Garibaldi

by Lucy Riall

  The Unification of Italy, 1859–70

  CHAPTER 9

  MAKING ITALIAN HEROES

  Much has always been made of the unexpected nature of Garibaldi's triumph in Sicily in 1860. Yet his successes were surprising only in terms of the initial disorganisation and the sheer scale of the task which the men had set themselves. In other respects, he and his leadership did have a military strategy which was well suited to the unstable situation in the rural South. They also had a political and social strategy which reflected a clear awareness of the need to get ordinary Sicilians – and, subsequently, Neapolitans – materially on their side.

  As is well known, the economic and social measures introduced by Garibaldi's dictatorship ran into problems.1 Still, these reforms were only one aspect of a general strategy to encourage popular support. In fact, attention to the material aspects of the Sicilian revolution was paralleled by a powerful appeal to people's emotions, and by a series of attempts to put the revolution on display through festivals and other ceremonies of national ‘belonging’, in order to encourage popular identification with the new regime, and with the idea of Italy more generally. Here what is most striking is the attempt to be inclusive – to appeal to as many sectors of the population as possible – and the use of religious iconography. In particular, Garibaldi and his administration made repeated efforts not to offend the Church and clergy in Sicily, and many of their actions show an explicit recognition that they could accomplish little in the South without the support of the Church.

  The religion of revolution

  As in 1848–9 and 1859, Garibaldi's progress through Sicily and in Naples was marked by a series of stirring speeches and proclamations. Just as he had done at the start of the campaign in Lombardy in 1859, he issued a call to the population to join him. This time, however, Garibaldi referred not to the northern Italian myths of Pontida and Legnano (see pages 74, 172) but to the central episode in Sicily's ‘national’ history, the Sicilian Vespers (a thirteenth-century revolt against French rule).2 ‘Everyone to arms! and Sicily will teach us once more the way to free a country from its oppressors.’3 Throughout the rest of the campaign in Sicily, he alluded to the Vespers and to Sicilian pride. At the end of the fighting for Palermo, he told the crowd assembled at the Palazzo Pretorio that ‘my companions and I rejoice that we can fight alongside the children of the Vespers, in a battle that will smash the last link in the chain which has bound this land of genius and heroism’ (this speech was published in the Giornale di Sicilia on 2 June).4 Some time later he told the ‘citizens of Palermo’ that during the fighting for the city ‘I understood that I had in my presence the descendants of the Vespers’.5 Sicilians were ‘a great and generous people … in this classical land, the citizen rose up in disgust against tyranny, broke his chains, and with his shattered prison irons turned into daggers, fought the hired assassins’.6 More than once he thanked them for their enthusiasm, the ‘brothers of the city’ who had fought alongside the ‘strong and courageous sons of the countryside’, for the support of the priests (‘what a change from the dissolute priest of Rome’) and for the defiance of women, ‘beautiful in their rage and their sublime patriotism’.7 ‘Sicily is a country’, Garibaldi wrote in a ‘Proclamation to Sicilian Women’:

  which has no need to look to foreign history for examples of civic virtue by both sexes. In this island blessed by God, the fair sex of all ages has offered proof of such courage to amaze the world … The Vespers, a unique moment in the history of nations, also saw the charming women of this island take their place alongside those fighting for the independence of the fatherland.

  ‘Dear and charming women of Sicily,’ Garibaldi continued, ‘hear the voice of the man who genuinely loves your beautiful country and to whose love he is tied for the rest of life’, a man who had never asked anything for himself, only for ‘the common Fatherland’. Holding up the example of Adelaide Cairoli of Pavia (‘the richest, dearest, kindest woman [matrona]’), who had sent her four sons to fight and die for Italy, he urged them: ‘Women, send us your sons, your lovers!’8

