by Lucy Riall
Garibaldi's own state of mind is perhaps best summed up by a personal letter written while he was under arrest in Genoa: ‘I am in this city from today, having wandered as a refugee around the Romagna and Tuscany for 36 days … I have lost the beloved companion of my life … I think I can leave tomorrow for Nice to see my babies and my old mother … Love, your unhappy brother.’12 Repeatedly, the correspondence between Chiavari, Genoa and Turin stressed the same message from Garibaldi, that ‘his intention … was to go on to Nice with the aim of returning to the heart of his family … his only desire is to be able to embrace his mother and children at Nice … he made known the strongest desire to go to Nice to see there his old mother and his children’, after which he was quite prepared to go into exile.13 Initially he refused money (‘a grant’) from the Piedmontese government, asking only for help for his mother and children.14 As it happened, this attitude won the sympathy of government officials, who were also impressed by his ‘prudence’, ‘good sense’ and ‘frankness’, and by his reluctance to encourage popular demonstrations in his favour. Indeed, on the journey from Chiavari, Garibaldi even agreed to use what was termed ‘his astonishing influence’ to control the crowd, ‘which he did to a good degree talking to them in a loud voice, and urging them to calm down’.15 After his visit to Nice, the intendant wrote to General La Marmora that Garibaldi had behaved ‘in the most laudable way’ and that actually no public demonstrations had taken place.16
It is interesting that Garibaldi managed to make a favourable impression on a man like Alfonso La Marmora. Already, during the siege of Rome in May, La Marmora had expressed a confused – and perhaps not untypical – mixture of patriotic pride and conservative alarm at Garibaldi's achievements (‘[t]he French have been taught a good lesson … on the one hand, there is no harm in their being punished for the contempt in which they hold the Italians, but on the other hand what pride and folly will it arouse in the republicans?’).17 After their first meeting, La Marmora was more unreservedly enthusiastic, writing to army headquarters that Garibaldi ‘has attractive features … rough but sincere; I am ever more convinced that in the right hands we could come to an agreement’. A week later he was even more explicit about the positive impression made on him by Garibaldi:
Garibaldi is no ordinary man, his features however rough are very expressive. He speaks little and well: he has much discernment: I am ever more persuaded that he got into the republican party to fight and because his services had been rejected [by us]. Nor do I think he is now republican by principle. It was a great error not to use him. If a new war proves necessary he will be a man to employ. How he managed to save himself this last time is really a miracle.18
Garibaldi's decision to be a calming influence was rewarded by the Piedmontese authorities. They allowed him to see his family, were anxious to treat him with respect and gave him a ‘grant’ on condition he leave the country. Official policy was to play down Garibaldi's arrest, and to try to pack him off overseas as soon as possible: at first the authorities thought of Montevideo (where they even considered founding an Italian colony under Garibaldi's direction), then the United States and finally Tunisia.19 A series of carefully conciliatory letters and articles were also published in various newspapers. One such letter appeared in Cavour's paper, Il Risorgimento; in it Garibaldi thanked the intendant of Chiavari for all his kindness and support;20 the semi-official paper La Legge also stated that Garibaldi's ‘language has been constantly that of a man who understands the necessities of the times, and who would not be even an involuntary source of discord’;21 while the conservative Gazzetta di Genova, in a report subsequently published in La Gazzetta di Milano, said he had shown ‘much deference’ to the government on arrival in Chiavari.22
Both Garibaldi's and the Piedmontese government's efforts at conciliation were, however, countered by the activities of the radical majority in the Piedmontese parliament. Members included the prominent parliamentarians Urbano Rattazzi and Angelo Brofferio, the editor of La Concordia, Lorenzo Valerio, and the deputies for Chiavari and Nice. In its report of 10 September, La Concordia had responded angrily to Garibaldi's arrest:
With our hearts full of joy, we got ready to say to Italy: ‘Garibaldi is safe! He has managed to reach this faraway branch of Italy where the law rules, and the symbol of national thought, for which he accomplished and suffered so much, still waves in the wind above the towers of its cities!’ [But] today a despicable and utterly unexpected event forces our hand to take up the pen and cry: Oh infamy! Garibaldi is in prison!
