The Thousand, pp. 82–109.
47. Ibid., pp. 106, 108.
48. 23 May 1859, Scritti e discorsi, 1, p. 168.
49. G. Visconti Venosta, Ricordi di gioventù: cose vedute o sapute (1847–1860), Milan, 1904, p. 453.
50. Trevelyan, The Thousand, p. 106; Garibaldi to the king, 3 July 1859, Epistolario, 4, p. 89.
51. Epistolario, 4, pp. 88–9; on Peard, see also G. M. Trevelyan, ‘The war journals of Garibaldi's
Englishman’, Cornhill Magazine, 24, Jan.–June 1908, pp. 96–110. De la Varenne says that
volunteers came from France, Baden and Poland as well as Hungary and England, and he is the
source of the information about Guerrazzi's translator, Charles Scott: see Les Chasseurs, pp. 307,
319–22.
52. C. Arrivabene, Italy under Victor Emmanuel. A personal narrative, London, 1862, pp. 299–300.
53. 26 July 1859.
54. Epistolario, 4, p. 55.
55. Carrano, I Cacciatori, pp. 253–4.
56. This description is by Giovanni Cadolini, Memorie del Risorgimento dal 1848 al 1862, Milan,
1911, p. 319, and is confirmed by Carrano, I Cacciatori, p. 254, and G. della Valle, Varese,
 Garibaldi ed Urban nel 1859 durante la guerra per l'indipendenza italiana, Varese, 1863, pp. 38–
9.
57. Cadolini, Memorie, p. 332; Carrano, I Cacciatori, p. 310.
58. Luigi Gemelli to Agostino Bertani, MRM, Archivio Bertani, Cartella 9, plico viii, n.120/15;
partly quoted in Isastia, Il volontario, p. 10.
59. Grew points out that the Society's propaganda efforts were much more successful than their
efforts at co-ordination and organisation, but suggests that this mattered little if at all during the
confused events of May–June 1859. A sterner plan, esp. p. 205.
60. Visconti Venosta, Ricordi, pp. 543–4.
61. Ibid., p. 544.
62. 31 Oct. 1859, in Mack Smith (ed.), Garibaldi, p. 102.
63. Scritti e discorsi, 1, p. 184.
64. 18 July 1859, Epistolario, 4, pp. 97–8.
65. Ibid., pp. 99, 102. See also his letter of 21 July to Lorenzo Valerio, ibid., p. 100.
66. 27 July 1859, ibid., p. 102.
67. See his letter to the king, 13 and 15 Aug., and to Ricasoli, 22 Aug. 1859, ibid., pp. 120–1, 123–4.
68. 29 Aug. 1859, ibid., p. 128.
69. Scritti e discorsi, 1, pp. 190–1, 201–11.
70. To Valerio, 21 Sept. and 5 Nov. 1859; to Vincenzo Malenchini, 18 Dec. 1859, in Epistolario, 4,
pp. 142, 182–3, 209–10.
71. Quoted in Trevelyan, The Thousand, p. 119.
72. 19 Nov. 1859, in Epistolario, 4, p. 166.
73. 2–4 Nov. 1859, ibid., pp. 151–3.
74. 25 Oct. and 8 Nov. 1859, ibid., pp. 175, 183.
75. 11 and 22 Oct., 9 and 14 Nov, ibid., pp. 161, 172, 184, 186–7. Grew, A sterner plan, p. 223.
76. T. Trollope, Social aspects of the Italian revolution in a series of letters from Florence, London,
1861, p. 95.
77. Ridley, Garibaldi, p. 418, who also describes the ceremony transferring her remains. Scritti e
discorsi, 1, pp. 191–6.
78. A. Scirocco, Garibaldi, Rome and Bari, 2001, p. 223.
79. 19 and 23 Nov. 1859, Scritti e discorsi, 4, pp. 211, 215–16; 16, 25 and 29 Nov. 1859, Epistolario,
4, pp. 187, 191, 195. Pagliano's portrait of Garibaldi from life, in December 1859, shows him still
wearing the General's uniform (in MRM).
80. Trevelyan, The Thousand, p. 123.
81. Grew, A sterner plan, pp. 229–31.
82. 21 Dec. 1860, Epistolario, 4, p. 213. In late October, Garibaldi had told the king that he should
become the dictator of central Italy, ‘just like in Piedmont’, ibid., p. 180.
83. His speech to the students of Pavia is ibid., pp. 215–18, the others are in Scritti e discorsi, 1, pp.
217–21.
84. Scritti e discorsi, 1, pp. 223–4.
85. Ridley, Garibaldi, p. 423.
86. Scirocco, Garibaldi, p. 225.
87. Trevelyan, The Thousand, p. 165.
88. C. Duggan, Francesco Crispi, 1818–1901. From nation to nationalism, Oxford, 2002, p. 168.
89. Trevelyan, The Thousand, p. 178.
90. Ibid., p. 166.
91. From Giuseppe Cacciari [?], Modena, 24 Nov. 1859, MCRR, b.45 n.26/ 75.
92. The Times, 29 Nov. 1859.
93. Joseph Kerr to Mr Vetter, 8 Dec. 1859, MCRR, b.52 3/33.
94. Trevelyan, The Thousand, App. K, pp. 340–1.
95. On this episode, see M. Mulinacci, La bella figlia del lago. Cronaca intima del matrimonio fallito
di Giuseppe Garibaldi con la marchesina Raimondi, Milan, 1978.
96. Ridley, Garibaldi, pp. 424–6; see his letters to Teresa Araldi Trecchi, 22 Sept. 1859, and to Sofia
Bettini, 24 Oct. 1859, in Epistolario, 4, pp. 143, 174.
97. 28 and 29 Jan., 26 Feb. 1860, ibid., 5, pp. 34–5, 43–4.
98. 30 Nov. 1859, ibid., 4, pp. 195–6.
99. 6 March 1860.
100. H. de Viel-Castel, Mémoires du comte Horace de Viel-Castel sur le règne de Napoleon III
(1815–1864), 6 vols, Paris, 1883–4, 6, 8 March 1860, p. 45.
101. From Luigi Reali, 6 Jan. 1860, MRM, Garibaldi Curàtolo, f. 603; 5 Jan. 1860, in Epistolario, 5,
p. 6.
102. 15 March 1860, ibid., p. 48; for more details about the planned insurrection, see Duggan,
Francesco Crispi, pp. 168–79.
103. 26 Nov. 1859, Epistolario, 4, p. 192; 11 Jan. 1860, ibid., 5, p. 14 (this letter also mentions that
Carrano, his Italian editor, had a copy of the memoirs), and 28 March 1860, ibid., 5, pp. 25–6. On
the encounter with Dumas, see G. Pécout, ‘Una crociera nel mediterraneo con Garibaldi’, in A.
Dumas, Viva Garibaldi, Turin, 2004, p. xvi.
104. 2 Feb. 1860, MCRR b.47 2/1. Thackeray was writing as the editor of Cornhill Magazine. See
also Garibaldi's letter to Dall'Ongaro of 21 Jan. 1860, where he refuses to give him a copy of the
ms. and mentions that a ‘Signor Troloppa’ [Trollope?] was also interested in his memoirs, 28
March 1860, Epistolario, 5, p. 55.
105. Trevelyan, The Thousand, p. 169.
106. Epistolario, 5, p. 53.
107. L. Oliphant, Episodes in a life of adventure, Edinburgh and London, 1887, p. 171.
108. On the Palermo insurrection, see L. Riall, Sicily and the unification of Italy, 1859–66. Liberal
policy and local power, Oxford, 1998, pp. 66–71.
109. D. Mack Smith, ‘Cavour and the Thousand, 1860’, in idem, Victor Emanuel, esp. pp. 184–6.
110. On the complexities surrounding Garibaldi's decision and Crispi's role, see Duggan, Francesco
Crispi, pp. 180–6.
111. Epistolario, 5, pp. 73–4.
112. For a discussion, see P. Ginsborg, ‘Risorgimento rivoluzionario: mito e realtà di una guerra di
popolo’, Storia e Dossier, 47, 1991, pp. 61–97.
113. The list of the Thousand was compiled by the Italian Ministry of War in 1864–5, and formed the
basis of a pension given to them by a law passed in 1865: see Legge colla quale è assegnata una
pensione vitalizia a ciascuno dei Mille fregiato della medaglia d'onore a ricordo della spedizione
di Marsala, Torino, 22 gennaio 1865, Milan, 1865. See also A. Pavia, Album dei Mille, Genoa,
1862, idem, Indice completo dei Mille, Genoa, 1867 (and M. Pizzo, L'Album dei Mille di
Alessandro Pavia, 2004).
114. G. Bandi, I Mille da Genova a Capua, Milan, 1977 (1886), pp. 16–18.
115. R. Balzani, ‘I giovani del Quarantotto: profilo di una generazione’, Contemporanea, 3/3, 2000,
pp. 403–16.
116. Trevelyan, The Thousand, p. 205.

Chapter 7: Fashioning Garibaldi

1. C. Bellanger, J. Godechot et al., Histoire générale de la presse française. Tome II, De 1815 à 1871,
Paris, 1972, p. 277.
2. H. K. Henisch and B. A. Henisch, The photographic experience, 1839–1914. Images and attitudes,
Philadelphia, PA, 1993, pp. 365–95.
3. A. Briggs and P. Burke, A social history of the media, Cambridge, 2002, pp. 135–6.
4. See the comments in H. R. Marraro, American opinion on the unification of Italy, 1846–61, New
York, 1932, pp. 244–9; and G. Lutz, ‘La stampa bavarese negli anni dell'unificazione italiana
(1858–1862)’, Rassegna Storica del Risorgimento, 53/1 (1966), esp. pp. 35–47.
5. New York Times, 12, 20 and 22 July 1859.
6. The Times, 27 June, 2, 3, 4, 6 July 1859; it should be noted that The Times changed its stance from
an anti-Italian position to a much more favourable view in 1859.
7. 25 Feb. 1860.
8. C. Arrivabene, Italy under Victor Emmanuel. A personal narrative, London, 1862, pp. 304–5.
9. Garibaldi. Arte e Storia, 2 vols, Florence, 1982, 2, cat. VII, 22 & 25, p. 54; ibid., pp. 115, 120–1.
10. The Times, 2 July 1859.
11. J. Ridley, Garibaldi, London, 1974, p. 413.
12. Bellanger et al., Histoire générale, pp. 8–10; C. Charle, Le Siècle de la presse (1830–1939),
Paris, 2004, pp. 91–4.
13. M. Milan, ‘Opinione pubblica e antigaribaldinismo in Francia: la querelle sull'unità d'Italia
(1860–66)’, Rassegna Storica del Risorgimento, 70/2 1983, pp. 143–4.
14. M. Bernardi, ‘Garibaldi et l'opinion publique française de 1860 à 1882’, Université de Paris I,
Centre de Recherches d'Histoire XIX–XXe Siècles, Mémoire de Maîtrise, 1982, p. 19.
15. Bellanger et al., Histoire générale, p. 277.
16. See especially 23 April, 7, 14 and 21 May 1859, for the outbreak of war; and 28 May and 25 June
1859 on the movement of the military.
17. Journal pour tous. Suppl. au.n.218: n.1. 4 June 1859; suppl. au. n.232: n.26, 10 Sept. 1859.
18. Souvenirs de la guerre d'Italie. Chants guerriers par messieurs Auguste Barbier, Pierre Dupont,
Fernand Denoyers, Gustave Mathieu, Charles Vincent. Musique et accompagnement de piano par
MM. Darcier, Pierre Dupont, Hector Salmon et Mme Mélanie Dentu. Paris, n.d. but 1859.
19. 7, 14, 21 and 28 May, 4, 11, 18 and 25 June 1859.
20. Album storico–artistico. 1859 Guerra d'Italia. Scritta dal corrispondente del Times al campo
Franco–Sardo con disegni dal vero di C. Bossoli. Lith. par les Freres Fd & Charles Perrin. Paris
and Turin, 1860; Album storico–artistico delle guerre per l'indipendenza italiana. Pubblicato in
due parti, Turin, 1860–1.
21. L'Italia e i suoi difensori. Album storico–biografico dell'avv. Giuseppe Pistelli, ornato da ritratti
e stampe litografiche, Florence, 1860.
22. L'Illustration, 4 June 1859.
23. Le Siècle, 2 June 1859. This ‘hommage’ to Garibaldi, by H. Lamarche was reprinted with Anatole
de la Forge's biography of Garibaldi as Histoire du Général Garibaldi, Paris, 1859.
24. Marraro, American opinion, pp. 246–57; D. Beales, England and Italy, 1859–60, London, 1961,
pp. 64–8. In both countries, however, there was considerable divergence of opinion, due to the
presence of Mazzinians, who criticised the war, and to anti-French feeling in Britain.
25. 14 June 1859, p. 545; the same image was published on the cover of New York's Harper's
Weekly, 9 June 1860; Journal pour tous, suppl., 4 June 1859, n. 1, p. 20.
26. Garibaldi. Arte e storia, 1, p. 97.
27. 3 June 1859, p. 392.
28. Epistolario, 4, facing p. 176.
29. See e.g. Le Siècle and L'Illustration, both 4 June 1859.
30. Ibid., 25 June 1859.
31. C. Paya, Histoire de la guerre d'Italie. Garibaldi, Paris, 1860, p. 165.
32. The Times, 20 June and 26 July 1859.
33. L'Illustration, 18 June 1859.
34. The Times, 20 June 1859.
35. Ibid., 26 July 1859.
36. Journal pour tous, suppl. 4 June 1859; 11 June 1859; 18 June 1859; 10 Sept. 1859; Paya,
Histoire; New York Times, 31 May 1859; Harper's Weekly, 18 June 1859; Album storico–artistico.
1859 and L'Italia e i suoi difensori.
37. Biografia di Giuseppe Garibaldi, Florence, 1859. See also Biografia del Generale Giuseppe
Garibaldi prode difensore della indipendenza italiana, Milan, 1859; Garibaldi ed i Cacciatori
delle Alpi. Cenni biografico–storici colla narrazione dei più recenti fatti d'arme, Milan, 1859; M.
Carletti, Biografia del Generale G. Garibaldi, Florence, 1859.
38. Garibaldi. Eine biographische Darstellung nach bisher unbekannten Documenten, Berlin 1859;
L. von Alvensleben, Garibaldi. Seine Jugend, sein Leben, seine Abenteuer und seine Kriegsthaten,
Weimar, 1859; W. Raible, Leben und Abenteuer des berühmten Freischaarenführers Joseph
Garibaldi, General der sardinischen Armee und der italienischen Liga, Munich, n.d. but 1859;
Leben und merkwürdige Abenteuer Joseph Garibaldi's, kühnen Aufwieglers und tapferen
Bandenchef, Zurich, 1859; L. C. Cnopius, Garibaldi. Zijn Leven, Krijgsbedrijven en Avonturen,
Haarlem, 1859. See also T. Moegling, Ein Besuch bei Garibaldi im Sommer 1859, Zurich, 1860,
and in general on German interest in Garibaldi in this period, W. Altgeld, ‘Giuseppe Garibaldi in
zeitgenössischer Sicht von der Verteidigung Roms bis zur Niederlage bei Mentana (1848–1867)’,
Risorgimento, 1982–3, pp. 175–8.
39. G. Sand, Garibaldi, Paris, 1859; A. Delvau, G. Garibaldi. Vie et aventures, 1807–1859, Paris,
1859; P. Dupont and A. d'Aunay, Mémoires sur J. Garibaldi, Paris, 1860; H. Castille, Garibaldi,
Paris, 1859.
40. G. B. Cuneo, Biografia di Giuseppe Garibaldi, Turin, 1850; T. Dwight, The life of Garibaldi
written by himself, New York, 1859. The London edition does not seem to have enjoyed a large
circulation in Britain: the BL has no record of a copy, although there is a London edition in the
library of the University of Birmingham.
41. Delvau, Garibaldi, p. 23.
42. Colonel Exalbion, Garibaldi: his life, exploits and the Italian campaigns, London, 1859, p. 6.
43. Hommes du jour, L'empereur Francois-Joseph, Garibaldi, Lord Palmerston, Le prince
Schwarzenberg … Le général Filangieri, Le roi Ferdinand II, Le duc de Modène, Le prince régent
de Prusse, Madame la princesse de Prusse, Le maréchal Canrobet, Paris, 1859, p. 31.
44. Castille, Garibaldi, pp. 3–4, 7–8. In Ludovico Ariosto's famous narrative poem Orlando furioso
(1532), the hero is driven mad by love but eventually cured, and his return to the ranks of
 Charlemagne's army leads to the end of the siege of Paris and the defeat of the pagan armies. The
suggested parallel with Garibaldi and the war of 1859 seems obvious.
45. Ibid., pp. 35–6.
46. Delvau, Garibaldi, p. 2.
47. Sand, Garibaldi, p. 16.
48. L. Goëthe, Garibaldi, sa vie, son enfance, ses moeurs, ses exploits militaires, Paris, 1859, p. 10;
Garibaldi et ses hommes rouges, Paris, 1860, pp. 10–13; von Alvensleben, Garibaldi, pp. 7–10;
Dupont and d'Aunay, Mémoires, p. 11.
49. Goëthe, Garibaldi, p. 18.
50. Ibid., pp. 19–52.
51. Von Alvensleben, Garibaldi, p. 23; Garibaldi. Eine biographische Darstellung, p. 15; Raible,
Leben und Abenteuer, pp. 10–17.
52. J. la Messine, Garibaldi, Paris, 1859, p. 20. Juliette also published under the name ‘Lamber’ and
‘Adam’; and an 1860 edition of the same Garibaldi is authored by Alexis la Messine.
53. J. Godechot, ‘Un Journaliste français libéral ami de l'Italie: Charles Paya (1813–1865)’, in Il
liberalismo moderato nel Risorgimento. Atti del XXXVII congresso di storia del Risorgimento
italiano, Rome, 1961, pp. 111–13.
54. Exalbion, Garibaldi, pp. 11–12, 152.
55. Garibaldi's Englishman, performed in St James Theatre, Dec. 1859, BL, Lord Chamberlain's
plays, ADD 52988 U.
56. Garibaldi, by Tom Taylor, performed Oct. 1859, ibid., 1859 ADD 52985 H.
57. Delvau, Garibaldi, p. 20.
58. C. Pita, Biographie du Général Garibaldi, Paris, 1859, p. 40; De la Forge, Garibaldi, p. 6.
59. Delvau, Garibaldi, p. 14; Pita, Biographie, p. 40; Hommes du jour, p. 37.
60. Castille and Pita give her name as Léonta, as do the authors of Hommes du jour, Biografia del
Generale Garibaldi and Leben und merkwürdige Abenteuer Joseph Garibaldis.
61. Von Alvensleben, Garibaldi, pp. 5–6.
62. Ibid., pp. 79–80.
63. Dupont and D'Aunay, Mémoires, p. 8.
64. Ibid., p. 15.
65. Lucia's story is ibid., pp. 33–120.
66. Ibid., p. 122.
67. Ibid., pp. 5–6.
68. Ibid., pp. 152–3, 156.
69. B. Hamnett, ‘Fictitious histories: the dilemma of fact and fiction in the nineteenth-century
historical novel’, European History Quarterly, 36/1, 2006, pp. 31–60; M. Samuels, The
 spectacular past. Popular history and the novel in nineteenth-century France, Ithaca, NY, 2004.
70. Castille, Garibaldi, p. 3; see also pp. 4–5, 8, 42.
71. Ibid., pp. 59–60, 62.
72. P. Vermeylen, Les Idées politiques et sociales de George Sand, Brussels, 1984, pp. 150–1.
73. Sand, Garibaldi, pp. 4, 14, my emphasis.
74. ‘Garibaldi’, in Souvenirs.
75. Paya, Histoire, p. 14.
76. Delvau, Garibaldi, p. 2; for a general discussion, see J. R. Dakyns, The Middle Ages in French
literature, 1851–1900, Oxford, 1973, esp. pp. 96–109.
77. Godechot, ‘Paya’, p. 112.

Chapter 8: The Thousand

1. G. Bandi, I Mille da Genova a Capua, Milan, 1977 (1886), p. 45.
2. Still the most complete account of the expedition is G. M. Trevelyan, Garibaldi and the Thousand,
London, 1909, pp. 211–64. There is a very detailed description of the movements of the volunteers
between Marsala and Palermo in C. Duggan, Francesco Crispi, Oxford, 2002, pp. 187–96. Much
of the following description is based on these two works.
3. G. C. Abba, The Diary of One of Garibaldi's Thousand, London, 1962 (1880), pp. 11, 19;
Trevelyan, The Thousand, p. 222.
4. Bandi, I Mille, pp. 42, 67–8.
5. E. Zasio, Da Marsala al Volturno. Ricordi, Padova, 1868, p. 34.
6. G. Nuvolari, Come la penso, Milan, 1881 (1861), p. 250.
7. 28 May 1860, in I. Nievo, Lettere garibaldine, Turin, 1961, p. 7.
8. 24 June, ibid., p. 17.
9. S. Corleo, Garibaldi e i Mille a Salemi, Rome, 1886, p. 7.
10. F. Brancato, ‘L'amministrazione garibaldina e il plebiscito in Sicilia’, in Atti del XXXIX congresso
di storia del Risorgimento Italiano, Rome, 1961, p. 181.
11. On Pantaleo, see B. E. Maineri, Fra Giovanni Pantaleo, Ricordi e note, Rome, 1883; Garibaldi's
proclamation is in Scritti e discorsi, 4, pp. 250–1.
12. 28 May 1860, in Nievo, Lettere, p. 8.
13. Duggan, Francesco Crispi, p. 191.
14. See Nievo's letter of 24 June, Lettere, p. 18.
15. Abba, Diary, p. 64.
16. 27 May, first published in Il Pungolo in June 1860, reprinted in Nievo, Lettere, p. 157.
17. Trevelyan, The Thousand, pp. 295–327. The description of the commander of the Hannibal,
Rear-Admiral Mundy, is probably the best eyewitness account of the taking of Palermo: R. Mundy,
 H.M.S. ‘Hannibal’ at Palermo and Naples during the Italian Revolution, 1859–1861, London,
1863.
18. In a letter to the Italian exile, Antonio Panizzi, quoted in G. Dethan, ‘Réactions françaises à
l'enterprise des “Mille” en Sicile (mai–août 1860)’, Revue d'Histoire Diplomatique, 99/3–4, 1985,
p. 199.
19. 12 June 1860, in E. Hodder, The life and work of the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, K. G., London,
1892, p. 563.
20. D. Beales, England and Italy, 1859–60, London, 1961, pp. 131–62.
21. L. Riall, Sicily and the unification of Italy. Liberal policy and local power, 1859–1866, Oxford,
1998, pp. 62–71.
22. D. Mack Smith, ‘The peasants' revolt in Sicily, 1860’, in idem, Victor Emanuel, Cavour and the
Risorgimento, London, 1971, p. 205.
23. Riall, Sicily, pp. 73–4.
24. Ibid.; Mack Smith, ‘The peasants' revolt’, p. 206.
25. Rosolino Pilo was killed in a skirmish in the mountains, which deprived the revolutionaries of an
important leader. Duggan, Francesco Crispi, pp. 194–5.
26. The Times, 8 June 1860.
27. Duggan, Francesco Crispi, pp. 192–3; Riall, Sicily, pp. 86–90.
28. Riall, Sicily, pp. 87–9.
29. Quoted in Duggan, Francesco Crispi, p. 192.
30. G. Fiume, La crisi sociale del 1848 in Sicilia, Messina, 1982.
31. L. Riall, ‘“Ill-contrived, badly executed [and] … of no avail?” Reform and its impact in the
Sicilian latifondo (1770–1910)’, in E. dal Lago and R. Halpern (eds), The American South and the
Italian Mezzogiorno. Essays in comparative history, London, 2002, pp. 132–52.
32. 10 Aug. 1860, in ASP, Ministero e Real Segretaria di Stato presso il Luogotenente Generale,
Polizia. Miscellanea. b.1510, f. personale del distretto di Alcamo.
33. For a general analysis of all these problems, see Riall, Sicily, pp. 92–107.
34. D. Mack Smith, ‘Cavour and the Thousand’, in idem, Victor Emanuel, p. 108.
35. The classic analysis of these early conflicts in Sicily is idem, Cavour and Garibaldi, 1860. A
study in political conflict, Cambridge, 2nd edn 1985, pp. 22–99, and see also Duggan, Francesco
Crispi, pp. 199–201.
36. Riall, Sicily, pp. 80–3.
37. R. Grew, A sterner plan for Italian unity. The Italian National Society in the Risorgimento,
Princeton, NJ, 1963, pp. 298–301.
38. Ibid., 301–2; see the detailed list in G. M. Trevelyan, Garibaldi and the making of Italy, London,
1911, App. B, pp. 316–18.
39. Abba, Diary, pp. 95–100; G. Adamoli, Da San Martino a Mentana. Ricordi di un volontario,
Milan, 1911 (1892), pp. 109–30.
40. C. S. Forbes, The campaign of Garibaldi in the Two Sicilies. A personal narrative, Edinburgh and
London, 1861, p. 126.
41. There is a substantial literature on the revolt at Bronte: see L. Riall, ‘Nelson versus Bronte: land,
litigation and local politics in Sicily, 1799–1860’, European History Quarterly, 29/1, 1999, pp. 39–
73; M. S. Messana Virga, Bronte 1860, Caltanissetta & Rome, 1989; Mack Smith, ‘The peasants'
revolt’, pp. 212–15.
42. Trevelyn, The making of Italy, pp. 80–90.
43. Ibid., pp. 99–100.
44. Ibid., p. 138.
45. Ibid., p. 146.
46. C. Arrivabene, Italy under Victor Emmanuel. A personal narrative, London, 1862, p. 148.
47. Trevelyan, The making of Italy, pp. 151–65.
48. H. Elliot, Some revolutions and other diplomatic experiences, London, 1922, p. 71.
49. M. Monnier, Garibaldi. Histoire de la conquête des deux Sicilies. Notes prises sur place au jour
le jour, Paris, 1861, p. 296.
50. Ibid., p. 155 (according to the speech in Scritti e discorsi, 1, p. 266, Garibaldi said, ‘We will see
each other again! We will meet again on the continent and this time, by God, we will not be
enemies!’).
51. A. Mario, The red shirt. Episodes, London, 1865, p. 160.
52. Monnier, Garibaldi, pp. 215–16.
53. W. G. Clark, ‘Naples and Garibaldi’, in F. Galton (ed.), Vacation tourists and notes of travel in
1860, Cambridge, 1861, p. 24.
54. Arrivabene, Italy under Victor Emmanuel, p. 190.
55. Zasio, Da Marsala, p. 88 (Zasio was in the carriage with Garibaldi).
56. Clark, ‘Naples’, p. 25.
57. Forbes, The campaign, p. 237 (see also his lengthy description at pp. 232–4).
58. 11 Sept. 1860, in M. Menghini (ed.), La spedizione garibaldina di Sicilia e di Napoli nei
proclami, nelle corrispondenze, nei diarii del tempo, Turin, 1907, p. 305.
59. Mack Smith, Cavour and Garibaldi, pp. 204–21, 243–50.
60. Quoted in Duggan, Francesco Crispi, p. 211, from R. Romeo, Vita di Cavour, Rome and Bari,
1984, p. 481.
61. Trevelyan, The making of Italy, p. 257.
62. Cavour and Garibaldi, pp. 310–11.
63. Quoted in M. Rosi, Il Risorgimento italiano e l'azione d'un patriota cospiratore e soldato, Rome,
1906, pp. 414–15.
64. Quoted in Mack Smith, Cavour and Garibaldi, p. 310.
65. Ibid., pp. 311–19; Duggan, Francesco Crispi, pp. 213–16.
66. Quoted in Mack Smith, Cavour and Garibaldi, p. 403.
67. Ibid., p. 388, and, in general, pp. 376–91.
68. Mario, The red shirt, pp. 276–90.
69. A. S. Bucknell, In the tracks of the Garibaldians through Italy and Sicily, London, 1861, p. 122.
70. Mack Smith, Cavour and Garibaldi, pp. 408–9.
71. Idem (ed.), Garibaldi. Great lives observed, London, 1960, p. 59.
72. Mundy, H.M.S. ‘Hannibal’, pp. 282, 285.
73. Monnier, Garibaldi, p. 383.
74. Carlotta Roskilly, 13 Nov. 1860, in MRM, Garibaldi Curàtulo, f. 612; ‘Sauvage’, ibid., f. 627; see
also the letters from Felicità Benso di Verdura, 21 Dec., ibid., f. 268.
75. M. C. Ruggieri Tricoli, I giochi di Issione. Segni ed immagini della modernità nelle architetture
provvisorie della Palermo borbonica, Palermo, 1990, pp. 143–8.
76. Mack Smith, Cavour and Garibaldi, p. 1.
77. 18 July 1860, in T. Palmenghi-Crispi (ed.), The memoirs of Francesco Crispi, 1. The Thousand,
London, 1912, p. 300.

