early life and exile
italian campaigns
final years and legacy
bibliography
GARIBALDI, GIUSEPPE (1807–1882), Italian military and nationalist leader.
The life of Giuseppe Garibaldi is fascinating, the English historian George Macaulay Trevelyan noted in 1909, because it contains all the ingredients of a novel. This observation is prescient. What is perhaps the most diffuse political myth of nineteenth-century Europe was indeed constructed by means of a biographical account strikingly similar to a fictional work, which Garibaldi himself, at little more than fifty years of age, had set out to make known to a vast public. This was in 1859, when his precocious Memoirs (Memorie) were published in New York by A. S. Barnes & Burr, and then in London, Paris (translated and tinkered with by Alexandre Dumas), Brussels, Hamburg, and elsewhere. Great public acclaim came immediately, because the story unfolded amid romantic passions and gallant adventures and exuded the exoticism of the wild lands of Latin America and the ancient fascination of the Mediterranean. It was a winning plot, breathtaking, sometimes incredible, and always played out along the lines of a fiction. The myth, moreover, called out to be separated from reality; the hero had to be distinct from the common man, and the story had to become a place where fantasies were fulfilled.
In Italy the situation was different. Already sensitive to the Romantic vein of Sir Walter Scott, Lord Byron, and Victor Hugo, the youthful Italian nationalist movement had attracted a group of writers, such as Silvio Pellico, the marchese d'Azeglio, Francesco Guerrazzi, and Alessandro Manzoni, who in their works took up remote themes in Italian history and used them as parables of the battle in progress for the independence of the country. These works included examples of physical courage, martial virtue, and national pride. Yet by their very nature, they were sunk in a remote past, and by the early nineteenth century, one needed a good dose of optimism to believe that times were ripe for the country to erase a centuries-long tradition of political fragmentation, military defeats, and foreign domination. It is for this reason that the myth of Garibaldi was so effective among the cultured elites, students, soldiers, and politicians, and could become a sort of popular faith—centered around the icon of a Christ with red shirt, long flowing hair, blond beard, and flashing eyes. At the moment in which it sought to enter into the club of European powers, Italy needed military glory. And Garibaldi was a warrior. "War is the true life of a man!" he would write in the preface to the 1872 edition of his Memoirs.
early life and exile
That life, which would enter precociously into legend, began on 4 July 1807 in Nice. The son of a sea captain who had intended for him a career as a professional, Garibaldi very early betrayed his father's aspirations and, at the age of sixteen, began to traverse the length and breadth of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, as far as Smyrna, Istanbul, Odessa, and Taganrog. In 1832, far from Italy, the young sailor first heard of Henri de Saint-Simon and Giuseppe Mazzini, of socialism and nationalism, and he was smitten. Two years later, when the partisans of Mazzini organized an insurrection at Genoa, Garibaldi, who was serving on a ship anchored in the harbor, debarked and attempted to participate in the escapade. The revolt, however, came to naught, and Garibaldi, never having returned to his ship, ended up being accused, tried in absentia, and condemned to death. He thus became an exile and a martyr in the cause of liberty, and the following year, after joining Giovine Italia (Young Italy, a revolutionary organization founded by Mazzini in 1831), he departed for Latin America.
He arrived at Rio de Janeiro at the end of 1835, welcomed by Mazzini's supporters as the "hero of Genoa," and two years later joined the republicans of the Rio Grande do Sul, a province of the empire of Brazil that was struggling for its independence. Employed by the rebels to command the small separatist fleet, at the head of a crew of adventurers and buccaneers, Garibaldi conducted forays against Brazilian ships, laid daring ambushes, suffered reprisals, conquered cities, endured arduous retreats, and was wounded, imprisoned,
and tortured. And he met the eighteen-year-old Creole Anita, who became his companion and whom he later married. In 1840, when the Brazilians looked to have bested the rebels, he left the Rio Grande province and arrived at Montevideo in the following year, after an adventure-filled march of five months. There, he promptly threw himself into the bitter civil war that had broken out in Uruguay in the wake of independence, a war intertwined with the conflict between Argentina and the liberal powers of Europe. In Montevideo, the adventure recommenced. Having taken command of the naval squadron of the progressives of José Fructuosa Rivera, Garibaldi took up the fight against the Argentine fleet, together with English and French contingents. He was brash, daring, and capable. He attacked the enemy and quickly retreated, requisitioned civil and military vessels, hid in the great fluvial network of the Paraná, organized impossible forced marches through the forest, occupied cities and villages, and was accused by the Argentine press of theft and violence against the civil population. Hero or brigand, his fame in Montevideo grew by the day, and his name appeared ever more frequently in the European and North American press.
italian campaigns
Finally, in 1848, Garibaldi left South America, attracted by events in Italy and strengthened by an experience that had taught him the art of war and guerilla tactics; tempered him in the command of men; accustomed him to dangerous situations, unequal contests of force, and public violence; and, not least, made him suspicious of the complex games of the political arena. He returned from South America with a concept of military dictatorship that he hoped would provide an antidote to those games but that, even though ennobled by appeals to classicism, would be difficult to transplant from its Latin American context to a European milieu.
