Heroes_Saviors, Traitors, and Supermen_A History of Hero Worship

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  In Calabria, the southernmost and least governable region of Italy, Garibaldi’s dream of a popular uprising at last came true. In 1849, in the Papal States, he had been asking a generally devout population to rise up against God’s representative on earth. Now he had come to oust the oppressive secular regime of a foreign dynasty. In the countryside the peasants formed themselves into guerrilla bands to fight alongside the invaders. In the towns Garibaldi was acclaimed under his title of dictator, the people being so emboldened by his presence that in one place they poured out into the streets to give him an enthusiastic welcome even before the Neapolitan troops had pulled out of town.

  “The population was frantic in their demonstrations of joy,” wrote one of the English volunteers. Wherever Garibaldi appeared people crowded round him, reaching out to touch him, kissing his feet, kneeling to ask for his blessing for themselves and their babies. In town after town he proceeded to the main square, mounted a balcony, and spoke to the people. He was solemn and splendid. Speaking slowly and ringingly in his beautiful deep voice he would addresses them caressingly, flatteringly, as the liberators of their own land. Finally he would raise his right arm with forefinger extended in what was becoming his personal salute—“the Garibaldi sign,” one finger for one Italy—while his auditors held up their fingers in turn and wept and roared.

  Town after town fell to the advancing Garibaldini with hardly a blow fired. “The Great Man,” wrote Carlyle, “is a Force of Nature.” Garibaldi was sweeping through Calabria like a tempest or a forest fire: before him the opposing army simply melted away. Within less than a week of Garibaldi’s landing, six thousand of the sixteen thousand Neapolitan troops in the province had deserted. When he identified himself to sentries stationed to prevent his entering a town they waved him through. His name worked like magic, even when he was not actually present. Six of the Garibaldini, accidentally separated from their unit, ran into a whole battalion of Neapolitan troops. They claimed to be Garibaldi’s scouts, and announced that the dictator was a short ride behind them. The entire Neapolitan battalion promptly surrendered, dropped their rifles, and went home. At Soveria a force of over a thousand Neapolitan troops surrendered to Garibaldi, who had with him only one fifth that number, most of them Calabrian partisans armed with hoes and sticks. It was fantastic, dreamlike, thrilling. Like Drake in the Pacific Garibaldi seemed untouchable, unstoppable. The Neapolitan soldiers said of him, as his German detractors had said of Wallenstein and as the Spaniards had said of Drake, that he was (or was possessed by) a devil and they told the old story about the bullets which had no power to harm him tumbling from his shirt as he undressed. The people of Calabria, equally if differently persuaded of his superhuman character, knelt down and worshiped him.

  Halfway to Naples he left his troops behind. He was intent upon claiming the capital before anyone (Cavour for instance) could forestall him. He had taken Sicily with a mere handful of men: why should he not take Naples alone? Traveling in a light carriage, attended only by a few of his staff, he raced northwards. Just in advance of him rode the English amateur of shooting John Peard who, tall, bearded, and sandy-haired, resembled him physically. In each town that either Garibaldi or Peard entered people would flock around them, kissing their hands, their feet, their knees. Peard demurred, protesting that he was not the general, but it made no difference to the people’s enthusiasm: like Patroclus dressed in Achilles’ armor, Peard, the hero’s simulacrum, had the same effect that the hero himself would have done. People refused to believe that he was not the real thing. They understood, they said, that his arrival was to be kept secret from the Bourbon authorities but he must let them worship nonetheless. Garibaldi himself accepted the adoration as his due, mounting balconies and standing impassive and serene while brass bands played, people were seized by convulsive fits brought on by the intensity of their joy, or fell to their knees hailing him as a second Jesus Christ.

  At Eboli, some sixty miles short of Naples, Peard marched into the telegraph station and ordered the terrified clerk to send a telegram to the Neopolitan minister of war, informing him that Garibaldi had arrived at the head of five thousand men, and that another five thousand would shortly be disembarking in the Bay of Naples, and advising an immediate withdrawal of the garrison at Salerno, the last line of defense south of the city. The minister was fooled. Eight hours later Salerno was evacuated.