Chapter 9: Making Italian Heroes

1. L. Riall, Sicily and the unification of Italy, 1859–66. Liberal policy and local power, Oxford, 1998,
pp. 91–102.
2. On the centrality of the Vespers to Sicilian revolutionary identity, see G. la Mantia, ‘I ricordi di
Giovanni di Procida e del Vespro nei proclami rivoluzionari dal 1820 al 1860’, Rassegna Storica
del Risorgimento, 28, 1931, suppl., pp. 217–19; and more generally, see G. Giarrizzo, ‘Note su
Palmieri, Amari e il Vespro’, Archivio Storico per la Sicilia Orientale, 69, 1973, pp. 355–9; and F.
Brancato, Storiografia e Politica nella Sicilia dell'Ottocento, Palermo, 1973, pp. 196–208.
3. 11 May, Scritti e discorsi, 1, p. 249 (all dates henceforth are 1860 unless stated).
4. 30 May, ibid., p. 255.
5. June, ibid., pp. 264–5.
6. 2 June, ibid., p. 258.
7. Ibid., p. 259; 13 June, p. 265; 20 June, p. 269.
8. 3 Aug., ibid., p. 283.
9. 11 or 14 May, ibid., pp. 250–1.
10. 11 May, ibid., p. 249.
11. 1 June, ibid., p. 258.
12. 6 Aug., ibid., p. 289.
13. Aug., ibid., pp. 291–3.
14. In M. Menghini (ed.), La spedizione garibaldina di Sicilia e di Napoli, Turin, 1907, p. 119.
15. G. C. Abba, The diary of one of Garibaldi's Thousand, London, 1962 (1880), p. 74.
16. The Times, 15 June; see also similar eyewitness descriptions in E. Zasio, Da Marsala al Volturno.
Ricordi, Padova, 1868, p. 58, and E. Lockroy, Au hasard de la vie. Notes et souvenirs, Paris, 1913,
pp. 29–30.
17. C. S. Forbes, The campaign of Garibaldi in the Two Sicilies. A personal narrative, Edinburgh and
London, 1861, pp. 118, 195.
18. M. Monnier, Garibaldi. Histoire de la conquête des deux Siciles. Notes prises sur place au jour le
jour, Paris, 1861, p. 302.
19. J. Butler, In memoriam Harriet Meuricoffre, London, 1901, p. 50; on Garibaldi's assistance to the
Protestants in Naples (including the granting of land to build a church), see M. Pellegrino Sutcliffe,
‘Victorian congregations and Anglican chaplains in unified Italy (1861–1891)’, MA thesis,
Birkbeck College London, 2001, pp. 24–5.
20. G. Tricoli, ‘Il mito di Garibaldi in Sicilia’, Archivio Storico Siciliano, serie 4, 9, 1983, p. 100; F.
Brancato, ‘La partecipazione del clero alla rivoluzione siciliana del 1860’, in La Sicilia verso
l'unità d'Italia, Palermo, 1960, p. 22.
21. C. Arrivabene, Italy under Victor Emmanuel. A personal narrative, London, 1862, p. 230.
22. R. Tosi, Da Venezia a Mentana (1848–1867), Forlì, 1910, p. 90; W. G. Clark, ‘Naples and
Garibaldi’, in F. Galton (ed.), Vacation tourists and notes of travel in 1860, Cambridge, 1861, pp.
29, 54.
23. H. Elliot, Some revolutions and other diplomatic experiences, London, 1922, p. 85. On the San
Gennaro miracle and its meaning, see M. P. Carroll, Madonnas that maim. Popular Catholicism in
Italy since the fifteenth century, Baltimore, MD, 1992, pp. 115–19.
24. For a useful discussion, see E. Muir, Ritual in early modern Europe, Cambridge, 1997, esp. pp.
232–46.
25. Forbes, The campaign, p. 118.
26. G. Oddo, I Mille di Marsala. Scene rivoluzionaria, Milan, 1863, p. 568.
27. Forbes, The campaign, p. 204.
28. In D. Mack Smith (ed.), Garibaldi, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1969, p. 131, from L. Colet, L'Italie
des Italiens, 4 vols, Paris, 1862–3, pp. 66–7.
29. Butler, In memoriam, p. 51.
30. Monnier, Garibaldi, p. 302.
31. ACP, Atti del Consiglio Comunale di Palermo, Deliberazioni Consiglio Comunale, n. 1.
32. That is, on 27 Sept. the council approved unanimously the expenditure for the celebrations.
33. 1 July, the$pretore to the president of the consiglio civico, ACP, Corrispondenza Finanza, n. 17/4.
34. La Mola, Gazzetta popolare di Sicilia, 20 July.
35. 27 July, in Menghini (ed.), La spedizione, p. 182.
36. La Forbice, Gazzetta popolare di Sicilia, 21 July.
37. From the Nazione, 29 July, in Menghini (ed.), La spedizione, pp. 443–4.
38. Il 19 luglio 1860. Festa popolare in Palermo pel giorno natalizio del generale Giuseppe
Garibaldi, Palermo, 1860, pp. 12–14.
39. Menghini (ed.), La spedizione, p. 445.
40. Il 19 luglio, pp. 6–10.
41. La Forbice, 28 July.
42. H. F. Winnington-Ingram, Hearts of oak, London, 1889, p. 212.
43. Raffaello Carboni to Agostino Bertani, 21 July, in MRM, Archivio Bertani, Cartella 11, plico xii.
See also the description in Crispi's paper, Il Precursore, 21 July.
44. There is now a huge literature relating to this aspect of nationalism; for a recent study of the same
period, S. Hazareesingh, The Saint-Napoleon. Celebrations of sovereignty in nineteenth-century
France, Cambridge, MA, 2004.
45. M. C. Ruggieri Tricoli, I giochi di Issione. Segni ed immagini della modernità nelle architetture
provvisorie della Palermo borbonica, Palermo, 1990; on France: M. Samuels, The spectacular
past. Popular history and the novel in nineteenth-century France, New York, 2004, pp. 18–62.
46. La Nazione, 29 July, in Menghini (ed.), La spedizione, p. 442. For a discussion of the cult of
Santa Rosalia in Palermo, see S. Cabibbo, Santa Rosalia tra terra e cielo, Palermo, 2004; and on
Italian popular Catholicism more generally, M. P. Carroll, Veiled threats. The logic of popular
Catholicism in Italy, Baltimore, MD, 1996.
47. 10 July, Scritti e discorsi, 1, p. 273.
48. La Nazione, 29 July, in Menghini (ed.), La spedizione, p. 443.
49. See the report in Il Garibaldi. Giornale Politico, 19 June, pp. 21–2 and La Nazione, 8 July (in
Menghini (ed.), La spedizione, pp. 132–3); Brancato, ‘La partecipazione del clero’, pp. 23–4.
50. F. Venosta, Rosolino Pilo e la rivoluzione siciliana. Notizie storiche, Milan, 1863, pp. 130–3; Il
Giornale di Sicilia, 25 Aug. On the creation of the church of San Domenico as a Sicilian
‘pantheon’ in the nineteenth century, see P. Antonino Barilaro OP, San Domenico di Palermo.
Pantheon degli uomini illustri di Sicilia, Palermo, 1971, pp. 74–5.
51. Giornale Officiale del Governo Provvisorio di Sicilia, 29 May, a.1, n.1.
52. 25 July.
53. 21 Aug.
54. 18 and 19 Sept.
55. E. Gentile, The sacralization of politics in fascist Italy, Cambridge, MA, 1996, pp. 2–5; M.
Ridolfi, ‘Per una storia della religione civile: il “caso italiano” in prospettiva comparata’, Memoria
e Ricerca, 13, 2003, pp. 133–40.
56. On which, see C. Duggan, Francesco Crispi, Oxford, 2002, pp. 426–50.
57. Artisans had also been at the centre of popular revolt against the government; for example the
1820 revolt in Palermo was largely caused by the government's attempt to abolish the trade guilds
or maestranze. See O. Cancila, Palermo, Rome and Bari, 1988, pp. 47–52; Riall, Sicily, pp. 39–41,
207–11.
58. L. Sarullo (ed.), Dizionario degli artisti siciliani, 2, Palermo, 1993, pp. 27–8, 81–2, 300–1; M.
Accascina, Ottocento siciliano. Pittura, Palermo, 1982 (1939), pp. 59–63, 93–100, 140–1.
Bagnasco went on to have a career as an official ‘nationalist’ artist. He worked on the monument
to Pilo and produced a famous curtain for the Teatro Garibaldi which showed Garibaldi sitting at
the fountain in Piazza Pretorio (see Garibaldi alla fontana pretoria in Palermo, Sipario, Palermo,
1895, and the sketch in the Museo del Risorgimento, Palermo). On Lojacono, who took part in the
fighting with his still more famous painter son, Francesco, see M. Vitella, ‘Una traccia per Luigi
Lojacono’, in G. Barbera et al., Francesco Lojacono, 1838–1915, Palermo, 2005, pp. 369–75. The
main designer for the Pilo monument was the architect, Giovan Battista Basile, later responsible
for the giardino Garibaldi in Piazza Marina and the Teatro Massimo, Palermo's monumental opera
house. See more generally N. and M. C. Bullaro, ‘L'impresa dei “Mille” nei pittori garibaldini’,
Nuovi Quaderni del Meridione, 80, 1982, esp. pp. 559–62.
59. For a discussion of Italian journalism in this period, see V. Castronovo, ‘Stampa e opinione
pubblica nell'Italia liberale’, in idem, L. G. Fossati and N. Tranfaglia, La stampa italiana nell'età
liberale, Rome and Bari, 1979, pp. 15–56.
60. 5 May, Epistolario, 5, p. 92.
61. The Times, 12 May; New York Times, 24 May.
62. 5 May, in Scritti e discorsi, 1, pp. 239–41; a facsimile of the flyer is in Garibaldi. Arte e storia, 2
vols, Florence, 1982, 2, cat. x, 13, pp. 56, 58.
63. 5 May, in Epistolario, 5, pp. 90–1.
64. 5 May, ibid., p. 95, and Scritti e discorsi, 1, p. 239.
65. 5 May, Epistolario, 5, p. 96.
66. 9 June (from which this translation is taken). The original is dated 7 May, in Scritti e discorsi, 1,
p. 242.
67. G. M. Trevelyan, Garibaldi and The Thousand, London, 1909, p. 230.
68. 16 May, Epistolario, 5, pp. 104–5. Bertani's letter was published on 4 June, Pilo's on 27 May.
69. To Besana and Finzi, 28 May, Epistolario, 5, p. 116 (published in Il Diritto, 11 June); see also to
Bertani, 3 June, ibid., p. 124.
70. To Thomas Parker, 24 June, ibid., pp. 139–40 (published in the Morning Herald and L'Unità
Italiana, 11 July); see also ‘Agli ufficiali della crociera inglese’, May, ibid., pp. 120–1 (published
in L'Unità Italiana of 1 June); ‘Alla Regina Vittoria’, 22 June, ibid., pp. 137–8 (published in Il
Diritto, 15 Aug.); ‘Al Presidente del comitato londinese per i soccorsi alla Sicilia’, 24 June, ibid.,
pp. 141–2 (published in L'Unità Italiana, 10 July).
71. 3 Aug., in Scritti e discorsi, 1, pp. 282–4; see also above, p. 227.
72. Garibaldi. Discorso di Giacomo Oddo. Letto all'Istituto d'istruzione popolare in Milano, Milan,
1860, pp. 6–7, 11, 14.
73. F. D. Guerrazzi, Addio ai giovani soldati volontarii della impresa italica capitanata dal Generale
Garibaldi, 1860; Il Precursore, 18 Sept.
74. In MRM, Bertani, cartella 12, plico xiii, n. 5; the material on the ‘funerali’ is in ibid., cartella 11,
plico xii, n. 99.
75. See, e.g., the letter from the editor of the Florentine paper, La Nazione, in which he says that he
would have liked to have known more about the expedition at the outset, but is still pleased to
publish information and letters relating to it. 9 May, to Bertani, ibid., cartella 12, plico xiii, n. 21.
76. F. dell'Ongaro, É Garibaldi. Canzone, Florence, 1859; I. Nievo, Gli amori garibaldini. Con
poesie e introduzione, Como, 1911; S. di Paola, ‘Il mito di Garibaldi nella poesia italiana’, in F.
Mazzonis (ed.), Garibaldi condottiero. Storia, teoria, prassi, Milan, 1984, p. 510.
77. Letter from Andra Fasciolo, 5 May, in Menghini (ed.), La spedizione, p. 7.
78. Ibid., p. 9.
79. La Nazione, 18 June; L'Unità Italiana, 22 June, ibid., pp. 105–9.
80. Il Diritto, 6 and 16 July, ibid., pp. 146–7, 151.
81. 27 June, ibid., p. 94.
82. Il Movimento, suppl. to 18 June, ibid., pp. 97–8.
83. Menghini (ed.), La spedizione, pp. 162–7.
84. Ibid., p. 173.
85. L'Unità Italiana, 5 Aug. and 9 Sept., ibid., pp. 225, 292.
86. 13 May, Epistolario, 5, p. 101.
87. 18, 21 and 29 May, in Menghini (ed.), La spedizione, pp. 21–3.
88. Ibid., p. 31.
89. Ibid., esp. pp. 57–80 (in Il Diritto, Il Movimento, La Gazzetta di Genova, L'Unità Italiana, and La
Nazione).
90. L'Unità Italiana, 4 Aug., ibid., p. 243.
91. Il Movimento, 3 Aug., ibid., p. 249.
92. L'Opinione, 15 Sept., ibid., pp. 311–13.
93. 13 May, ibid., pp. 14–15.
94. 3 June, ibid., p. 33.
95. 5 Aug., ibid., p. 214.
96. 28 Aug., ibid., pp. 271–2.
97. G. Pécout, ‘Una crociera nel mediterraneo con Garibaldi’, in A. Dumas, Viva Garibaldi.
Un'odissea nel 1860, Turin, 2004, pp. xii–xiii.
98. 16 Oct. in MRM, Garibaldi Curàtulo, f. 378.
99. 4 Aug.
100. Les garibaldiens. Révolution de Sicile et de Naples, Paris, 1861, which he then republished with
additions in Le Monte-Cristo in 1862. An English translation was published in 1861: see the
translator's note to another version of the same text, On board the Emma. Adventures with
Garibaldi's ‘Thousand’ in Sicily, trans. R. S. Garnet, London, 1929, pp. xi–xii. For a discussion,
see F. Boyer, ‘“Les Garibaldiens” de Alexandre Dumas: roman ou chose vue?’, Studi Francesi, 4,
1960, pp. 26–34.
101. Suppl. to Il Movimento, 18 Aug. in Menghini (ed.), La spedizione, pp. 183–204. The phrase ‘my
dear Italians’ was changed to ‘my dear Sicilians’ in the Sicilian papers.
102. Quoted in Monnier, Garibaldi, p. 136.
103. The Times 15 June; L'Unità Italiana, 10, 18 April, 23 June and 3 July, in G. Rondoni, ‘Garibaldi
nei vecchi giornali della patria’, Garibaldi, numero unico, 1907, p. 49.
104. M. Bernardi, ‘Garibaldi et l'opinion publique française de 1860 à 1882’, Université de Paris I,
Centre de Recherches d'Histoire XIX–XXe Siècles, Mémoire de Maîtrise, 1982, pp. 23–4; for an
analysis of anti-Garibaldi opinion in France, see M. Milan, ‘Opinione pubblica e
antigaribaldinismo in Francia: La querelle sull'unità d'Italia (1860–1868)’, Rassegna Storica del
Risorgimento, 60/2, 1983, pp. 147–8.
105. Halte-là Garibaldi!, Paris, 1860, p. 3.
106. ILN, 19 May, p. 465.
107. 24 May.
108. G. Dethan, ‘Réactions françaises à l'enterprise des “Mille” en Sicile (mai–août 1860)’, Revue
d'Histoire Diplomatique, 99/3–4, 1985, p. 203.
109. Mémoires de Garibaldi par Alexandre Dumas, précédés d'un discours sur Garibaldi par Victor
Hugo et d'une introduction par George Sand, 2 vols, Brussels, 1860, pp. viii–ix.
110. H. Durand-Brager, Quatre mois de l'expédition de Garibaldi en Sicile et en Italie, Paris, 1861,
pp. i–ii.
111. D. Stübler, ‘Guerra e rivoluzione in Italia nella stampa liberale prussiana (1859–1860)’,
Contemporanea, 1/3, 1998, pp. 590–2; W. Altgeld, ‘Giuseppe Garibaldi in zeitgenössicher Sicht
(1848–1867)’, Risorgimento, 1982–83, pp. 178–83, 186–9; G. Lutz, ‘La stampa bavarese dal 1858
al 1862’, Rassegna Storica del Risorgimento, 53/2, 1966, pp. 221–2.
112. On Marx and Engels' attitude to Garibaldi and the Thousand, see Altgeld, ‘Giuseppe Garibaldi’,
pp. 183–6.
113. H. Marraro, American opinion on the unification of Italy, 1846–61, New York, 1932, p. 280.
114. Bernardi, ‘Garibaldi’, p. 44. This is a play on words: ‘campagne’ means both ‘campaign’ and
‘countryside’ in French.
115. R. Grew, A sterner plan for Italian unity. The Italian national society in the Risorgimento,
Princeton, NJ, 1963, pp. 291, 293.
116. Regno di Sardegna, Camera dei Deputati. Seduta del 12 aprile, in Garibaldi in parlamento, 1.
Dalla Repubblica Romana a Aspromonte, Rome, 1982, pp. 64–7; P. G. Boggio, Cavour o
Garibaldi? Turin, 1860, to which see Brofferio's reply, Garibaldi o Cavour? Genoa, 1860. The
comment from The Times is from 25 Nov. 1862, on the occasion of another attack by Boggio on
Garibaldi.
117. P. G. Boggio, Da Montevideo a Palermo. Vita di Giuseppe Garibaldi, Turin, 1860, pp. 5, 7.
118. The Times, 15 June; L'Unità Italiana, 10, 18 April, 23 June and 3 July, in Rondoni, ‘Garibaldi
nei vecchi giornali’, p. 49.
119. Rondoni, ‘Garibaldi’, pp. 48–9.
120. Eber's long article, which takes the reader from the camp above Gibilrossa to Palermo under
siege, is in The Times, 8 June.
121. Boston Courier, 10 July, also in Mack Smith (ed.), Garibaldi, p. 128.
122. 16 June.
123. See, for instance, the description of the French journalist Lockroy, Au hasard de la vie, p. 31.
124. On Thomas Nast, see the article in Harper's Weekly, 11 May 1867, and A. Boime, The art of the
Macchia and the Risorgimento, Chicago, IL, 1993, pp. 29–32.
125. Garibaldi. Arte e storia, 1, p. 314.
126. F. du Plessix Gray, Rage and Fire. A life of Louise Colet – pioneer feminist, literary star,
Flaubert's muse, London, 1994, esp. pp. 299–307. She and Du Camp also loathed each other, and
Du Camp was much more critical of Garibaldi in private.
127. Monnier, Garibaldi; M. du Camp, Expédition des Deux-Siciles: souvenirs personnels, Paris,
1861; L. Colet, L'Italie des Italiens, Paris, 1863, vol. 3. Charles Arrivabene also wrote a book
about his experiences (Italy under Victor Emmanuel, London, 1862), as did the artist De Fonvielle
(Souvenirs d'une chemise rouge, Paris, 1861).
128. Forbes, The campaign; A. S. Bucknell, In the tracks of the Garibaldians through Italy and
Sicily, London, 1861; W. G. Clark, ‘Naples and Garibaldi’, in F. Galton (ed.), Vacation tourists and
notes of travel in 1860, Cambridge, 1861.
129. G. Adamoli, Da San Martino a Mentana. Ricordi di un volontario, Milan, 1911 (1892), p. 145,
and see his more detailed description on pp. 141–6.
130. Forbes, The campaign, pp. 130–1.
131. F. Boyer, ‘Les Volontaires français avec Garibaldi en 1860’, Revue d'Histoire Moderne et
Contemporaine, 7, 1960, pp. 129–30.
132. Arrivabene, Italy under Victor Emmanuel, pp. 263–85.
133. Mrs Burton Harrison, Recollections Grave and Gay, New York, 1911, pp. 133–4; another
American described Vizitelly as a ‘bummer’ (a Union guerrilla): J. Johns, ‘Wilmington N.C.
during the blockade’, Skedaddle, 12 April 2004, p. 17.
134. 9 June; in Harper's Weekly, 7 July.
135. 9 and 16 June.
136. 16 and 23 June, 7 July.
137. 28 July, 4 Aug.
138. 8 and 29 Sept.
139. See Vizitelly's illustration in the ILN, 23 June, and another portrait by Orsani ibid., 14 July. Die
Gartenlaube's portrait is in n. 9, p. 133.
140. ILN, 28 July. This picture had a wide circulation: published in Harper's Weekly on 25 Aug. and
Die Gartenlaube, in n. 36, pp. 564–6.
141. 21 July, 13 and 21 Oct. The paper was careful to state that the British volunteers were middle
class and especially prized by Garibaldi, but it also confessed that they were motivated by a ‘love
of adventure, as much, perhaps, as a love of freedom’. On this problem, see below, pp. 301–2.
142. 14 and 21 July, 18 Aug.
143. 21 Sept., 13 and 20 Oct.
144. 8 Oct., 23 March 1861.
145. See J. Plunkett, Queen Victoria. First media monarch, Oxford, 2003, pp. 48–52.
146. 12 and 29 Dec.
147. Halte-là Garibaldi!, p. 3.
148. Both magazines' coverage of Milazzo is on 18 Aug.
149. Published by Fratelli Terzaghi in Milan, 1860–2. See the programma at the start of the book,
which explains the plan and layout of the album.
150. Ibid., p. 78.
151. See the various illustrations ibid., pp. 10, 12, 22, 24, 26, 28, 32, 68; Induno's lithograph is on p.
2, the painting is in the Museo del Risorgimento in Milan, and it formed the basis for the departure
scene in Alessandro Blasetti's 1934 film, 1860.
152. Album storico–artistico, p. 4.
153. Garibaldi. Arte e storia, 1, pp. 94–5.
154. G. La Cecilia, Storia della insurrezione siciliana, dei successivi avvenimenti per l'indipendenza
ed unione d'Italia e delle gloriose gesta di Giuseppe Garibaldi compilata su note e documenti
 trasmessi dai luoghi ove accadono, 2 vols Milan, 1860 (there were two different editions in Milan,
and in Palermo the book was serialised in six parts, each with illustrations).
155. F. Mistrali, Storia popolare della rivoluzione di Sicilia e dell'impresa di Giuseppe Garibaldi,
Milan, 2nd edn. 1862.
156. La Cecilia is best known for his Memorie storico–politiche, Rome, 1876–8; see also the
‘prefazione’ by R. Moscati to a 1946 edition of the memoirs.
157. Among other editions, Mistrali produced Da Palermo a Gaeta. Storia popolare della campagna
dell'Italia meridionale, Milan, 1861; a three-volume Storia anedottica politico-militare della
guerra d'Italia nel 1859 e 1860, Milan, 1863; and a 442-page Storia anedottica politico-militare
della guerra d'Italia, nel 1860 … Da Caprera ad Aspromonte, Milan, 1875.
158. Gli abitanti della luna, Bologna, 1874; Vita di Gesù, Milan, 1863; Morte e testamento di
Urbano Rattazzi, Milan, 1863. For a full list of Mistrali's publications, see Clio. Catalogo dei libri
Italiani dell'800, Milan, 1991, 4, p. 3060. Pagnoni, the Milan publisher of his Garibaldi volumes,
had specialised in historical novels and after 1859 began to publish works of a nationalist nature.
159. Storia della insurrezione, 2, pp. 518–19; Storia popolare, p. 60.
160. Dumas's first letter to Le Siècle was published on 25 May; the memoirs began on 8 June and
were serialised throughout the rest of the month.
161. M. Martenengo, ‘Garibaldi narratore. Vicende editoriali e stato attuale dei manoscritti’, Il
Risorgimento, 55/1, 1996, pp. 90–1.
162. Turin, 1860: the memoirs are inserted in the volume at pp. 9–86.
163. G. Ricciardi, Vita di G. Garibaldi narrata al popolo … e continuata sino al suo ritiro nell'Isola
di Caprera [9 novembre, 1860], Florence, 1860.
164. L. de la Varenne, Vita del General Garibaldi, Bologna, 1860.
165. A. Balbiani, Storia illustrata della vita di Garibaldi, Milan, 1860.
166. Ricciardi, Vita, pp. 1, 6, 14–15.
167. Balbiani, Storia illustrata, p. 12.
168. These illustrations (printed by Rossetti in Milan) are, for example, preserved separately in the
collections of both the Museo del Risorgimento in Turin and the Biblioteca di Storia Moderna e
Contemporanea in Rome.
169. Il Generale Garibaldi. Italia luglio del 1860; Storia di Giuseppe Garibaldi, Genoa, 1860; G.
Marchese, Giuseppe Garibaldi, Turin, 1860; F. Santi, Vita aneddotica politico–militare del
Generale Giuseppe Garibaldi, Milan, 1860 (this volume had the same publisher, Pagnoni, as
Franco Mistrali).
170. O. J. Victor, Life of Joseph Garibaldi. The Liberator of Italy. Complete up to the withdrawal of
Garibaldi to his island home after the Neapolitan campaign, 1860, New York, 1860, pp. 5, 9–10,
81.
171. [Anon], The illustrated life and career of Garibaldi, London, 1860.
172. O. Féré and R. Hyenne, Garibaldi. Aventures, expéditions, voyages. Amérique, Rome, Piémont,
Sicile, Naples. 1834–1848–1859–1860, Paris, 1861.
173. Garibaldi, der Held und Befreier Italiens, dessen Lebensbeschreibung und Bildniss, Reutlingen,
1860; Garibaldi, das Haupt des jungen Italiens; sein Leben, seine Abenteuer und Heldenthaten,
Berlin, 1861.
174. Dr D. Burger, Een vorlooper van Garibaldi, Amersfoort, 1860; Garibaldi, zijn leven,
krijgsbedrijven en avonturen, etc. (Met portret.), Haarlem, 1859; Garibaldi en de Profetiën,
Amsterdam, 1860; Garibaldi en het Duizendjarig Rijk, gevolg van Garibaldi en de Profëtien,
Utrecht, 1860.
175. A. Altadill, Garibaldi en Sicilia ó la unidad italiana, Madrid/Barcelona, 1860.
176. Dethan, ‘Réactions françaises’, pp. 198–9.
177. V. Ottolini, Cacciatori delle Alpi (1848–59). Scene storicomilitari, Milan, 1860, pp. 119–29.
178. Garibaldi in Sicilia, p. 5.
179. D. Manuel Gil de Salcedo, Garibaldi y Procida, ó las Pasquas Sangrientas de Sicilia. Novela
Histórica Contemporánea, Madrid, 1860; ‘Rendicion de Capua y triunfal entrada de S.M. el Rey
Victor Manuel y el Garibaldi’, Barcelona, 1860.
180. L'#afAne et les trois voleurs. Proverbe garibaldien en un acte et en vile prose, Paris, 1860, pp.
7–8.
181. E. Atgier, Garibaldi le Filibustier, Rochefort-sur-mer, 1860 and 1861, p. 5.
182. M. Barthélemy, Garibaldi ou le réveil du lion, Paris, 1861, p. 5.
183. M. Roberts, Mademoiselle Mori. A tale of modern Rome, London, 1860; A. B. Edwards, Half a
million of money, London, 1865; W. Somerville Lach Szyrma, Heroes of the day: Franklin and
Garibaldi. Poems, Plymouth, 1860; M. Braddon, Garibaldi and other poems, London, 1861.
184. BL, Lord Chamberlain's plays, ADD 52994 K and 52997 J (Garibaldi's excursionists by H. J.
Byron was also published as The Garibaldi excursionists, London, 1860).
185. Here I use ‘popular’ not in the sense of mass culture per se: see Samuels, The spectacular past,
p. 5.
186. G. M. Trevelyan, Garibaldi and the making of Italy, London, 1911, pp. 3, 296.
187. F. della Peruta, ‘Il mito del Risorgimento e l'estrema sinistra dall'Unità al 1914’, Il Risorgimento,
47/1–2, 1995, pp. 32–70. I refer here to the final version of Garibaldi's memoirs, written in 1872,
Le memorie di Garibaldi nella redazione definitiva del 1872, Bologna, 1932.
188. See Mack Smith's comments on the effect of his book in the preface to the 1985 edn of Cavour
and Garibaldi. A study in political conflict, Cambridge, 1985, pp. ix–xvi.
189. Idem, ‘Cavour and parliament’, in idem, Victor Emanuel, Cavour and the Risorgimento,
London, 1971, pp. 56–76.
190. O. Chadwick, A history of the Popes, 1830–1914, Oxford, 1998, pp. 132–9.
191. Trevelyan, The making of Italy, pp. 296–7.

