It was not allowed to remain undisturbed for long. In April the new French president, Louis-Napoleon, sent an army to restore the Pope and to “liberate” Rome from the handful of dangerous radicals who, as he saw it, had forced themselves upon the unwilling citizens.
It was Garibaldi’s moment. “It was then,” wrote the republican officer Giacomo Medici, “the providential man appeared.” On April 27 Garibaldi led his followers into Rome through streets packed with people shouting out his name. “It is impossible to describe the enthusiasm which took possession of the population at the sight of him,” wrote Medici. Hats and handkerchiefs were thrown in the air. A young German artist who was one of the adoring multitude wrote: “I went after him; thousands did likewise. He only had to show himself. We all worshipped him. We could not help it.” The hour had come, and so had the man. “This mysterious conqueror surrounded by such a brilliant halo of glory … was, in the minds of the Roman people, the only man capable of maintaining the decree of resistance,” wrote an onlooker. To Medici “he might have been thought the protecting God of the republic who hastened to the defence of Rome.”
He entered the city riding, as usual, on a white horse, his tawny hair and beard flowing beneath a broad black hat with long feathers, his white cloak flung back to show his inevitable red shirt. When Alcibiades returned to Athens the older men had pointed him out to their juniors; now the women of Rome held their babies up to see Garibaldi, calling out, “Oh isn’t he beautiful! Beautiful!” Others, recognizing his resemblance to the bearded redeemer Jesus Christ, fell to their knees as he went by.
Behind him clattered the Garibaldini. They were not ranked neatly like regular soldiers, but slouching and swaggering like a band of brigands. Their hats were big, their hair was long. Garibaldi himself was the only officer among them to have a batman, a black Brazilian, Andrea Aguiar, who was his constant and—to European eyes—exotic companion. The rest carried all their belongings on their saddles, South American style, including a roll of cloth which, hoisted on a sword for a tent pole, became their shelter. As homeless and therefore invulnerable as the Scythians about whom Herodotus wrote, they seemed both noble and savage, magnificent and alarming in equal measure.
The battle which they had come to join had already, before the French even arrived at the walls, the tragic glamour of one which could not possibly be won. “There is no religion without its martyrs,” Mazzini had once said. “Let us found ours, even if it be by our blood.” Soon after his arrival in Rome he concluded: “The foes are too many, too strong and too subtle.” But if the republic could not stand, it could at least fall beautifully. For him, the defense of the city was to be an episode of noble self-sacrifice, a story of uplifting sadness. “For the sake of the future,” he wrote later, “it was our duty to offer our morituri te salutant to Italy from Rome.” And at the center of the sublime and sorrowful spectacle he was planning for the inspiration of all ages to come would stand the hero he had done so much to create, the noble warrior clad, like the spectral figure seen by Rodrigo Díaz’s men after his death, in white and red, and riding upon a great white horse, the stainless champion whose archaic hair-style so fittingly resembled that of the Savior who had laid down his life for others. It is unlikely that many Romans foresaw their defeat as clearly as Mazzini did, but it was evident to all and sundry that they faced awful odds. If Garibaldi was Christ, then his entrance into Rome was his Palm Sunday, as the people ran through the streets avid for a glimpse of him, of the man who had come to save them and perhaps to lay down his life.
He is remembered as the defender of the Roman Republic, just as Francis Drake rather than Admiral Howard is remembered as the man who put the Spanish Armada to flight. In fact the Roman commander was General Avezzana. Of the nearly twenty thousand men under his command, the troops assigned to Garibaldi constituted only a fraction. But theirs was the battle that came to stand for the whole heartbreaking story of the failed defense of the new republic.
