by Lucy Riall
Written after the tragic end of the retreat from Rome, accompanying Garibaldi into exile in America and being partially lost along the way, as well as being rewritten by others thereafter, the memoirs' relationship with their author is a complex one. Yet it is revealing that during the period when he was most removed from political life, from late 1849 to 1850, Garibaldi was preoccupied by writing and publishing his memoirs. He referred frequently to their preparation for publication; he specified for instance that the biographical sketches should be published separately from the memoirs, he noted that the whole text required substantial correction, and he accepted his cousin's advice that the sketches needed more detail and suggested that this was also true of his memoirs.110 The fact that at different times during the 1850s Garibaldi gave four copies of his memoirs to four friends of different nationalities, and was apparently happy to let them translate the memoirs and/or add their own narratives and impressions, also suggests a strong commitment to their promotion and international distribution.
Yet the memoirs in general, and the French version published in 1860 by Dumas in particular, have always been treated with suspicion by historians. They are irritated by the significant gaps in the narrative and they find the mixture of personal memory, partisan polemic and novelistic fantasy an impediment rather than an aid to establishing the truth about Garibaldi's actions in the Risorgimento. G. M. Trevelyan says of the Dumas version that, as there is ‘no ostensible means of distinguishing Garibaldi's statements from Dumas' romantic inventions’, it is impossible for a historian to use it as evidence.111 Since Garibaldi went on to revise the memoirs and wrote a ‘definitive’ and considerably altered edition in 1872, the large number of different editions meant that it became more, not less, difficult to separate ‘legend from fact’.112 For the literary critic too, the memoirs are of little significance as they are undeniably badly written. Garibaldi's long-winded melodramatic style, which relies heavily on superlative and bathos, does little to commend his narrative to the reader; and the structure of the narrative, with its extended battle scenes and political digressions, can be equally off-putting. Yet most historians do agree that the memoirs have some value in psychological terms. They can, it is suggested, inform us about Garibaldi's state of mind and they are said to offer clear insights into his emotions and ideas; as Trevelyan puts it: ‘Without knowing that he is making “confessions”’, Garibaldi ‘gives himself away as much as Augustine or Rousseau … [and] the gift is pleasant’.113
This perception of Garibaldi's memoirs is interesting because, with the possible exception of the question of their literary interest, it can be challenged on every count. Broadly speaking, the dismissal of his memoirs as historical data and their readmission as psychological evidence is based on a misunderstanding of the nature and importance of memoirs in nineteenth-century political life. As Pierre Nora has shown convincingly in relation to France, the memoir genre was not only an immensely prolific one in the first half of the nineteenth century, but it was also one aimed specifically at ‘the public’; it was a genre which deliberately evoked and produced a sense of collective past and national belonging, and it was ‘deeply engaged in politics’.114 Thus, the authenticity and accuracy of Garibaldi's memoirs should be, for us, of less interest than what they can tell us about the historical context in which they were produced and about Garibaldi's own relationship to contemporary concerns. To follow Nora: memoirs ‘do not construct actions; they create a character. They contribute only secondarily to history, yet they establish a myth’, and they propose a strong link between the individual and the course of history.115
In effect, what Nora suggests to us is that Garibaldi's memoirs were central to the construction of his public persona and to the myth created around it. Although it would be a mistake simply to place Garibaldi's memoirs within the French political and literary tradition,116 ‘patriotic memoirs’ had from the start been a prominent and enduringly popular feature of Risorgimento literature, building on a strong tradition of biographical writing in Italy which goes back to the lives of saints and to the Renaissance works of Petrach, Bruni and Cellini, among others.117 As in France, memoirs in Risorgimento Italy can be considered a part of political action, whereby the writer asserted his/her role in history and made a bid to establish and control the memory of a political event or series of events. In general terms, Garibaldi's memoirs form one in a series of similar attempts by Risorgimento writers and activists (or writer– activists) to create a sense of national identity through the construction of, and appeal to, collective memory. More immediately, his memoirs were part of the effort, which gathered increasing momentum after 1848–9, to produce a narrative which would identify these decades as the ‘Risorgimento’: in other words, to establish and publicise in narrative form an ideal of national resurgence apparently so compelling that people were prepared to fight and die for it and self-evidently so important that it would come to define an epoch. Finally, Garibaldi's memoirs may well reflect the literary influence on him of Argentine oppositional culture, which was similarly engaged in the construction of biography and history for the purpose of creating national memory.118 Far from giving him away inadvertently, as Trevelyan supposes, Garibaldi's memoirs were an essential aspect of his self-fashioning as a nationalist hero after the events of 1848–9; they were a move to assert himself within the broader Risorgimento myth, and an attempt to establish himself as the symbol of the Italy which he was dedicated to ‘resurrecting’.
