From Marsala, the Thousand–as they came to be called, though there were actually 1,089 of them–headed inland, where their numbers were soon doubled by Sicilian volunteers. At Calatafimi, some thirty miles to the northeast, they found Bourbon troops awaiting them. The battle was fought on 11 May and lasted several hours, most of the fighting being hand-to-hand, with bayonets rather than rifles. Garibaldi’s men were massively outnumbered; on the other hand, he could count on a huge psychological advantage. To every Italian this army of Redshirts–with its whole string of victories in South America as well as in Italy–was by now of almost legendary fame, its members often credited by the simple with a magic invulnerability to bullets. The Neapolitan soldiers were frightened and had little stomach for the fight; the Thousand were fighting for an ideal in which they all passionately believed, under a leader whose swashbuckling charisma was a constant inspiration. If they could win this first battle, Garibaldi told them, there was a strong probability that the opposition would melt away; then, in just a week or two, they would be masters of Sicily.
And they won it. And Garibaldi was proved right. There was no more obstruction before Palermo; on the contrary, thousands of Sicilians rallied to his colours, and when he arrived on 26 May it was to find that the citizens had already risen against the Bourbon government. There was a little desultory fighting, but it was not long before the Neapolitan commander gave the order to evacuate Palermo. By the end of the month Garibaldi was master of the city. There followed a brief period of consolidation, during which substantial reinforcements arrived from north Italy; then in early July he continued his advance. His last Sicilian battle was fought at Milazzo, a fortified seaport some fifteen miles west of Messina. It was harder fought than the others, but it opened the way to Messina itself, which surrendered without a struggle, apart from a small but courageous Bourbon garrison which held out for a little longer in the citadel.
The Neapolitans had withdrawn their forces from every other town and city, so with this negligible exception Sicily was free. Cavour sought its immediate formal annexation to Victor Emmanuel’s rapidly-growing kingdom–an idea hotly opposed by Garibaldi and Francesco Crispi, now his right-hand man. To all intents and purposes, they argued, Sicily was already part of the kingdom. The Sicilians certainly assumed as much, and the long legal formalities could surely wait until the rest of the fighting was over. They were worried, too–though they took care not to say so–that if the island were annexed Cavour might use his new authority to refuse to allow them to make it a springboard from which to advance on Naples, Rome and Venice.
These fears were by no means groundless. On 1 August Cavour wrote in desperation to his chef de cabinet and close friend Costantino Nigra:
If Garibaldi can pass to the mainland and take possession of Naples as he has of Sicily and Palermo, he becomes the absolute master of the situation…King Victor Emmanuel loses almost all his prestige; to most Italians he is simply the friend of Garibaldi. He will probably keep his crown, but that crown will shine only with the reflected light that a heroic adventurer chooses to throw on it…The King cannot take the crown of Italy from the hands of Garibaldi; it would lie too unsteadily on his head…
We must ensure that the government of Naples falls before Garibaldi sets foot on the mainland…The moment the King is gone, we must take the government into our own hands in the name of order and humanity, while snatching from Garibaldi’s hands the supreme direction of the Italian movement.
This brave, you may say audacious, measure will provoke cries of horror from Europe, will cause serious diplomatic complications, may even involve us at a somewhat later stage into a war with Austria. But it saves our revolution, and it preserves for the Italian movement that quality which is at once its glory and its strength; the quality of nationhood, and of monarchy.
Cavour had already persuaded Victor Emmanuel to write officially to Garibaldi asking him not to invade the mainland. The King had done so, but had followed up his letter with another, private note to the effect that these official instructions could perhaps be ignored. It now appears that this second note may never have been delivered–when it was found the seal was still unbroken–but it hardly mattered: Garibaldi’s mind was already made up. Cavour then sent agents provocateurs to stir up trouble in Naples in the hope of sparking off a liberal revolution. Naples, however–in striking contrast to Palermo–proved numb and apathetic. There was nothing to do but allow events to take their course.
