by Lucy Riall
Nonetheless, in the early months of 1867 Garibaldi left Caprera and embarked on a frenetic bout of political activity. He came first to the new Italian capital, Florence, and went on a triumphant tour via Bologna and Rovigo to Venice, where he arrived to a great welcome in late February. He made a series of violently anticlerical speeches, in which he also put pressure on the government for action on Rome.10 He then stayed on the mainland throughout the spring and summer. During this time, his son, Ricciotti, raised money in Britain for a new Roman campaign, and the campaign received a large donation from the Tuscan democrat and financier, Adriano Lemmi (a former secretary of Kossuth's, and active in anti-clerical and Masonic circles in Britain and the USA).11 Garibaldi also established a series of contacts with a committee of Roman exiles in Bologna (an anti-clerical city), and a Centre of Insurrection in Rome; the latter appointed him their ‘Commander-in-Chief’ in April. During the summer, Garibaldi toured a series of towns – Pistoia, Siena and Orvieto – which brought him ever closer to the frontier with the Papal States. He issued a call to the Masonic lodges of Palermo and Naples to unite, and published a statement supporting radical proposals for compulsory free lay education and the extension of equal civil and political rights to women. In September, he travelled to Geneva to speak at the Congress of the International League of Peace and Liberty, and called not just for peace but also for an end to the Papacy.12 He then went back to Florence, where he began final plans for the invasion of the Papal States, and travelled south towards the frontier at Orvieto. It is clear from his activities in 1867 that Garibaldi saw the seizure of Rome not just as a nationalist objective but also, and above all, as the destruction of the Papacy and the liberation of ‘humanity’ from priestly oppression.13
At this point, however, the king and Rattazzi, who were under great pressure from Napoleon III over the threat to Rome, lost their nerve and arrested Garibaldi, who was taken back to his home on Caprera.14 Yet even the arrest of Garibaldi was not the end of the story. Rattazzi, now in contact with Crispi, apparently still had designs on Rome. Instead of a direct invasion of Rome, which would have been an open breach of the September convention with France, they hatched a new plan to encourage a popular insurrection in the Papal States, which they hoped would appeal to Italian (and international liberal) public opinion, and make it seem that the government had no choice but to invade Rome. Accordingly, large sums of money were passed to clandestine volunteer groups and a committee of assistance to encourage insurrection; Crispi mounted an intense nationalist campaign in the press; and in mid-October Garibaldi was allowed to escape from Caprera and come to Florence. However, two days before his arrival the French government announced its decision to send another expeditionary force to Rome to protect the Pope; and on the day of his arrival Rattazzi resigned as prime minister.15 Nonetheless, in the delay before the formation of another government, he continued to assist Garibaldi, who finally managed to enter papal territory on 24 October and join up with other volunteers (including his son, Menotti) at Monterotondo.
On 3 November, Garibaldi's volunteers met with papal troops at Mentana. Although Garibaldi had experienced problems of morale and discipline with his forces, they gradually gained the upper hand and, by the afternoon, had forced the papal troops into a retreat.16 The arrival of the French expeditionary force cancelled this advantage. The French were equipped with the new chassepot rifle, which enabled them to fire repeatedly from a long distance; and Garibaldi's tactics of enthusiastic charging with a large body of men were simply no match for this weapon. By the evening, his volunteers had fled the battlefield in confusion and Garibaldi was defeated. The next day, he retreated with part of his army across the border to Italy and was immediately arrested and placed once again in the fort at Varignano. During the same days, a Mazzinian-inspired insurrection had started in Rome, but was quickly suppressed by papal troops amid the general indifference of the population.17
‘Mentana’, as this episode now came to be called, was even more disastrous for the government than the war for Venice. ‘Ill-designed, badly-conceived, and miserably executed’, was the comment of the American consul in Rome.18 Mentana made the king unpopular at home; it showed how many of Italy's politicians were, at heart, conspirators rather than statesmen; and it not only failed to achieve its objective but also offered, again, the humiliating spectacle of Italy as the territory of foreign (French) invasion. The government's action in failing to protect the integrity of the Papal States was condemned in Berlin, Vienna and Paris; and the British politician, Lord Clarendon, remarked on the ‘universal agreement that Victor Emanuel is an imbecile … a dishonest man who tells lies to everyone’.19 Much like the war for Venice, in other words, Mentana pointed to the failure of the new Italy. On the one hand, it represented the public betrayal of the Risorgimento promise while, on the other, it added to Italy's reputation as a weak power and unreliable ally.
