by Lucy Riall
In Britain, Garibaldi enthusiasm took on a new guise with the performance of two plays. The first, a oneact play called Garibaldi's Englishman, was a satire on political celebrity. The protagonist, John Smith (‘Garibaldi's Englishman’) is a crook and an impostor: he gives out locks of hair and calls himself a lion, but his suitcase (with MAGENTA pasted on to it) is full of pickles and dried sausages and he leaves a trail of dishonoured cheques in his wake.55 Garibaldi, the other play performed in 1859, was a more elaborate (fouract) piece which took Garibaldi from South America to the Austrian war via the Roman Republic. It mixed ‘real’ people – Anita, Manara, Bertani, John ‘Beard’ (Peard) – with more imaginary stock characters like Garibaldi's ‘negro attendant’, Procopio, and a villain, Mancini, who is in love with Anita and betrays Garibaldi. Garibaldi himself is a bandit who first appears on stage (in Uruguay) carrying a gun and dead jaguar over his shoulders: ‘Holloa! Procopio! Anita! Dinner for as hungry a hunter as ever chawed beef! Holloa – Anita – mia! Dinner!’ Anita is unaware that Mancini has stolen her daughter, also called Anita, and brought her up as his own. In the play's climax, all the characters (except Anita, dead at Rome) are reunited on the Stelvio pass in 1859. Procopio discovers that Mancini's daughter is really the daughter of Garibaldi and Anita (‘Oh Goramighty, bless you for sure you dat pickaninny. You dat little Anita’); the daughter, Anita, understands why she has always loved Garibaldi ‘even when hate of him was inculcated as a duty’; Garibaldi is reunited with his daughter (‘Oh! Good God! Is this a dream or a delusion! Anita's self the very face … My child! My child! Long lost – here to this lonely heart’); and he fights and kills Mancini, whose dying words are: ‘My curse upon you both through life and death, for ever’.56
The 1859 war helped commodify Garibaldi as public entertainment, and brought him to the attention of a more popular audience. The main characteristic of Garibaldi's transformation into popular spectacle was the free mix of fact and fiction, especially when it comes to describing Garibaldi's sentimental attachments. Apart from the invented ‘Margarita’ episode and the invention of a longlost daughter, the treatment of his reallife wife, the ‘Creole’ Anita, is also worth noting. Garibaldi's French biographers are clear enough about her death (pregnant, on the retreat from Rome), albeit with embellishments and inaccuracies: Delvau, for example, has her dying for three days under a blazing sun (‘[t]he Calvary of Christ – the sublime crucifixion – only lasted one day. And Christ was well weary at the last station of his Calvary!’).57 Another describes her death in the mountains before reaching San Marino; while still another says she is killed ‘by the Austrians next to her husband’.58 There is also a general consensus that she too was something special, ‘a heroine worthy of this hero! … a great and proud Brasilian creole … who had followed her husband everywhere, and who followed him to the end’; ‘a virile soul: dressed in soldiers clothes’; ‘a great and proud creole … with flaming eyes, magnificent black hair … Throughout the siege of Rome, our bullets whistled past her ears without disturbing her.’59 Despite this, only a small minority of them (Delvau, La Messine) get her name right. For the rest, she is Léonta or Florita, an error whose origin is impossible to trace but which is repeated in German and Italian biographies as well as in French editions.60
A particularly fine example of novelist's licence dressed up as historical fact is Ludwig von Alvensleben's biography of Garibaldi. In the introduction, he states his aims very clearly. He wants to provide a ‘comprehensive and unbiased … description’ of Garibaldi's life; this is vital, he tells his readers, because the man provokes such strong feelings and responses. Thus, he has tried to find ‘as many sources as possible about the hero of the day’, and took from the sources (which ‘contradicted each other often in stark contrast’) everything that seemed to allow him to portray ‘the human being Garibaldi’ (den Menschen Garibaldi), ‘as he is, his weaknesses, his sins, where he did really commit them, not in a beautifying sense, but also his better characteristics, amongst which his heroic braveness’.61 Yet in spite of this admirable statement of commitment to the German historical method, a great deal of von Alvensleben's Garibaldi is made up.