  Garibaldi raced on. In Wallenstein’s lifetime, Grimmelshausen’s Simplicissimus had elaborated the fantasy of a hero whose personal qualities were so extraordinary that he needed no army. Wallenstein, with his prodigious ability to conjure an army out of the ravaged earth, seemed like a figurative and approximate realization of that vision, but Garibaldi fulfilled it literally. His nearest troops were now a full forty-eight hours’ march behind him. Not that he was alone. A gathering snowball of excited hangers-on had attached themselves to his retinue, eager to participate in his astonishing progress. Journalists, aristocratic Grand Tourists, adventurers of all descriptions, including several thrill-seeking English ladies, galloped their carriages alongside his, pestering him for autographs, drinking in details for their memoirs.

  The rumors of his imminent arrival were enough to topple the monarchy. Five times, as Garibaldi had progressed through Sicily and Calabria, King Francis II, despairing of repelling this invincible opponent by human means, had telegraphed the Pope to ask for a blessing. On September 4, while Garibaldi was still south of Eboli, Francis realized that even God couldn’t save his throne for him. He and his queen drove down to the waterfront and steamed away. As their ship left the harbor its captain hoisted a signal ordering all the others in port to follow. Not one did so. The king’s admirals, like the king’s ministers, were all going over to Garibaldi. A few hours later Don Liborio Romana, who was not only the chief of police and commander of the National Guard but also chief of the Camorra (which is to Calabria what the Mafia is to Sicily), sent Garibaldi a telegram addressing him as “Dictator of the Two Sicilies” and offering to place in his hands “the power of the State and her destinies.”

  Garibaldi was ready. The mayor and the National Guard officer who had come out to greet him begged him to delay his entrance into Naples for twenty-four hours so that triumphal arches could be erected and, more importantly, so that the garrisons of the king’s troops who were still holding the city’s four formidably well-armed fortresses could be evicted. Garibaldi would not hear of it. There were others who might try to fill the vacuum the king’s departure had left. “Naples is in danger,” he said. “We must go there today, at once, this minute.” He went straight to the railway terminus at Vietri and commandeered a train for the last few miles of his journey. Hundreds of people swarmed onto it with him, all singing, cheering, shouting, and waving muskets or tricolor flags. The heat was intense, the noise literally deafening, the mood ecstatic. The train crept along, impeded by the crowds alongside the tracks, by “demonstrations of welcome from all classes; from the fishermen who left their boats on the beach, from the swarthy fellows, naked to the waist, who were winnowing corn on the flat house roofs as well as from the National Guards.”

  At each station the cheering mobs brought the train to a lengthy standstill. At Portici a naval officer managed to force his way into Garibaldi’s carriage, frantic with urgency, to warn him that the Bourbon troops in the city’s fortresses had trained their cannon on the railway station. But nothing could stop Garibaldi now. He betrayed no emotion. He had written in his memoirs that, like Horatio Nelson, he could ask, “What is fear?” Now, as stubborn and as splendid as Nelson clamping his telescope to his blind eye, he asked, “What cannon? … When the people receive us like this there are no cannon.”

  He was right. When the train finally pulled into Naples station it was immediately engulfed by a crowd which knocked down the barriers, drowned out Don Liborio’s speech of welcome, and swept Garibaldi away. His supporters managed to get him into an open carriage and attempted to steer it by a safe route into
the city center. It couldn’t be done. The movement of the crowd was irresistible. The carriage was carried helplessly towards the nearest of the fortresses. As it passed beneath the cannon Garibaldi, unmistakable in his black hat, his red shirt, his knotted silk kerchief, rose to his feet in the open carriage, folded his arms, and gazed steadfastly upward at the guns. None fired. It was a heart-stopping moment. (“If he were not Garibaldi he would be the greatest tragic actor known,” remarked one of his officers.) Calmly sitting down again, he went on, serene and impassive in the midst of all the hysterical excitement his arrival had provoked, while around him the crowd, who adored him even though they were not yet sure of his name, yelled themselves into a frenzy of adoration of Garibaldo, Gallipot, Galliboard, the bringer of freedom, the champion of Italian unity, the second Jesus. He hadn’t conquered Naples, any more than Alcibiades conquered Selymbria. He had simply arrived, and like Alcibiades on that long ago occasion, acted like a conqueror until the act became a reality. He had ousted a king, faced down an army, and taken a city, and he had done it armed only with his fame.

