by Lucy Riall
Many of these letters are especially interesting for the sense of a personal relationship and of intimacy, as well as political involvement, which their authors convey to their hero. Some had met Garibaldi, and wrote to renew their acquaintance. Sarah Barfield, who had met Garibaldi in Messina and published an account of their meeting in the Daily News, wrote: ‘May God long preserve your valuable life and when you visit England I hope you will come and see me’.162 The wife of the British consul in Tangier in 1850 wrote to remind Garibaldi of ‘the quiet and happy times’ they had spent together: ‘no one has followed your career with more interest and pride than I have done’; and an American who had met him in 1853 wrote with a message of political support, a lengthy account of his own life, and an invitation to visit in Boston.163 More usually, however, such confidence was entirely imagined. As one passionate supporter of Garibaldi wrote angrily to Joseph Cowen, Mazzini's great supporter in Newcastle: ‘Garibaldi, remember, is THE man of action at the present moment, and he deserves all the support we can collect. I have nothing to do with the Italian Committee here … I work for and with Garibaldi & no one else at PRESENT. The money that I receive shall be sent to HIM direct if possible.’164 A fifteen-year-old, ‘F. Keel’ from Birmingham, sent two letters to Garibaldi asking to be allowed to join him:
I hope that you will allow me to come to you now for I love you as I did my parents … [I] can stand or go through any danger or hardships for those I love, as I do you, I will do every thing in my power to please or enjoy you I will be unto you as a son should be to a father. do not think that this step is without due consideration … I hope you will send a letter as soon as possible for I am impatient to come to you. Please do not say no. for I shall be obliged to disobey this one request for my determination is fixed to come & serve you [sic].
‘Hoping you are quite well and happy … Goodbye till we meet’, the boy ended the letter.165 By way of contrast, but still displaying this sense of personal closeness, William Cobbit sent Garibaldi a nine-page diatribe about taxes and government spending in September, along with a similar letter to a newspaper, from a debtors' prison.166
Many letter-writers saw in Garibaldi an expression of their own religious beliefs, especially their faith in Protestantism and their horror of Roman Catholicism.167 Margaret Davis from Aberdare in Wales, a ‘profound admirer of Garibaldi’, wrote to him both of her desire to go as a nurse ‘to his wounded soldiers’ and of her ‘involuntary’ ability to do so, and of her conviction that Garibaldi would help in ‘opening the door of that blessed gospel of Jesus Christ which alone makes nations as well as individuals’.168 Religious fervour also inspired another Welsh writer, William Rayner from Swansea, to write a long letter in which he compared Garibaldi to Cromwell, and assured him that:
prayers from my heart and thousands of Christian hearts and pulpits in this country are constantly ascending on your behalf and for your preservation in every danger until your work is done. Oh! may it be done in your own humane and loving way and not by blood … My dear friend your little island [Caprera] is your throne and your work the Crown set not in polished jewels or diamonds but with great and worthy deeds that shall sparkle through the distant mists of time and nothing but the great conflagration shall obliterate its light.169
John Spear, ‘a staunch friend of Italian freedom’, wrote from Dublin of his disgust at the formation of the Irish brigade to defend the Pope. They were, he assured Garibaldi, only ‘400 misguided fanatics’ and should not be allowed to colour his attitude to Ireland. ‘Now your Excellency, is a great nation to be answerable for such a paltry piece of papal intrigue? I almost hear a determined negative, thundering from your lips, and grasp the auspicious moment, to implore of you, not to listen to the voice of those, that say “my country is your foe”.’ He accordingly asked permission of Garibaldi to organise a band of excursionists, ‘a noble Irish Legion’.170
That so many of these letters come from British or Anglo-Saxon sources suggests that British support for Garibaldi was especially strong. However, this may not necessarily be the case, since it may be that only the British letters to Garibaldi have survived, or were kept, while others were lost. In general, the most striking aspect of foreign support for Garibaldi was its international or cosmopolitan character, and it is possible to speak of a wave of international enthusiasm for Italy and for Garibaldi: along with Britain, the USA and France, Hungary, Poland and Germany sent volunteers to Sicily and the South. Moreover, throughout 1860, expressions of foreign support for Garibaldi, and the presence of foreign volunteers in his army, received huge attention and publicity. Foreign backing added force to the prevailing feeling that Garibaldi's campaign was both just and unstoppable, and it formed part of his government's selfimage and propaganda.
Such enthusiasm is further evidence of the success of Mazzini's international publicity campaign for Italy, which had begun some twenty-five years previously. It also shows us the effect of the press and publishing in creating a community of readers with shared interests and common sentiments. Subscriptions, letters and the act of volunteering suggest the extent to which readers in Paris, London and New York had become personally and emotionally involved with Garibaldi and his fate, and they tell us that some were inspired to become more than mere spectators to political events and had decided to invest materially in their result.
