Garibaldi
Page 37
It was Dumas who made famous the incident of Garibaldi and Missori's reaction to the cavalry charge. Blocked on the road by the Bourbon cavalry:
The General leapt at the bridle of the officer, shouting: surrender. By way of reply, the officer swiped at him with a downward blow: General Garibaldi parried the blow, and with a backhand strike cut his throat … Three or four sabres were drawn on the General, who wounded one of his aggressors with the point of his sword. Missori killed another two and the horse of a third with three pistol shots.
Finally, it was Dumas who gave the reader a memorable – and again intensely personal – description of Garibaldi sleeping on the steps of a church after the battle, in which the private and intimate became a sign of immeasurable historical greatness:
surrounded by his staff … lying on the vestibule, with his head leaning on his saddle, worn out with tiredness: he slept. Next to him was his supper, a piece of bread and a jug of water. My dear Carini, I was taken back to 2500 years ago, and I found myself in the presence of Cincinnatus. May God protect him for you my dear Italians, because if some misadventure were to take him from you, the whole world could not give you another like him.101
Journalists and their public
The involvement of Alexandre Dumas best symbolises the remarkable fusion of politics and theatre, news journalism and popular fiction, and the public and the personal which characterised the way the story of the Thousand was accomplished, narrated and remembered. It can hardly be over-stressed how important winning the sympathy of journalists was to Garibaldi. Most obviously, press sympathy was crucial to combat any criticism of what Garibaldi had done. We should remember that at the outset of the expedition Garibaldi's volunteer army had no legal basis whatever, that they had stolen two ships, and that they had attacked without provocation the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, a recognised and legitimate state, from a base in Piedmont, a non-enemy state. All these actions gave ample opportunity to his right-wing and clerical enemies to attack Garibaldi for being a pirate and a bandit.
In fact, the Bourbon government immediately denounced Garibaldi on this basis, and was quickly followed by the rest of legitimist and reactionary Europe, and especially by the French press. The Neapolitan minister Carafa published a diplomatic note which accused Garibaldi of leading ‘a fact of the most savage piracy’ with a ‘horde of brigands’ (as well as saying the British had helped him disembark at Marsala).102 La Gazzetta di Napoli called Garibaldi ‘a monster in human shape’ and La Gazzetta di Roma an ‘Antichrist’.103 On 10 May, Le Pays, a Bonapartist paper in France, wrote that ‘[the] expedition of Garibaldi carried out without a tie to any nationality, without a flag, without a right of any kind, should simply be treated as an act of piracy’; and it was followed on 22 May by the legitimist Le Correspondant, which said that Garibaldi had attacked a state he was not at war with, ‘at the whim of his fancy and his ambitions’. Also in France, L'Union on 2 June called Garibaldi ‘an adventurer … a bandit, a pirate acting for his own ends … a buccaneer’, and on 10 June described his volunteers as ‘barbarians of the modern age … Saracens of the revolutionary idea’.104 The author of a pamphlet Halte-là Garibaldi! described him as a ‘bandit-chief subsidised by the foreigner’, and repeated the accusation against the British.105
Some inkling of how the expedition could be interpreted even by the friends of Garibaldi was provided by The Illustrated London News, normally very well disposed towards him. However, on hearing the news of his arrival in Sicily the paper found it impossible to deny that ‘the famous partisan General in his present expedition is acting the part of nothing more or less than a buccaneer; that he is guilty of simple piracy’, and criticised his ‘characteristic impetuosity’.106 And even though a writer for the New York Times hoped ‘fervently’ for the success of Garibaldi's expedition, he feared ‘that the end of the heroic Garibaldi is nigh. Disappointed and heart-sore [a reference to Giuseppina Raimondi], he has, it is said, a desire to meet a glorious death, and it is likely that his fancy will be indulged.’107 Garibaldi, according to a leader in London's Times on 22 May (reprinted in the New York Times on 4 June), ‘is either a hero or a brigand, all men of his stamp divide the world in admiration or execration’.