  Garibaldi's speeches and proclamations to the Sicilian people are interesting because they follow an established Risorgimento formula – with their references to innate heroism, a glorious history and national ‘resurgence’ – while also being tailored to flatter and to excite a specific audience, whether Sicilians in general, women, peasants or priests. As in 1859, moreover, these speeches had two related purposes. They aimed to represent and popularise an ideal of virile, popular and inclusive italianità and, in so doing, they sought to make the thought of volunteering to fight for this ideal attractive and emotionally appealing; equally, others (women) were encouraged to participate by giving their material and moral support to Garibaldi's campaign. In this way, political consent was transformed into active political engagement. Especially worthy of note, because very unusual, was the attention paid to priests and the encouragement given to them to join Garibaldi. Indeed, one of Garibaldi's earliest proclamations, issued at the beginning of the campaign at Salemi (or possibly even Marsala), had been an appeal to the ‘good priests’ to follow ‘the true religion of Christ’. He gave specifically to priests the leadership in the war ‘to fight the oppressors’ and the task of liberating Sicily (‘our land … our children … our women … our inheritance and … us!’) from the domination of foreigners.9

  Garibaldi's Marsala proclamation re-used one of the most vivid phrases from his May 1859 call to the ‘people of Lombardy’: ‘Anyone who does not take up arms is a coward and a traitor to the fatherland.’10 In Palermo, he repeated the message: ‘So, all to arms, and armed, smash your prison irons and prepare every means of defence and offence … All to arms and armed, I repeat … Who does not take up arms in these three days is a traitor or a coward.’11 As Garibaldi moved towards the Straits of Messina and then Naples, his proclamations began to address the ‘Neapolitans’: ‘I would like … to avoid the spilling of blood between Italians, and so I turn to you, sons of the Neapolitan continent. I have seen that you are brave, but I don't want to see this again. Our blood, we will spill together over the corpses of Italy's enemies, but between us … truce!’12 ‘We will win without you; but I would be proud to win with You’, he wrote to the ‘Neapolitan Soldiers’ in a printed flyer with a political manifesto attached. The manifesto called on them to revolt against the king (‘destiny is in your hands, oh soldiers of Naples!’) and appealed to their sense of pride and religion. ‘Tomorrow you could be respected as soldiers of the world's first nation, as Italian soldiers’, the programme stated; but if they resisted, they would be fighting against Italy, France and England, and against a Providence which had protected Italy, put Napoleon on the throne of France, and ‘saved Garibaldi from a thousand deaths’.13 The (uncommonly) positive references to France and Napoleon are worth noting here: they are presumably an acknowledgement of Neapolitan nostalgia for Bonapartism, and especially for Napoleon's brother-in-law, the king of Naples, Joachim Murat.

  Garibaldi's dictatorship also appealed to the people through the figure of Garibaldi himself. In 1860, Garibaldi was not just the political dictator of Sicily (and later Naples), he also became the symbol of revolution in the South and, with the Piedmontese king, of Italian Risorgimento. As a letter to the radical Movimento paper put it: ‘the Sicilian revolution triumphed with him and in him’.14 Following on from the practice established in towns like Varese and Como during 1859, Garibaldi's public appearances and other commemorative occasions associated with him became the occasion for great public festivities. As in 1859, of course, we know about these festivities and the other scenes of enthusiasm for Garibaldi largely through the descriptions of partial observers, who had an interest in exaggerating the extent of popular involvement and the size of the crowds. Nevertheless, they can tell us something about the frenetic atmosphere in 1860 and the ways in which a cult of Garibaldi was publicly encouraged and staged.

  The first great Garibaldi celebration cam
e in Palermo after the armistice with the Bourbons at the end of May. Here Garibaldi made a speech to the crowd telling them of the terms, and of his determination to fight on. ‘I can find no words to describe the crowd's reaction’, Giuseppe Abba, a volunteer from Bergamo, writes:

  At the terrifying yell that broke out from the Piazza my hair stood on end and my skin went all goose-flesh. People kissed each other, embraced, almost suffocated in their passion. Women, even more than men, demonstrated their desperate readiness to face all dangers. ‘Thank you, thank you!’ they cried, stretching out their hands towards the General. From the end of the Piazza I, too, blew him a kiss. Such a radiant face had never, I believe, been seen before as on that balcony at that moment. The very soul of the people seemed transfused in him.15

  The next day, Garibaldi made a tour of the city. Ferdinand Eber, a correspondent of the London Times and a huge Garibaldi enthusiast, told his readers:

  I was there, but find it really impossible to give you even a faint idea of the manner in which he was received everywhere. It was one of those triumphs which seem to be almost too much for a man … the popular idol, Garibaldi, in his red flannel shirt, with a loose coloured handkerchief around his neck, and his worn wideawake [hat], was walking on foot among those cheering, laughing, crying, mad thousands … The people threw themselves forward to kiss his hands, or at least to touch the hem of his garment, as if it contained the panacea for all their past and perhaps coming sufferings. Children were brought up, and mothers asked on their knees for his blessing; and all this while the object of this idolatry was as calm and as smiling as when in the deadliest fire, taking up the children and kissing them, trying to quiet the crowd, stopping at every moment to hear a long complaint of houses burnt and property sacked … giving good advice, comforting, and promising that all damages should be paid for.