As before, however, we must be careful lest we too are drawn into, and convinced by, the powerful nationalist rhetoric of 1860. The appeal of events in Italy for the British public lay in the apparently simple triumph of good over evil, and their enthusiasm reflected a sense of national satisfaction at being on the right side (and ‘subjects of our devoted and beloved Queen Victoria’, as the secretary of the Southampton Athenaeum wrote). It is evident from their letters and statements that many people were as transfixed by Bourbon ‘tyranny’ as they were fascinated by the heroism of Garibaldi. For example, a visit to, and description of, the Bourbon prisons in Naples (condemned by Gladstone in the mid-1850s) became a seemingly obligatory ritual for all the British writers who made it out to join Garibaldi in 1860.171 So all this enthusiasm should be treated with some scepticism: a taste for morality tales and the spectacular did not always translate into lasting political engagement. Internal politics and preferences had always played a significant role in defining foreign support for Garibaldi: resistance to Napoleon III in the case of France; and a strident Protestantism (characterised by ‘extraordinary wildness and nastiness’, according to one of its historians)172 in the case of Britain and the USA.
Most important of all, we must note that – with the exception of one or two officers with previous military experience – the foreign volunteers for Garibaldi were never a huge help to him and were, on occasion, a positive hindrance. There was jealousy between the French and Italian volunteers and the French men were allegedly difficult to control.173 The British ‘excursionists’ caused very serious problems. These started before they even left Britain, and were created by a fake garibaldino, ‘Captain Styles’, who convinced the committee in London he was an agent of Garibaldi (see his picture in The Illustrated London News, figure 17 on page 256). He went about selling commissions but kept the money for himself, so that when the men arrived in Italy to find that their commissions were not recognised by Peard, their new commander, they were understandably furious. Further difficulties were caused by the Foreign Enlistment Acts, which forbade the recruitment for foreign armies on British soil. Although this problem was avoided by calling the volunteers ‘excursionists’, the published announcement read like a tourist advertisement, and many who went to join Garibaldi were ready for adventure and little else.174 One journalist, who published a highly fictionalised account of his experiences as an ‘excursionist’, wrote of his decision to go to Sicily with friends: ‘we all loved adventure, were sick of the dull routine of idle bachelor's life in town, and thought “it would not be such bad fun after all” … And thus it was we three friends became Garibaldi
ni’.175 Some were what Trevelyan calls ‘roughs’ from Glasgow and London, ‘who considered that they were out on a holiday at other people's expense’ and, although they were happy to fight, ‘expected a maximum of food and good quarters and a minimum of discipline’.176 They got drunk on the cheap wine, a group of them robbed a peasant on the Volturno, and there were real problems involved in getting them home when the campaign was over.177 Even medical volunteers were not immune to criticism. One of them, a Dr Wolfe who went out in July with drugs and medical instruments, fell out so badly with Garibaldi's doctors (and with Jessie White Mario in particular) that he was arrested and placed in Caserta prison.178
Finally, while much of the material looked at in this chapter would suggest that the whole world loved Garibaldi, this was actually not the case. As we saw earlier, the right-wing press in France attacked Garibaldi in newspapers and pamphlets: they argued that Britain was the true instigator and economic beneficiary of the collapse of the Two Sicilies, and that the real victim was Francesco II.179 One of the most passionate of all the letters to Garibaldi came from ‘a patriotic Frenchman, a friend of truth, [and] enemy of falsehood’, who wrote to condemn his actions (‘What have you done, brigand!’) and who was entirely unconvinced by the attempts to justify his attack on the Two Sicilies:
what is the good of adding hypocrisy to all the horrors of your life? … no! Everyone will understand what they already know: and what your apologists also know: that your aim is to bring disorder to humanity … and that were your desires to be fulfilled, Europe and perhaps the universe, would be nothing more than a vast sewer of mud and blood in which you and those like you would crawl until Judgment Day.180
Even in Britain, the Garibaldi committee was sued more than once by an anti-Garibaldi group which objected to its recruitment for the nationalist cause.181
Most importantly, the combination of Piedmontese expansion into the Papal States and Garibaldi's expedition to the Two Sicilies put Catholics everywhere on the defensive against Italian nationalism. In 1859, Pius IX had adopted a visible public stance of no compromise with the Piedmontese state and this had produced ‘a wave of emotion’ which ‘drew the hearts of Catholics towards Rome’ across Europe and America.182 Huge amounts of money were sent, in the form of a revived ‘Peter's Pence’, to help the Pope defend Rome and the Papal States against attack, and a wave of addresses were sent to the Pope, totalling over five and half million signatures.183 In 1860, the French General, Lamoricière, issued a proclamation: ‘The revolution now menaces Europe as once Islam used to menace it. Today as in old days the cause of the Pope is the cause of the civilization and liberty of the world’; he then went to Rome to raise an army of volunteers for the Pope.184 French bishops responded to his call and encouraged young men to join what would be called ‘the ninth crusade’. In Catholic Ireland, Archbishop Cullen launched a massive pro-papal agitation, and between February and July 1860 he organised a collection which raised a ‘prodigious’ £80,000 (or c. £5 million in present-day figures) for the Pope.185 A brigade of over 1,000 Irish volunteers formed and went out to join the 500 French zouaves and 600 Belgians, and they fought at the battles of Spoleto, Castelfidardo and Ancona against the Piedmontese army.
