Heroes_Saviors, Traitors, and Supermen_A History of Hero Worship

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  He was never a willing subordinate. In South America once, when a senior general attempted to give him orders, he responded with a frigidly polite note: “I have decided to act myself… and I must ask your Excellency not to take any contrary action, and inform you that I shall take all steps to prevent this.” The mutinous threat was followed by action. A month later he ordered the local chief of police to escort the unfortunate general onto a ship which would take him back to Montevideo: he had effectively deposed his superior, in what in a more orderly military situation would have amounted to an act of mutiny punishable by death. In 1848 he peremptorily cabled the leaders of the Tuscan government: “I ask will you take Garibaldi as commander of Tuscan forces to operate against Bourbons. Yes or No. Garibaldi.” He would be commander or he would be nothing.

  A few days before the Roman Republic capitulated, an agitator had ridden through the streets shouting out to anyone who would listen that only Garibaldi could save Rome, that Garibaldi should be made dictator. Garibaldi demurred, disowning his advocate, but only on the grounds that it was too late: the loss of the city was by then inevitable. He had already told Mazzini, “It is not possible for me to be of use to the Republic except in two ways; either as absolute dictator, or as a simple soldier.” Since his time the word “dictatorship” has acquired overtones it did not yet have in the 1840s. In the ancient Roman Republic, upon which the constitution of the new republic was based, dictators were appointed for six-month periods in times of war or other emergency, an arrangement which Garibaldi was to describe as “propitious.” Garibaldi was probably sincere when he later explained he had made the demand “as sometimes in my life I had demanded and seized the helm of a vessel which was being driven on the breakers.” The fact remained that he wanted absolute power, and when Mazzini refused to hand it over to him, insisting that he continue to serve Rome as a subordinate general, he consistently defied the authority of those over him.

  On the march to Velletri Roselli had found him uncontrollable, pushing ahead and eventually provoking a battle at a time the superior general had expressly forbidden him to do so. During the defense of Rome in June he had repeatedly disobeyed or ignored orders. When he wanted more men he took them from other units in defiance of the high command, and when ordered to lead his men in a counterattack he flatly refused to do so. Like Achilles, like Rodrigo Díaz, like Drake, he was a man who fit only uneasily, if at all, into a chain of command. Leading his volunteer army out of the gates of Rome he was at last coming into his own. Now he was indeed sole dictator of a republic which existed nowhere outside of his own imagination but which was at least entirely under his control.

  Two months later the volunteer army was disbanded, most of its leaders had been captured and executed, Anita was dead, and Garibaldi himself was a solitary refugee. He had hoped and believed that he had only to “throw myself in the midst of an energetic population” to “kindle the flame of their patriotism,” that his little band of volunteers would grow and grow as enthusiastic nationalists rallied to his cause. He was wrong. The educated urban middle class might care about their country, but the peasants Garibaldi counted on enlisting now disliked “liberals” even more than foreigners and looked upon those who had driven the Pope from Rome as impious heathen. They closed their doors to Garibaldi, refused him food and transport, and informed the French and Austrians of his movements, behavior which Garibaldi blamed on the fell influence of the priesthood, but which may have had as much to do with the Garibaldini’s locustlike way of stripping the country bare. The London Times called them “brigands,” and that is how they were received in the towns and villages where they looked for shelter. Garibaldi forbade looting; on one occasion he had a man shot for stealing a hen. But he could not always control his rabble of volunteers. Nor could he feed them by any means other than a kind of requisitioning which was barely more legitimate than straightforward pillage would have been. He paid for the provisions he demanded in the worthless currency of the defunct Roman republic, or he extorted “loans” to be repaid when Italy was free.

  What had begun as an act of magnificent defiance became a hopeless flight, yet one of his biographers has claimed that the retreat from Rome was “a tour de force of astonishing and enduring brilliance,” one which “triumphantly confirmed his reputation as one of the greatest of guerrilla leaders.” It was certainly to become one of the most popular acts in the drama of his life, one in which he appears both as the fabulously skillful and audacious individual defying not one but four great powers and as the pathetic protagonist of a heartbreaking tale of love and death.

