by Lucy Riall
Equally, Garibaldi fashioned himself, but he was not the only source of the cult which surrounded him. In the vast theatre which characterised the production of the Garibaldi cult in 1860 – the symbols and associations, speeches and newspapers, the memoirs, novels, plays and letters – it is not always clear who is controlling whom, or who is the ‘transmitter’ and who the ‘receiver’ in this process of communication. The creation of the cult of Garibaldi can perhaps be more accurately defined as, in Marjan Schwegman's words, ‘a dynamic, highly international, interactive work of art created by many different men and women’, a product which was political because it publicised and inspired adherence to a political project ‘that the public was supposed to act out in their own life’.193 This ‘interactive’ nature of Garibaldi's appeal can explain why such a wide range of groups found in him something to react to. It may also help to account for the intensely emotional response to Garibaldi (the feelings of personal involvement with his programme, or of intimacy with and confidence in him) which is typical of the correspondence of those, like volunteers or foreign women, who had never actually met him or known the places he fought for. So, while Garibaldi's message in 1860 may seem somewhat equivocal and his charisma artificially constructed and promoted, its reception was in many ways spontaneous and creative, and the responses to him were genuinely felt.
CHAPTER 11
UNIFICATION
Caprera
Garibaldi threw away a huge political advantage when he agreed to hand over power to Piedmont and retired ‘backstage’ to Caprera in November 1860. At least initially, however, he was not aware of the scale of his defeat. On 18 October, he wrote simply to Mazzini that ‘if one must concede it is better to do so with good grace’.1 He was careful to thank everybody who had helped in the expedition, which may suggest he was planning to call on their support another time. He wrote a public letter to the Garibaldi committee in New York, in which he thanked them and the ‘generous American people’, and told them that ‘the enterprise is not completed. There is a part of our family still oppressed by atrocious despotism … you must not abandon your work for us.’2 He explicitly told the Italian committee, in another public letter, ‘don't disband. Do not abandon the enterprise halfway. What you did in the name of Sicily and Naples, you must also do for Rome and Venice.’3 He wrote to the Polish émigré Ludwik Mieroslawksi that ‘my withdrawal to Caprera is not a desertion of the cause of the people to which I have dedicated my whole life.’4 Finally, he even wrote as much to the king, telling him that he was going to Caprera in order to get himself ready, that ‘soon Your Majesty will be called to finish that great task for which Providence has destined you’, and that, in this case, ‘I would consider myself very fortunate to be numbered among your soldiers.’5 With his generals, Garibaldi also envisaged the creation of five armed divisions – the Cacciatori delle Alpi – made up of his southern army, foreign volunteers, and any other volunteers not subject to the national conscription laws; and these were to be stationed in various regions of Italy in readiness for the next war against Austria.6 Everything suggested, in other words, that Garibaldi left for Caprera planning another campaign for Venice and/or Rome over the following summer, and did not consider that the struggle for Italy was over.
The winter spent in Caprera did little to alter his expectations and ambitions. Fundraising activities continued, and in January Bertani relaunched the 1860 ‘committees of aid’ as ‘committees of assistance’ for Rome and Venice with Garibaldi as president. Accepting the appointment, Garibaldi wrote to the committee that they must have ‘as the password for every day, every moment, repeated incessantly to every committee and tried by every other means to be absorbed into the minds of every Italian: – that in the forthcoming spring of this year 1861 Italy must, without mercy, put a million patriots to arms’. To that end, he recommended that they set up a newspaper, Roma e Venezia.7 At this point, he still saw Austria – rather than the Pope – as the main adversary. His letter to Mieroslawksi, in which he also stated his support for ‘our brave Poles’, was redated and published in Il Diritto.8 To Mazzini he wrote that he would prefer to fight for Venice first: ‘We have a vast theatre of operations: – that is from the mouth of the Danube to the mouth of the Po’.9 ‘I am sure that Italy can fight its war of redemption again this year’, he wrote to the British political leader ‘John Russel’ [sic], in London in early March.10
