by Lucy Riall
Women [Matrone] of Rome, Rome or Death has rung again in the land of the Vespers. Have hope! In this land of volcanoes a flame leaps which will burn the throne of tryants! Rome or Death! … Rome, the mother of Italian greatness! … Rome, oh Rome! He who pronounces your name and is not moved to take up arms and redeem you did not deserve the gentle touch of his mother, or the ardent kiss of his lover … I am with you until death, oh women.89
So Rome it was to be. In Sicily itself, where Garibaldi was followed closely by the press, he made speech after speech, and created a new style of impromptu dialogues with his audience. From the Hotel Trinacria, the town hall, the Teatro Garibaldi, and the Convento della Gancia in Palermo, he travelled to Cefalù, Termini Imerese, Corleone, Misilmeri and Trapani, making short, emotive statements and establishing dialogues with the crowd (‘You know I am a friend of the people, yes, friend, of the people, and above all of the Sicilian people … People of Palermo … Rome is ours [the crowd: Ours, ours] … out, out with Napoleon! [Out, out]’). Finally at Marsala, he raised the cry which was to set the tone for the expedition, and which he used again and again: ‘Rome or Death’.90 In rhetoric and in practice, Garibaldi's attempt to raise a volunteer army in Sicily in 1862 and seize Rome from the Pope followed a familiar Risorgimento formula. In order to gain momentum, he relied heavily on the force of his own appeal to the people and on publicity in the press; and the absence of any detailed planning suggests that he hoped, once again, to wrongfoot his opponents, rush to Rome with his men and present the government with a seemingly spontaneous fait accompli. At the very least, by his actions he hoped to gain publicity, and maintain the questions of Rome and Venice as issues on the political agenda.
For this plan, he had certainly chosen the right place to start. Apart from the evidence of Rattazzi's collusion with the campaign, the security forces in Sicily had very little control over the island. Local officials lacked proper instructions about how to deal with Garibaldi, and even senior members of the administration believed – quite understandably – that he had the full support of the government. Volunteers later questioned about their motives for joining Garibaldi claimed to have been convinced that ‘everything would go like it did in 1860’.91 For all these reasons, Garibaldi was allowed to pass south-eastwards and unimpeded through the interior of Sicily, raising the cry of ‘Rome or Death’ and encouraging men to join his campaign. In August, he and his volunteers (now some 4,000 men) converged in three columns on Catania, which they entered at 2 a.m. on 19 August and were ‘met by an immense crowd’.92 Although on the following day the government finally responded by declaring martial law in Sicily and the mainland South, on 25 August Garibaldi was allowed openly to cross the Straits of Messina with his men, and to land on the shores of Calabria.93
Having done up to then remarkably little to stop Garibaldi, the government now cracked down with considerable force. On 26 August, the arrest of all those ‘who were part of the band of Garibaldi or took part in any way in the rebellion’ was ordered. On 28 August, three left-wing parliamentarians were arrested in Naples. On the same day, emergency powers were introduced in Catania, which included a general disarmament and a ban on the wearing of red shirts and berets.94 On 29 August, Garibaldi and his volunteers were halted by Italian troops in the mountains of Aspromonte. In the resulting confusion, firing broke out and Garibaldi was badly wounded in the foot. Another group of garibaldini, left in Sicily in the hills above Acireale, was also caught by the army, which shot dead seven of them. General Cialdini, who had arrived in Messina on 27 August, issued a decree stating that ‘all those who are caught armed and vagrant in the countryside and villages … [should] be considered and treated as brigands’. During the same days, the government took advantage of martial law to suspend the freedom of the press, and to dissolve the Societies for Freedom, set up by the democrats in Genoa during the previous March. There followed a general military crackdown throughout Sicily which lasted until mid-November.95