  ‘Anyone in search of violent emotions’, Eber advised, ‘cannot do better than set off at once for Palermo.’16

  An interesting feature of these descriptions is the reference to religion and to religious feeling. In his speeches and appearances in 1860, Garibaldi seemed to develop an ability to adopt a dignified pose (‘calm and … smiling’) while provoking (or recreating) impromptu scenes of popular religious fervour. His use of a religious vernacular to communicate with the people was alluded to by Charles Forbes, the English volunteer, who saw Garibaldi arrive in Messina: ‘There is a sort of intimate communion of mind between Garibaldi and the masses which is perfectly electrifying. They look up to him as a sort of link between themselves and the Deity – as a sort of father who would pardon their most venial crimes.’ ‘I have been many times told,’ he wrote later, ‘in all sincerity by the peasants, that he is the brother of the Redeemer.’17 Marc Monnier, observing Garibaldi in Naples, made very similar comments: ‘Garibaldi is a saint for the common people [les lazzarones] … It is God who has sent him to save the country; several call him Jesus Christ; his officers are the apostles. Alms are asked for in Garibaldi's name.’18 Moreover, Garibaldi's religious appeal was not confined to the Neapolitan lazzaroni. An English Protestant woman, Harriet Meuricoffre, wrote to her father from Naples in August of his extraordinary, and for her inexplicable, charisma (‘You have only to look into his face, and you feel that there is, perhaps, the one man in the world in whose service you would, taking your heart in your hand, follow blindfold to death’), and of his ‘devotion to and faith in a holy cause’ which were ‘written in letters of light’ on his face.19

  That the identification of the cult of Garibaldi with religious cults was deliberate, and created from above, is suggested not just by his speeches praising priests and the use of religious language, but also by his direct participation in religious services and celebrations. As we will see, he also managed to get a significant proportion of the southern clergy on his side. One of his first acts after the battle of Calatafimi was to receive a blessing in the cathedral of nearby Alcamo. On 15 July, for the festa di Santa Rosalia (the patron saint of Palermo), he sat on the high throne of Palermo cathedral, in the role of royal defender of the faith and of the Church, and followed the traditional religious ceremony which affirmed the power of the Pope's representative in Sicily.20 The day after he arrived in Naples, 8 September, was the popular religious festival of Piedigrotta, traditionally attended by the Bourbon monarchs, and Garibaldi made a point of participating in the religious service and celebrations. According to the journalist Charles Arrivabene, Garibaldi was accompanied by a great procession along the seafront to Piedigrotta: ‘lofty green, white and red poles were fixed in a double row in the ground, with flags waving from the summit. Hundreds and hundreds of carrozelle, gaily dressed with hangings and banners, and crowded with more people than the half-starved horses could well pull along, followed our carriages.’ He was cheered by the fishermen and lazzaroni, and women shouted ‘May the blessed virgin be with you, Eccellenza!’21 In the tiny church of Piedigrotta, Garibaldi was trapped by the crowds: one of his entourage described ‘the frenzy of the people to reach Garibaldi, who passed by, speaking brief words of love’.22

  On 19 September, Garibaldi went to the cathedral and presided over the liquefaction of the blood of San Gennaro, the patron saint of Naples. This ceremony was a central date in the city's religious and political calendar, and the fact that the saint's blood liquefied in the presence of Garibaldi was celebrated as a good portent for the new regime. As the British envoy, Henry Elliot, commented: Garibaldi treated ‘St. Januarius’ with ‘the greatest respect’, so that ‘the liquefaction came off last week with the usual éclat’.23 During all these celebrations, Garibaldi took great care to observe and pay his respects to local cults and sensibilities. In so doing he accepted the power of the Church, and identified himself with it in the role of a traditional monarch.24

