by Lucy Riall
Conclusion
The changes which affected the Italian peninsula in the 1850s and thereafter were not merely the result of high politics. The outcome of the Crimean War, the international isolation of Austria, and the conflicts within and between political groups in Italy may help explain the rise to prominence of the Italian Question in European diplomacy. Yet these events explain little about the public response to the wars of Italian unification or how this response shaped the actions of political leaders. One of the most important political developments of the 1850s was the growth of a liberal public opinion, in Italy and internationally, which was not just sympathetic to Italian nationalism but passionately concerned with Italy's future. This development was the result of new trends in publishing and entertainment which were in turn linked to the emergence of a broader, and more radical, public sphere across Europe.
Nationalism, as the anthropologist Benedict Anderson has shown and Mazzini always knew, was dependent on print culture. Without the expansion of the printed word and image, it was impossible for complex modern societies to ‘fashion’, ‘invent’ or ‘imagine’ a sense of national community and belonging. It is no coincidence that the mid-century revolution in publishing coincided with the first great age of nationalism, and with the creation and consolidation of nation states in much of Europe. More specifically, the unprecedented scope and scale of Garibaldi's fame as a popular leader were largely maintained by the publishing and entertainment industry. The publicity surrounding him – his actions, his appearance, his private life – was sustained by the rapid and extensive supply of information about him, and this was made possible by the revolution in print culture. At the same time, this wide-scale publicity created a new relationship between the ‘performer’ and his audience, in which a sense of familiarity and intimacy combined with one of admiration and awe.
Content and style also mattered. Like the idea of Italian freedom more generally, Garibaldi's popularity in mid-century liberal Europe was the result both of the spread of democratic ideas and of their fit with the genres of romantic popular fiction. Garibaldi's political appeal was part of a radical style which was structured and told like a story. Garibaldi and those who wrote about him sought to reach and capture the public by presenting him as a romantic hero in his own drama of love, liberty and adventure. Just how far Garibaldi could take, use and promote this narrative formula for political ends became clear during the dramatic events of Italian unification. Here it is important simply to note that the formula itself was established at an earlier stage (during the 1840s and – especially – the 1850s), that there was little or nothing unplanned about its construction and dissemination, and that Garibaldi was responsible for at least part of the final script. One of the most striking features of this script was the apparently seamless blend of fact and fiction, of novelistic fantasy and political truth, and this blend (which could vary, and pick up and discard different elements) seems to have been at the heart of Garibaldi's public success. It helped Garibaldi's appeal to become international in reach and eclectic in nature. It combined the emotive appeal of romanticism with an ideal of republican virtue, and it proposed a persona in which bravery and sensitivity mingled in equal measure. Perhaps especially, his image and its popularity offer proof of what Miles Taylor has called ‘the persistence of romanticism in the mentalité of mid-nineteenth-century popular politics’, or of the ‘long reach’ of romanticism135 which the Risorgimento contributed significantly to, and was the beneficiary of.
Finally, it would be a mistake to see the creation – or fashioning – of Garibaldi necessarily as an imposition from above. In many respects, Garibaldi was less a sign of the constraining power of political symbols and more an indicator of their potential to subvert and destabilise. Not only did Garibaldi represent and promote a movement of political radicalism but the diffusion of his fame was a symptom of the democratisation of political culture, a sign of the arrival of ‘non-polite’ society in the public sphere with a new set of rules and responses. His appeal was tailored to the perceived tastes and demands of this nascent political culture and he helped to create it. Those involved in promoting him came partly (if not always entirely) from outside the traditional establishment. His popularity also reflected a struggle for control of the public sphere. It contributed to the increasing hegemony of nationalist discourse but neither Garibaldi nor Italian nationalism was loved by everyone and his fame only partially masked a significant divergence between rival political visions of the new Italy. Hence it is by no means surprising that the bitter conflicts which beset the Italian peninsula from the 1840s onwards, and which erupted in spectacular fashion in 1859 and after, involved not just diplomacy and battles but also meetings, lectures and theatrical performances, and that they focused, with such remarkable energy, on control over the printed word.
CHAPTER 6
INDEPENDENCE
The 1859 Campaign
On 10 January 1859, at the opening of parliament in Turin, King Vittorio Emanuele II made the most important political speech of his life. Much of the speech was made up of political banalities: the king looked to Piedmont's future with confidence and spoke vaguely of his love of liberty and the ‘fatherland’. But one short reference to the ‘cries of grief’ – reaching him, the king said, from the other regions of Italy and which he found impossible to ignore – received enormous publicity, and cemented the king's reputation as a national leader in Italy and abroad.1
The speech was part of a deliberate strategy to provoke a war with Austria. The vivid phrase – ‘cries of grief’ – was suggested by the French Emperor, Napoleon III, with whom the Piedmontese prime minister, Cavour, had concluded a secret agreement the previous year at the spa town of Plombières. France had agreed to join Piedmont in a war to drive Austria out of Lombardy–Venetia; and it had also agreed to the creation of four states in Italy (a powerful kingdom of Upper Italy ruled by the House of Savoy and comprising Piedmont, Lombardy–Venetia, the central duchies, and the papal Romagna; a kingdom of Central Italy dominated by Tuscany but absorbing other provinces of the Papal States; Rome and its immediate province; and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies). These would form an Italian Confederation with the Pope as president, ‘to console him’, in Cavour's words, ‘for the loss of the best part of his States’. In return, Napoleon asked for the provinces of Nice and Savoy to be ceded to France and for a marriage between his nephew, the middle-aged and dissolute Prince Jérôme Napoléon, with the king's pious fifteen-year-old daughter, Clotilde. Above all, however, the French promise of military assistance was conditional upon Austria declaring war on Piedmont, so that Austria would be diplomatically and militarily isolated and thus easy to defeat.2 Everything depended, in other words, on making Italy the victim and Austria the aggressor in the upcoming war.