The radicals alleged that Garibaldi's arrest was designed to appease the Austrian government, with which Piedmont was still negotiating peace terms (although his arrest was more directly linked to concerns about public order in Genoa, where a major revolt in March had been repressed by a Piedmontese bombardment). Also on 10 September, Sanguinetti, the deputy for Chiavari, presented a petition to the Piedmontese parliament protesting about Garibaldi's arrest, and this was backed up with a lengthy eulogy by Baralis, the deputy for Nice. Juxtaposing Garibaldi's supposed ‘guilt’ with the evidence of his accomplishments, Baralis insisted that Garibaldi was guilty of nothing ‘but his own valour’:
guilty of having left Montevideo with his brave militia … guilty of having offered his sword, his life to the magnanimous Carlo Alberto … guilty of having maintained unsullied at Rome the honour of Italian arms, honour which had fallen elsewhere; guilty of having fought against the foreigner … guilty of having revived in the Latin land a longing for the Camilli, for the Scipiones; of having swollen the ranks of Carmagnola, of Sforza, of Zeno, of Ferruccio, of Sampieri … of having linked the force of Giovanni de' Medici of the Bande Nere with the bravery of his compatriot General Massena … guilty finally of having rejected the dictatorship of Rome which was offered to him by general acclaim, and of having tried to rescue the dying Venice, in whose deserted fields, tormented and pursued, he heartbreakingly lost his wife.23
By identifying Garibaldi with a historical tradition of Italian heroism, and juxtaposing this with a present vision of Italian decadence (‘dying Venice’) to make a political point, Baralis’ speech is a striking indication of the spread of Risorgimento discourse as political rhetoric over the previous four years. These themes of death and redemption – and with them the glorification of Garibaldi – were emphasised again, and more succinctly, by Valerio in the same parliamentary debate:
Garibaldi is a fellowcitizen, he is the first of our fellowcitizens, he saved the honour of Italian arms, he is martyr and hero of a holy cause, he is the love and pride of the nation, he has the right to our respect, honourable ministers. Imitate him if you can; if you don't know how to imitate him, respect him, but don't arrest him. (General applause)24
The next day a similar idea was repeated by Valerio's La Concordia. The paper warned its readers that the French government had sought Garibaldi's arrest so as to avenge his great challenge to the French army; it ‘could not bear to see unpunished the man who had so effectively scorned their insult, throwing the famous phrase Les Italiens ne se battent pas into the face of the most distinguished General Oudinot’. In the same issue Garibaldi's letter to Valerio was published, in which he bemoaned the present political climate, recommended ‘union and concord’ and hoped that Piedmont might one day become ‘the bulwark of Italian liberty and independence’.25
The radicals’ immediate purpose was to use Garibaldi to attack the present government and to bring about a change in its policy towards France. As the deputy Baralis had put it to the chamber amid general cheering, ‘perhaps a man blessed with extraordinary courage and integrity without parallel inspires fear in the government? The fear of an individual is a fault only of weak, cowardly and tyrannical governments.’ It was also part of a crucial and ultimately successful struggle to safeguard constitutional guarantees in Piedmont and assert the independence of parliament. In the end, after quite lengthy discussion, a motion was passed condemning Garibaldi's arrest as ‘contrar
y to the rights consecrated by the constitution and to the sentiments of Italian nationality and glory’.26
The parliamentary motion condemning Garibaldi's arrest was widely publicised, thanks largely to Valerio's efforts, and it formed a significant part of a fairly detailed coverage of the whole episode in the London Times.27 However, the radical protest provoked a backlash from both the Catholic and the moderate liberal press. Il Cattolico di Genova criticised the defence of Garibaldi, implying that he was a shady character who was complicit in the death of his wife.28 And in an article also published in the conservative Gazzetta di Milano, Cavour's moderate paper, Il Risorgimento, condemned the attack on the government. It ‘deplored’ the rhetoric and tactics used by the parliamentary radicals as merely ‘theatrical’, mocked Baralis' eulogy as nonsense and accused the radicals of having no serious interest in the law, in government or indeed in Garibaldi himself. Garibaldi, the paper insisted, was merely a symbol used to divert public attention from the pressing questions of the day: ‘Garibaldi is not capable of inciting such rage as an individual or citizen. Garibaldi is an accident in the majority's power. He is a name, he is a system, he is a protest, he is a hope, he is one of many things that destiny prepares and sends out to unlucky peoples, when it is written up there that they should not benefit from free institutions.’29