Just outside, and perched on a hill above, the city’s western walls stood a private house set in gardens, the Villa Corsini. If the French were allowed to set up their cannon there they would be able to fire into the city. If Rome’s defenders controlled it they might be able to prevent the French passing beneath them to attack the walls. On April 29, with Avezzana’s approval, Garibaldi occupied the garden and set up his headquarters in the villa. The next day the French army approached. Garibaldi sent his men, seasoned Garibaldini and new recruits alike, racing down the hill to repulse them. The French held their ground through an hour’s hand-to-hand fighting, but when Garibaldi led a second charge himself, “erect on horseback,” as one of his officers described him, “his hair streaming to the winds like a statue of brass representing the god of battles,” they turned and ran. It was an astounding victory. Ten thousand Frenchmen—the descendants of those who, under another Napoleon, had swept through Italy in still living memory—were turned back by barely four thousand Italians under the command of a maverick general who had managed to transform a rabble of irregulars and volunteers into a victorious army almost literally overnight.
Garibaldi was wounded in the stomach. He gave no sign that he was hurt and fought on, his saddle drenched with blood. That night he sent for a doctor. “Come to me after dark. I have been wounded but nobody must know.” His stoic endurance, the secrecy and the secret’s not-too-long-delayed revelation helped to render him not just a conquering hero but a suffering saint as well. Meanwhile to his enemies he was a bugbear. Had it not been for Garibaldi, Louis-Napoleon told the French Assembly, their army would have marched unopposed into Rome. As Drake seemed a greater man to the Spanish than he did to his own compatriots, so Garibaldi, an adored but subordinate commander in Rome, seemed in Paris to be sole guardian of his city.
A two-week armistice was agreed for negotiation. Meanwhile the army of the Bourbon king of Naples was menacing Rome from the south. Garibaldi went to meet it under the command of a General Roselli. There was a desperate, inconclusive battle at Velletri, where Garibaldi came close to being killed when he and his horse were thrown down and badly trampled by some of his own retreating cavalry. He survived thanks to some boys who dragged him clear of a tangled pile of fallen horses and men, and returned to Rome. On June 1 the French General Oudinot gave notice that he was ending the armistice. His letter was (probably deliberately) ambiguous. The Romans, understanding themselves to have three days to prepare, were taken unawares when, on June 2, French troops occupied the undefended Villa Corsini. Garibaldi was given the task of recapturing it.
The battle for the Villa Corsini which took place on June 3 was a terrible one, as stupid in its futile wasting of young men’s lives as the charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava six years later, and equally celebrated. For seventeen hours, from dawn to dusk on a swelteringly hot day, Garibaldi sent wave after wave of men up the rising ground between the city and the villa, through its garden gate, which they could pass only five at a time, and up the steeply sloping drive toward the front of the four-story villa on top of the hill, from every window, balcony, and terrace of which the French were firing on them. Their chances of success were negligible, their chances of dying hideously high. That they obeyed him is evidence not only of their courage but also of the power of his hold over them.
He had a mesmerist’s capacity to impose his will. One volunteer recalled: “He laid his hand on my shoulder and simply said, with that low strange smothered voice that seemed like a spirit speaking inside me ‘Courage! Courage! We are going to fight for our country.’ Do you think I could ever turn back after that?” An officer leading one of the assault parties described afterwards how, on receiving Garibaldi’s order to “go, with twenty of your bravest men, and take the Villa Corsini at the point of the bayonet,” he was at first “transfixed by astonishment,” so preposterous and so terrible did it seem. He did it all the same. By the time he reached the steps below the villa only twelve of his twenty men were left alive. Seven made it
back, two of them badly wounded. Another recalled how, as his men fell all around him, he imagined for a moment that they were tripping over the roots of vines—so inconceivable was the grim speed with which they were being killed. “Those hurrying past would try to drag away a fallen comrade, but the man who stretched out his hand to help would bring it suddenly back to clutch at his own death-wound.” One in six of the men and boys (some of his soldiers were as young as twelve years old) under Garibaldi’s command died. Twice the villa was captured, but each time the French, who could approach it safely under cover of trees to the rear, swiftly retook it. Throughout the day Garibaldi himself, an unmistakable target on his white horse, directed operations from beneath the villa, well within reach of the French marksmen. It was said of Wallenstein that after the battle of Lützen musket balls clattered out of his buff coat. He was one of those superhuman warriors whom gunshot, however well aimed, could not kill. So was Garibaldi. By nightfall, so the story goes, his white poncho and his wide plumed hat were both riddled with bullet holes.
