by Lucy Riall
The ‘decade of preparation’
Garibaldi's second exile, and the first real low point in his political career, coincided with the start of major changes both in Italian politics and in public opinion. These changes will be examined in detail in this and the following chapter since they are crucial to understanding all of Garibaldi's subsequent career, both as a military leader and as a national hero. First, although the defeat of the revolutions had demonstrated the international resilience of conservatism, by the mid-1850s the coalition which had sustained conservatives during 1848–9 was in crisis. Austria, the guarantor of conservative stability in Italy, suffered a serious blow to its international standing with the Crimean War of 1854–6; its refusal to stand by its ally, Russia, during the war broke up the conservative coalition, leading to Austria's diplomatic isolation and to particular tensions with Prussia and other members of the German Confederation.78
Austrian weakness might have been less serious had Italian conservatism managed to stabilise itself and gain consensus but, in the aftermath of revolution, Italy's conservative rulers made the (arguably understandable) mistake of shifting to the right. During the 1850s, Ferdinando II of Naples ignored the clear need for reform, including in the crucial areas of finance and administration, reimposed press censorship and rejected all compromise with even the most moderate of liberals, preferring to imprison them or send them into exile, while the Austrian authorities in Lombardy–Venetia also brought in censorship and pursued political repression, including executions, with apparent enthusiasm. In Rome, the restored Pius IX set himself firmly against liberalism. During the 1850s, he dedicated himself to matters of Catholic dogma, and left political matters in the hands of his capable but uncompromising Secretary of State, Cardinal Giacomo Antonelli, whose personal dictatorship attracted much political criticism and whose nepotistic tendencies and taste for wealth and luxury encouraged a series of attacks on papal ‘corruption’. Once again, censorship, in the notorious form of the Papal Inquisition, was reintroduced. Such high-profile policies of reaction caused a storm of opprobrium and encouraged opposition to the conservative regimes both in Italy and from outside the peninsula. For perhaps the first time, Italian rulers became genuinely, if not universally, unpopular.79 After the end of the Crimean War, and the shift in international relations away from Austria, they were also faced with growing international condemnation of their governments. Most notably, at the Congress of Paris in February 1856, the British minister, Lord Clarendon, raised the ‘Italian question’, criticising the Pope and the Bourbons and expressing sympathy for Italian national aspirations.80
The problems facing conservatism in Italy opened up new opportunities for the opposition, but the opposition itself experienced some surprising changes in fortune. Reaction in 1849 had left only one Italian state – Piedmont – with a liberal constitution, which limited the power of the monarchy, established an elected parliament based on limited suffrage and guaranteed important civil liberties, such as equality before the law and the right of association. There was also a free press. Moreover, in 1849 the radicals formed a majority in the lower chamber of parliament. But some two months after the debate on Garibaldi's arrest had caused such a furore, the king, Vittorio Emanuele II, dissolved parliament and called new elections, and threaten to revoke constitutional concessions if the radicals' hostility to the crown was allowed to continue (the proclama di Moncalieri). In these elections, the radicals suffered a serious defeat. The moderate liberals, who had fought the election equally as royalists and as defenders of the constitution, returned with a strong majority and formed a government. Despite these rather shaky beginnings, the moderates managed to bring about an extraordinary transformation in Piedmont over the next ten years. Under, first, Massimo d'Azeglio and, after 1852, Camillo Benso di Cavour, constitutional government was consolidated, the power of the Church and the crown was contained, and the Piedmontese economy was revolutionised through a series of measures which introduced free trade and improved the country's financial infrastructure and transport system. These transformations meant that, again for the first time, there existed a real and successful alternative (a ‘middle way’ or juste milieu) to both conservatism and revolution in the Italian peninsula.81
Still more worthy of note was the boost which moderate liberal government gave to Piedmont and to the personal reputations of its ministers. Cavour used his exceptional political talents to control parliament throughout the 1850s and, although the scale and stability of his achievement can certainly be questioned, the great skill with which he outmanoeuvred his opponents and promoted his policies is undeniable. During this period, Cavour and his party seized the political and ideological initiative from both the radicals and the reactionaries in Piedmont. In particular, by creating what was termed an ‘unlawful union’ (connubio) between the centre right and centre left in the Piedmontese parliament on the basis of opposition to left and right extremism, and by establishing an alliance with the radical leader Rattazzi, Cavour isolated the clerical right and gave the parliamentary radicals a choice of being either with him and in power, or opposed to him and powerless. He thereby threw the parliamentary radical movement in Piedmont into a confusion from which it never really recovered.82 At the same time, the political and economic achievements of the moderate government in Piedmont, and Cavour's capacity to secure a role for Piedmont in European diplomacy especially after the Congress of Paris in 1856, lent a growing attraction to the Piedmontese ‘solution’ for liberals and radicals all over Italy. This allowed Cavour, in turn, to assume de facto leadership of the liberal movement in the Italian peninsula.
