Heroes_Saviors, Traitors, and Supermen_A History of Hero Worship

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  By May 26 Garibaldi was encamped within six miles of Palermo. Almost every Sicilian in the city seems to have known he was there, and so did the British whose ships were in the harbor. A delegation of revolutionaries came out to meet him and coordinate plans. Even the prisoners in the jail knew he was at hand. Only General Lanza, in command of the twenty thousand Neapolitan troops in and around the city, remained oblivious. Towards the end of the day, when an informer finally reached him with the news of Garibaldi’s presence within striking distance of the walls, he dismissed the man, declaring the story preposterous.

  That night the Thousand, joined now by some three thousand excitable Sicilian volunteers, broke through the gates, with Garibaldi leading the assault. He was greeted with tumultuous excitement. “One must know these Sicilians,” wrote the Hungarian volunteer Fernand Eber, “to have an idea of the frenzy, screaming, shouting, crying and hugging; all would kiss Garibaldi’s hands and embrace his knees.” He quickly established control of the narrow, mazelike streets of the medieval center. The Neapolitans bombarded the city from their headquarters in the royal palace and from their ships in the harbor. The barrage reduced large areas of the city to rubble and set fire to more of it, but the Garibaldini, undaunted, retreated into inaccessible back streets and erected barricades. The Neapolitans seemed at a loss as to how to deal with them. General Lanza had all the advantages except for optimism. He seems to have believed as unquestioningly as any member of the Thousand in Garibaldi’s ability to work miracles, and his faith was cripplingly demoralizing.

  The fighting continued for three days during which the Palermitans, bitterly angry at the bombardment of their town and further alienated by the behavior of the Neapolitan troops—who tore through the ruins, destroying any structure left standing in their hunt for loot and setting fire to what remained—gave ever more enthusiastic support to the Thousand. Lanza had at least eighteen thousand troops concentrated around the royal palace but he was afraid to order them forward into the lethal trap which the old town, occupied by the Garibaldini, had become. Garibaldi, as usual on battlefield, was serene and fearless, whether leading assaults on the Neapolitan positions or directing operations from his headquarters. All around him men were being shot but he, as always, was invulnerable. The Palermitans, watching him sitting on the steps of a fountain eating the fruit or smelling the flowers that adoring women continually brought him, concluded he must be a sorcerer. People noticed he had a habit of fiddling with the strap of his whip, and told each other it was the amulet which was shielding him from danger.

  It was the difference between his resolute self-confidence and Lanza’s fear which decided the battle. By the third day Garibaldi’s men were on the point of running out of ammunition altogether, but Lanza cracked first. He was effectually trapped in the palace, unable to get his wounded men out or provisions in. He asked for a ceasefire, to which Garibaldi agreed. The timing of the truce was yet another of Garibaldi’s amazing strokes of luck (or miracles). While he and Lanza’s representative were negotiating on board a British ship in the harbor, four fresh battalions of Neapolitan troops were marching into the city at the Garibaldini’s rear. A lookout on the palace roof saw them come. Lanza’s staff desperately tried to persuade him to start fighting again. With the reinforcements so well positioned Garibaldi could have been defeated within an hour. But Lanza, honorable, exhausted, or both, would not go back on his word. Garibaldi had twenty-four hours’ grace. He returned from the harbor to find a vast and intensely excited crowd awaiting him. As moved by their enthusiasm as they were by his he urged them to work all night for “tomorrow will be a day of life or death.”

  All night long the city was brilliantly illuminated while women, children, and priests repaired the barricades and in workshops all over the city smiths, carpenters, anyone who had the appropriate skills struggled to convert what material they could find into weapons. When morning came General Lanza, listening to his officers’ reports of the people’s determination, asked for a further three days’ armistice. Garibaldi demanded the entire contents of the mint as the price of his agreement. Lanza agreed. He had not been defeated, but already he was acting like a loser.

