Heroes_Saviors, Traitors, and Supermen_A History of Hero Worship

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  Twenty years later the contents of the fatal note were made public in the course of their divorce proceedings. It had revealed that Giuseppina, with her father’s knowledge and connivance, had had several lovers (including Rovelli himself) beginning when she was only eleven, that at the time she married Garibaldi she was in love with one of his officers, a Lieutenant Caroli, and that the very night before her wedding she had been in bed with someone other than her bridegroom (whether Caroli or Rovelli is unclear). It appears that she had reluctantly agreed to the marriage on the insistence of her father. It was pitiful; Garibaldi had been first infatuated and then humiliated by a seedily exploitative father and a damaged girl. But the year that had begun so cruelly was to be the year of his apotheosis.

  In April there was an uprising in Sicily, partly engineered by Mazzini, against the regime of the Bourbon king Francis of Naples, of whose domains the island formed part. The insurrection was quickly contained, but there were many who believed that, with support, it could be revived. In Genoa a Sicilian Committee was formed, several of its members being long-term associates of Garibaldi’s, and they proposed that he lead an expedition to the island to make common cause with the revolutionaries there. Three times before he had turned down similar suggestions from Mazzini but this time he was at least half persuaded. He established himself in a villa at Quarto, a few miles from Genoa, and for nearly a month he vacillated.

  He made preparations. He ordered new red shirts for himself and his followers. During the previous winter he had instituted a “Million Rifles Fund,” appealing for money so that the Risorgimento should not be short of weapons. Now he asked that two hundred of the rifles purchased with the fund be sent to him. The house in which he was staying was besieged by journalists, police agents, and foreign spies all agog to discover his intentions. Unable to go out, Garibaldi, who was in the habit of taking long walks every morning, expended his surplus physical energy in digging the garden. While he cultivated his borrowed plot his following was growing. He had two hundred volunteers in mid-April, five hundred ten days later, over a thousand by the beginning of May.

  The status of the projected expedition to Sicily was uncertain. Garibaldi asked for Victor Emmanuel’s sanction. The king hesitated for several days and then, probably persuaded by Cavour, refused. He couldn’t overtly agree to an unprovoked attack on a neighboring kingdom with which Piedmont was not at war. It made no difference. In and around Rome eleven years earlier Garibaldi had been repeatedly restrained from taking initiatives, and he had never ceased to believe that he had been right and his more cautious commanding officers wrong. At the end of the previous year’s war his birthplace—to his furious chagrin—had been ceded to France once more. Arriving in Quarto he characterized himself as a man without a country: “Now that Nice belongs to Italy no longer,” he told his host, “I am like Jesus Christ—I have no longer a stone on which to lay my head.” He was one of the long line of homeless heroes operating outside of any fixed community. He owed allegiance now only to Italy, a country not yet found on any map. He was not to be held back from Sicily by his lack of an official order from the Kingdom of Piedmont.

  Cavour’s attitude towards the plan is hard to gauge. The British diplomat James Hudson, a perspicacious observer, reported a few weeks later that “at the outset nobody believed in the possibility of Garibaldi’s success; and Cavour and tutti quanti thought the country well rid of him…. The argument was if he fails we are rid of a troublesome fellow, and if he succeeds Italy will derive some profit from his success.” Once the expedition was launched beyond recall Cavour’s attitude to it seems to have been not unlike Queen Elizabeth’s to Drake’s piracies, one of public disassociation and private satisfaction, and later he was to declare that he had always secretly admired Garibaldi and wished him well. But there is evidence to suggest that initially he wholeheartedly deplored the venture. A few days before the expedition departed he took a special train to Bologna, where the king was staying, and during the several hours the two men spent alone together the chief minister allegedly did his utmost to persuade the king to have Garibaldi arrested and the volunteers dispersed, and declared at last that if no one else would do it he would put his own hand on Garibaldi’s collar. It may be true. As Garibaldi’s ships steamed southwards they were followed or outdistanced by a series of messages from Cavour to the governor of Sardinia, the first ones ordering him to arrest the expedition if it entered a Sardinian port, the later ones to stop it “at all costs” (the underlining is Cavour’s).