Chapter 10: The Garibaldi Moment

1. In looking at the response to Garibaldi in Sicily, I focus largely on Palermo, where most of the
nationbuilding effort was concentrated, and where there is a large collection of nationalist
memorabilia kept in the library of the SSSP.
2. ‘Album per la sottoscrizione alla spada di onore che offre l'Italia all'immortale eroe Giuseppe
Garibaldi’, Naples, 1860. The Palermo record book is in the SSSP. The subscription ran into other
problems, see Garibaldi to Federico Bellazzi, 22 April and 3 June 1861, Epistolario, 6, pp. 88–9,
113–15.
3. 7 Aug. 1860 [henceforth 1860 unless stated], G. Piola to Bertani, in MRM, Bertani, cartella 11,
plico xii, n. 62/8.
4. 8 and 21 July, in NA, FO 165/134.
5. 27 Aug., in Memorie di Angelo Bargoni, 1829–1901, Milan, 1911, p. 142.
6. 12 and 13 June, Giacinto Scelsi to Crispi, in F. Crispi, Memoirs of Francesco Crispi. The
Thousand, vol. 1, 3 vols, London, 1912–14, pp. 226–7.
7. 15 June 1860, NA, FO 70/317.
8. 17 June, in Crispi, Memoirs, 1, pp. 228–9.
9. 1 July, I. Nievo, Lettere garibaldine, Turin, 1961, p. 27.
10. M. Menghini (ed.), La spedizione garibaldina di Sicilia e di Napoli, Turin, 1907, pp. 76, 104,
117–19.
11. See the analysis in N. Moe, The view from Vesuvius. Italian culture and the Southern Question,
Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2002, pp. 156–83.
12. For a discussion of some of these issues, see F. Renda, ‘Garibaldi e la questione contadina in
Sicilia’, in G. Cingari (ed.), Garibaldi e il socialismo, Rome and Bari, 1984; and for a broader
analysis of the historiographical approach to which it relates, L. Riall, Sicily and the unification of
Italy. Liberal policy and local power, 1859–1866, Oxford, 1998, pp. 1–29.
13. G. Falzone, ‘Volontarismo siciliano’, in Atti del XXXIX congresso di storia del Risorgimento
italiano, Rome, 1961, p. 147.
14. L. Riall, ‘Elites in search of authority: political power and social order in nineteenth-century
Sicily’, History Workshop Journal, 55, 2003, pp. 25–46.
15. F. Brancato, Francesco Perroni Paladini, garibaldino e uomo politico, Palermo, 1962, pp. 31–5.
16. Falzone, ‘Volontarismo siciliano’, pp. 166–70.
17. Rosario Lentini to the Marchese di Torralta, in C. E. di Torralta, ‘La spedizione garibaldina del
1860 in alcune lettere di contemporanei’, in La Sicilia verso l'unità d'Italia, Palermo, 1960, p. 63.
18. La Frusta. Gazzetta semiquotidiana, 10 July.
19. La Costanza e la Supremazia d'Italia; L'Italia Redenta; L'Unità Italiana; La Guerra; Il Mondo
Nuovo; Il Predicatore Italiano; La Libertà; and Il Garibaldi.
20. Il Garibaldi, 6 and 23 June; Gazzettino della Sera, 27 June; L'Unità Italiana, 19 June (this paper
should not be confused with the democratic paper published in Genoa). For Jourdain's article, see
above, p. 249.
21. 6 June.
22. 4, 5 and 15 June.
23. 19 July.
24. 15 and 26 June, 21 July.
25. 6 June.
26. 13 Aug., 21 Sept.
27. 9 June.
28. 23 June; 13 Aug.
29. N.d., 1, n.3.
30. 21 June, and 6, 11, 14, 16 June.
31. 12 June.
32. Il Vessillo Italiano, 5 June.
33. Il Garibaldi, 6 June; La Forbice, 5 and 6 June; L'Unità Italiana, 9 June; La Cicala Italiana, 13
Aug.
34. See La Forbice (‘Quanto pasticci’), 2 Oct., and especially Tom Pouce (‘Signor Basile, if
Garibaldi only knew!!!’), 3 Oct.
35. See e.g. Il Garibaldi, 19 June; La Mola, 20 July; La Forbice, 21 July.
36. 15 June.
37. ASP, Ministero e Segreteria di Stato presso il Luogotenente Generale, Ripartimento dell'Interno
(1818–1864), b.1608, f.pubblica spettacoli dal n. 1 al n. 3 da giugno a dicembre (which includes
the programme and illustrations of the show).
38. These flyers are in the Biblioteca di Storia Moderna e Contemporanea in Rome, and published in
D. Bertoni Jovine (ed.), I periodici popolari del Risorgimento, 2 vols, Milan, 1959, 2, pp. 139–40.
39. 9 June and 4 July.
40. P. Chiara, Garibaldi dall'Italia alla gran giornata della Sicilia già mossa, Palermo, 1860; C.
Pardi, A Giuseppe Garibaldi. Ode, Palermo, 1860.
41. V. Navarro di Ribera, Il Garibaldi, Palermo, 1860.
42. L. Capuana, Garibaldi, leggenda drammatica in tre canti, Catania, 1861.
43. 12 June, quoted in F. Brancato, ‘La partecipazione del clero alla rivoluzione siciliana del 1860’,
in La Sicilia verso l'unità d'Italia, p. 17.
44. 5 June, ibid.
45. From La Nazione of 29 July, in M. Menghini (ed.), La spedizione garibaldina, p. 446.
46. Brancato, ‘La partecipazione’, pp. 18–26.
47. C. S. Forbes, The campaign of Garibaldi in the Two Sicilies. A personal narrative, Edinburgh and
London, 1861, p. 128.
48. A. Mario, The red shirt. Episodes, London, 1865, pp. 3–4.
49. G. Tricoli, ‘Il mito di Garibaldi in Sicilia’, Archivio Storico Siciliano, series 4, 9, 1983, pp. 90–1.
50. Mario, The red shirt, pp. 3–4; G. Nuvolari, Come la penso, Milan, 1881 [1861], p. 299; G. C.
Abba, The diary of one of Garibaldi's Thousand, Oxford, 1962, pp. 67, 71, 79, 84–5.
51. Francesco Lanza, 5 Nov. MRM, Garibaldi Curàtulo, f. 470.
52. 21 Dec., 23 March 1861, ibid., f. 268.
53. C. E. di Torralta, ‘La spedizione garibaldina del 1860 in alcune lettere di contemporanei’, in La
Sicilia verso L'Unità', pp. 55, 69, 73.
54. Brancato, ‘La partecipazione’, pp. 24–5, 27–8.
55. S. Salomone-Marino, ‘Garibaldi e le tradizioni popolari’, Archivio per lo studio delle tradizioni
popolari, 1, 1882, pp. 459–60.
56. G. M. Trevelyan, Garibaldi and the Thousand, London, 1909, pp. 306–7 (Trevelyan was told the
legend by Giuseppe Pitrè); Tricoli, ‘Il mito di Garibaldi’, pp. 91–3.
57. C. Duggan, Francesco Crispi, 1818–1901. From nation to nationalism, Oxford, 2002, pp. 179–
80.
58. S. Salomone-Marino, Leggende popolari siciliane in poesia, Palermo, 1880, pp. vii–xxii.
59. E.g. ‘La rivuluzioni di lu 1860’; ‘Lu cummattimentu di Calatafimi’; ‘Lu sbàrchitu di Canibardi a
Marsala’; ‘La trasuta di Canibardi a Palermu’; ‘Lu bummardamentu di Palermu’, in Salomone-
Marino, Leggende popolari, pp. 343–53.
60. Ibid., pp. 361–2.
61. Idem, Canti popolari siciliani in aggiunta a quelli di Vico, Palermo, 1867, n. 741, p. 287.
62. Idem, La trasuta di Garibaldi a Palermu. Storia popolare siciliana in poesia, Palermo, 1885, p.
10.
63. C. di Mino, ‘Il Risorgimento italiano nei canti del popolo siciliano’, Rassegna Storica del
Risorgimento, 18, 1931, suppl. p. 226: see also in S. di Paola, ‘Il mito di Garibaldi nella poesia
italiana’, in F. Mazzonis (ed.), Garibaldi condottiero. Storia, teoria, prassi, Milan, 1984, pp. 512–
13.
64. B. Messana, ‘Dialogu tra lu Generali Lamoriciere e lu Cardinal Antonelli doppu l'entrata di
Garibaldi in Napuli’, in Poesie liberali siciliani, Palermo, 1860, pp. 93–4.
65. Salomone-Marino, ‘Garibaldi e le tradizioni popolari’, p. 461.
66. Ibid., pp. 460–1.
67. Salomone-Marino, La trasuta di Garibaldi, pp. 11–12.
68. Idem, ‘Garibaldi e le tradizioni popolari’, p. 59.
69. T. Cannizzaro, ‘Frammenti di canti popolari politici’, Archivio per lo studio delle tradizioni
popolari, 7, 1888, p. 140.
70. Salomone-Marino, Canti popolari, p. 288.
71. Ibid., p. 287.
72. Idem, La trasuta di Garibaldi, p. 9.
73. Di Paola, ‘Il mito di Garibaldi’, p. 514.
74. 18 Sept.
75. These (very approximate) figures and those below are obtained from C. Cipolla, Le avventure
della lira, Bologna, 1975, table. A6, p. 145, and http://eh.net/hmit.
76. On Bertani's role in 1860, see A. Galante Garrone, I radicali in Italia, 1849–1925, Milan, 1973,
pp. 42–6.
77. R. Grew, A sterner plan for Italian unity. The Italian national society in the Risorgimento,
Princeton, NJ, 1963, p. 296.
78. See the breakdown of figures, ibid., pp. 396–404; Trevelyan, The Thousand, App. K, pp. 340–1;
G. M. Trevelyan, Garibaldi and the making of Italy, London, 1911, App. C, pp. 321–2. Bertani
gives the subscription list for his fund in Resoconto della cassa centrale soccorso a Garibaldi,
1860, Genoa, 1860, and for the other funds in Le spedizioni per i volontari per Garibaldi, Genoa,
1861. On his work, see C. Maraldi, La spedizione dei Mille e l'opera di Agostino Bertani, Palermo,
1940.
79. 29 May, Carlo Strada, in MRM, Bertani, cartella 12, plico xiii, n.121.
80. 22 March, Filippo Collo Cavanna in Molazzano, MCRR, b.45, n. 26/76.
81. L. Oliphant, Episodes in a life of adventure, Edinburgh and London, 1887, p. 174.
82. P. Ginsborg, ‘Risorgimento rivoluzionario: mito e realtà di una guerra di popolo’, Storia e
Dossier, 47, 1991, pp. 61–97.
83. Trevelyan, The making of Italy, pp. 36–7, 321.
84. MRM, Bertani, cartella 12, plico xiii, n. 6.
85. 11 May, Cesare Pescetto, ibid., n. 26.
86. 12 May, Giovanni Guarlotti in Galliate, ibid., n. 28.
87. 11 May, Giacomo Abelli in Saluzzo, ibid., n. 31.
88. 18 May, Filippo Torricelli in Turin, ibid., n. 33.
89. 19 May, Romano Campagnola in Casale, ibid., n. 73.
90. 25 May, ibid., n. 110.
91. Demetrio Cialdini in Modena, ibid., n. 99.
92. 10 May, C. Moreto and T. Brocchieri from Milan, ibid., n. 17.
93. 22 Aug., Giovanni Camponovo in Coleah, ibid., cartella 13, plico xvi, n. 42.
94. E.g. 14 May, Pontoli in Parma, ibid., cartella 12, plico xiii n. 104; 25 May, Marchetti, ibid., n.
109; 15 June, Santo Polli in Gallarate, ibid., plico xiv, n. 6; 16 June, Gaspare Finali in Turin
(Camera dei Deputati), ibid., n. 14; 4 June, Giuseppe Levi in Milan, ibid., n. 133; 29 June, Antonio
Sergent in Milan, ibid., n. 192.
95. 11 and 15 May, from Giacomo Abelli, ibid., plico xiii, n. 31; plico xiv, n. 144; see also e.g. 10
May, Pietro Massa, ibid., plico xiii, n. 20; 11 May, P. Cacciò in Piacenza, ibid., n. 25; 18 May,
Filippo Torricelli in Turin, ibid., n. 33; 19 May, the comitato di soccorso per la Sicilia in Brescia,
ibid., n. 69.
96. 10 June, Volpino Volpini in Tredozio, ibid., plico xiv, n. 218.
97. 4 July, Teresa Penco, ibid., plico xv, n. 180; quoted in Trevelyan, The Thousand, p. 38.
98. Most of these relate to Garibaldi's companion, Maria della Torre, but see the mentions in W. B.
Brooke, Out with Garibaldi: or from Milazzo to Capua, London, 1860, pp. 238–9; and E. Maison,
Journal d'un volontaire de Garibaldi, Paris, 1861, pp. 96–7; and the discussion in L. Guidi,
‘Patriottismo femminile e travestimenti sulla scena risorgimentale’, Studi Storici, 41/2, 2000, pp.
571–87.
99. 14 May, Defendente Mapelli in Monza, MRM, Bertani, cartella 12, plico xiii, n. 62.
100. 30 May, Luigi Bergeno in Saluzzo, ibid., n. 127. See also the letter of 23 May, Francesco
Allegro in Oneglia, ibid., n. 98.
101. 17 May, G. Giucciardi in Milan, ibid., n. 38.
102. 15 June, Giuseppe Briasco in Genoa, ibid., plico xiv, n. 24.
103. 18 June, Stefano Castiglioni in Angera, ibid., n. 33.
104. 17 June, Salvolini in Novi, ibid., n. 15.
105. 28 June, in Sarzana, ibid., n. 250.
106. 7 May, Cesare Crugati in Montespluga, ibid., plico xiii, n. 13.
107. 13 June, Pietro Gillio in Turin, ibid., plico xiv, n. 213.
108. 13 June, Giacomo Talassano in Savona, ibid., n. 208.
109. 21 June, Giovanni Moro, ibid., n. 67.
110. 29 May, Angelo Pavesi, ibid., plico xiii, n. 123.
111. 26 Sept., Stefano Canessa, ibid., Garibaldi Curàtulo, f. 471.
112. 23 May, Vincenzo Ghirardini in Cremona, ibid., Bertani, cartella 12, plico xiii, n. 100.
113. 14 May, in Brescello, ibid., n. 66.
114. 22 May, Enrico Ruspini in Cuneo, ibid., n. 91.
115. 11 June, Carlo Romagnani in Lugo, ibid., plico xiv, n. 99.
116. 1, 4, 5 and 14 June, Marco Fasolis de Salineri, ibid., n. 85, 151, 188, 190.
117. 12 June, ibid., n. 320.
118. 20 June, Domenico Casanova in Pinerolo, ibid., n. 49. His second letter (25 June) is published in
Maraldi, La spedizione dei Mille, pp. 157–8, along with a selection of other letters begging to be
allowed to volunteer.
119. Trevelyan, The making of Italy, App. B, pp. 316–19.
120. MRM, Bertani, cartella n.13, plichi xv–xvi; cartella 15, plico xxii.
121. Trevelyan, The making of Italy, App. B, pp. 316–19. See the comment added to the letter of 30
May 1860, MRM, Bertani, cartella 12, plico xiii, n. 126.
122. 23 May, Giorgio Gilette, ibid., n. 97.
123. Ibid., plico xiv, n. 89.
124. F. Conti, L'Italia dei democratici, Milan, 2000, p. 78.
125. 21 June, MRM, Bertani, cartella 12, plico xiv, n. 64; 11 June, ibid., n. 99; 23 June 1860, ibid.,
ns. 116 and 121. These comments are instructions apparently written by Bertani to his secretaries
on the back of each letter: the actual letters of rejection are missing.
126. 13 June, Antonio Scotti in Lodi, ibid., n. 228.
127. 31 May, Paolo Francesco Ramella in Turin, ibid., plico xiii, n. 131 (and see 12 May, ibid., n.
34).
128. E.g. 24 May, Pietro Venchi in Robbio Lomellina, ibid., n. 106; 10 June 1860, Luigi Monari in
Novara, ibid., plico xiv, n. 187.
129. 13 June, ibid., n. 226; on Bertani's state of health, see Trevelyan, The making of Italy, p. 38.
130. E.g. 6 May, MRM, Bertani, cartella 12, plico xiii, n. 10; 7 May, ibid., n. 12; 10 May, ibid., nn.18
and 20; 11 May, ibid., n. 25; 16 May, ibid., n. 49, 15 May, ibid., n. 59; 14 May, ibid., nn. 65 and
66; 19 May, ibid., nn. 69 and 72; 20 May, ibid., n. 79; 21 May 1860, ibid., n. 96; 20 June, ibid.,
plico xiv, nn. 51 and 53.
131. 6 May, Giuseppe Redaelli in Lande St Maurizio, ibid., plico xiii, n. 10.
132. 30 May, Achille Regard in Casale, ibid., n. 125.
133. 12 June, Giacomo Taricchi in Chesrasco, ibid., plico xiv, n. 234.
134. 27 June, Ottavo Ferrero, ibid., n. 246.
135. One or two correspondents complain about the ‘lack of energy’ of the Piedmontese government:
e.g. 21 May, Nob. Gio. Batt. Contarini in Milan, ibid., plico xiii, n. 96; and another, Angelo Pavesi,
complains about ‘hardships of every kind’ in Pavia, 29 May, ibid., n. 123.
136. 1 Feb. 1861, Anna Ingram in London, ibid., Garibaldi Curàtulo, f. 449.
137. M. O'Connor, The romance of Italy and the English political imagination, London, 1998, p. 90;
M. C. Finn, After Chartism. Class and nation in English radical politics, 1848–74, Cambridge,
1993, pp. 206–7. The currency figures are based on calculations given by http://eh.net/hmit.
138. J. Ridley, Garibaldi, London, 1974, p. 459.
139. According to a flyer dated 20 June, and a letter from the ‘Honorary Secretary’ dated 29 Dec. in
MCRR, b.53 11/4.
140. 19 Dec., in MRM, Garibaldi Curàtulo, f. 449.
141. MCRR, b.52, 3/96.
142. 30 Nov., in MRM, Garibaldi Curàtulo, f. 449.
143. H. Marraro, American opinion on the unification of Italy, 1846–61, New York, 1932, p. 304;
http://eh.net/hmit.
144. 18 Sept., and n.d., both in MRM, Garibaldi Curàtulo, f. 449.
145. These details are in Marraro, American opinion, pp. 287–95, and Ridley, Garibaldi, p. 462.
146. N.d., in MRM, Garibaldi Curàtulo, f. 449.
147. Trevelyan, The making of Italy, pp. 48–9; App. B, pp. 316–20.
148. Marraro, American opinion, pp. 285–7.
149. 19 Nov., in MRM, Garibaldi Curàtulo, f. 449.
150. Trevelyan, The making of Italy, pp. 64–5; see also Dunne's obituary in The Times, 3 Dec. 1906.
151. Trevelyan, The making of Italy, pp. 259–61.
152. J. Fyfe (ed.), Autobiography of John McAdam (1806–1883), Edinburgh, 1980, pp. 44–5;
McAdam's letter to Holyoake, 28 May, ibid., pp. 130–1.
153. F. Boyer, ‘Souscriptions pour Garibaldi en France (1860)’, Rassegna Storica del Risorgimento,
47/1, 1960, pp. 69–74.
154. Idem, ‘Les Volontaires français avec Garibaldi en 1860’, Revue d'Histoire Moderne et
Contemporaine, 7, 1960, pp. 126–7, 142–3; see also the same author's ‘Journalistes, volontaires et
armateurs français à Gênes en 1860’, in Genova e l'impresa dei Mille, 2 vols, Rome, 1961, 2, pp.
539–50.
155. M. Paolino, ‘Johann Philipp Becker ed il Risorgimento Italiano’, Rassegna Storica del
Risorgimento, 85/2, 1998, p. 219.
156. 2 Aug., 16 Sept. and 14 Dec., in MRM, Garibaldi Curàtulo, f. 449.
157. 18 Sept., ibid.; see also John Connor's letter of 5 Oct. and Elisabeth Hodges' letter of 8 Dec.,
also ibid.
158. 19 Nov., ibid.
159. 27 Nov., in MCRR, b.53, 11/3.
160. 27 Aug., signed ‘La Barone de Walniew’, in MRM, Garibaldi Curàtulo, f. 470.
161. 10 Nov. and 25 Nov., ibid., f. 449 (the latter writer had also fought with Garibaldi in Brazil).
162. 18 Aug., ibid.
163. N.d., from Elisabeth Murray; 5 Nov., from John Sullivan, ibid.
164. Quoted in Ridley, Garibaldi, p. 460.
165. 10 Nov., in MRM, Garibaldi Curàtulo, f. 449.
166. 24 Sept., ibid.
167. On the importance of Protestantism in Britain and the USA, see G. Spini, Risorgimento e
Protestanti, Naples, 1956, esp. pp. 274–365, and more generally G. Best, ‘Popular Protestantism in
Victorian Britain’, in R. Robson (ed.), Ideas and institutions of Victorian Britain. Essays in honour
of George Kitson Clark, London, 1967, pp. 115–42.
168. 6 Aug., in MRM, Garibaldi, Curàtulo, f. 449.
169. 23 Nov., ibid.
170. 1 Nov., ibid.
171. W.G. Clark, ‘Naples and Garibaldi’, in F. Galton (ed.), Vacation tourists and notes of travel in
1860, Cambridge, 1861, pp. 35–6 (he suggests that they were taken to visit the prisons on
government orders); Forbes, The campaign, pp. 252–6; R. Mundy, HMS ‘Hannibal’ at Palermo
and Naples during the Italian revolution, 1859–61, London, 1863, p. 255; A. S. Bucknell, In the
tracks of the Garibaldians through Italy and Sicily, London, 1861, pp. 132–8.
172. Best, ‘Popular Protestantism’, p. 117.
173. Boyer, ‘Les Volontaires français’, pp. 133–5.
174. G. J. Holyoake, Bygones worth remembering, London, 1905, pp. 244–54.
175. Brooke, Out with Garibaldi, p. 6.
176. Trevelyan, The making of Italy, p. 260.
177. John McAdam had to go to considerable trouble to get them home, going out to Naples with
money and borrowing more, and he was left personally ‘out of pocket’ from the whole experience.
Fyfe (ed.), Autobiography, pp. 47–8, and his letters, pp. 140–9.
178. See the correspondence in MCRR, b.53, n.11/1, 2, and 5a and b.
179. M. Milan, ‘Opinione pubblica e antigaribaldinismo in Francia: la querelle sull'unità d'Italia
(1860–1868)’, Rassegna Storica del Risorgimento, 70/2, 1983, pp. 150–4.
180. N.d. MCRR, b.53, f. 11/52.
181. Ridley, Garibaldi, pp. 460–1.
182. O. Chadwick, A history of the Popes, 1830–1914, Oxford, 1998, p. 145.
183. C. Clark, ‘The new Catholicism and the European culture wars’, in idem and W. Kaiser (eds),
Culture wars. Secular–Catholic conflict in nineteenthcentury Europe, Cambridge, 2003, p. 21.
184. Ibid., pp. 148–51.
185. E. Larkin, The consolidation of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland, 1860–70, Dublin, 1987,
p. 13.
186. G. F. H. Berkeley, The Irish battalion in the papal army of 1860, Dublin, 1929, pp. 32–9, 240–1.
187. Larkin, The consolidation, p. 50; this is an important point, as in other respects the Irish brigade
suffered great problems of morale and discipline, leading to what Larkin calls a ‘perceptible
 cooling’ in Irish–Roman relations: Cullen himself anticipated this, writing on 21 June that
‘[p]robably the whole affair will end up a fiasco – like some of the Crusades’. Ibid., p. 19.
188. R. Jonas, France and the cult of the sacred heart. An epic tale for modern times, Berkeley, CA,
2000, pp. 3–5, 158–60.
189. Clark, ‘The new Catholicism’, p. 13.
190. Forbes, The campaign, pp. 340–1.
191. 6 Aug., in Scritti e discorsi, 1, pp. 285–8.
192. See L. Cole, ‘Introduction: reexamining national identity in nineteenthcentury Central Europe
and Italy’, in idem (ed.), Different paths to the nation: regional and national identities in Central
Europe and Italy, 1830–1870, Basingstoke, 2006, pp. 1–15.
193. M. Schwegman, ‘In love with Garibaldi: romancing the Italian Risorgimento’, European Review
of History, 12/2, 2005, pp. 371–2.

