Garibaldi

by Lucy Riall

  Yet it was equally evident that Garibaldi had lost none of his nationalist verve and military ambition. In late 1858 he tried (but presumably failed) to reassure La Farina, and indirectly Cavour, by telling him that ‘[t]he revolutionary elements are all with us'; in the same letter he praised the student demonstrations in Pavia (‘an event which you could increase at your will’), and in January 1859 he confidently told La Farina that the organisation of the volunteers would be on a ‘fearsome scale’. In the same period, Garibaldi wrote enthusiastically to friends that ‘our affairs are moving forward with giant steps’, and that ‘our affairs are moving marvellously and we will show them our fists’.30 He also began to reconstruct his Roman high command from 1849, most of whom were former Mazzinians and some of whom had kept in contact with the revolutionary leader. Thus, Garibaldi invited his old comrade from South American days, Giacomo Medici, to join him and got him to overcome his enmity with Nino Bixio, who was also brought into his high command. He persuaded Bertani (who everyone knew had ‘certain mazzinierie’ in his outlook and loyalties) to run the ambulance service, as he had done in Rome in 1849. Many other Roman veterans, such as the Lombard radical, Giovanni Cadolini, came back to fight with Garibaldi, and Garibaldi involved the Pavian student radical, Benedetto Cairoli, as a fund-raiser along with the rest of his family, as volunteers or as support for the volunteers. Finally, with Medici, he planned the organisation of the volunteers into a national guard, and he instructed Bertani to buy Colt revolvers from America for them: ‘they are firearms of great precision … they have six shots and are lighter than any other firearm’.31

  ‘Oh my dear friend!’ Garibaldi wrote to one correspondent in April 1859, ‘the day we have longed for for so many years has finally arrived.’32 For Garibaldi, the war was the political and symbolic moment he had been waiting for since the failure of revolution in 1849. He hoped that his volunteer army would, with the help of Piedmont and France, provide the nucleus and leadership for a revitalised Italy. In February, he approved the wording of a ‘hymn’ for the volunteers to sing when ‘marching against the oppressors of our land’, which began ‘The tombs are uncovered, the dead come from far,/ The ghosts of our martyrs are rising to war!’33 On 24 April (two days before Piedmont refused the Austrian ultimatum), he wrote a letter (‘my heart is stirring’) to Giovanni Battista Cuneo, his friend from the South American days:

  I thank Providence which has brought us to the fulfilment of our desires after so many years. Yes, in a few days we will fight the loathed oppressor of our country. Today Italy offers us a magnificent picture, the parties have all disappeared. The sole idea of throwing out the Austrian dominates our spirits. From every province volunteers are rushing forward to ask for a gun. I have the strongest faith that this blessed land will soon redeem itself.34

  The next day, he issued a similar proclamation to his soldiers:

  We have reached the fulfilment of our desires, the object of our hopes; you will fight against the oppressors of the fatherland. Perhaps tomorrow I will meet the Austrians with a gun in my hand to ask for satisfaction for the thefts and outrages which it disgusts me to remember.35

  Garibaldi's enthusiasm reflected the nationalist excitement in Turin in early 1859; in turn, his presence provided a focus and encouragement for the great demonstration of nationalist feeling offered by the volunteers arriving in the city ready for action.

  However, Garibaldi's agenda was not shared by the Piedmontese establishment. By some accounts, the king liked Garibaldi, and Cavour, Napoleon III and the Piedmontese generals all recognised that Garibaldi had his uses, but they disliked his political image, feared his political friends, and were reluctant to cede any freedom of action to him or the volunteers. Despite Garibaldi's expectations, Cavour had originally envisaged no more than an unofficial part for Garibaldi in organising volunteers; for example, in March he told the diplomat Costantino Nigra ‘in confidence and for you alone’ that they planned to give ‘the deserters to Garibaldi who will know what to do with them’.36 But he never clarified what Garibaldi's role was to be in the royal war with Austria and was most probably far from pleased at Garibaldi's attempts to reconstruct the spirit and organisation of 1848–9. In reality, Cavour simply wanted Garibaldi and the volunteers to bolster up numbers for the forthcoming war, and perhaps by encouraging desertions from the Austrian army to provoke an act of aggression by the Austrian government; he always intended to keep the volunteers away from the royal armies and felt that the regular business of war should be left to them.37 Hence, to a suggestion that Italians living in America might want to return to Italy and fight for Piedmont, Cavour advised that:

  the Government is not in need of the elements whence to form good soldiers and officers … What is really needed is not so much military assistance as money. While grateful … for this offer, and fully appreciating the sentiments that inspire it, the Sardinian government does not consider it expedient that it should be accepted, as there is already a superabundance of the military element … The greater part of our countrymen now in America can as effectually serve the Italian cause by remaining in the United States and using their influence in favor of our efforts as by returning to Italy.38

  This diffidence was more than shared by the army itself and by Piedmont's French allies. Perhaps unsurprisingly given the experiences of Rome in 1849, Napoleon III had severe misgivings about involving Garibaldi and his volunteers in the upcoming war.39 The Piedmontese military hierarchy was equally suspicious of Garibaldi, and they made no attempt to hide their antipatie towards the volunteers arriving in Turin, treating them in a way which even a loyal supporter of Piedmont described as ‘contemptible’.40

  The army's hostility to the volunteers led it initially to resist the integration of volunteers into its ranks as distinct units, although some were accepted as normal recruits. Nevertheless, by March 1859 the stream of volunteers and their clear enthusiasm for Garibaldi was so significant that the army was forced to bow to the inevitable, and it was agreed not only to incorporate Garibaldi into the army as a major-general, but also to organise three volunteer corps – around 3,000 men as the Cacciatori delle Alpi – under his personal command. Interestingly, while this decision was taken with reluctance, the government had in fact pulled off a considerable coup. As Grew remarks, ‘they had purchased a large gain in propaganda with a small concession’. They now controlled Garibaldi, who was no longer free to choose his own men, and he was sent most of the older and less able volunteers, while the royal army took most of the younger men and those with more relevant experience.41

  Garibaldi's campaign

  From the beginning of the campaign, the Cacciatori suffered from constant problems due to the lack of supplies of food, bedding or basic clothing, and of any provision for the dead and wounded.42 Garibaldi and his Cacciatori also fought a largely separate campaign, being sent away from the main army towards the Alps on Cavour's instructions to disrupt and cut enemy lines as much as possible.43 ‘They gave him three thousand five hundred badly armed and badly dressed young men, without artillery, without cavalry, and they told him: make the best of it’, comments Garibaldi's biographer, Giuseppe Guerzoni, who fought with him in the war.44 In the event, the volunteers performed surprisingly well. They were the first to come into conflict with Austrian forces and defeat them, at Varese in the Lake Maggiore region of Lombardy, on 26 May. The following day, they marched down towards Como and met with the main body of General Urban's army at San Fermo. Although Urban had about twice the number of men as Garibaldi, Garibaldi decided to charge them in a full-frontal attack – sending his men ‘down like a torrent’ in Bixio's words45 – and was successful, after which the volunteers entered Como. After an abortive attack on the fort of Laveno on Lake Maggiore, Garibaldi was forced to turn back to Como on hearing that Varese had been re-occupied by the Austrian army but, following the news of the French victory at Magenta, he retook Varese and marched eastwards towards Bergamo and Brescia.

 
At Brescia, his growing band of volunteers finally joined up with the main army, and went on towards Salò on Lake Garda. In return for their successes, Garibaldi and his volunteers received military decorations from the king. However, in mid-June they were sent off again into the mountains, this time to the Valtellina to flush out a derisory Austrian force holding Bormio and the Stelvio Pass.46 In fact, such was the bad treatment of Garibaldi and his volunteers in 1859 that even G. M. Trevelyan, normally entirely laudatory about the process of Italian unification, admits that the Cacciatori were unable to play a decisive part in the war of 1859, and that the decision to send them into the remote Valtellina – ‘to the rear’ of the army – just when they had become ‘formidable in numbers’ may have been due to ‘professional jealousy’.47

