by Lucy Riall
Everything changed, however, with the news at the end of March that Cavour had ‘signed away’ the provinces of Nice and Savoy to France.105 The cession of these provinces was the price asked by Napoleon III for French agreement to Piedmont annexing Parma, Modena, Tuscany and the Romagna, and was immensely unpopular, severely damaging Cavour's reputation at home and abroad. Garibaldi's reaction was expressed succinctly in a letter of 26 March: ‘My native city is in danger of falling into the claws of the lord protector … Thirty years of service for the cause of popular freedom: I will only have won the servitude of my poor land!’106 In the general election held shortly afterwards, he was returned as a member of parliament, and went to Turin determined to speak against the annexation (which was due to be sanctioned by plebiscite on 15 and 16 April). His speech was applauded but changed nothing (‘I knew it would be all a waste of time and breath’, he told an Englishman who had accompanied him);107 and he hatched a plan to travel by ship to Nice, seize the ballot papers and burn them, thus postponing the plebiscite and giving himself more time to stir up enough publicity to prevent the annexation from ever taking place. He decided against this, however, and agreed instead to lead an expedition to Sicily. Encouraged by Rosolino Pilo, an insurrection in Palermo in early April had apparently spread to the countryside, and the Bourbon government faced a serious crisis.108
But Garibaldi remained far from convinced by the revolution in Sicily. He lost his nerve more than once before the final departure with his volunteers from Quarto near Genoa in the early morning of 6 May. The news coming in from Sicily was confused, and increasingly suggested that the revolution had failed. In mid-April, 12,000 firearms bought by the Million Rifles Fund for the expedition were seized in Turin, on the orders of the Piedmontese government. Cavour's general attitude, typically equivocal, was largely unhelpful.109 More moderate colleagues, such as Giacomo Medici, also tried to stop Garibaldi from going.
So it is not clear why exactly Garibaldi did decide to leave for Sicily to help the revolution, although endless efforts at persuasion by Francesco Crispi played a key role.110 Crispi was helped by the presence of Nino Bixio and the Sicilian baron, Giuseppe La Masa, both of whom were keen to go. Garibaldi's decision may also reflect a highly charged emotional state. The fragment of a letter to ‘a relative’, written on 25 April, gives us some insight into his feelings:
Everything crushes and humiliates me, my heart is full of mourning. What should I do? Abandon this place, which suffocates me and disgusts me so much that I feel sick. I will do so soon, quite soon … But honest patriots will always be able to count on me. I will never ask if an expedition is possible or not, so as to buy my fame … with success on the cheap. For me it is enough that it should be an Italian expedition … In any case I have only one remaining desire: To Die for Italy; and this destiny, these dangers I will risk earlier than I expected…111
The expedition, in other words, followed an established Mazzinian tradition of commiting acts of martyrdom for symbolic purposes. Once again, it reminds us of how much Garibaldi's political outlook and practice continued to be determined by romantic tropes and Mazzinian assumptions.112
Considerable momentum had been created by the continual arrival at Garibaldi's headquarters in Quarto of volunteers who had heard about the expedition and wanted to be part of it. There was a striking continuity between the social and geographical background of these volunteers, who eventually numbered just over a thousand, and those of 1859; and many, it seems, had fought with Garibaldi the year before. They came mostly from the cities of Lombardy (434 out of a total of 1,089), with significant numbers from the Veneto and Liguria, and a roughly equal number from Sicily and Tuscany. There were a few foreigners (notably some Hungarian officers), and they were mostly, but by no means all, young (i.e. born in the 1820s and '30s). Many were professionals (lawyers, doctors), others were from the lower middle class (artisans and shopkeepers), and a significant number were also writers, journalists and artists.113 When it seemed as if the expedition would be abandoned, some of these volunteers wept, others swore, and a few sent a deputation to Garibaldi in an attempt to persuade him otherwise, or at least to give them the money and firearms so that they could go without him. The Tuscan writer, Giuseppe Bandi, then a young man at the beginning of his friendship with Garibaldi, later recalled their disappointment: ‘those poor fellows, who had spent the night singing happy songs, who were convinced of going on a glorious voyage to the island of the Vespers, adorned with all the poetry that can dance in the head of young people’.114 Their presence at Quarto is evidence of what the New York Times called at this time ‘the magic of [Garibaldi's] name’, around which had begun ‘to cluster the most passionate hopes and the loftiest aspirations of the patriots of Italy’. Their enthusiasm for the expedition was a clear response to Garibaldi's call to the political generation of 1848 and '59, and proof of their political and emotional engagement with the Risorgimento ideals represented and pursued by him.115
Finally, during the night of 5 May, a small group led by Nino Bixio seized two steamships in Genoa from the Rubattino shipping company in order to transport the volunteers to Sicily (they had already managed to get hold of some old rifles from La Farina). They took the two ships, which they had renamed Piemonte and Lombardo, to the nearby rocks at Quarto, where the volunteers (including Crispi's wife, Rosalie) who had gathered there during the previous days embarked for Sicily. One of Garibaldi's last acts before leaving his bedroom at the Villa Spinola to go down to join his volunteers was to change his clothes. Gone was not just the Piedmontese uniform but also the dark gentleman's clothes in which his other public appearances had been made during the previous decade. In their place, he put on grey trousers and a red shirt and tied a silk handkerchief around his neck; he came out of his room wearing this outfit, with a poncho over his shoulders and on his head a black felt hat.116 His reportedly radiant appearance left no one in doubt that Garibaldi the revolutionary had returned.