Garibaldi had good reason to be confident. His prestige in early 1861 was immense: ‘dominating the picture we have the gigantic figure of Garibaldi growing bigger and bigger on his rock at Caprera and casting his enormous shadow even at this distance’, the diplomat Costantino Nigra wrote to Cavour from Naples in March.11 In the national elections of January 1861, Garibaldi won seats in several constituencies, and chose to represent Naples (although he did not travel to parliament when it met in February). Letters of support and various honours were sent to Garibaldi by many municipal governments, including those of Pavia and Turin, the Workers’ Club of Parma and a women's group in Como.12 The Council in Lodi declared 11 May (the date of arrival in Marsala) a ‘citizens' holiday’, with money to be given to the families of those who had fought with Garibaldi.13 At the end of March, the Italian Unitary Association in Milan made him their president (his letter of acceptance was published in the main nationalist papers); and in early April he received a delegation from the workers’ clubs (società operaie), and the speeches made on that occasion were published in Il Diritto.14 In Palermo, a new version of the paper Il Garibaldi was published in January and February; a collection of poetry appeared in Catania to celebrate his name-day (San Giuseppe);15 and the priest Carmelo Pardi gave a published speech to commemorate the first anniversary of the April revolt which had brought Garibaldi to Sicily.16
Caprera itself was the centre of intense activity. Apart from his children, Teresita and Menotti, there was Fruscianti, who looked after the farm, the Deideri couple, who had acted as Teresita's parents when she was a child, and various other semi-permanent residents, including Specchi, Carpeneto and Basso, who worked as his secretaries. Moreover, Garibaldi's celebrated solitude was, in his own words, ‘shattered by visitors’.17 His close political friends, Bixio and Vecchi, came to stay for extended periods; a number of artists came to paint and sculpt him; and Timoteo Riboli, a phrenologist, came to study his skull. The latter became a friend of, and physician to, Garibaldi, and made a public announcement that his head was ‘remarkable … the craniology of the head … offers an original phenomenality of the rarest kind, one might even say unprecedented: the harmony of all the organs is perfect … a marvellous, organic, faultless head’.18 Johann Becker, the ‘German Garibaldi’, came to Caprera to discuss his plans for an Italian–German alliance against Austrian and French ‘despotism’.19 The Scottish radical, John McAdam, arrived (after a terrible journey in midwinter) with money from the Glasgow Ladies Sick and Wounded Fund, and conceived an elaborate plan to set up a salmon hatchery on Caprera.20 A stream of uninvited admirers also arrived almost continuously and were seemingly always welcomed. Vecchi remarked that ‘the presence of the General in Caprera’ was a ‘god-send’ to the neighbouring village of La Maddalena: a ‘sort of inn’ even opened to put up the tourists.21
Garibaldi's home at Caprera became an integral part of his fame. This process had begun in 1860, when Garibaldi's sometime lover, Esperanza von Schwartz, published an account of her visit a few years earlier, in German, English and French. She described the wild beauty of Caprera, where ‘the Cincinnatus of our time has withdrawn himself from the world and its delusive hopes [in 1858]’, as well as offering a host of details about his private life: the design of his house; the well-kept garden; his books; his children and the family's lifestyle on Caprera; and his love for his late wife.22 Thereafter, Garibaldi's simple life on Caprera became a form of public display. However genuine his own commitment may have been to farming the land and making a personal life for himself, the image of a ‘modern Cincinnat
us’ captured the public imagination and made Caprera anything but a private place. Frank Vizitelly of The Illustrated London News went specially to Caprera on his way home at the end of the campaign ‘to close my correspondence with a few illustrations of the island home of the modern Cincinnatus’. Although he warned his readers not to expect intimate descriptions (‘I visited General Garibaldi as a friend … and doubtlessly, he will expect from me but gentlemanly treatment in whatever I may write respecting him and his home’), he offered them exhaustive details of the house, and of Garibaldi and his family's behaviour, along with seven illustrations of Garibaldi at home.23 These included General Garibaldi spearing fish by night off Caprera (‘it is impossible to conceive anything more picturesque’, see figure 23 opposite), and The farmyard, which showed a bucolic scene of Garibaldi feeding his dog with his horse ‘Marsala’ impatiently pawing the ground next to him.
23 This illustration by Vizitelly of Garibaldi spearing fish both reflects, and contributed to, the mythology of his life at Caprera.