  Much as in 1848–9, however, Garibaldi was not prepared to let official obstruction hamper his political style. Instead, he used the war and his own progress through the mountains of northern Italy to raise more volunteers for the Cacciatori and to promote his nationalist message as widely as possible. His speeches and proclamations at this time all repeated the same point: that Italy needed every able-bodied man to volunteer, that it was their duty to join the ‘holy war’ to drive out the foreigner, and that they had to fight under both the tricolour flag and King Vittorio Emanuele. Perhaps the most emblematic of all his speeches at this time was the proclamation at the beginning of his campaign, ‘to the Lombard people’, in which his appeal to a sense of national identity combined history, honour and hatred of the foreigner in a religious call to resurgence:

  You are called to a new life and you must respond to the call, as our fathers did in Pontida and in Legnano. The enemy is still the same, a cruel, murderous despoiler. From every province our brothers have sworn to win or die with us. We must revenge the insults, the outrages, the servitude of twenty past generations, and bequeath to our children an inheritance which is uncontaminated by the stink of a domineering foreign soldier … [Anyone] who is capable of taking up arms and does not do so is a traitor.48

  Garibaldi's appeals were very successful. Giovanni Visconti Venosta, then a local official in the Valtellina, described men volunteering every day: ‘people of every circumstance and age, often worn-out and with a tired and sickly air. There were old people and even children.’49 According to figures given by Trevelyan, the Cacciatori numbered around 12,000 men (from an original 3,000) by the end of the campaign; although Garibaldi himself gave the more conservative figure of 9,500 men.50 Also significant in terms of what they reveal about the spread of Garibaldi's popularity was the number of former exiles and/or foreigners who volunteered to fight with him. Among them were Quirico Filopanti from New York, the Hungarian Stefano Türr, the English translator of Guerrazzi's Beatrice Cenci and, most famously of all, ‘the gigantic Peard’ – ‘Garibaldi's Englishman’ – an Oxford-educated ‘adventurer’ who was immediately useful for his skills as a sharpshooter.51 One company, observed by a Lombard journalist, included not only young men ‘generally belonging to the best classes of Italian society’ but Swiss, French and American volunteers as well.52 London's Times reported that the exiled Tuscan writer–activist, Giuseppe Montanelli, had followed his son into ‘this perilous adventure’, along with many foreigners, including some Spaniards and a man from China.53

  Garibaldi's movements and those of the Cacciatori were also greeted with great scenes of popular enthusiasm. After his entrance into Varese on 26 May, Garibaldi wrote to Cavour that ‘[a]ll the young people rushed to take up arms and defend the barricades; the population responded with shouts of viva l'Italia, viva Vittorio Emanuele to the sound of cannon fire. The church bells rang the tocsin in Varese and neighbouring villages.’54 Others confirmed his account, and were more forthcoming with details. One officer, Francesco Carrano, described extraordinary scenes in Varese, which the Cacciatori entered slowly, in the dark and the pouring rain, to find the town abandoned by the Austrians:

  suddenly a loud shot was heard from not far away, and a large red light was seen to break the darkness of the rainy night. It was the population of Varese who had come out with hundreds of torches to meet Garibaldi and his Cacciatori delle Alpi. A thousand cries of joy greeted the famous Italian leader, the man of miracles … he was carried in triumph through the city, while men and women came out to shake the hands of the soldiers all dripping with water, and they embraced them like sons and brothers, and quite a few really were[;] Garibaldi saluted with his sword on all sides, and encouraged the people to cheer the King Vittorio Emanuele, and to take up arms against the foreign oppressors, and to come as volunteers to enlarge the ranks of those who were fighting the holy war…55

  On the steps of the town hall, amid a general ‘frenzy’, Garibaldi and the mayor hugged and kissed each other.56 In Como too, the population was said to have gone wild. For Giovanni Cadolini, ‘the exultation was such that it became almost painful … I never saw more impressive scenes of brotherly love.’ Carrano saw the people of Como dressed only in their nightclothes and in the rain, unfolding tricolour flags and shouting at the tops of their voices: ‘“Viva l'Italia! Viva Garibaldi” and they vied with each other to see the face and to embrace the legs of the famous Italian warrior’.57