Mentana also led to further shifts on the left. Some younger radicals distanced themselves from Mazzinianism and Garibaldi; and the Neapolitan radical paper La Situazione pronounced Garibaldi dead at Mentana: ‘and history will say of him that, born of the people, he neither understood nor fought for them; he lived an immensely glorious but fatuous life, and died consumed by the tabes dorsalis of the party system: [a mixture of] incapacity and utopia’.20 A new anti-clerical paper, Libertà e Giustizia, criticised those who joined Garibaldi for their inability to understand popular religious sentiment.21 At the same time, Mentana helped to define the left's opposition to the government. Bertani (who had opposed the expedition but had followed Garibaldi into battle) spoke openly against the monarchy in parliament: ‘[at] Mentana something solemn and serious occurred; at Mentana was ruptured the solidarity … between the volunteers and the monarchy’;22 Lo Zenzero, a Florentine radical paper, proclaimed: ‘Italy was born from revolution; and the day that Italy deviates from its revolutionary policy will be the last day of its greatness … General Garibaldi has always been the personification of revolutionary politics in Italy, from 1848 to this time.’23 The kind of political and popular fallout Mentana could cause is demonstrated clearly by the case of Bologna, an anti-clerical city where, until this time, there had been very little left-wing opposition to the moderate liberal hegemony over the local administration. However, in the aftermath of Mentana, the refusal of the City Council to give a public funeral to two ‘martyrs’ of the campaign caused days of street protests and a public row. Indeed, so angry was the crowd that Bologna's leading moderate politician, Marco Minghetti, had to be protected by bodyguards and hurredly left the city. So, for Bologna's ruling elite, Mentana marked the end both of a post-Risorgimento consensus and its division into openly hostile political camps.24
Garibaldi's motives for trusting the king and Rattazzi in 1867 are not entirely clear. He never trusted them again and became, henceforth, an outspoken critic of the monarchy and the political system in liberal Italy. After his arrest, he agreed to return to his home on Caprera and, although he was obliged to stay only for six months, in the end he remained there in a kind of internal exile for almost three years. He resigned as a deputy in the national parliament. These decisions reflect his political disillusionment and may also have been made partly for personal reasons: he was now in his sixties, and suffering badly from rheumatism. He also had a new family in Caprera, this time the result of a relationship with his daughter's wet-nurse, Francesca Armosina, with whom he had two daughters, Clelia in 1867 and Rosa in 1869, and a son, Manlio, in 1873. He wanted to marry her but, since he was still married to Giuseppina Raimondi and could not divorce her, he was unable to do so (and, indeed, they only married in 1880, when the Court of Appeal finally accepted Garibaldi's argument that his marriage to Raimondi was unconsummated).25
Nevertheless, Garibaldi's decision to remain on the island was also political; it represented an ‘abstention’ rather than a retirement.26 As we shall see, he continued to write in abundance, publishing a multitude of comments on nationa
l politics, addresses to clubs and meetings, and letters to newspapers; and all of these pronouncements were uncompromisingly radical and anti-clerical. He followed the lead of his Neapolitan colleague Giuseppe Ricciardi and endorsed the formation of an anticoncilio in opposition to the convocation of the first Vatican Council in Rome.27 He did not see Mentana as the end of his military career. At the end of December 1867, he wrote an address to the Mentana veterans: ‘A woman has sent me the following motto: Perseverance wins. I hope that the Italians will remind the world of this next spring.’28 On the anniversary of the departure from Quarto (in 1860), he wrote to the Sicilian veterans of Milan: ‘Yes! I know that not all the brave men in Italy are dead and I hope that with your help, the priests, mercenaries and traitors will know this soon. To another 5th of May!’29 He also wrote two novels while at home in Caprera, Clelia and Cantoni il volontario (both published in 1870), which represent, among other ambitions, a forceful attempt to publicise his anti-clericalism, and which express his personal and political frustration at the conditions prevailing in Italy.30