  “The Great Man,” wrote Carlyle, “was always a lightning out of Heaven; the rest of men waited for him like fuel, and then they too would flame.” Mazzini had believed for years that if Garibaldi were to go to Sicily his presence would be encouragement enough to raise a host of revolutionaries. Garibaldi himself was not so sure. More cautious now than when he had crossed the Atlantic with sixty-three men to free Italy, he would not attempt to lead an insurrection in Sicily, or anywhere else, without reliable information that the local people were ready to give their enthusiastic support. He had, after all, only one thousand men. The Neapolitans had twenty-five times that number.

  A classic catch: without Garibaldi there would be no popular uprising, without a popular uprising Garibaldi would not go. There was no straight way of getting past the obstacle. It was the Sicilian republican (and future prime minister of Italy) Francesco Crispi who found a crooked one. On April 27 he received a telegram with news from Sicily. It was in a code no one at Quarto beside himself understood. Sadly he told Garibaldi that it reported that a further attempted insurrection had failed and it ended “Do not start.” Garibaldi accordingly summoned together the volunteers who were encamped all around the villa and on the beach and told them, with tears in his eyes, that they would not be going to Sicily. The announcement was received with furious disappointment. Some, bitterly let down, went home at once. Others, including Nino Bixio, who had long been one of his most trusted officers, accused Garibaldi of cowardice and declared their intention of going anyway. Crispi had been working towards the liberation of Sicily for years. He saw the expedition which was the cause’s best hope flying to pieces. He made his intervention. On April 29 he told Garibaldi he had had another look at the encrypted telegram and he could see now that his first reading of it had been quite, quite wrong. This time, he alleged, he had deciphered its true meaning: “The insurrection suppressed in the city of Palermo maintains itself in the provinces.” He produced other telegrams (forged, or so Nino Bixio said later) which confirmed his revised interpretation. On April 30 Garibaldi announced that he would take his volunteers to Sicily after all.

  When Alcibiades led out his fleet to Sicily all Athens was afire with ambition, greed, and battle ardor. Garibaldi’s expedition was a more modest affair: no gilded triremes, no massed warriors, no official endorsement, just a scruffy band of idealists and adventurers. “The Thousand” (the name under which they were remembered; actually they were 1,089) were untrained almost to a man. Victor Emmanuel had refused Garibaldi’s request that he might enlist the Cacciatori delle Alpi. His new volunteers were of many sorts and conditions. There were a hundred doctors, a hundred and fifty lawyers. There were students, journalists, gentleman-adventurers, laborers, tramps, and artists. There was one woman. The youngest of the volunteers was eleven years old (Garibaldi had no scruples about asking children to kill and be killed), the oldest had fought half a century earlier under the first Napoleon. All of them, like Bixio the previous year, were “living in poetry” and about to enter legend. Their adventure was to become modern Italy’s foundation myth. The most prominent among them are commemorated in street names all over the peninsula. Fifty-five years after their embarkation from Quarto G. M. Trevelyan talked to some of those who were still alive. “Those who remember the day,” he wrote, “speak of it as something too sacred ever to return.”

  There was though, one aspect, besides their destination, in which Garibaldi’s expedition resembled Alcibi
ades’. Both were led by outlaws. Subsequent histories, especially Fascist versions which sought to present the Risorgimento as a pan-Italian project in which all true patriots thought and fought as one, a prototype for the Fascist revolution, have tried to minimize the distance between Garibaldi and Victor Emmanuel’s government, but there is no disguising it. He wasn’t hindered: The Times of London pointed out there had rarely been so flagrant a toleration by a government of preparations for warlike operations against a friendly foreign state. But he was not helped either. His request for weapons from the Million Rifles Fund was refused by the governor of Milan. The muskets Garibaldi did manage to obtain were old and rusty. Nine out of ten of them, he complained, “would not even fire.” He had no ships. No one, whether government authority or private backer, wanted to be seen to have provided him with transport until finally the manager of a Genoese shipping company agreed to turn a blind eye while he “stole” two steamers.