It was a catastrophic defeat. With the French immovably entrenched in the villa the eventual fall of Rome was inevitable. Garibaldi was privately much criticized by his colleagues both for the pointless slaughter and for the failure. He was never one to spare his men: “Even with the certainty of defeat we had to fight,” he declared once after an occasion when he had fought on pointlessly for two whole days, “at least for the honour of our arms.” Now there were murmurs that he was not only gallant to the point of foolhardiness but perhaps incompetent as well. In the opinion of his fellow republican Pisacane he might have taken and held the villa if only he had concentrated his forces. Another officer judged that “he was utterly incapable of directing the manoeuvres of men by which alone the scale can be turned in a field of battle.” Working with small guerrilla bands he could be innovative and astonishing, but he never found any other way of approaching a conventional battle than that of sending his men marching straight on the enemy (uphill if necessary) with swords drawn or bayonets fixed, a strategy productive of stirring spectacles but horribly wasteful of lives. But the glory of an engagement is not measured by its utility, or even by its outcome. His defeat at Sant’ Antonio had made Garibaldi an international celebrity. His defeat at the Villa Corsini made him something greater. On the night after the battle Mazzini issued a proclamation: “Romans! This day is a day of heroes, a page of history. Yesterday we said to you, ‘be great’; today we say to you ‘you are great.’ ” June 3 is a solemn festival in the calendar of the Risorgimento, the day on which Italians had proved that they would give their lives to make their country their own. The men and boys shot down in the gardens of the Villa Corsini became the movement’s martyrs, and Garibaldi, who sent them to their deaths, gained by association with them an aura of tragic numinosity, of one ready to give his life that others might be free.
For another month the republic held out. Garibaldi commanded the defense of the most desperately beleaguered section of the walls, taking hair-raising risks with his own life. His headquarters were in range of the French guns and shook under their bombardment as though suffering a perpetual earthquake. Every morning he climbed a watchtower and there, unhurriedly, he lit his first cigar of the morning while French sharpshooters filled the air around him with bullets. “I can safely say,” he wrote later, reveling in his own bravado, “I never heard a tempest make such a hissing noise in my life.” Every day he rode along the line of walls, unmistakable in his brilliant clothes and his broad plumed hat, with his black servant Aguiar, yet another badge of his identity, just behind him. To his enemies he was a clear target, to his followers a vision. One man told Trevelyan nearly half a century later how, sleeping on the ramparts early one morning, he had “opened his eyes, dreamily half aware that a horse was stepping tenderly across his body. He had a vision of the rider’s face looking down at him out of masses of curling golden hair. It was imprinted on his brain as one of the noblest things in art or nature which he had ever seen.” Garibaldi took his meals in the open while shells burst around him. It was said that those who dined with him were likely to be killed before they had time to digest their meal. Somehow, amazingly, he survived. Death was everywhere, and Garibaldi was supremely happy. He wrote to Anita, “Here they live, die and suffer amputation, all to the cry of ‘Viva la Repubblica!’ One hour of our life in Rome is worth a century of ordinary existence.”
On the night of June 29 the French launched their final offensive. For two hours Garibaldi led the defenders as they struggled to hold back the attack. “Garibaldi was greater than I have ever seen him, greater than anybody has ever seen him. His sword was like lightning,” wrote one of his officers. “At every moment I feared to see him fall, but no, there he remained, as immovable as destiny.” At last, as a section of the wall collapsed under the French barrage and the invaders came pouring through the gap, he rode down the hill and over the Tiber to the Capitol, where the assembly was in session. The city was lost; the great political experiment had failed. But when Garibaldi walked into the chamber covered with blood, sweat, and dust, his sword filthy and dented at his side, the assembly rose as one man to cheer him.