  Yet if Garibaldi in his public appearances was careful to follow or borrow elements from traditional religious and royal rituals, he also achieved a familiarity, freedom, and even ordinariness which was entirely democratic (in Forbes’ words, he was both ‘one of themselves’ and ‘immeasurably above them all’).25 On the throne in Palermo, he wore his red shirt and scarf: he epitomised, according to one supporter, the ‘son of the people’ and the ‘alliance … between altar and law, between religion and reason, between the gospel and progress’.26 He also took to walking on foot among the people. When in Naples huge crowds greeted Garibaldi, he responded with a great show of friendliness and intimacy. Before his arrival in the capital, in the town of Rogliano, he had allowed himself to be ‘almost devoured by kisses’, and he had been ‘ubiquitous’: ‘seated on a sofa amidst a bevy of young ladies and children, evidently charmed with the variety of their stupid questions, as he fondled a baby one minute, wrote a few words in an album the next, and from time to time gave orders to the civil and military authorities’.27 After he arrived, according to the French writer Louise Colet who was in Naples, Garibaldi was ‘accessible to everybody, and appreciative of applause and public demonstrations’. He excited the people with his public speeches ‘just like in a kind of Greek democracy’ and ‘was their ideal of a sovereign’. He showed himself frequently on the balcony of his hotel, he came out for walks through the streets and along the seafront, and he greeted, and was greeted by, everyone. ‘He conquered this town,’ Colet comments, ‘not so much by force as by sentiment and real human warmth.’28 Both Marc Monnier and Harriet Meuricoffre, who had noted his exceptional charisma, stressed equally his ease, openness and ‘simplicity’. Meuricoffre wrote of his face ‘in which the whole character is written, simple, grand, and loving’;29 while Monnier noted that ‘[h]e greets all intruders with the patience of a martyr; he does not keep them at a distance; he does not speak to them sententiously. He is simple and kind … He is a child of the people, and adored by the people.’30

  This eclectic mix of the sacred and the everyday – the union of ritualised authority with the casual intimacy of the democratic leader – may explain the popular success of the cu
lt, and in particular help to account for the spontaneous emotional response to Garibaldi's presence. Such spontaneity should not obscure the extent to which popular enthusiasm had been prepared beforehand by nationalist propaganda, and further stirred up by Garibaldi on arrival, through his speeches and behaviour. Even if to a limited extent, Garibaldi's public appearances were planned and choreographed in advance. By 1860, moreover, Garibaldi had the advantage of being very famous. Already he embodied an heroic story of national pride constructed over the preceding two decades and which needed only to be adapted for the conditions of 1860; various tried and trusted mechanisms – such as the press and public appearances and speeches – were already in place to promote a popular cult. To this image was simply added a religious and especially a miraculous vocabulary which seemed particularly suited to the popular culture of Sicily and southern Italy, where there were local traditions of popular festivities for saints from which Garibaldi could benefit. What really distinguished the cult of Garibaldi in 1860 was that, for the first time, he was in power. This major difference meant that the cult could be elaborated in new ways and circulated on a scale which had never been possible before. In short, the cult of Garibaldi in 1860 became official.

  An indication of the government's determination to encourage an official cult of Garibaldi can be found in one of the first meetings of the new town council of Palermo on 17 June 1860. To applause, the members agreed on an address to the ‘Supreme Italian, General Garibaldi’: ‘a man from the heroic age, your name hardly had to be uttered and the Sicilians were freed, and became citizens of the great fatherland. The city of Palermo raises a unanimous cry of gratitude to the liberator of Sicily, and from its smoking ruins … salutes the Italian hero.’ They proclaimed him ‘the first among Palermo citizens’; and they decided that Porta Termini should be renamed Porta Garibaldi (and that the via Toledo – one of the two main streets of Palermo – should be renamed via Vittorio Emanuele).31 More important perhaps than names and speeches was their decision to pay for a birthday celebration in Palermo in honour of Garibaldi.32 This expenditure was especially significant since the government's lack of money was a serious problem; so serious that, by early August, the town council risked bankruptcy and considered reinstating the unpopular grist tax.33