CHAPTER 7
FASHIONING GARIBALDI
Events were to prove Garibaldi right in one sense. The peace of Villafranca was by no means the end of the affair; rather, it was just the beginning of a rapid series of events which culminated in Garibaldi's expedition to Sicily in the spring of 1860, and which were drastically to alter the political map of Italy and European diplomatic relations. Just as remarkable was the public response to Garibaldi and the wars of Italian independence. Enthusiasm for Garibaldi spread across Europe and to the United States, and publications about him found a wide readership in France, Britain and Germany, as well as in Italy itself. A particular feature of these non-Italian publications was the free mixing of history and invention, and the effect of these developments was to produce a new image of Garibaldi with a general European-wide appeal, in which his radicalism tended to be toned down or at least depoliticised. Yet, as we shall see, this new image produced its own tensions and political contradictions, and did not go unchallenged.
A media war
The war of 1859 was the most newsworthy event of the year. Following on from the Crimean War in the mid-1850s, and coming before the American Civil War of the 1860s, the reporting of the 1859 war in Italy was, like them, affected by a new public and ‘media’ engagement with warfare. This ‘enormous demand for information and newspapers’ was made possible and encouraged by the new advances in communication and publishing.1 The significance of photography in raising public awareness of these wars is well known,2 but perhaps of more immediate importance in explaining the wide coverage of the 1859 war in France, Germany, Britain and the United States, as well as in Italy, was the development of the telegraph. The telegraph allowed correspondents to send their reports, and officials their dispatches, to the newspapers on a daily (if not more than daily) basis; here, the Reuter telegram company (set up by Baron Julius Reuter in 1851), which sent news of the battles and Napoleon III's dispatches to the European press, played a crucial role in publicising the war and providing news
paper editors with regular copy.3 Equally relevant in accounting for the prominence of the war was the extent to which, in the absence of functioning copyright laws, papers and pamphlets could use information and directly reproduce articles from other newspapers, so that any one episode could be discussed several times in different reports in a single issue of a newspaper.
From the outset of the war, all foreign eyes were fixed on Italy and each battle in the war, especially Solferino, was frontpage news.4 The New York Times correspondent sent back detailed letters about the battle, and the paper also published a large map of the battlefield;5 the London Times coverage of Solferino (‘one of the greatest battles of modern days … a gigantic duel’, according to a correspondent) included Reuter's telegrams, extracts from French newspapers, official bulletins and reports from all three armies, and eyewitness accounts sent in from correspondents stationed on both sides of the conflict.6 Early in the following year, The Illustrated London News published a special colour supplement on the battle of Solferino.7 There was also a broad public interest in the war in Britain and the USA, where it seems to have become something of a spectator sport. One Italian journalist, Charles Arrivabene, noted the presence of British tourists visiting the battlefields near Brescia, and states that this was ‘by no means rare at that time’. Sometimes the men ‘were loaded with all sorts of projectiles and arms’, souvenirs bought from peasants at the Solferino battlefield, although the ladies were content to collect ‘stones, flowers, and even branches of slender trees, in commemoration of the places they had visited’.8 Public engagement with the war is also suggested by the production of souvenirs to commemorate battles and the main protagonists; these included plates, scarves, fans and medals.9
Of course, not all the press was in favour of the war, and some journalists focused attention on the suffering it caused. For instance, accounts of the terrible bloodshed (‘carnage’, according to a Times reporter)10 at Solferino, and of the absence of an adequate medical service to treat the wounded (most notably in Henri Dunant's Un souvenir de Solférino) were instrumental in the setting up of the International Red Cross in Geneva five years later.11 Elsewhere, the war caused considerable political controversy. Even in France, where Napoleon III was only too well aware of the potential of new technology to influence public opinion and there were strict government controls over the press,12 a debate emerged about Napoleon III's involvement in the Italian war. Alongside the war itself, there took place what one historian has called a ‘pamphlet battle’ between left and right in France over the correct line to pursue in Italy: ‘journalists and polemicists, famous writers, important statesmen and clerical personalities’ became actively engaged in a battle for public opinion which manifested itself in print, and which extended and intensified in the following years.13 The campaign in Italy led to a deterioration in relations between Napoleon III's regime and the Church in France, and it probably helped radical papers like Le Siècle to survive government censorship, since Napoleon III needed their support for the campaign.14
Le Siècle responded to this opportunity with a blanket reporting of the war, which included reports from special correspondents, daily bulletins, articles from other papers and profiles of the personalities involved. In general and more than in Britain or the USA, in France the immediate requirements of domestic politics intruded into representations and perceptions of the war. Not surprisingly, the war was frequently presented as a positive, patriotic experience, and here political commentaries on the war were both subordinated to, and indirectly expressed as, public entertainment. In this respect, the war also provided an occasion for newspapers and magazines to make money.15
