by Lucy Riall
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 lea
ders 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