‘Aspromonte’, as the whole episode came to be known (the name coincidentally means ‘sour mountain’), was a disaster for all concerned. In the South, it was just the beginning of a violent campaign of military repression and emergency legislation which lasted throughout 1863, and which then dragged on more or less unsuccessfully until late 1866. Aspromonte hugely discredited the government, and prime minister Rattazzi in particular. Stories of his involvement were heard everywhere, and in December 1862 his government was forced to resign. Many on the left, including Crispi and Bertani, had been against Garibaldi's expedition and advised him against it; so Aspromonte revived the divisions with the democratic movement and halted the steps taken in early 1862 towards the construction of an effective political party. During 1863, efforts were made to reconstruct this alliance around resistance to the government's campaign in the South, but in the end these came to nothing. Bertani tried to orchestrate a mass resignation of deputies from parliament in protest at government policy in Sicily (‘I have no faith left in your system’, he announced), but this was not a success.96 The majority, led by Crispi and Mordini, chose to remain in parliament, while only a small minority, which included Garibaldi, resigned their seats in protest.97 The great divergence in political attitudes on the left was also obvious in the reaction to the split of 1863. Crispi wrote of Garibaldi that ‘God did not endow him either with Cromwell's mind or Napoleon's ambition … his arena is not parliament but the public piazza and the field of battle’, while Mazzini was delighted by Garibaldi's decision, and urged all those who had resigned to turn to the masses, ‘who must learn to see in you the future leaders of a revolution, that cannot fail to break out sooner or later’.98 Thus, Aspromonte and its aftermath deepened the divisions in the democratic movement, and did nothing to resolve the political crisis on the left.
Garibaldi suffered great and lasting pain from the wound to his foot. After the skirmish at Aspromonte, he was arrested and taken with his family and immediate associates to the fortress of Varignano near La Spezia, and for a while it seemed he would be put on trial. However, at the end of October he was allowed to leave Varignano, and moved to La Spezia and then Pisa; he had an operation to remove the bullet from his foot, and finally in late December he was able to return to Caprera. After Aspromonte, he was physically never the same. He spent the winter with his leg strapped in bandages and could move only in a bath chair or on crutches; and he failed to recover full mobility thereafter, walking almost always with a limp and the help of a stick.99 Despite the outbreak of revolt in Poland, which attracted great public sympathy and to which a group of Garibaldi volunteers rushed to fight, he was unable to move from Caprera during the whole of 1863. In truth, his health was already compromised by chronic rheumatism, but hitherto this had been relatively well hidden; now Aspromonte marked the permanent and public loss of Garibaldi's physical vitality.
Aspromonte seemed at first to deal a major blow to Garibaldi's political reputation as well. The Turin satirical paper, Il Fischietto, immediately published a large cartoon of Mazzini depicted as death – an ‘insatiable Saturn’ – eating his children, the last of whom was Garibaldi (see figure 26 above).100 The episode was also seized on by the right-wing and clerical press in France. L'Union described Garibaldi as ‘a bandit in a comic opera’ caught in a mountain gorge by ‘a handful of bersagliers’, while Augustin Cochin in Le Correspondant announced: ‘The redeemer descends again to a scoundrel’,101 and claimed his defeat was the result of divine intervention. For the main government paper, Le Constitutionnel, Aspromonte was ‘the victory of order over anarchy’, while the liberal press remained largely silent on the subject.102 Even The Times in London saw Aspromonte as a major defeat for Garibaldi, writing as soon as the news came in:
26 Mazzini is an ‘insatiable Saturn who devours his children big and small indiscriminately one after the other’, according to Il Fischietto in the aftermath of Aspromonte.
What made Garibaldi an idol to his friends … was the prestige of his in
vulnerability, the conceit of his omnipotence, his certainty of success, his faculty to peform miracles in everything he undertook … But now blood has been drawn from the veins of the charmed man … the hero sinks to the level of mere mortals … He has tempted Providence, and his star pales in heaven; his final defeat may be deferred, but his fall is no less inevitable.