Garibaldi sailed from Genoa bound for exile in Tunisia on 16 September 1849. Although the ten days spent on the Ligurian coast represent a relatively minor incident in his long political career, they are revealing in many ways. The behaviour and reactions of all the political groups and government officials involved are a testimony to Garibaldi's growing fame. If private letters, newspaper reports and parliamentary debates are anything to go by, Garibaldi's name was firmly associated with the currently prevailing, if still partisan, sense of national resurgence, and in particular with deeds of military valour which were seen as belonging to a specifically Italian tradition and which could be used as a rhetorical device to hide and/or belittle more prosaic political realities and interests. It is interesting that Garibaldi himself did little or nothing in these days to encourage such reactions. Presumably exhausted and clearly stricken with grief for the loss of his beloved wife, he played no part in the political furore over his arrest. Indeed he toed the government line to a conspicuous extent. Yet his reluctance to do anything but go home meant that he provided a blank space on which an explicit sense of historical identity and national pride could be inscribed, as well as being a more immediate focus for the hopes, fears and rivalries of Piedmontese politicians at a time of political crisis. Indeed, his disappearance in August, with only brief appearances thereafter, served to increase political fascination with him. The reported death of his wife, and his clear desire to see his ‘old mother’ and children, also introduced for the first time an element of private intimacy and sentimentality into his heroic reputation.
It became clear in these weeks how difficult it could be to direct or control Garibaldi's fame. Its effects were unpredictable. Garibaldi himself suffered as a result of them – being arrested on home territory as an unlawful immigrant. Subsequently, when he arrived in Tunisia on 19 September, he was refused entry by the Bey, who was frightened of Garibaldi's ‘great renown’ and feared ‘that the mere fact of Garibaldi's disembarking could cause the eruption of a disorderly movement and demonstration in Tunisia’.30
In the weeks and months that followed Garibaldi's arrest at Chiavari, La Concordia sought to publicise his sad plight, and published letters and reports on his peregrinations from Tunisia to Sardinia, to Gibraltar (where he met with a frosty reception from the British governor), and on to Tangier, where he spent the winter.31 La Concordia announced that, in Tangier, Garibaldi had found:
a land which welcomed him hospitably, and which gave him a peaceful refuge. There, neither government officials [intendenti], nor special commissioners, nor carabinieri ask for passports or are concerned for his security … in the land of the Bedouins, who eat men; and there he found a friendly and polite welcome, and the kind of peace which Europe and his ungrateful land have so rudely denied him!
Garibaldi wrote to the paper saying: ‘Here among the Turks I can live in peace!’32 In reality, Tangier marks Garibaldi's withdrawal from active politics. In a letter published in La Gazzetta del Popolo on 25 April 1850, he acknowledged receipt (in Nice) of a sword ‘dedicated to me by the Italians’, and a letter addressed by him to Valerio at La Concordia in June 1850 was published in that paper. Otherwise he spent his time writing his memoirs, and hunting and fishing: seeking to calm his soul ‘so traumatised’, as he put it, ‘by the vicissitudes of a tempestuous life’ and ‘trying to shake off a kind of dreaded melancholy which for a time has possessed me’.33
New York
Garibaldi's letters reveal that money – or more precisely the lack of it – rather than politics was his main concern at this time. He was especially worried by the need to help maintain his mother and children. Out of his financial problems a plan developed to travel to New York, procure a boat and make a living as a merchant seaman.34 Thus, in June 1850, Garibaldi left Tangier and stopped first at Gibraltar and then at Liverpool, where he spent a week. He then embarked on the Waterloo for New York, where he arrived on 30 July.