That Garibaldi's memoirs were conceived of neither as personal autobiography nor as ‘authentic’ history but were, from the outset, intended as a form of public intervention is suggested by a series of factors. They are generally concerned far less with minute political recollection than with the broader question of political reputation. Thus, in August 1850, Garibaldi referred to the growing disagreements between Italian republicans, telling one correspondent that he had learnt in New York ‘things about the events of Porta S. Pancrazio [in Rome in 1849] that I was ignorant of; although I was quitedevoted to my post there; and it upsets me to see those events described by people who didn't witness them’. Despite this, he stressed that he had decided not to write about the 1848–9 revolutions in his memoirs so as to avoid ‘obscuring’ the ‘fame of certain individuals’.119 In the event, Garibaldi gives overwhelming prominence in these 1850s versions of his memoirs to his South American experiences; and although both Dumas and von Schwartz include in their editions details of the 1849 Roman Republic and the events of 1859, the official part of the published memoirs ends with Garibaldi's return to Europe in 1848. Moreover, only the first few pages of the memoirs are concerned with Garibaldi's early life and journeys to the Black Sea, and here too he has little to say about his own political background. He is much more interested in constructing an exemplary life. He tells the reader of his childhood mishaps and adventures, of his early dedication to the risorgimento of Italy, and of his joy at first seeing Rome (‘the Rome of the future … of the regenerative idea of the people!’), but he says frustratingly little (one paragraph only) about joining Young Italy – he notoriously omits to tell who recruited him – and still less about the failed Mazzinian conspiracy which led him to emigrate to South America.120
In this respect, Garibaldi's memoirs reflect the growing tensions in opposition circles and his own ambivalence towards Mazzinian conspiracy. The memoirs express a general desire for Italian ‘liberation’ but Mazzini, along with other living Italian activists, is scarcely alluded to and the divisive events of 1848–9 are simply excluded from the narrative. Only those companions of Garibaldi who died in 1848–9 – Daverio, Masina, Mameli, Manara, Risso and Bassi – are mentioned, and then only in the biographical sketches published by Dwight in New York in 1859. Instead, Garibaldi adapts a familiar Risorgimento trope first developed to get past the censors: he presents the reader with his own idealised past, against which the situation in ‘our poor Italy’121 can be implicitly compared.