In Italy, in 1849, Garibaldi was a protagonist in the desperate struggle of the Roman Republic against the French, Neapolitans, and Austrians. His deeds were on the lips of all, and even his flight from Rome became legendary: the perilous journey north, the death of his wife, Anita, along the way, and his long wandering through Tuscany, Liguria, and the North African coast. As always, there was no repose for Garibaldi. In 1850 he went to New York, then to Peru, and from there to China. Yet in 1854 he was again in Europe, and in the following year he bought part of the island of Caprera, a refuge from the delusions of public activity and, obviously, a classic site of pilgrimage for the devout of the whole globe, aiming to see and meet their hero. Meanwhile, giving testament to his realism and entering on a collision course with Mazzini, he decided to support the nationalist project of the Savoyard monarchy. In 1859, having been named a general, he led his Cacciatori delle Alpi (Alpine Hunters) to war against the Austrians. Shortly thereafter, on 11 May 1860, Garibaldi landed with a thousand volunteers (the Redshirts) on a Sicily in
the throes of revolution. In the span of two months, thanks to a rapid series of military successes that laid low the far more numerous Bourbon army, Garibaldi conquered Palermo and the entire island. He then went to Calabria, rapidly traversed the south of Italy, and on 7 September entered triumphantly into Naples, capital of the Bourbon king, Francis II.
The conquest of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies was stunning, on a military level, because of the disparity of the forces in the field and the blinding speed of events. On a political level, the situation was more complex because Garibaldi was operating on a razor's edge. Though he was a democrat, Mazzini was deeply suspicious of him. Garibaldi was supported by the newly proclaimed king of Italy, Victor Emmanuel II, but failed to prevail over the subtle political and diplomatic maneuverings of Count Cavour, who while interested in the success of the undertaking had to repudiate it officially in front of his French allies, and who had no intention of granting any leeway to the democrats. Little wonder, then, that after 1861—the year of Italian unification—Garibaldi became both a national hero and a source of grave embarrassment for Italy's right-wing government. His priority was to liberate Rome from papal rule, an unrealistic objective in light of existing Italian alliances. Yet the general moved of his own accord, and in the summer of 1862 he assembled a small army of volunteers and attempted a surprise attack. He landed in Sicily and then moved to Calabria, where he prepared to set out for the north, but was intercepted by regular Italian troops in Aspromonte, who opened fire, wounded him, and arrested him. Five years later, in 1867, he again planned to use force to regain Rome. To prevent this he was arrested, but made a theatrical escape only to flee in improbable fashion and be defeated by the French at Mentana.
final years and legacy
The military undertaking of 1867 was Garibaldi's last, other than his participation on the French side in the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871). But the last twenty years of his life, from 1862 to 1882, took an increasingly schizophrenic form, between the already worldwide scale of his myth and the great difficulties of integrating a charismatic leader of his ilk into Italian political life. In the words of the American ambassador in Turin, he had become "a great power." London welcomed him in 1864 with the largest crowd ever seen in the British capital; Abraham Lincoln sought, unsuccessfully, Garibaldi's participation in the battle against slavery; Poles fighting for independence sought his aid. And his Memoirs were translated into eleven languages. Meanwhile in Italy, everyone adopted his iconic image, but neither democrats nor moderates were disposed to follow him in his initiatives or in his strident denunciations of parliamentary government. To make matter worse he described Cavour in exceptionally harsh terms after 1860 and called Mazzini a "coward" and a "rogue" after 1867. The truth is that the life of this pirate who became a general, the republican who supported the Savoyard monarchy, the Freemason and populist, internationalist and individualist, does not fit any neat categories of party politics or even class struggle.
Even after his death on Caprera on 2 June 1882, the icon of Garibaldi continued to be invoked in very different political contexts. It was the banner of those who pressed for Italy's intervention in World War I in 1915, of Fascists preaching dictatorship, and of the Socialists and Communists who in 1948 vied for control of the government with the Christian Democrats of Alcide De Gasperi. In the late twentieth century, the story of the general would be reprised by Bettino Craxi, another controversial and innovative leader. Yet the changing and often contradictory uses to which his image has been put illustrates, if not the ambiguity, then certainly the political fragility of Garibaldi.
See alsoCavour, Count (Camillo Benso); Italy; Kingdom of the Two Sicilies; Mazzini, Giuseppe; Nationalism; Risorgimento (Italian Unification); Rome; Victor Emmanuel II; Young Italy.
bibliography
Primary Sources
Garibaldi, Giuseppe. Autobiography of Giuseppe Garibaldi. 3 vols. Translated by A. Werner. London, 1889. Reprint, with a new introduction, New York, 1971.
Secondary Sources
Banti, Alberto Mario. La nazione del Risorgimento: Parentela, santità e onore alle origini dell'Italia unita. Turin, 2000.
Calabrese, Omar. Garibaldi: Tra Ivanhoe e Sandokan. Milan, 1982.
Ridley, Jasper. Garibaldi. London, 1974. Reprint, London, 1991.
Scirocco, Alfonso. Garibaldi: Battaglie, amori, ideali di un cittadino del mondo. Rome, 2001.
Smith, Denis Mack. Garibaldi: A Great Life in Brief. New York, 1956. Reprint, Westport, Conn., 1982.
Trevelyan, George Macaulay. Garibaldi and the Thousand. London, 1909. Reprint, New York, 1979.
Ugolini, Romano. Garibaldi: Genesi di un mito. Rome, 1982.
Paolo Macry
Encyclopedia of Modern Europe: Europe 1789-1914: Encyclopedia of the Age of Industry and Empire