A prominent feature of the reporting of the war in France was the production of regular supplements to newspapers and other serial publications, and especially the use of illustrations and other visual material. As early as April, the Paris magazine L'Illustration told its readers that it was preparing an atlas of the war and had sent correspondents and established contacts throughout the likely theatre of war. The following month, the magazine increased its circulation and gave its readers a coloured map of Italy and four engravings of the soldiers' departure along with many other illustrations. The magazine, which emphasised that the French progress in Italy ‘had been simply one long triumphal march’, continued to cover the war throughout the summer; the edition of 28 May dedicated a whole section to a description of the physical landscape of northern Italy with illustrations of lakes and mountains. In effect, L'Illustration sought to present the war as a great patriotic adventure and relied heavily on the travel guide formula.16
L'Illustration's recasting of the war as public entertainment seems to have been popular, and was adopted elsewhere. Thus, the more modest Journal pour tous, with poorer reproduction values than L'Illustration, published a regular illustrated supplement to the war – La guerre d'Italie. Récit hebdomadaire illustré – which appeared in twenty-six numbers during 1859.17 Perhaps most revealing of how politics and war could be reworked and presented was the publication of a series of ‘war songs’, Souvenirs de la guerre d'Italie, by a group of radical poets and song-writers led by Pierre Dupont. These songs – ‘The departure’,'The Alpine song’, ‘To women during the Italian war’, ‘The cry of the Zouaves’, ‘The Piedmontese girl’, ‘Garibaldi’ and so on – were published in serial form as part of the weekly illustrated magazine, Chants et chansons populaires de la France, complete with sheet music for piano. The accompanying illustrations again included idealised patriotic representations and detailed depictions of soldiers and battle scenes in Alpine environments.18 Nor was this type of reporting a purely French phenomenon; elsewhere, public interest in the war blended seamlessly with more traditional, ‘picturesque’ perceptions of the Italian landscape to produce an essentially escapist narrative of events. Much of the coverage offered by The Illustrated London News resembled a travel guide to northern Italy. It described the beautiful nature of the local scenery, and maps, landscapes and cityscapes dominated its reporting, along with illustrations of French troops departing, French troops arriving, and even the public receptions held for Napoleon III.19
In Italy too, this pattern of reporting was largely followed in the liberal press. Cheap maps, lithographs of battle scenes and portraits of the protagonists were soon produced in large numbers and appeared for sale in the main cities. Sales of such prints were probably responsible for one of the most vivid examples of public engagement with the war, which was the production of higher-quality, illustrated ‘Albums’. These were published in series form, each instalment featuring an episode or personality from the war along with an illustration, usually a good-quality portrait or a battle scene. One Album storico–artistico, published contemporaneously in Turin and Paris in forty instalments, used reports from the London Times to produce what the editors called an ‘elegant volume’ with ‘40 beautiful watercolour drawings of the main battles, drawn from life by the distinguished Piedmontese artist Bossoli’, along with ‘twenty wonderful portraits’. We know very little about the commercial success of these ventures, but a ‘sequel’ was produced the following year, in which the author referred to the ‘extraordinary approval’ of the 1859 album, which indicates that, at the least, the format had proven popular.20 That these albums were indeed popular is also suggested by the publication of another album on the 1859 war – L'Italia e i suoi difensori. Album storico–biografico – which used a similar format, this time with a short history of ‘Italian resurgence [risorgimento] in the nineteenth century’, and more emphasis on the biographies of the main protagonists.21
The General
Given his proven ability to be picturesque and to capture the attention of the press and the public, it was perhaps to be expected that Garibaldi would loom large in accounts of the 1859 war. The problem facing journalists and editors in France, however, was his reputation as a revolutionary and an enemy of France in 1849. The general response, by the non-clerical press at least, was to de-poli
ticise Garibaldi, and to present him as a kind of broad, all-purpose hero, whose bravery was unparalleled but whose loyalty and discipline were never in doubt. L'Illustration made no mention at all of his politics and wrote only of his popularity and prestige. Garibaldi was the ‘illustrious leader’, ‘the intrepid general … the indefatigable Garibaldi’, an ‘intrepid soldier of Italian liberty’, and a useful ally of France who, ‘always driven by his strong love for Italy, and powerfully attached to the cause of independence’, had also been one of the first to ally himself with the king, Vittorio Emanuele.22 Le Siècle was notable for its adulation:
Garibaldi! what a man! what prestige! He has the ability to excite everyone who sees him, who follows him, everyone who comes near him. His name is on everybody's lips, in everybody's heart … The rich man like the peasant has his portrait, his engraving or his lithograph … Both men are happy to see the hero of the day up close, and whose lively, piercing eyes are fixed on one single point … Italy is his mother and his fatherland, he loves her, he defends her and he wants her to be free. Danger does not exist for him: he is a soldier of liberty.23
