by Lucy Riall
In stressing Garibaldi's wide appeal (‘The rich man like the peasant has his portrait’) and his overwhelming love for Italy, the publication was able to dodge his republican past. Interestingly, the British and American liberal press were also often as keen as the French press to stress Garibaldi's decency and respectability; and this approach reflects a quite widespread tendency to present the war, once it started, as a simple struggle for Italian ‘liberation’ and to emphasise the prevalence of political restraint and moderatism.24
9 Garibaldi by Gustave Doré. The artist seeks a compromise between Garibaldi's romantic past and more conventional present by placing a cloak over his uniform and placing him in a rocky landscape.
The iconography of 1859 departed radically from that of 1849 and followed the lead given by Garibaldi himself and the Piedmontese in stressing his ‘gentlemanly’ qualities and officer appearance. Echoes of his unconventional past lived on. The Illustrated London News, for example, showed Garibaldi on horseback in poncho and large hat, with a uniform barely visible underneath, while the French artist Gustave Doré placed a cloak over his uniform and showed him in romantic pose amid a rocky landscape (see figure 9).25 His romantic side was particularly marked in battle scenes, perhaps especially in representations of the battle for Varese: here Doré produced a spectacular print of Garibaldi standing high on a rocky peak with a jumble of men and horses rushing past him.26 Still by far the most widely circulated representation of Garibaldi at this time was of him in the Piedmontese general's uniform, with neat, welltrimmed hair and beard: a sterner, stiffer and rather more banal figure than hitherto. L'Illustration, for example, published a picture taken from a daguerreotype of Garibaldi in Piedmontese uniform.27 Considerable effort was also made to place Garibaldi among a figurative pantheon of generals and legitimate national leaders. He appears in the Italian Album storico–artistico as a general alongside the other generals of 1859, far down in a hierarchy which includes the king, Cavour and Napoleon III. On the cover of the slightly later album, L'Italia e i suoi difensori, he has moved to the head of the group but is still surrounded by respectable figures (this time he is joined by the Tuscan moderate leader, Bettino Ricasoli), and he appears inside as a Piedmontese general identical to the others, using the standard military iconography of the time (see figures 10 and 11). In a French colour print of 1859, Défenseurs de l'Italie, he stands, ‘Le Général Garibaldi’, with stern expression and about as unattractive as he ever appears in print. He is below Vittorio Emanuele in a stiff little group with Cavour and Generals Cialdini and La Marmora.28 Henceforth, usually the only mention of Garibaldi the bandit in the press was to remind readers that the Austrians treated him as one, and this was taken as further proof of Austrian superstition and ill intent.29
Similar prominence was given to the respectability of Garibaldi's volunteers. They were presented as the best that Italy could offer, and no mention was made of the tensions with the regular army. They were ‘the elite of provincial youth’, in the words of L'Illustration, ‘young people, robust, brave, enthusiastic, and within a short time, well disciplined’.30 An illustration in Claude Paya's Histoire de la guerre d'Italie shows a group of them enrolling; one man wears a beard and rough, rural clothes but the majority are well dressed in frock coats.31 Among the ranks there were ‘a large number of gentlemen’, according to a Times correspondent who saw them in Como:
sons or themselves small proprietors, farmers, and tradesmen … operatives and working men from town and country; all men who had worked honestly for their living, or did not require to do so, decently and comfortably dressed, and all wonderfully tidy after sleeping so long in their clothes … quiet and orderly … respectable citizens fighting for their country, carrying into war the same respect for life and property which they showed in peace.
10 ‘Italy and its defenders’: Garibaldi joins a pantheon of royal, military and moderate liberal heroes. This image was evidently produced after Garibaldi's expedition to Sicily – note the references to Sicily's broken chains and the volcano (often used to represent the Risorgimento, especially in southern Italy).
