by Lucy Riall
Apart from the spectacular story of the Thousand itself, writers now also had Garibaldi's memoirs to work with. Dumas had a version ready by June, and they were immediately serialised in Le Siècle as part of its coverage of Garibaldi's campaign.160 The memoirs met with instant success, going into numerous French editions and versions in the early 1860s, and (unlike Dwight's English version of 1859) were widely translated. By 1861, the memoirs had appeared in Italian (published in Palermo and Livorno), English, Norwegian, Dutch, German (in Zurich, Berlin and Stuttgart), Spanish (in Barcelona and Montevideo), Portuguese, Romanian and Russian.161 They were serialised in the German illustrated magazine, Die Gartenlaube, and in Italy in the Neapolitan paper, Il Nomade, and the Palermo paper, Il Garibaldi. Also in Italy in 1860, a cheap abridged (and presumably illicit) version was produced – Vita del prode vincitore di Varese – as well as a different version by Francesco Carrano, a Garibaldian officer, this time on the basis of a manuscript given to Carrano by Garibaldi and published as part of his own memoirs of the Cacciatori delle Alpi.162
The versions by Carrano and Dumas were only partly the memoirs of Garibaldi. Both men had decided to take the narrative beyond 1848 (where Garibaldi's memoirs had stopped), and to use other published sources and their own recollections and conversations to bring them up to date. Dumas, in particular, embellished the South American episodes and the personality of Anita to great dramatic effect. Again, the interest of these memoirs lies not so much in any new autobiographical details which they reveal about Garibaldi, as in the timing of their publication and fact of their immediate diffusion and multiple translation. The memoirs are a further indication of the continuing and growing appeal of Garibaldi's life to a national and international reading public.
That the expedition of the Thousand had sparked further interest in Garibaldi's life is confirmed by the proliferation of new biographies, alongside the publication of his memoirs. Some of these, like the Vita di G. Garibaldi narrata al popolo by Giuseppe Ricciardi,163 Louis de la Varenne's Vita del General Garibaldi (an Italian abridgement of the same author's Chasseurs des Alpes, with four pages added about the Sicilian expedition),164 and Balbiani's Storia illustrata della vita di Garibaldi,165 were written by those close to Garibaldi and/or to the sources. Ricciardi's volume aimed explicitly at historical accuracy (he filled his work with published speeches, letters and decrees), although he too was keen to exaggerate Garibaldi's charms (Garibaldi's life was ‘the most marvellous life that has ever been lived on this earth … more of an epoch than history’). He also added embellishments of his own and glossed over political disagreements.166 If Ricciardi's biography suggests the problems of maintaining biographical objectivity, Balbiani's Storia shows how commercially viable Garibaldi's life could be. Aimed broadly at the same market as the Album storico–artistico (every copy was signed by the author), there was again nothing special about Balbiani's narrative, which was little more than a lengthy (817-page) hagiography (indeed, Balbiani specificially compared Garibaldi to Jesus Christ in his looks, background and actions).167 Much more compelling were the book's high-quality colour prints, which made great use of green, white and red (the colours of the tricolour flag) and which illustrated every key episode in Garibaldi life, with a particular emphasis on the battle scenes of 1859 and 1860. That this illustrated formula worked is suggested by the book's numerous editions (at least five between 1860 and 1866), and the fact that the colour illustrations seem to have been produced, or at least have survived, as historical documents entirely separately from the book.168 At the same time, alongside these more significant works appeared a huge amount of cheaper, more emphemeral material.169 These too suggest the circulation of a Garibaldi narrative in a broader mass market, and the growth of a Garibaldi cult in a more popular culture.