Chapter 11: Unification

1. 18 Oct. 1860, Epistolario, 5, p. 266.
2. End Nov. 1860, ibid., p. 285, first published in the New York Herald, 14 Dec. 1860.
3. 6 Nov. 1860, Epistolario, 5, p. 278, first published in Il Diritto, 17 Nov. 1860, p. 278.
4. 30 Dec. 1860, in Epistolario, 5, p. 293.
5. 7 Nov. 1860, ibid., p. 281.
6. P. Pieri, Storia militare del Risorgimento, Turin, 1962, p. 733.
7. 13 Jan. 1861, Epistolario, 6, pp. 8–9. On the comitati, see A. Galante Garrone, I radicali in Italia,
1849–1925, Milan, 1973, pp. 57–9.
8. 30 Jan. 1861, Epistolario, 6, p. 27.
9. 4 Feb. 1861, ibid., p. 30.
10. 4 March 1861, ibid., p. 54.
11. 17 March 1861, from Costantino Nigra, in D. Mack Smith (ed.), The making of Italy, 1796–1866,
London, 2nd edn, 1988, pp. 366–7.
12. See his letters in Epistolario, 6, pp. 13, 15, 29, 37.
13. 13 March 1861, ibid., pp. 56–7.
14. 30 March 1861, ibid., pp. 63–4. On the società operaie, see Galante Garrone, I radicali, pp. 59–
61.
15. La libera parola. Foglio estraordinario pel giorno onomastico del Generale Garibaldi, Catania,
19 March 1861.
16. C. Pardi, Pel primo anniversario del 4 aprile. Orazione, Palermo, 1861.
17. 25 Feb. 1861, to Flora Dorant, Epistolario, 6, p. 48.
18. Riboli's letter is in E. Maison, Caprera. Les loisirs de Garibaldi, Paris, 1861, App., pp. 25–31. On
the popularity of phrenology among radicals (in Britain), see T. M. Parssinen, ‘Popular science and
society: the phrenology movement in early Victorian Britain’, Journal of Social History, 8/1, 1974,
pp. 1–20.
19. M. Paolino, ‘Johann Philipp Becker ed il Risorgimento Italiano’, Rassegna Storica del
Risorgimento, 85/2, 1998, pp. 216–37; the title ‘German Garibaldi’ is Jenny Marx's. See also the
correspondence between Garibaldi, Becker and Mieroslawski in MRM, Garibaldi Curàtulo, f. 266.
20. J. Fyfe (ed.), Autobiography of John McAdam (1806–1883), Edinburgh, 1980, p. 63. See
McAdam's letter to Garibaldi, 13 Jan. 1861, in MCRR, b.54 f. 1/8.
21. Col. Vecchi, Garibaldi at Caprera (ed. Mrs Gaskell), London, 1862, pp. vii–xi, 22–3, 58, 94. See
also the descriptions of various visitors in Riboli's letter in Maison, Caprera, App., pp. 25–6.
22. Writing as Elpis Melena, Hundert und ein Tag auf meinem Pferde und ein Ausflug nach der Insel
Maddalena, Hamburg, 1860; Garibaldi at home: a visit to the Mediterranean islands of La
Maddalena and Caprera, London, 1860; Recollections of General Garibaldi; or travels from
Rome to Lucerne: comprising a visit to the Mediterranean islands of La Maddalena and Caprera,
London, 1861; Excursion à l'île de Caprera, Geneva, 1862. She also published a version of
Garibaldi's memoirs (Garibaldi's Denkwürdigkeiten) in Hamburg in 1861.
23. The illustrations are in ILN, 26 Jan. 1861, pp. 71 (the front page), 74–5, 79 (this edition also had a
colour portrait); Vizitelly's description is in the 2 Feb. edition, pp. 105–6.
24. Garibaldi, Arte e storia, 2 vols, Florence, 1982, 1, cat. 3.3.11, pp. 105–6.
25. Giuseppe Garibaldi da Caprera ad Aspromonte, 1860–61–62. Memorie storiche raccolta da
Felice Venosta, Milan, n.d., pp. 4, 5, 11.
26. Die Gartenlaube, 1866, n.2. p. 32.
27. Maison, Caprera, p. 6, App., p. 25.
28. C. MacGrigor, Garibaldi at home. Notes of a visit to Caprera, London, 1866, p. 39.
29. Il tributo all'immortale Giuseppe Garibaldi o sia catechismo politico costituzionale italiano per
la necessaria istruzione del popolo, Naples, 2nd edn, 1861, p. 5.
30. Garibaldi a Caprera, Turin, 1861; Garibaldi e Caprera, Naples, 1862; Garibaldi en Caprera,
Utrecht, 1861; Garibaldi et Caprera, Utrecht, 1862; Garibaldi på Caprera, Stockholm, 1862;
Garibaldi auf Caprera, Leipzig, 1862. I have used the English version, see above, note 21.
31. Vecchi, Garibaldi, pp. 7–8, 38, 43–5.
32. Ibid., p. 2.
33. Ibid., pp. 55, 75.
34. Letter of 3 Jan. 1861, in Fyfe (ed.), John McAdam, p. 51.
35. 4 Feb. 1861, Epistolario, 6, p. 29.
36. 2 Feb. 1861, MCRR, b.47 f. 2/2; 9 April 1861, MRM, Garibaldi Curàtulo, f. 383 (and see
Garibaldi's reply in Epistolario, 6, pp. 62–3).
37. 28 Oct., 14 Nov., 22 and 24 Dec. 1860, MRM, Garibaldi Curàtulo, f. 470.
38. 25 Dec. 1860, ibid., f. 453
39. 6 May 1861, MCRR, b.54 f. 1/4; 2 March 1861, ibid., b.53, f. 11/9.
40. 26 Feb. 1861, ibid., b.53, f. 57.
41. 3 Dec. 1860, MRM, Garibaldi Curàtulo, f. 566.
42. 30 Jan. and 8 Feb. 1861, ibid., f. 449.
43. 31 Jan. 1861, in MCRR, b.53 f. 11/7 (Garibaldi's reply in Epistolario, 6, p. 65, and published in Il
Diritto and L'Unità Italiana on 6 April). Ashley's letter of 9 April is in MRM, Garibaldi Curàtulo,
f. 449.
44. Both letters 30 Jan. 1861, ibid.
45. C. Duggan, Francesco Crispi, 1818–1901. From nation to nationalism, Oxford, 2002, p. 245.
46. Galante Garrone, I radicali, pp. 49–50, 56.
47. 4 Feb. 1861, in Epistolario, 6, p. 30.
48. Galante Garrone, I radicali, pp. 53–4, 72.
49. L. Riall, Sicily and the unification of Italy. Liberal policy and local power, 1859–66, Oxford,
1998, pp. 123–30; A. Scirocco, Il Mezzogiorno nella crisi dell'unificazione, 1860–1, Naples, 1981.
50. Pieri, Storia militare, pp. 734–5; F. Molfese, ‘Lo scioglimento dell'esercito meridionale
garibaldino 1860–1’, Nuova Rivista Storica, 44, 1960, pp. 1–53.
51. E. Francia,$Le baionette intelligenti. La guardia nazionale nell'Italia liberale (1848–1876),
Bologna, 1999, pp. 57–86; P. Pieri, Le forze armate nella età della Destra, Milan, 1962, pp. 66–7.
52. Riall, Sicily, pp. 138–55; F. Molfese, Storia del brigantaggio dopo l'unità, Milan, 1964; J. A.
Davis, Conflict and control. Law and order in nineteenthcentury Italy, London, 1988, pp. 168–86.
53. 22 Nov. 1860, to Cavour, in D. Mack Smith (ed.), Garibaldi, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1969, p. 60.
54. 11 April 1861, in Epistolario, 6, pp. 78–9.
55. Florence MacKnight, MRM, Garibaldi Curàtulo, f. 566; Caroline Gifford Philippson, ibid., f.
580.
56. The Times, 23 April 1861.
57. H. d'Ideville, Journal d'un diplomate en Italie, Paris, 1871, 1, pp. 179–80, and in Mack Smith
(ed.), Garibaldi, p. 60; see also the description in Madame C. de Bunsen, In three legations. Turin,
Florence, The Hague, London, 1909, pp. 136–9.
58. M. Isabella, ‘Exile and nationalism: the case of the Risorgimento’, European History Quarterly,
36/4, 2006, p. 496.
59. The speech is in Mack Smith (ed.), The making of Italy, pp. 348–52.
60. 23 April 1861.
61. Mack Smith (ed.), The making of Italy, p. 352; the full text of the debate is in Garibaldi in
parlamento, 1. Dalla repubblica romana a Aspromonte, Rome, 1982, pp. 89–237.
62. J. Ridley, Garibaldi, London, 1974, pp. 519–20.
63. 29 April 1861, Epistolario, 6, pp. 94–6. See also 22 April 1861, ibid., pp. 89–90.
64. 18 May 1861, ibid., pp. 104–6.
65. At least from the foreign audience in parliament, see The Times, 23 April; D'Ideville, Journal, and
De Bunsen, In three legations.
66. 12 April 1861, NA, 30/22/68.
67. On this episode, about which there was considerable debate, see Ridley, Garibaldi, pp. 520–4;
and a recent discussion in The Times, 9 Feb. 2000.
68. Ridley, Garibaldi, pp. 525–6.
69. Duggan, Francesco Crispi, p. 248.
70. Galante Garrone, I radicali, pp. 64–71.
71. D. Mack Smith, ‘Constitutional monarchy, 1861–1865’, in idem, Victor Emanuel, Cavour and the
Risorgimento, London, 1971, pp. 283–8; Duggan, Francesco Crispi, p. 249.
72. Most of these letters can be found in MCRR, b.50, f. 1–2; b.45, f. 26–7.
73. 23 Jan. 1862, from Leopold Comte Ribarola, ibid., b.50 f. 2/19.
74. Dec. 1861, ibid., b.47 f. 2/5.
75. N.d. (but in 1861–6 file), ibid., b.316 f. 32/5.
76. Jan. 1862, ibid., b.45 f. 26/53.
77. 17 Oct. 1861, ibid., b.52, f. 3/54 (the letter is partly destroyed).
78. G. Guerzoni, Garibaldi, 2 vols, Florence, 1882, 2, pp. 284–7.
79. G. Pécout, ‘Les Sociétés de tir dans l'Italie unifiée de la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle’,
Mélanges de l'Ecole Française de Rome, pp. 544–50. Garibaldi's letters to the Rifle Clubs (March
and April 1862) are in in Epistolario, 7, pp. 12–13, 18, 51, 61, 63–4, 68, 77–81.
80. Ibid., pp. 19–20, 28–9, 32–7, 39–40, 44–8, 53–60, 65, 69–70, 76–8, 83–7, 89, 91–5.
81. Pécout, ‘Les Sociétés de tir’, pp. 550–1.
82. 19 May 1862, Scritti e discorsi, 2, pp. 80–1 (see also his followup letter, pp. 81–2).
83. Duggan, Francesco Crispi, p. 250.
84. Mack Smith, ‘Constitutional monarchy’, p. 288.
85. Guerzoni, Garibaldi, 2, p. 300.
86. Epistolario, 7, p. 158.
87. 16 July 1862, ibid., p. 164.
88. July 1862, ibid., pp. 289, 292–5.
89. Ibid., pp. 165–7.
90. Almost all these speeches were published in Il Diritto and are republished in Scritti e discorsi, 2,
pp. 96–123.
91. These were soldiers being tried for desertion, in ACS, Tribunali militari di guerra di Palermo,
Messina, Catania e Catanzaro, 1860–6, b.1.
92. 19 Aug. 1862, telegram from the prefect of Catania to the prefect of Palermo, in G. Scichilone
(ed.), Documenti sulle condizioni della Sicilia dal 1860 al 1870, Rome, 1952, p. 141.
93. Riall, Sicily, pp. 162–3; Mack Smith, ‘Constitutional monarchy’, pp. 289–91.
94. The decree is in MCRR, b.668, f. 34/5.
95. Riall, Sicily, pp. 163–7.
96. A. Bertani, Scritti e discorsi, 2 vols, Florence, 1890, 2, pt 1, p. 42.
97. Galante Garrone, I radicali, pp. 72–3, 78–9.
98. Quoted in Duggan, Francesco Crispi, pp. 259–60; on Sicily in 1863, see Riall, Sicily, pp. 167–78.
99. Guerzoni, Garibaldi, 2, p. 332; on his wounds, see E. Albanese, La ferita di Garibaldi ad
Aspromonte. Diario inedito della cura, Milan, 1907.
100. ‘Io e il popolo’, 4 Sept. 1862.
101. August 1862, vol. 56, p. 833.
102. P. Gut, ‘Garibaldi et la France, 1848–1882. Naissance d'un mythe’, Rassegna Storica del
Risorgimento, 74/3, 1987, pp. 309–10.
103. 1 and 5 Sept. 1862.
104. Epistolario, 7, pp. 300–2; Scritti e discorsi, 2, pp. 146–9. Il Diritto was already involved with a
polemic over Garibaldi's support of those arrested at Sarnico (see ‘Garibaldi e la legge. Risposta
all'opuscolo dell'Avvocato P. C. Boggio’, published as a supplement to the paper, and as a separate
pamphlet), so led the controversy over Aspromonte in Italy. Garibaldi's letter was also published in
The Times on 10 Sept. 1862.
105. Scritti e discorsi, 2, pp. 150–3; quoted in M. Finn, After Chartism. Class and nation in English
radical politics, 1848–1874, Cambridge, 1993, p. 208. This letter was also published in Il Diritto.
106. Una voce dalle prigioni. Il fatto d'Aspromonte, Lugano, 1862, p. 7.
107. Aspromonte. Ricordi storico–militare, Turin, 1862, p. 59.
108. La verità sul fatto di Aspromonte, per un testimonio oculare, Milan, 1862, p. 55.
109. Cinque giorni in Calabria o la catastrofe d'Aspromonte per un volontario garibaldino, Palermo
(?), 1862, pp. 33–4.
110. C. Bianchi, I martiri d'Aspromonte, cenni storici, Milan, 2nd edn, 1863, title page.
111. Napoleon III was widely presumed to be behind the government's action at Aspromonte.
112. F. Pyat, Lettera al Generale Garibaldi, n.d. but 1862, p. 8.
113. Garibaldi et la civilisation. La rédemption – les puissants – le Pape – mensonges de la
civilisation – l'avenir, Turin, 1862, pp. 7–8.
114. Garibaldi, Arte e Storia, 2, cat. 12, nn. 12–14, pp. 67–70.
115. W. Settimelli, Garibaldi. L'album fotografico, Florence, 1982, pp. 59–63.
116. Giuseppe Garibaldi da Caprera ad Aspromonte, p. 73.
117. A. Herzen, My past and thoughts, 6 vols, London, 1924–7, 5, p. 36.
118. Civica Raccolta delle Stampe A. Bertarelli, Milan, ASM, 36–65; Arte e storia, 2, pp. 219, 229–
33 (which has other examples of the same theme).
119. Both are in Epistolario, 8, pp. 66, 130 (from MCRR).
120. See e.g. MCRR, b.52, f. 3, b.47, f. 2 & b.53, f. 11. For typical examples of Garibaldi's replies
see his letter to Teodorina Muller, 7 Nov. 1862, Epistolario, 7, p. 220; to the students of Utrecht, 6
Dec., ibid., p. 244; and to the surgeon Nikolai Pirogov, 6 Aug. 1863, Epistolario, 8, p. 127.
121. Christopher Wordsworth's travel journal (1863), quoted in H. W. Rudman, Italian nationalism
and English letters, London, 1940, p. 318.
122. 2 Nov. 1862, in MCRR, b.52, f. 3/52.
123. 3 Sept. 1862, ibid., f. 3/55.
124. Jan. 1863, ibid., b.51, f. 1/16.
125. Ridley, Garibaldi, p. 544.
126. 25 Oct. 1862, MCRR, b.54, f. 1/22.
127. 17 Oct. 1862, ibid., f. 1/19.
128. Ibid., b.53, f. 11/30–2.
129. 4 Dec. 1862 and 15 April 1863, ibid., f. 11/39 and 52.
130. Settimelli, Garibaldi, pp. 60–1.
131. Various ‘indirizzi’ and subscriptions are in MCRR, b.51, f. 1/1–19; b.316, f. 32. Many of his
replies are published in Epistolario, 7, pp. 199–200, 213–14, 245–7.
132. 19 Jan. 1863, ibid., 8, pp. 18–19.
133. 24 Feb. 1863, ibid., pp. 37–8.
134. Aug. 1863, ibid., pp. 128–30.
135. 1 and 2 March 1863, ibid., pp. 44–7.
136. See his letters to various priests, 11 and 15 Jan. 1863, ibid., p. 16; to Perroni Paladino [sic] and
the editor of L'Aspromonte about the election of a candidate, 19 Jan., ibid., pp. 17–19; to the
republican Giovanni Corrao, 1 March, ibid., p. 45; to ‘alcuni amici palermitani’, 3 Nov., ibid., p.
166; and to the socialist Saverio Friscia, 25 Dec. ibid., p. 187.
137. Quoted in N. Blakiston, ‘Garibaldi's visit to London in 1864’, unpublished paper, BL, p. 3.
138. Quoted in L. Elda Funaro, ‘Il viaggio di Garibaldi in Inghilterra e la crisi della democrazia
italiana dopo l'unità’, Studi Storici, 7/1, 1966, pp. 134–5, and more generally on the attitude of the
Italian government, pp. 137–40.
139. Finn, After Chartism, pp. 214–17.
140. Fyfe (ed.), John McAdam, p. 67; D. Beales, ‘Garibaldi in England: the politics of Italian
enthusiasm’, in J. A. Davis and P. Ginsborg (eds), Society and politics in the age of the
Risorgimento. Essays in honour of Denis Mack Smith, Cambridge, 1991, p. 194.
141. 3 April 1864, in Epistolario, 8, p. 212: it was published in The Times, 4 April, and Il Diritto &
Unità Italiana, 7 April.
142. Quoted in Elda Funaro, ‘Il viaggio’, pp. 147–8.
143. According to R. McWilliam, The Tichbourne claimant: a Victorian sensation, London,
forthcoming.
144. 12 April 1864.
145. Quoted in M. O'Connor, The romance of Italy and the English political imagination, London,
1998, p. 168. Her volume, along with Ridley, Garibaldi, pp. 546–64, Beales, ‘Garibaldi in
England’, pp. 184–216, and J. A. Davis, ‘Garibaldi in England,’ History Today 32, 1982, pp. 21–6,
are the most detailed accounts of Garibaldi's visit to England.
146. M. Reynolds, The realms of verse. English poetry in a time of nation-building, Oxford, 2001,
pp. 3–8.
147. 12 April 1864, in Elda Funaro, ‘Il viaggio’, App. p. 155.
148. Mack Smith (ed.), Garibaldi, p. 132.
149. 12 April 1864.
150. Munby's diary, 11 April 1864, in D. Hudson (ed.), Munby. Man of two worlds, London, 1972,
pp. 186–7.
151. 12 April 1864.
152. Diary entry for 11 April 1864, quoted in Beales, ‘Garibaldi in England’, p. 191.
153. Herzen, My past and thoughts, 5, p. 32.
154. Quoted in Beales, ‘Garibaldi in England’, p. 137.
155. Elda Funaro, ‘Il viaggio’, p. 139; Paul Cullen to Patrick Moran, 12 April 1864, Cullen papers,
Dublin diocesan archives, f. 40/4 (also in C. Barr (ed.), The correspondence of Paul Cullen,
Dublin, forthcoming).
156. Ridley, Garibaldi, pp. 549–51, 555–61; O'Connor, The romance of Italy, pp. 172–4.
157. The phrase is Matthew Truesdell's, Spectacular politics. Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte and the
‘Fête Impériale’, 1849–1870, Oxford, 1997.
158. E. Biagini, Liberty, retrenchment and reform. Popular liberalism in the age of Gladstone, 1860–
80, Cambridge, 1992, p. 374; Beales, ‘Garibaldi in England’, p. 189.
159. Beales, ‘Garibaldi in England’, pp. 188–9; O' Connor, The romance of Italy, pp. 153–5, P. D.
Gordon Pugh, Staffordshire portrait figures and allied subjects of the Victorian era, Woodbridge,
1970; R. McWilliam, ‘The theatricality of the Staffordshire figurine; Journal of Victorian Culture,
10/1, 2005, pp. 107–14. On the Garibaldi biscuit, see
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garibaldi_biscuit’. This British biscuit (two crackers with a currant
filling) also bears a resemblance to a fruit bread, pane dei pescatori, still sold today on the
Ligurian coast.
160. ‘Hyam & Co.'s leading styles for the present season’, advertising sheet, BL.
161. In M. Smith, A wreath for Garibaldi, London, 1864.
162. Quoted in Biagini, Liberty, p. 373.
163. Both on p. 3.
164. Colonel Chambers, Garibaldi and Italian Unity, London, 1864, p. 3.
165. Quoted in Finn, After Chartism, p. 221; on Princess Alexandra's arrival, see J. Plunkett, Queen
Victoria. First media monarch, Oxford, 2003, pp. 51–2.
166. G. Claeys, ‘Mazzini, Kossuth and British radicalism’, Journal of British Studies, 28/3, 1989, pp.
227, 245–7.
167. J. Davis, ‘Radical clubs and London politics, 1870–1900’, in D. Feldman and G. Stedman Jones
(eds), Metropolis London. Histories and representations since 1800, London, 1989, pp. 103–28; S.
Shipley, Club life and socialism in mid-Victorian London, London, 1971.
168. Beales, ‘Garibaldi in England’, p. 186.
169. 18 April 1864, MRM, Garibaldi Curàtulo, b.449.
170. O'Connor, The romance of Italy, pp. 152–60, 177–8; see also the comments of J. Vernon,
Politics and the people, Cambridge, 1993, pp. 265–6.
171. Anon. The life of Garibaldi … Interspersed with anecdotes illustrative of his personal character.
Compiled from original and authentic sources, London, 1864, pp. 4, 17, 60.
172. 12 April 1864.
173. Quoted in Finn, After Chartism, p. 218.
174. Ibid., pp. 217–24.
175. Mack Smith (ed.), Garibaldi, p. 75.
176. Blakiston, ‘Garibaldi's visit to London’, p. 5.
177. Elda Funaro, ‘Il viaggio’, pp. 145, 152.
178. Beales, ‘Garibaldi in England’, pp. 199–216.
179. Elda Funaro, ‘Il viaggio’, p. 155.
180. Finn, After Chartism, pp. 223–5.
181. See Catherine Hall et al., Defining the Victorian Nation: Class, Race, Gender and the Reform
Act of 1867, Cambridge, 2000.
182. Quoted in O'Connor, The romance of Italy, p. 182.
183. H. E. Manning, The visit of Garibaldi to England. A letter to the Right Hon. Edward Cardwell,
M.P., London, 1864, p. 6; see also R. J. Cooper, Three letters to the conservatives of England … on
the subject of Garibaldi and Revolution, London, 1864.
184. S. Gilley, ‘The Garibaldi riots of 1862’, Historical Journal, 16/4, 1973, pp. 697–732.
185. To Myles O'Reilly, National Library of Ireland, MS 17,886; in Barr (ed.), The correspondence of
Paul Cullen, forthcoming; N. Blakiston (ed.), The Roman Question, London, 1962, p. 285.
186. Quoted in Beales, ‘Garibaldi in England’, p. 193.
187. Hudson, (ed.), Munby, p. 187.
188. Mack Smith (ed.), Garibaldi, pp. 132–3.
189. Quoted in Ridley, Garibaldi,, pp. 558, 560.
190. MRM, Garibaldi Curàtulo, f. 657.
191. Ibid., f. 656. It was also considered surprising that at Stafford House she took him to her boudoir
and allowed him to smoke there: Earl of Malmesbury, Memoirs of an exminister, London, 1885,
pp. 593–4.
192. 29 April, 15 and 29 June 1864, MRM, Garibaldi Curàtulo, f. 656; see also her letters of 31 May,
11 July, 13, 26 and 31 Aug. 1864.
193. 23 April 1864, ibid., f. 632.
194. 24 April, 2 May and 1 June 1864, ibid.
195. ‘May’, 2 May, 20 June, 4 Aug., 5 Sept. 1864, ibid.
196. 2 and 24 May 1864, ibid.; MCRR, b.54, f. 1/42 (quoted in G. Monsagrati, ‘Garibaldi e il culto
vittoriano dell'eroe’, Studi Storici, 42/1, 2001, p. 176).
197. Nanette Malleim, 14 Dec. 1866, MRM, Garibaldi Curàtulo, b.449.
198. O'Connor, The romance of Italy, pp. 154–6.
199. 24 May 1864, MRM, Garibaldi Curàtulo, f. 632.
200. Hudson (ed.), Munby, p. 187.
201. Mack Smith (ed.), Garibaldi, p. 133.
202. Quoted in Beales, ‘Garibaldi in England’, pp. 187–8.
203. 12 April (‘Sauvage’) and 15 May (MacKnight) 1861, both in MRM, Garibaldi Curàtulo, f. 566.
204. 20 Oct. 1864, ibid., f. 632.
205. 24 April and 13 June 1864, Epistolario, 8, pp. 57, 92–3.
206. 24 April and 7 June, ibid., p. 58.
207. 3 May 1864, ibid., p. 63.
208. According to a letter she wrote to him, 9 Oct. 1864, ibid., f. 629; and see also her frantic letter to
him of 12 May, ibid.
209. This point is also made by O'Connor, The romance of Italy, pp. 112–15.
210. 15 April 1861, MRM, Garibaldi Curàtulo, f. 566.
211. 10 April and 9 Oct. 1864, ibid., f. 629.
212. 1 and 17 June 1864, ibid., f. 657.
213. 28 April and 22 Oct. 1864, ibid., f. 656.
214. G. Curàtulo, Garibaldi e le donne, Rome, 1913, pp. 59–65; see also her letter of 14 Oct. 1862,
MCRR, b.54 f. 1/17.
215. Le memorie di Garibaldi nella redazione definitiva del 1872, Bologna, 1932, p. 499.
216. E. Mana, ‘La “democrazia” italiana. Forme e linguaggi della propaganda politica tra Ottocento e
Novocento’, in M. Ridolfi (ed.), Propaganda e communicazione politica, Milan, 2004, p. 149.
217. Galante Garrone, I radicali, p. 157.

