Heroes_Saviors, Traitors, and Supermen_A History of Hero Worship

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  Before they reached Naples the king had informed Garibaldi that he himself, at the head of his regular troops, would finish off the Neapolitan army. The final conquest of the Bourbon kingdom was to be his show. The Garibaldini were to stay in the rear, out of the limelight, Garibaldi with them. On parting from him Garibaldi was silent. His “countenance was full of melancholic sweetness,” wrote Mario. “Never did I feel drawn to him with such tenderness.” He stopped to eat a breakfast of bread and cheese and water. Having tasted the water he spat it out, declaring there must have been a dead animal in the well.

  Over the next two weeks he had to swallow bitterer things than bad water. Abruptly demoted from autocrat to not-quite-trustworthy, not-quite-respectable servant he had to bear the ungracious sneers of the courtiers and the commanders of the Piedmontese army. The senior minister in the king’s entourage, the man who was there to supplant him as the governor of the Two Sicilies, declined to hold any discussions with him, and when they met refused to shake his hand. His personal anthem, the “Garibaldi hymn,” was banned. Finally, on November 6, came a snub so hurtful that the pain of it stayed with Garibaldi for the rest of his life.

  Victor Emmanuel had agreed to review the Garibaldini. It was to be a solemn and ceremonious occasion. The redshirts prepared themselves. Surely this was the moment when the king would publicly and generously express his gratitude to the surviving members of the Thousand and those later volunteers who with them had doubled the extent of his dominions, men who had left their homes and families to fight, unpaid and often unfed, risking their lives, seeing their comrades die, to make him the first king of Italy. It rained. The redshirts were drawn up, probably for the first time ever, in parade-ground order. Six hours passed, and then another six. Garibaldi, who had been bedridden with rheumatism since his first meeting with the king, waited out the downpour with his men. The king never came. Garibaldi, still brooding years later over the insult, blamed Cavour for persuading him to stay away. But the story going the rounds in Naples in 1860 was that Victor Emmanuel had spent the afternoon alone with a woman. It was not that he deliberately withheld public acclaim from Garibaldi and his brave band; it was simply that something more amusing had turned up.

  The next day Victor Emmanuel entered Naples with Garibaldi beside him in his open carriage. Garibaldi had initially refused to join him, but had finally allowed himself to be persuaded. It was still raining. Neither man was seen to speak. The triumphal arches collapsed under the downpour. Rivulets of dark blue dye ran down from the king’s beard, streaking his uniform. Garibaldi attended the king to the cathedral and stood beside him while he knelt to give thanks for his victory. At the reception afterwards he stood apart and, to the consternation of a court functionary, kept his hat on. One of his supporters pointed out that Spanish grandees had the right to keep their heads covered in the presence of their monarch (as princes of the Holy Roman Emperor had in Wallenstein’s day); Garibaldi was a grandee of Italy “and perhaps something more.” The following day he formally abdicated his dictatorship, acknowledging Victor Emmanuel as king of all the territories he had conquered that summer, but he asked the king to appoint him their governor. Victor Emmanuel refused, perhaps out of a jealous desire to exclude his dangerously popular servant from political power, perhaps also because he had concluded—along with everybody else with influence in Naples—that Garibaldi’s two-month rule had been enough to demonstrate his administrative incompetence.

  Denied the power he wanted, Garibaldi was offered only honors and rewards for which he (like Cato) had no use: the specially created rank of field marshal, money and estates for his son and himself, a dowry for his daughter, a castle, a steamship, a dukedom. He refused them all. He was known all over Italy and most of the Western world as “the General.” Belatedly Victor Emmanuel granted him a commission as general in the Piedmontese army. Garibaldi screwed up the piece of paper and dropped it on the floor. He announced that he was going home to Caprera. That evening he visited the British Admiral Mundy, who had followed him north from Palermo. “His whole manner,” noted Mundy, “was that of a man who was suffering a poignant grief.” He left Naples as a solitary passenger on a steamship, slipping away before dawn. Since he set out from Quarto six months previously he had made himself absolute ruler of half Italy. All he took home to show for it was a sack of seedcorn.

