Garibaldi

by Lucy Riall

  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, magic
al 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