From Caprera, Vizitelly's prose and pictures took up the juxtaposition of the public figure and the private man which had already been a potent feature of journalism in 1860, and turned the glimpses of Garibaldi's intimate life into a form of popular theatre:
here am I, sitting peaceably under the roof and partaking of the hospitality of the man who seven months since … raised the standard of freedom on the shores of Sicily, and threw his gauntlet at the feet of Francis II and his legions. As I write this I can see Giuseppe Garibaldi, the undoer and maker of Kings, trundling along a barrowful of roots that he has grubbed from the rocky soil … Little dreamt I when, nearly seven months ago, I shook hands with that daring revolutionist, the morning after his entry into Palermo, that seven months later I should congratulate him on his complete success in his cottage at Caprera.
The iconographic fascination of Caprera persisted into the following year, and thereafter. In May 1862, a colour print of Garibaldi in his island home was published in Newcastle ‘and dedicated to the People of United Italy’. Garibaldi's pose was copied from a famous photograph, but the landscape was pure invention: a mix of classical and romantic references featuring a stormy sea, an overhanging rock, and two goats grazing nearby.24 The same attraction can be observed in the first numbers of a serialised Italian Album, published by Terzaghi of Milan. This took up the story of Garibaldi's life after his departure from Naples; and illustrations included The hermit of Caprera (Garibaldi with spade, surrounded by farm animals, looking tired and downcast, see figure 24 below); the happier and openly patriotic Garibaldi in the heart of his family (Garibaldi sits on a sofa in front of a map of Italy and reads Il Diritto, surrounded by his personal and political family); and the more sensational A young Spaniard who prefers to kill himself than leave Garibaldi (the accompanying text explains that the man ‘had made an idol of Garibaldi, and no longer being able to live with him, had decided to die where he lived’; see figure 25 opposite).25 In 1866, the German illustrated paper, Die Gartenlaube, published an article on ‘the Cincinnatus of Caprera’, with the usual details of his happy family life.26 These publications also helped define a new phase in the cult of Garibaldi, in which interest in his private life and character competed with awareness of his political concerns and objectives.
24 ‘The hermit of Caprera’: a popular representation of Garibaldi at Caprera. Contemporary prints made much of his solitary existence, his work in the fields (suggested by the spade) and his relationship with the farm animals.
25 ‘A young Spaniard who prefers to kill himself than leave Garibaldi’. Note also Garibaldi's white house in the background here and in figure 24: an essential element of the established iconography of Caprera.
In turn, however, Caprera acquired a political significance as the physical representation of Garibaldi's reputation. Engaging loosely with a symbolism inherited from the American and French revolutions, where public greatness was matched by private virtue, Garibaldi's lifestyle on Caprera seemed proof that he was a ‘genuine’ hero, whose personal modesty was unaffected by his political fame. Each writer used this juxtaposition in different ways, but the rhetorical point remained the same. ‘All eyes are turned at this moment on a little, almost inaccessible and completely barren island, lost in the heart of the Mediterranean’, the French volunteer Emile Maison wrote, praising Garibaldi's military talent and his personal diffidence. Riboli published his description of Garibaldi's exceptional head and ordinary life in the French radical paper Le Siècle.27 A British visitor described Garibaldi's friendliness to him at Caprera: ‘I was soon impressed with the belief that the General was not only the bravest of warriors and the purest of patriots, but also the prince of gentlemen.’28 In Modena, an Abate Bazzani dedicated an Ode ‘To Garibaldi in Caprera’, in which he praised equally his greatness and his selflessness; and in Naples, a priest, Domenico Jonata, wrote a ‘political constitutional catechism’ designed to teach ‘the people’ democratic principles, and dedicated it to the ‘immortal Giuseppe Garibaldi’ on his ‘humble … home, the happy island of Caprera’.29
The person who probably did most for Caprera was Colonel Vecchi, whose book, Garibaldi a Caprera, was translated into English, Dutch, French (published in Holland presumably to avoid censorship problems), Swedish and German.30 Like the others, Vecchi made a great deal of the simplicity of Caprera and the dedication of Garibaldi to his farm; like the others, he described in detail his frugal but happy private life, the feminine talents of his daughter, Teresita, and the names of his animals (notably the fact that one donkey was called Pius IX). He too stressed Garibaldi's greatness (‘[t]he days that I passed by the side of my General are like a fugitive but brilliant dream’) and his gentleness (there is one passage in which Garibaldi searches all night for a lost lamb).31 But Vecchi went one step further, and sought to sacralise Caprera and, with it, the man who had made his home there:
Who can visit Caprera without emotion? … He is about to step on a shore made illustrious by the highest human excellence, and he feels his thoughts softened, elevated and enchanted. Even at the distant point where the boat lands, perched amid great lumps of granite rock, that little white house is visible, an object of deep affection to how many human creatures! Within dwells an exceptional, I might say an almost superhuman being. It is the den of the Italian Lion. It is the refuge of the friend of mankind. It is the fountain-head of all that is noble, generous and holy. It is the oasis of peace of Giuseppe Garibaldi!32
In reality, Garibaldi spent most of the winter engaging in a vast correspondence: ‘there were three people employed in answering the heaps of letters that arrived daily for the General’, according to Vecchi, who also helped out with answering letters.33 John McAdam noted that Garibaldi worked incessantly on his correspondence, continuing to write after supper, dictating to his secretaries in bed, and getting up before dawn to work with them again.34 ‘My correspondence quite exceeds my capacity, and the capacity of those who assist me in writing’, Garibaldi admitted to Mazzini;35 and many of his letters of this period are written in another hand and bear just his signature.