Four days later, the paper had not changed its mind: ‘Garibaldi is on the ground, never again to rise. Whatever events the future may have in store for Italy, Garibaldi's game is played out. He is old, prematurely old, broken in health, worn by fits of excessive activity … The gout tortures and paralyses his limbs, sorrow will soon gnaw into his very soul.’103
Despite all these setbacks, Aspromonte became something of a propaganda success for the left in Italy. However politically divided by this episode, the left responded with a public show of support for Garibaldi, and this was accompanied by a major publicity exercise intent on showing Garibaldi, the hero of Italy, to be the victim of government brutality and duplicity. This effort began as soon as his men got him off the mountain at Aspromonte, and it was instigated by Garibaldi himself. On board the ship taking him to Genoa, he wrote a long letter to Il Diritto in which he defended his actions. In a dramatic opening sentence, he pushed the blame on to the government. ‘They were thirsty for blood! And I sought to save it.’ He had told his men not to fire and, although wounded and unable to see the whole conflict, ‘I am … assured in all conscience that … from the lines under my command and the command of my adjutants, not a single shot was fired.’ He even went so far as to praise the conduct of Colonel Pallavicini, the commanding officer at Aspromonte, in order further to express his contempt for Rattazzi's government. He concluded the letter with a brief, but masterly, piece of Risorgimento rhetoric which contrasted his and his men's voluntary martyrdom for Italy with the apathy of its official representatives:
What pains me most is the fatal mistrust (by the head of State) which contributes in no small way to the non-fulfilment of Unity. But however it may be, this time too I can present myself to Italy with my head held high, sure that I have done my duty. This time too, my indifferent life, and the more precious life of so many generous young men, was offered as a sacrifice to the most holy of causes, untouched by cowardly self-interest.104
Garibaldi's letter to Il Diritto, cast as a defence of national honour, was widely published and translated. It was followed up by another open letter, this time to the ‘English nation’ and written from prison in Varignano, in which he denounced the ‘immoral monstrosity which is called the Papacy’ and acclaimed England as the land of liberty.105 In Italy itself, press restrictions seem to have muted the immediate response. However, a series of pamphlets was produced semi-clandestinely in order, as they put it, to combat the ‘lies’ put out by Rattazzi and to defend the selfless heroism of Garibaldi. One anonymous author wrote from prison to back up Garibaldi's account written from ‘his bed of pain’: they had done everything they could to avoid a conflict with their ‘brothers’ in the army.106 An officer, R. Maurigi, also wrote from prison to give more details of the episode. Forced by his wound to sit down, Garibaldi had continued shouting viva l'Italia, and in the end the regular soldiers cried viva Garibaldi and they had all exchanged ‘fraternal embraces’.107 Alexandre Dumas, who claimed to have obtained an eyewitness account from a Hungarian officer, told his readers that Garibaldi had continued smoking while he was hit, and his face never changed expression;108 while a volunteer, another eyewitness, observed that Garibaldi was hit in front of all his men, implying that he had been fired at deliberately. The volunteer quoted the Book of Genesis at his readers: ‘and it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him’.109
Thanks to these propaganda efforts, Aspromonte ceased to be seen as the defeat of Garibaldi. Instead, it was recast as one more painful event in Italy's national history, a tragic example of civil strife (another writer quoted Manzoni: ‘brothers have killed brothers’),110 and an emblematic illustration of the nation's betrayal by the perfidy of a few Italians (Rattazzi) and the tyranny of its foreign oppressors (Napoleon III).111 At the centre of this tragedy was the treatment of Garibaldi, and his suffering acquired conspicuous religious overtones. Two French writers explicitly compared Garibaldi's pain to that of Christ on the cross. One pamphlet, by Felix Pyat ( a French political exile, and later member of the Paris Commune), spoke directly to Garibaldi:
Your sacrifice … seems a Transfiguration. All of you that was earthly has disappeared with your blood. Your wounds render you divine. Aspromonte recalls the peaks of Calvary, your martyrdom recalls the Passion. Your glory becomes a cult. The people loved you, now they adore you. They glorified you, now they deify you. You were great, now you are a saint … ‘Behold the Man!’112
A. Mancel called on the whole Christian world in verse:
World, cover your head in mourning!– Garibaldi,
your earthly Redeemer has fallen.
Cry! – his wounds bleed.
Pray! – his heart suffers…
By his death, the heavenly Redeemer re-ascended
to the throne of his father.
