by Lucy Riall
Villafranca and after
Like so much else in 1859, there was a basic contradiction between these nationalist demonstrations and the prosaic exigencies of international politics. As Garibaldi's campaign of recruitment and mobilisation reached its climax, the tables were turned against him and the entire nationalist movement by the announcement of the armistice between France and Austria at Villafranca. The peace terms agreed by the two emperors recognised the defeat of Austria in Italy, but also tried to save Austria's face. They sought to downplay the victory of Piedmont, and to deny a triumph to the nationalists in the peninsula. So the emperors decided that Lombardy was to be ceded first to France, and only then to be given by France to Piedmont. Furthermore, all the military fortresses of the Quadrilateral (two of which were in Lombardy) were to remain in Austrian hands, as was the entire province of Venetia; and the Habsburg rulers were to be restored to the duchies of Modena, Parma and Tuscany, from where they had fled at the start of the war.
The peace of Villafranca caused consternation among Mazzinian sympathisers and disappointment among the supporters of Italy abroad. Cavour too was frantic to continue the war and furious at the frustration of all his plans; having failed to persuade the king to continue the war without the French, he resigned as prime minister of Piedmont and temporarily retired from politics. But, interestingly, La Farina for the National Society adopted a more conciliatory tone and insisted nothing had been changed by Villafranca. This line seemed to be endorsed by Garibaldi, who issued a proclamation on 23 July which acknowledged the help given by Napoleon and ‘the heroic French nation’ and insisted that Italy's future still lay with Vittorio Emanuele.63
In private, however, it was clear that Garibaldi did not accept the peace. He pleaded personally with the king to be allowed to continue the nationalist struggle; he told the king that he wanted to liberate ‘enslaved’ Venetia and the other fifteen million Italians in the peninsula, and ‘to repeat your cry of national war along the Appennines and the two seas [the Tyrrhenian and the Adriatic]’.64 He focused his attention on central Italy, where it was obvious that the Habsburg rulers could not be restored without a struggle. On 19 July, he wrote to the Tuscan leader Montanelli that, if offered, he would accept the command of troops in central Italy, and on 27 July he repeated his commitment to (the pro-Piedmontese but also ex-Mazzinian) Antonio Mordini, telling him, ‘in any case I think it is indispensable to arm everyone to the death, to bring everyone together whenever we can and to close ranks in the most complete harmony’.65
Garibaldi's response to Villafranca – maintaining a public loyalty to the king while in private rejecting and plotting against the political line endorsed by the same – represented the continuation of a policy which he had long pursued, and which had determined his participation in the National Society and his rapprochement with Cavour before 1859. Still, there was no doubt that Villafranca revealed cracks in the façade of unity and ‘harmony’ that he and the National Society had so carefully constructed. Henceforth, some kind of clash between Garibaldi's heroic vision of a ‘nation-at-arms’ and Cavour's cynical mix of royalist liberalism seems to have been inevitable. Garibaldi's own discomfort and frustration were expressed bluntly in a letter he wrote on 27 July to the founder of the National Society, Giorgio Pallavicino Trivulzio, ‘I am with you, with Vittorio and with Italy; I despise all the rest and I hope that before too long we will rise again on the battlefield and finish it off.’66
From Villafranca onwards, Garibaldi sought repeatedly to force the government's hand, but he faced difficulties and obstacles at every turn. First, he agreed to resign his commission in the Piedmontese army and to accept the command of troops in central Italy where, despite the armistice agreement, the provisional governments had remained in control. Immediately he began to make plans for the new army; he wanted the volunteers to be transferred to central Italy and he invited his closest officers – Medici, Bixio, Cosenz – to join him.67 However, to his great irritation, he found himself placed as second in command to General Manfredo Fanti, or ‘at the third level’, as he put it, also behind Generals Roselli and Mezzacapo.68