  When they burst into Palermo the Garibaldini had been ragged, filthy, and exhausted after weeks of sleeping out in all weathers. Their newly recruited Sicilian allies were panicky and undisciplined. They had perilously little ammunition to start with. By the time the first truce was called they had next to none at all and only four hundred functioning muskets. During the armistice Garibaldi had managed to beg and buy some powder from American and Greek ships in the harbor, but there is no doubt that had the Neapolitans fought on they could have driven him out. But Lanza despaired. His report to his royal master was so pessimistic that it persuaded King Francis the situation was hopeless. On June 7 he capitulated to Garibaldi. The Neapolitan army marched sullenly out of Palermo while a squad of redshirts, fronted by Garibaldi’s eighteen-year-old son Menotti on a big black horse, watched them go. The Thousand had put twenty thousand to flight.

  So amazing was the spectacle of an undefeated army fleeing before a tiny volunteer force supported by a mob of virtually unarmed civilians that almost immediately conspiracy theories began circulating. The observable facts were literally incredible—people were persuaded the truth must lie hidden. There must have been bribery or blackmail. Some sinister body—the Freemasons, the Mafia, the British—must have been in on it. But no historian has ever managed to find evidence for any of these theories. The truth is simply that Garibaldi achieved the apparently impossible in Sicily because it was, by this time, expected of him. His fantastic success in Sicily shows that he was one of those born in a happy hour, like the Cid, whose successes bred further and greater success until—like Valdés surrendering to Drake—his enemies, even those whose strength enormously overtopped his, simply abandoned all hope of defeating him. To Alexandre Dumas, who joined him in Sicily soon after the fall of Palermo, he seemed capable of absolutely anything. “If he were to say to me ‘I am setting out tomorrow on an expedition to capture the moon’ I should doubtless reply, ‘All right, go on. Just write and tell me as soon as you have taken it, and add a little postscript saying what steps I must take to come and join you there.’ ”

  The romance of his little band of rebels taking on a kingdom (and a notoriously oppressive one at that) was an international sensation. From Canada to Siberia, where the exiled anarchist Mikhail Bakunin found everyone hanging on the news from Sicily, from Bengal to Valparaíso, the exploits of the Thousand and their leonine leader were avidly read and retold. “This man, almost alone, becomes the man of prodigy,” wrote Dumas. “He makes thrones tremble, he is the oriflamme of the new era. All Europe has her eyes upon him and awakes each morning asking where he is and what he has done.” In Britain especially, where William Gladstone had been inveighing against the Bourbon monarchy’s oppressions, Garibaldi fever was rife. Fashionable British women ate Garibaldi biscuits (a line so successful they are still in production) and wore red Garibaldi blouses and round Garibaldi hats. A fund was set up to raise money in his support. The second Duke of Wellington gave £50, Florence Nightingale £10, and Charles Dickens £5 while thousands of workingmen contributed their shillings to “liberate Italy from the Yoke of Tyranny.” “Garibaldi is a demi-god,” reported the Italian ambassador from London. “Lady John [Russell, the foreign secretary’s wife] can no longer sleep because of him.”

  Hundreds of new volunteers from here, there, and everywhere descended on Palermo. Some came in search of adventure, some wanted a part in the most romantic real-life drama currently playing in Europe. Others seized the chance to strike a blow in the struggle for a somewhat hazily defined ideal in which liberty, national sovereignty, and revolution for revolution’s sake all played their part. And there were those who simply enjoyed striking a blow. Dumas arrived accompanied by a nineteen-year-old mistress dressed in a velvet sailor suit, whom he used to introduce variously as his son or his
nephew. The Countess de la Torre came, bringing a hussar tunic, a big plumed hat, and a sword way too large for her. There were British (not all of them welcome, as being unused to wine they tended to get quickly and violently drunk). There were five hundred Hungarians, numerous Frenchmen, some Germans, Americans, Poles. Some were high-minded idealists. Some had come, as one candidly explained to an English reporter, “at all costs to have a lark.” The Englishman John Peard, who liked to go into battle in his tweed suit until persuaded that unless he donned something more recognizably military he risked being summarily executed as a spy, probably spoke for many when he replied to an inquiry about his motives for volunteering by saying that he had “the greatest respect” for Italian independence “but I am also very fond of shooting.”