  He went back to Caprera to resume clearing stones and planting beans. Cavour, and his counterparts in office all over Europe, let out a collective sigh of relief. Ten years earlier Emerson had written, “Mankind have, in all ages, attached themselves to a few persons who, either by the quality of the idea they embodied or by the largeness of their reception, were entitled to the position of leaders and law-givers.” The idea Garibaldi embodied—Byron’s “grand object” and “poetry of politics”—was a luminous one. His reception could hardly have been larger. From comparable beginnings Bonaparte had become an emperor, Bolívar (whom Garibaldi revered) a president for life with the power to appoint his own successor. But Garibaldi, invincible on the battlefield, meek and manipulable off it, surrendered his power.

  The modesty of his homecoming, the Christ-like self-abnegation it demonstrated, was immediately recognized as evidence of his noble nature. He was repeatedly, then and later, likened to Cincinnatus, the hero of the early days of Rome, a landowner who in time of crisis assumed command of the Roman armies, was elected dictator but then, when victory was assured, voluntarily laid down his power and—asking no reward for having saved the republic—went back to his farm. It was a comforting story, one designed to allay the tremor of anxiety aroused in conservative breasts by the figure of an individual whose popular following was so grossly incommensurate with his position in any political hierarchy. But it didn’t fit the facts about Garibaldi, who had no intention of beating his sword into a plowshare.

  His mission was not yet accomplished. The Bourbons had been driven from the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, but Rome and Venice were still occupied by the French and Austrians respectively. Before he left Naples he addressed the Garibaldini in words startlingly inappropriate to the cessation of warfare: “To arms, all of you, all of you! If March 1861 does not see a million Italians in arms, alas for liberty! Alas for the Italian way of life!” He had told Admiral Mundy not to visit him in Caprera in the spring because by then he hoped to have returned to the fight.

  For the next seven years he was to play an increasingly disruptive part in Italian affairs. He had a vision of himself as leader, not of a thousand volunteers but of a hundred thousand, or even perhaps a million, operating independently of any civil government. In the winter before he went to Sicily he had launched an appeal for a million men and the money to buy a million rifles, a project which terrified statesmen all over Europe. He had been elected president of the Italian National Society, a patriotic pressure group, dissolved it and proclaimed a new, more belligerently political association, the Armed Nation, with the avowed intention of raising an independent volunteer army—an idea which so alarmed the British minster in Turin that he talked Victor Emmanuel into ordering Garibaldi to disband it. Garibaldi, like Alcibiades, Caesar, and the Cid before him, was even then too influential and too reckless for the stability of the state.

  A year later, his reputation newly burnished by the glory he had won in Sicily and Naples, his international prestige by now immense, he was an even more threatening and destabilizing presence. The American minister in Turin described him as one “who believed, quite rightly, that his achievements and prestige had placed him in a position in which he could negotiate as an equal with kings and governments.” No wonder the king and government of the new Italy looked at him askance.

  He was indignant at the treatment accorded his Garibaldini after he left Naples. Few of his officers had been granted commissions in the Piedmontese army. Many complained, correctly, that they were treated worse than the Neapolitan soldiers, who as members of a trained army were more easily assimilable than the undiscipli
ned individualists who had conquered the Two Sicilies. Garibaldi wrote a letter which was read out in the Turinese parliament and widely quoted, complaining of the treatment accorded to the nation’s heroes. He issued a press release calling for the creation of a corps of volunteers to complement the regular army, one which, it was understood, would be under his command.

  In April 1861 the newly elected parliament of the enlarged Italy was sitting in Turin. Garibaldi, who was the member for Naples, arrived in the city amid scenes of great public excitement. For five days he kept to his hotel room, laid up by rheumatism. No one knew precisely what he had come to do or say, but some kind of high drama was expected. People traveled all the way across Italy to be in the parliament house when he took his seat. Veterans of Sicily and Calabria, wearing their red shirts, filled the public galleries while grand ladies struggled for standing room.