Garibaldi responded by issuing a series of public appeals to the people of Italy, encouraging them to take arms and calling for military action to drive out the foreigner. He told the people of Tyrol they had not been forgotten; he called on ‘our brothers in Naples’ to join their brothers in northern and central Italy; and he invited the soldiers in the Papal States to fight with Italy for liberty and unification. These appeals appeared in newspapers and were published as flyers; according to one report, ‘thousands’ of copies of his appeal to the Neapolitans were circulated in the capital and its provinces.69 Most importantly, he opened a subscription for a ‘Million Rifles’. Its aim was to raise money for a new volunteer national guard, ‘made up of every man able to carry a firearm, divided into three categories’, or a mass army organised according to physical capacity; the older and more infirm were to be included but confined to policing the cities, while the more active were to be organised into mobile columns.70 The fund was an implicit rebuke to Piedmont for its material reliance on the French military. The Garibaldian programme, Benedetto Cairoli wrote on 25 September, was ‘not local defence but national war’.71
Strengthened by his appointment as president of the revived National Society, Garibaldi's ‘Million Rifles’ campaign gathered pace. Accepting the presidency from La Farina (who maintained practical control of the National Society), he announced that he looked forward to the ‘redemption’ of Italy: ‘we will not lay down our arms while a palm of our land remains unredeemed!’72 Mazzini arrived in secret in Florence, with money from his English friends. Although it is not clear that Garibaldi was in touch with Mazzini, he did not entirely exclude conspiracy, if the recruitment of his lover, Esperanza von Schwartz, in a highly secret mission to Messina is any indication.73 Garibaldi also organised an office for the Rifles Fund, with Enrico Besana as director, and he ordered clothes for the soldiers.74 Committees were formed in Bologna, Milan and New York; money came in from Tuscany, the Romagna and Lombardy; and Pallavicino of the National Society ‘supported it vigorously’.75
That Garibaldi's fame continued to grow is indicated by the increasing number of public demonstrations in his honour in central Italy. ‘Garibaldi is at last in Florence’, Thomas Trollope wrote to the Athenaeum magazine, ‘[y]esterday he tried hard, but in vain, to preserve his incognito, for brave “Gallibardi”, as the Tuscan lower classes … invariably call him, is no lover of noisy demonstration.’ But he was caught by them in the Piazza della Signoria ‘in a tempest of enthusiastic welcome, and could only extricate himself at the cost of a short address to his welcomers’.76 Even an apparently private visit to his wife's grave in Ravenna became the occasion for nationalist demonstrations, and for a speech in which Garibaldi called for contributions to the Million Rifles Fund.77 ‘This man [Garibaldi] enjoys an immense, universal and almost limitless popularity’, the Tuscan leader, Bettino Ricasoli, wrote in October; ‘[w]e are all aware of the prestige which the name of General Garibaldi brings with it’, admitted General Farini at the end of the same month.78
However, in mid-November Garibaldi took a step too far. Stationed on the frontier with the Papal States, he responded to the false news of an insurrection in the Marche, and prepared his army to help the rebels. But his order to invade the Marche was cancelled by the Piedmontese army (Generals Farini and Fanti), and Garibaldi, summoned to Turin by the king, was removed from his command in the Romagna. Even this setback failed entirely to stop him, however. He issued a proclamation ‘to the Italians’ in which he announced his retirement from the army and referred to ‘underhand tricks and continual constraints’ on his freedom of action; he announced that the subscription for a Million Rifles remained open, and told his colleagues in the fund to carry on their activities because ‘[w]hen the day of battle returns, I will take one of those guns offered to the fatherland by its loving children and I w
ill rush into battle with my old companions’. He declined the king's offer to re-appoint him general in the Piedmontese army because it would deprive him of that freedom of action ‘with which I could still be useful in central Italy and elsewhere’, although he did accept the gift of a shotgun and he seems to have carried on wearing a general's uniform.79 As Trevelyan comments, this quarrel in the autumn of 1859 marked the re-emergence of a ‘more dangerous and intractable Garibaldi’: ‘the long honeymoon of Garibaldi and the cabinet of Turin was at an end’.80