For instance, the first meeting betweeen Garibaldi and Anita, a crucial moment in the reader's emotional engagement with the hero, is pure makebelieve. Their meeting takes place in a camp, where Garibaldi is being held prisoner. She is called Florita, and is the daughter of a highranking officer in Rosas’ army. Florita, in love with Garibaldi from afar, bribes the guards to get into his hut. When she enters, he jumps up, steps towards her and grabs her hand, pulls it to his lips and covers it with ‘fiery kisses’. Before they can say anything, they fall into each other's arms. She tells Garibaldi that she cannot tolerate the way he is being treated: he can be free, the guards won't follow him, she has bribed them. He replies, embracing her, that he won't leave without her, ‘my saviour angel’. She says she is prepared to follow him, but only as his ‘lawful wife’: will he marry her when he is free and as soon as a priest can be found? ‘I am not free,’ says Garibaldi, smiling, ‘since I am captivated by you, but to put these shackles around me, that is my deepest wish.’ Florita ‘sank against his chest and willingly moved her lips towards his glowing kisses, which she gave back with the same fire’. They then escape, to the fury of Rosas.62
One other work on Garibaldi, produced somewhat later than the others (in the spring of 1860) but belonging to the same fictionalised biography format, is worthy of mention. The book is narrated in the first person and claims to be Garibaldi's memoirs, written ‘from day to day, in the midst of a life now as tranquil and serene as a pure and peaceful lake, sometimes as violent and rough as a vast sea raised by unleashed winds’.63 It is also listed as a copy of Garibaldi's memoirs in the catalogue of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, with the editors given as Pierre Dupont and Alfred d'Aunay. In reality, it is another invented narrative, presumably the work of Dupont and D'Aunay. The first fifteen or so pages, describing Garibaldi's early life in Nice, is lifted from Cuneo. But the bulk of the 156-page narrative consists of a madeup and complex story, involving Garibaldi's love affair with the beautiful Lucia (‘thin, frail, elegant, with the proud and contemptuous look of a duchess’), a famous actress with an extraordinary background.64
It is Lucia who dominates the narrative of these ‘memoirs’. Garibaldi meets Mazzini and learns to love Italy in a duel to defend Lucia's honour; later, in a crucial episode, he sees off four bandits who are threatening her. After the plot shifts to Venice, Garibaldi and Lucia meet a mysterious Spaniard called Don Fanello. Upset by his presence, she confesses her past to Garibaldi at great length. Fanello seduced her when she was fifteen, and drowned her mother in the Venetian lagoon. Although she escaped, she ended up in a castle with an old man, Don Fabiani, who (she tells Garibaldi) ‘abused my excessive trust in him … [and] made advances to me’, so she was obliged to escape from him as well.65 Garibaldi kills Fanello in a duel, and learns from Mazzini that Fanello was also an Austrian spy. He marries Lucia and they join forces to fight for Italy.66 This entire, substantial (over-100-page) account takes place before Garibaldi's departure for South America in 1834. His adventures there and the events of 1848–9 and thereafter are then described cursorily.
These ‘memoirs’ are a vibrant illustration of the creation of an imaginary Garibaldi, along with a new set of adventures and companions, and its narrative of murder, seduction and mystery is a nice example of the use of a sensationalist style to reconstruct his life story. The memoirs are typical of the format as a whole. Especially interesting is the continuing insistence on the need to tell the truth about Garibaldi, so that even these false and largely ludicrous ‘memoirs’ make a claim to realism by being narrated in the first person, and they pretend to disparage the mystification of Garibaldi's reputation and life:
Some present me as an extraordinary man, a hero, a man of providence; others make me, my past, my present, my purpose out to be something quite hideous. Th
e truth is that I am neither that great person nor that bandit. … What I am is this: a patriot who loves his nation, ready to gowhere the common good may call me, and not interested in private gain.67
Invented is Garibaldi's return to Caprera to see both his mother and father die (his father's last words are ‘God, Italy, the sea …’); but the death of Lucia borrows something from the story of Anita. Garibaldi's speech to his soldiers before the war against Austria is imaginary but also uses elements of his 1849 speech at the end of the siege of Rome. He tells them to expect ‘thirst and heat by day, cold and hunger by night … You are free to be shot like dogs by a Croatian platoon, or to die with the sabre in your chest on the corpses of your enemies shouting: Vive l'Italie!’ The memoirs conclude on an openended but factual note. Garibaldi tells the reader that he has ‘rien’ to say about ‘the expedition which I am planning for Sicily … I will soon be in Palermo.’68
Given such a widely advertised dedication to the ‘facts’, and given that at least some precise details of Garibaldi's life were generally available, it is worth asking why these writers chose to invent so much of his biography. The most obvious answer is that this kind of invention was not unusual. Indeed, a rejection of conventional distinctions between fact and fiction was a feature of French romanticism in the midnineteenth century; and the mix of history and melodrama to produce ‘realism’ was especially prominent in popular historical dramas and in the historical novel, the genre which had such a strong influence on the construction of Garibaldi's biography as exemplary life and which had already been used to great effect by Cuneo.69 In various portrayals of Garibaldi it is also possible to see a free use of the Gothic style (Goëthe) and the sensationalist (Dupont and D'Aunay); here historical events and the ‘real’ Garibaldi serve as a background to an imaginary hero's adventures and struggles, much as they do in the contemporary novels of Dumas and Hugo. The manifest taste for the more picturesque and sexual aspects of Garibaldi's story (all the fantasy episodes and characters serve to emphasise that side of his personality and image) should suggest to us that many of these authors were simply following and adapting an already popular romantic style. At the same time, some biographers, such as Hippolyte Castille (whose biography of Garibaldi was part of his second series of ‘Historical portraits of the nineteenth century’) and the anonymous author of ‘Men of today’ (whose other subjects included Emperor Franz-Josef, Lord Palmerston, General Filangieri and the prince and princess of Prussia) had to make Garibaldi fit into an established format, with a standard message, structure and page numbers. Here historical reliability probably mattered less than the simple observance of a biographical fashion.
One effect of these biographies is that Garibaldi's personal qualities – his exotic lifestyle, unrestrained sexual appeal, prodigious strength – become more immediately important than his politics. In fact, his politics are seemingly reduced to a dutiful ‘decency’ and a vague commitment to ‘justice’ and ‘liberty’ for an Italy oppressed by Austria. So it may be that, like the newspaper reporting of 1859, these imaginary biographies deliberately attempted either to depoliticise Garibaldi or to diminish his republican past. Perhaps most noticeably in the Garibaldi of Hippolyte Castille, a liberal who had decided to cooperate with the regime, there is a move to exalt Garibaldi's personal allure and political actions in order to dismiss both as rhetorical flourish or as nothing more serious than a political fashion (‘a man of extraordinary bravery, who seems to combine, in his perhaps excessive and hyperbolic actions, all the heroic and epic vigour of the Italian temperament’).70 Castille's political intention is equally evident in the conclusion to the biography, where he reassuringly compares the wild hero of Rome to the presentday Garibaldi, now an older, wiser and much less radical soldier: ‘The Garibaldi of 1859 is not the same man as 1849. His hair has become grey, his spirit has hardened. He has fewer illusions, and perhaps more ardour … today Garibaldi wears the uniform of a Sardinian general … This life of devoted heroism has finally been blessed with victory.’71
However, the exaggeration of the picturesque can give us a very different hero from the compliant general in Piedmontese uniform, and in some of these biographies a more subversive intent can be discerned. A few of the Garibaldi biographers – Paya, Sand, Delvau and Dupont – were radicals, bohemian ‘outsiders’ and/or socialists, opposed to Napoleon III's regime. Sand had socialist sympathies, she had been a friend and supporter of Mazzini in 1849, while in 1859 she described herself as a ‘young enthusiast’ for the events unfolding in Italy.72 Her Garibaldi (a sixteenpage pamphlet) cast him as a popular hero; she claims that the ‘devout peasants of Velay and the Cévennes’ hang Garibaldi's portrait ‘among the images of saints’. What makes Garibaldi special, for Sand, is not his appearance but his ‘personal thought … his moral work’, and here she is careful to define the moral qualities necessary for political freedom:
he is of a rather delicate nature … he is softlyspoken, of modest air and refined manners, with a great generosity and immense kindness tied to an inflexible resolve and a sovereign calm. He is clearly a leader of men, but he leads by persuasion; he can only command free men … There is a quality of enthusiasm and religion which has no counterpart in regular troops … a small army of partisans, marching to its own tune with the sole concern to conquer or die.73
By likening Garibaldi's popularity to the appeal of a radical secular religion, Sand comes close to recommending the original Mazzinian conception of the democratic hero. Her praise of morality, ‘persuasion’ and voluntary action can also be seen as a reminder of radical ideals.
Equally, Delvau and Dupont (the former best known for a Parisian slang dictionary and for a series of bohemian and erotic novels; the latter a socialist poet forbidden by the regime to talk about politics) seek out the radical in Garibaldi. Both use fictionalised accounts to emphasise his transgressive appearance and rebellious actions. There is a striking similarity between the illustration for Delvau's Garibaldi and the illustration for the song ‘Garibaldi’, published in Dupont's series Souvenirs de la guerre d'Italie. Although the song itself was fairly conventional and nonpolitical, the accompanying illustration was more risky: Garibaldi is dressed in Piedmontese uniform, but his jacket is loose, even untidy, and his trousers are baggy. He wears a scarf and braid around his neck, and a sash tied around his waist; with his hat – a large ‘puritan’ affair with feather – he waves on his men; and his firearm, complete with long, sharp bayonet, is almost as large as he is. His beard is long, and in the background there is a soldier, and a castle which look suspiciously medieval (see figure 12).74 Like Dupont's ‘Garibaldi’, Delvau's hero wears a uniform, but here too the military iconography is persistently denied: Garibaldi's hair is long and wavy, his eyes sloping and seductive, his stance more sensual than martial. Behind him, three volunteers wear the ‘medieval’ outfits of 1849.
There is a great deal in both these pictures which seeks to remind the viewer of Garibaldi's association with a bandit aesthetic and a medieval past, and so with the republican and revolutionary ideals of 1848–9. Even Paya, whose biography closely follows the regime's established text, and whose illustrations show Garibaldi as a slim and elegant figure in Piedmontese uniform, dwells at length on his defiant actions in Rome in 1849. There is an especially vivid picture of Garibaldi and his men in 1849, on horseback and ‘[a]rmed with their lassos’, out catching cattle for their food.75 In both Delvau's and Dupont's texts, moreover, there is a celebration of all that is wild, unconstrained and excessive (and medieval) in Garibaldi. He is Don Quixote, ‘Fra Moreale’, ‘Fra Diavolo’ and Roland/Orlando;76 he is ‘ardent’, he fights duels and kills villains. It thus seems likely that, operating within the constraints of press censorship, these writers deliberately chose to create a transgressive Garibaldi, and that by stressing the picturesque and romantic they sought to recall more radical forms of political belonging.
Conclusion
In the London play, Garibaldi's Englishma
n, ‘John Smith’ has this to say about his fame:
everybody takes me for Garibaldi's Englishman and stares at me admiringly – I think I could make a decent thing of it were I to show myself at a shilling a head. It's very agreeable to be so popular. It's astonishing the attention I get by it. Railway porters actually fight for possession of me. Landlords, landladys and chambermaids give me the best rooms and the best beds – waiters do come when they say ‘coming’ and cabmen are actually civil and content with only twice their legal fare.
The war of 1859 played a central role in fashioning a Europe-wide cult of Garibaldi. It was a leading part of, and contributed significantly to, a myth of Italian resurgence, an entire narrative complete with minor characters, and as much make-believe as historical fact. Garibaldi seemed to symbolise all that was compelling (fair, heroic, poetic) about the Italian nationalist struggle, and he developed an appeal sufficient to mobilise sections of (mostly) urban society behind the idea of an Italian nation.
There seems to be little doubt about the popularity of Garibaldi. We can perhaps raise questions about the numerous reports of patriotic demonstrations and enthusiasm in 1859, which were described in the previous chapter, since many of them were written later and with an obvious political intent. The large number of articles, books and other visual representations of Garibaldi is, however, clear proof of the spread of the cult and of its commercial success; it is estimated that Paya's Histoire alone had a circulation of 50,000 copies.77 Just as noteworthy is the international reach of Garibaldi. Biographies and other texts were produced in the USA, Britain, Holland, Germany, Switzerland and, above all, France, as well as in Italy itself, and details about Garibaldi were copied and reproduced by writers across national frontiers and languages. This Garibaldi literature is a strong sign of the existence in the mid-nineteenth century of a liberal and cosmopolitan reading community, international in character but engaged with nationalism and nationalist struggle as an idealised representation of itself.