  As well as the fighting men came sightseers—eccentrics and thrill seekers of both sexes and several nationalities anxious to watch from close-up the great adventure unfolding in Sicily, and to bring themselves close to the man a British enthusiast described as “THE THE THE man of action at the present.” Their enthusiasm was matched by that of the Sicilians, to whom Garibaldi seemed all but godlike. Palermo was so hung with red banners that to Dumas it felt like a field of poppies. Every day the dictator (the man who had characterized priests as “black-robed cockroaches”) was invited to little parties in the city’s numerous convents. In one the nuns, exclaiming that he was the image of Our Lord, all swarmed around to kiss him on the lips. In others he was showered with gifts; sweets, flowers, handkerchiefs, and embroidered banners, of which a typical one bore the slogan “To thee Giuseppe: Saint and Hero! Mighty as St. George! Beautiful as the Seraphim!” A decade earlier Thomas Carlyle had lamented that the heroic age was over, that now “heroic action is paralysed” and the human capacity for hero worship had been dulled by the “iron ignoble circle of necessity.” Garibaldi in Sicily gave him the lie.

  His tremendous international celebrity was both a source of power and an unassailable protection. “We cannot struggle with him,” Cavour told one of his confidants. “He is stronger than we are … There is only one thing to be done. Associate ourselves with him.” It was quite an admission: the maverick freedom fighter was “stronger” than the established government and standing army of Piedmont. It was not a situation Cavour wished to see perpetuated. Just as Queen Elizabeth could only lay claim to Francis Drake’s plunder if she acknowledged, after the fact, that he had acted on her behalf, so Victor Emmanuel would only be able to assume control of the dominions conquered by Garibaldi if he treated the conqueror as his representative. Accordingly, Cavour proceeded to act as though all the obstructions he had put in the way of the Thousand’s embarkation had never been, as though Garibaldi had all along simply been carrying out his and the king’s orders. He dispatched an emissary, Giuseppe La Farina, to Sicily with instructions to prepare the way for the annexation of the island to the Kingdom of Piedmont.

  Garibaldi was not so easily bullied. Like Rodrigo Díaz in Valencia he was now master of his own territory. Quartered in Palermo’s royal palace (he had, of course, chosen one of the smallest and barest rooms) he was briefly a real dictator, a ruler with absolute power over the little country which he, at the head of a troop owing loyalty to him alone, had liberated. When high mass was said in the cathedral he presided on the royal throne, claiming the right of “apostolic legateship.” (No wonder he and Mazzini—the uncompromising republican—fell out so frequently.) While the Gospel was read he unsheathed his sword, token that he had by no means come to the end of his martial miracles. In 326 BC Alexander the Great, having conquered the Persian Empire and brought his army through Afghanistan and into India, summoned together his homesick, exhausted men and told them he intended to march on past the Ganges to the Eastern Ocean which he thought lay somewhere beyond. There was a long silence, until one of his officers at last had the temerity to say, “Sire, if there is one thing above all others a successful man like you should know, it is when to stop.” Like Alexander, Garibaldi was splendidly lacking in that knowledge. He had no intention of stopping until he had wrested all southern Italy from the Bourbons, and he knew Cavour could never consent to such a venture. He had to retain his autonomy. A month after La Farina’s arrival Garibaldi had him arrested and banished from the island.

  He still had fighting to do. The Neapolitan troops had retreated eastwards after the fall of Palermo but they had not yet left Sicily. A month later Garibaldi’s men confronted a force of twenty-five hundred Neapolitan troops at Milazzo. Many of his troops were seeing action for the first time. Garibaldi outdid himself in his efforts to put heart into them. Before an assault he positioned himself so that a whole troop of untried men would file past him, then he murmured a few words of encouragement to each one. He himself went into battle armed only with a walking stick and a cigar. When his men balked before a wall from behind which came heavy rifle fire he walked straight up to it without pausing to look back to see if his men would follow. They did. The Neapolitan marksmen fled. “Garibaldi is here,” a volunteer wrote home, “or all would be lost.”