In 1870, France declared war on Prussia. The war was the final stage in a protracted diplomatic stand-off between Bismarck and Napoleon III and in it France suffered a series of swift losses and a crushing defeat at the battle of Sedan on 1 September. After Sedan, Napoleon III abdicated and left France as a German prisoner. Shortly before, he had withdrawn all his troops from Rome and, on 19 September, the Italian army (led by General Cadorna but without Garibaldi) made a breach in the Roman walls at Porta Pia and seized Rome from the Pope. In France, a republic was declared and a Government of National Defence was formed, which then set about creating a new army to defend the nascent republic. As part of this programme, an auxiliary army was created, in which all non-regular troops – mobiles and francs-tireurs operating as guerrilla forces – could be given commissions and appointed to any rank. These francs-tireurs were a popular success: their numbers quickly reached over 55,000, and volunteers came from Spain, Poland, America, Britain and Italy to fight for the new French republic. Garibaldi decided to join them. Encouraged by Philippe Bourdon or ‘Bordone’, a French ‘disciple’ (and a volunteer from 1860),31 he wrote to the provisional government: ‘What remains of me is at your service. At your command.’32 He then left Caprera and came to Tours, France's temporary capital during the siege of Paris. There he was appointed commander of the Army of the Vosges, a force of some 15,000 francs-tireurs and mobiles in eastern France.33
The radical press (notably Le Siècle)34 welcomed Garibaldi, and a journalist in besieged Paris published a paper, ‘Garibaldi, the defender of oppressed peoples’, which declared: ‘Garibaldi does not belong to Italy; he belongs to the whole world.’35 But the French authorities were not pleased to see him. His reception was not helped by the presence of Bordone, who was widely considered an unsavoury character and had a criminal record.36 Garibaldi had annoyed everyone before arriving by writing two letters to Il Movimento in Genoa: one in which he proclaimed the historic independence of Nice, and another where he praised his ‘brothers in Germany’ for having rid the world of that ‘incubus of tyranny’ which was Bonapartism (this pro-German stance was not uncommon at the time).37 The Catholic right was openly furious, and the archbishop of Tours lamented: ‘I thought that divine Providence had reached its fill of the humiliations which it had heaped on our country; I was wrong: one supreme humiliation was kept back for us, that of seeing Garibaldi arrive here, having given himself the mission of saving France.’38 According to an English commentator, French civilians considered Garibaldi to be ‘a presumptious intruder, who felt that, because he had beaten a few miserable Neapolitans in a little enterprise that had become famous for the mere romance of it, he could conquer the great armies of Germany, before which so many French generals had been compelled to retreat in disaster’.39 All the commanders of the regular French divisions in eastern France were said to despise and resent Garibaldi. There was also no denying that Garibaldi was now old and suffering from ill health; plus he had no experience of fighting in a northern European winter. So there were real doubts about how much help he and his ‘collection of revolutionaries’ could really be.40 As one hostile French historian of the war put it a few years later: ‘Garibaldi, this so-called saviour of France, was nothing but an invalid in body and spirit, who constantly let himself be dominated by his entourage and above all by his favourite, Bordone. In return, he always refused to submit to government orders.’41
In the event, Garibaldi's campaign in eastern France was not a success. His son, Ricciotti, won a brief victory over a German command in Châtillon-sur-Seine, but Garibaldi himself proved repeatedly unable to recapture Dijon for the French. Only at the end of December, after the Germans had evacuated the city, did he prepare to move; but then he delayed the troops' departure from their base in Autun due to the lack of trains and, after arrival, he was incapacitated by an acute attack of rheumatism. And, although his army was able to fight off a German counter-attack for Dijon on 21 January (commanded from a carriage by Garibaldi), they later abandoned it to the Germans after the armistice. They also did nothing to help General Bourbaki's army at Besançon, which now collapsed or fell into ‘a kind of instanteous decomposition’ and started to surrender to the Germans; later they were interned in Switzerland.42