Thus,
Garibaldi's South American years resemble a pastoral golden age. He recalls the ‘immense and undulating fields’ of Uruguay, and his own reaction, as a ‘25-year-old corsair’, to the first sight of the wild, untamed ‘stallion of the pampas’.122 In an extended passage, he praises the ‘real kind of independent man’ – the matrero of Uruguay (like the gaucho, he says, but ‘more illegal, more independent … He rules over that vast extensive countryside, with the same authority as a government, [but] he gives no orders; he raises no taxes’):
A good horse is the first element of the matrero; his arms normally consist of a carabine, a pistol, a sabre, and the inseparable knife, without which the matrero could not exist … from the ox he gets the necessary for his saddle, the maneador to tie his companion while he grazes … las bolas which catches the bagual (wild horse) in the fury of a race … the lasso … finally the meat which is the only food of the matrero … the field and the forest are his rooms; the sky, his roof.’123
His own life there is remembered in idyllic terms. As a ‘buccaneer’ on the Rio Grande coast, he writes, he had a life full of danger, adventure and physical pleasure:
but at the same time beautiful, and very suited to my character … We had saddles, we found horses everywhere … whenever the situation demanded it – we were transformed into not brilliant but awe-inspiring knights, and we were feared … Moreover, in almost every place … maize, legumes, sweet potatoes and often oranges were to be found … The people who accompanied me, a real cosmopolitan crew, were made up of all colours and of all nations. I treated them with kindness, perhaps too much kindness … [but] they were not without courage, and this seemed enough to me.124
If Garibaldi excludes most living Italians from his memoirs, this does not mean that his pages are unpeopled. He gives lists of those who fought with him in South America and died there; he praises their heroism, bemoans their sacrifice and laments that he can't remember all their names.125 He stresses the great value of the people who fought with him in the South American wars: the freed slaves, ‘true sons of freedom. Their lances, longer than the normal length, their dark black [nerissimi] faces, their robust limbs used to permanent and demanding work, their perfect discipline’; and the Italian volunteers, who made charge after charge at the battle of Salto (showing that ‘Italians are no cowards’), and who were ‘glorious’ at the battle of Dayman, ‘as solid as a bulwark and highly agile, they rushed to wherever the need took them, and invariably chased away their companions' adversaries’.126 He pays tribute to the character of Bento Gonçales, his commander in the Rio Grande Republic, ‘noble warrior … Tall and slim … Highly courageous … of a moderate and generous heart … [yet] simple … I shared his meals in the field, with as much familiarity as if we had been friends from childhood and equals’ (although, perhaps to prevent Gonçales from stealing too much of his own glory, he points out that he was always defeated in battle). Garibaldi singles out for special admiration the courage and ‘purity’ (l'illibatezza) of a Uruguayan comrade, Juan de la Cruz Ledesma: ‘dark-haired, with an eagle eye, with the noble bearing of a fine man’.127 Most of all, he eulogises those of his fellow exiles who are now dead. He bemoans the loss of his childhood friend Edoardo Mutru, ‘the love of my heart’; he describes meeting Luigi Rossetti: ‘our eyes met … We smiled at each other and became brothers for life. Inseparable for life!’; he recalls Luigi Carnaglia (‘another martyr for freedom!’), without a formal education but with a ‘high’ soul ‘which upheld the honour of the Italian name everywhere’ and who looked after Garibaldi ‘like his own child’; and he praises Francesco Anzani, who brings discipline to the volunteers and who distinguishes himself by his ‘courage’ and ‘cold blood’ under fire.128 Anzani, Rossetti and Mutru all feature in the ‘sketches’ published by Dwight in New York, as does Garibaldi's closest companion of all, his dead wife, Anita, ‘the Brasilian heroine’: ‘my treasure, no less fervent than myself for the sacred cause of the people, she looked on battles as entertainment and the discomforts of camp life as a pastime.’129
All these passages confirm that Garibaldi's memoirs should be seen as a continuation or extension of his political action in 1848–9. The similarities between descriptions of Garibaldi's arresting appearance, behaviour and companions in Rome in 1849 and his own colourful depictions of the ‘adventurous life’ of the pampas suggest that he not only consciously modelled himself on the matrero but that he also sought to convey this image to the public by political action and by the written word. There is in his memoirs the same attempt at theatrical bricolage that we observed in his gestures and speeches of the 1840s, and here too it is meant for the purposes of public consumption. Moreover, the linking in his memoirs of the pastoral exoticism of his South American exile to examples of individual heroism has a serious political message, whose eclecticism should not mask its intended use as political rhetoric. Garibaldi uses the story of his life to outline a model of nationalism which is international and voluntary.130 It may not entirely convince us, but his vision of a utopian community is based loosely on a romantic socialist model of political belonging. Its ideals are those of rustic selfreliance and republican virtue, it has a virile martial ethic, and its inhabitants are free and beautiful people: rebellious young Italians, wise elders, freed slaves and liberated women.