They sat at cafés to write letters home and, according to the correspondent, ‘some I saw in the handsome Cathedral, admiring it like ourselves’. Such was ‘[t]he charm thrown by the hero of Montevideo over the whole Italian population’ that, according to another Times correspondent, he had managed to enlist ‘young men of the highest classes, artists, literary men, professors, and scholars, in his ranks as mere privates’.32
Without necessarily denying Garibaldi's physical and personal attraction, it is tempting to see in this emphasis on his personality a consensus to gloss over his political beliefs and so minimise the divisions within the anti-Austrian military coalition. Whatever the reasons, there developed a clear and mounting press obsession with Garibaldi's looks and background in 1859. So, while both L'Illustration and The Times went ‘behind the lines’ to Como to obtain interviews with Garibaldi, they sought the personality, not his politics. The two French journalists – a writer and an illustrator – sent back to their readers detailed descriptions of the man and his manner: ‘we were well compensated for our trouble [in reaching Garibaldi],’ the illustrator wrote, ‘by the friendly welcome of the General. His kindness is immense; and while resolve is clearly written on his face, benevolence also reigns there and makes his language and manners most pleasing.’ They dined with Garibaldi, and drew his portrait, but apparently did not discuss politics or the war.33
Two long reports from Times correspondents offer striking evidence of the growing tendency to venerate every detail of Garibaldi's personal appearance and manner. The first, in the form of a diary sent by an Australian on a tour of Switzerland, admitted surprise at Garibaldi's looks: ‘From his portraits and warlike exploits I had pictured to myself a very tall large man, of sallow complexion, with long black hair and beard, with something of the romantic air of those Spanish guerrilla chiefs, who sung their songs to the guitar or killed people with equal gusto’, so he could ‘scarcely believe’ that this ‘quiet, unaffected, gentlemanly man who entered and sat down with us was Garibaldi’.
He is of middle height … a squareshouldered, deep chested, powerful man, without being at all heavy … a healthy English complexion, with brown hair and beard, rather light, both slightly touched with gray, and cut very short. His head showed a very fine development, mental as well as moral, and his face is good, though not remarkable to a casual observer … but when he spoke of the oppression and sufferings of his country, the lip and eye told the deep feeling long suppressed, and the steadfast daring character of the man … He has the calm manner and appearance of the English gentleman and officer … it was palpable that, strong as may be his impulses, they are thoroughly under control. Bold and enterprising even to apparent rashness he is no doubt, but he is also cool and calculating … what impressed me most was the mental calibre of the man.34
11 Garibaldi as a Piedmontese general, in a typical portrait from 1859.
Strong, intelligent and goodlooking but never overbearing; passionate and driven but controlled, Garibaldi is idealised here as a typical, if unusually attractive, English gentleman.
A month later, a Times ‘special correspondent’ started his report with the following lines: ‘I am not greatly inclined to heroworship … but I have just now travelled 150 miles to press the hand of Garibaldi.’ He found him ill in bed, ‘with rather a young and good looking’ lady sitting next to him:
He has a bright, cheerful look; the colour of his skin and hair betoken a sanguine temperament. There is not one of the bust, lithographs, photographs etc that are sold by thousands throughout Italy and Europe as Garibaldi's portraits, that gives the slightest idea of the expression of that noble countenance. There is not the least approach to fierceness or wildness about the hero's countenance. He looks intelligent, earnest, benevolent, and affable in the extreme … He has a fine head but not very massive; a large, but by no means broad face … Th
e hair is brownred, and has been rich and glossy. The eye struck me as light gray, but with a tint of the lionred in it. His voice is clear, ringing, silvertoned. Nothing can equal the gentleness, freedom and ease of his address.