  All that night and for several nights thereafter the people of Naples danced in the streets. “Not only was all business suspended but the people roused themselves into a state of frenzy bordering on madness,” wrote one observer. The city was alive with flaring lights and waving banners and chanting people. “Here and there an excited orator addressed the crowd about him with wild declamations; little bands of enthusiasts … went dancing through the streets and burst into the cafes…. An unfortunate man who did not cry ‘Viva Garibaldi!’ when he was bidden was ripped open by enthusiasts and died on the spot.” “The town was running mad with flags, daggers and red shirts,” wrote the English minister. When Garibaldi attended the ballet the performance had to be halted because all the audience could do was shout “Viva!” and raise their arms as though in prayer to the box in which he sat.

  He had won Naples, and by extension the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies of which it was capital, with amazing ease. Knowing what to do with it was far harder for him. Shakespeare’s Thersites jeered at Achilles, calling him and the oafish Ajax Ulysses’ oxen. In Naples, Garibaldi, was a conquering hero, but he was also an ox plowing a field whose harvest both Mazzini and Cavour hoped to make their own.

  He was no statesman. Taciturn and self-reliant in battle, in the corridors of power he was hesitant and disastrously impressionable. Throughout the two months during which he personally ruled half Italy he dithered and vacillated. An English observer wrote at the time, “The stories told in Naples of his utter incapacity for civil Government are extraordinary. He signed almost anything which the Ministers gave him, and next day would sign a decree cancelling the former, because others got round him and told him to do so.”

  He had to decide whether to give in to Cavour’s increasingly pressing demands that he allow his conquests to be annexed to the Kingdom of Piedmont, or to insist that they remain under his own independent dictatorship. Should he act as though he were the Cid of the Poema, the great servant laying the spoils of his conquests at the foot of the throne, or should he play the Cid of historical reality, an autonomous warlord ruling his own domain as he thought fit? He seemed incapable of making up his mind. The republicans wanted to call elections for an independent constituent assembly. Cavour’s supporters, and most of the Neapolitan middle class, wanted a plebiscite to get public endorsement for an immediate annexation by Piedmont. Garibaldi, under intense pressure from both parties, gave in to both, ordering both the election and the referendum without apparently having any idea that the two were incompatible. “The weakness of the man is something fabulous!” wrote Mazzini, exasperated beyond measure to see how easy it was for rival plowmen to lead away his ox.

  Mazzini had slipped secretly back into Italy just after the Thousand left from Quarto. He arrived in Naples ten days after Garibaldi made his triumphal entrance. Garibaldi shocked Cavour’s agents and the Neapolitan aristocracy by receiving Mazzini cordially. Mazzini urged him to attack King Francis, who had joined his remaining troops near Capua, and, after routing them, to invade the Papal States. It was a plan with which Garibaldi was happy to concur.

  He moved out of the city and established his headquarters at Caserta. Built in the previous century in direct imitation of Versailles, Caserta was the largest palace in Europe. Garibaldi characteristically chose one of the smallest rooms, but soon the rest of the apartments were packed with sightseers, suitors of all sorts, and more besotted English ladies. A lock of Garibaldi’s hair was considered an accessory more desirable and more charged with erotic symbolism than any jewel. Ever polite, he obligingly submitted to having his hair cut so that the expatriate English ladies of the city could each have some of the clippings. The locks of Garibaldi’s hair in circulation were soon almost as numerous as fragments of the True Cross.

  Shaking free of this time-wasting foolishness, on October 1 Garibaldi took on, and after a day and a half of fighting defeated, the armies of the king of Naples on the river Volturno. The original Thousand had been multiplied twentyfold by the volunteers that had flocked to Garibaldi over the previous weeks, giving him by far the largest army he had ever commanded, facing some twenty-eight thousand Bourbon troops. By nineteenth-century standards, this was large-scale warfare. Garibaldi was magnificent. “He was like thunder. He was beautiful in the battle, like Raphael’s archangel Michael trampling on the demon,” one of his soldiers recalled. “His eyes devoured the enemies, consumed them, laid them low.” For the first time he had too many men to be able to inspire more than a small proportion by his own words or gestures, but throughout the battle he dashed from one point to another on horseback or in an open carriage, leaping down whenever he came into contact with the enemy to lead a charge, saber in hard, shouting, “Victory! Victory!” Skeptical veterans asked, “What victory?” but once more Garibaldi demonstrated his ability to translate hope into reality. The battle was won.

