Garibaldi
Page 31
12 Garibaldi as the hero of a popular war song: ‘Garibaldi’. This illustration clearly rejects the traditional military iconography used in most representations of Garibaldi in 1859.
It should be stressed that this cult of Garibaldi was not gender specific. Although we know almost nothing about who read these biographies, a significant number of those who wrote them were women. A woman, Garibaldi's lover Esperanza von Schwartz, took much of the responsiblity for the production of his memoirs. It is arguable that at least some of these biographies were aimed also at women readers; the equal emphasis given in many to Garibaldi's sensitive and sensual side, to his many romances and to his love for Anita suggests authorial attention to a readership which, if not exclusively female, was interested in something else, or more, than battles and brave deeds. In this respect, the cult of Garibaldi both reflects and addresses the existence of a female reading public, with its own tastes and literary genres.
In this chapter, I have outlined the emergence and coexistence of two Garibaldis: the real and the imaginary. As I have sought to explain, Garibaldi was politically quite distinctive – someone who knew how to use his physical charisma to shape and inspire the collectivity – and in 1859–60 he combined this with a great run of military success. These material successes were helped, celebrated and reinterpreted by his imaginary counterpart, the product of articles and biographies which followed separate sets of political priorities and/or literary rules. This kind of coexistence of the real and the imaginary is, of course, quite typical of myth, and it was also a feature of mid-nineteenth-century literature, as writers experimented with first establishing and then dissolving boundaries between fact and fiction. In 1859 no obvious distinction was drawn between the political leader and the literary hero. In the descriptions and ‘lives’ of Garibaldi, documentary sources were alternately used, ignored and embellished to produce an imagined narrative which was all the more potent by apparently being true.
By the time Garibaldi sailed to Sicily in the spring of 1860, the original Mazzinian purpose of creating a hero who would symbolise and publicise the existence of an Italian people had been fully realised. Yet its extensive success was not without problems. Politically, what Garibaldi stood for could never be that clear; Garibaldi's purpose, for Cavour at least, was to mask the realpolitik of 1859, and it is worth remembering that much of the moderate leadership in this period rather despised his capacity to attract so much public attention. Indeed, a deliberate obfuscation of the cult took place, amply demonstrated in the iconography of 1859 with its endless versions of Garibaldi looking awkward in a general's uniform. At the same time, this blander version of Garibaldi never succeeded entirely in obscuring the picturesque bandit, who reappeared in various guises in contemporary illustrations and semi-fictionalised biographies, and whose political message was much more subversive. We can conclude, therefore, that just as the cult of Garibaldi became more widespread and successful, so did it become more eclectic and ambiguous.
It is possible to observe a tendency for the imaginary Garibaldi to ‘float free’ of the politicians, or to take on a logic and life of its own. The biographies of Garibaldi produced in 1859 and early 1860 were, after all, also vehicles of entertainment, dependent on the skills of the individual writer and the demands of his/her readers. In other words, the cult of Garibaldi was fashioned and elaborated in 1859 in such a way as to make it, if anything, more difficult to control from above by Italy's nation builders. The popular/fantasy dimension to Garibaldi's political appeal was troubling to Italian moderates and to the Piedmontese establishment, already wary of him as a military leader. It may also lie behind the emergence of a substitute element in the Garibaldi cult: that Garibaldi was no good at politics. This view was to gain force in the years that followed, and involved both a recognition of the power of Garibaldi and an attempt to belittle, and so contrast, his significance.
I stress the political purpose of this view – that Garibaldi was politically inept – because it is not entirely accurate. Garibaldi made political mistakes in 1859 (he was plainly too trusting of Cavour), and his impatience with political details and conventions let him down in central Italy during the autumn and winter. But he was not incapable politically, and undeniably possessed what we might call natural political skills which enabled him to connect with individuals and with crowds, and which he used to pursue his political ideals and place them permanently on the political agenda. His speeches and behaviour in 1859 were at times overblown, but they could be very effective, and were the expression of a political leader conscious of his power and aware of how to use it. After Villafranca, as both contemporaries and historians acknowledge, it was Garibaldi who provided the real nationalist counterweight to the stabilisation of Piedmont's deal with European diplomacy. It was he who helped keep the organisation and momentum of the 1859 volunteer movement alive.
What Garibaldi made of the imaginary personality being created alongside him is, unfortunately, not known, but he was certainly attentive to its political possibilities, careful to foster it in his speeches and anxious to protect its appearance. Ironically, however, for a reader with twenty-first-century sensibilities, much of the dramatic tension of the Garibaldi story is derived from the contradictions within it. We find revealing the clash between cynical diplomacy and nationalist enthusiasm; we are intrigued by the contrasts between a military leader and his heroic alter ego; and we are amused by the gulf which separates the imagined tendernesses of a young romantic lover from the jealous antics of a lascivious older man. In the last case, the decision by journalists to suppress, apparently voluntarily, the salacious details of Garibaldi's private life may now seem the most interesting aspect of the story. By contrast, what seems to us absurd, and interests us hardly at all, is the glorification of the 1859 war and of Garibaldi's role in it. Yet by dismissing the cult, we fail to understand its impact, and – as I have sought to show in this and the previous chapters – the cult of Garibaldi was crucial politically. His ‘heroic’ example provided focus and inspiration for nationalist organisations; his public actions placed Great Power diplomacy, and the Piedmontese leadership, under significant pressure; and his imaginary counterpart helped convince a broader European public that Italy existed politically, and that it must be free and independent.
CHAPTER 8
THE THOUSAND
Miracle at Marsala
The expedition which sailed from Quarto for Sicily was ill supplied and under-manned. This problem reflected the hurried circumstances of its departure and Garibaldi's equivocal attitude, as well as the confiscation of its guns by the Piedmontese government. After they left Quarto on 5 May, Garibaldi's thousand volunteers put in at Talamone on the Tuscan coast. There, Garibaldi put on the Piedmontese general's uniform which he had brought along (‘[t]oday these clothes should be useful’, he is said to have remarked),1 and talked the military commander into giving them some – but not nearly enough – Enfield rifles and assorted ammunition. They also took a couple of cannons and some other pieces of artillery of antiquarian value which Garibaldi found in the old tower at Talamone. At Talamone, Garibaldi gave a more formal organisation to the expedition – its motto was proclaimed as ‘Italy and Vittorio Emanuele’ – and he sorted the men into seven companies and appointed a General Staff which included Bixio, Crispi and the Hungarian Colonel Türr. In the same days, in a controversial decision, he sent off a small group of volunteers in an abortive attempt to invade the Papal States.2
After Talamone, the volunteers set out for Sicily. The larger boat, the Lombardo, was commanded by Nino Bixio, who seems to have spent much of the voyage terrifying his men. He hit one of them across the face with a plate and, according to one memorable description, summoned his men on deck where he stood ‘stripped to the waist, bare-headed, irascible’, and announced: ‘I'm young, I'm thirty-seven years old, I've been around the world. I've been shipwrecked; I've been a prisoner; but here I am and here I command! Here I'm everything, Czar, Sultan, P
ope. I'm Nino Bixio!’3 Those on Garibaldi's Piemonte evidently had an easier time, chatting, smoking cigars and trying to sing a hymn composed by Garibaldi.4 There was some doubt about where exactly they should land in Sicily; indeed, during the night of 10 May the two ships nearly lost each other before they had decided on a landing place. But the following morning, as they were sailing past the port of Marsala (a wine-trading area with a significant British colony) in the direction of Sciacca on the south coast, they saw two British warships in the harbour and decided to land there.
At Marsala, the expedition met with a real stroke of good luck. The Bourbon garrison at Marsala had left for Trapani (the provincial capital), and the Bourbon warships which had been in the harbour had sailed southwards the previous night. This temporary absence of military defence enabled the volunteers to make a very hurried landing on the long harbour wall, even though Bixio had run the Lombardo aground at the entrance to the port. One Bourbon ship did return in time to prevent part of the disembarkation. However, its commander was worried by the presence of British ships in the port and perhaps was also reluctant to fire on the town, so he fired low, missing all the men who were running ashore with their supplies. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the only casualties were one man who was hit in the shoulder and a dog, although a Bourbon missile did narrowly miss killing the English manager's wife in one of the wine warehouses.
The first act of the garibaldini who got ashore at Marsala was to cut the telegraph link with Trapani. The second – organised by Crispi – was to persuade the town councillors to declare Bourbon rule at an end, and Garibaldi, as the representative of Vittorio Emanuele, to be the dictator of Sicily. Some of the councillors obeyed Crispi, but with considerable reluctance. Generally, the volunteers – the vast majority of whom were from northern Italy – met with very little welcome and a great deal of suspicion in Marsala. One of them, Emilio Zasio from Brescia, remembered their reception eight years later: ‘The people were bewildered, ignorant, surprised by the news. We tried to encourage all of them, to raise their enthusiasm with evvivas of every type, but with no sign, no response.’5 Only the Sicilians among them could communicate in (more or less) the same language as the inhabitants of Marsala – a serious problem when the expedition lacked even the most rudimentary maps of the territory they had come to ‘liberate’. There were no great scenes of enthusiasm on either side. According to the memoirs of another volunteer, the strong wine they were given by a local man made them all feel ill (Crispi alone could handle it), and they weren't even able to understand the time from the local clock.6 As the writer Ippolito Nievo (one of the Thousand) wrote to his cousin, ‘[in] Marsalla [sic] squalor and fear; the revolution had been put down everywhere or more accurately had never existed’.7 Six weeks later, he wrote to the same:
We, the first to land in Marsala, actually brought with us the news of the revolution which had put us all at risk of drowning – In Lombardy it was said and it was written: Garibaldi has touched dry land: the expedition is assured, Sicily is free. Instead we all said to each other – We didn't die at sea, but ridding ourselves of that uncertainty, we have gained the certainty of dying on dry land.8
This strange mix of political daring, military inadequacy, good fortune and personal confusion lent – at least in retrospect – a miraculous quality to the Marsala landing and the ensuing events. The truth is that the volunteers were extraordinarily lucky not to be shot to pieces as they came ashore. This luck stayed with them after Marsala. From there, they marched across the plain towards the hill town of Salemi, where they arrived on 13 May. Although the Sicilian leader, Giuseppe La Masa, had gone ahead of them to warn the town of their arrival, it still caused a stir; one observer, Simone Corleo, described his astonishment at seeing a number of ‘small groups’ of forty to fifty men who walked up into town from across the plain, ‘without firearms, a few with sabres, Garibaldi alone in a red shirt, the rest in military uniforms or civilian dress … Tuckory [a Hungarian officer] in a Hungarian uniform’.9
At Salemi, Garibaldi once again declared himself dictator of Sicily. He also began to put together a heterogeneous military force. First, he declared the military conscription of all-able bodied Sicilian males between the ages of seventeen and fifty (this decree followed the plans made for the nation-at-arms at the end of the previous year, and divided the men into three categories, with the youngest going into active army service, and the older men being involved with internal policing).10 He received reinforcements of around a thousand extra men from the surrounding area, organised as peasant irregulars, or into so-called squadre by La Masa. In addition, he was joined by a radical Franciscan priest, Fra' Pantaleo, and called on the ‘good priests’ to lead the revolution against the Bourbons.11 At Salemi, finally, he received the news that the Bourbon army had caught up with him: a force of around 3,000 men under General Landi had blocked the road to Palermo at Calatafimi, a few miles north-east of Salemi.
Garibaldi went out on the morning of 15 May to meet the Bourbon troops, who were waiting for him on the top of a terraced hill outside Calatafimi. Despite this strategical disadvantage, and being greatly outnumbered in men and weapons, Garibaldi and the volunteers fought their way determinedly and in bursts up the hill, using the terraces for cover. As Ippolito Nievo wrote: ‘We thousand attacked, with the General in the lead: every last soldier was used without pause, without care, and without reservation because on that day rested the outcome of the whole expedition’.12 In a final bayonet charge to the summit, the garibaldini managed to scare the Bourbon soldiers into a full-blown retreat across the countryside.
Victory at Calatafimi changed everything. Calatafimi, in Christopher Duggan's words:
gave the expedition an enormous fillip, an aura of success, even of invincibility, and many Sicilians who up to this point had been reluctant to commit themselves now threw caution to the wind and declared openly for ‘Italy and Victor Emmanuel’. Garibaldi was no longer just the commander of a band of ill-armed insurgents: he was the leader of an alternative government to that of the Bourbons.13
After Calatafimi, Garibaldi pressed on towards Palermo via the Alcamo road. When they reached the high plateau of Renda, with its view of the plain of Palermo (the famous Conca d'Oro) and the city itself below, they stopped and made camp. From there, Garibaldi and his General Staff began to plan the invasion of Palermo. It was decided not to go straight down into the town via Monreale, which was well defended, but instead to stay up in the mountains and to move through them to Misilmeri, where they could join up with more of La Masa's peasant squadre and enter the city through Porta Termini to the south-east. In this way, they evaded capture by the Bourbon army: they even sent their bags and wounded men south on the Corleone road so that the Bourbons would believe they were retreating.
Towards the end of May, the garibaldini had, in effect, disappeared and the Bourbon army was congratulating itself on having seen them off into the Sicilian interior. The men were exhausted and debilitated from sleeping out in the mountains, often in the rain, and most still wore the now ragged clothes and boots they had embarked in at Quarto.14 However, late on 25 May Garibaldi and his men entered Misilmeri and joined up with La Masa's forces, and on 26 May they left for Gibilrossa, from where they planned to descend the narrow path to Palermo. ‘It's Palermo or Hell now!’ Bixio told his men.15 During the following night, keeping as quiet as possible, they came down into the city, taking the Bourbon troops guarding Palermo by surprise (‘total surprise’, Nievo wrote in his diary).16 After a brief skirmish at the Ponte dell'Ammiraglio, and encouraged by Garibaldi on horseback, they rushed through to Porta Termini, where they dismantled the temporary gate under heavy fire and charged into the city as far as Piazza Fieravecchia, at the time one of the city's main markets and known for its revolutionary sympathies (the 1848 revolution had started there). From the market in Piazza Fieravecchia, where they arrived at about four in the morning and were reportedly greeted with some enthusiasm, Garibaldi's army fa
nned out in small groups through the narrow streets. Garibaldi himself led a group diagonally across the city to take the strategic points of Piazza Pretorio (the seat of municipal government, from where the Bourbon troops fled) and neighbouring Piazza Bologni, on either side of the Quattro Canti (‘Four Corners’) at the centre of Palermo.
There followed three long days of brutal street fighting inside Palermo. Barricades were erected across the main streets by the garibaldin and their supporters; the main prison was opened; and the Bourbon warships in the port fired on the city, causing great damage to property and loss of life. Throughout this battle, Garibaldi maintained a great public calm. He made a particular display of his indifference to the Bourbon bombs, and spent much of these days sitting on the steps of the over-size Renaissance fountain in Piazza Pretorio by the municipal government (which he had made his headquarters), receiving guests and giving orders, while the bombs crashed around him. On 30 May, the Bourbon government requested a truce. Garibaldi put on his Piedmontese uniform once again, and went off to negotiate terms on board the British warship Hannibal in Palermo harbour. After much heated discussion, in which Garibaldi threatened to break off negotiations and continue the fighting, an armistice was agreed, to last until the following day; this armistice was subsequently extended until 6 June, when the head of the government in Sicily, General Lanza, signed a capitulation agreeing to withdraw all his troops (some 20,000 of them) from the city.17