Garibaldi seeks, in short, to offer through his own experiences a vision of the nation-at-arms which is also a democratic community. This political vision is conveyed through the actions and appearance of two different but related groups. Much of the narrative is sustained by his interaction with a series of captivating companions with whom he shares the dangers, privations and excitements of a military (and/or seafaring) life. He is careful to emphasise both the fraternal love which grows between these men of different ages, backgrounds and nationality or race, and the importance and glory of their sacrifice (their martyrdom). Here we see outlined in narrative form his ideal of volunteering as the crucible of a national community (volunteers were the basis of Garibaldi's military action in 1848–9, and they were to remain central to his political programme during the 1850s, and in the wars of 1859 and 1860). Yet in stressing the ties of this new fraternal family, he also gives prominence to his own natural family. His memoirs begin with a description of his ‘good parents, whose character and loving care had such an influence on my education and on my physical activities’: his father, a sailor, who loved his children, did his best for them despite his poverty, and did all he could to give the rebellious young Garibaldi a decent education; and his mother, a ‘model for all Mothers’, who suffered so much for his ‘adventurous career’, whose tenderness to Garibaldi was perhaps ‘excessive’, whose ‘angelic’ character is responsible for ‘the little of good’ there is in his, and who, he feels, still watches over him after her death.131
There is in Garibaldi's memoirs an attempt to link the republican principles of voluntary political engagement to the affective ties and responsibilities of the traditional nuclear family. In this respect, the central role given to his wife, Anita (‘whom I mourn today, and will mourn all my life!’), is especially interesting. It is she who most clearly embodies the Garibaldian fusion of an ideal of intimate love with the ideal of political virtue, and she is also used to represent the reconciliation of the affective life with the life of fighting and adventure. Before their meeting (‘one of the defining moments of my life’), he had been convinced that – despite his love of women – his ‘independent’ and ‘adventurous’ spirit must necessarily exclude marriage and children. But one day he sees Anita through a telescope from his ship, rushes ashore, and desperately looks for her. He finally finds her, takes one look at her and announces ‘you will be mine!!!’ He hints that there is a scandal involved in their union, but she becomes ‘the only woman in the world for me!’132 ‘[M]y incomparable Anita’ is, for Garibaldi, ‘the Amazon … superior to her sex in the discomforts and dangers of war’. She fought alongside him, loaded and fired cannons in battle with him and enc
ouraged his men ‘with admirable serenity … with her voice, with her gestures, while she brandished the scimitar in a threatening manner’. She is also a loving wife who escaped from enemy hands and crossed the Brazilian forest alone to rejoin her husband, a companion who rode across the American desert at his side and ‘consoled me in hard times’, and a concerned mother, ‘admirable in domestic life’, who, with Menotti, their infant son (and a favourite with all the soldiers), on the front of her saddle, endures a disastrous winter retreat across the Serra mountains.133
When they were eventually published between 1859 and 1861, Garibaldi's memoirs met with lasting and significant success. Particularly in the version adapted by Dumas, which added more personal and more sensational detail and which restructured the narrative as a set of canonical episodes, the memoirs were an international hit and gave rise to numerous copies and pirated versions. But even before his encounter with Dumas in 1860, Garibaldi had done his best to make the memoirs attractive to the reading public. For instance, the episodic feuilleton style used to good effect by Dumas is a feature of the other versions too. It may not be fully successful, but the memoirs attempt precisely the episodic structure, the racy and emotive language, the violent struggle between good and evil, and the all-powerful love between brave hero and spirited heroine which can be found in the historical and adventure novels that were commercially popular at this time. Garibaldi's attention to women (described twice as ‘the most perfect of all beings’),134 not just to Anita and his mother but to the whole number of enchanting women who appear in and inspire his narrative, is typical of the adventure story. It can also be seen as a specific move to entice the female reader to take up his text. Thus, like Cuneo and other radicals near him, Garibaldi sought to construct and sell a political message by the use of a conventional narrative formula. His memoirs are interesting, neither as authentic history nor as a psychological mirror, but as proof that Garibaldi used the printed word to fashion himself as the hero of a political adventure, and sought to reach and extend his public through the leisure activity of reading.