  But it was not one of those amazing victories to which Garibaldi had become accustomed that summer. This time the opposing army had neither deserted en masse nor retreated in needless panic. Garibaldi, sobered by it, told Mazzini that he could not possibly annihilate King Francis’s army, let alone conquer the Papal States. Instead he withdrew into Naples to wrestle with the increasingly intractable political problems by which he was beset.

  He had declared his intention of proclaiming Victor Emmanuel king of all Italy in the Quirinale Palace in Rome. But Victor Emmanuel, under Cavour’s influence, didn’t want Rome—or not yet anyway, not until his ally Napoleon III was ready to relinquish it peaceably—and he had no desire to accept Italy from Garibaldi. He wanted to be seen to conquer it for himself.

  Within days of Garibaldi’s arrival in Naples Cavour dispatched the Piedmontese army to invade the Papal States and march through them into the Kingdom of Naples. While Garibaldi was confronting the Neapolitans at Volturno, the Piedmontese army was advancing on their rear.

  Cavour was now determined to remove Garibaldi from whatever power he had. Garibaldi was well aware of his hostility, but he fondly believed that the king (who had after all deceived his chief minister in conniving at Garibaldi’s crossing of the Strait of Messina) would stand by him. Increasingly he began to see all his setbacks as the products of Cavour’s malevolence. He wrote to Victor Emmanuel demanding that he sack his chief minister. Victor Emmanuel replied that as a constitutional monarch he was not in a position to dismiss a member of an elected government; he was severely displeased. A few days later Cavour wrote with satisfaction that it was this “insolent ultimatum” which had finally decided the king “to march on Naples at the head of his army to bring Garibaldi to his senses, and to throw into the sea this nest of Red Republicans and Socialist demagogues.”

  The plebiscites took place. Both in Sicily and in Calabria Garibaldi had been greeted as something like a god, but the people’s adoration of him, as it turned out, was no more constant than the ecstatic fervor with which the A
thenians had welcomed Alcibiades home in 410 BC. They yearned for a hero to effect a regime change and to provide them with an occasion for tumultuous excitement, but once that excitement was over they had no further use for him. Both in Palermo and in Naples the people gave an overwhelming “yes” to annexation. Garibaldi, the adored liberator, had been voted out of office. Victor Emmanuel, having made himself master of the former Papal States of Umbria and the Marche, led his army towards Naples to claim the new adjunct to his kingdom. Garibaldi rode out to receive him.

  On October 26, thirty miles north of the city, they met. Garibaldi and his men had waited since before dawn. Cavour had said privately that he would stop at nothing, not even civil war, to teach Garibaldi his place, but Garibaldi needed no such lesson. He had been slow to make up his mind to the annexation of his conquests by Piedmont, but he had always looked forward to this moment. For months he had been boasting of how with his “victorious sword” he would make all Italy his and then lay it at his monarch’s feet. He had spoken of the occasion as one of glorious consummation, when a grateful king would acknowledge the great services of his loyal champion, embracing him and praising him and heaping him with honors. It wasn’t like that at all. As the battalions of the royal army began to file by, their commanders saluted him correctly, but it was evident to Alberto Mario, one of Garibaldi’s companions, that “all were alike averse to Garibaldi, this plebeian donor of a realm.” When the royal party approached, Garibaldi rode up to the king, removed his hat, and said with a flourish, “I salute the first King of Italy.” Victor Emmanuel, failing to take his cue, eschewed grand rhetoric to rejoin blandly “How are you, my dear Garibaldi?”

  The two rode side by side for the next eight miles, redshirts and soldiers of the royal guard pairing off behind them. Mario strained his ears to hear what a king would say to a hero on such a momentous day: Victor Emmanuel talked about the weather and the state of the roads. At one point a group of peasants gathered around them, crying, “Viva Garibaldi!” Garibaldi, embarrassed, pulled his horse back, shouting out “This is your king! The King of Italy! Viva il Re!” but he was unable to deflect the crowd’s attention away from himself. The shouts of “Viva Garibaldi” continued. Garibaldi did not, as Rodrigo Díaz had done, position his camp in such a way as to seem to claim preeminence, but he was, like the Cid, a hero whose reputation was so great that he could not help but outshine his king. Victor Emmanuel, accordingly, resolved to hustle him out of sight.