  On May 5, under cover of darkness, the Thousand embarked. Their expedition had an awkward, flustered beginning. While the majority of them waited in little boats, seasick and anxious, throughout the night, Nino Bixio and a group of volunteers had had to fight for their ships after all, the crew being more careful of their employer’s property than he was. Of the two vessels only one had a functioning engine and had to take the other one in tow. The boatmen who had been employed to bring out the ammunition failed to turn up, a more profitable venture in the smuggling line having presented itself. At last, just before dawn, the ships arrived. With obsolete guns, no ammunition, barely enough food to get them through the day (Garibaldi never could be bothered with provisions), and so little space on their ramshackle stolen transports they could barely sit, let alone lie down, the Thousand set off on their great adventure.

  Garibaldi was calm, sure, magnificent. All his life he swung between two states of being. Frustration made him twitchy. “Poor Garibaldi,” wrote one of his closest friends. “He ruins himself in times of inaction; he talks too much, writes too much, and listens too much to those who know nothing.” In action, though, he became as strong, still, and silent as a hero should be. In the Alps the previous year his men had noticed that during a battle he spoke only when he had to and consulted no one. He would sit his horse for hours, silent, immobile, and intensely watchful, his wide-brimmed black hat pulled low over his eyes. His concentration was intense, almost trancelike, his self-confidence equally absolute. From the moment he left the beach at Quarto he was in a state of serene euphoria. Miracles were expected of him: he confidently expected them of himself.

  They duly occurred. After a brief stop in a Tuscan port where they managed to bamboozle the governor into giving them supplies of food and ammunition, the Garibaldini arrived off Marsala, on Sicily’s west coast, on May 11. By an astonishing coincidence of their luck and the Neapolitan commander’s mismanagement the city was undefended. Two Neapolitan warships had sailed out of Marsala’s harbor only hours before Garibaldi’s decrepit steamers struggled into it: they were still visible in the distance. One turned back and fired on the Garibaldini as they disembarked but the shells fell short. Only two men and a dog were wounded. Safely onshore Garibaldi declared himself Dictator of Sicily. It was a preposterous title—there were still twenty-six thousand Neapolitan troops on the island—but with astonishing rapidity and ease Garibaldi gave it substance.

  From Marsala, where the native populace were disappointingly wary of their new dictator, he led his men on toward Palermo. A few peasants joined them. “I hope we shall become an avalanche,” wrote Garibaldi, but they were as yet a scarcely perceptible rockfall. Then, on May 15, they encountered some two thousand Neapolitan troops near the village of Calatafimi. When they first sighted each other the opposing armies were each on high ground, with a valley between them. The Neapolitans advanced across the valley first: the Thousand drove them back. The Neapolitans retreated to the crest of their hill: the Thousand followed them, advancing unprotected straight into the enemy’s fire just as Garibaldi’s men had done at the Villa Corsini a decade before. Garibaldi led, once more riding a white horse. Near the top of the punishingly steep slope they faltered, finding what shelter they could behind the low walls which broke up the terraced hillside. It was blazingly hot. They had no way of defending themselves against the enemy’s cannon, no shelter from the sweltering sun, no provision for helping their wounded. Their ancient guns were little use against the Neapolitans’ modern rifles. Surely they had no alternative but to retreat. “What shall we do, General?” someone asked Garibaldi. “Italians,” he told them (or so one of them later reported), “here we shall make Italy—or die!” Thirty of them (including a thirteen-year-old boy) died. The rest made Italy.

  They marched onto the enemy’s guns, clambering and scrambling, bayonets fixed, Garibaldi leading the attack, on foot now and brandishing his sword. When they closed with the Neapolitans both sides fought ferociously, but it was the Neapolitans who eventually gave way. At midnight they withdrew from Calatafimi. But more important than any strategic advantage gained by the battle was its effect as spectacle. Throughout the day ever-growing groups of peasants gathered on the surrounding ridges to watch the fighting. What they saw impressed them profoundly.

