Everywhere Garibaldi went he whipped up storms of enthusiasm. Repeatedly in the past he had been furiously disappointed by his inability to convert worshipers into recruits, but this time he was received not only with adoration, but with action. Like the volcanic fire on the banner of Montevideo’s Italian legion, his army was invisible and dormant, but he had only to set foot in Italy and speak from a few balconies for it to erupt into the light.
In the Turinese parliament, before a critical and politically sophisticated audience, he had fumbled his notes and tangled his arguments, but when speaking to a multitude he was, as he always had been, an electrifying orator. Fully aware of the excitement he could generate simply by presenting himself, he would stand silently while the adoring crowd roared and wept. Then, at the moment of maximum expectation, he would raise his thrilling voice and call out questions to which his hearers would bellow back the familiar answers—“Whose is the victory?” “Italy’s!” “What are we fighting for?” “Rome or Death!”—a secular litany which, involving the crowd in the inflaming of their own emotions, led repeatedly to a collective rapture. This was not the canvassing of a politician: it was the advent of a messiah. A poster printed in Sicily is headed “In the name of the Father of the Nation,” and contains versions of the Ten Commandments (“Thou shalt not be a soldier of the General’s in vain”), of the Lord’s Prayer (“Give us this day our daily cartridges”), and of the catechism, in which Garibaldi is defined as a second Trinity, “The Father of the Nation, the Son of the People, and the Spirit of Liberty.” To fight for Garibaldi had become a sacred duty.
In northern Italy in April Garibaldi called upon his followers to form “rifle clubs” with guns subsidized by the Million Rifles Fund. Thousands of young men took up the suggestion, the clubs constituting a kind of unofficial militia loyal to “the General.” In May a group of about a hundred of them were arrested, apparently on their way to invade the Austrian Tyrol. The government, embarrassed and unwilling to be seen to oppose the people’s idol, announced that the men were not true Garibaldini but agitators who had falsely used the General’s name. Garibaldi exposed the lie by going to the prison where his men were being held, offering to stand security for them, and issuing a statement to the press confirming that they had been acting on his orders. No action was taken against him. Instead he received a visit from one of the king’s ministers, with whom he talked alone in his room and then in a rowing boat on Lake Maggiore. Again it is impossible to know what passed between them, but it seems likely that the minister begged him to quiet down and go away, for shortly thereafter Garibaldi returned to Caprera, staying there for ten days before abruptly announcing he was setting off for Sicily.
The “second Jesus” was proving almost as troublesome to established authority as the first one had been. Had Garibaldi but known how to wait quietly Rome could have been Italy’s that summer without a single death. Napoleon III was ready to withdraw his troops, but what he would have been willing to do in his own time he was too proud to do under pressure from a populist agitator: “A nation like France does not give way to the threats of a Garibaldi,” he declared. “Death if they like, but Rome never,” added the Empress Eugénie, a far more militant Catholic than her husband. Garibaldi’s outspokenness and lack of finesse was as damaging to his own cause as Cato’s had been to his. Garibaldi was an Achilles, not an Odysseus. He was never to understand that there were less romantic, less violent, more efficient ways of altering international relations than by running into the enemy’s fire flourishing a saber. He was becoming a grave embarrassment to Victor Emmanuel, who wished neither to associate himself with his actions, nor to admit how far beyond the government’s control he now was.
Volunteers from all over Italy and elsewhere, including some opposition MPs from Turin, joined him in Sicily. By the beginning of August he had assembled a force of some three thousand men near Palermo. The British foreign secretary, Lord John Russell, wrote to him reminding him that no “individual, however distinguished, has a right to determine for his country the momentous question of peace or war.” Garibaldi ignored the warning. His speeches became increasingly incendiary, until at last Victor Emmanuel responded. He issued a proclamation declaring that no one but he, the king, was to decide if and when Rome or Venice were to be liberated, expressly forbidding any Italian, however eminent, to make war on a foreign state, and announcing that any individual who assembled an army without his authority would be guilty of high treason and of fomenting civil war.