During the months following the Plombières pact, both the French and the Piedmontese leaders did everything they could to precipitate a conflict with Austria. Initially, it had been hoped to provoke Austrian aggression through a revolt in the Duchy of Modena; but recognising the danger of revolution there they concentrated more on encouraging war fever through a series of inflammatory remarks and actions. Just before Vittorio Emanuele's speech, at a public reception in the Tuileries, Napoleon III had told the Austrian ambassador to Paris that he regretted the strained relations between the two countries: this was widely interpreted as a threat of war. War seemed ever more imminent when, later in January, the forthcoming marriage of Jérôme and Clotilde was announced along with a military alliance between France and Piedmont. However, in February, the British government, which was horrified at the prospect of a European war, began successfully to put pressure on both France and Austria to call off the conflict,3 and in March the Russian government called for a congress to resolve the differences between the two Great Powers, from which Piedmont would be excluded. By early April, Napoleon III had agreed to the congress and to disarm. But Cavour's plan was saved by an ultimatum from Austria threaten
ing war if Piedmont did not disarm immediately. As Mack Smith puts it, Cavour's ‘patient work of provocation was dramatically rewarded when Austria, instead of being grateful for this fortunate respite, decided to make Lombardy a test for the viability of her multi-national empire’.4 On 26 April 1859, Piedmont refused the ultimatum and Austria declared war.5
The war of 1859 was short, messy and violent. Austria was slow to mobilise and Piedmont had apparently little in the way of a military plan, relying instead on the French army ‘coming to their rescue’.6 Thus, much of the military strategy was devised by the French high command, and it was the French army which won the first significant battle of the war, at Magenta on 4 June. As a result of Magenta, Vittorio Emanuele and Napoleon III were able to enter Milan in triumph on 8 June. On 24 June, amid scenes of the most terrible bloodshed and chaos, the allies won an impromptu but major battle at Solferino–San Martino. At the same time, disturbances in central Italy (in Parma, Modena, Emilia–Romagna and Tuscany), which were partly orchestrated by the National Society, led to the overthrow of their rulers and to the establishment of liberal governments in these states. These governments then began actively to seek some kind of union with Piedmont.7 Subsequently, as a result of both the revolutions in central Italy and the violence and cost of the war, Napoleon III suffered a fatal loss of political and military nerve. In early July, and without consulting Piedmont, he and Franz Josef, the Emperor of Austria, concluded an armistice at Villafranca which brought the war to an end.
The 1859 conflict was a crisis of major European significance. While Russia and Britain had sought urgently to keep the peace, the events revived political debate in the German states after a ‘long post-revolutionary torpor’.8 German conservatives were horrified by revived French aggression and the prospect of revolution; neo-conservatives (including Bismarck) saw advantages in the creation of a strong state south of the Alps; Catholics were alarmed by the probable threat to the Papal States; and liberals were enthused by the success of Piedmont and the apparently declining power of the Catholic Church.9 In the United States too, the potential for the conflict in Italy to destabilise international relations and alter the European balance of power was widely recognised.10
Partly as a result of their international significance and of the crucial military role played by Napoleon III's France, the events of 1859 seem to indicate ‘the primacy of foreign policy’ in Italian unification, or to demonstrate that royal armies, diplomacy and secret alliances played a far more important role than nationalism. Similarly, Cavour's actions – his deal at Plombières and his provocation of war with Austria – are usually studied as prime examples of his ‘Machiavellian’ methods and of the use of ‘almost pure realpolitik’ in international relations.11 Especially after the release of government documents which showed how little Cavour cared about the principle of nationality and how far he was prepared to go to aggrandise Piedmont, the events of 1859 have loomed much larger as a problem in European diplomacy and statecraft than as evidence of the strength of nationalist feeling in Italy.12
Yet while the role of diplomacy and armies in 1859 is undeniable, it was accompanied by a no less important, and arguably just as visible, wave of patriotic enthusiasm. Much of this was encouraged by the National Society in a major press campaign. From late 1858 onwards, its publications had predicted that a war with Austria was imminent, and its propaganda was picked up by other papers, such as France's La Presse. But although this campaign was clearly linked to the willingness of La Farina, the National Society's secretary, to do Cavour's bidding, the closeness of their relationship should not be over-stressed,13 nor should the ability of the Society entirely to orchestrate or to control nationalist agitation. The broader process of anti-Austrian nationalist agitation included a tobacco boycott in Milan and Parma, the appearance of nationalist slogans and posters in many northern cities, and patriotic demonstrations in theatres throughout the peninsula.14 In Pavia, the university was closed down by the authorities at the end of 1858 as a result of anti-Austrian and pro-Piedmontese protests by students.15