As the campaign wore on, however, and Garibaldi went from victory to victory, there was a marked shift in his favour in the attitude of the press. This shift was especially noticeable in France, and probably reflected Napoleon III's view that Garibaldi's conquest of Sicily was a fait accompli. The liberal Journal des Débats wrote on 23 May that it now seemed impossible ‘to prevent the unanimous explosion produced in favour of Garibaldi’, and described his progress as ‘a serious victory’. ‘All eyes are fixed on Garibaldi’, the paper proclaimed at the end of May.108 On 7 June, the radical Le Siècle felt able to publish an extended tribute by Louis Jourdain to the ‘miracle’ brought about by Garibaldi: ‘Condottiere, adventurer, officer of fortune, even a brigand … what does it matter! Garibaldi is above all a hero, even better, an apostle of liberty and independence … he has just won his place – and what a place! – among the greatest and most heroic figures of this century, of all centuries. All honour to this brave captain!’ Reflecting and adding to the publicity surrounding Garibaldi, the exiled novelist Victor Hugo made a speech from Jersey in June which was reported, translated and reprinted across the European press:
Garibaldi! What is Garibaldi? He is a man, nothing more. But a man in the most sublime meaning of the word. A man of liberty; a man of humanity … Does he have an army? No. A handful of volunteers. Does he have weapons of war? Not at all … So where does his force come from? … What does he have with him? The people's soul.
Hugo's speech was also reprinted and published in a Brussels edition of Dumas’ Mémoires de Garibaldi, with an introduction by George Sand, and the flurry of press activity around his speech can be seen as a furtive political discussion of French policy in Italy.109 In fact, throughout the summer the Revue des Deux Mondes dedicated significant amounts of space to in-depth discussion of the Italian revolution. By the end of the campaign, one of the French artist–writers who had followed Garibaldi in 1860 described the attitude of the French press as follows:
For some, the famous native of Nice is an adventurer, a seawolf … his companions a heap of bandits and buccaneers … For others, the erstwhile defender of Rome is a hero, a character from the book of Plutarch, almost a new Messiah surrounded by a phalanx of martyrs and liberators. But there is one point on which the whole world is in agreement, and that is the integrity and unselfishness of the hermit of Caprera.110
In Germany too, the press began to express admiration of Garibaldi's courage and ability as a soldier, even while it disagreed with his politics.111 Karl Marx, never a fan of the Italian nationalists, wrote in the New York Tribune on 14 June that Garibaldi was ‘the prevailing topic of discussion’ in Germany.112
In the end, there was no doubt in the international press that 1860 was Garibaldi's year. The Illustrated London News wrote about the prince of Wales’ visit to Canada and the growth of a volunteer movement in Britain, and L'Illustration faithfully followed the tours of Napoleon III and his family to his new provinces in Savoy and the south of France, but there was little really to rival Garibaldi. On 9 June, New York's Harper's Weekly proclaimed that: ‘There are conjunctures in every age when the triumph or defeat of great principles hinges on the fortunes of individuals’. Thus, ‘the course of civilization and human freedom depends … upon the success of Garibaldi’. For the London Times on 15 June, Garibaldi was the ‘Washington of Italy’ who ‘descended among a people whose spirit was broken by long oppression, and whose trust was broken by frequent treacheries … [he] has made war like a Christian gentleman. He has spoken and he has fought in the old spirit of chivalry.’ The British satirical paper, Punch, published a cartoon the next day, Garibaldi the liberator: or the modern Perseus, showing Garibaldi (Perseus/‘Garibaldi to the rescue’) chasing off Francesco II (the serpent/�
��Bomba junior’) while Sicily (the beautiful maiden Andromeda) lay chained on the rock behind him (see figure 15). Women's illustrated magazines like The Lady's Newspaper and Pictorial Times also published pictures of Garibaldi. This fascination continued throughout the summer. ‘No such feat’, commented the New York Herald in September, ‘is recorded in history, nor even amongst the deeds of mythological heroes.’ ‘It was truly a most daring and extraordinary enterprise’, wrote the New York World: ‘an enterprise unparalleled in modern times, whether it is viewed in relation to the paucity of the force by which it was achieved, the formidable strength of the potentate against whom it was directed, or the tact, audacity, and military skill of the hero who projected and executed it.’113 In France, the satirical paper Le Chiarivari poked fun at the prevailing obsession with Garibaldi: a middle-class husband criticised by his wife for not caring for the garden replies that it is true, he had forgotten that they had their house to see to and their garden to cultivate, but ‘la campagne de Garibaldi me fait oublier la mienne’.114
15 ‘Garibaldi to the rescue’ comments Punch. This cartoon was produced shortly after the details of Garibaldi's conquest of Palermo had become known.