  Twenty minutes after the session began Garibaldi arrived, hobbling between two supporters. The Garibaldini in the galleries rose and cheered nonstop for five minutes but the majority of the deputies sat silent. Garibaldi was dressed as usual in his red shirt and poncho. The costume which had once seemed so romantically exotic had outlived the fashion it had inspired: it struck several observers as undignified and embarrassing, as inappropriate to the occasion as Cato’s bared chest had seemed when he officiated in the law courts. To the French minister Garibaldi looked like “a prophet, or, if you prefer, an old comedian.”

  An orator of genius when speaking extempore to massed crowds, Garibaldi lost his nerve when faced with a sophisticated audience of knowing politicians. He could whip up excitement like no one else alive, but he was nothing like so skilled at presenting an argument. “Politics were not his forte,” wrote a British diplomat who once tried to help him write a speech. “He always seemed to miss the principal points.” When he rose to speak in Turin he had a sheaf of notes in his hand which he had evident difficulty in reading, despite the fact that he was not only wearing his usual pince-nez but using a large magnifying glass as well. He meandered incoherently. It was turning out to be a sadly disappointing performance. But then, as though abruptly coming to himself, he laid aside his papers and began to speak as he had done from balconies all over southern Italy, from the heart. His voice was as resonant and beautiful as ever. Enunciating his words with majestic slowness, he accused Cavour of having been ready to order the Piedmontese army to open fire on the Garibaldini outside Naples the previous year. The charge, as many of those present must have known, was substantially correct.

  “The effect was tremendous,” according to a Prussian diplomat’s wife. “All the deputies left their seats, crowding down to the centre, all talking, screaming and gesticulating at once.” The redshirts in the gallery were roaring. Cavour was hammering on the dispatch box and shouting, “It’s not true!” A fight broke out, a group of opposition deputies trying to set upon Cavour and being violently repulsed by his supporters. Only Garibaldi, immobilized by rheumatism, remained still until the noise subsided then implacably repeated his accusation: “You were planning to wage a fratricidal war!” The session was suspended.

  When it resumed twenty minutes later Cavour, once more in control of himself, was suavely conciliatory. Garibaldi was not. He never said what he did not mean and, meaning it, he would not unsay it. For the third time he repeated his accusation. He reiterated his demand for a volunteer force to be placed under his command and stalked out of the chamber. Carlyle had praised Oliver Cromwell, whose inarticulacy seemed to him the mark of a truly great soul, for breaking through the glib subtleties of parliamentary debate with a “voice from the battle-whirlwind.” Garibaldi seemed to his admirers equally splendid, both in his initial failure to display the weaselly talents of the professional politician and in his subsequent leonine roar. The galleries emptied as the red-shirts poured out to escort their beloved leader in procession through the streets, followed by the sightseers who had come not to hear the debate but to gaze upon the hero.

  “Arrogant toward the Government, insolent towards Parliament” was the verdict on his performance, according to the French attaché in Turin, who noted that in political circles Garibaldi was “very unpopular and regarded as a man dangerous for Italy.” His request for a volunteer force was rejected out of hand. Italy’s representatives had turned their backs on him. Back on Caprera he cast about for a new cause, as Cavour put it, “like a bear searching for prey to devour.” After Wallenstein’s dismissal at Regensburg all Europe was in suspense, wondering to whom he would next offer his services. So, in 1861, every foreign ministry was speculating anxiously about where Garibaldi would next raise a revolution. Montenegro? Mexico? Dalmatia? Spain? Hungary? Greece? Ionia? Russia? Or perhaps America? That summer, the first year of the U.S. Civil War, he received first a spate of letters and then a delegation from Abraham Lincoln’s secretary of state. There was already a “Garibaldi guard” serving the Union, a legion of European volunteers who wore red shirts and “Garibaldi caps.” Now Garibaldi himself was offered a major general’s commission in the Union army. He replied that he would consider the post of commander in chief but nothing less—no mere modern major general he. Besides, he was not interested in fighting to protect the interests of one group of morally compromised American states against those of another group. If he wanted Garibaldi’s services Abraham Lincoln must announce the abolition of slavery forthwith, something he was not ready to do. The negotiations foundered. Garibaldi stayed in Europe.