Chapter 12: Culture Wars

1. J. Ridley, Garibaldi, London, 1974, pp. 566–70.
2. D. Mack Smith, ‘The king and the war of 1866’, in idem, Victor Emanuel, Cavour and the
Risorgimento, London, 1971, pp. 306–32.
3. Idem (ed.), The making of Italy, 1796–1866, London, 1988 edn, p. 392.
4. Quoted in C. Duggan, Francesco Crispi, 1818–1901. From nation to nationalism, Oxford, 2002, p.
283.
5. Il Politecnico, Sept. 1866, in Mack Smith (ed.), The making of Italy, pp. 392, 395.
6. L. Riall, Sicily and the unification of Italy. Liberal policy and local power, 1859–1866, Oxford,
1998, pp. 198–221.
7. Quoted in E. Gentile, The sacralization of politics in fascist Italy, Cambridge, MA, 1996, p. 6.
8. A. Galante Garrone, I radicali in Italia, 1849–1925, Milan, 1973, pp. 82–95; Duggan, Francesco
Crispi, pp. 263–96.
9. D. Mack Smith, ‘Victor Emanuel and the occupation of Rome’, in idem, Victor Emanuel, pp. 344–
5.
10. G. Verucci, L'Italia laica prima e dopo l'unità, 1848–1876, Rome and Bari, 1996 edn, p. 285.
11. D. Mack Smith, Garibaldi, London, 1957, pp. 159–60; on Lemmi, see C. Lovett, The democratic
movement in Italy, 1830–1876, Cambridge, MA, 1982, pp. 177, 220.
12. Scritti e discorsi, 2, pp. 394–5, 399–401, 411. See also S. Morelli, I tre disegni di legge sulla
emancipazione della donna, riforma della pubblica istruzione e circoscrizione legale del culto
cattolico nella chiesa. Preceduti da un manifesto di Giuseppe Garibaldi, Florence, 1867.
13. For a discussion of anti-clerical culture and the left in Italy during this period, see Verucci,
L'Italia laica, pp. 266–311.
14. Ridley, Garibaldi, pp. 573–82.
15. Duggan, Francesco Crispi, pp. 296–302; Mack Smith, ‘Victor Emanuel’, pp. 346–9.
16. Although some observers insist the Papal troops were winning, see the letter of Edwin Cushman,
14 Nov. 1867, in H. R. Marraro, ‘Unpublished American documents on Garibaldi's march on
Rome in 1867’, Journal of Modern History, 16/2, 1944, pp. 119–21.
17. Mack Smith, ‘Victor Emanuel’, pp. 346–9; Ridley, Garibaldi, pp. 586–90.
18. In Marraro, ‘Unpublished documents’, p. 121.
19. Quoted in Mack Smith, ‘Victor Emanuel’, p. 352.
20. Quoted in Galante Garrone, I radicali, p. 96; on Situazione, see Verucci, L'Italia laica, pp. 314–
15.
21. Verucci, L'Italia laica, p. 317.
22. Quoted in Galante Garrrone, I radicali, p. 98.
23. 7 Nov. 1867, quoted in C. Ceccuti, ‘Garibaldi e la stampa democratica fiorentina fra 1860 al
1870’, Garibaldi e la Toscana. Atti del convegno di studi, 1982, Florence, 1984, p. 94.
24. A. Körner, ‘Local government and the meaning of political representation: a case study of
Bologna between 1860 and 1915’, Modern Italy, 10/2, 2005, pp. 139–42.
25. Raimondi had miscarried the child that she was pregnant with when she married Garibaldi.
26. On ‘abstentionism’, see Galante Garrone, I radicali, p. 98, 101–4.
27. Verucci, L'Italia laica, p. 201 (on the Vatican Council, see below, p. 378).
28. 22 Dec. 1867, in E. Ximenes (ed.), Epistolario di Giuseppe Garibaldi, Milan, 1885, p. 320.
29. 11 May 1868, ibid., p. 326; Scritti e discorsi, 3, pp. 8–9.
30. Clelia, ovvero il governo del monaco (Roma nel secolo XIX), Milan, 1870 (it was preceded by an
English translation); Cantoni il volontario, Milan, 1870. On the editorial history of these novels,
see M. Martinengo, ‘Garibaldi narratore’, Il Risorgimento, 55/1, 1996, pp. 95–100; on their
importance as political intervention, see below, pp. 370–2.
31. F. Boyer, ‘Les Volontaires français avec Garibaldi en 1860’, Revue d'Histoire Moderne et
Contemporaine, 7, 1960, pp. 127–9.
32. Scritti e discorsi, 3, p. 47.
33. M. Howard, The Franco-Prussian war. The German invasion of France, 1870–1, London, 1961,
pp. 205–56; for the numbers of men (said to be 16,645 at the end of the campaign), see R. Molis,
Les Francs-tireurs et les Garibaldi, Paris, 1995, p. 260.
34. P. Gut, ‘Garibaldi et la France, 1848–1882. Naissance d'un mythe’, Rassegna Storica del
Risorgimento, 74/1, 1987, p. 317.
35. Quoted in R. Paris, ‘L'Italia fuori d'Italia’, in Storia d'Italia, 4. Dall'unità a oggi, pt. 1, Turin,
1975, p. 510.
36. Ridley, Garibaldi, pp. 602–3.
37. 7 and 12 Sept. 1870, Ximenes, Epistolario, pp. 356–7; Scritti e discorsi, 3, pp. 46–7; for a
discussion, see J. Petersen, ‘Garibaldi und Deutschland 1870–71’, in idem, Italien-Bilder–
Deutschland-Bilder, Cologne, 1999, pp. 120–40. Thomas Carlyle proclaimed Germany's defeat of
France as ‘the hopefullest public fact that has occurred in my time’, quoted in J. Joll, Europe since
1870. An international history, London, 1990 edn, p. 1.
38. Quoted in Howard, The Franco-Prussian war, p. 253.
39. In D. Mack Smith (ed.), Garibaldi, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1969, p. 121.
40. Howard, The Franco-Prussian war, pp. 254, 407.
41. A. Vuilletet, Garibaldi en France, Paris, 1876, p. 99.
42. Quoted in Howard, The Franco-Prussian war, p. 429, and for a description of all these events,
pp. 407–31.
43. Paris, ‘L'Italia fuori d'Italia’, p. 512.
44. Mack Smith (ed.), Garibaldi, p. 122; Gut, ‘Garibaldi et la France’, pp. 321–2; Ridley, Garibaldi,
pp. 614–16.
45. K. Varley, ‘Contesting concepts of the nation in arms: French memories of the war of 1870–1871
in Dijon’, European History Quarterly, 36/4, 2006, pp. 548–83.
46. F. Cammarano, ‘La costruzione dello Stato e la classe dirigente’, in G. Sabatucci and V. Vidotto
(eds), Storia d'Italia, 2. Il nuovo stato e la società civile, Rome and Bari, 1995, pp. 73–5.
47. Joll, Europe since 1870, p. 50.
48. Quoted in Galante Garrone, I radicali, p. 113.
49. Scritti e discorsi, 3, pp. 93–4.
50. Verucci, L'Italia laica, pp. 223–30.
51. Galante Garrone, I radicali, pp. 127–9.
52. On these works, see Martinengo, ‘Garibaldi narratore’, pp. 91–4, 100–8.
53. Verucci, L'Italia laica, pp. 300–1.
54. D. Pick, Rome or death. The obsessions of General Garibaldi, London, 2005 pp. 1–9.
55. 15 June 1875 and 13 May 1876, Scritti e discorsi, 3, pp. 155, 239.
56. F. Conti, L'Italia dei democratici. Sinistra risorgimentale, massoneria e associazionismo fra '800
e '900, Milan, 2000, pp. 88–113; A. Scirocco, ‘Garibaldi e la lega della democrazia’, in G. Cingari
(ed.), Garibaldi e il socialismo, Rome and Bari, 1984, pp. 121–43; Galante Garrone, I radicali, pp.
193–5.
57. Scritti e discorsi, 3, pp. 308–9.
58. C. Garibaldi, Mio padre, Florence, 1948, pp. 136–7.
59. F. Brancato, ‘Il vi centenario del vespro e l'ultimo viaggio di Garibaldi in Sicilia’, Nuovi
Quaderni del Meridione, 20, 1982, pp. 573–4, 586–90.
60. Pick, Rome or death, pp. 219–20.
61. Quoted in A. Scirocco, Garibaldi. Battaglie, amori, ideali di un cittadino del mondo, Rome and
Bari, 2001, p. 391; and see the similar set of instructions in his ‘Testamento politico’, pp. 316–18,
and its ‘Appendice’ 2 July 1881, Scritti e discorsi, 3, p. 318.
62. D. Mengozzi, La morte e l'immortale. La morte laica da Garibaldi a Costa, Manduria, 2000, p.
187.
63. Ibid., p. 316.
64. Verucci, L'Italia laica, pp. 235–6.
65. The Times, 10 June 1882; Scirocco, Garibaldi, pp. 391–3.
66. Mengozzi, La morte e l'immortale, pp. 213–14, 221–4. There is a photograph of the Roman
‘funeral’ in Garibaldi. Arte e storia, 2 vols, Florence, 1982, 2, fig.18.3, p. 91.
67. For a description, see Mengozzi, La morte e l'immortale, pp. 188–95.
68. A Giuseppe Garibaldi. Parole di Enrico Panzacchi dette alla Associazione Progressista
Costituzionale delle Romagne nell'adunanza dell'11 Giugno 1882, Bologna, and Conegliano, 1882.
F. Dolci, ‘L'editoria d'occasione del secondo Ottocento’, in Il mito del Risorgimento nell' Italia
unita, Milan, 1995, pp. 124–48, counts 220 commemorative pamphlets published in 1882 alone;
see also the list in idem (ed.), Effemeridi pattriotiche, Rome, 1984.
69. In morte di Giuseppe Garibaldi. Commemorazione. Codogno 8 guigno 1882, Codogno, 1882;
Funebri onoranze a Giuseppe Garibaldi in Pisa, 15 giugno 1882, Pisa, 1882; E. Befardeci, Cenno
necrologico di Giuseppe Garibaldi letto nel teatro greco di Siracusa il 25 giugno 1882, Siracusa,
1882; Commemorazione della morte del Generale Giuseppe Garibaldi, 30 aprile 1883, Macerata,
1883.
70. Alla venerata memoria del prode dei prodi Giuseppe Garibaldi, Messina, 1882, p. 12.
71. Avv. L. Fulci, Garibaldi. Conferenza tenuta nella grande aula della Università di Messina,
Messina, 1882; G. De' Nobili, Apoteosi di Garibaldi. Discorso, Trapani, 1882.
72. M. Caselli, ‘Garibaldi è morto!’, Naples, 1882.
73. A Giuseppe Garibaldi. Parole di cordoglio pronunziate il 17 giugno 1882 nella ricorrenza delle
civile onoranze resegli in Pachino, Noto, 1882.
74. Arte e storia, 1, cat. II, 9, 158–67, pp. 256–8; S. Abita and M. A. Fusco, Garibaldi
nell'iconografia dei suoi tempi, Milan, 1982, pp. 184–6.
75. ‘Morte di Giuseppe Garibaldi a Caprera’, Civica Raccolta delle Stampe A. Bertarelli, Milan,
ASM, 42–6.
76. 17 June 1882.
77. 3 June 1882.
78. Vol. 52, juillet–âout 1882, p. 204.
79. G. Sabbatucci, Il trasformismo come sistema. Saggio sulla storia politica dell'Italia unitaria,
Rome and Bari, 2003; L. Musella, Il trasformismo, Bologna, 2003.
80. Körner, ‘Local government in Bologna’, p. 138.
81. Although Garibaldi did not fight in the Paris Commune, many garibaldini did, including his son,
Menotti, and he sent a message of support to its leaders. Paris, ‘L'Italia fuori d'Italia’, pp. 513–19.
82. F. della Peruta, ‘La concezione del socialismo in Garibaldi’; L. Briguglio, ‘Garibaldi e
l'Internazionale’; A. A. Mola, ‘L'internazionalismo massonico di Garibaldi’; all in Cingari (ed.),
Garibaldi e il socialismo, pp. 81–95, 97–118, 147–64.
83. 14 Nov. 1871, to Giorgio Pallavicino, in Mack Smith (ed.), Garibaldi, p. 83.
84. E. Mana, ‘La “democrazia” italiana. Forme e linguaggi della propaganda politica tra Ottocento e
Novocento’, in M. Ridolfi (ed.), Propaganda e communicazione politica, Milan, 2004, pp. 152–4.
85. E. Mana, ‘La democrazia radicale italiana e le forme della politica’, in M. Ridolfi (ed.), La
democrazia radicale nell'Ottocento europeo, Milan, 2005, pp. 197–202.
86. Mana, ‘La “democrazia” italiana’, pp. 147–155.
87. Conti, L'Italia dei democratici, pp. 75–87.
88. 3 and 5 June 1882.
89. W. Settimeli, Garibaldi. L'album fotografico, Florence, 1982, figs 81–3, pp. 78–9; Arte e storia,
1, cat. 1, 3.1.8., p. 87. On the ‘Macchiaioli’ and their relationship to nationalism, see A. Boime,
The art of the Macchia and the Risorgimento, Chicago, 1993.
90. G. Guerzoni, Garibaldi, 2 vols, Florence, 1882, v. 2, pp. 585–6.
91. Pick, Rome or death, pp. 145–6, 185, 204–10.
92. I discuss this in greater detail below; see also M. Isnenghi, ‘I due volti dell'eroe. Garibaldi
vincitore–vinto e vinto–vincitore’, in S. Bertelli and G. Clemente (eds), Tracce dei vinti, Florence,
1994, pp. 265–300.
93. U. Levra, ‘Vittorio Emanuele II’, in M. Isnenghi (ed.), I luoghi della memoria: personaggi e date
dell'Italia unita, Rome and Bari, 1997, pp. 49–52.
94. See I. Porciani, ‘Italien. “Fare gli Italiani”’, in Mythen der Nationen. Ein europäisches
Panorama, Berlin, 1998, pp. 199–222.
95. For a discussion and bibliography of this substantial literature, see above, pp. 3–5.
96. Duggan, Francesco Crispi, pp. 436–40.
97. I. Porciani, ‘Lo statuto e il Corpus Domini. La festa nazionale dell'Italia liberale’, in Il mito del
Risorgimento, p. 171.
98. Recently, the work of Catherine Brice on the monarchy has suggested that this negative view
needs to be modified: ‘La Monarchie et la construction de l'identité nationale italienne, 1861–
1911’, Doctorat d'Etat, Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris, 2004.
99. Album della guerra del 1866, Milan, 1866–7, illustrations on pp. 9, 12, 68, 76–7.
100. 25 Sept. 1866.
101. 26–31 Oct. 1867.
102. 31 Oct. 1867.
103. 9 Nov. 1867.
104. Atlantic Monthly, 1869, in Mack Smith (ed.), Garibaldi, p. 146.
105. 7 Nov. 1867.
106. Both in Mack Smith (ed.), Garibaldi, pp. 120–3.
107. F. M. Elliot, Roman gossip, London, 1894, p. 142.
108. C. Garibaldi, Mio padre, p. 136; the Museum of the Risorgimento in Palermo displays the chair
as one of its Garibaldi ‘relics’.
109. 26 June 1882.
110. C. Garibaldi, Mio padre, p. 137.
111. Scritti e discorsi, 3, p. 308. The word ‘guaranteed’ refers to the law of guarantees, with which
the Italian government tried to regulate its relationship with the Vatican by guaranteeing its
sovereign status.
112. 26 Aug. 1867, Scritti e discorsi, 3, pp. 407–8.
113. 5 May 1869, Ximenes, Epistolario, pp. 334–5.
114. 7 Sept. 1869, ibid., pp. 344–5.
115. Letter to the Gazzettino Rosso, 21 June 1870, Scritti e discorsi, 3, p. 43.
116. Cassell's Magazine, 1870, in Mack Smith (ed.), Garibaldi, p. 82.
117. Quoted in C. E. J. Griffiths, ‘The novels of Garibaldi’, Italian Studies, 30, 1975, p. 90.
118. Ibid., pp. 95–6.
119. M. Borutta, ‘La “natura del nemico”: rappresentazioni del cattolicesimo nell'anticlericalismo
dell'Italia liberale’, Rassegna Storica del Risorgimento, 88, 2001, pp. 124–8.
120. Clelia, p. 2.
121. Cantoni, pp. 26, 96, 111, 147–9.
122. Ibid., p. 11.
123. I Mille, Bologna, 1874 edn, pp. v, 57.
124. Cantoni, p. 79.
125. Le memorie di Garibaldi nella redazione definitiva del 1872, Bologna, 1932, pp. 12–13.
126. Ibid., p. 14.
127. Cantoni, pp. i–ii, in Mack Smith (ed.), Garibaldi, pp. 80–1.
128. For further discussion, see L. Riall, ‘Eroi maschili, viriltà e forme della guerra’, in A. M. Banti
and P. Ginsborg (eds), Il Risorgimento, Turin, forthcoming.
129. I Mille, p. 1.
130. Ibid., pp. 399–408, 410.
131. See above, p. 182.
132. I Mille, p. 31.
133. Cantoni, p. 33.
134. L. Guidi, ‘Patriottismo femminile e travestimenti sulla scena risorgimentale’, Studi Storici, 41/2,
2000, pp. 574–5.
135. S. Patriarca, ‘Indolence and regeneration: tropes and tensions of Risorgimento patriotism’,
American Historical Review, 110/2, 2005, pp. 380–408.
136. Ibid., p. 380.
137. Quoted in R. Villari, ‘La prefigurazione politica del giudizio storico su Garibaldi’, Studi Storici,
23/2, 1982, p. 266.
138. Conti, L'Italia dei democratici, p. 15.
139. F. della Peruta, ‘Il mito del Risorgimento e l'estrema sinistra dall'Unità al 1914’, in Il mito del
Risorgimento, pp. 38–50.
140. B. Tobia, Una patria per gli italiani, Rome and Bari, 1991, pp. 168–80.
141. C. Ceccuti, ‘Le grandi biografie popolari nell'editoria italiana del secondo Ottocento’, in Il mito
del Risorgimento, pp. 111–16, 122–3; I. Biagianti, ‘Jesse White Mario e la “cultura garibaldina”’,
in Cingari (ed.), Garibaldi e il socialismo, pp. 238–40; on the more compromised attitude of
Carducci, see G. Spadolini, Fra Carducci e Garibaldi, Florence, 1982.
142. Della Peruta, ‘Il mito’, pp. 61–2.
143. Arte e storia, 1, p. 245.
144. Ibid., 2, pp. 103–5 (see also the illustrations in Don Pirloncino and Omnibus).
145. A reviewer in the Athenaeum called it ‘an impetuous, angry, unwise book, which can have no
good result to Italy’ and which risked damaging Garibaldi's reputation. Griffiths, ‘The novels of
Garibaldi’, p. 87.
146. See above, pp. 154–6, 161, 264.
147. See G. Stiavelli, Garibaldi nella letteratura italiana, Rome, 1901; B. Croce, ‘Letteratura
garibaldina’, in La letteratura della nuova Italia. Saggi critici, vol. 6, Bari, 1940; G. Trombatore,
‘Introduzione’, Memorialisti dell'Ottocento, Milan and Naples, 1953, 1, pp. xxvi–xxvii, 721, 751–
2, 897–9, 1007–8, 1052–3, 1085–8, M. Tedeschi, ‘Memorialisti garibaldini’, in La letteratura
italiana. Storia e testi: il primo ottocento. L'età napoleonica e il Risorgimento, Rome and Bari,
1975, 8, pt. 2, pp. 433–83.
148. For the publication history of Abba's Noterelle, see G. Mariani (ed.), Antologia di scrittori
garibaldini, Bologna, 1958, pp. 73–5. Bandi's memoir was rediscovered in the post-'45 period: see
esp. Croce's comparison of Bandi and Abba, and his criticisms of Abba's work for its ‘sforzi
letterari, di necessità artificiosi’, ‘Letteratura garibaldina’, p. 13.
149. A. Mario, The red shirt. Episodes, London, 1865 (the first Italian version, ‘La camicia rossa’,
was published in Rivista Contemporanea in 1869, and in a series of editions thereafter: see A. P.
Campanella (ed.), Giuseppe Garibaldi e la tradizione garibaldina, 2 vols, Geneva, 1971, 1, pp.
378–9); E. Zasio, Da Marsala al Volturno. Ricordi, Padua, 1868; F. Cavallotti, L'insurrezione di
Roma dai sui primordi fino alla esecuzione di Monti e Tognetti, Milan, 1869–70; A. Bizzoni,
Impressioni di un volontario all'esercito dei Vosgi, Milan, 1871 and 1874; E. Checchi, Memorie di
un Garibaldino/ Memorie alla casalinga di un garibaldino, Livorno, 1866; E. Socci, Da Firenze a
Digione. Impressioni di un reduce garibaldino, Prato, 1871.
150. Mario, The red shirt, p. 9.
151. Zasio, Da Marsala al Volturno, pp. 1–22, 69–70, 130–5.
152. Cavallotti, L'insurrezione di Roma, pp. 629–30. The volume was illustrated, and came out in
parts, in the publishers’ series, ‘Collana dei martiri italiani’.
153. G. Mariani, Storia della Scapigliatura, Milan, 1967.
154. Memorie, pp. 1, 14, 20–3, 26, 73, 187.
155. Mario, The red shirt, p. 9.
156. G. Mosse, The nationalization of the masses. Political symbolism and mass movements in
Germany from the Napoleonic wars through the Third Reich, New York, 1975, p. 6.
157. B. Tobia, ‘Una forma di pedagogia nazionale tra cultura e politica: i luoghi della memoria e
della rimembranza’, in Il mito del Risorgimento, pp. 194–207.
158. Quoted in Duggan, Francesco Crispi, p. 437.
159. Mengozzi, La morte e l'immortale, pp. 199–200.
160. Ibid., pp. 203–5.
161. ‘Le tre Italie per Giuseppe Garibaldi. Le orazioni funebri’, Il Pensiero Mazziniano, 11–12, 1982,
pp. 14, 27–8.
162. Quoted in Mengozzi, La morte e l'immortale, p. 208.
163. D. Kertzer, ‘Religion and society, 1789–1892’, in J. A. Davis (ed.), Italy in the nineteenth
century, Oxford, 2000, pp. 190–6.
164. O. Chadwick, A history of the Popes, 1830–1914, Oxford, 1998, pp. 161–228.
165. C. Clark, ‘The new Catholicism and the European culture wars’, in idem and W. Kaiser (eds),
Culture wars. Secular–Catholic conflict in nineteenth-century Europe, Cambridge, 2003, pp. 11,
19.
166. Ibid., pp. 13–23; Chadwick, A history of the Popes, pp. 38–9.
167. Borutta, ‘La “natura del nemico”’, pp. 122–4.
168. A. Scattigno, ‘Caterina da Siena: modello civile e religioso nell'Italia del Risorgimento’, in A.
M. Banti and R. Bizzocchi (eds), Immagini della nazione nell'Italia del Risorgimento, Rome, 2002,
pp. 177–8.
169. Clark, ‘The new Catholicism’, p. 22.
170. Chadwick, A history of the Popes, pp. 244, 284.
171. Ibid., p. 238.
172. Ibid., pp. 268–72.
173. M. Pappenheim, ‘Roma o morte: culture wars in Italy’, in Clark and Kaiser (eds), Culture wars,
pp. 207–8, 225–6.
174. Clark, ‘The new Catholicism’, p. 36.
175. Pappenheim, ‘Roma o morte’, p. 214.
176. Research tends to focus more on the anti-clerical media, see ibid.; Borutta, ‘La “natura del
nemico”’; Verucci, L'Italia laica.
177. La Civiltà Cattolica, Rome, 1867, vol. 12, pp. 396–407; 1868, vol. 2, pp. 408–11, in Mack
Smith (ed.), Garibaldi, pp. 114–18.
178. T. Salzillo, I fatti d'arme delle prodi legioni pontificie nella invasione garibaldesca di ottobre e
novembre 1867 del patrimonio di S. Pietro, Rome, 1868, pp. 6, 13; P. Mencacci, La mano di Dio
nell'ultima invasione contro Roma. Memorie storiche, 3 vols, Rome, 1868, vol. 3, p. 149.
179. Generale Kanzler, Rapporto alla santità di nostro signor Papa Pio IX. Felicemente regnante …
sulla invasione dello Stato Pontificio nell'autunno 1867, Rome, 1867, p. 3.
180. Mencacci, La mano di Dio, 3, pp. 147–8, 215; see also C. Brezzi, ‘La “mano di Dio” a
Mentana’, in F. Mazzonis (ed.), Garibaldi condottiero. Storia, teoria, prassi, Milan, 1984, pp.
425–39.
181. A. Vitali, Le dieci giornate di Monterotondo. Racconto Storico, Rome, 1868, pp. 85–6.
182. Mencacci, La mano di Dio, 2, p. 301; Vitali, Le dieci giornate, pp. 57, 64, 66; Salzillo, I fatti
d'arme, p. 48.
183. Salzillo, I fatti d'arme, p. 29; see the almost identical description in Mencacci, La mano di Dio,
2, p. 251.
184. Vitali, Le dieci giornate, pp. 44–5, 57, 120; Mencacci, La mano di Dio, 2, pp. 301–6.
185. Mencacci, La mano di Dio, 2, p. 304.
186. Kanzler, Rapporto, p. 3.
187. Vitali, Le dieci giornate, p. 2.
188. Ibid., pp. 26–7, 38, 49; Salzillo, I fatti d'arme, pp. 11, 14, 30–1, 47.
189. Mencacci, La mano di Dio, 1, p. vii.
190. Father V. Cardella, Julian Watts Russell, pontifical zouave, London, 1868; Mencacci, La mano
di Dio, also has a long biographical section devoted to the martyrs of Mentana, 3, pp. 465–518.
191. L'Osservatore Romano, 7 Nov. 1867; Chadwick, A history of the Popes, p. 271.
192. Mencacci, La mano da Dio, 3, pp. 303–4.
193. K. Beste, The victories of Rome, London, 1868, p. 43.
194. 20 Dec. 1867, to Thomas Kirby, Kirby papers, Irish College Rome Archive, K67–466 (in C.
Barr, The correspondence of Paul Cullen, Dublin, forthcoming).
195. See, in particular, F. Dupanloup, Lettre a M. Ratazzi [sic] … sur les entreprises de Garibaldi,
Paris, 1867; J. C. P., Les Pontificaux et les Garibaldiens ou histoire anecdotique d'après les
documents officiels et les correspondances, Paris, 1868; F. Ribeyre, Histoire de la seconde
expédition française à Rome, Paris, 1868; M. Roget, Les Diplomates italiens et Garibaldi devant
l'Europe, Paris, 1868. In general, see M. Milan, ‘Opinione pubblica e antigaribaldinismo in
 Francia: La querelle sull'unità d'Italia (1860–1868)’, Rassegna Storica del Risorgimento, 70, 1983,
pp. 141–66.
196. R. Huguet, Les Victoires de Pie IX sur les garibaldiens en 1867 et les soldats du pape devant
l'histoire, Paris and Brussels, 1868, p. 38; Ribeyre, Histoire, p. 18; J. C. P., Les Pontificaux, p. 107.
197. See the volunteer memoirs, Glorieuse victoire de Mentana … par les troupes du SaintPère,
Paris, 1868; and Comte Eugène de Walincourt, Les Héros de Mentana, Paris and Lille, 1868.
198. C. Cantù, Della indipendenza italiana, cronistoria, Turin, 1878, 3, pt 2, pp. 580–13, trans. in
Mack Smith (ed.), Garibaldi, p. 154.
199. 1879, vol. 9, pp. 360–1; vol. 10, pp. 487–9, vol. 13, p. 79.
200. Vol. 12, p. 336; vol. 13, p. 363.
201. ‘Fe … Gio … Gi’ [anonymous author], Garibaldi politico, Rome and Florence, 1879, and the
same author's Garibaldi l'ingrato. Compilazione funebre, Rome and Florence, 1879.
202. See above, p. 323.
203. Vol. 13, pp. 78–82.

Conclusion: The Myth of Garibaldi

1. 5 June 1882.
2. For a discussion, see S. Gundle, ‘The death (and re-birth) of the hero: charisma and manufactured
charisma in modern Italy’, Modern Italy, 3/2, 1998, pp. 173–89.
3. See the discussion in L. Cavalli, ‘Considerations on charisma and the cult of charismatic
leadership’, ibid., pp. 164–6.
 SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Sources

There is a vast amount and huge variety of sources for the study of
Garibaldi's life, career and myth. A very detailed bibliography (to 1971) is
provided in A. P. Campanella (ed.), Giuseppe Garibaldi e la tradizione
garibaldina, 2 vols, Geneva, 1971; however, its uses are somewhat limited
by the author's decision to follow a chronological and hagiographical
approach, and not to distinguish between the various types of publications
on Garibaldi. Readers seeking a straightforward biography of Garibaldi in
English can choose between D. Mack Smith, Garibaldi. A great life in brief,
London, 1957, and J. Ridley, Garibaldi, London, 1974, while D. Pick,
Rome or death. The obsessions of General Garibaldi, London, 2005, is an
interesting experiment with psycho-biography. In Italian, A. Scirocco,
Garibaldi. Battaglie, amori, ideali di un cittadino del mondo, Rome and
Bari, 2001, is a useful recent study. Still fundamental in many ways is G.
M. Trevelyan's Garibaldi, published in London between 1907 and 1911.
Among the published primary sources, indispensable are the two versions
of Garibaldi's memoirs published by the Edizione Nazionale degli scritti di
Garibaldi in the 1930s, along with the various editions produced by
Alexandre Dumas in 1860–1, the Denkwürdigkeiten by Esperanza von
Schwartz/Elpis Melena published in Hamburg in 1861, and the rarer
English version edited by Theodore Dwight, The life of General Garibaldi
written by himself, New York, 1859. The Edizione Nazionale also published
three volumes of Garibaldi's Scritti e discorsi politici e militari, Bologna,
1934–7, which complement the more recent publication of his letters,
Epistolario di Giuseppe Garibaldi, in eleven volumes (Rome, 1973–2002),
which has now reached the year 1866. For the years 1867–82, the reader
must still rely on E. E. Ximenes, Epistolario, Milan, 1885. Also useful is
the huge correspondence of Mazzini, Scritti editi ed inediti di Giuseppe
Mazzini, Imola, 1906–86, which amounts to over one hundred volumes.
 The two main Garibaldi archives are in the Museo Centrale del
Risorgimento, Rome (on which, see E. Morelli, I fondi archivistici del
Museo Centrale del Risorgimento, Rome, 1993), and the Museo del
Risorgimento, Milan. Although the catalogues of both archives make them
difficult to use, they have an extraordinary wealth of material relating to
Garibaldi, and indeed to all the protagonists of the Risorgimento.
Particularly worthy of note in the Museo del Risorgimento, Milan are the
Carte Garibaldi ‘Raccolte Storiche del Comune di Milano’, the Archivio
Bertani (for the events of 1860, including the letters of volunteers) and the
Archivio Garibaldi Curàtulo. The latter, along with the collection donated
by Clelia Garibaldi to the Museo Centrale del Risorgimento, contains a
large numbers of letters to Garibaldi from his admirers, which were of
particular use to the present study. The Archivio di Stato and the Archivio
Comunale in Palermo have a limited amount of material on the cult of
Garibaldi in 1860, and Foreign Office records in the National Archives in
London are helpful on official British reactions to Garibaldi. The Biblioteca
Labronica in Livorno and the Garibaldi museum on Caprera share the
contents of Garibaldi's Caprera library (on which see T. Olivari, ‘I libri di
Garibaldi’: http://www.storiaefuturo.com/arretrati/2002/ 01/01/005.html).
For the present study, I have made extensive use of newspapers and
patriotic ‘ephemera’ – cheaply produced biographies, pamphlets and
published poems and songs. The main collections of these ephemera in Italy
are in the Biblioteca di Storia Moderna e Contemporanea in Rome and the
Museo del Risorgimento in Milan, although most public libraries in Italy
have collections of published material relating to Garibaldi. The Società
Siciliana per la Storia Patria in Palermo has a very large collection of
nineteenthcentury newspapers and pamphlets, with a substantial section
dedicated to Garibaldi and the events of 1860. The general problem is
choosing from the wealth of material on offer, and I have focused only on
the ephemeral publications produced during Garibaldi's lifetime (and at his
death), and have not considered, for example, the commemorative literature
produced for the various Garibaldi anniversaries, or the Garibaldi literature
produced under Fascism (a fascinating subject in itself). Outside Italy, the
Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris has an extensive collection of
newspapers, books and pamphlets, with a special emphasis on Garibaldi's
role in FrancoItalian relations; and both the New York Public Library and
the Anthony P. Campanella Collection at the University of South Carolina
at Columbia have useful published material. In Berlin, the Ibero-
Amerikanisches Institut has a substantial collection of Buenos Aires
newspapers from the 1830s and 1840s. Scholars of Garibaldi are
particularly well served by the British Library in London, which has a
collection of Garibaldi material that in some respects is unparalleled, both
in the volume and variety of printed material and in its geographical reach
(including volumes and newspapers from Argentina, the USA, France,
Germany, Spain and eastern Europe).
For the iconography of Garibaldi, the main collections are in the Museo
Centrale del Risorgimento, Rome; the Museums of the Risorgimento in
Milan and Genoa; and the Civica Raccolta delle Stampe A. Bertarelli,
Milan, but most museums of the Risorgimento in Italy have a collection of
Garibaldi art and/or ‘relics’. Here too the amount of available material is
overwhelming; a very detailed and helpful (if not entirely exhaustive) guide
is Garibaldi. Arte e Storia, 2 vols, Florence, 1982. For photographs of
Garibaldi, the most complete selection is W. Settimeli, Garibaldi. L'album
fotografico, Florence, 1982.
Manuscripts and archives
Archivio Comunale, Palermo
Atti del Consiglio Comunale di Palermo, Deliberazioni Consiglio Comunale, Corrispondenza
Finanza

Archivio di Stato, Milan

Civica Raccolta delle Stampe, A. Bertarelli

Archivio di Stato, Palermo

Ministero e Real Segretaria di Stato presso il Luogotenente Generale, Polizia, Miscellanea
Ministero e Real Segreteria di Stato presso il Luogotenente Generale, Interno (1818–1864)

British Library, London

Garibaldi's Englishman, performed 1859, Lord Chamberlain's plays, ADD52988U
Garibaldi, by Tom Taylor, performed 1859, Lord Chamberlain's plays, ADD52985H
Garibaldi the Italian liberator, performed 1860, Lord Chamberlain's plays, ADD52994K
Garibaldi's excursionists, by H. J. Byron, performed 1860, Lord Chamberlain's plays, ADD52997J
Museo del Risorgimento, Milan
Archivio Bertani
Archivio Garibaldi Curàtulo

Museo Centrale del Risorgimento, Rome

National Archives (PRO), London

Foreign Office Papers

Published documents
Il Carteggio Cavour-Nigra dal 1858 al 1861, 4 vols, Bologna, 1961
Cavour e l'Inghilterra. Carleggio con V. E. d'Azeglio, Bologna, 1933
Edizione nazionale degli scritti di Giuseppe Garibaldi, vols 4–6. Scritti e discorsi politici e militari, 3
vols, Bologna, 1934–7
Epistolario di Giuseppe Garibaldi, 11 vols, Rome, 1973–2002
Garibaldi in parlamento, 2 vols, Rome, 1982
D. Mack Smith (ed.), The making of Italy, 1796–1866, London, 1988 edn
I. Nievo, Lettere garibaldine, Turin, 1961
Scritti editi ed inediti di Giuseppe Mazzini, 106 vols, Imola, 1906–90
L. Valerio, Carteggio (1825–1865), 4 vols, ed. A Viarengo, Turin, 1991–2003
E. Ximenes (ed.), Epistolario di Giuseppe Garibaldi, Milan, 1885

Newspapers and magazines

Apostolato Popolare
British Packet and Argentine News
La Civiltà Cattolica
La Concordia
Il Corriere Livornese
Il Diritto
Il Don Pirlone
L'Eco
Il Felsineo
Il Fischietto
Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper
Gaçeta Mercantil
Die Gartenlaube
La Gazzetta di Milano
Il Gazzettino Rosa
Harper's Weekly
The Illustrated London News
L'Illustration
L'Italia del Popolo
Italia e Popolo
Journal pour tous
The Lady's Newspaper and Pictorial Times
The Liverpool Mail
Il Lampone
Il Legionario Italiano
Letture di Famiglia
Il Mondo Illustrato
Il Movimento
El Naçional
La Nazione
New York Daily Tribune
New York Evening Post
New York Herald
New York Times
The Northern Tribune
L'Osservatore Romano
La Patria
The Philadelphia Inquirer
Il Piccolo Corriere d'Italia
Punch
The Red Republican
Revue des Deux Mondes
Il Risorgimento
Le Siècle
The Times
L'Unità Italia