In this way, the longterm assault on national and international public opinion, prepared by Mazzini since the 1830s, produced a press-led ‘Garibaldimania’ characterised by massive press attention, most of which was entirely positive. In Italy itself, press reporting in 1860 represents an apogee for Risorgimento rhetoric. Nationalists of all political persuasions came to echo each other in praising what had been accomplished, and concurred in emphasising the glorious example set by Garibaldi. Raymond Grew points out that, while the attitude of the National Society and La Farina to Garibaldi's expedition had been ‘uncertain’ and hesitant, its newspaper – Il Piccolo Corriere – ‘played happily to the hero-worship of Garibaldi’, comparing him to El Cid, a medieval knight, and Napoleon, and complimenting him for the enthusiasm he had engendered in a ‘skeptical and materialistic’ age.115 A left-moderate deputy in the Piedmontese parliament, Pier Carlo Boggio (‘the enfant terrible’ of the Rattazzi party, according to The Times), who had opposed Garibaldi in the parliamentary debate over Nice in April 1860, and after the campaign was over was to attack Garibaldi again,116 had nothing but praise for him during the summer. He wrote a short biography of Garibaldi (Da Montevideo a Palermo) which was decidedly conventional both in its narrative structure and in the praise which it heaped on him. Boggio differed only in the portrait which he used of Garibaldi (showing him in his dark civilian garb of the 1850s), and in the suggestion – couched in very positive terms – that the hero was an enigma:
the most extraordinary man! An unresolved and perhaps irresolvable Enigma! … he brings alive the fiction of Homeric songs, and of the Round Table … the contrast between his physical form, which is quite delicate, and the unyielding energy of his moral gifts – between the sweetness of his gaze and the toughness of his will – everything contributes to endow this man with a prestige which is easier to sustain, than to understand or explain.
Otherwise, he followed entirely the nationalist formula in praising ‘Garibaldi, the most powerful, the most marvellous personality that Italy, and perhaps the world, boasts in the field of action.’117
More broadly, the moderate press followed the democrats in exalting Garibaldi as a new nationalist saint. He was a ‘heroic son of Italy’, ‘the redeemer of Italy’, the ‘Genius of Italy’ and the ‘Archangel Gabriel … appeared in human shape on earth’.118 The Turin illustrated paper, Il Mondo Illustrato, which was relaunched on 7 July probably in response to the events in southern Italy, fully embraced Garibaldi and the story of the Thousand. In its first number, it began a two-part history of ‘Garibaldi in Sicilia’ by F. Botto. Botto's history, along with similar accounts in the foreign illustrated press, helped to create a narrative of the campaign as a series of emblematic and picturesque moments. The departure from Quarto, ‘They arrive in Sicilia’, ‘Calatafimi’, were followed by ‘They win’, ‘Within sight of Palermo’, ‘Entrance’, and so on until Garibaldi's entry into Naples and the defence at Volturno. All these episodes and characters were constructed as a pictorial history of the events of 1860, with a beginning (Quarto), climax (Naples), and happy ending (the king and Garibaldi at Teano).119
There was nothing casual about the involvement of the press with Garibaldi in 1860. Indeed, Garibaldi and those around him consistently did their utmost to endear themselves to journalists. Garibaldi, in particular, used his personal charm to win over journalists, and he encouraged them along with other writers and artists to join his campaign and report on it from the inside. Other than his friendship with Dumas (which predated the departure from Quarto), perhaps the most striking example of Garibaldi's closeness to journalists, and the blurred line between journalism, camp following and soldiering, is his relationship with the Times correspondent Eber, a Hungarian officer who had come out to Sicily to fight with, as well as write about, Garibaldi. Eber's articles for The Times are among the most vivid contemporary accounts of the experience of being with Garibaldi, but what is most interesting for us is how Garibaldi treated him. Unlike the Bourbon army, Eber had no problem in finding Garibaldi