Although the correspondent complained loudly of the prevailing tendency to mythologise Garibaldi (‘it was neither fair justice nor good taste to represent him as a truculent bandit or as a theatrical hero’), he allowed his own imagination to run wild, associating Garibaldi with a scene from Walter Scott's Redgauntlet and attributing to him an innate majesty: ‘I fancied I saw the lionhearted King lying on his lion's hides, and his lovely Queen a suppliant at his feet for the life of the Scotch knight. Truly Garibaldi is one of nature's own kings and leaders to men.’35
An imaginary life
The fascination with, and fantasy about, Garibaldi's personal appearance extended to his life story. During and after the war of 1859, journalists and writers rushed to produce biographies of Garibaldi, indeed, no coverage of the war was complete without an account of Garibaldi's life. For example, the supplement to Journal pour tous included a serialised biography of Garibaldi; the illustrated work by Claude Paya, Histoire de la guerre d'Italie, was little more than a biography of ‘this famous man’; the New York Times published a ‘Sketch of the life, character, and political opinions of General Garibaldi’; and Harper's Weekly's account of ‘Garibaldi and his legion’ was really a short account of his life, with particular emphasis on his defence of the Roman Republic. The war ‘Albums’ published in Turin and Florence in early 1860 also contained short biographies.36 By the summer of 1859, biographies also started to appear in Milan and Florence. These were mostly short, cheap and clearly rushedout pamphlets; the only expensive production (a 160-page Biografia with some fine illustrations) was little more than a pirated version of Cuneo's 1850 biography with details of the 1859 war attached, and in the copy which survives in the Biblioteca di Storia Moderna e Contemporanea in Rome the pages are all in the wrong order, which suggests more haste than care in its preparation.37 In Britain, a ‘Colonel Exalbion’ produced a substantial biography, Garibaldi: his life, exploits and the Italian campaigns; while publishing houses in Berlin, Weimar, Munich, Zurich and Haarlem all produced biographies of Garibaldi.38 Above all, in Paris a huge number of biographies appeared, with prominent writers such as George Sand, Alfred Delvau, Pierre Dupont and Hippolyte Castille, among many lesser-known figures, giving their versions of Garibaldi's life.39
There was nothing at all unusual about the production of, and public enthusiasm for, biographies of Great Men in mid-nineteenth-century Europe. In the case of Garibaldi, the main narrative of his life had been established some time before, by Cuneo in 1850, and in 1859 English-speaking readers had the additional benefit of Garibaldi's memoirs which were published in New York by Theodore Dwight (and in London later in the year).40 Almost all Garibaldi's biographers followed Cuneo's format. They stressed his early life and appetite for adventure, his acts of heroism in South America, the events in Italy in 1848–9 and so on, and some, as we saw above, directly copied or abridged Cuneo's text with minor alterations. Most also included a portrait of Garibaldi (always in military uniform), sometimes associated with an image of Italy such as the tricolour; and almost all made a great deal of the close relationship between the seafaring life and his specially passionate nature. Only the references to Garibaldi's life in Caprera and its symbolism were entirely new. ‘Don't laugh’, Delvau told his readers, ‘at the sight of a lion turned into a shepherd, this adventurer become an agricultural expert. Did not Cincinnatus, the Roman dictator, return to his plough after he had nobly taken up arms to defend the honour of his country?’41
Even more than Cuneo's study, these biographies shared a tendency to hyperbole, and even a kind of catchall hagiography in their approach to their subject. Colonel Exalbion wrote that from an early age Garibaldi had ‘a spirit bold as that of any of the adventurers recorded in Tasso's pages’;42 while an anonymous French biographer described him as ‘dedicated since childhood to this noble idea of Italian independence … caring not for danger nor fatigue, always ready to go into battle, to risk his life at the head of his plucky companions … how could you not love him?’43 For Hippolyte Castille, Garibaldi was:
a man of extraordinary bravery … with a handsome countenance, well-built, full of strength and agility, imposing, proud and theatrical … of a few words and many actions, generous, tender … [a] blond head, calm, even languid, eyes … His life is but a series of adventures, travels, loveaffairs, and of great swordfights, just like the novels of Ariosto.44
To his enemies, he was invincible and indeed, according to Castille, perhaps he really was: hit by a bullet in combat in Rome, ‘[h]e pulled it out with a smile and, holding it out in his hand, he showed it to his soldiers and shouted: “They still can't hurt us!”’45 Nor were more serious writers like Alfred Delvau and George Sand immune to his charms. Delvau wrote that Garibaldi belonged to that category of ‘tigermen’ and ‘lionmen’: ‘he is the knight of adventure, the valiant figure of legend, the Don Quixote of patriotism’.46 Sand saw him as ‘a kind of personification of Italy reborn, with her painful past, her poignant tragedies, her quiet patience, her vital genius, and above all her hatred of the foreign yoke which silences in her all vain pretence and all baneful discord when the hour has come to be or not to be’.47