  These accounts are clearly partisan and some are written much later, so the tendency greatly to exaggerate the extent of enthusiasm and the numbers involved should not be excluded. The weight of evidence suggests nevertheless that there was widespread practical support for Garibaldi and his men, and for the idea of Italy more broadly. One of the doctors who accompanied the Cacciatori remarked on what he termed the ‘generous support of citizens’ for Garibaldi's soldiers. Indeed, he suggested that the soldiers survived the cold rain and hardship of the mountains largely thanks to the general welcome given by ordinary people:

  Throughout Lombardy the care lavished on us by both citizens and town councils was all we could have hoped for. Our soldiers, without packs and with only one shirt and one pair of underpants would certainly not have been able to keep themselves clean and free of lice if the citizens had not come to their help with clean linen, nor would they have been able to put up with the rain for so long were it not for the fact that all the fireplaces in every town and village were made available to them on arrival so that they could dry themselves.58

  That scenes of patriotic fervour were also quite commonplace is suggested by similar descriptions of the welcome given to the king in cities like Milan and Brescia, and by other patriotic demonstrations such as the making of tricolour flags, the composing and publication of songs and other patriotic pamphlets, and the wearing of tricolour cockades, all of which could involve broad sections of urban society, and which involved the participation of women as well as men. Indeed, it is possible to speak of a wave of nationalist agitation in northern and central Italy during 1859, which had been prepared by the propaganda efforts of the National Society and was spread by the war. Nor did the efforts of the National Society cease during the war; it was its presence in the central Italian duchies during April and May which encouraged the prevailing sense that the Austrian era was over, and that the political future lay with Piedmont and Italian nationalism.59

  The great welcome given to Garibaldi in places like Varese and Como was the result of his identification with a particular political moment, with his physical affiliation to the nation and to Piedmont; he personally did much to encourage this identification in his speeches and actions. It is equally possible to observe a tendency for Garibaldi's charisma to acquire a life of its own. In 1859, outbreaks of public emotion began to follow his person as much as his politics. Those who heard Garibaldi speak in 1859 agreed that his ability to focus and excite the crowd, and to persuade men to volunteer, was extraordinary. ‘One of the characteristic and emotionally moving spectacles of those days [in early July in the Valtellina]’, according to Visconti Venosta, ‘was the enthusiasm, the irresistible passion, with which people rushed to the sign of Garibaldi, or rose up as if pushed by a
turbine if Garibaldi appeared.’ He described the ‘spell [fascino]’ which Garibaldi ‘cast over the multitude’ as something ‘marvellous’ and ‘almost unimaginable’ (as well as being worthy of study):

  Garibaldi, when he came through a town, and although at that time he did not wear the red shirt, did not seem to be a general as much as the leader of a new religion, followed by a fanatical rabble. The women were no less enthusiastic than the men, and they even brought along their children so that Garibaldi would bless them, or even baptise them!60

  Much of this fascino, for Visconti Venosta, was due to Garibaldi's speeches and to the way he used his voice, so that his every pronouncement, even the most insignificant, ‘had an immeasurable effect’ and produced a ‘frenzy’. There was, he speculated, a kind of ‘magnetic current’ between Garibaldi the speaker and the crowd who heard him.61 The unusual effect of Garibaldi on his listeners was confirmed by an arguably more impartial observer, the British military attaché George Cadogan. He described Garibaldi as a gentle, cautious and rather unrefined man, but with ‘an influence on his hearers which a more cultivated intelligence might fail to have. Add to this a voice of singular charm and a manner that brings conviction with it as to the sincerity of speech, and it can be easily imagined that it is no exaggeration to say he could make his followers go anywhere and do anything.’ Thus, for Cadogan, Garibaldi had the common touch. He had watched as Garibaldi gave a speech to his soldiers at the outposts. ‘It would be impossible’, he commented, ‘to do justice to the familiar and paternal, though not undignified, character of the few words thus spoken, or to the enthusiasm they produced’.62