On 18 and 19 August 1860, Garibaldi and his men crossed the Straits of Messina on the first step of their march on Naples. If Cavour had been alarmed, the twenty-four-year-old King Francis II,252 who had succeeded his father Ferdinand the previous year, was panic-stricken. The British diplomat Odo Russell, at that time serving on a mission to Naples, had reported that when Garibaldi entered Palermo the King ‘telegraphed five times in twenty-four hours for the Pope’s blessing’, and ‘Cardinal Antonelli…sent the last three blessings without reference to His Holiness, saying that he was duly authorised to do so.’ Francis knew that his army was incapable of further resistance to the seemingly invincible Redshirts, and that he himself was equally incapable of breathing further life into it; the only alternative was flight. On 6 September he took ship for Gaeta. Less than twenty-four hours later, Garibaldi entered Naples.
His journey through Calabria had been ridiculously easy. As against the 16,000 Neapolitan soldiers in the province, his vanguard consisted of only 3,500, but after a token resistance at Reggio there was no more opposition. For his men there were still 300 miles to cover in the broiling summer heat, but with Bourbon troops instantly surrendering their arms as they approached he had no fear for their safety. On the other hand, he was anxious to get to Naples as soon as possible–he did not trust Cavour an inch, and feared a preemptive strike. Fortunately for him, the late King Ferdinand had recently built a railway; Garibaldi now requisitioned all the rolling stock he could find and filled it with his army. He himself, with six companions, climbed into an open carriage and trundled into Naples on the afternoon of 7 September. That evening he addressed a cheering populace from the balcony of the royal palace, thanking the Neapolitans ‘in the name of all Italy which, thanks to their cooperation, had at last become a nation’. It was a shameless lie–they had not lifted a finger–but, he doubtless felt, a little flattery at this stage would do no harm.
Naples was the largest city in Italy, and the third largest in Europe. For the next two months Garibaldi ruled it–with Sicily–as a dictator. Meanwhile, he was planning his next step, which was to be an immediate march on the Papal States and Rome. But this step was never taken. Cavour, who had been unable to prevent his invasion of the mainland, was now determined to stop him in his tracks–knowing full well that to allow him to continue might well mean war with France. The Redshirts would have found the well-trained French a very different proposition to anything they had encountered so far, and Italy might well have lost everything she had gained in the past two years. There were other considerations too: as he had feared, Garibaldi was now far more popular than Victor Emmanuel himself; the Piedmontese army was deeply jealous of his recent successes; and there was always the lurking danger that Mazzini–who arrived in Naples on the 17th September–and his followers might persuade Garibaldi to desert the King of Piedmont and espouse the republican cause.
Garibaldi was well aware of Cavour’s hostility, just as he believed in the King’s tacit support, and soon after his arrival in Naples he had even gone so far as publicly to demand the Chief Minister’s resignation. In doing so he badly overplayed his hand. Victor Emmanuel, realising that he could no longer continue to play off the two men against each other, found it safer to accept the policy of his government. None of this, however, nor any number of letters (inspired by Cavour) from distinguished foreigners ranging from the Hungarian patriot Lajos Kossuth to the British social reformer Lord Shaftesbury, weakened Garibaldi’s resolve to march on Rome. The only argument that could hav
e had an effect was the one that eventually did so: force majeure.
Suddenly he found two formidable armies ranged against him: the Neapolitan and the Piedmontese. King Francis in Gaeta had managed to raise a new army, and not long after Garibaldi and his men left Naples on the first stage of their advance to the north they found a force of some 50,000 ranged along the bank of the Volturno river. It was here that they suffered their first defeat since their landing in Sicily; outside the little town of Caiazzo, in the leader’s temporary absence, one of his generals tried and failed to cross the river and lost 250 men in the attempt. On the first day of October, however, Garibaldi had his revenge. The battle was fought just outside Capua, in and around the little village of S. Angelo in Formis.253 It was an expensive victory–some 1,400 killed or wounded–but it saved Italy.