There was an equally ready market for Garibaldi biographies and other material outside Italy. In the United States, O. J. Victor published a biography as the first number in the series ‘Beadles Dime Biographical Library’. Victor made great claims for his book: no ‘complete and authentic biography’ existed, and ‘the disjointed “autobiographies” of Dwight and Dumas’ were full of shortcomings. He, on the other hand, had used records in the Astor Library in New York, and the publisher's blurb claimed his book to be ‘The only correct and reliable life of Garibaldi; the Washington of Italy’ (the volume was also praised by the New York Herald on 22 December as ‘a well written and carefully compiled biography of the modern Washington’). In reality, however, Victor relied heavily on Garibaldi's memoirs for his narrative, and was just as happy as everyone else to invent new details. For example, he felt able confidently to assure his readers that Garibaldi had royal blood: ‘Garibaldi was Duke of Bavaria, AD 584 – his ancestors having discarded the title of King. Garibaldus … was King of Lombardy, AD 673 … The blood of l'ancinne [sic] noblesse, then, courses in his veins, and he may consort with kings by “divine right” as well as by right of his own greatness.’ Victor also revealed that, while in the United States, the hero had opened a cigar store in Cincinnati.170 In Britain, Paya's biography written in 1859/60 was translated into English, without acknowledgement, complete with illustrations;171 and in France, O. Féré and R. Hyenne published a new illustrated life (Aventures, expéditions, voyages), where once more the illustrations were as significant as the largely recycled, if very detailed, narrative.172 New biographies were published in Germany173 and in the Netherlands,174 and a biography based largely on Cuneo was also published in Spain.175
‘I like Garibaldi's expedition because I love novels and adventure stories!’ the dramatist Prosper Mérimée wrote to his friend Antonio Panizzi, the director of the British Museum Library, in May 1860.176 Alongside biographies and histories, Garibaldi inspired a plethora of poems, plays and novels. In Milan, Vittorio Ottolini published a melodramatic novel, Cacciatori delle Alpi, centred around the adventures of a group of Lombard liberals and volunteers in 1859. The novel opens with them drinking a toast to the liberty of Italy, and one of them recites at length the biography of Garibaldi from birth to the present day.177 Innumerable poems, hymns to Garibaldi, and musical marches for piano were also written and published as fly-sheets or as pamphlets in northern Italy. These included P. Giorzia's Garibaldi a Palermo: marcia trionfale (Milan, 1860); G. Predazzi's L'entrata di Garibaldi a Napoli: marcia per pianoforte (Genoa, 1860); or more simply E. La Croix, Garibaldi: marcia: invito all'Italia (Milan, 1860). In June, G. Azzi published in Ferrara Garibaldi in Sicilia. Canto nazionale:
He arrrived – waving in the wind
Is the sign of the cross;
‘Viva Italia!’ he cries, and ten million
Rise up to the sound of his voice.
‘Victory or the tomb
Is my proclamation to you’…
A hundred fires are lit
On the Sicilian hills;
A hundred brave men load
Their terrible rifles.
‘The Italians don't fight’
A foreigner said one day:
While the protector of our despots,
Pours his last glass away.178
This poem, with its emphasis on heroic example, sacrifice and the rejection of foreign accusations of cowardice, confirms the almost instant establishment of the Thousand as a standard story within Risorgimento discourse.
Nor, again, was this literary production confined to Italy. In Madrid, Manuel Gil de Salcedo published a ‘historical novel’ – Garibaldi y Procida, ó las Pasquas Sangrientas de Sicilia – set in Palermo during the 1848 revolutions, with a biography of Garibaldi attached, and the meeting of Garibaldi and the king was marked by two poems, published cheaply in Barcelona as broadsides with an accompanying illustration.179 In Paris, a satirical play, L'Ane et les trois voleurs, set in Naples and with Garibaldi, Mazzini and Cavour as its main protagonists, was performed. In it Garibaldi complains about the attention of foreign correspondents: ‘responsible for letting Europe know every time I blow my nose’.180 The indefati
gable Pierre Dupont published a chant rustique: ‘Sicilienne à Garibaldi’; an ‘E. Atgier’ published a robust defence of his hero (‘O dear Garibaldi! whoever hates you/ Belongs body and soul to the deadly caste’);181 while after Garibaldi's return to Caprera, M. Barthélemy published a sevenpage poem, ‘Garibaldi or the waking of the lion’:
Such is Garibaldi! … His hand holds the oriflamme;
He is the God of battle, throwing everywhere his flame!
