by Lucy Riall
33 Garibaldi at the Augustus Mausoleum in 1875. The occasion was a banquet for workers’ societies and, despite his gravely ill appearance, was part of a renewed bout of political activity.
It is sad to tell of these last years: sad, like the spectacle of greatness which declines and lives beyond itself. Garibaldi was now but the ghost of a giant, obliged to drag across the earth the weight of his past greatness … fortune, which had bestowed so many favours on our Hero, refused him the greatest one of all: that of resting on the last trace of his victories and dying at the right time.90
A crucial aspect of the later legend of Garibaldi is that, as Daniel Pick writes, he ‘found … little solace and contentment in old age’; he suffered ‘political marginalisation’, and he was self-destructive, prone to melancholy and inclined to obsessive behaviour.91
As I have sought to show here, Garibaldi was not politically marginal, and there is another way of interpreting his obsessive behaviour. Although Garibaldi was severely ill and visibly frustrated in his final years, it seems likely that at least some of his melancholy and neurosis was staged for public consumption and for political purposes, and that this was a tactic ably supported by artists, writers and his first serious biographers, men like Guerzoni, most of whom were also his political colleagues.92 I would suggest that, since Garibaldi was no longer able or willing to press his good looks and physical energy into the service of the national cause, personal sadness became for him an alternative form of political display. In the context of postunification political disillusionment, it seems evident that Garibaldi's ill, tired and broken body served as a symbol of national suffering, and was a very effective means of publicly personifying the social injustices of liberal Italy, the ‘sickness’ of Rome, and the betrayal of the Risorgimento.
The politics of memory
National unification posed many problems for Italy's rulers. In the 1860s, the political divisions and clerical opposition caused by the circumstances of unification combined with economic depression and widespread poverty, social disorder (especially brigandage in southern Italy) and the humiliations of foreign policy to create a clamour of opposition to the rightwing government. After 1876, the disillusionment caused by the meagre political record and trasformismo of the new left government produced a climate of political and social instability. The increasingly visible issue of Italy's regional diversity, notably the political, economic, cultural and geographical difference between North and South, added to these problems and seemed to offer clear proof that unification had still not been achieved. National unification was meant to resolve Italy's difficulties, not increase them, and the inability of Italy's new governing class to solve these problems undermined its legitimacy, and provided both the radical movement and the Church with ample opportunity to attack its legislative record and the conduct of political life. Crucially, these practical problems of unification were paralleled by problems with nationalism itself. As we have seen, Italy lacked national symbols such as the monarchy and the army, the Italian language was spoken by a minority of the population, and illiteracy rates were extremely high. Unification, by profoundly alienating the Catholic Church, neutralised (at the very least) the role of traditional religion as a source of Italian national identity. In this way, nationality could not unite Italians; it became another one of liberal Italy's disappointments.
It is now a commonplace that the rulers of Italy were faced after unification with the prodigious task of ‘making Italians’. Involved was a process both of nationbuilding (what Umberto Levra calls a process of ‘amalgamating’ and ‘homogenizing’ Italians) and of organising political consent through the invention of Italian national traditions, and the creation of symbols of italianità.93 As part of this process, the Risorgimento was quickly appropriated and recast as the latest episode in Italy's foundation story, or as a recent heroic past which could inspire and consolidate a sense of national community and belonging.94 There has been an enormous amount of scholarly interest in this political project. Research has focused on a number of related themes and issues, but especially on the moment of nation-building after the broadening of the suffrage in 1882 and thereafter (the construction of monuments to dead heroes like Garibaldi and King Vittorio Emanuele; commemorations, anniversaries and museums of the Risorgimento; educational policies; and the writing of a national history). The prevalence of personality cults (the glorification of Garibaldi and Vittorio Emanuele; and the promotion of historical heroes of italianità like Dante, Columbus and the boy insurgent Balilla) was also a characteristic feature of the late-nineteenth-century process of nation-building in Italy.95
Francesco Crispi, in particular, used Garibaldi to promote his own nationalising agenda. He assiduously fostered the cults of both Garibaldi and Vittorio Emanuele in the 1880s, and sought specifically to turn Garibaldi into ‘a sacred symbol … of the unity of the nation, of the people bound in selfless faith and duty to Italy and to its main political incarnation, the monarchy’. In speeches, articles and in his paper, La Riforma, Crispi presented Garibaldi as a ‘divine’ and ‘exceptional being’; a man devoted to the king and even an antisocialist, as well as a nationalist and anticlerical.96 At the same time, and as Crispi's language suggests, attempts were made to sanctify Garibaldi and his work in the construction of the Italian nation state. These were part of broader efforts to create a new civic religion in Italy, by simultaneously promoting secular moral values through institutions such as schools and the army, and appropriating and recasting the symbols and rituals of the Catholic Church.