As in 1860, it was foreign letters which filled Garibaldi's postbag. For example, Elisanter, the editor of Die Deutsche Zeitung, wrote from Berlin of the support of his paper (which showed, he said, that not all Germans thought like the Austrians), and to invite him to the city.36 Many were content to send Garibaldi gifts or expressions of their admiration. A company in Milan sent him ‘the proverbial Panettone’ for Christmas 1860; a garibaldino sent him nougat and jam from Cremona; Zeffira Levi made him a flag (‘what an Italian woman who can't do more must do’); while Margherita de Sanctis, of the Institution Dolet in Naples, composed a verse: ‘Napoli calls you, Palermo desires you. Your brave men invoke your name. The whole world admires you! … Venezia cries sighs and waits for you. Rome quivers, but hopes. Only Caprera is happy. The heavens bless and protect you. The fair sex adores you, and I hold you carved in my heart.’37 One group wr
ote from Brussels to tell Garibaldi that they had ‘woken his spirit’ in a seance: the spirit had told them that he had landed in Catania with two friends disguised as him, and that his soul ‘was that of Hannibal’.38 Manfred Warmund wrote enclosing a song and expressed his great esteem for Garibaldi (‘Believe me, 100,000 young Germans think like me’); and an anonymous fan letter arrived from Bremen written in Latin.39 A French writer sent a letter from Aix-en-Provence to tell Garibaldi: ‘You are great! you are noble! … I admire you, I envy you … Heaven has elected you to change completely the destiny of beautiful Italy … so Courage … Courage, Courage!’;40 while a professional female companion, ‘E. Birkardt’, wrote to Garibaldi from Nice to ask if she could come and live with him in Caprera.41
Perhaps excited by the prospect of a war for Rome, British Protestants were especially frequent correspondents. Few were as colourful as Paul Doig, who from Stirling sent Garibaldi a handwritten extract from the Book of Revelation: ‘Fall of Rome by Fire’ (‘[t]he great whore spoken of (as you will observe) is a city, and that city, terrible Rome’), but all were hugely enthusiastic. Another Scot, Julia Lees, wrote from ‘poor, Priest-ridden Ireland’: she filled eight dense pages with religious fervour and sent him a copy of the New Testament, ‘not too large, I hope, to be easily carried about, so as to be your friend, a companion’.42 Culling Eardley, the president of the Evangelical Alliance, asked for Garibaldi's help in the battle against Catholic intolerance, and William Ashley, of the same, sent him a copy of the ‘Polyglot bible’.43 Thomas Scott, secretary of the Reformed Romanist Priests Protection Society (whose motto was ‘Christ and not the crucifix all over the world’), wrote from Dublin to invite Garibaldi to speak in Ireland, and assured him (rather implausibly) that he would be given a good ‘Irish welcome’. A final indication of the strength of these religious associations with Garibaldi comes from a Charles Turner in London, who wrote nine detailed pages to tell him of the error of his ways: ‘you have gone forth with the deadly sword against your Brothers in the same faith’. In the letter's climax, the author asked Garibaldi:
