Garibaldi
Page 4
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 Ita
ly. 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 revol
ution 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