  Milazzo surrendered on July 23, and the garrison marched out of the castle leaving the cannons and all their ammunition behind. There were another fifteen thousand Neapolitan troops in the region but they were never deployed. Five days later, on the orders of King Francis, the Neapolitan commander in Sicily capitulated and took all his troops off by sea. Garibaldi was now dictator of the island in fact as well as in name, and he had won his position not by fighting off his enemies, but by frightening them away.

  He had thus given himself a job for which he had no aptitude whatsoever. The business of government bothered and bewildered him. According to one of his long-term associates, “Finance, taxation, police, law courts, bureaucratic machinery were alike for him artificial and oppressive accretions to the life of nature. … In his heart he despised and abhorred them.” Having made Sicily his, he longed not to reform its institutions or reestablish its economy, but to leave it behind him. Even before he finally defeated the Neapolitans at Milazzo he was planning to cross the Strait of Messina to the Italian mainland and defeat them at home.

  Cavour, with equal determination, was planning to prevent him. “We must stop Garibaldi from conquering Naples,” he wrote early in July. He persuaded King Victor Emmanuel to write to Garibaldi forbidding him to move. He ordered the Piedmontese admiral who was stationed in Sicily to prevent Garibaldi crossing the Strait of Messina “at all costs.” He urged the Neapolitans to “attack Garibaldi, catch him and execute him.” The astounding success of the Sicilian adventure had presented Cavour with an irresolvable dilemma. As a Piedmontese politician he needed to assure Victor Emmanuel’s subjects that he was as proud and glad of Garibaldi’s triumphs as they were. But as a diplomat and statesman he had an equally imperative need to distance his administration from what most of the crowned heads of Europe saw as an act of aggression by dangerous radicals and seditionaries. (Prince Albert, on being shown a photograph of the queen of Naples in shooting costume, remarked that it was a pity she had not yet shot Garibaldi.) Later Cavour was to claim that all his efforts to obstruct the triumphant progress of the Risorgimento’s golden warrior were deceptions designed to fool the enemy, but there seems no reason to believe it. For a republican revolutionary to topple a monarchy seemed to him an ineffably dangerous precedent: even if Victor Emmanuel were to gain a kingdom by it, it would be at an intolerable cost to his authority and prestige. “He will become, in the eyes of the majority of Italians, no more than the friend of Garibaldi.”

  King Victor Emmanuel, however, was far more susceptible than his chief minister to the excitement Garibaldi’s great adventure was generating; he was genuinely of two minds. A few days after the battle of Milazzo an emissary arrived in Sicily from Turin carrying two letters from the king to Garibaldi. The official one, Cavour-approved, expressly forbade him to lead his troops onto the mainland. The second, secret one instructed him to disobey the orders contained in the first. Garib
aldi would probably have done so anyway: he was a loose cannon whose onrush had by now gathered an unstoppable momentum. “Your Majesty knows the high esteem and love I bear you,” he wrote. “But… if now I delayed any longer I should fail in my duty and imperil the sacred cause of Italy. Allow me then, Sire, this time to disobey you.” Like Nelson, he was about to serve his country by breaking the line.

  The main body of his troops were drawn up near the lighthouse on Cape Faro at the narrowest point of the Strait of Messina. For days on end Garibaldi stood in the lighthouse, scrutinizing the coast of the mainland through a telescope, silent, intent, waiting for the opportune moment. On August 18, he finally gave the order for half of his force to set out, not from Faro, as most of his supporters and all the Neapolitans expected, but from Taormina. He had two unarmed steamers to transport an army which now numbered 3,360 men. One of them sprang a leak. Garibaldi, seaman that he was, plugged it using a mound of manure. After a hair-raising thirty-hour journey he and his men landed safely at Italy’s southernmost tip while the Neapolitan warships still waited for them, oblivious, forty miles to the north. Garibaldi marched on Reggio and took it after a sharp but swift battle. Meanwhile the Neapolitans, hearing he had dodged them, sailed south in pursuit. The fifteen hundred Garibaldini still waiting on the beaches of Faro promptly seized their opportunity to cross the strait in a flotilla of little fishing boats. By the time the warships returned the Garibaldini were ashore. The Neapolitans vented their frustration at being so outwitted by sinking the abandoned boats.