Palermo Newspapers (1860)

La Cicala Italiana
Il Corriere di Sicilia
La Costanza e la Supremazia d'Italia
La Forbice
La Frusta
Il Garibaldi
Gazzettino della Sera
Il Giornale di Sicilia
La Guerra
L'Italia Redenta
La Libertà
La Mola
Il Mondo Nuovo
Il Precursore
Il Predicatore Italiano
Il Pungolo
Tom Pouce
L'Unità Italiana
Il Vessillo Italiano

Contemporary books, memoirs and pamphlets

G. C. Abba, The diary of one of Garibaldi's Thousand, trans. E. R. Vincent, London, 1962 (1880)
G. Adamoli, Da San Martino a Mentana. Ricordi di un volontario, Milan, 1911 (1892)
E. Albanese, La ferita di Garibaldi ad Aspromonte. Diario inedito della cura, Milan, 1907
Album della guerra del 1866, Milan, 1866–7
Album storico–artistico. Garibaldi nelle due Sicilie ossia guerra d'Italia nel 1860. Scritta da B.G.
con disegni dal vero, le barricate di Palermo, ritratti e battaglie, litografati da miglioriartisti,
Milan, 1862
Album storico–artistico delle guerre per l'indipendenza italiana. Pubblicato in due parti, Turin,
1860–1
Album storico–artistico. 1859 Guerra d'Italia. Scritta dal corrispondente del Times al campo
Franco-Sardo con disegni dal vero di C. Bossoli. Lith. par les Frères Fd & Charles Perrin. Paris
and Turin, 1860
A Giuseppe Garibaldi. Parole di cordoglio pronunziate il 17 giugno 1882 nella ricorrenza delle
civile onoranze resegli in Pachino, Noto, 1882
A Giuseppe Garibaldi. Parole di Enrico Panzacchi dette alla Associazione Progressista
Costituzionale delle Romagne nell'adunanza dell'11 Giugno 1882, Bologna and Conegliano, 1882
Alla venerata memoria del prode dei prodi Giuseppe Garibaldi, Messina, 1882
L'Âne et les trois voleurs. Proverbe garibaldien en un acte et en vile prose, Paris, 1860
A. Altadill, Garibaldi en Sicilia ó la unidad italiana, Madrid/Barcelona, 1860
L. von Alvensleben, Garibaldi. Seine Jugend, sein Leben, seine Abenteuer und seine Kreigsthaten,
Weimar, 1859
Anon, Angelo. A romance of modern Rome, London, 1854
Anon [H. Tuckerman], ‘Garibaldi’, North American Review, 92, 1861, pp. 15–56
Anon [‘Fe…Gio…Gi’ ], Garibaldi politico, Rome and Florence, 1879
C. Arrivabene, Italy under Victor Emmanuel. A personal narrative, London, 1862
Aspromonte. Ricordi storico-militare, Turin, 1862
E. Atgier, Garibaldi le Flibustier, Rochefort-sur-mer, 1860
A. Azzi, Garibaldi in Sicilia. Canto nazionale, Ferrara, 1860
A. Balbiani, Storia illustrata della vita di Garibaldi, Milan, 1860
G. Bandi, I Mille da Genova a Capua, Milan, 1977 (1886)
M. Barthélemy, Garibaldi ou le réveil du lion, Paris, 1861
A. Bertani, Resoconto della cassa centrale soccorso a Garibaldi, 1860, Genoa, 1860
———, Le spedizioni per i volontari per Garibaldi, Genoa, 1861
G. Bertoldi, Alla legione Italiana in Montevideo ed al colonello Giuseppe Garibaldi, Lugano, 1847
J. R. Beste, Modern Society in Rome, 3 vols, Rome, 1856
C. Bianchi, I martiri d'Aspromonte, cenni storici, Milan, 2nd edn, 1863
A. Bizzoni, Impressioni di un volontario all'esercito dei Vosgi, Milan, 1871
P. G. Boggio, Cavour o Garibaldi?, Turin, 1860
———, Da Montevideo a Palermo. Vita di Giuseppe Garibaldi, Turin, 1860
F. de Boni, Così la penso. Cronaca, 1, Lugano, 1846, pp. 365–84
A. Bresciani, Lionello, Rome, 1852
A. Brofferio, Garibaldi o Cavour?, Genoa, 1860
W. B. Brooke, Out with Garibaldi: or from Milazzo to Capua, London, 1860
A. S. Bucknell, In the tracks of the Garibaldians through Italy and Sicily, London, 1861
J. Butler, In memoriam Harriet Meuricoffre, London, 1901
F. Cavallotti, L'insurrezione di Roma dai sui primordi fino alla esecuzione di Monti e Tognetti, Milan,
1869–70
G. Cadolini, Memorie del Risorgimento dal 1848 al 1862, Milan, 1911
M. du Camp, Expédition des Deux-Siciles: souvenirs personnels, Paris, 1861
L. Capuana, Garibaldi, leggenda drammatica in tre canti, Catania, 1861
Father V. Cardella, Julian Watts Russell, pontifical zouave, London, 1868
T. Carlyle, On heroes, hero-worship and the heroic in history, Lincoln, NB, and London, 1966 (1841)
F. Carrano, I Cacciatori delle Alpi comandati dal generale Garibaldi nella guerra del 1859, Turin,
1860
H. Castille, Garibaldi, Paris, 1859
G. la Cecilia, Storia della insurrezione siciliana, dei successivi avvenimenti per l'indipendenza ed
unione d'Italia e delle gloriose geste di Giuseppe Garibaldi compilata su note e documenti
trasmessi dai luoghi ove accadono, 2 vols, Milan, 1860
Colonel Chambers, Garibaldi and Italian unity, London, 1864
E. Checchi, Memorie di un Garibaldino, Livorno, 1866
P. Chiara, Garibaldi dall'Italia alla gran giornata della Sicilia già mossa, Palermo, 1860
Cinque giorni in Calabria o la catastrofe d'Aspromonte per un volontario garibaldino, Palermo[?],
1862
W. G. Clark, ‘Naples and Garibaldi’, in F. Galton (ed.), Vacation tourists and notes of travel in 1860,
Cambridge, 1861
A. H. Clough, The poems and prose remains of Arthur Clough with a selection from his letters and a
memoir, 2 vols, London, 1869
R. J. Cooper, Three letters to the conservatives of England … on the subject of Garibaldi and
Revolution, London, 1864
S. Corleo, Garibaldi e i Mille a Salemi, Rome, 1886
G. B. Cuneo, Biografia di Giuseppe Garibaldi, Turin, 1850, and Rome, 1932
E. Dandolo, I volontari ed i bersaglieri lombardi, Turin, 1849
A. Delvau, G. Garibaldi. Vie et aventures, 1807–1859, Paris, 1859
S. Devine, ‘A new song on the capture of Garibaldi’, Dublin [?], 1871
A. Dumas, Les garibaldiens. Révolution de Sicile et de Naples, Paris, 1861
———, Montevideo ou une nouvelle Troie, Paris, 1850
F. Dupanloup, Lettre a M. Ratazzi … sur les entreprises de Garibaldi [sic], Paris, 1867
P. Dupont, Sicilienne à Garibaldi, Paris, 1860
P. Dupont and A. d'Aunay (eds), Mémoires sur J. Garibaldi, Paris, 1860
H. Durand-Brager, Quatre mois de l'expédition de Garibaldi en Sicile et en Italie, Paris, 1861
T. Dwight, The Roman Republic of 1849; with accounts of the Inquisition and the siege of Rome,
New York, 1851
H. Elliot, Some revolutions and other diplomatic experiences, London, 1922
Colonel Exalbion, Garibaldi: his life, exploits and the Italian campaigns, London, 1859
O. Féré & R. Hyenne, Garibaldi. Aventures, expéditions, voyages. Amérique, Rome, Piémont, Sicile,
Naples. 1834–1848–1859–1860, Paris, 1861
U. de Fonvielle, Souvenirs d'une chemise rouge, Paris, 1861
C. S. Forbes, The campaign of Garibaldi in the Two Sicilies. A personal narrative, Edinburgh and
London, 1861
A. de la Forge, Histoire du Géneral Garibaldi, Paris, 1859
A. B. Fuller (ed.), At home and abroad. Or things and thoughts in America and Europe, Boston, MA,
1874
C. Garibaldi, Mio padre, Florence, 1948
G. Garibaldi, Edizione nazionale degli scritti di Garibaldi, vol 1. Le memorie di Garibaldi in una
delle redazioni anteriori alla definitiva del 1872, Bologna, 1932
———, Edizione nazionale degli scritti di Garibaldi, vol 2. Le memorie di Garibaldi nella redazione
definitiva del 1872, Bologna, 1932
———, I Mille, Bologna, 1874
———, Cantoni il volontario, Milan, 1870
———, Clelia, ovvero il governo del monaco (Roma nel secolo XIX), Milan, 1870
———, Garibaldi's Denkwürdigkeiten nach handschriftlichen Aufzeichnungen desselben und nach
authentischen Quellen bearbeitet und herausgegeben von Elpis Melena, Hamburg, 1861
———, Mémoires de Garibaldi, Paris, 1860
———, The life of General Garibaldi written by himself with the sketches of his companions in
arms, New York, 1859
Garibaldi. Eine biographische Darstellung nach bisher unbekannten Documenten, Berlin 1859
Garibaldi et la civilisation. La rédemption – les puissants – le Pape – mensonges de la civilisation –
l'avenir, Turin, 1862
Garibaldi et ses hommes rouges, Paris, 1860
Giuseppe Garibaldi da Caprera ad Aspromonte, 1860–61–62. Memorie storiche raccolta da Felice
Venosta, Milan, n.d
Glorieuse victoire de Mentana … par les troupes du Saint-Père, Paris, 1868
L. Goethe, Garibaldi, sa vie, son enfance, ses moeurs, ses exploits militaires, Paris, 1859
G. Guerzoni, Garibaldi, 2 vols, Florence, 1882
Halte-là Garibaldi!, Paris, 1860
C. G. Hamilton, The Exiles of Italy, or Garibaldi's miraculous escapes. A novel, London, 1857
P. Harro-Harring, Dolores. A historical novel. With an introduction to Mazzini, New York and
London, 3rd edn, 1853
A. Herzen, My past and thoughts, 3 vols, London, 1968
G. von Hoffstetter, Giornale delle cose di Roma nel 1851, Turin, 1851
Hommes du Jour, L'empereur FrancoisJoseph, Garibaldi, Lord Palmerston, Le prince
Schwarzenberg … Le général Filangieri, Le roi Ferdinand II, Le duc de Modène, Le prince
régent de Prusse, Madame la princesse de Prusse, Le maréchal Canrobet, Paris, 1859
R. Huguet, Les victoires de Pie IX sur les garibaldiens en 1867 et les soldats du pape devant
l'histoire, Paris and Brussels, 1868
H. d'Ideville, Journal d'un diplomate en Italie, Paris, 1871
Il 19 luglio 1860. Festa popolare in Palermo pel giorno natalizio del generale Giuseppe Garibaldi,
Palermo, 1860
L'Italia e i suoi difensori. Album storico-biografico dell avv'Giuseppe Pistelli, ornato da ritratti e
stampe litografiche, Florence, 1860
Generale Kanzler, Rapporto alla santità di nostro signor Papa Pio IX. Felicemente regnante … sulla
invasione dello Stato Pontificio nell'autunno 1867, Rome, 1867
J. C. P., Les pontificaux et les Garibaldiens ou histoire anecdotique d'après les documents officiels et
les correspondances, Paris, 1868
J. P. Koelman, Memorie romane, 2 vols, Rome, 1963 (1863)
La libera parola. Foglio estraordinario pel giorno onomastico del Generale Garibaldi, Catania, 19
March, 1861
E. Lockroy, Au hasard de la vie. Notes et souvenirs, Paris, 1913
C. MacGrigor, Garibaldi at home. Notes of a visit to Caprera, London, 1866
E. Maison, Journal d'un volontaire de Garibaldi, Paris, 1861
———, Caprera. Les loisirs de Garibaldi, Paris, 1861
H. E. Manning, The visit of Garibaldi to England. A letter to the Right Hon. Edward Cardwell, M.P.,
London, 1864
D. Manuel Gil de Salcedo, Garibaldi y Procida, ó las Pasquas Sangrientas de Sicilia. Novela
histórica contemporánea, Madrid, 1860
A. Mario, The red shirt. Episodes, London, 1865
L. Mariotti [A. Gallenga], Latest news from Italy, London, 1847
E. Melena [Esperanza von Schwartz], Hundert und ein Tag auf meinem Pferde und ein Ausflug nach
der Insel Maddalena, Hamburg, 1860
P. Mencacci, La mano di Dio nell'ultima invasione contro Roma. Memorie storiche, 3 vols, Rome,
1868
M. Menghini (ed.), La spedizione garibaldina di Sicilia e di Napoli nei proclami, nelle
corrispondenze, nei diarii del tempo, Turin, 1907
J. la Messine, Garibaldi, Paris, 1859
F. Mistrali, Storia popolare della rivoluzione di Sicilia e dell'impresa di Giuseppe Garibaldi, Milan,
2nd edn, 1862
B. Mitre, Ricordi dell'assedio di Montevideo (1843–1851), Florence, 1882
M. Monnier, Garibaldi. Histoire de la conquête des deux Sicilies. Notes prises sur place au jour le
jour, Paris, 1861
R. Mundy, H.M.S. ‘Hannibal’ at Palermo and Naples during the Italian Revolution, 1859–1861,
London, 1863
I. Nievo, Gli amori garibaldini. Con poesie e introduzione, Como, 1911
V. Navarro di Ribera, Il Garibaldi, Palermo, 1860
G. Nuvolari, Come la penso, Milan, 1881 (1861)
G. Oddo, I Mille di Marsala. Scene rivoluzionarie, Milan, 1863
L. Oliphant, Episodes in a life of adventure, Edinburgh and London, 1887
F. dell'Ongaro, É Garibaldi. Canzone, Florence, 1859
V. Ottolini, Cacciatori delle Alpi (1848–59). Scene storico-militari, Milan, 1860
C. Pardi, Pel primo anniversario del 4 aprile. Orazione, Palermo, 1861
———, A Giuseppe Garibaldi. Ode, Palermo, 1860
C. Paya, Histoire de la guerre d'Italie. Garibaldi, Paris, 1860
C. Pisacane, Guerra combattuta in Italia negli anni 1848–49, Genoa, 1851
C. Pita, Biographie du Général Garibaldi, Paris, 1859
W. Raible, Leben und Abenteuer des berühmten Freischaarenführers Joseph Garibaldi, General der
sardinischen Armee und der italienischen Liga, Munich, n.d. but 1859
‘Rendicion de Capua y triunfal entrada de S.M. el Rey Victor Manuel y el Garibaldi’, Barcelona,
1860
F. Ribeyre, Histoire de la seconde expédition française à Rome, Paris, 1868
G. Ricciardi, Vita di G. Garibaldi narrata al popolo … e continuata sino al suo ritiro nell'Isola di
Caprera [9 novembre, 1860], Florence, 1860
M. Roget, Les diplomates italiens et Garibaldi devant l'Europe, Paris, 1868
J. Sadler, ‘The Pope's trumph over Garibaldi’, Dublin, 1871
T. Salzillo, I fatti d'arme delle prodi legioni pontificie nella invasione garibaldesca di ottobre e
novembre 1867 del patrimonio di S. Pietro, Rome, 1868
G. Sand, Garibaldi, Paris, 1859
M. Smith, A wreath for Garibaldi, London, 1864
E. Socci, Da Firenze a Digione. Impressioni di un reduce garibaldino, Prato, 1871
Souvenirs de la guerre d'Italie. Chants guerriers par messieurs Auguste Barbier, Pierre Dupont,
Fernand Denoyers, Gustave Mathieu, Charles Vincent. Musique et accompagnement de piano
par MM. Darcier, Pierre Dupont, Hector Salmon et Mme Mélanie Dentu, Paris, n.d. but 1859
R. Tosi, Da Venezia a Mentana (1848–1867), Forlì, 1910
Il tributo all'immortale Giuseppe Garibaldi o sia catechismo politico–costituzionale italiano per la
necessaria istruzione del popolo, Naples, 2nd edn, 1861
L. de la Varenne, Vita del General Garibaldi, Bologna, 1860
G. della Valle, Varese, Garibaldi ed Urban nel 1859 durante la guerra per l'indipendenza italiana,
Varese, 1863
La verità sul fatto di Aspromonte, per un testimonio oculare, Milan, 1862
O. J. Victor, Life of Joseph Garibaldi. The Liberator of Italy. Complete up to the withdrawal of
Garibaldi to his island home after the Neapolitan campaign, 1860, New York, 1860
G. Visconti Venosta, Ricordi di gioventù: cose vedute o sapute (1847–1860), Milan, 1904
A. Vitali, Le dieci giornate di Monterotondo. Racconto Storico, Rome, 1868
Una voce dalle prigioni. Il fatto d'Aspromonte, Lugano, 1862
A. Vuilletet, Garibaldi en France, Paris, 1876
Comte Eugène de Walincourt, Les Héros de Mentana, Paris and Lille, 1868
J. White Mario, Garibaldi e i suoi tempi, Milan, 1884
H. F. Winnington-Ingram, Hearts of oak, London, 1889
E. Zasio, Da Marsala al Volturno. Ricordi, Padova, 1868

Secondary works
M. Agulhon, ‘Le Mythe de Garibaldi en France de 1882 à nos jours’, in idem, Histoire vagabonde,
vol II. Idéologie et politique dans la France du XIXe siècle, Paris, 1988, pp. 85–131
W. Altgeld, ‘Giuseppe Garibaldi in zeitgenössischer Sicht von der Verteidigung Roms biszur
Niederlage bei Mentana (1848–1867)’, Risorgimento, 1982–3, pp. 169–99
B. Anderson, Imagined communities, London, 1991 edn
P. Anderson, The printed image and the transformation of popular culture, 1790–1860, Oxford 1991
A. M. Banti, La nazione del Risorgimento. Parentela, santità e onore alle origini dell'Italia unita,
Turin, 2000
C. Barr, ‘Giuseppe Mazzini and Irish nationalism’, Proceedings of the British Academy, forthcoming
G. Batticuore, K. Gallo and J. Myers (eds), Resonancias románticas. Ensayos sobre historia de la
cultura argentina (1820–1890), Buenos Aires, 2005
D. Beales, ‘Garibaldi in England. The politics of Italian enthusiasm’, in J. A. Davis and P. Ginsborg
(eds), Society and politics in the age of the Risorgimento. Essays in honour of Denis Mack Smith,
Cambridge, 1991, pp. 184–216
J. Belchem and J. Epstein, ‘The nineteenth-century gentleman leader revisited’, Social History, 22/2,
1997, pp. 174–93
C. di Biase, L'arresto di Garibaldi nel settembre 1849, Florence, 1941
F. Brancato, ‘La partecipazione del clero alla rivoluzione siciliana del 1860’, in La Sicilia verso
l'unità d'Italia, Palermo, 1960, pp. 7–33
A. Boldrini, ‘Il mito di Garibaldi nella letteratura del Rio Grande do Sul’, Quaderni Storiografici
dell'Istituto internazionale di studi Giuseppe Garibaldi, 8, 1993, pp. 3–25
M. Bonsanti, ‘Una generazione democratica: amore familiare, amore romantico e amor dipatria’, in
A. M. Banti and P. Ginsborg (eds), Il Risorgimento, Turin, forthcoming
F. Boyer, ‘Les Volontaires français avec Garibaldi en 1860’, Revue d'Histoire Moderne et
Contemporaine, 7, 1960, pp. 123–49
P. Brantlinger and W. B. Thesing (eds), A companion to the Victorian novel, Oxford, 2002
S. Candido, La rivoluzione riograndese nel carteggio inedito di due giornalisti mazziniani: Luigi
Rossetti e G.B. Cuneo (1837–1840). Contributo alla storia del giornalismo politico di ispirazione
italiana nei paesi latinoamericani, Florence, 1973
———, Giuseppe Garibaldi nel Rio della Plata, 1841–1848, Florence, 1972
———, Giuseppe Garibaldi. Corsaro riograndese (1837–1838), Rome, 1964
A. Cavaciocchi, ‘Le prime gesta di Garibaldi in Italia’, Rivista Militare Italiana, 6, 1907, pp. 5–87
O. Chadwick, A history of the Popes, 1830–1914, Oxford, 1998
G. Cingari (ed.), Garibaldi e il socialismo, Rome and Bari, 1984
G. Claeys, ‘Mazzini, Kossuth and British radicalism, 1848–1854’, Journal of British Studies, 28/2,
1989, pp. 225–61
R. Chartier and H.-J. Martin (eds), Histoire de l'édition française. Vol 3. Le temps des éditeurs, du
romantisme à la belle époque, Paris, 1990 edn
C. Clark and W. Kaiser (eds), Culture wars. Secular–Catholic conflict in nineteenth-century Europe,
Cambridge, 2003
F. Conti, L'Italia dei democratici. Sinistra risorgimentale, massoneria e associazionismo fra '800 e
'900, Milan, 2000
G. Cubitt, ‘Introduction: heroic reputations and exemplary lives’, in idem and A. Warren (eds),
Heroic reputations and exemplary lives, Manchester, 2000, pp. 1–26
G. Curàtulo, Il dissidio tra Mazzini e Garibaldi. La storia senza veli, Milan, 1928
———, Garibaldi e le donne, Rome, 1913
J. A. Davis, ‘Introduction: Antonio Gramsci and Italy's passive revolution’, in idem (ed.), Gramsci
and Italy's passive revolution, London, 1979, pp. 11–30
——— (ed.), Italy in the nineteenth century, Oxford, 2000
G. Dawson, Soldier heroes. British adventure, empire and the imagining of masculinities, London,
1994
C. Dipper, ‘Helden überkreuz oder das Kreuz mit den Helden’, Jahrbuch des Historischen Kollegs,
Oldenbourg, 1999, pp. 91–130
F. Dolci, ‘L'editoria d'occasione del secondo Ottocento nella Biblioteca di Storia Moderna e
Contemporanea di Roma,’ in Il mito del Risorgimento nell'Italia unita, Milan, 1995, pp. 124–48
——— (ed.), Effemeridi pattriotiche, Rome, 1984
C. Duggan, Francesco Crispi. From nation to nationalism, Oxford, 2002, pp. 426–50
G. Eley, ‘Nations, publics, and political cultures: placing Habermas in the nineteenth century’, in C.
Calhoun (ed.), Habermas and the public sphere, Boston, MA, 1994, pp. 289–339
E. Feraboli, ‘Il primo esilio di Garibaldi in America, 1833–1848’, Rassegna Storica del
Risorgimento, 19/2, 1932, pp. 251–82
M. Finn, After Chartism. Class and nation in English radical politics, Cambridge, 1993
L. G. Fossati and N. Tranfaglia, La stampa italiana nell'età liberale, Rome and Bari, 1979
S. Freitag (ed.), Exiles from European revolutions. Refugees in mid-Victorian England, Oxford, 2003
N. Frye, The anatomy of criticism, Princeton, NJ, 1957
F. Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, Cambridge, 1981
A. Galante Garrone, I radicali in Italia, 1849–1925, Milan, 1973
A. Galante Garrone and F. della Peruta, La stampa italiana del Risorgimento, Bari, 1976
Garibaldi. Arte e storia, 2 vols, Florence, 1982
E. Gellner, Nations and nationalism, Oxford, 1983
E. Gentile, Le religioni della politica. Fra democrazia e totalitarismi, Rome and Bari, 2001
R. Gerwarth, The Bismarck myth. Weimar Germany and the legacy of the Iron Chancellor, Oxford,
2005
A. M. Ghisalberti, Momenti e figure del Risorgimento romano, Milan, 1965
L. Giampolo and M. Bertolone, La prima campagna di Garibaldi in Italia (da Luino a Morazzone) e
gli avvenimenti militari e politici nel Varesotto 1848–1849, Varese, 1950
S. Gilley, ‘The Garibaldi riots of 1862’, The Historical Journal, 16/4, 1973, pp. 697–732
P. Ginsborg, ‘Il mito del Risorgimento nel mondo britannico: “la vera poesia della politica”’, in Il
mito del Risorgimento, pp. 384–99
———, ‘Risorgimento rivoluzionario: mito e realtà di una guerra di popolo’, Storia e Dossier, 47,
1991, pp. 61–97
———, Daniele Manin and the Venetian revolution of 1848–49, Cambridge, 1979
———, ‘Gramsci and the era of the bourgeois revolution in Italy’, in J. A. Davis (ed.), Gramsci and
Italy's passive revolution, London, 1979, pp. 31–66
E. Goffman, The presentation of self in everyday life, London, 1969
A. Gramsci, Selections from prison notebooks, ed. and trans. Q. Hoare and G. Nowell Smith,
London, 1971
———, Il Risorgimento, Turin, 1949
J. Grévy, Garibaldi, Paris, 2001
R. Grew, A sterner plan for Italian unity. The Italian National Society in the Risorgimento, Princeton,
NJ, 1963
C. E. J. Griffiths, ‘The novels of Garibaldi’, Italian Studies 30, 1975, pp. 86–98
L. Guidi, ‘Patriottismo femminile e travestimenti sulla scena risorgimentale’, Studi Storici, 41/2,
2000, pp. 571–87
P. Gut, ‘Garibaldi et la France, 1848–1882. Naissance d'un mythe’, Rassegna Storica del
Risorgimento, 74/3, 1987, pp. 299–328
B. Hamnett, ‘Fictitious histories: the dilemma of fact and imagination in the nineteenth-century
historical novel’, European History Quarterly, 36/1, 2006, pp. 31–60
I. Haywood, The revolution in popular literature. Print, politics and the people, 1790–1860,
Cambridge, 2004
S. Hazareesingh, The legend of Napoleon, London, 1994
E. Hobsbawm, Nations and nationalism since 1780, London, 1990
———, ‘Introduction, inventing traditions’, in idem and T. Ranger, The invention of tradition,
Cambridge, 1983, pp. 1–14
L. Hunt, The family romance of the French Revolution, London, 1992
M. Isabella, ‘Exile and nationalism: the case of the Risorgimento’, European History Quarterly, 36/4,
2006, pp. 493–520
M. Isnenghi, ‘Garibaldi’, in idem (ed.), I luoghi della memoria. Personaggi e date dell'Italia unita,
Rome and Bari, 1997, pp. 25–45
———, ‘I due volti dell'eroe. Garibaldi vincitore–vinto e vinto–vincitore’, in S. Bertelli and G.
Clemente (eds), Tracce dei vinti, Florence, 1994, pp. 265–300
———, Le guerre degli italiani, Milan, 1989
A. M. Isastia, Il volontario militare nel Risorgimento. La partecipazione alla guerra del 1859, Rome,
1990
C. Jean, ‘Garibaldi e il volontariato nel Risorgimento’, Rassegna Storica del Risorgimento, 69/4,
1982, pp. 399–419
A. Jourdan, Napoléon. Héros, imperator, mécène, Paris, 1998
I. Kershaw, The ‘Hitler myth’. Image and reality in the Third Reich, Oxford, 1987
D. Kertzer, Rituals, politics and power, New Haven, CT, 1988
D. Laven, ‘Italy: The idea of the nation in the Risorgimento and liberal era’, in T. Baycroft and M.
Hewitson (eds), What is a nation? Europe 1789–1914, Oxford, 2006, pp. 255–71
———, ‘Mazzini, Mazzinian conspiracy and British politics in the 1850s’, Bollettino Storico
Mantovano, nuova serie, 2, 2003, pp. 267–82
U. Levra, Fare gli italiani. Memoria e celebrazione del Risorgimento, Turin, 1992
J. Lynch, Argentine caudillo. Juan Manuel de Rosas, Wilmington, DE, 2001
———, Caudillos in Spanish America, 1800–1850, Oxford, 1992
A. Lyttelton, ‘Creating a national past: history, myth and image in the Risorgimento’, in A. Russell
Ascoli and K. von Henneberg (eds), Making and remaking Italy. The cultivation of national
 identity around the Risorgimento, Oxford, 2001, pp. 27–74
D. McLean, ‘Garibaldi in Uruguay: a reputation reconsidered’, English Historical Review, 113, April
1998, pp. 351–66
D. Mack Smith, Mazzini, London, 1994
———, Cavour and Garibaldi. A study in political conflict, Cambridge, 2nd edn, 1985
———, Victor Emanuel, Cavour and the Risorgimento, London, 1971
———, Garibaldi. A great life in brief, London, 1957
——— (ed.), Garibaldi. Great lives observed, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1969
E. Mana, ‘La “democrazia” italiana. Forme e linguaggi della propaganda politica tra Ottocento e
Novocento’, in M. Ridolfi (ed.), Propaganda e communicazione politica, Milan, 2004, pp. 147–
65
H. R. Marraro, American opinion on the unification of Italy, 1846–1861, New York, 1932
M. Martenengo, ‘Garibaldi narratore. Vicende editoriali e stato attuale dei manoscritti’, Il
Risorgimento, 55/1, 1996, pp. 89–112
L. Mascilli Migliorini, Il mito dell'eroe, Naples, 1984
M. Milan, ‘Opinione pubblica e antigaribaldinismo in Francia: la querelle sull'unità d'Italia (1860–
66)’, Rassegna Storica del Risorgimento, 70/2 1983, pp. 141–66
D. Mengozzi, La morte e l'immortale. La morte laica da Garibaldi a Costa, Manduria, 2000
G. Monsagrati, ‘Garibaldi e il culto vittoriano dell'eroe’, Studi Storici, 42/1, 2001, pp. 165–80
———, ‘Garibaldi Giuseppe’, Dizionario biografico degli italiani, 52, Rome, 1999, pp. 315–31
G. Mosse, The image of man. The creation of modern masculinity, New York, 1996
———, The nationalisation of the masses. Political symbolism and mass movements in Germany
from the Napoleonic wars through the Third Reich, New York, 1975
M. Mulinacci, La bella figlia del lago. Cronaca intima del matrimonio fallito di Giuseppe Garibaldi
con la marchesina Raimondi, Milan, 1978
H. Nelson Gay, ‘Il secondo esilio di Garibaldi (1849–1854)’, in idem, Scritti sul Risorgimento,
Rome, 1937, pp. 193–213
P. Nora, ‘Memoirs of men of state: from Commynes to De Gaulle’, in idem (ed.), Rethinking France.
Les lieux de mémoire. Vol 1, The State, Chicago, 2001, pp. 401–51
M. O'Connor, The romance of Italy and the English political imagination, London, 1998
T. Olivari, ‘I libri di Garibaldi’, Storia e Futuro, 1, 2002, pp. 1–16, www.storiaefuturo.com
D. Outram, The body and the French Revolution. Sex, class and political culture, New Haven, CT,
and London, 1989
M. Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution, Cambridge, MA, 1988
N. W. Painter, ‘Representing Truth: Sojourner Truth's knowing and becoming known’, The Journal of
American History, 81/2, 1994, pp. 461–92
F. della Peruta, ‘Il mito del Risorgimento e l'estrema sinistra dall'Unità al 1914’, in Il mito del
Risorgimento, pp. 39–70
———, ‘Garibaldi fra mito e politica’, Studi Storici, 23/1, 1982, pp. 5–22
S. Patriarca, ‘Indolence and regeneration: tropes and tensions of Risorgimento patriotism’, American
Historical Review, 110/2, 2005, pp. 380–408
S. di Paola, ‘Il mito di Garibaldi nella poesia italiana’, in F. Mazzonis (ed.), Garibaldi condottiero.
Storia, teoria, prassi, Milan, 1984, pp. 507–21
N. Petiteau, Napoléon, de la mythologie à l'histoire, Paris, 1999
D. Pick, Rome or death. The obsessions of General Garibaldi, London, 2005
P. Pieri, Storia militare del Risorgimento, Turin, 1962
J. Plunkett, Queen Victoria. First media monarch, Oxford, 2003
I. Porciani, ‘Der Krieg als ambivalenter italienischer Gründungsmythos – Siege undNiederlagen’, in
N. Buschmann and D. Langewiesche (eds), Der Krieg in den Gründungsmythen europäischer
Nationen und der USA, Frankfurt and New York, 2003, pp. 193–212
———, La festa della nazione, Bologna, 1997
M. Praz, The romantic agony, London, 1933
C. Prendergast, Napoleon and history painting. Antoine-Jean Gros's La bataille d'Eylau, Oxford,
1997
L. Riall, ‘Eroi maschili, virilità e forme della guerra’, in A. M. Banti and P. Ginsborg (eds), Il
Risorgimento, Turin, forthcoming
———, ‘Elites in search of authority: political power and social order in nineteenth-century Sicily’,
History Workshop Journal, 55, 2003, pp. 25–46
———, Sicily and the unification of Italy. Liberal policy and local power, 1859–1866, Oxford, 1998
———, The Italian Risorgimento. State, society and national unification, London, 1994
J. Ridley, Garibaldi, London, 1974
M. Ridolfi, C. Brice and F. de Giorgi, ‘Religione civile e identità nazionale nella storia d'Italia: per
una discussione’, Memoria e Ricerca, 13, 2003, pp. 133–52
T. Roberts, ‘The United States and the European revolutions of 1848’, in G. Thomson (ed.), The
European revolutions of 1848 and the Americas, London, 2002, pp. 76–99
R. Romeo, Cavour e il suo tempo, 3 vols, Rome and Bari, 1969–84
S. Salomone-Marino, ‘Garibaldi e le tradizioni popolari’, in Archivio per lo studio delle tradizioni
popolari, 1, 1882
———, Leggende popolari siciliane in poesia, Palermo, 1880
M. Samuels, The spectacular past. Popular history and the novel in nineteenth-century France,
Ithaca, NY, 2004
R. Sarti, ‘La democrazia radicale: uno sguardo reciproco tra Stati Uniti e Italia’, in M. Ridolfi (ed.),
La democrazia radicale nell'ottocento europeo, Milan, 2005, pp. 133–57
———, Mazzini: a life for the religion of politics, Westport, CT, 1997
G. Schöpflin, ‘The function of myth and a taxonomy of myths’, in G. Hosking and G. Schöpflin
(eds), Myths and nationhood, London, 1997, pp. 19–35
B. Schwartz, George Washington. The making of an American symbol, New York, 1987
M. Schwegman, ‘In love with Garibaldi: romancing the Risorgimento’, European Review of History
– Révue européenne d'histoire, 12/2, 2005, pp. 363–81
A. Scirocco, Garibaldi. Battaglie, amori, ideali di un cittadino del mondo, Bari and Rome, 2001
W. Settimelli, Garibaldi. L'album fotografico, Florence, 1982
E. Shils, ‘Charisma, order and status’, American Sociological Review, April 1965, pp. 199–213
A. D. Smith, ‘National identity and myths of ethnic descent’, in idem, Myths and memories of the
nation, Oxford, 1999, pp. 57–95
J. Smith Allen, Popular French romanticism. Authors, readers and books in the nineteenth century,
Syracuse, NY, 1981
A. Soboul, ‘Religious feeling and popular cults during the French Revolution: “patriotsaints” and
martyrs for liberty’, in S. Wilson (ed.), Saints and their cults. Studies in religious sociology,
folklore and history, Cambridge, 1983, pp. 220–44
C. Sorba, Teatri. L'Italia del melodrama nell'età del Risorgimento, Bologna, 2001
J. Sperber, The European revolutions, 1848–1851, Cambridge, 1994
G. Spini, Risorgimento e Protestanti, Naples, 1956
V. Titone, ‘Garibaldi’, Quaderni Storici, 2, 1963, pp. 52–65
B. Tobia, Una patria per gli italiani. Spazi, itinerari, monumenti nell'Italia unita, Rome and Bari,
1991
G. M. Trevelyan, Garibaldi and the making of Italy, London, 1911
———, Garibaldi and the Thousand, London, 1909
———, Garibaldi's defence of the Roman Republic, London, 1907
G. Tricoli, ‘Il mito di Garibaldi in Sicilia’, Archivio Storico Siciliano, serie 4, 9, 1983, pp. 79–106
R. Ugolini, Garibaldi. Genesi di un mito, Rome, 1982
W. L. Vance, America's Rome, 2 vols, New Haven, CT, and London, 1989
Colonel Vecchi, Garibaldi at Caprera, trans. Mrs Gaskell, London, 1862
J. Vernon, Politics and the people: a study in English political culture, c.1815–1867, Cambridge,
1993
R. Villari, ‘La prefigurazione politica del giudizio storico su Garibaldi’, Studi Storici, 23/2, 1982, pp.
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M. Weber, Economy and society, 2 vols, Berkeley, CA, 1978
 Unpublished theses and papers
M. Bernardi, ‘Garibaldi et l'opinion publique française de 1860 à 1882’, Université de Paris, I, Centre
de Recherches en Histoire des XIX–XXe Siècles, Mémoire de Maîtrise, 1982
N. Blakiston, ‘Garibaldi's visit to London in 1864’, unpublished paper, British Library
 INDEX