Meanwhile, the army of Piedmont was also on the march. Cavour, determined to recapture the initiative from Garibaldi, had launched an invasion of his own into the papal territories of Umbria and the Marches. Leaving Rome untouched, he had neatly avoided antagonising France and, quite possibly, Austria; he had also opened the way into the south, where–since Garibaldi was now dictator–he could claim that the Piedmontese army was urgently needed to save Naples from the forces of revolution. Most important of all, he had removed the geographical barrier which, so long as it lasted, would always divide Italy into two separate parts and make unification impossible. The campaign itself was unspectacular but effective. The Piedmontese army overcame a spirited resistance at Perugia, scored a small victory over a papal army near the little village of Castelfidardo near Loreto and a rather larger one when, after five days’ fighting, they captured Ancona, taking 154 guns and 7,000 prisoners–including the commander of the papal forces, the French General Christophe de Lamoricière. That was the end of the papal army; henceforth there was no further trouble.
Victor Emmanuel himself, accompanied by his long-term mistress, Rosina Vercellana–dressed, we are told, to kill–now came to take titular command of his army. From that moment Garibaldi’s star began to set. The battle of the Volturno had already persuaded him that a march on Rome was no longer a possibility, and now, with the King himself on his way, he saw that his rule in the south must come to an end. This was confirmed in late October, when plebiscites were held in the Kingdom of Naples and in Sicily, in Umbria and in the Marches, on whether voters wished their land to form an integral part of Italy under Victor Emmanuel. The votes in favour were overwhelming: in Sicily–to take but one example–432,053 voted in favour, 667 against.
Garibaldi gave in gracefully. He rode north with a large escort to meet the King, and on 7 November the two of them entered Naples side by side in the royal carriage. He asked one favour only: to be allowed to govern Naples and Sicily for a year as viceroy. But this was refused. He was after all a dangerous radical and anticlerical, who still dreamed of capturing Rome from the Pope and making it the capital of Italy. In an attempt to sugar the pill, Victor Emmanuel offered him the rank of full general together with a splendid estate, but Garibaldi would have none of it. He remained a revolutionary, and for as long as Austria still occupied the Veneto–and the Pope continued as temporal ruler in Rome–he was determined to preserve his freedom of action. On 9 November he sailed for his farm on the little island of Caprera off the Sardinian coast. He took with him only a little money–borrowed, since he had made none during his months of power–and a bag of seed for his garden.
On Passion Sunday, 17 March 1861, Victor Emmanuel II was proclaimed King of Italy. Old Massimo d’Azeglio, Cavour’s predecessor as Chief Minister, is reported to have said when he heard the news: ‘L’Italia è fatta; restano a fare gli italiani.’254 But although the first half of the statement was true–an Italian nation had indeed come into existence, even if it was not yet complete–the second half was truer still. Francis II kept up his resistance; the country had been divided since the end of the Roman Empire, and few indeed of Italy’s twenty-two million people thought of themselves as Italians. North and south had virtually nothing in common, with radically different standards of living (as indeed they still have today). New roads and railways had to be built as a matter of urgency. A national army and navy had somehow to be created, together with a single legal system, civil administration and common currency. In the meantime, there was no alternative to the adoption of Piedmontese institutions; but this forcible ‘Piedmontisation’ was widely resented and did little to help the cause of unity. Even the King’s decision to keep his designation ‘the Second’ caused offence. As King of Italy he was surely Victor Emmanuel I; was the Risorgimento really the rebirth of Italy, or was it simply the conquest of Italy by the house of Savoy?
Less than three months after the royal proclamation Cavour was dead. He had spent his last weeks in furious debate over the future of Rome–in which, it should be recorded, he had never once set foot. All the other major Italian cities, he argued, had been independent municipalities, each fighting its own corner; only Rome, as the seat of the Church, had remained above such rivalries. But though the Pope must be asked to surrender his temporal power, papal independence must at all costs be guaranteed–‘a free church in a free state’. He encountered a good deal of opposition–the most vitriolic from Garibaldi, who emerged from Caprera in April, strode into the Assembly in his red shirt and grey South American poncho, and let loose a stream of abuse at the man who, he thundered, had sold off half his country to the French and done his best to prevent the invasion of the Two Sicilies. But he succeeded only in confirming the general view that however brilliant a general he might be, he was certainly no statesman; Cavour easily won the vote of confidence that followed. It was his last political victory. He died suddenly on 6 June, of a massive stroke. He was just fifty years old.