Yet despite the evidence of so much effort, most historians of the period have found that the process of making Italians had little impact either on Italian culture, which remained largely local and regional in character, or on popular ignorance (illiteracy rates remained high). They have also concluded that many of the new symbols and rituals of the nation were unpopular or failed largely to affect popular emotions or otherwise ‘impact upon the collective imagination’.97 Hence, historians tend to stress the difficulties, narrowness and ultimate failure of the nationalising project in Italy, especially compared to similar programmes in France and/or Germany.98
34 Garibaldi in a more mature incarnation, on the occasion of the war in 1866.
In the rest of this chapter, I will look at the role played by Garibaldi and his radical colleagues in making Italians and in the construction of national memory before his death in 1882, which was also the year that the suffrage was widened. Although there has been much less interest in the period before 1882, there was little that was qualitatively new about the late nineteenth-century attempts to make Italians; indeed, remarkably similar policies were tried out in Sicily in 1860. Many of the problems which frustrated the process of making Italians in the 1880s and after were either caused by, or prefigured in, the political stance taken by Garibaldi during the last years before his death. Furthermore, the clash for control of his image and its symbolic associations involved more protagonists than has hitherto fully been recognised. A study of this earlier conflict can tell us much about the obstacles to nationbuilding in later nineteenth-century Italy, and the equivocal outcome of this process.
An important, if obvious, point to remember is how famous Garibaldi had become by the 1860s and '70s. The potent combination of media interest and popular enthusiasm established in 1859–60 did not desert him in his old age. Pictorial albums were produced to commemorate the war of 1866 and the Franco-Prussian war of 1870–1, and the coverage of the former war, in particular, continued to propose Garibaldi as an emblem of manly vigour and Italian military success, while admitting that he had grown older (see figure 34 opposite).99 ‘So the star of Garibaldi still shines’, was the comment of Le Siècle.100 His efforts to destroy the Papacy in 1867 attracted huge international attention. Le Siècle continued to support him, and if The Times in London was openly concerned about the diplomatic consequences of his actions, and was a strong advocate of Franco-Italian understanding, even it coul
d not entirely contain its excitement at his escape from Caprera, and at the prospects of the ‘Garibaldi movement’ thereafter.101 His actions were widely applauded in the American press as proof of the resolute power of republicanism. The Philadelphia Inquirer used the Roman Question to press home its republican message: the king had no desire for Rome, the paper insisted, but Garibaldi did, and the king ‘is not nearly so beloved as Garibaldi’.102 Harper's Weekly described Garibaldi as a
simple hero … [who] inspires a nation with a word and confounds the astutest politics of the most experienced statesmen … it is Garibaldi who plays the first part in Italian regeneration … No King could grasp by sympathy the popular heart like Garibaldi, and the character and life of the present monarch chill the national ardour…103
The events around Mentana also inspired popular demonstrations and poetry. John Greenleaf Whittier's ‘Garibaldi’ instructed him to ‘Rejoice’, as one day his aims would be realised: ‘All men shall be priests and Kings – One royal brotherhood, one church made free – By love, which is the law of liberty!’104 The Times reported that Mentana had even revitalised Guy Fawkes Day (5 November) in London: ‘At the East End a large representation of the Pope was carried on poles, Garibaldi, with uplifted sword, being about to strike him down’.105
As the example of Guy Fawkes Day suggests, Garibaldi's ability to appeal to the crowd was equally undiminished by political failure and physical infirmity. Indeed, the political events described in the previous section must be imagined against the backdrop of cheering crowds and mass celebrations:
He came at last, the commander, the most romantic hero of our century, the most famous human being on the planet, the leader most sure of living in the hearts of future generations, a living man whose legend is already as firmly implanted as that of Wallace or William Tell [an Englishman wrote of Garibaldi's arrival in southern France in 1870] … this hero came amongst us, and [as he] walked through the station to his one-horse carriage we saw his face very clearly in the gaslight. It was a pale, grave face, much more like that of a student and philosopher than a hero of great exploits. We cried ‘Vive Garibaldi’ with some energy, but he answered with a tone of extreme gravity and sadness ‘Vive la République Française!’