GG refers to Giuseppe Garibaldi. VE II refers to Vittorio Emanuele II. Page

references in italics indicate illustrations.
Abba, Giuseppe Cesare (i), (ii)
Noterelle (i)
Abramo, Eloisa (i)
d'Acquisto, Benedetto, archbishop of Monreale (i)
Adamoli, Giulio (i)
Adams, Henry (i)
Agulhon, Maurice (i)
Aguyar (i), (ii)
Alberdi, Juan Bautista (i)
albums, illustrated (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Album storico–artistico (i), (ii), (iii)
Giuseppe Garibaldi da Caprera ad Aspromonte (i)
Italia e i suoi difensori (i), (ii), (iii)
Alcamo, Sicily (i)
Alessandria, fortifications at (i)
Alvensleben, Ludwig von: biography of GG (i), (ii)
Amari, Count (i), (ii)
Anderson, Benedict (i), (ii), (iii)
Andrews, Alexander (i)
L'Ane et les trois voleurs (play) (i)
Angelo (novel) (i)
Annual Register (i)
d'Annunzio, Gabriele see D'Annunzio, Gabriele
anti-Catholicism (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Antonelli, Cardinal Giacomo (i), (ii)
Anzani, Francesco (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
Apostolato Popolare (newspaper) (i), (ii)
Armellini, Carlo (i)
Arrivabene, Charles (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
Ashley, William (i)
Ashurst, William (i), (ii)
Aspromonte, battle of (1862) (i)
L'Aspromonte (newspaper) (i)
Associazione Emancipatrice Italiana (i)
Atgier, E. (i)
Athenaeum Club, London (i)
Athenaeum (magazine) (i)
d'Aunay, Alfred see Dupont, Pierre
Avezzana, General Giuseppe (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
d'Azeglio, Emanuele (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
d'Azeglio, Massimo (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Ettore Fieramosca (i), (ii), (iii)
Azzi, G.: Garibaldi in Sicilia (i)

Bagnasco, Giuseppe (i)

Bakunin, Michael (i), (ii)
Balbiani, Antonio: Storia illustrata della vita di Garibaldi (i)
Balbo, Cesare: Delle speranze d'Italia (i), (ii)
Bandi, Giuseppe (i)
I Mille da Genova a Capua (i), (ii)
Bandiera, Attilio and Emilio: insurrection (1844) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Banti, Alberto (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii)
Bara, Joseph (i), (ii)
The Death of Bara (David) (i)
Baralis (deputy for Nice) (i), (ii)
Barfield, Sarah (i)
Bargoni, Angelo (i)
Barilli, Anton (i)
Barker, George (i)
Barletta, ‘challenge’ at (i)
Barrault, Emile (i)
Barthélemy, M.: ‘Garibaldi or the waking of the lion’ (i)
Basile, Giovan Battista (i)
Bassi, Ugo (i), (ii)
Basso (friend and secretary to GG) (i)
Bazzani, Abate (i)
Becker, Johann (i), (ii)
The Bee-Hive (newspaper) (i)
Belgioioso, Cristina di (i), (ii)
Bellini, Vincenzo (i)
Benso di Verdura, Felicità (i)
Bentivegna revolt, Palermo (1856) (i)
Bentivoglio, Stanislao (i)
Bertani, Agostino (i)
1849 campaign (i)
1859 campaign (i), (ii), (iii)
on GG (i)
GG's letters to (i)
parliamentary career (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
raising of funds and volunteers (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix), (x)
Bertoldi, Giuseppe: Alla legione Italiana in Montevideo (i), (ii)
Besana, Enrico (i)
Beste, Father (i)
Beste, J. Richard: Modern Society in Rome (i)
Bettini, Sofia (i)
Bezzecca, battle of (1866) (i)
biographies (i), (ii)
of GG (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix)
Birkardt, E. (i)
biscuits see ‘Garibaldi’ biscuits (i)
Bismarck, Otto von (i), (ii)
Bixio, Nino: at defence of Rome (i)
visits Caprera (i), (ii)
1859 campaign (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
Sicilian campaign (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
accepts position in Piedmontese army (i)
speaks in support of GG in parliament (i)
Bizzoni, Achille (i), (ii)
Blanc, Louis (i)
Blasetti, Alessandro: 1860 (film) (i)
Blews, Fanny (i)
Blind, Karl (i)
Bocage, Pierre (i)
Boggio, Pier Carlo (i)
Da Montevideo a Palermo (i)
Bolloli, Carlo: Album storico–artistico (i)
Bologna: fund-raising in (i), (ii)
GG's visit (i)
political fallout after Mentana (i)
riots in 1848 (i)
Roman exiles in (i)
Boni, Filippo de (i), (ii)
Bosco, General Ferdinando (i)
Boston, GG arives in (i)
Botto, F. (i)
Bourbaki, General (i)
Bourbon government (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii)
Bourdon, Philippe (‘Bordone’) (i)
bozzettino style (i)
Brescia (i), (ii), (iii)
‘massacre’ in (i)
Bresciani, Padre Antonio (i)
Lionello (i)
Bright, John (i)
Britain: GG's visits to (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
leader cults (i)
and the pact of Plombières (i)
popular culture in (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
support for GG (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
support for Italian Nationalism (i), (ii), (iii)
and the Uruguayan–Argentinian war (i)
Brofferio, Angelo (i), (ii)
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett (i), (ii)
‘Casa Guidi windows’ (i)
Browning, Robert (i)
Bruni, Leonardo (i)
Bruno, Giordano (i)
Brutus (i)
Bucknell (writer) (i)
Buenos Aires (i)
Buonarotti, Filippo (i)
Burney, George (i)
Butler, Marilyn (i)
Byron, George Gordon, Lord (i), (ii), (iii)

Cabianca, Vincenzo: portrait of GG (i)

Cacciatori delle Alpi (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
Cadogan, George (i)
Cadolini, Giovanni (i), (ii), (iii)
Cadorna, General (i)
Cairoli, Adele (i)
Cairoli, Benedetto (i), (ii)
Calatafimi, battle of (1860) (i)
Camicia Rossa (journal) (i)
Camp, Maxime du (i)
canards (i)
Canessa, Luigi (i)
Cantoni il volontario (GG) (i), (ii), (iii)
Cantù, Cesare (i)
canvases, transparent (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Canzio, Stefano (i)
Caprera (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix), (x)
GG buys a home on (i)
life on (i)
Caraffa, Luigi (i)
Carbonari, the (i)
Carducci, Giosuè (i), (ii), (iii)
Carini, Giacinto (i)
Carlo Alberto, king of Piedmont: 1848 war against Austria (i), (ii)
authorises subscription for Garibaldi (i)
Carlyle, Jane (i), (ii)
Carlyle, Thomas (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
Carnaglia, Luigi (i)
Carpaneto, Francesco (i), (ii), (iii)
Carrano, Francesco: Cacciatori delle Alpi (i), (ii)
cartes de visite (i)
Caselli, Matilde (i)
Cass, General Lewis (i), (ii)
Castellamare, fort of (i)
Castille, Hippolyte: Garibaldi (i), (ii)
Catholic Church: anti-Catholicism (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
attitude to GG (i), (ii), (iii)
GG's attacks on (i), (ii)
and Italian nationalism (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii)
Cattaneo, Carlo (i), (ii), (iii)
Il Cattolico di Genova (newspaper) (i)
Cavallotti, Felice (i), (ii), (iii)
L'insurrezione di Roma (i)
Cavour, Camillo Benso di (i)
enmity towards Mazzini (i)
political strategies (i), (ii)
and GG (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
pact of Plombières and war with Austria (1859) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
resigns after peace of Villafranca (i)
recalled to power (1860) (i)
Sicilian campaign (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
and unification of Italy (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
liquidates GG's army (i), (ii)
death (i)
celebrity, cult of (i), (ii), (iii)
Cellini, Benvenuto (i)
Central Committee in Aid of Garibaldi (i)
Ceroni, Piero (i)
Chambers, Colonel (i)
Garibaldi and Italian unity (i)
Chants et chansons populaires de la France (song collection) (i)
Chartism (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
chassepot rifles (i)
Checci, Eugenio (i), (ii)
Chiara, Pietro (i)
Le Chiarivari (newspaper) (i)
Christian Alliance (USA) (i)
Cialdini, General (i), (ii)
La Cicala Italiana (newspaper) (i)
Ciceruacchio (Angelo Brunetti) (i)
Cinque Giornate uprising (1848) (i)
La Civiltà Cattolica (newspaper) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Clarendon, George Villiers, fourth earl of (i), (ii)
Clark, Christopher (i)
Clark, W. G. (i), (ii)
Clary, General (i)
Clelia (Garibaldi) (i), (ii), (iii)
Clément, Victor (i)
Clotilde, princess of Piedmont (i), (ii)
Clough, Arthur (i), (ii)
clubs, Italian (i)
Cobbitt, William (i)
Cochin, Augustin (i)
Cochrane, Lord (i)
Codogno, service to honour GG (i)
Colet, Louise (i), (ii)
Colonia, capture of (1843) (i), (ii), (iii)
Columbus, Christopher (i), (ii)
Como, capture of (1859) (i), (ii)
La Concordia (newspaper) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix), (x), (xi), (xii), (xiii), (xiv)
Congress of Unity (1872) (i)
conscription in Sicily (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Le Constitutionel (newspaper) (i), (ii), (iii)
Corleo, Simone (i)
Corrao, Giovanni (i), (ii)
Le Correspondant (newspaper) (i), (ii), (iii)
Il Corriere Livornese (newspaper) (i), (ii)
Corriere Mercantile (newspaper) (i)
Cosenz, Enrico (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
Così la Penso (journal) (i), (ii)
Costa, Andrea (i)
Cowen, Joseph (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
Craxi, Bettino (i)
Cremona (i), (ii)
Crimean War (1854–6) (i), (ii)
Crispi, Francesco: and GG (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
in Sicily (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii)
organises Pilo's funeral (i)
political career (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii)
and the 1866 campaign (i)
Crispi, Rosalie (i)
Cullen, Paul, archbishop of Dublin (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
Cuneo, Giovanni Battista (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix), (x), (xi), (xii), (xiii)
account of the Italian Legion (i)
biography of GG (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
GG's letters to (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
Mazzini's letter to (i)
Custoza, battle of (1848) (i), (ii)
Custoza, battle of (1866) (i)

daguerreotypes (i)
Root's portrait of GG (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Daily News (newspaper) (i), (ii)
Dandolo, Emilio (i), (ii)
Dandolo, Enrico (i), (ii), (iii)
D'Annunzio, Gabriele (i)
Dante Alighieri (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
Daverio, Francesco (i)
David, Jacques-Louis: The Death of Bara (i)
Marat at his Last Breath (i)
Davis, Margaret (i)
De Boni, Filippo (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
Deideri couple (at Caprera) (i)
‘Delangle’ (i)
Delvau, Alfred: Garibaldi (i), (ii), (iii)
Depretis, Agostino (i)
Derby, Edward Stanley, fourteenth Earl (i)

Deutsche Zeitung (newspaper) (i)

Devaux (artist) (i)
Dickens, Charles (i), (ii), (iii)
Dijon, France (i)
Dionese, Eugenio (i)
Il Diritto (newspaper) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix), (x)
Disraeli, Benjamin (i)
Il Divin Salvatore (journal) (i)
Doig, Paul (i)
Il Don Pirlone (newspaper) (i), (ii)
Doré, Gustave (i)
Duggan, Christopher (i)
Dumas, Alexandre: forwards funds to GG (i)
GG's biography (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix), (x)
letters (i)
novels (i), (ii)
Dunant, Henri: Un souvenir de Solférino (i)
Dunne, Colonel John (i)
Dupont, Pierre: ‘Sicilienne à Garibaldi’ (i)
(with D'Aunay) ‘memoirs’ of GG (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
Dwight, Theodore: GG's memoirs (i)
The Roman Republic of 1849 (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)

Eardley, Culling (i)

Eber, Nandor (i), (ii)
Echeverría, Esteban (i)
L'Eco (newspaper) (i)
Edward, prince of Wales (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Eley, Geoff (i)
Elisanter (editor of Deutsche Zeitung) (i)
Elliot, Sir Henry (i), (ii)
Emancipation of Italy Fund Committee (UK) (i), (ii)
Engels, Friedrich (i)
Estrema (i)
Evening Post (New York newspaper) (i)
‘Exalbion, Colonel’: Garibaldi: his life, exploits and the Italian campaigns (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)

Fabrizi, Nicola (i), (ii), (iii)

Fanti, General Manfredo (i), (ii), (iii)
Farini, General Luigi (i), (ii), (iii)
Fascists/Fascism (i), (ii)
Il Felsineo (newspaper) (i)
Fenzi, Carlo (i)
Ferdinando II, king of Naples (i), (ii), (iii)
Féré, O. (with Hyenne): Aventures, expéditions, voyages (i)
Ferrari, Emilio (i)
Ferrari, Giuseppe (i)
Ferrari, Nicolao (i), (ii)
Ferruccio, Francesco (i), (ii)
fiction: Catholic (i)
growth of popular fiction (i), (ii), (iii)
and politics (i), (ii)
representations of GG in (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Risorgimento narrative (i), (ii), (iii)
Filopanti, Quirico (i), (ii)
Finn, Margot (i)
First International (i)
Il Fischietto (newspaper) (i), (ii)
Florence: becomes new Italian capital (i)
fund-raising in (i)
publishing in (i), (ii)
Flotte, Paul de (i)
Fonvielle, Ulric de (i), (ii)
Forbes, Charles (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii)
Forbes, Hugh (i)
La Forbice (newspaper) (i), (ii), (iii)
Foreign Enlistment Act (UK) (i)
Foresti, Felice (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Forster, William (i)
Foscolo, Ugo (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
France: 1848 unrest (i)
and the Italian question (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
publishing in (i), (ii), (iii)
and the Uruguayan–Argentinian war (i)
volunteers from (i), (ii), (iii)
see also Franco-Prussian War (1870–1); French Revolution; Jacobinism
Francesco II, king of the Two Sicilies (i), (ii)
Franco-Prussian War (1870–1) (i)
francs-tireurs (i)
Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper (i), (ii)
Franz Josef, emperor of Austria (i)
Freemasons/Freemasonry: Catholic press and (i)
GG and (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
French Legion of Montevideo (i), (ii)
French Revolution (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
Fruscianti (farm manager on Caprera) (i)
La Frusta (newspaper) (i), (ii)
Fuller, Margaret (Marchese Ossoli) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
fund-raising: foreign (i), (ii), (iii)
Mazzini and (i)
see also Million Rifles campaign
funerals, public (i)
Furet, François (i), (ii)
Frye, Northrop (i)

Gallino, Gaetano: portrait of GG (i), (ii), (iii)

Garibaldi (play) (i)
Il Garibaldi (newspaper) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
Garibaldi, Anita (GG's daughter) (i), (ii), (iii)
Garibaldi, Anita (née Ribeiro, GG's first wife) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix), (x)
death (i)
fictional representations of (i), (ii)
GG on (i), (ii), (iii)
monument to (i)
Garibaldi, Bruno (GG's grandson) (i)
Garibaldi, Clelia (GG's daughter) (i), (ii), (iii)
Garibaldi, Costanzo (GG's grandson) (i)
Garibaldi, Domenico (GG's father) (i)
Garibaldi, Ezio (GG's grandson) (i), (ii)
Garibaldi, Felice (GG's brother) (i)
Garibaldi, Francesca (née Armosina, GG's third wife) (i), (ii), (iii)
Garibaldi, Giuseppe: works as a merchant seaman (i), (ii), (iii)
joins Young Italy (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
goes to Rio de Janeiro after failed Young Italy uprisings (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
fights against Brazil for Rio Grande rebels (i), (ii), (iii)
moves to Montevideo (i)
commands Uruguayan navy against Argentina (i)
organises Italian Legion (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
triumph at San Antonio del Salto (1846) (i)
acclaimed as hero but refuses any reward (i)
presentation of sword of honour (i), (ii)
goes to Italy to fight for Carlo Alberto against Austria (1848) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
returns to Nice (i)
Roman campaign, victory at Gianicolo Hill (1849) (i), (ii)
retreat through central Italy (i), (ii)
arrested in Chiavari, taken to Genoa (i)
visits Nice (i)
exiled to Tunisia, travels to Sardinia and Tangier (i)
first visit to Britain (1850) (i)
goes to America, lives quietly in Staten Island (i), (ii)
works as merchant seaman in South America and the Pacific (i)
returns to Europe (i)
visit to Britain (1854) (i), (ii)
split with Mazzini (i), (ii), (iii)
meets Cavour (i)
raises volunteers for Cavour (i), (ii)
campaign against Austria (1859) (i)
publicly accepts Peace of Villafranca but determines to continue struggle in central Italy (i)
Million Rifles campaign (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii)
removed from command in Romagna (i)
and the nation-at-arms (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii)
and the cession of Nice and Savoy to France (1860) (i)
conquest of Sicily (1860) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
declares himself dictator of Sicily (i)
conquest of Naples (1860) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Cavour thwarts his plans to advance on Papal States (i)
holds plebiscites in Sicily and Naples, hands power to VE II (i)
VE II refuses him viceroyship of southern Italy, (i)
returns to Caprera (i), (ii)
clashes with Cavour over moves to disband his army (i)
makes secret agreement with VE II and Rattazzi (i)
tours Lombardy promoting rifle clubs and raising recruits (i)
arrest of volunteers at Sarnico, protests at ‘massacre of Brescia’ (i)
goes to Sicily to organise expedition to Rome (i)
wounded at Aspromonte (1862) and imprisoned (i)
returns to Caprera (1863) (i)
visit to England, acclaimed as hero (1864) (i), (ii)
fights in Tyrol for VE II (1866) (i)
Roman campaign, defeated at Mentana (1867) (i)
commands Army of the Vosges in Franco-Prussian War (1870) (i)
death in Caprera (i)
funeral and national mourning (i), (ii)
POLITICAL ACTIVITIES: political beliefs (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
and radicalism (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii)
allegations of political ineptness (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
attacks on Catholic Church (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
becomes president of Associazone Emancipatrice Italiana (1862) (i)
Congress of Unity (i)
and the Freemasons (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
League of Democracy (i), (ii)
and the National Society (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii)
support for female emancipation (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
PARLIAMENTARY CAREER: elected deputy for Macerata (i)
protests against annexation of Nice (i)
represents Naples (i)
resigns from Parliament (i)
elected deputy for Dijon, Paris, Nice and Algiers (i)
 elected deputy for Rome (i)
promotes Tiber project (i)
PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS AND STYLE: appearance/clothes (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi),
(vii), (viii)
attractiveness to women (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
charisma (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
charm of manner (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
heroic status (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix), (x)
(see also press, the: promotion of GG)
fame (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
financial problems (i), (ii)
influence of gauchos on (i)
interest in agriculture (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
italianità (i), (ii), (iii)
life on Caprera (i)
‘lion’ nickname (i), (ii)
as military leader (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
personal allure (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
refusal of rewards (i), (ii), (iii)
rhetorical style (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii)
self-promotion (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
PERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS: marries Anita Ribera (i), (ii), (iii)
marries and divorces Giuseppina Raimondi (i), (ii)
marries Francesca Armosina (i)
relationships with women (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
HEALTH: tortured in prison (i)
malaria (i), (ii)
rheumatism (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix), (x)
wounded in foot at Aspromonte (i), (ii), (iii)
in later years (i), (ii), (iii)
WRITINGS: Cantoni il volontario (i), (ii), (iii)
Clelia (i), (ii), (iii)
I Mille (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
‘Italian Programme’ (i)
Manlio (i)
memoirs (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix), (x)
 posthumous publication of work (i)
public letters (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
PORTRAITS (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix), (x)
caricatures/cartoons (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix), (x)
as Christ (i), (ii)
daguerreotype by Root (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
painting by Gaetano Gallino (i), (ii)
illustrations of his death (i)
illustrations of his life (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
(see also albums, illustrated)
Staffordshire figures (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
DEPICTION IN LITERATURE: biographies (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix), (x)
fiction (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
plays (i), (ii), (iii)
poetry (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix)
CULT: creation of (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix), (x), (xi), (xii)
religious overtones (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix), (x), (xi), (xii), (xiii), (xiv), (xv),
(xvi), (xvii)
Crispi's promotion of (i), (ii)
and public festivities (i)
in Britain (i), (ii), (iii)
and GG's private life (i)
in the twentieth century (i)
Garibaldi, Giuseppina (GG's second wife) see Raimondi, Giuseppina
Garibaldi, Manlio (GG's son) (i)
Garibaldi, Menotti (GG's son) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii)
Garibaldi, Ricciotti (GG's son) (i), (ii)
Garibaldi, Rosa (GG's daughter) (i), (ii)
Garibaldi, Rosa (GG's mother) (i), (ii)
Garibaldi, Teresita (GG's daughter) (i), (ii)
‘Garibaldi’ biscuits (i)
Garibaldi Fund Committee (UK) (i)
‘Garibaldi’ overcoat (i)
Garibaldi politico (pamphlet) (i)
Garibaldi the Italian liberator (play) (i)
garibaldini (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
garibaldinismo (i)
Garibaldi's Englishman (play) (i), (ii)
Garibaldi's excursionists (play) (i)
Garrone, Alessandro Galante (i)
Die Gartenlaube (magazine) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
gauchos (i), (ii)
Gavazzi, Father Alessandro (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
La Gazzetta del Popolo (newspaper) (i), (ii), (iii)
La Gazzetta di Genova (newspaper) (i), (ii)
La Gazzetta di Milano (newspaper) (i), (ii), (iii)
La Gazzetta di Napoli (newspaper) (i)
La Gazzetta di Roma (newspaper) (i)
Gellner, Ernest (i)
Genoa (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
GG in (i), (ii), (iii)
Gentile, Emilio (i)
Germany: 1848 unrest (i)
and 1859 campaign (i)
and Austria (i)
Catholic press in (i)
volunteers from (i)
see also Prussia
Ghio, General (i)
Ghisalberti, Alberto Mario (i), (ii)
Gianicolo Hill, Rome, GG's victory at (1849) (i)
Gil de Salcedo, Manuel: Garibaldi y Procida, ó las Pasquas Sangrientas de Sicilia (i)
Ginsborg, Paul (i), (ii)
Gioberti, Vincenzo (i)
Del primato morale e civile degli Italiani (i), (ii)
Giolitti, Giovanni (i)
Il Giornale di Sicilia (newspaper) (i), (ii)
Giorzia, P.: Garibaldi a Palermo: marcia trionnfale (i)
La Giovine Italia (newspaper) (i)
Giuseppe Garibaldi da Caprera ad Aspromonte (album) (i)
Giusti, Cesare (i)
Gladstone, William Ewart (i), (ii), (iii)
 ‘Two letters to the Earl of Aberdeen’ (i), (ii)
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (i)
Goëthe, Louise: Garibaldi et ses hommes rouges (i), (ii)
Il Goffredo Mameli (newspaper) (i)
Gonçales, Bento (i)
Goodwin, John (i)
Gramsci, Antonio: notebooks (i)
Granville, Lord George (i)
Greeley, Horace (i)
Gregory XVI, Pope (i)
Grew, Raymond (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix)
La Guerra (newspaper) (i)
Guerrazzi, Domenico (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
L'assedio di Firenze (i), (ii)
Guerzoni, Giuseppe (i)
Garibaldi (i), (ii), (iii)
Guevara, Che (i)
Guglielmetti, Girolamo (i)
Guizot, François (i)