  The French were behind him. To the south were the troops of the Bourbon king of Naples. To the west was an army of six thousand Spaniards, just landed to defend the interests of the Pope. To the north, lying between Garibaldi and the republic of Venice (the only one of the free states established in the previous year’s flurry of revolutions that was still undefeated), lay the Austrians. Garibaldi could not afford to risk a pitched battle. Marching by night, resting only for a few hours by day, keeping always to the least frequented roads or to mule tracks generally regarded as impassable, he led his army in wild zigzags which their pursuers could not follow. They would set out at nightfall in one direction and then, while the peasants who had seen them go passed on information about their apparent destination to the French or Austrian spies behind them, they would wheel round in the dark and appear at dawn miles from where they were awaited. After the first few days they abandoned their carts, taking nothing more than they and their pack animals could carry and the cattle whom they drove in front of them for food. Garibaldi himself, galloping on ahead to reconnoiter, wheeling down his little army’s flanks to watch for danger, was tireless. Naturally ascetic, he was at his most effective, his swiftest and surest when he had least. Some years later he was to write of how he dreamed of equipping a ship (this was after he had reverted to the seaman’s life) and sailing the world in support of good causes everywhere, a kind of mobile revolution. He was a patriot who was never much at ease in his patria, one whose brilliance was most apparent when he was homeless and on the run.

  It was not only the people of the countryside through which he passed that disappointed him by their lack of fervor for his cause. Every night some of his men slipped away under cover of darkness; in every town some few remained behind. Over and over again over the remaining years of his life he was to discover how hard it was to convert the adulation he inspired into those things he actually needed—money, armaments, manpower. He could call up an ecstatic crowd with ease, but he couldn’t hold together an army. Many of those who had left Rome with him probably never intended to fight for his lost cause but, wanting to get away from the soon-to-be-occupied city, or eager to return to homes in the countryside, saw the Garibaldini as a convoy with which they could travel more safely. Others simply lost heart. His mobile revolution was melting away. To add to his unhappiness Anita was unwell. Contemporary sources are all too coy to specify her complaint, but it was presumably related to her pregnancy.

  On July 31, a month after he had set out from Rome with such uplifting words, he led his remaining fifteen hundred men into the refuge of the tiny independent state of San Marino. Even as he was negotiating with the San Marinesi for their reception a party of Austrians was harrying his rearguard. His last order of the day read: “Soldiers, I release you from your duty to follow me, and leave you free to return to your homes. But remember that although the Roman war for the independence of Italy has ended Italy remains in shameful slavery.” He himself, true to form, intended to fight on. In a café where his disconsolate staff had gathered he made another of his ringingly pessimistic offers. “Whoever wishes to follow me, I offer him fresh battles, suffering and exile—but treaties with foreigners, never!” He then mounted and rode off, without so much as turning his head to see who would follow him. Some 230 men did, and so did Anita.

  The countryside was full of Austrian troops. Their only hope of escapin
g to a raise another revolution was to make their way to the Adriatic coast and thence by sea to Venice. With the help of a local guide, maintaining absolute silence, they passed by night through the Austrian lines. They reached the sea at a little harbor where Garibaldi gave his white horse to a local sympathizer with orders that it should be shot rather than allowed to fall into Austrian hands. They seized thirteen fishing boats and forced their owners to ready them for the trip to Venice. A high wind had come up, the fishermen protested it was impossible even to get out of port in such weather, but Garibaldi—a seaman before he was a general—leaped into the sea to fix the anchors on which the boats were to be hauled out. The fishermen, balking at risking the boats on which their livelihoods depended and perhaps their lives as well, “could be made to move at all—not to speak of doing the necessary work—only by mean of blows with the flat of our swords.”