Despite the availability and widespread use of Cuneo's biography, a great deal of what was published as ‘biography’ of Garibaldi in 1859 and early 1860 was pure invention. Many authors used the basic episodic structure established by Cuneo, and went on to add embellishments, characters and episodes of their own, additions which were then borrrowed by other biographers to produce a narrative of Garibaldi's life which was heavily fictionalised although based on a standard factual chronology. His early life in Nice and his adventures in South America provided the largest scope for narrative fantasy. The novelist Louise Goëthe describes Garibaldi's dramatic birth in a boat in a storm, and this episode was borrowed by the author of the nicely named Garibaldi et ses hommes rouges (‘Garibaldi and his red men’) and by a German biographer, Ludwig von Alvensleben. Dupont and d'Aunay (and later Alexandre Dumas) say Garibaldi was born on dry land, but ‘in the room where Masséna was born’ (Masséna, a native of Nice, was a Napoleonic general noted for his victories in Italy).48
Goëthe seems to have been the original source for an entirely new and substantial episode in Garibaldi's life, after he fled Nice following the failed conspiracy in the early 1830s. She reminds her readers that, ‘in the time of which we speak’, Garibaldi ‘was a very handsome young man, of fine and daring profile, with a look both soft and firm, hair like an eagle, and blessed with prodigious strength and agility’, and that his life's story should be read ‘at night, in the moonlight, like an Ann Radcliffe novel’.49 Emboldened by her comparison with this pioneer of the Gothic novel, Goëthe concocts a Gothic episode for her bandit–hero. She says that Garibaldi, ‘like Rob Roy’ took refuge in the highlands of ‘the Black Mountain’ (presumably an imaginary version of Montenegro) and became a tutor to Margarita, the beautiful daughter of the Count of Ransbergue at his château. They read books together and fell passionately in love, but when the nobleman discovered them together, he was so infuriated that he struck Garibaldi across the face with a whip. Garibaldi – ‘like a wounded lion’ – wanted to stab the count, and was only prevented by Margarita's intervention. Instead, he left the château and became a patriot–bandit. He returned, burnt the château to the ground and carried Margarita off into the mountains to marry her. Although Garibaldi was ‘hunted like a wild beast’ by the Austrians, he and Margarita were happy and their love grew. Margarita made him a father and he wrote her poetry: ‘I am King; my kingdom is the deep forest … My voice, is a hurricane which wakes up nature … I am King, but outlawed, worn down by the tempest, And I have no shelter to put over your head’. But Margarita grew ill and died, and Garibaldi buried her in a rocky place
now known as ‘Margarita’. Since then, Goëthe tells her readers, Garibaldi is a changed man, and seeks adventure and comfort where he can.50
Goëthe's episode appears in various German biographies of Garibaldi51 and even in a French biography by Juliette la Messine, which cites Garibaldi's own memoirs as its source.52 The episode itself is entirely emblematic of the mythologising of Garibaldi. There was nothing new about his casting as a heroic character using tropes and techniques borrowed from popular fiction; what was new in 1859 was the almost unrestrained element of fantasy and the subordination of political discussion when it came to selling his life to the reading public. At the same time, the appearance of history – in the sense of biographical truth – was always strictly maintained. For instance, Claude Paya's publisher claimed that his biography was authentic thanks to the author's close ‘relations … with the most important personalities in Italy’, although this was rather unlikely since he had been in prison for ten years (between 1849 and August 1859).53
Historical authenticity was maintained in other ways too. All the biographies discussed here are careful to give the date and place of Garibaldi's birth (in Nice in July 1807), and to quote from his speeches and use newspaper reports. Thus, Colonel Exalbion feels able to condemn the ‘inflated narratives and official falsehoods’ surrounding Garibaldi's part in the war of 1859, and relies instead on ‘leading journals’ for his account. But he also gives Garibaldi some extra exotic, and entirely imaginary, adventures in South America: ‘On one occasion he rolled down a precipice, and found himself in the embraces of a jaguar at the bottom. On another, he with difficulty avoided the embraces of a huge serpent, thirty feet long.’ His wife, Anita, had to confront ‘a body of mutineers’ repeatedly and once nearly fell with her child ‘into a frightful mountain abyss’ because the rope bridge she was on became entangled in the middle, leaving her suspended halfway across.54