Garibaldi ignored the proclamation. Perhaps he believed that, like the orders Victor Emmanuel had sent him three years before forbidding him to cross the Strait of Messina, it was a blind to placate foreign powers, not to be taken seriously. Three days after its publication he led his men eastward across Sicily. The governor of the island, an old friend of his, resigned rather than be obliged to restrain him. He reached Catania on Sicily’s east coast. The troops of the royal Piedmontese army stationed in the town surrendered to him immediately and the townspeople lit all their lamps in a welcome which had them all cheering him until three in the morning. A week later he seized two vessels, one French and one Italian, and crossed to the mainland. There were ships of the Italian navy in the vicinity but they made no attempt to intercept him. (Their officers were later court-martialed for negligence but acquitted.) It appeared that Garibaldi had begun a second miracle-working progress through southern Italy. All over the Western world people watched enthralled. That week Ivan Turgenev wrote to Alexander Herzen from Baden-Baden, “But what of Garibaldi? One cannot help trembling as one follows every movement… Surely Brutus, who perishes not only always in history, but even in Shakespeare, cannot triumph? One cannot believe it—one’s heart stops beating.”
Garibaldi was bound for the Papal States to drive out the French. Before embarking at Catania he proclaimed: “I bow to the Majesty of Victor Emmanuel!” Like the Cid of the Poema, he was still claiming to make his conquests in his king’s name. When the Piedmontese garrison at Reggio marched out against him he retreated. He had no intention of fighting his fellow Italians. He still imagined that a monarch would condone any defiance so long as it was profitable. Wallenstein had wished to impose a secularized and greatly strengthened empire on a reluctant emperor; so Garibaldi intended to force a kingdom on an unwilling king. But Victor Emmanuel was no longer prepared to accept gifts under duress. He ordered out an army to hunt down and stop Garibaldi.
The royal troops found Garibaldi in the mountains of Aspromonte. Garibaldi’s men were drawn up on a plateau, their General standing before them. Their position was strong, but to defend it would be to initiate a civil war. Garibaldi gave orders that no one was to fire. For nearly an hour he watched the royal army approach until they were within gunshot. As they advanced uphill, they began to shoot the Garibaldini. Garibaldi stood still.
When Napoleon Bonaparte returned from exile in Elba in 1815, not a single one of the thousands of troops ordered out to stop him marching on Paris could find it in himself to fire a gun at the fallen emperor. Nearly half a century later Garibaldi appears to have believed it was as impossible for an Italian soldier to shoot him as it had been for a French one to shoot Napoleon. He was wrong. He must have hoped that the Italian troops would lay down their arms as so many of the Neapolitans had done three years before, that by the power of his oratory and his physical presence he could avert a battle and win over an army. Stranger and more marvelous things had happened. But at Aspromonte, instead of the demoralized Neapolitan army with its pusillanimous generals, Garibaldi was facing disciplined troops and determined officers. Finding themselves unopposed they advanced the faster and fired the more. Even the heroic drama of unresisting martyrdom was spoiled when some of the Garibaldini, understandably, lost their nerve and fired back. Garibaldi, of whom it was once said that he used to shake bullets by the hundred out of his shirt while remaining unscathed, was hit in the thigh and the foot. By the time a colonel came to accept his surrender, h
e was no longer grandly upright but in great pain on the ground. As a doctor investigated his foot he lit a cigar and told the man to amputate immediately if he judged it necessary. But he was felled, metaphorically as well as literally. The myth of his invincibility had been shattered.
As Wallenstein’s murderers had congratulated themselves on their heroic courage in taking on a sick man in a nightshirt, so Victor Emmanuel rewarded his soldiers generously for having defeated an unresisting enemy: seventy-six medals for valor were awarded after the nonbattle of Aspromonte. Garibaldi was charged with treason and imprisoned, to the outrage of his admirers everywhere. There were demonstrations in his support all over Italy: Rattazzi was obliged to resign as prime minister. In London a hundred thousand people attended a rally in Hyde Park protesting against his arrest. A Swiss poet composed an epic on the tragedy of Aspromonte.