Relations did not improve thereafter. More than ever before, according to Raymond Grew, Garibaldi became ‘the symbol of a program which competed with Cavour's’. In December, he resigned from the presidency of the National Society. He drew closer to the left deputy Angelo Brofferio, who had begun to organise an increasingly vituperative campaign against Cavour, and he endorsed the programme of Brofferio's Liberi Comizii, set up as a rival to the National Society. When the Liberi Comizii ran into difficulties at the end of December, Garibaldi set up his own political organisation, the nation-at-arms (Nazione Armata), with openly military aims.81 His contempt for Cavour and parliamentary government became more unequivocal. He confided his view to Pallavicino that ‘our good Vittorio Emanuele’ should ‘put one of his boots into the head of the Minister and keep for himself alone the army and the Italian nation, with which he could accomplish miracles’.82 His public speeches and published proclamations were equally inflammatory. In a speech published in L'Unione on 14 December, he recalled past examples of ‘female patriotism’ and asked Italian women to give their ‘surplus’ to Italy; on the 18th, he challenged the idea of the regular army and called for the national guard to increase its numbers; and on 24 December he addressed the students of Pavia University in a barely coherent tirade against ‘a few wicked men’, priests and ‘the cancer called the Papacy’. Announcing the formation of the nation-at-arms on 31 December, he looked forward to the day when, ‘[b]ound together in a single phalanx, we will have from that moment but one enemy, the foreign oppressor, and we will live with one hope, Italian freedom’.83
Garibaldi's activities seem to have been connected to a plot between the king and Urbano Rattazzi, Cavour's great rival in parliament, to prevent Cavour forming a new government. If so, they failed in this objective, as Cavour was recalled to power in late January 1860. Already, only four days after its foundation, Garibaldi had been told by the king to dissolve the nation-at-arms. He announced its dissolution in a ‘Proclamation to the Italians’ on 4 January, pointing to the fear it aroused among ‘corrupters and bullies, as much within as outside Italy, [where] the crowd of modern Jesuits took fright and cried anathema’.84 Even for those on Garibaldi's side, the whole episode seemed proof of his political clumsiness. The British ambassador to Turin, Sir James Hudson, described him as a ‘well-meaning goose’,85 and Pallavicino observed, ‘he is not an eagle but a lion. The lion is distinguished by his strength, and not by his intelligence.’86 His close friend Medici lamented that: ‘Our poor friend Garibaldi … allows himself to be persuaded by discredited men … he ruins himself in times of inaction; he talks too much, writes too much, and listens too much to those who know nothing’;87 while the Sicilian revolutionary Francesco Crispi condemned him for being ‘as weak as a woman … [he] allows himself to be … taken in by the very first person who comes along’.88 Instead of being a means of relaunching the military struggle against Austria, as Garibaldi had hoped, the nation-at-arms had added to his reputation as someone who, in G. M. Trevelyan's words, ‘did not understand European politics’.89
However, it is worth remembering what Garibaldi had achieved through this frenetic activity. He had sought, and partly managed, to maintain the nationalist organisation and promote international publicity for Italy after the end of the war with Austria. He had established himself as an unassailable force in Italian politics (‘one of the greatest forces’, admitted Cavour), and his personal popularity grew after Villafranca. Garibaldi had ‘in his hands the people of Italy’, according to Bertani.90 As one enthusiast wrote to him from Modena after his resignation from the army: ‘We are faithfully awaiting Your return, because we hope that our cause will make its ultimate appeal to the Tribunal of Arms!’91 At the same time, his reputation for political ineptness could work in his favour, since it added to his standing as a man of affection and integrity. Garibaldi had a warm and tender heart, the poet Walter Savage Landor wrote to The Times: he was brave in battle and careful of his men.92 Most importantly of all perhaps, and thanks to his tireless publicity efforts, his Rifles Fund amassed significant amounts of money and significant amounts of goodwill. One English manufacturer of breech-loading rifles wrote to Garibaldi in December that to honour the ‘illustrious son Freedom!’ he would ‘cheerfully’ waive all the patent and service charges relating to their supply.93 These achievements were to prove vital to the success of his spring expedition to Sicily; the expedition itself was paid for by the Rifles Fund and other related subscriptions organised during these months.94
From Nice to Sicily