Garibaldi's brief visit to England received little press attention. The Times noticed his arrival in New York (‘Garibaldi the celebrated partisan chief in the late wars of Italy and of Montevideo arrived a few days since’)35 but not his stay in Liverpool. The Liverpool Mail mentioned his visit to the city, but only after he left. However, the paper did display a fascination with the minute, if often inaccurate, narrative of Garibaldi's life and appearance, which was already becoming a commonplace in public perceptions of him. In a short passage the paper managed to reveal the following details to its readers: that Garibaldi's wife had died ‘from fatigue’ in the Apennines; that he had then reached the island of La Maddalena to be ‘kindly treated and protected by the Sardinian government’; that ‘his pecuniary affairs are said to be the reverse of flourishing’; that his mother was looking after his children in Nice; that he was well educated and spoke many languages fluently; that he had fought ‘in the war of the Greek revolution, and served … under Lord Cochrane, at that time admiral of the Greek fleet’; that he was ‘rather below the middle size, stoutly made, with an erect and soldierlike air; and that his manner was ‘pleasing and lively, but … his demeanour … staid and grave’.36
Almost a week after Garibaldi's departure for New York, The Red Republican, a Chartist paper owned by the ‘Jacobin in an English setting’, George Harney, and an important vehicle for the views of foreign exiles in Britain after 1848–9, sought to give publicity to Garibaldi's stay in England. Introducing Garibaldi to its readers, the paper used the now familiar trope of denunciation and defence:
‘The insufferable domination of Garibaldi and his band’ formed the chosen theme, for weeks, of the newspapers subsidized by the great political parties. Reading their lucubrations, you would have imagined that the Roman General was a barbarian of the first order, and that his followers were little better than halfcivilized savages. Other, and more impartial testimony, succeeds in proving diametrically the reverse of this. The combined spirit of high chivalrous honour and selfdenying patriotism never exhibited itself more strikingly than in the case of the calumniated Garibaldi.
It also published a nineverse poem (‘Lines’) by the Reverend John Jeffrey about ‘one of the most brilliant episodes of Garibaldi's career, when he … scattered in “rabble rout” the forces of the King of Naples’. In its way, the poem was very typical of a growing trend in British radical attitudes to Italy – a mixture of Protestant antiCatholicism (‘Popery’), simple juxtaposition of good and evil in the representation of Italian politics, and sheer fantasy in perceptions of Garibaldi:
Garibaldi! Garibaldi!
Thrills the shout through street and square,
While the legion of the hero
/> Gathers to its thunder there!
But a handful seems the band,
As with flushing cheeks they stand,
Ardent at their chiefs command,
To rush forward on the foe, –
And to crush the slaves of Naples
By a first and final blow
…
Garibaldi! Garibaldi!
Towering foremost there of all,
Moves he like destruction's Angel, –
Till in circle round him fall,
Moved by his unresting blade,
Those who hoped in gore to wade
One day hence beneath the shade
Of St Peter's giant dome:
‘Romans!’ rings his watchword – ‘hurl them
To the tyrant's hell, – their home!’37
Unlike his passage through Liverpool, Garibaldi's arrival in New York was anticipated some time in advance. Hearing of Garibaldi's decision to come to the United States, a welcoming committee of Italian republican exiles was formed. The committee consisted of Mazzini's correspondent from the early 1840s, Felice Foresti (also professor of Italian literature at Columbia University and the Roman Republic's official representative in New York), as well as General Avezzana (the exMinister of War in the Roman Republic), Quirico Filopanti (exsecretary to the Roman triumvirs), and Antonio Meucci (the scientist and entrepreneur). On 26 July, the New York Daily Tribune, a leftleaning paper edited by the prominent labour reformer Horace Greeley, published a statement from ‘[t]he Italians in New York’ that they accepted ‘with feelings of gratitude the offers from American, French and other Friends of Liberty, to unite with them in honoring with a public procession the arrival of Gen. Garibaldi, the heroic defender of Liberty in the Old and in the New World’. Those who wanted to take part in the demonstration were asked to inscribe their name and corporation in a register at the Café de la République on Broadway. After his quarantine on Staten Island, it was planned that Garibaldi would be greeted on arrival at the Battery by Mayor Woodhall and that he would be taken to Astor House, where a ‘splendid banquet’ was to be held a few days later, with speeches in Italian and English. A committee of German and French socialists announced its intention to participate in the Garibaldi demonstrations; ‘socialist citizens’ were asked to gather at the Shakespere [sic] hotel to collect their red badges, ‘as no other color than the red will be admitted’.38