  For the whole of the following day they sailed north but at night they ran into an Austrian naval squadron. The majority of the boats were captured (the fishermen making no effort to avoid it). The remaining three boats, carrying about ninety people in all (including Garibaldi and Anita), made it to the shore, with the Austrians in close pursuit. Anita was by now in such pain she couldn’t walk. Garibaldi carried her through the breakers. As the others raced for the cover of the dunes the two of them and a wounded officer, Major Culiolo, were soon the only people left exposed on the beach. They had landed by ill chance on what was effectively an island, an area of marshland cut off by canals and lagoons from the mainland. They would unquestionably have been captured very shortly—Austrian troops were already advancing towards them—but a local landowner played deus ex machina. Giacomo Bonnet, two of whose brothers had fought in Rome with Garibaldi, had seen what was happening out at sea and had rushed down to the beach to offer his help if it was needed. Finding Garibaldi he hurried him, Anita, and Culiolo to a hut secluded in the marshes, and gave them clothes (both the men had been wearing the unmistakable red shirt). He then helped them carry Anita two miles across the marshes to a farmhouse, where she was put to bed. She was now so ill it was clear that any attempt to escape with her would be hopeless for all of them. Bonnet proposed that she should be left in another safe house where a trustworthy doctor could be called to attend her while Garibaldi and Culiolo made their escape. Garibaldi reluctantly agreed.

  Again the little party moved, Anita this time lying in a cart. She was delirious and incoherent. When Garibaldi tried to explain that he must go on without her she clung to him, crying hysterically and saying, as she had often said before when he tried to persuade her not to follow him into battle, “You want to leave me!” This time it was her husband, not herself, whom she was endangering, but she was beyond understanding that.

  Their ordeal continued. There were Austrian troops everywhere. A large reward had been offered for any information leading to Garibaldi’s capture. Anyone helping him to escape put themselves in extreme danger. Bonnet was only the first of the dozens who were to take that risk in the month that followed. He found two boatmen and arranged, without telling them who their passengers were to be, for them to take Garibaldi and his companions over the lagoon to the mainland that night. They embarked, but halfway across the boatmen guessed who they were carrying and, terrified of the danger they had been tricked into incurring, landed them on a tiny island and rowed off. It was three in the morning. There was no shelter, no prospect of rescue. The two men lay beside Anita on the ground, trying to keep her warm as she muttered and raved.

  Help came five hours later. The boatmen had been unable to keep their lethal secret to themselves and one of those they told had reported the news to the ever-reliable Bonnet. He found another boatman, a republican willing to risk his own life to rescue Garibaldi. He took them off the island, rowed with numerous delays across to the mainland, procured a cart in which they laid Anita, and then slowly escorted them to another farm twelve miles off. It was late in the afternoon by the time they arrived there. As they carried Anita into the house she died.

  For the next month Garibaldi was under the protection of the impressively well organized and courageous republican resistance movement. He had been bitterly disappointed in the failure of Italians in general to offer their lives for the sake of independence, but he had cause to be deeply grateful to and respectful of the network of people who hid him in woods, in fields, in their homes or stables, who guided him by back roads and unmapped pathways right across Italy, who fed him and provided him with disguises, all risking their liberty and probably their lives to protect him.

  While his followers were imprisoned, tortured, and, in many cases, shot, he evaded all the strenuous efforts of the Austrians to catch him. Once, riding in a hired cart, he drove past a whole troop of Austrian soldiers marching the other way in pursuit of him. On another occasion he was sleeping in a clump of bushes when he was awakened by the voices of a party of Austrians passing within feet of him. On yet another, when he was resting in an inn, a group of Croats serving in the Austrian army came in and he had to sit for hours, keeping to the room’s dimmest corner, while they talked of what they would do to “the infamous Garibaldi” when they caught him. On that occasion (according to her own less-than-reliable story—Garibaldi himself does not appear to have remembered her) he was saved by the innkeeper’s daughter, who led him to a safe house. When one of their guides failed to meet up with them, he and Culiolo were for several frightening days unprotected until Garibaldi, taking a necessary but potentially fatal risk, revealed his identity to a young man whom he had overheard talking sympathetically about him. He was lucky. The man kept the secret and found them a guide. On September 2 they reached the west coast and were taken by friendly fishermen northwards and put ashore over the border in the kingdom of Piedmont, where neither Austrians, French, Neapolitans, nor the papal authorities could harm them. There, in Garibaldi’s homeland, reached after such tribulations, he was promptly put under arrest.

  The new king, Victor Emmanuel, the man whom Garibaldi was later to be instrumental in making king of all Italy, held his throne on Austria’s sufferance on the understanding he would tolerate neither radicalism in general nor Young Italy in particular. Garibaldi’s return was intensely embarrassing for him. In Genoa, where Garibaldi was held prisoner, and in Nice, where he was allowed to go ashore on parole for a few hours to visit his mother and children, he was applauded by crowds full of enthusiasm for him and indignation at his detention. In both places the ship on which he was being transported was surrounded by little boats crammed with sightseers and supporters. In the Piedmontese parliament there were angry scenes so noisy that a Turin newspaper reported that two days later sessions were still preternaturally quiet, so many of the deputies having lost their voices shouting out their views on Garibaldi. One of them called upon his peers to “imitate his greatness if you can; if you are unable to do so respect it”: Garibaldi, he said, was his country’s glory. Eventually the opposition proposed a motion censuring the government for their treatment of him, and it was carried all but unanimously. Garibaldi was released, but on condition that he leave Italy forthwith.

  Exiled for the second time, he was hard put to find a place of refuge. He was evicted from Tunisia, refused entry to Gibraltar. Eventually he settled in Tangier. He was only forty-two, but like an old man whose glory days are over and done he found himself a place in the sun and began to write his memoirs. He had already, for some years, been plagued by rheumatism and arthritis. The indifference of the Italian peasants who had failed to rally to his cause and the Italian troops who had deserted him had left him profoundly depressed: “I was ashamed to belong to these degenerate descendants of the greatest of nations, who were incapable of keeping the field a month without their three meals a day.” He had lost the wife who seems to have been, in reality as well as in popular legend, the love of his life. He was separated from his children, whom he left behind in Nice under the care of their grandmother and family friends. Italy, “the only hop
e of my life” as he wrote that year, had “fallen back again into shame and prostitution.” He had lost his cause.

  Seven months later he traveled to New York. To Americans European republicans in exile were heroic figures. Lajos Kossuth, leader of the Hungarian revolution, was to be greeted in the following year by a thirty-one-gun salute as his ship docked, by reception committees, banquets, parades, and brass bands. He was invited to see in the new year at the White House and to address Congress. Similar levels of razzmatazz had been planned to welcome Garibaldi, but he rejected them. At Staten Island, where, under the rules of quarantine, he had to stay for several days, he was unable to avoid a stream of visitors, whom he received sitting on a sofa carried in for the purpose, his rheumatism being so severe he was unable to stand. But at the earliest opportunity he took the ferry on his own and slipped away to a friend’s house. Three days later he wrote to the Italian Committee declining to attend the civic reception they had planned for him and declaring his intention to settle down and quietly earn a living.

  His reluctance to receive applause has been ascribed to his admirable modesty, but at this period in his life he was so downcast that he was probably in no fit state to play the celebrity. “We love to associate with heroic persons,” wrote Carlyle’s American friend Ralph Waldo Emerson that year. “With the great our thoughts and manners easily become great.” Garibaldi in exile had no energy to spare, no surplus greatness he would willingly allow others to siphon off. Besides, he knew precisely how useful, and how useless, public enthusiasm could be. In his year and a half in Italy he had all too often stood on balconies or sat his horse while rapturous crowds pressed around him, yelling his name in ecstasies of enthusiasm, only to find that when he was ready to leave town only two or three, or none, of those who seemed to adore him so had volunteered to join him. America would have given him parades and banquets, used him as entertainment and as a focus for vague and thrilling dreams of heroic rebellion against ill-defined tyranny, but America would not grant him citizenship. As an alien he was not permitted to captain a ship. He lived with an Italian friend, idle and wretched, and so miserably humiliated by his dependent status that he insisted on working as a porter in his hosts’ candle factory. Once he went down to the waterfront and tried to sign on as an ordinary seaman but was rejected by both the ships he tried. In despair he applied for work as a docker, only to be told that he was too old. Only three years before he had been admiral in chief of the (admittedly small) Montevidean navy. Now, for all his celebrity, he was an unemployable, superannuated immigrant.