After the failure of the nation-at-arms, Garibaldi withdrew once more from public life. His political troubles seem to be reflected in his personal life: during the summer of 1859, at the age of fifty-two, he had fallen violently in love with Giuseppina Raimondi, an eighteen-year-old girl from a noble family, and proposed marriage to her.95 However, his passion for Giuseppina did not stop him from falling in love with another woman, the Marchesa Paulina Zucchini, in October, to whom he also proposed marriage; nor did it prevent him from writing fervent letters to Teresa Araldi Trecchi, the sister of a fellow soldier, or from declaring infatuation to a Sofia Bettini, whom he had met in Staten Island and who had written asking for his autograph. Earlier in the year, his housekeeper in Caprera, Battistina Ravello, had given birth to his child, Anita, and throughout this time his close relationships with Esperanza von Schwartz and Maria della Torre continued (although Esperanza was apparently unhappy about his relationship with Battistina).96 All this sexual activity reached crisis point in January when he married Giuseppina, only to reject her on the day of their marriage after he discovered her involvement with another man, and that she was pregnant. He wrote furiously to Lorenzo Valerio that he wanted nothing to do with her or her ‘foul and loathsome’ family, and that she should be prevented from using his name. In February, he wrote again to Valerio that he and Giuseppina could be divorced, as their marriage was not consummated: he had had sex (‘copulations’) with her in December, but not after 20 January, ‘so that since the marriage took place on the 24th and not having copulated again, I think that the marriage can be considered unconsummated’.97
It is difficult to know what to make of Garibaldi's behaviour towards Giuseppina. His treatment of her (he never forgave or acknowledged her again) is certainly interesting as it reveals to us less attractive aspects of his private life and personality, otherwise closely guarded ‘off-stage’ at Caprera. His passionate letters to her, and his violent overreaction to her conduct when he was doing the same as she was, suggest either personal confusion or considerable hypocrisy, or both. Equally, and most rarely of all, his letters to her give us an insight into his own view of his fame and its purpose:
Adorable Giuseppina! I am divided by two sentiments which trouble me to an unimaginable extent: love and duty! I love you with all my heart … Here is the voice of duty: I have in the island a common woman [una donna plebea], and with this woman I have a child; this would be a minor obstacle, because I can't love her any more …. [but] uniting with you, mostbeautiful maiden! I would deny that aspect of self-denial which is part of the popularity which I enjoy and which I can use for the good of the fatherland, when Italian matters call me once more to lead soldiers they will say of Garibaldi: he has intrigued fortune! … Answer me quickly! I am in such a state that I can't wait! … For God's sake don't get angry! With someone who worships you!98
Despite his fears, the newspapers mostly kept quiet about h
is affair and the fiasco of his marriage, reflecting a general, if somewhat surprising, reluctance to comment on the more ‘scandalous’ aspects of his private life. The New York Times published a letter defending Garibaldi and Raimondi's characters against ‘a most infamous aspersion’ in ‘one or two of the City papers’;99 but publicly little more than vague rumours circulated. Yet that people knew about his disastrous marriage is suggested by the private diary of Horace de VielCastel, a Bonapartist writer:
Garibaldi … married a young girl, the heroine of a romance … as beautiful as anything etc. etc. … Garibaldi, although a republican hero, allowed himself to be swayed by every vanity: the old partisan found it quite normal that a young girl of seventeen should be madly in love with him, so he married her. But, oh bitter disappointment, this enchanting young girl ‘was four months pregnant!’100
His comments suggest that Garibaldi was not wrong to worry about his romance damaging his ‘noble’ reputation.
Following these personal and political problems, Garibaldi withdrew to Caprera. ‘You have been forced to renounce the Presidency of the nation-at-arms as well?!’ one correspondent wrote to him; ‘once again I have preached in the desert’, Garibaldi wrote to Medici.101 He spent the whole of February and March at Caprera, refusing all attempts to get him involved with the nascent rebellion in southern Italy. Although he did what he could materially to assist the Sicilian revolutionary, Rosolino Pilo, who was planning a revolt in Sicily, he also felt it necessary to tell him that ‘in the present time I don't think that a revolutionary movement is appropriate in any part of Italy, unless it has a really significant chance of success’.102 That he had chosen once more to take up a life of semi-exile and was planning to pursue politics by another means is indicated by the decision to work on, and try to publish, his memoirs. After his resignation from the army, he wrote to Esperanza von Schwartz asking her for the manuscript back. In January, Alexandre Dumas sought him out in Genoa, and shortly afterwards Garibaldi sent his memoirs to the French novelist.103 It was clear that there was considerable public interest in anything written by Garibaldi. As William Thackeray wrote to him from London in February: ‘We have 500,000 readers. How many more should we have for an article by you? Biography, Italy, America, military tactics … how grateful our public would be for any contribution from your pers[on].’104