  On Caprera he continued to live the ascetic, energetic life he preferred, rising at dawn every day to cultivate his vegetable patch, but his solitude now was frequently interrupted. His children, Menotti, Ricciotti, and Teresa, were with him. Old friends and comrades in arms came to stay, sometimes for long periods, and were pressed into service as laborers or secretaries. Sacks of mail arrived by every steamer, the great majority of the letters from women begging for Garibaldi’s autograph or a lock of his hair. Politicians from Turin came and went—soliciting his support or just keeping an eye on him—and so did sightseers, or rather pilgrims come to worship at the shrine of the man one of them described as a “superhuman being … the fountain-head of all that is noble, generous and holy.” Strangers who had an introduction, or whose rank was such as to make them sure of their welcome, would land uninvited on the island. Admirers insufficiently well connected or brazen to visit Caprera itself contented themselves with gazing at him across the water. The first hotel was opened on the previously unfrequented island of La Maddalena, separated from Caprera by a narrow strip of water, to accommodate the visitors who came to watch him through binoculars as he chased the wild goats, hoed his beans, and smoked his cigars.

  Garibaldi played the celebrity game gracefully. He never altered his routine (one lady visitor was incredulous, privately asking whether the great man really did his own digging; she could not believe it, but it was true), but he readily handed out signed photographs and locks of his hair and red shirts to those who came to adore him. An English aristocrat arrived in his yacht and was served fried blackbirds for dinner, a meal which he declared was a dish for which most of his friends would have paid its weight in gold (not for gastronomic reasons, but because he had eaten it at the table of the great Garibaldi). Every celebrity hunter wanted a trophy, every pilgrim a relic. Garibaldi was amused when he found one visitor gathering pebbles to take home as mementoes of his visit to Caprera. Others picked the hairs from his comb or collected his nail clippings, and one especially fortunate souvenir hunter spotted a laborer wearing his old general’s uniform and bought it for a splendid sum. Another asked for a pair of Garibaldi boots, to be told that he had only one pair and couldn’t spare them since “the shoemaker lives on that shore on which it has pleased others to make me a foreigner.” And while some took away, others gave. The officers of an American ship, stopping by to visit and observing that Garibaldi had only three chairs, presented him with a dozen more. A consortium of English admirers bought him a fifty-foot yacht. Oth
ers raised enough money to buy out the owner of the other half of Caprera for him, making him proprietor of the whole island.

  A private island, however, was not enough to satisfy him: he wanted a nation. In the spring of 1863 he set out not to seek a liberation movement abroad but to foment one at home. The Piedmontese government continued to tolerate the French in Rome and the Austrians in Venice, but he could not. He had no army but he had a multitude of supporters. He traveled first through northern Italy and then through Sicily, everywhere he went addressing enormous and enthusiastic crowds and calling upon them to rise up and drive out the foreigners. His watchwords were “Rome and Venice!” “Rome or Death!”

  To what extent he was defying Victor Emmanuel, whose overt policy was that of peaceable coexistence with France and passive acceptance of Austria, is a matter of dispute. Before he began his tour Garibaldi visited Turin and talked with Victor Emmanuel and with his new prime minister, Rattazzi (Cavour had died the previous year). What was said during these meetings was, and has remained, secret. It is possible that the king gave Garibaldi covert encouragement, hoping to profit by any success he might score as he had profited by his conquest of the Two Sicilies. People asked where Garibaldi’s funding was coming from if not from the government in Turin, and it was rumored later that year that he carried with him a tin box containing secret orders from the king. But if those orders existed they were never produced, and if Victor Emmanuel ever thought it wise to make use of Garibaldi in such a way, by the end of the year he had emphatically changed his mind.