‘It is finished’, wrote the correspondent of the Daily News, when Garibaldi left some five months later: ‘Garibaldi has quitted the soil of France … I think the entire population of Marseilles was on foot at dawn … “There”, cried a working man, “there goes our last hope!” … All is blank and tame, and void of interest. I never felt so forlorn.’106 An English woman who saw Garibaldi arrive in Rome in 1875 was astonished by his ill appearance (‘his face corpselike … carried like an infant in the strong arms of his son Menotti’) but also by the ‘wild yell of love’ which rose from the crowd on his arrival, ‘so shrill and piercing in its intensity that it could be heard half over the city’.107 His arrival in Palermo in 1882 was an even more remarkable spectacle: almost entirely immobilised by rheumatism, Garibaldi had to be carried on a specially designed bath chair through a crowded but hushed city (the crowd had been told to welcome him with a ‘religious silence’ for the sake of his health).108 For Harper's Weekly, his arrival was ‘inexpressibly pathetic’: ‘As the train rolled into the dépôt, a shout was raised, which was quickly hushed when his illness was announced. He lay like a dead man on the couch, which was placed in an open carriage, and followed by a mourning, silent crowd.’109
I can't begin to understand, even today [Garibaldi's daughter Clelia wrote in 1948], how that enormous flood of people managed to control the enthusiasm in their hearts and succeeded in obeying the orders [to be quiet] … The carriages passed between two wings of people gathered together around Garibaldi, in great silence … so many shining eyes, so many kisses blown from women's, men's, children's hands, from every social class! Papa was moved too, [and] with a sign of his hand responded to the greeting of that huge crowd gathered around him.110
Surrounded by this heady fusion of political radicalism (‘Vive la république française!’) and popular religiosity, Garibaldi expired gradually but publicly in front of his audience; in contrast to these emotional scenes, his funeral at Caprera represents the victory of secular officialdom, and of a much more hierarchical vision of national belonging.
Indeed, we should not be surprised at the scale and persistence of Garibaldi's celebrity, which was the fruit of almost forty years of unrivalled publicity. More interesting is the use which he and the radicals made of this fame to score rhetorical and symbolic points against their political opponents.
One way in which Garibaldi sought to undermine the government's legitimacy was by promoting a specific kind of Risorgimento memory, and he did this through his presence and speeches at commemorative events. Garibaldi's presence at any public event tended to evoke a more splendid past and better leaders, thus serving as an implicit rebuke to the government, or he could directly remind the audience of the government's betrayal of the Risorgimento. His 1880 speech for the monument to Mentana had all of these ingredients; and is a skilful piece of Risorgimento rhetoric in which he explicitly juxtaposed reminiscences of revolutionary glory with evidence of government treachery:
Legnano and the Five Days show that this people will not suffer tyranny. You have kindly asked me to assist at the erection of a monument to our heroic martyrs of Mentana, fallen under the sword of Bonapartist soldiers [soldatesche] who had joined up with the cops of the papal monster, and were assisted and guaranteed by an immoral government to the misfortune of Italy.111
In the later years of his life, Garibaldi's speeches and public announcements were rarely, if ever, occasions for self-congratulation or satisfaction, but were usually treated as opportunities for political attack, as moments of high emotion directed against Italy's enemies. ‘Italy is not made’, he told the crowd in Orvieto in August 1867. ‘Who prevents us from finishing our task are first the priests, then Bonaparte … We must go to Rome; without Rome Italy cannot make itself. We must remove that cancer from the middle of our country.’112 To the president of a workers’ club which had made him honorary president, he advised: ‘tell the brother workers from me not to believe the priests … because the priests are the greatest obstacle to Italian redemption’;113 and to the editor of the French paper, Le Rappel de Provence, he declared: ‘The truth above all, my friend, and let's call everything by its name: the priest is the murderer of the soul’.114 In 1870, he told the inhabitants of Trieste (still part of the Austrian Empire) that ‘a priest, in whatever name or guise he presents himself, is an impostor, and an enemy of God.’115
‘Who will deny’, he wrote in an English magazine in the same year
that the prime cause of brigandage in Italy is Bonaparte, with the priests for his myrmidons and the Italian government for his accomplices? Does not this son of Hortense, with his crocodile's devotion, bring about the misery of my country by maintaining in the heart of Italy that den of assassins [the Papal States]…?116
The main focus of Garibaldi's attack in his later years was the Church. His novels, in particular, offer us a fascinating glimpse into the culture of anti-clericalism in the early years of liberal Italy. As he wrote to Edgar Quinet (the French translator of Cantoni), ‘by writing Novels … I sought to make my ideas on Papal Theocracy (the plague of the World) more accessible … because I believe – every honest man must contribute … with word – and deed – when he can – to overthrowing such disgusting – and corrupting obstacles to human progress’.117 Each of his novels, moreover, had the same plot: ‘in each a priestly villain conceives an illicit passion for the young heroine, and the novel tells of his attempts to satisfy that passion, the eventual foiling of his schemes, and en passant reveals a considerable amount of hypocrisy and moral corruption within the Church’.118 This basic plot allows Garibaldi to press into service one of the favourite tropes of radical anti-clericalism, which is the illegitimate, uncontrollable sexuality of the clergy.119 In Clelia
, Cardinal Procopio (‘the factotum and favourite of His Holiness’) instructs an aide to procure him the eponymous heroine: ‘Go Gianni … go and procure this gem for me at any cost. I can no longer live if Clelia is not mine. Only she can relieve my boredom and bless the stupid existence which I drag out alongside that old imbecile [i.e. the Pope].’120 In I Mille, one of the heroines, Marzia, is the daughter of a priest, Monsignor Corvo, who, having stolen her from her mother and then abandoned her, fails to recognise her when they meet so rapes her, after which he places her in a convent (and kills himself when she reveals her true identity later in the novel). Although Cantoni has a slightly less racy plot, the heroine, Ida, does have to fight off the Jesuit priest (‘the Jesuit! the Jesuit! another human anomaly’), Fra Gaudenzio, who tries to rape her when she is unconscious and a prisoner: ‘he bent his snake's face over Ida's gagged mouth and tried to kiss her’. It also has a lengthy description of the horrors of the papal dungeons (‘that filthy bastion of priestly tyranny’), including a diabolic scene where Cantoni's gaolers die in a drunken stupor amid the ruins of the burning prison.121
Garibaldi's diatribes against ‘priestism’ (pretismo) are set against the background of real episodes in the Risorgimento – 1849 (Cantoni), 1860 (I Mille) and 1867 (Clelia) – in which he figures personally and in which he intervenes to make explicitly contemporary political comments. The wars described here are all moments of high national drama where the volunteer fights heroically against ‘priestism’ (the volunteer can say, ‘with his head held high … I have served no one but my country!’),122 but is let down by the politicians. In both Cantoni and Clelia the hero dies defending national honour. Thus, Garibaldi takes Italy's recent history – the Risorgimento – and restructures it as a canonic Risorgimento narrative. In the process, he uses the plot to turn the government into something like a Judas figure who betrays the nation for personal gain. ‘I consider it absurd to deny that the Monarchy supported national aspirations for unification out of its own interests’, Garibaldi comments at the start of I Mille. ‘Your misdeeds are too many, the hate too great which the population in all justice feels for you: tricked, humiliated, plundered, betrayed by you!’123 he tells Italy's monarchs later in the novel. In Cantoni, even the Bourbons are victims of Piedmontese hypocrisy (‘[t]he inexperienced Francesco II, betrayed by the northern fox’).124