An especially strong indication of the spread of patriotic enthusiasm was the rush by men from outside Piedmont to volunteer for the upcoming war. According to contemporary estimates, around 20,000 volunteers arrived in Turin between mid-January and the end of March 1859;16 while a more recent calculation puts the number of those actually enlisted as just under 15,000.17 Subscriptions were opened to which the public gave generously; horses were even sent to provide a mounted guard.18 The majority of those who volunteered to fight for Piedmont came from Lombardy, with a significant number also from the central duchies, and this is a strong indication of the success of pro-Piedmontese nationalist propaganda in these states during the previous half-decade. Raymond Grew remarks that this demonstration of nationalist fervour was especially significant if ‘one remembers the hazards and expense of the journey’ to Piedmont, which involved men leaving their families and homes and risking encounters with police in order to join the army of another state; even more so since many of those who volunteered were property-owners, professionals, students, and crafts- and tradesmen who had much to lose and little to gain by leaving home and interrupting their career or occupation.19 Here too, the government's hand was obvious. It had been part of Cavour's policy to encourage the formation of volunteer corps and desertion from the Austrian army in Lombardy, and he had expected the National Society to oversee their recruitment. However, both Cavour and the National Society were entirely surprised by the flood, or the ‘exodus en masse’,20 of volunteers from neighbouring Italian states into Piedmont from January onwards, and they had no clear strategy for dealing with them.21 To quote Grew again, if the ‘movement of volunteers to Turin’ established Piedmont as the centre of nationalist aspirations and ‘overshadowed the disappointments the SNI [National Society] had known’, it also ‘left the Society all but swamped by one of the great demonstrations of the Risorgimento’.22
Cavour and Garibaldi
In retrospect, therefore, the months leading up to war in 1859 were marked by an evident contradiction between the expansionist ambitions of Piedmont and the general mood of nationalist expectation and enthusiasm. Yet the protagonists sought to deny or to mask this tension, which led to confusion about the means and aims of military struggle. There is no better expression of this uneasy situation than the alliance which was forged in late 1858 between the Piedmontese establishment and Garibaldi. In December 1858, Cavour let Garibaldi in on some aspects of the Plombières deal, asking him to become involved by organising and training volunteers and getting them ready for action in the following spring. Agostino Bertani, a close friend and ally of Garibaldi, reported that after this conversation with Cavour, Garibaldi came to see him and ‘with a radiant face and a voice broken with emotion … [said] “At last they have agreed to act … I have been empowered at the very highest level to tell our friends to get ready.” … He kept on repeating that we must all be united and all must take arms if we were going to succeed on our own.’23 Bertani's comments suggest that Garibaldi initially knew nothing of the alliance with France; he was certainly unaware of the plan to cede Nice (his home town) and Savoy to France.
Garibaldi's letters and actions at this time show that his political game was not entirely clear either. He was very happy to help the Piedmontese, but just as keen to impose his own more radical programme on them. He evidently did his best to please the Piedmontese leadership. On more than one occasion in March 1859, Cavour felt able to reassure those concerned that Garibaldi ‘made the most explicit declarations, assumed the most precise responsibilities’ and that ‘[h]e has maintained until now the most reserved and prudent attitude'; he had even remarked that Mazzini was ‘the greatest enemy of Italy’.24 At the end of June, despite the fact that relations between them had grown tense, Garibaldi assured Cavour of his personal respect and honour, and of his devotion to Cavour, ‘whom I have learnt to identify with Italy’.25 Garibaldi also tried to en
dear himself to the king by telling La Farina that the king should act at the head of the army (‘and don't mind those who call him incapable’) and that a military dictatorship should be established to avoid rivalries and ‘stormy uprisings’ (although it is of course unlikely that this idea would have pleased Cavour).26
Before and during the campaign, Garibaldi's speeches to the volunteers repeatedly recommended discipline, obedience, order and ‘cold blood’.27 Perhaps the most startling transformation, for those who remembered Garibaldi from 1848–9, was in his appearance. The changes begun in America in the early 1850s now reached their logical conclusion. The red shirt disappeared, although the poncho remained for a while. He was now in his early fifties and in a photograph taken around this time his figure appears round and more paternal than athletic, a look which was accentuated by the presence of his oldest son, Menotti, among the volunteers.28 His famous red-blond hair was growing grey and thin, and he wore it more neatly trimmed and with a short beard. After his incorporation into the army, Garibaldi wore the blue Piedmontese general's uniform with silver lace on the collar and cuffs. The volunteers too were neatly dressed in tidy grey clothes, and there was little or nothing ‘picturesque’ about their appearance.29