Tremble, tyrants, tremble! Don't irritate the God…
He takes but one step, and Europe is on fire!182
In Britain too, the expedition of the Thousand was celebrated in novels and poems.183 Two plays were performed – Garibaldi the Italian liberator and Garibaldi's excursionists – in the course of 1860.184
The narratives of Garibaldi's expedition in 1860 and the new biographies published in the same year follow a trend established in 1859, and concentrate on selling Garibaldi to as broad a readership as possible. This trend was immensely popular, in that the material was relatively cheap and readily accessible, even to those with a limited reading ability.185 Moreover, this kind of cultural production gave the public in Italy and elsewhere a choice of reading material. Readers could follow Garibaldi's progress through volunteers’ letters and detailed commentaries in the daily press; and they were able to enjoy them again, with accompanying pictures, in the illustrated weekly and satirical magazines. If this was not enough, they might follow up their interest in an illustrated biography or in the great man's memoirs. They could read (or indeed write) a poem dedicated to him, play a tune to him on a piano or even go to the theatre to watch a Garibaldi play. What was significant about the story of Garibaldi in 1860 was the vast extent, pace and variety of its circulation.
Conclusion
There are different memories of the Thousand and its aftermath. The first is a Risorgimento tale of triumph and tragedy: a small group of heroic men overthrow oppression and liberate their enslaved ‘brothers’, only to be betrayed and defeated by a number on their own side. The second sees the events of 1859–60 as a single, happy continuum: the story of Garibaldi being ‘the right man in the right place at the right time’, and of opposing political views compromising and coalescing at the right point and with the right objective – Italian unification.186 Finally, there is the more recent interpretation of the events of 1860 by historians. For them, 1860 was a form of civil war, a moment of intense political conflict and social instability, the results of which were actually damaging to national unity. The first view is represented by the democrats and told in Garibaldi's memoirs;187 the second was officially sanctioned after unification; and the third was outlined by Marxist historians, and by Denis Mack Smith in Britain, during the 1950s and after.188 All are useful in explaining and understanding the myth of Garibaldi which developed in and from 1860.
Recent historians are correct to argue that behind the scenes the events of 1860 were driven by a bitter three-way struggle for political control of southern Italy, between conservatives, moderate liberals and democrats/ republicans, in which the moderate liberals eventually emerged victorious. The key to understanding what drove this struggle forward lies in the immense ambitions of those democrats who left for Sicily in May. The volunteers – a tiny group of ill-armed men – aimed to overthrow an entire kingdom with a powerful army, and to impose their democratic vision of a future Italy on Piedmont. The leaders then tried to create, in the space of a few months, a new kind of mass volunteer army (the nation-at-arms) based on a revolutionary ideal of active political engagement. They also sought to create a model of national belonging which would exclude as few as possible, and to persuade diverse groups (including priests), classes and regions that their identity was Italian. Garibaldi's government spent considerable time and effort in publicising itself and putting Garibaldi on display. In turn, in his published letters, speeches and personal appearances in southern Italy, Garibaldi himself did a great deal directly to popularise and endorse the idea of Italy. In effect, an official cult of Garibaldi was encouraged in the South, using a potent mix of religious rituals and democratic discourse, of traditional symbols and modern methods, in an effort to persuade its inhabitants to become ‘national’. These ambitions predated the expedition to Sicily, and all were traceable – in one way or another – to the political ideas and propaganda methods of Mazzini.
It is not surprising that Garibaldi's actions provoked Cavour's hostility. In the light of its ambitions, Cavour's dislike of the revolution in southern Italy was not at all unexpected. Brilliant politician that he was, he tried consistently to hide his horror at the threat it posed to his domination of Italian politics. Yet it is evident in retrospect that he had little, if any, enthusiasm for Italian nationalism, no interest whatever in southern Italy, and a deep antipathy to the idea of the nation-at-arms. Nor was he much reassured by the use of the king's name to justify the expedition. Cavour was a politician whose strength came from parliament and from resisting the power of the crown, so Garibaldi's royal dictatorship was equally a threat to him.189 Cavour also had a long-standing antipathy to the Church, and practical experience of bitter Church–state conflict during the parliamentary struggles in Piedmont during the 1850s, so he would hardly have been pleased by Garibaldi's friendliness towards priests.190
As we have seen, Cavour was able to trap the democrats and push them politically out of southern Italy. However, he was far less successful in challenging Garibaldi's appeal and the religion of the Italian nation which the southern dictatorship in Sicily had promoted with such skill and dedication. In the end, Cavour managed only temporarily to control Garibaldi and neutralise the threat of Italian nationalism, and he did this by acting as the defender of Italy. In order to control the apparent inevitability of national unification, Cavour was forced to become its main architect. It is in this way that Italian unity was the product both of political conflict and of nationalist feeling. It is also in this light that Garibaldi's achievements – militarily victorious, politically defeated and publicly celebrated – can best be assessed.
In the next chapter, I will assess the evidence of popular support for Garibaldi's expedition and of enthusiasm for him as a heroic figure. The point to note here is how widespread it was imagined to be. Publicity was part of the expedition from its outset, and part of its political ambition. Garibaldi and others with him went to Sicily with a narrative strategy, and they sought to promote the expedition as a popular and morally justified venture, destined for a glorious outcome if only Italians would join them. This aspect of the story of the Thousand was in place even before the volunteers arrived in Marsala, and it follows established Risorgimento discourse. Thereafter, life began to imitate art. Put simply, the lived experiences of the Thousand and the representation of these experiences seemed for a time to converge, a fusion perhaps best illustrated by the heavy use of the epistolary formula in newspaper coverage of the events. The publication of volunteers' letters from the front added a touch of intimacy to these otherwise public affairs. As the expedition faltered with the arrival in Naples of the Piedmontese army, writers – particularly Garibaldi – fell back on an initially oblique rhetoric of disappointment and betrayal. The use of fictional techniques to describe and justify ‘real’ political activity was immensely effective: it gained Garibaldi and his expedition unprecedented fame and had a powerful impact on public opinion.
Palermo and Naples may never have become the democratic power base that Cavour so feared, but they did become the centre of (‘global’) press attention in the summer of 1860. What happened in these cities provided the basis for spreading the nationalist message to the rest of Italy and beyond. In fact, more surprising than the reliance on democratic publishers and writers, and as notable as the process of official nation-building within southern Italy, was Garibaldi's capacity to get substantial sections of the European and American press on his side. Such support had been prepared well in advance, and it reflected a prevailing sympathy with
the Italian Question felt by much of liberal Europe. Garibaldi succeeded remarkably well in charming journalists. Press support was reflected in the exceptional amount of printed material produced about him in 1860 and, along with the tendency of journalists to chase copy and copy each other, it produced an elaborate mythology of the man and his actions which drowned out any conservative/clerical criticism. It also became, for a while, self-sustaining. Most of all, the rapport which developed between Garibaldi and his press followers helped construct an image of the expedition with a very broad appeal, in which politics became a form of public entertainment. Thus, however equivocal and divisive the political outcome of Garibaldi's expedition to Sicily, its representation was no less than a propaganda triumph.
By 1860, Garibaldi's story had acquired a powerful fictional element and became a kind of collaborative effort with a structure and logic of its own. Dumas, who has always been taken to task for inventing and embellishing episodes in Garibaldi's life, was anything but unusual, and is really the best example of a much wider fashion. Popular biographies and fictionalised histories were not simply a significant – if inaccurate – way in which news of Garibaldi's expedition reached a broader reading public in 1860. They also became a means through which the public could engage with Garibaldi on an imaginary level. Writers used a novelistic style, or they embellished events and invented episodes and, helped by the spectacular nature of the events they were describing, produced a narrative of revolution which read like an adventure romance. Artists too produced a heavily romanticised visual narrative of the Thousand. In short, the appeal of Garibaldi relied on a strong call on the imagination and emotions. Political principles were not absent, but they were treated as only one aspect of a life which was at once exemplary and entertaining.