If Camillo Cavour had lived just one more decade he would have seen the last two pieces of the Italian jigsaw fitted into place. Where Rome was concerned, the situation was not helped by Garibaldi, who in 1862 made a faintly ridiculous attempt to repeat his triumph of two years before. Adopting the slogan ‘Rome or death!’, he raised 3,000 volunteers at Palermo, with whom he took possession of a complaisant Catania; then in August, having commandeered a couple of local steamers, he crossed with his men to Calabria and began another march on Rome. This time, however, government troops were ready for him. He had got no further than the Aspromonte massif in the extreme south of Calabria–the toe of Italy–when they attacked. Fearing a civil war, Garibaldi ordered his men not to return the fire, but there were a few casualties nonetheless, he himself having his right ankle shattered. He was arrested and sent in a gunboat to Naples, where he was promptly freed; he remained a hero, and the government did not dare take action against him.
Meanwhile, quiet diplomacy was proving rather more successful. Pope Pius himself was refusing to yield an inch; so far as he was concerned, he held the Papal States for the Catholic world and was obliged by his coronation oath to pass them on to his successor. Napoleon III, by contrast, was becoming steadily more amenable to negotiation, and by what was known as the September Convention, signed on 15 September 1864, he agreed to withdraw his troops from Rome within two years. Italy in return pledged herself to guarantee papal territory against any attack, and agreed to transfer her capital within six months from Turin to Florence.
The Convention, which was to remain in force for six years, did not directly improve the prospects of incorporating Rome into the new Italian state; indeed, it seemed at least temporarily to guarantee the status quo. On the other hand, by putting an end to the fifteen years of French occupation it cleared the ground for the next steps, whatever these might be, and by freezing the situation in Rome it enabled the government to turn its mind to the other overriding necessity in those early years of Italian nationhood: the recovery of the Veneto. For some time past King Victor Emmanuel had been toying with the idea of an invasion of the Balkans–led, it need hardly be said, by Garibaldi–to stir up revolt among the Austrian subject peoples;
with Austria fully engaged in restoring order, it would be a simple matter to occupy the Italian lands. Unfortunately Napoleon III–whose support would have been vital–had pooh-poohed the idea and the King had reluctantly put it to one side.
But now, by a stroke of quite unexpected good fortune, there appeared a deus ex machina who was effectively to drop both the coveted territories into Italy’s lap. This was the Prussian Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, who was now well on the way to realising his dream of uniting all the German states into a single empire. The one stumbling-block was Austria, whose influence in Germany he was determined to eliminate. He therefore approached General La Marmora–now once again Victor Emmanuel’s Chief Minister–with a proposal for a military alliance: Austria would be attacked simultaneously on two fronts, by Prussia from the north and by Italy from the west. Italy’s reward, in the event of victory, would be Venetia. La Marmora readily agreed, and Napoleon III signalled that he had no objection. The treaty was signed on 8 April 1866, and on 15 June the war began.
Six weeks later it was over. For the Prussians, a single battle was enough. It was fought at Sadowa, some sixty-five miles northeast of Prague, and it engaged the largest number of troops–some 330,000–ever assembled on a European battlefield. (It was also the first in which railways and the telegraph were used on a considerable scale.) The Prussian victory was total. It bankrupted the military resources of the Austrian Emperor Franz Josef I and opened the way to Vienna. Bismarck had achieved exactly what he wanted, and was glad to accede to Austria’s request for an armistice.
Italy, unfortunately, did less well. Her main army, under the King, La Marmora and General Enrico Cialdini, Duke of Gaeta, was defeated several times in and around Custoza–always unlucky for the house of Savoy–and at sea her navy was largely destroyed off Lissa (now the Croatian island of Vis). The only good news was provided by Garibaldi, who had delightedly obeyed a summons to lead a force of 35,000 into the Tyrol. While scoring no major victory, he certainly caused the Austrians a good deal of discomfiture. The Italian government, now settled in Florence, though mildly aggrieved that it had not been consulted over its terms, nevertheless welcomed the armistice–not least because it provided for the cession of the Veneto. Since Austria had not yet granted recognition to the new kingdom of Italy, the same procedure was followed as for Lombardy five years before: the province was ceded to Napoleon III, who instantly passed it on to Victor Emmanuel.
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