Of course, most moderate liberals, Cavour included, were not Italian nationalists. They were anti-Austrian and usually sought the expansion of Piedmontese power and influence; they all despised what Cavour called the ‘deplorable influence’ of Mazzini's unitarian ideals; and they saw Italian unification as mere ‘foolishness’.83 Yet here, too, a shift took place in the mid-1850s. Cavour became aware of the political advantages of encouraging nationalist feeling, while disillusioned Mazzinians formed the National Society to press for Italian unification under the leadership of the Piedmontese monarchy. These shifts reflected a great surge of political immigration, with an estimated 50,000 refugees arriving in Piedmont in 1849 and some 20–30,000 remaining thereafter. Especially in Turin and Genoa, the impact of these exiles on cultural life was striking and they helped hugely in making Piedmont the nucleus of a reinvented Italian nationalism.84 In this respect also, Cavour showed a striking ability to adapt to changed circumstances, and to create and hold the centre ground. So by the end of the Crimean War in 1856, Cavour had not only extended his hold over Piedmontese politics, he had come to influence many aspects of the nationalist agenda in Italy as well.
The full significance of Cavour's achievement was to become clear during the climactic years of national unification in 1859–60. Yet already by the mid-1850s, the effect on the Mazzinians was all too evident. Despite enjoying enormous prestige among revolutionary exiles and in the Anglo-Saxon world as the leader of Italian nationalism (perhaps ‘the great Italian of this century’, according to one Englishman)85 and a triumvir of the Roman Republic, Mazzini thereafter steadily lost support in Italy and amongst his own followers. In London, he established the National Italian Committee to promote nationalist activity in Italy, saying this represented a ‘National Party’ (later, ‘Party of Action’). He continued trying to organise revolutionary conspiracies, first in Sicily in 1850–1 (which came to nothing) and more notably in Milan in 1853. But the Milan insurrection was a catastrophe for Mazzini. It was misconceived, badly led and poorly supplied, and it severely damaged his image as a revolutionary leader. One conspirator stole most of the money sent by Mazzini to fund the insurrection, and in the Austrian crackdown that followed, sixteen insurgents were executed. When the property of Lombards living in Piedmont was seized by the government, Cavour, not Mazzini, successfully posed as their defender agains
t Austrian bullying. Mazzini even fell out with his fellow revolutionary, Lajos Kossuth, about the use of the Hungarian's name to encourage the uprising.86
Not all the Mazzinian conspiracies which followed – Lunigiana in 1853; Massa in 1854; the Bentivegna revolt in Palermo in 1856; Pisacane's expedition in 1857 – were directly organised by Mazzini, but he was widely blamed when they ended in disaster. Pisacane's expedition finished tragically at Sapri on the Calabrian coast with Pisacane's suicide amid the total indifference of the rural population, and the other conspirators were killed or imprisoned. Although Mazzini had not been closely involved in the planning of the expedition but had merely tried to assist Pisacane, the events at Sapri led to a wave of accusations of cowardice and fanaticism against him. Even when Felice Orsini became a hero in 1858 after his attempt to assassinate Napoleon III in Paris, Mazzini, who had deplored Orsini's action, was publicly condemned for it and sentenced to death in absentia by the high court in Genoa.87
Throughout the 1850s, there was also growing criticism of Mazzini from among his own supporters. A series of rival, and increasingly dissident, organisations were established which challenged his leadership and its base in London: the Latin Committee in Paris (1851) which argued in favour of a federal republic; the Military Committee in Genoa (1852) which sought the military direction of the revolution for itself and which, led by Giacomo Medici, became increasingly opposed to Mazzini; and most notably the aforementioned National Society, founded in 1857 by the hero of Venice, Daniele Manin, in Paris and by two exiles in Turin, Giorgio Pallavicino Trivulzio and Giuseppe La Farina. In a famous statement published in 1855, Manin had announced his conditional support of Piedmont (‘Make Italy and I am with you. If not, not’). The following year, in a series of letters to ‘Caro [Lorenzo] Valerio’ and published in the important new paper, Il Diritto, Manin openly endorsed the Piedmontese monarchy and advocated political restraint;88 and in a letter to The Times he seemed to criticise Mazzinian conspiratorial methods by declaring that the ‘great enemy’ of Italy in the present time was ‘the doctrine of political assassination or … the theory of the poniard’.89