By his fall, the earthly Redeemer has only increased
his glory:
It is a station on his Way of the Cross!113
Objects relating to the affair at Aspromonte were collected and conserved as ‘relics’. These included the wooden stretcher used to carry him down the mountain; the blanket with which he was covered after he was wounded; and the boot he was wearing with the bullet hole in the ankle.114 Garibaldi was photographed, in prison at Varignano and subsequently, with his wounded foot displayed like a stigma; these photographs were heavily retouched (some were simply photo-montages) to emphasise his imprisonment, pain and sacrifice, and they were widely circulated as cartes-de-visite and lithographed copies.115 The final illustrations of the pictorial album, Giuseppe Garibaldi da Caprera ad Aspromonte, represented Aspromonte in three key episodes. The first was the conflict itself, defined by the caption, ‘“Don't fire!” cried Garibaldi’; the second, The transportation of Garibaldi to Scilla, showed him being carried down the mountain by his loyal volunteers; and the third was Garibaldi on his bed of pain. The album made Rattazzi the villain of the drama, and Garibaldi the sacrificial victim.116 ‘To the greatness of the hero’, in Alexander Herzen's words, ‘was added the crown of the martyr.’117
27 ‘Cain and Abel’, comments the satirist Adolfo Matarelli. Italy, flanked by Rome (the wolf) and Venice (the winged lion), reproaches Rattazzi for wounding Garibaldi. This casting of Rattazzi as the villain of Aspromonte became standard, and was agreed upon by left and right on the Italian political scene.
Images of the martyred Garibaldi were especially popular with caricaturists, and it is in satirical papers and flyers that we find the strongest reaction to Aspromonte. The artist Matarelli, working mostly for the Florentine satirical paper, Il Lampione, produced a long series of comments on the events of 1862. An early sketch by him, The trial of Garibaldi, was published on 12 September and reflects a legal concern about his arrest and possible trial; but by 10 December the same artist had picked up on the religious theme: in Cain and Abel, Abel (Garibaldi) lies wounded in a loincloth, while mother Italy reproaches Cain (Rattazzi) for his violence (see figure 27 opposite). Many of the outstanding caricatures from this period rely on religious references to produce an anti-clerical message. One, The Calvary of Garibaldi at Aspromonte, represents Garibaldi as Christ on the cross, surrounded by weeping women (Italy), while his tormentors (the Pope, Napoleon II) dance in the background (see figure 28 below). Garibaldi is also the ‘Sacred Heart’ and a saint in various guises who kills the serpent; Rattazzi, Napoleon III and/or General Cialdini are Judas and/or Pilate. A particularly effective anticlerical religious allegory can be found in a colour calendar for 1863, which shows a bust of Garibaldi as the saint on an altar, surrounded by guns and cannons in the place of candles an
d candlesticks (‘These are your candles and this is your saint’ reads part of the caption).118
28 Garibaldi's ‘Calvary’ (‘Aspromonte 28 August 1862’) is the most explicitly religious comment to come out of the events of Aspromonte.
Other caricatures dating from this time pursue the idea of Aspromonte as the final trial of an exemplary life. The popular pictorial Life of Garibaldi represents his life in thirty-five patriotic pictures from birth (breast-fed by ‘mother’ Italy), through exile and adventure to Aspromonte (two dark images of Napoleon's hat and a leg wrapped in bandages); and culminating in his victory in the arms of a winged lion: a personal triumph over physical suffering and the oppression of crown and altar. Rather more sophisticated, but still depicting Garibaldi's life in visual and exemplary terms, is the colour lithograph, The 12 labours of Hercules, which represents Garibaldi as the mythical hero Hercules, who overcomes the obstacles of human greed and folly by virtue of his superior (moral and physical) strength.119 These last two prints, and the colour calendar, are especially significant in that they carry a positive political message. They make explicit an attempt to reconcile Garibaldi the victim with Garibaldi the personification of strength and courage, and to emphasise his role as the redeemer of Italy who will show the people the way to the promised land (Rome and Venice).