The republican government surrendered. Garibaldi did not. The previous year he had refused to accept defeat when King Charles Albert did. Now, once again, he announced his attention of fighting on. While Mazzini and his fellow politicians scrambled for safety abroad he declared that he would lead any who would follow him out of Rome’s eastern gates to continue the fight in the countryside.
For weeks he had been chafing against Mazzini’s determination to defend the city. A guerrilla by experience and inclination, he favored relinquishing towns, which too easily turned into traps, and taking to open country where speed and cunning could be used to compensate for inferiority of numbers or weaponry. He had begged to be allowed to pursue the French after their initial defeat. He had wanted to lead his men out of Rome and circle round behind their lines. On the route to Velletri he had disguised himself as a peasant in order to spy out the Neapolitan positions with a view to harassing them with repeated raids. After the battle he had wanted to chase the Neopolitan army back into its own territory. All these plans had been thwarted by his political leaders, whose sole aim was to hang on tight to Rome. The ancient, sacred city was a potent symbol. Mazzini had declared: “Within those walls is the future of the nation.”
Garibaldi disagreed. “Rome” was not brick and marble: it was a great idea. It stood for republican liberty and for a vague and luminous cluster of other concepts worth dying for. It was no longer enshrined in a place; it was incarnated in a man. In Utica, staunchly defending the defunct republic, Cato was Rome. Now Rome was Garibaldi. “Wherever we shall be,” he ringingly proclaimed, “there will be Rome.”
At five o’clock on the afternoon of July 2 Garibaldi rode his white horse into Bernini’s grand piazza before St. Peter’s. His appearance had been expected. The magnificent space was teeming with people. Very slowly he made his way through the crowd towards the obelisk in the piazza’s center. “Women stormed him from all sides,” wrote one who was there. The din was tremendous. People were cheering and yelling out his name. Others were weeping, and some were cursing him for taking away their sons, for it was already known what he intended to do. He waited. For all his much-lauded simplicity he was a superb orator, with a talent for crowd control to match Cato’s and a great gift for stillness. When he had a speech to make he would hold silent, his face half hidden by his great black hat, until the crowd was awed into quietness, before he addressed them in his slow, resonant voice. (The French novelist and journalist Maxim du Camp thought it the most beautiful he had ever heard.) This time, when he gestured for the shouting to stop and that vast and hysterical crowd hushed to hear him, his words were harsh and noble. He asked for volunteers to march out of Rome with him and continue the fight.
Rodrigo Díaz had enticed men to follow him into exile with promises of the great fortunes they c
ould win under his command; similarly, Drake had assured his men that he would make them as rich as gentlemen. Garibaldi held out no such inducements. He was offering not money or social status, but something even more headily intoxicating: the tragic glamour of defeat which had transfigured Cato, and the ennoblement of suffering. “They wrong man greatly,” wrote Carlyle, “who say he can be seduced by ease. Difficulty, abnegation, martyrdom, death are the allurements that act on the heart of man.” Eighty years later Winston Churchill told the British Parliament, “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.” Garibaldi, anticipating him, issued a stirring challenge to his listeners. He told the people of Rome that those who came with him “will have no pay, no provisions, and no rest. I offer hunger, cold, forced marches, battles and death. Whoever is not satisfied with such a life must remain behind. He who has the name of Italy not only his lips but in his heart, let him follow me.” Two hours later he led 4,700 volunteers eastward out of Rome, his heart, he afterwards recorded, “as sad as death.” Anita was among them. She was six months pregnant but she had disregarded all his messages forbidding her to join him. Her hair cropped short, sitting astride her horse in men’s clothes, she rode out with him to fight for a Rome of the mind.
At last Garibaldi was free and autonomous. Mazzini—with whom he was by then bitterly angry, blaming him for their defeat—could no longer thwart him. There were no superior officers anymore, no triumvirate, no assembly, no one whatsoever in authority over him.
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