Although at the time Manin's attack was disapproved of by many on the left, his views increasingly became mainstream during the years which followed. The National Society quickly gained adherents and established local organisations in Piedmont, as well as important – if inevitably more clandestine – contacts in Lombardy, the central Italian duchies, Tuscany and the Romagna. According to its historian Raymond Grew, the formation of the National Society was ‘the most dramatic sign that republicans were turning to Cavour, that nationalists would accept unification under Piedmontese monarchy, that the era of Mazzini was really over’.90 Its methods of peaceful agitation and propaganda now looked more convincing, and won more middle-class and widespread support, than conspiracy and insurrection. In southern Italy, moreover, many began to look to Lucien Murat, the son of Napoleon's king of Naples, Joachim Murat, as a possible alternative to the Bourbon kings. Other revolutionaries continued to follow Mazzini's old rival, Nicola Fabrizi, who was based in Malta, and still others moved towards a more explicitly anarchist and/or socialist position. Their increasing emphasis on the South and Sicily as the new theatre for revolutionary action exasperated Mazzini.91
While Mazzini did retain a loyal core of supporters in Italy and among exiles abroad (Saffi, De Boni, Francesco Crispi), many more of them were irritated by his refusal to consult or take criticism, and they distanced themselves from him even where they did not openly endorse Piedmont. His old friend Jacobo Ruffini joked that ‘Mazzini thinks he is infallible like the Pope’; the extremist Felice Orsini called him ‘the new Mahommed’; and the more moderate Antonio Mordini defined him as ‘the tyrant of our party’. Others tended to agree with the satirical poet Cesare Giusti that Mazzini's political clock had stopped in 1848.92 At the beginning of the 1850s, Italian revolutionaries had suffered the demoralising effects of exile, persecution and financial hardship as a result of their activities. After the disaster of Pisacane's expedition to Sapri in 1857, they were ‘deserted’ by what Mordini called ‘wealth and intelligence’, and it became increasingly difficult to agree on a concrete programme with which to reach out and win popular support.93
Nor, ironically, did the creation of a myth of revolutionary action do much to help Mazzini. After 1849, a large number of revolutionaries and volunteers published their versions of events as memoirs or pamphlets. These did a great deal to make known what had happened in Rome and made heroes out of those involved.94 But few were firm followers of Mazzini and they tended either openly to criticise him or to diminish his role. Mazzini also received a great deal of unfavourable publicity from ex-fellow travellers and conspirators. In 1856, the former London exile now living in Piedmont, Antonio Gallenga, published a two-volume history of Piedmont in which he revealed the story of a plot hatched by Mazzini in 1833 to assassinate the king, while during 1857 and 1858 La Farina's paper Il Piccolo Corriere d'Italia published a series of attacks on Mazzini, notably the letters of Orsini, which recounted details of Mazzini's treachery and cruelty to his followers.95
The break with Mazzini
Garibaldi's political disillusionment and tendency to seek a compromise with the Piedmontese government, evident as early as 1849, was thus part of a broader trend in nationalist circles which developed during the early to mid-1850s. Before leaving the United States for the second time, in 1854, Garibaldi had also seemed to support the idea of an alliance of nationalists under Piedmontese leadership and he expressed equal concern about the utility of Mazzini's methods and tactics (‘he is full of hope and fire. I would like him not to act rashly. I am ready to give my life to my country, in any case. [But] I would like to do this to some profit’).96 After his return to Europe, Garibaldi increasingly distanced himself from Mazzini. The two men met in London after Garibaldi arrived there in February 1854, first at a meal on board Garibaldi's ship, and later with a number of prominent European exiles – Herzen, Kossuth and Ledru-Rollin, among others – at a dinner given by American diplomats to celebrate Washington's birthday. Although Mazzini and Garibaldi were by all accounts friendly to each other, henceforth they were in serious disagreement. Garibaldi refused once more to lead an expedition to Sicily.97 In a somewhat garbled draft of a letter to Mazzini, dated 26 February 1854 (that is, after their first meeting), Garibaldi made his own position very clear:
…or we can do things on our own, overthrowing foreign and domestic obstacles, or we can ally ourselves with a government in which we can place our hopes for Italian unity alone. I don't believe in the first concept, and there are many reasons for my conviction: scarce resources, the masses who can make a revolution are of no use to an army which can support it, not having the peasants fully with us; so I am sure that whatever our maxim, it will serve no other purpose than to make victims, discrediting and weakening the task of redemption. Allying ourselves to the Piedmontese government is a bit tough, I understand that, but I think it to be the best solution, and to combine in that centre all the different colours, which divide us; whatever happens, at whatever cost.98
Also in London in 1854, Garibaldi spoke to Alexander Herzen of his differences with Mazzini, and stressed that he was totally opposed to insurrection at that time.99 Three years later, to his and Mazzini's English supporter, Jessie White, he reiterated that at the present time insurrections had ‘no probability of success’, that he refused to support ‘laughable insurrections’ which would make Italians a laughing-stock, and that in his view an alliance with Piedmont had great practical advantages.100 More seriously for all concerned, he repeated the same anti-insurrectionary, pro-Piedmontese message in public. In London in March 1854 he wrote a (somewhat) restrained address to his ‘Lombard friends’ which simply stressed the importance of ‘union … [and] combination of every element … at any cost, with the sacrifice, if necessary, of any system, however likeable’.101 However, five months later, in Genoa, he wrote a letter
to the prominent Mazzinian paper, Italia e Popolo, in which he told its readers that he had no intention of taking part in the current ‘movements of insurrection’, and that he felt it his duty to warn young people, eager to fight for ‘the redemption of the fatherland’, ‘not to let themselves be so easily led astray by the easy insinuations of deceived or deceiving men [uomini inganni o ingannatori], who push them into untimely attempts which ruin, or at the least discredit, our cause’.102 In 1855, he wrote an ‘Italian programme’, presumably intended for publication, which started with the words: ‘First of all we must make Italy’, and which went on to deplore the factionalism of Italian political life. The choice, according to Garibaldi, was a ‘combination’ under Piedmontese leadership or being ‘destroyed’ (‘there is no middle way’), and he further recommended that this leadership be ‘strictly dictatorial’.103
For Mazzini, Garibaldi's attitude was a source of enormous frustration. Mazzini had been unable to understand Garibaldi's departure for the Pacific Ocean in 1851 and his disappearance from politics for nearly two years. ‘I don't know where the devil he is, nor how long he will take to come back’, he wrote in November 1851, while in June 1853 he complained to Cuneo that there was still no news of Garibaldi, ‘who is roving on the high seas far away, and whom I have uselessly tried to contact’.104 He was briefly cheered by Garibaldi's arrival in London in February 1854, but was soon disillusioned by what he termed Garibaldi's ‘vacillation’.105 Although Mazzini hoped that he could control Garibaldi, as we have seen, Garibaldi refused to co-operate and in private correspondence at least Mazzini became much more hostile. The turning-point for Mazzini was Garibaldi's declaration against republicanism and insurrection published in Italia e Popolo in August 1854. ‘What is this declaration of Garibaldi's?’ he asked Nicolao Ferrari; to Emilie Hawkes he wrote, ‘Garibaldi … has published a declaration against our Party. I begin to be like Nimrod, all hands against me, and I against all'; while to Nicola Fabrizi he described the declaration as ‘cowardly’.106 Just as ‘shameful’ and ‘sickening’ for Mazzini was the evidence that his old friend, Giacomo Medici, had encouraged Garibaldi to make the declaration: ‘It is bad to allow Garibaldi to call us, who taught him patriotism, “ingannati o ingannatori”: it is bad not to stand up resolutely for our own creed, for our own old friends’.107