The French government surrendered Paris to the German army at the end of January, and brought the war to a close. Garibaldi stayed on after the armistice, and was elected as a deputy in the new National Assembly for Dijon, Paris, Nice and Algiers. Although he announced his intention of resigning his seat(s) and returning to Caprera, he first travelled to Bordeaux (where the assembly was temporarily located) to cast his vote in favour of retaining the Republic. Garibaldi's arrival, ‘in a red jumper, with his large felt hat, [and] the rough, calm air of a soldier’ (according to the eyewitness Emile Zola), caused a terrible uproar in the chamber, which was dominated by conservatives and monarchists who despised him as a republican and had accused him of military insubordination during the war.43 They argued that, as a foreigner, he could not be elected, and the president of the chamber told him he could not speak as he had just resigned his seat. Garibaldi repeatedly tried to speak but was shouted down. Eventually he left the chamber, and Bordeaux, for Marseille, from where he travelled to Caprera in the middle of February. A popular demonstration took place outside the chamber to protest at his treatment, but it subsided after Garibaldi's departure became known. Three weeks later, Victor Hugo caused another uproar in the French assembly when he sought to defend Garibaldi (‘I don't wish to be offensive,’ he told the deputies, ‘but I must say that, among all the French generals fighting in this war, Garibaldi alone did not suffer a defeat’); he too was shouted down.44 If nothing else, this bitter episode at the end of a deeply divisive war showed just how intensely French public opinion was divided over Garibaldi.45
The years 1870–1 were a major turning-point in nineteenth-century history. The defeat of France by Prussia, following the defeat of Austria four years earlier, and the creation of the German Empire marked the emergence of Germany as the dominant power in continental Europe, and a new phase in international relations. These years also saw an important shift on the democratic left. Two events dominated political life in Italy: the capture of Rome from the Pope in the autumn of 1870, and the revolution in Paris (the Paris Commune) of spring 1871. By removing any further reason for insurrection, the capture of Rome seemed to eliminate the tensions between the ‘loyal’ parliamentary opposition and the ‘extreme’ left (Estrema). But the Paris Commune separated them again, pushing some towards greater political compromise and the formation of the Historic Left (Sinistra Storica), which four years later took power in the parliamentary ‘revolution’ of 1876, and pushing others (a series of radical organisations, and various socialist and anarchist groups) further to the left. Within this radical left, a crucial division emerged. Mazzini utterly condemned the Paris Commune as a socially divisive mistake, and sou
ght to regroup the workers’ clubs to combat the danger of socialism.46 However, many other radicals in Italy followed the socialist lead and mythologised the Commune as a social revolution (‘the glorious harbinger of a new society’ in Karl Marx's words).47
As a result, the Paris Commune allowed a significant section of the radical left, especially a younger generation of radicals led by the poet and satirist Felice Cavallotti and grouped around the newspaper Il Gazzettino Rosa, to break openly and decisively with both Mazzini and the principles and methods of Mazzinian politics. Il Gazzettino Rosa praised Mazzini as the ‘saviour’ and teacher of Italy but insisted:
We have no more idols, we don't accept abstruse, incomprehensible formulas … What we object to in Mazzini is not his opinion in itself, as much as his opinion erected into a system and a political dogma. We are materialists, but we don't make a political school out of our materialism. To us it does not matter if one believes or does not believe in God … instead Mazzini wants to impose a new religion on us.48
The emphasis by younger radicals on the ‘social question’ was paralleled by an increase in what was called ‘internationalist’ or socialist activity (mostly Bakuninist anarchism) throughout northern and southern Italy, which was given a big boost by the Paris Commune. The rise of socialism represented a genuine challenge to Mazzini and the Mazzinian emphasis on politics and culture; and Mazzini's death early in 1872 only served to underline the prevailing sense that his political era was over.
