by Lucy Riall
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 subsc
ription. 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’:
