Garibaldi
Page 33
They were met in Salerno by cheering crowds and prolonged celebrations. Garibaldi's arrival had been announced in advance by the English volunteer Colonel Peard, whom many mistook for Garibaldi, and Garibaldi preceded his nearest troops, some 1,500 men under Colonel Türr, by two days' march.47 The British envoy in Naples, Sir Henry Elliot, was told that ‘the whole of the southern part of the kingdom … has been conquered by Garibaldi single-handed and without an army at all, for he seems all along to have been from thirty to sixty miles in advance of it, the people rising and the troops falling back or capitulating as he advanced’.48 ‘The royalists dispersed like the dust which followed their flight’, commented Marc Monnier, a French resident in Naples, who witnessed these same events.49
When the Bourbon garrison left Palermo at the beginning of June, Garibaldi had been there to see them go. ‘Au revoir, à Naples!’ he was said to have told the soldiers, and apparently they all believed them.50 During the events which followed, the Bourbon army had become utterly demoralised. ‘Bewilderment and terror was written on every face’ according to Alberto Mario, who saw the soldiers in one town: ‘to their overstrained imaginations, Garibaldi had gradually assumed the nature and the form of Fate’.51 Their king too seemed paralysed by fear and anxiety. As early as 4 August, Monnier in Naples wrote of ‘reaction on one side, revolution on the other: the king in the middle, helpless and abandoned, the government industriously idle, the population restless … a sickening spectacle, inspiring shame and pity’.52 By the end of August, aware that the city of Naples was almost indefensible militarily, King Francesco II's advisers persuaded him to withdraw from the capital, and to retreat with his army to the fortress of Capua north of Naples. From there they planned to concentrate their forces and launch a counterattack against Garibaldi.
Thus it came about that Garibaldi was able to enter Naples unopposed on 7 September. He took a train from Salerno in the morning. W. G. Clark, the public orator of Cambridge University, out from England on his annual vacation, went with him from Salerno, and wrote that Garibaldi was sent off to ‘the roar of vivas’. One member of the crowd collapsed in a convulsive fit, Garibaldi was accompanied by vocal enthusiasts singing ‘interminable’ songs (‘We are Italians/ Fresh young men/ Against the Germans,/ We will fight’), and at every station there was ‘a mob of curious people … who exchanged cheers with the occupants of the train’.53 The AngloItalian journalist, Charles Arrivabene, who had also ‘squeezed’ on to the train, wrote that ‘[f]rom Torre del Annunziata to Naples, we saw nothing but a succession of triumphal arches, festoons of flowers, hangings and flags … An interminable scene of movement and gaiety was everywhere visible along the line; a continual shouting of “Viva Garibardo!” [sic] “Viva l'Italia!” filled the air.’54 Garibaldi arrived in Naples itself at lunchtime, and immediately got into a carriage with some of his men. He was driven through an impromptu but reportedly vast crowd, as the streets rapidly filled with ‘waving hats and handkerchiefs, hands raised in salute, and a deafening frenzy of shouts and cries’.55 Garibaldi sat through all this, according to one spectator, ‘apparently unmoved, but from time to time he lifted his hat, and smiled, as it were, with the eyes rather than the lips’.56 Later, on the waterfront, he stood up in the carriage, removed his cap and gazed at the crowd, before retiring to his lodgings at Palazzo Angri.
For two days thereafter, the festivities in Naples continued. In the words of the English follower of Garibaldi, Charles Forbes, an active if not very sympathetic eyewitness: ‘the entire population roused themselves into a state of frenzy bordering on madness, which ofttimes became ridiculous, and at others unfortunately dangerous … Night and day the entire population were in the streets … Bands of ruffians in red shirts invaded hotels and cafes, and forced, arms in hand, every one to join in their orgies.’57 A correspondent for the Italian radical paper, Il Movimento, offered a more positive, if less coherent, description:
the whole city in lights, like nothing ever seen before; the long via Toledo just wonderful, with more than 4 thousand carriages going up and down full of beautiful ladies wearing tricolour flags and scarves, the enthusiasm impossible to describe, the shouts in favour of Vittorio Emanuele, of Italia una, to Garibaldi, to Venezia … Thousands of radiant faces, every window covered with flags and flowers in the same way; I never saw a more enchanting party.58
Unification
After Naples, Garibaldi's attention turned to Rome, and at first he planned immediately to continue the campaign so as to arrive in the papal capital before the winter rains came in November. It was at this point that he learnt about the invasion of the Papal States by the Piedmontese army. Although at first he seems to have believed that Piedmont was on his side, he soon realised that the invasion was part of a Cavourian design to frustrate his plans and prevent him taking Rome. This design also entailed Cavour's plotting to take over the government in Naples and his pressing for immediate annexation by Piedmont of Naples and Palermo. In the middle of September, the differences betweeen Garibaldi and Cavour became publicly irreconcilable, when Garibaldi openly condemned Cavour and asked the king to replace Cavour and Farini in the government. Cavour was under attack from the radicals in Turin, and had become increasingly alarmed by the continuing presence of Mazzinians like Crispi and Bertani close to Garibaldi. He was especially horrified to learn that Mazzini himself had arrived in Naples on 17 September.59 He spoke of marching on Naples, ‘to bring Garibaldi to his senses and hurl that nest of red republicans and socialist demagogues that has grown up around him, into the sea’.60
Also during September, the Bourbon army dug in along the River Volturno with some 50,000 men, led by Marshal Ritucci (Garibaldi's army was by now some 20,000 men strong), and prepared to counter-attack for Naples. On 1 October, following a minor victory against Garibaldi's army at Caiazzo, Ritucci attacked Garibaldi's lines between Sant'Angelo and Santa Maria and forced Garibaldi to fight, for the first time in the campaign, a defensive batttle. The battle of the Volturno lasted two days, and although initially the Bourbons had all the advantages, in the end Garibaldi's army were victorious, and saved Naples. According to Trevelyan, the victory at Volturno was due to Garibaldi's great talent as a military leader, and specifically to three factors: ‘the personal inspiration of his presence at so many of the important points, the combined caution and vigour of his offensive–defensive tactics and … a sound strategy governing the disposition of his men over the whole region of conflict’.61 Although subsequently played down for political reasons, in reality Volturno was, in Mack Smith's words:
one of Garibaldi's finest military ventures, in which he defied the pundits by showing himself a master of defensive strategy, and in which he proved fully able to control a larger force of men than the Piedmontese regulars had numbered at Castelfidardo [against the papal army in the Papal States] or indeed in the whole of the Crimean War.62
The presence of mind which Garibaldi showed at Volturno is worth stressing because of the fatal political mistake which he also made at this time, and which to an extent overshadowed the rest of his career. Faced with the Piedmontese advance through the Papal States and towards Garibaldi at Naples (rather than towards Rome, as he had hoped), and burdened with the conflicting pressures of radicals and moderates in Naples and Palermo, Garibaldi simply vacillated and did nothing. He seems to have become bored and demoralised by the endless discussions in Naples. As Bertani wrote from Naples to Mordini (the pro-dictator in Palermo) on 28 September:
On the political side, matters go from bad to worse. The dictator has been struck down by moral paralysis. We can't get anywhere with him, he won't sign anything, he won't be completely on our side and it disgusts him to be with the other side … We can't form a government, but no decision is taken to dissolve it. And our enemies profit from this paralysis … We are assailed by hate on all sides. Garibaldi is not fully aware of his strength in Italy – discouraged and irritated at the same time.63
‘[N]othing can be done wit
hout him – very little, I fear, with him’, Mazzini commented to his friend Caroline Stansfeld on 2 October.64
Garibaldi may have become discouraged about the practicalities of continuing the war without Piedmontese help; in any event, he gradually became convinced that there was no longer any alternative to falling in with Turin, and began instead to place his hopes in a new military campaign for the following summer. During the second week of October, amid scenes of political agitation in Naples and the spread of peasant resistance to the new government in the Abruzzo and Molise mountains, Garibaldi went against the advice of the radicals. Instead of setting up an elected assembly to negotiate the terms of union with Piedmont, he agreed to hold an immediate plebiscite to decide on the question of annexation by Piedmont. Shortly afterwards, pro-Dictator Mordini in Sicily was forced to follow suit.65
The decision to hold plebiscites was a decisive victory for Cavour and his supporters in the South. It meant that annexation by Piedmont would be unconditional and immediate. Garibaldi, with this decision, handed over his dictatorial powers to Vittorio Emanuele. ‘Cavour has won’, complained L'Unità Italiana on 17 October: ‘the first act of the drama ended at Villafranca, the second is now ending at Naples. God help Italy!’66 The plebiscites took place on 21 October, and the entire adult male population was asked to vote ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to whether they wanted ‘to form an integral part of Italy one and indivisible under Victor Emanuel as their constitutional King’. The result was an overwhelming (over 99 per cent), and unsurprising, vote in favour of unification. The vote was in public, and in most places there was tremendous pressure for a ‘yes’ vote; moreover, as Mack Smith points out, ‘[t]o vote no … had no meaning at all, for the only alternative to Victor Emanuel was Francesco, and the clock could not have been put back short of a bloody counter-revolution’. There was also little or no sense among the population that Garibaldi represented a different political ideal from the Piedmontese king.67
Garibaldi stayed on at Naples for three weeks after the vote. On 25 October, he rode north to Teano to meet the king. Although later glorified as a happy and dignified occasion, many contemporary accounts suggest the meeting was a tense and melancholy affair full of bad omens, and that the king became upset when peasant onlookers shouted Viva Galibardo [sic]! and ignored the king.68 On 6 November, the king failed to show up for a review of Garibaldi's troops at Caserta. The next day, after some bitter discussion, the two men rode together in a carriage into Naples during a thunderstorm, both looking sullen and gloomy. ‘Garibaldi smiled amidst the storm’, a British onlooker remarked, although he seemed ‘pale and anxious’, while the king ‘rolled his eyes and stared in a vacant way quite peculiar to Kings of Italy’.69 Garibaldi asked to be made viceroy of southern Italy and was refused; the king offered once more to make Garibaldi a general in the Piedmontese army, but his offer was rejected.70 Although the two men had once liked each other, the king at least was cross with Garibaldi, writing to Cavour some two weeks later that Garibaldi was ‘neither as docile nor as honest as people say and as you yourself think’.71
Finally, in the early morning of 9 November, Garibaldi left Naples quietly, taking with him only some beans and seedlings for his farm at Caprera. Before departure, he stopped at the British warship Hannibal to say a private (but again subsequently celebrated) farewell to Admiral Mundy, the man who had helped negotiate the truce in Palermo. While he told Mundy of his plans to take Rome and Venice, and to put ‘a million of men under arms’ the following year, Mundy noticed that Garibaldi was gloomy and dejected ‘and his whole manner was that of a man who was suffering under a poignant grief’.72 He was then escorted to the steamer Washington, which would take him to Caprera, by what Marc Monnier called ‘a simple entourage of intimate friends’ who were all in tears (‘it was really simple and sad’).73
Garibaldi also left behind a number of broken-hearted women. A British resident in Naples, Carlotta Roskilly, expressed her ‘profound grief’ at his refusal to live ‘for a few days in your room prepared by me’, and blamed herself personally for his decision to leave; while another British woman, signing herself simply ‘Your Sauvage’, wrote him letter after passionate letter complaining of the ‘endless’ wait for him, and of her desire to sleep until the moment she awoke and, ‘with my hand in yours, I can squeeze it and say “Never apart again”’.74 The king stayed on for a while longer in Naples. In December he visited Sicily and met with an elaborate reception at Palermo, which included a huge monument to Garibaldi in the Piazza Marina.75 He then returned home to Piedmont. Italy was officially united the following February, with Vittorio Emanuele II as king, its capital in Turin, and Venice and Rome still under the control of ‘foreign oppressors’ (Austrian and papal rulers) (see map 2 on page 225). So ended the story of the Thousand.
Conclusion
The year 1860 was, as Denis Mack Smith has observed, the ‘annus mirabilis’ of the Risorgimento. Garibaldi's actions brought about the collapse of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, and led to the political unification of the Italian peninsula. These changes seemed all the more momentous because they were so unexpected and so rapid. For a short time in the summer of 1860, the small army led by Garibaldi – and with him Italian nationalism itself – seemed unstoppable. Yet, as Mack Smith has also shown, 1860 was also a ‘complicated and controversial passage of history’, involving civil war, diplomatic struggle and peasant unrest. Moreover, in the end, ‘[f]ew people were more surprised’ by Italian unification than Cavour, ‘its chief architect’, and ‘few more disappointed than Mazzini and Garibaldi, the two men who had looked forward to this moment most keenly and who had sacrificed most for its attainment’.76
Garibaldi was helped greatly in his campaign by the severe political crisis in southern Italy. He was also able to take advantage of a diplomatic situation, and especially a sympathetic British government, which worked in his favour. Equally, Garibaldi showed considerable military talent in 1860, both in his ability to surprise and improvise – he continually wrong-footed the enemy – and as a leader of his men. As an administrator, with the able assistance of Crispi, he was not unimpressive, especially when the government's lack of resources, the extent of rural unrest, and the scale of the previous government's collapse are taken into consideration. As I will explain in the next chapter, he also proved particularly good at giving his revolution a positive appearance, at making it seem a dramatic and inspiring turning-point in history.
He was much less successful at sustained political negotiation. He provided little leadership during the political crises in Palermo over the summer, and, while he supported Crispi, he seemed unable to stop La Farina. Anecdotal evidence also suggests that Garibaldi became impatient and bored during the prolonged discussions over the question of annexation. If only in this respect, it is clear that he was ‘no good at politics’. While his attitude may be understandable, it was also deeply problematic in a revolutionary leader and it caused problems for the democratic movement, as it had done on various occasions during the late 1850s. In 1860, Garibaldi's reluctance fully to resist the Piedmontese solution of immediate annexation led to his defeat by Cavour. This meant that all the political advantages gained in the spring and early summer were thrown away by the autumn. ‘Never tire of repeating to the General [Garibaldi]’, the Lombard federalist Carlo Cattaneo wrote to Crispi in July, ‘that it is not sufficient to know how to take, one must also know how to hold.’77 In the end, Garibaldi quietly handed over power to the king and Cavour, and slipped off ‘backstage’ to Caprera.
It is of course clear that the defeat of Garibaldi's revolution had, to an extent, been determined in advance by the subservient position long taken by many democrats in the alliance made with Cavour's Piedmont. This subservience is clear in 1860, both in the slogan – Italia e Vittorio Emanuele – adopted by the Thousand and in succession of decrees which adopted the Piedmontese constitution, legislation and administration in the newly ‘liberated’ provinces of southern Italy
. We might- also agree that Garibaldi was unlucky to have been faced with an opponent as endlessly resourceful as Cavour. It is also possible to argue that Garibaldi's real achievement in 1860 was to have forced Cavour's hand, to have obliged him to unite Italy under Piedmont and Vittorio Emanuele, an act which Cavour had never considered seriously before July 1860. Certainly, Cavour's reaction to the expedition reflected the now unstoppable appeal of Italian nationalism and of Garibaldi, its main symbol. Garibaldi's withdrawal to Caprera may also have made good sense militarily and personally, and it definitely worked on a symbolic level. There was no campaigning to be done in the winter, Caprera was good for Garibaldi's rheumatism, and the retirement to his farm added to his mystique as the Cincinnatus or Washington of Italy (both of whom had done the same at the end of their campaigns). For those opposed to the government, Garibaldi's lonely retreat also pointed to a form of internal exile and thus highlighted his shoddy treatment by the Piedmontese.
In the longer term, however, Garibaldi's actions made much less political sense. On the one hand, they left his army without a general, and the democrats without one of their most powerful, and certainly their most popular and famous, representatives during the crucial period between the plebiscite and the consolidation of unity in the spring of 1861. Southern Italy lost the leader of its revolution. Garibaldi's departure for Caprera was essentially an abdication of power. On the other hand, his behaviour offered a political basis for endless recriminations between moderates and democrats, gave rise to a personal bitterness which was to become a destabilising feature of the new Italian politics, and struck a symbolic pose which laid the foundation for a fractured and divisive national memory. In this way, an expedition conceived of in the name of liberty and unity and carried out in the most dramatic form imaginable, ended – in much the same way as the war of 1859 – in a political compromise which satisfied nobody.