In Catholic Ireland, in other words, Garibaldi's campaign was not seen in a positive light at all, but as a threat to the Pope's temporal power. Moreover, the defence of the Pope contributed to the formation of an Irish–Catholic consciousness which could distinguish itself neatly from proItalian, Protestant, British identity.187 In general, 1860 saw the mobilisation of the Catholic Church against Italian nationalism, broadly associated with the revolution and perceived as a threat to European civilisation. As one French zouave wrote: ‘Nowadays the forces of Hell are known by a name that incorporates them all: the Revolution. Italy is the battleground where the great armies of Christian civilization and barbarism meet.’ This campaign was extremely successful, producing a popular response on a scale which in many ways surpassed support for Italian unification. Appeals to the Catholic community were made via pamphlets and newspapers, the organisation of subscriptions, and networks of voluntary associations; and some of the French zouaves attached the Sacred Heart insignia to their uniforms, using a symbol of Catholic identity developed during the French Revolution as protection against the sign of ‘Marianne’.188 Hence the Catholic war on ‘Italy’ relied on propaganda methods which were all too clearly ‘artefacts of political modernity’.189
Conclusion
Although support for Garibaldi in 1860 was not unanimous, he was definitely hard to ignore. In Sicily, he had the support of an intellectual elite and of sections of the Church, and his government was celebrated in newspapers, plays and poetry. He enjoyed considerable mass popularity, even if this popularity was tough to define and control. In the rest of Italy, his expedition to Sicily resulted in subscriptions and associations, and he quickly amassed a large and enthusiastic volunteer army. Throughout the summer, he was inundated with offers of foreign support and expressions of admiration. He posed as the ‘saviour’ of Sicily, and was seen as the ‘Redeemer’ (Saint Michael, Jesus Christ and/or Charlemagne). His calls to the nationatarms were reflected in volunteers’ letters to their ‘father’ at the head of a ‘holy cause’. His careful cultivation of foreign support was amply repaid by the declarations of support for the gallant (Protestant) General, fighting for the benefit of humanity (and against Rome and the Papacy).
The response of volunteers to Garibaldi's call can also be seen as a triumph for Mazzini's ideas and methods. Mazzini's propaganda strategy finally came good in 1860 and produced practical results on a significant scale. ‘Garibaldianism’, according to his British follower, Charles Forbes, was for Garibaldi's troops in 1860 ‘as completely a religion as was Mohammedanism with the fanatical followers of the prophet in the earlier days of the Koran’.190 His statement reflects the steps taken in 1860 towards establishing nationalism as a political religion. Just as striking is the variety of understandings of Garibaldi's message. Above all, it is clear that the radical and republican aspects of the revolution were submerged beneath a more generic discourse of national revival, whose broad appeal masked a variety of sometimes selfinterested and contradictory motives. Equally, we should not suppose, as many of his supporters seemed to in 1860, that Garibaldi carried all before him, or that his conquest of southern Italy represented the inevitable defeat of political conservatism and the Roman Catholic religion.
In August 1860, as Garibaldi prepared to relaunch his war against the Bourbons on the Italian mainland, he made the following speech to his officers and soldiers:
Among those qualities which must prevail among the Officers of the Italian Army, apart from bravery, there must also be kindness, which will attract and keep the affection of the soldier … A strict discipline can be obtained with severity; but it is preferable to obtain it with affection and leadership … It would be impossible … for a soldier in the field of battle to abandon his dear officer, who has treated him kindly, who has smiled at him in times of need, and with whom he has shared the trials and glories of a campaign. For this reason an officer must take special care to stay with his soldiers, and to look after them, as if they were his own family.191
In this passage, Garibaldi recognises the importance of affective ties to the functioning of his army and, more broadly, of appeals to emotion as the basis of his popularity. It was a sense of belonging (to a ‘family’) and affection for the national ‘community’ which lay at the root of the decision of so many men to leave their homes and fight with him for ‘Italy’ in 1860. These emotions offer powerful evidence for the formation of a national community in Italy, however complex, contingent or constructed.192
Although I have stressed caution in approaching much of the evidence presented in this chapter, it still suggests that the achievement of Garibaldi's dictatorship in creating a passionate sense of political identity in 1860 was quite considerable. These elements of a nationalist religi
on created by Garibaldi were neither especially authoritarian nor entirely oneway. The reactions to Garibaldi which I have looked at here point to his appeal being based on a fusion of authoritarian and democratic symbols. It was his capacity to be both magnificent and humble to which people responded; and it was the juxtaposition, beloved of democratic iconography and used so frequently in the letters and stories of 1860, of political achievement and private simplicity which seemingly made the most impression on the public imagination. Although, by 1860, he had left his more dangerous bandit persona far behind, Garibaldi still appealed to radicals, or to those who sought political, religious and social change, and to those who sought, more simply, an alternative form of political identity or a means of social escape.