  Perhaps they identified Garibaldi as a saint, a representative of Christ’s church militant. Perhaps they associated him with a legend current on the island about a supernatural warrior of olden times who would one day come again (like Arthur, like Christ, like Drake) to restore justice and redeem his people. When next day Garibaldi passed through a village the people all fell to their knees as he passed.

  He had shown that the impossible could be done, if only by someone resolute, courageous, and unrealistic enough to attempt it. Carlyle elaborated his vision of the hero in passionate rejection of modern notions of biological, social, and economic determinism. In telling tales of great men he wanted to prove that “Man is heaven-born; not the thrall of circumstances, of Necessity, but the victorious subduer thereof.” To his mind, his great exemplars asserted the value of human dignity and the freedom of the human will in the face of the apparently inexorable forces by which (according to newfangled theories he found repugnant) human character and human history are shaped. Darwin’s Origin of Species was published the year before the Thousand invaded Sicily, the first volume of Marx’s Das Kapital seven years later. But Garibaldi, winning his amazing victories in defiance of all statistical probability, seemed—to the enormous international audience who followed his exploits in the press—to be doing something that made nonsense of the ideas that humans were simply highly evolved mammals, and that historical change was effected by forces so large and generalized as to make any piffling individual actions futile. Here was one man challenging an entrenched political system and overcoming it! Here were battles won, not by big battalions and even bigger guns but by valor and devotion! It was a prospect immensely flattering and consoling to all who contemplated it, one which allowed people who had begun to be anxious about their status in the cosmos to feel once more proud to be human. (There is, of course, another way of reading the story—Garibaldi, in taking on the corrupt and demoralized Bourbon monarchy, was felling a tree already rotten and ready to topple at a touch—but that is not the way it was read.)

  The miracles kept coming, thanks in large part to the incompetence and irresolution of the Neapolitan generals. Garibaldi led his band towards Palermo, dodging and weaving to the bafflement of those attempting to block or pursue him. The Neapolitans were too slow and cautious to catch him in a straight chase, too ill informed to find him once he began to play hide-and-seek. Their intelligence was almost incredibly scant: at a time when they were totally unable to find the Thousand in the thirty miles which separated Calatafimi from the capital, a journalist from

  The Times made his way to Garibaldi’s camp with no difficulty at all, simply by asking directions of the locals.

  It is questionable to what extent the Sicilian peasantry who swelled the ranks
of the Thousand cared about, or even understood, the cause of a united Italy. According to a skeptical joke current at the time, when they echoed Garibaldi’s cry of “Viva l’Italia,” most of them were under the impression they were honoring a mistress of the general’s, “la Talia.” But Mazzini had been at least partly right: there were plenty of people in Sicily who had been waiting, not specifically for Garibaldi perhaps, but for anyone capable of giving them a lead in turning on their masters from the mainland. In northern and central Italy the cause of Italian liberation was of interest only to the educated; there were no peasants among the Thousand, as Garibaldi recorded in sorrow. But in Sicily Garibaldi was fighting a cause with which the country people were ready to identify themselves with a degree of violent intensity which he found almost frightening. As the Neapolitans fled back down the road from Calatafimi those injured or unarmed or simply too exhausted to defend themselves were set upon by the local people. Garibaldi, a day later, was sickened to find the roadside lined with their mutilated bodies left out for the dogs. “A miserable sight!” he wrote. “The corpses of Italians … torn in pieces by their own brothers with a fury which would have horrified the hyenas.” But whatever his qualms, he made good use of the Sicilians’ hostility toward their Neapolitan “brothers.” And he was enough of an opportunist to adapt himself to his new public’s religious sensibilities. He was beginning to understand, with Carlyle, the link between religious devotion and hero worship. He saw that the Sicilian populace, pious if hardly orthodox, were ready to see in him a saint, an avenging angel, even perhaps a messiah, and he was careful not to alienate them by revealing his views on the clergy (“ministers of falsehood,” “descendants of Torquemada”). He recruited a friar and in Sicily he kept him always with him as a sign to the watching peasantry that God was on his side. To the surprise of some of his officers, who had seen him blasting open the doors of monasteries and had never before known him to pray, he made a point of very publicly attending mass.