Halte-là Garibaldi! (pamphlet) (i)

Hamilton, C. G.: The Exiles of Italy, or Garibaldi's miraculous escapes (i)
Hamilton, Janet (i)
Harney, George (i)
Harper's Weekly (magazine) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii)
Harro-Harring, Paul: Dolores (i)
Hauser, Fratelli (i)
Hawkes, Emilie (i)
Hayez, Francesco (i), (ii)
Hazareesingh, Sudhir (i)
Hercules (i)
‘hero worship’ (i)
heroes (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
British leader cults (i)
Herzen, Alexander (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
historians and GG (i)
Hobsbawm, Eric (i)
Hofstetter, Gustav von (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Holcome, William (i)
Horace (i)
Hudson, Sir James (i), (ii)
Hughes, Bishop (i)
Hugo, Victor (i), (ii), (iii)
Hyam & Co. of Leeds (i)
Hyenne, R. (with Féré): Aventures, expéditions, voyages (i)

The Illustrated London News (magazine) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix), (x), (xi), (xii),
(xiii), (xiv), (xv), (xvi), (xvii), (xviii)
illustrated press (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
L'Illustration ( magazine) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix), (x)
illustrations, proliferation of (i)
El Iniciador (newspaper) (i)
International Red Cross (i)
Ireland (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Isle of Wight, GG's visit to (i)
L'Italia del Popolo (newspaper) (i), (ii), (iii)
Italia e i suoi difensori: Album storico–biografico (i), (ii), (iii)
Italia e Popolo (newspaper) (i), (ii), (iii)
L'Italia Redenta (newspaper) (i)
Italian dialects/language (i)
Italian Freedom Association see Associazione Emancipatrice Italiana
Italian Legion of Montevideo (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
accompany GG to Italy (i), (ii)
Cuneo's account of (i), (ii)
uniforms (i), (ii)
Italian school, Hatton Garden, London (i), (ii)
Italian Unitary Association, Milan (i)
italianità (i), (ii), (iii)
GG and (i), (ii), (iii)
L'Italiano (newspaper) (i)

Jacobinism (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)

 personality cults (i)
James, Edwin (i)
Jeffrey, Reverend John: ‘Lines’ (i)
Jesuits (i), (ii), (iii)
Johnson, William (i)
Jonata, Domenico (i)
Jones, Ernest (i), (ii), (iii)
Jourdain, Louis (i), (ii)
Journal des débats (newspaper) (i), (ii)
Journal pour tous (magazine) (i), (ii)

Kanzler, General (i), (ii)

Keel, F. (i)
‘keepsakes’ (i)
Keil, Ernst (i)
Koelman, Jan (i)
Körner, Axel (i)
Kossuth, Lajos (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)

La Cecilia, Giovanni: Storia della insurrezione siciliana (i)

La Croix, E.: Garibaldi: invito all'Italia (i)
La Farina, Giuseppe (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix), (x), (xi), (xii), (xiii)
Credo Politico (i)
La Marmora, Alfonso (i), (ii)
La Masa, Giuseppe (i), (ii), (iii)
La Messine, Juliet: biography of GG (i), (ii)
Lady's Newspaper (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Lamberti, Giuseppe (i), (ii), (iii)
Lamoricière, General (i)
Il Lampione (newspaper) (i)
Landi, General (i), (ii)
Landor, Walter Savage (i)
Lanza, General Ferdinando (i)
Latin Committee, Paris (i)
Laugier de Bellecour, Cesare: Documenti storica intorno … degl'Italiani in Montevideo (i)
Laven, David (i)
Le Gray, Gustave (i), (ii)
League of Democracy (i), (ii)
Ledesma, Juan de la Cruz (i)
Ledru-Rollin, Alexandre (i)
La Legge (newspaper) (i)
Leggero (Battista Colliolo) (i)
légion de Flotte (i)
Il Legionario Italiano (newspaper) (i), (ii), (iii)
Lemaître, Frédérick (i)
Lemmi, Adriano (i)
Leopardi, Giacomo (i)
Leopold II of Tuscany (i)
Letture di Famiglia (newspaper) (i), (ii)
Levi, Zeffira (i)
Levra, Umberto (i)
Liberi Comizii (political organisation) (i)
Libertà e Giustizia (newspaper) (i)
Life of Garibaldi (pictorial pub.) (i)
Lind, Jenny (i)
Linton, William (i)
Lissa, battle of (1866) (i)
Litchfield, John (i)
literacy (i), (ii), (iii)
literature see biographies; fiction; memoirs; poetry; publishing
Liverpool, GG's visit to (i)
Livorno (i), (ii), (iii)
Lo Jacono, Luigi (i)
Lo Zenzero (newspaper) (i)
Lombardi, Ignazio (i)
‘Garibaldi and Italy’ (i)
‘Il Cacciatore delle Alpi’ (i)
Lombardo (ship) (i), (ii)
Lombardy (i), (ii)
peace of Villafranca (1859) (i)
see also Lombardy–Venetia
Lombardy–Venetia: Austrian repression in (i)
 Pact of Plombières (i)
publishing in (i), (ii)
Louis-Philippe, king of France (i)
Luino, battle of (1848) (i)
Lunigiana, revolt in (1853) (i)
Luther, Martin (i)
Lynch, John (i)
Lyttelton, Adrian (i), (ii)

McAdam, John (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)

Macerata, Garibaldi celebration (i)
Machiavelli, Niccolò (i), (ii)
Mack Smith, Denis (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
MacKnight, Florence (i), (ii)
Magenta, battle of (1859) (i)
Maggiore, Lake: GG's 1848 campaign (i), (ii)
Maguire, John Francis: Rome, its rulers and its institutions (i)
Maison, Emile (i)
Mameli, Goffredo (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Manara, Luciano (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Mancel, A. (i)
Manin, Daniele (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
Maniscalo, Salvatore (i)
Manlio (Garibaldi) (i)
Manzoni, Alessandro (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
Marat, Jean-Paul (i), (ii)
Marat at his Last Breath (David) (i)
‘Marianne’ (i)
Mario, Alberto (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
Mario, Jessie White see White, Jessie
Marsala: conquest of (1860) (i)
festival (i)
Martin Garcia, capture of (1843) (i)
Marx, Karl (i), (ii)
Marxist historians (i)
Masi, Vincenzo (i)
Masina (Angelo de Masini) (i)
Massa, revolt in (1854) (i)
Matarelli, Adolfo (i), (ii)
Maurigi, R. (i)
Mazzini, Giuseppe: personal characteristics (i)
and Young Italy (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
and GG (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix), (x), (xi), (xii), (xiii), (xiv)
GG's break with (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
founds Young Europe in Geneva (i)
moves to London (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
1848 uprisings (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
1849 Roman Republic (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
in Florence (1859) (i)
in Naples (1860) (i)
and Aspromonte (1862) (i)
and Paris Commune (1871) (i)
Dwight on (i)
and Margaret Fuller (i), (ii), (iii)
and nationalism (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii)
belief in media propaganda (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
support of insurrections (i), (ii), (iii)
death 1872 (i)
medical services (i), (ii)
International Red Cross (i)
Medici, Giacomo (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix), (x), (xi), (xii), (xiii), (xiv), (xv), (xvi),
(xvii), (xviii)
Meli, Santo (i)
memoirs (i), (ii)
GG's (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix)
Mencacci, Paolo (i)
Mentana, battle of (1867) (i)
the Catholic press and (i)
Cavallotti on (i)
reaction to (i)
GG attends inauguration of monument (1880) (i), (ii)
Mérimée, Prosper (i), (ii)
Messina (i), (ii)
Metternich, Prince Clemens von (i), (ii), (iii)
Meucci, Antonio (i), (ii)
Meuricoffre, Harriet (i), (ii)
Mezzacapo, General (i)
Michelet, Jules (i)
Mieroslawksi, Ludwik (i)
Milan: fund-raising in (i), (ii)
funeral procession for GG (i)
publishing in (i), (ii)
tobacco boycott (i)
uprisings against Austria (i), (ii), (iii)
Milazzo, battle of (1860) (i), (ii), (iii)
Military Committee, Genoa (i)
I Mille (Garibaldi) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
I Mille (the Thousand) see Thousand, the
Million Rifles campaign (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii)
Minghetti, Marco (i)
Missori, Giuseppe (i)
Mistrali, Franco: Storia popolare della rivoluzione di Sicilia (i)
Mitre, Bartolomé (i), (ii), (iii)
Modena (i), (ii), (iii)
La Mola (newspaper) (i)
Il Mondo Illustrato (magazine) (i), (ii), (iii)
Monnier, Marc (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
Montanelli, Giuseppe (i), (ii), (iii)
Monte Suello, battle of (1866) (i)
Montevideo, Uruguay (i), (ii), (iii)
siege (i), (ii), (iii)
Monthly Chronicle (journal) (i)
Morazzoni, battle of (1848) (i)
Mordini, Antonio (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
Morelli, Emilia (i), (ii)
Morley, John (i)
Morning Star (newspaper) (i)
Mortara affair (1858) (i)
Mosse, George (i)
‘heroic manhood’ (i), (ii), (iii)
Il Movimento (newspaper) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
Munby, Arthur (i), (ii), (iii)
Mundy, Admiral Rodney (i)
Murat, Joachim (i), (ii)
Murat, Lucien (i)
Musolino, Benedetto (i)
Mussolini, Benito (i)
Mutru, Edoardo (i)

El Naçional (newspaper) (i), (ii)

Naples: 1848 uprisings (i)
conquest of (1860) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii)
Swiss mercenaries in (i)
Napoleon Bonaparte (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
‘Napoleon plays’ (i)
Napoleon III (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix), (x), (xi)
Napoléon, Prince Jérôme (i), (ii)
Napoleonic wars (i), (ii)
Nast, Thomas (i), (ii)
Le National (newspaper) (i)
National Italian Committee (UK) (i)
National Society (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii)
formation (i), (ii), (iii)
GG and (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii)
nationalism, Italian: and the Catholic Church (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii)
cult of heroes (i), (ii)
and Italian cultural identity (i), (ii)
Mazzini and (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii)
as political religion (i)
and the press (i), (ii)
public celebrations (i), (ii)
and publishing (i), (ii), (iii)
songs (i), (ii)
support in Britain (i), (ii), (iii)
 and the theatre (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
see also National Society
nation-at-arms (Nazione Armata) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii)
La Nazione (newspaper) (i)
Nazione Armata see nation-at-arms
Nelson, Horatio (i), (ii)
neo-classicism (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
New York, GG in (i), (ii)
New York Daily Tribune (newspaper) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
New York Herald (newspaper) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
New York Times (newspaper) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
New York World (newspaper) (i)
Newcastle, GG's visit to (i)
Nice, cession to France (i), (ii), (iii)
Nicolini, Ugolino (i)
Nicotera, Giovanni (i), (ii)
Nievo, Ippolito (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
Nightingale, Florence (i), (ii)
Nigra, Costantino (i), (ii)
Nolan, E. H.: The liberators of Italy (i)
Nomade (newspaper) (i)
Nomis di Cossilla, Augusto (i)
non expedit policy (i)
Nora, Pierre (i)
Northern Tribune (newspaper) (i), (ii)
Nottingham Forest football club (i)
Novara, battle of (1849) (i), (ii)
Nullo, Francesco (i)
nuns, reaction to GG (i)
La Nuova Europa (newspaper) (i)
Nuvolari, Giovanni (i)

O Povo (newspaper) (i)

O'Connell, Daniel (i)
O'Connor, Feargus (i), (ii)
Oddo, Giacomo (i)
Oliphant, Laurence (i)
Olivieri, Silvino (i)
Ollandini, Captain (i)
Ongaro, Francesco dell' (i)
opera (i)
Operative Bricklayers’ Trade Circular (newspaper) (i)
L'Opinion Nationale (newspaper) (i)
L'Opinione (newspaper) (i), (ii)
Oribe, General Manuel (i), (ii)
Orsini, Felice (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
The Austrian Dungeons of Italy (i)
Ossoli, Marchese Giovanni Angelo (i), (ii)
Ottolini, Vittorio: Cacciatori delle Alpi (i)
Oudinot, General Nicolas (i), (ii), (iii)
Outram, Dorinda (i)
overcoats, ‘Garibaldi’ (i)

Paez, General José Antonio (i)

Paladini, Perroni (i)
Palazzini, N. (i)
Palermo: 1846 revolution (i), (ii), (iii)
conquest (1860) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
Garibaldi festivities (i), (ii), (iii)
1866 rebellion (i)
Pallavicini, Colonel (i)
Pallavicino Trivulzio, Giorgio (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii)
Palmerston, Henry John Temple, third Viscount (i), (ii), (iii)
Panizzi, Antonio (i)
Pantaleo, Fra' (i), (ii), (iii)
Panzacchi, Enrico (i)
papal infallibility, dogma of (i)
Papal Inquisition (i), (ii)
Papal States (i)
see also Rome
Il Pappagallo (newspaper) (i)
Paraná expedition (i)
Pardi, Carmelo (i), (ii)
Paris, Congress of (1856) (i)
Paris Commune (1871) (i)
Parlamento (newspaper) (i)
Parma (i), (ii), (iii)
Workers Club (i)
‘Pater Noster’, GG version of (i)
La Patria (newspaper) (i), (ii)
Patriarca, Silvana (i)
Le Patriote Français(newspaper) (i)
Pavia (i), (ii)
university (i), (ii), (iii)
Paya, Claude (i)
Histoire de la guerre d'Italie (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii)
Le Pays (newspaper) (i)
Peard, Colonel John (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
Il Pensiero Italiano (newspaper) (i), (ii)
People's International League (UK) (i)
People's Journal (i)
Pepe, General Guglielmo (i)
Petrarch (i)
The Philadelphia Inquirer (newspaper) (i)
Philipson, Caroline Gifford (i)
photography (i), (ii)
creation of celebrities (i), (ii)
physiologies (i)
Il Piccolo Corriere d'Italia (newspaper) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Pick, Daniel (i)
Pictorial Times (magazine) (i), (ii)
Piedigrotta, religious festival at (i)
Piedmont (i)
1859 war with Austria (i)
battle of Novara (1849) (i)
language (i)
political immigration to (i)
the press in (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
 see also Vittorio Emanuele II
Piemonte (ship) (i)
Pilo, Rosolino (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
funeral (i), (ii)
Pisacane, Carlo (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
expedition to Sapri (1857) (i), (ii), (iii)
Pitrè, Giuseppe (i)
Pius IX, Pope (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix), (x), (xi), (xii)
Plombières, pact of (1858) (i), (ii), (iii)
Poerio, Carlo (i)
poetry (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix), (x)
Poland (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Il Popolo d'Italia (newspaper) (i)
portraiture (i), (ii), (iii)
see also Garibaldi, Giuseppe: portraits
Praz, Mario (i)
Il Precursore (newspaper) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Predazzi, G.: L'entrata di Garibaldi a Napoli: marcia per pianoforte (i)
press, the: and the 1859 campaign (i)
Catholic (i), (ii)
censorship (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
GG and (i), (ii), (iii)
and GG's marriage to Giuseppina Raimondi (i)
growth of (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
illustrated (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Jacobin journals (i)
Mazzini and (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
and nationalism (i), (ii)
and politics (i)
promotion of GG (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix), (x), (xi), (xii)
Uruguayan–Argentinian war propaganda (i), (ii)
La Presse (newspaper) (i), (ii), (iii)
printing, industrialisation of (i), (ii)
Protestantism (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
Prussia (i), (ii)
Franco-Prussian War (1870–1) (i)
publishing: copyright laws (i)
growth of (i), (ii), (iii)
radical (i)
Punch (magazine) (i), (ii)
The noblest Roman of them all (i), (ii)
The saint and the hero (i), (ii)
Pyat, Felix (i)

Quinet, Edgar (i), (ii)

Les Révolutions d'Italie (i)

radicalism, GG and (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)

Britain (i), (ii)
Raimondi, Giuseppina (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Rattazzi, Urbano (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
and GG (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
Ravello, Battistina (i), (ii)
Rayner, William (i)
Récit hebdomadaire illustré (journal supplement) (i)
Red Republican (newspaper) (i)
red shirts (i), (ii), (iii)
Reformed Romanist Priests Protection Society (i)
Reggio Calabria (i)
Il Repubblicano della Svizzera Italiana (newspaper) (i)
Restauracion (newspaper) (i)
Reuter telegram company (i)
Revue des Deux Mondes (journal) (i), (ii)
Reynolds, George (i)
Reynold's Weekly Newspaper (i), (ii)
Riboli, Timoteo (i), (ii)
Ricasoli, Baron Bettino (i), (ii), (iii)
Ricciardi, Giuseppe (i)
Vita de G. Garibaldi narrata al popolo (i)
La Riforma (newspaper) (i), (ii)
Rio de Janeiro (i), (ii)
Rio Grande (i)
 rebellion against Brazil (i)
1837
Ripa, Cesare della (i)
Ripari, Pietro (i)
Riso, Francesco (i)
Il Risorgimento (newspaper) (i), (ii)
Risorgimento (i), (ii)
creation of myth (i), (ii)
Risorgimento narrative (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Ritucci, Marshal (i)
Rivera, Fructuoso (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Roberts, Emma (i)
Rogers, Samuel (i)
Roma, Pact of (1872) (i)
Roma (play) (i), (ii)
romanticism, Italian (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
heroes (i)
Rome: Roman Republic (1848) (i)
GG's 1848–9 campaign (i), (ii)
GG's 1862 expedition (i)
remains Austrian in 1861 (i)
GG's 1867 campaign (i)
capture from Pope in 1870 (i), (ii)
GG's funeral commemoration (i)
monument to GG (i)
Roney, Henry (i)
Root, Marcus: daguerreotype of GG (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Rosa, Salvator (i)
Rosalia, Saint (i), (ii)
Rosas, Juan Manuel de (i), (ii), (iii)
Rosista propaganda and GG (i)
Roselli, Pietro (i), (ii)
Roskilly, Carlotta (i)
Rosselli, Carlo (i)
Rosselli, General (i)
Rossetti, Luigi (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Rossi, Pellegrino (i)
Rossini, Gioacchino (i)
Rubattino Steamship Company (i), (ii)
Ruffini, Jacobo (i)
Lorenzo Benoni (i)
Russell, John, first Earl (i)
Russell, Julian Waits (i)
Russell, Odo (i)
Russia (i), (ii)

Saffi, Aurelio (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)

Saint-Simon, Claude-Henri de (i)
Nouveau christianisme (i)
Salasco armistice (1848) (i)
Salerno (i)
Salomone-Marino, Salvatore (i), (ii)
Salvatore Maniscalo (play) (i)
San Antonio del Salto, battle of (1846) (i), (ii), (iii)
San Remo (i)
Sanctis, Margherita (i)
Sand, George (i), (ii)
La Daniella (i)
Garibaldi (i), (ii), (iii)
Sanguinetti (deputy for Chiavari) (i)
Santo Stefano: political prisoners at (i)
Sardo, Paolo (i)
Sarmiento, Domingo (i), (ii)
‘Sauvage’ (i), (ii)
Savi, Francesco (i)
Savoy, cession to France (i), (ii)
scapigliata movement (i)
Schaffer, Thomas (i)
Schiller, Friedrich von (i)
The Robbers (i)
Schwabe, Julie Salis (i)
Schwartz, Esperanza (‘Speranza’, ‘Elpis Melena’)
 von (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix)
Schwegman, Marjan (i)
Scientific Congress, Genoa (1846) (i)
Scotsman (newspaper) (i)
Scott, Thomas (i)
Scott, Walter (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
Ivanhoe (i), (ii)
Red Gauntle (i)
Rob Roy (i)
Sedan, battle of (1870) (i)
Seely, Charles (i)
Seely, Mary (i), (ii), (iii)
Sella, Quintino (i)
‘September Convention’ (1864) (i)
Sevaistre, Eugène (i)
Shaftesbury, Anthony Cooper, third earl of (i), (ii), (iii)
Shakespeare, William (i)
sheet music (i), (ii)
Shelley, Percy Bysshe (i)
Sicilian Vespers (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
sixhundredth anniversary celebrations (i)
Sicily (i)
1848 uprising (i)
1860 conquest of (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii)
1866 rebellion (i)
the church in (i), (ii), (iii)
conscription in (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
festivities for GG (i)
GG's speeches and proclamations (i)
see also Palermo
Le Siècle (newspaper) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix), (x), (xi), (xii)
Silva, Bento Gonçalves da (i)
Sinistra Storica (i)
Siracusa, Garibaldi commemoration in (i)
Sirtori, General (i)
Situazione (newspaper) (i)
Socci, Ettore (i), (ii)
Society of the Friends of Italy (UK) (i)
Socrates (i)
Solferino–San Martino, battle of (1859) (i), (ii)
songs: 1859 campaign (i)
nationalist (i), (ii)
Spadolini, Giovanni (i)
Spanish Civil War (1936–9) (i)
Spear, John (i)
Specchi, Eliodoro (i)
Spectator (journal) (i)
Sperber, Jonathan (i)
squadre (i), (ii)
Staël, Madame de (i)
Staffordshire figures of GG (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Stansfeld, Caroline (i)
Stansfeld, James (i), (ii)
Staten Island, New York (i), (ii), (iii)
Sterbini, Pietro (i), (ii)
Stevens, Thomas (i)
Story, William Wetmore (i)
Stuart, James (i)
Suárez, Joaquin (i)
Sue, Eugène (i)
Le juif errant (i)
Les mystères de Paris (i)
Sutherland, Anne, third duchess of (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Sutherland, George, third duke of (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Sutherland, Harriet, dowager duchess of (i), (ii)

Taschenbücher (i)
telegraph, development of (i), (ii)
Tennyson, Lord Alfred (i)
Tennyson, Lady Emily (i), (ii)
Tennyson, Hallam (i)
Tennyson, Lionel (i)
Terzaghi of Milan: illustrated album (i)
Texier, Edmund (i)
Thackeray, William Makepeace (i), (ii)
theatre: and nationalism (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
plays about GG (i), (ii), (iii)
Thierry, Augustin (i)
Thousand, the (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
histories of (i)
monument at Gibilrossa (i)
personal accounts of campaigns (i)
slogan (i)
Tiber project (i)
The Times (London newspaper) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix), (x), (xi), (xii), (xiii),
(xiv), (xv), (xvi), (xvii), (xviii), (xix), (xx), (xxi), (xxii), (xxiii), (xxiv), (xxv), (xxvi), (xxvii),
(xxviii), (xxix), (xxx), (xxxi)
tobacco boycott, 1859 (i)
Tonelli, Giulia (i)
Torre, Maria della (i), (ii)
Torricelli, Antonio (i)
trasformismo (i), (ii)
Trecchi, Teresa Araldi (i)
Trevelyan, George Macaulay (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix), (x), (xi)
Trollope, Anthony (i)
Trollope, Thomas (i)
Tuckerman, Henry (i), (ii), (iii)
Tuckory, Ludovico (i), (ii)
Tunis (i)
Tunisia, GG's exile to (i)
Turchetti, Odoardo (i)
Turin (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii)
monument to GG (i)
Turner, Charles (i)
Türr, Colonel Stefano (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
Türr, Stefano (i)
Tuscany (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii)
Tyrol, the (i)
Umberto, Crown Prince (later Umberto I, king of Italy) (i), (ii)
L'Union (newspaper) (i), (ii), (iii)
L'Unità Italiana (newspaper) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix), (x), (xi)
L' Univers (newspaper) (i)
Urban, General (i)
USA: GG's stay in (i), (ii)
and the Italian question (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
support for GG (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)

Valerio, Lorenzo (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)

GG's letters to (i), (ii)
Manin's letters to (i)
Varenne, Louis de la: Vita del General Garibaldi (i)
Varnese, battle of (1859) (i), (ii)
Vecchi, Augusto (i), (ii)
Garibaldi a Caprera (i)
GG's letter to (i)
Velletri, battle of (1849) (i), (ii)
Venetia, cession to Austria (i), (ii)
see also Lombardy–Venetia
Venice (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix), (x), (xi), (xii)
acquired by Italy (i)
Venosta, Giovanni Visconti (i), (ii)
Verdi, Giuseppe (i), (ii), (iii)
Verignano, fort at (i), (ii)
Vernon, James (i)
Il Vessillo Italiano (newspaper) (i)
Victor, O. J.: biography of GG (i), (ii)
Victoria, Queen (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
Viel-Castel, Horace de (i)
Vienna, Congress of (1815) (i)
Vieusseux, G. P. (i)
Villa Corsini, battle at (1849) (i), (ii)
Villafranca, peace of (1859) (i), (ii), (iii)
Villari, Pasquale (i)
Vittorio Emanuele II, king of Piedmont, later king of Italy: proclamation of Moncalieri (1849) (i)
 meets GG (1859) (i)
and GG's 1859 campaign (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
plots against Cavour with Rattazzi (i)
GG hands over power in Sicily and Naples (i)
secret negotiations with GG 1862 (i)
and GG's invasion of the Papal States (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
funeral (i), (ii), (iii)
and GG's trip to England (1864) (i)
cult of (i)
Vittorio Emanuele's entrance in Palermo (play) (i)
Vizitelly, Frank (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
General Garibaldi spearing fish by night off Caprera (i), (ii)
Narrow escape of our special artist (i), (ii)
Volturno, battle of the (1860) (i)
volunteers: nation-at-arms (i), (ii), (iii)
Cacciatori delle Alpi (i), (ii)
international (i), (ii), (iii)
the Thousand (i), (ii), (iii)
see also nation-at-arms

Walewski, Count (i)

Warmund, Manfred (i)
Washington, George (i)
Watson, Thomas (i)
Watson (first mate of Charles and Jane) (i)
Weber, Eugen (i)
Weber, Max (i), (ii)
Wedgwood commemorative china (i)
Weidlich, Carl (i)
Wellington, Arthur Wellesley, duke of (i)
The Westminster Review (journal) (i), (ii)
White, Jessie (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix)
The Life and Times of Garibaldi (i)
Whittier, John Greenleaf (i)
‘Garibaldi’ (i)
Wiseman, Cardinal Nicholas (i)
Wolfe, Dr (i)
women: the Catholic Church and (i)
GG's addresses to (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii)
GG's attraction for (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
Italian clubs and (i)
literacy (i)
magazines (i), (ii), (iii)
neoclassicism and (i)
as readers of fiction (i), (ii)
Young Italy and (i)
Woodhall, Mayor (i)
Working Men's Fund for Garibaldi (Glasgow) (i)

Young Europe (i)

Young Italy (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii)

Zambeccari, Livio (i), (ii)

Zasio, Emilio (i), (ii)
Zola, Emile (i)
Zucchini, Marchese Paulina (i)