in the mountains above Palermo; he joined up with some American and British sightseers and was taken quickly to Garibaldi's camp at Gibilrossa, on the day before the volunteers were due to go down to Palermo. Garibaldi received the visitors ‘with that charming, quiet simplicity which characterizes him, lending himself with great complaisance to the invariably recurring demands of autographs, and answering the numerous questions which were naturally put to him’. Only after the other visitors had gone did Garibaldi resume the pressing business of organising the descent to Palermo and, if the report is to be believed, he immediately let Eber in on all his plans and included him in the invasion party.120
Garibaldi's courtesy towards Eber was not at all unusual, and reflects his awareness that the press had become an integral part of modern warfare. As The Times pointed out on 8 June 1860:
Battles are now fought in an amphitheatre with the eager public of a hundred nations, in a figurative sense, looking on … The duel between Garibaldi and the Neapolitan Viceroy is being fought out under eyes of newspaper correspondents, tourists, artists, and English or American sympathizers, as well as … more official spectators.
According to Henry Adams, an American journalist who met Garibaldi shortly after the taking of Palermo, Garibaldi was careful to greet, and shake hands with, every member of his party: ‘He talked with each of us, and talked perfectly naturally; no stump oratory and no sham’. When Garibaldi learnt that Adams had come all the way from Naples to see him, ‘he turned around thanking me as if I had done him a favor. This is the way he draws people.’121 Vizitelly of The Illustrated London News agreed. He wrote: ‘I shall never forget as long as I live the courteous reception given me by the General. He advanced to meet me from his group of officers, and, shaking me by the hand, welcomed me to his roof, which at any time might be splintered into fragments above our heads.’122 Later on, after the crowds grew too insistent and Garibaldi retreated from the Palazzo Pretorio to the more protected Palazzo Reale, he was still careful to keep his door open to journalists; and he made a great display of the simplicity of his apartments and the beauty of their setting on top of the Porta Nuova, with a splendid view of the city below.123
By the time he left Palermo in July, Garibaldi was accompanied by a substantial, increasing, and loyal press entourage. Apart from Dumas and Eber, two Italian journalists based in London – Gallenga and Arrivabene – came to Sicily, as did Texier and Paya from France, and the artists Vizitelly, Nast (a German–American who joined Medici's expedition and worked for Harper's Weekly and The Illustrated London News),124 and Devaux and De Fonvielle (for the Paris Illustration). Two photographers – Sevaistre and Le Gray – also travelled to Palermo to photograph the war and its protagonists.125 Later, they were joined by the writers Maxime du C
amp and Marc Monnier (who wrote for the Revue des Deux Mondes), and by the poet Louise Colet (‘Flaubert's muse’).126 All of these people published articles and books about their experiences.127 Some stayed with Garibaldi, others moved around more: a significant number in Sicily, for instance, seem to have followed General Türr into the wild interior, and sent reports back from there on their activities. These writers were joined by a broader group of political sympathisers or simple admirers: Englishmen like Forbes, Clark and Bucknell, who followed Garibaldi's campaign, sometimes at the front of the army (Forbes was with Garibaldi at Milazzo; Clark on the train with him into Naples). They too sent letters to the papers and published reminiscences – often written as travel books but with their political adventures included – describing, glorifying and promoting their experiences.128 One of the Italian volunteers, Giulio Adamoli, described the atmosphere in Türr's headquarters as a ‘Babel’ full of foreign journalists and volunteers, whose only common language was German: ‘A caravanserai of the Orient, with all his guests of different races, fashions, colours, can only give some idea of our headquarters and of the respectable or vulgar, pleasant or grotesque, renowned or unknown people who sat at our table during those fantastic months’.129