Defeated and suffering, the second Jesus was now seen to be enduring his Passion. The wound to Garibaldi’s foot became one of the stigmata. A print of the period shows him hanging from the cross while an angel flies down to crown him. The Redeemer had fallen foul of secular authority, as redeemers tend to: he had come among his people and his people had received him not. In prison he lay on a bed donated by Lady Palmerston and he was attended by no fewer than twelve of the most distinguished surgeons in Europe, their fees paid by his admirers. After one of the twelve eventually succeeded in extracting the bullet from his foot while he bit down hard on his cigar an English gentleman offered “a fabulous sum” for it. He was refused: Menotti Garibaldi wanted the horrid keepsake for himself. But thousands of bloodstained handkerchiefs, each one said to have been used to staunch the great man’s wound, subsequently went on sale.
Within weeks Victor Emmanuel, anxious to shrug off as quickly as possible the opprobrium of being Garibaldi’s oppressor, granted him and his men an amnesty. Garibaldi retired to Caprera, permanently lamed and even more fundamentally disabled by the shock of being treated—he, the people’s hero!—as a public enemy. In 1866, when Victor Emmanuel, in partnership this time with Bismarck’s Prussia, finally resolved to declare war on Austria again, he accepted with alacrity the king’s invitation to serve, leaving the island on the very same day to take up his command, but he was not what he had once been. For the third time he was operating in the Alps, from a base on Lake Garda. But like Drake returning to the Caribbean for his last voyage he found the scenes of his early glory sadly changed. He was wounded early in the campaign. The Austrian Tyrolese who opposed him were as wise to the techniques of guerrilla warfare as he was. When peace was concluded the Tyrol, of which he had eventually succeeded in gaining control, was granted to Austria. All his efforts had been futile. In 1848 in similar circumstances he had refused to lay down his arms. But this time he acquiesced in a grim one-word telegram: “Obbedisco”—I obey.
That telegram was much quoted. Like the comparison with Cincinnatus it conjured up an image of Garibaldi as the great servant, one who willingly sacrificed his own ambitions and aspirations to subordinate himself to the state. It was an image designed to reassure all established authority, but it was a grossly misleading one. Garibaldi’s obedience was short-lived. Alcibiades, after he defected to Sparta, declared, “None of you should think the worse of me…. The Athens I love is not the one that is wronging me now … The man who really loves his country is not the one who refuses to attack it when he has been unjustly driven from it, but the man whose desire of it is so strong that he will shrink from nothing in his efforts to get back there again.” Garibaldi, bitterly disappointed in the Italy that had come into being, whose regime now seemed to him so compromised, so ignoble, longed to “get back” to the pure-hearted Italy he had once envisioned. When an uprising in Sicily was suppressed with what seemed to him unjustified brutality he resigned his parliamentary seat in disgust. In the following year he was once more traveling around the country, defying the government and calling wherever he went for volunteers for the liberation of Rome.
History was repeating itself. Once again Garibaldi was fomenting sedition in the name of patriotism. Once again Victor Emmanuel’s government issued a proclamation calling on all Italians to respect the authority of Parliament and the frontiers of foreign states. Once again Garibaldi went ahead in defiance of the government’s explicit veto. Once again he told his recruits that they would be marching against foreigners, and were to avoid fighting the Italian army. He traveled by rail. At every station the train was surrounded by huge crowds. At every station Garibaldi announced that he would lead his irregular army on Rome. He was flagrantly defying the government. At Sinalunga he, along with fifty of his followers, was arrested. Again there were demonstrations, many of them violent, all over Italy; even the soldiers on guard outside his prison window shouted, “Long live Garibaldi, free! Long live Rome, the capital!” Again Rattazzi feared for his political life. Again Garibaldi was rapidly released and shipped back to Caprera.
That autumn his son Menotti led a troop of volunteers across the border into the Papal States. Everyone concerned was certain that the outcome of the invasion would depend on whether or not Garibaldi himself could join it. The government could not keep him in prison, but they were determined to keep him at home, and they were prepared to tie up eight warships in order to blockade him on Caprera. It was useless. On October 2 Garibaldi was stopped by a salvo of cannon as he tried to row himself to a neighboring island and obliged to go back, but two weeks later, on a misty night, he made his escape. He was all alone. With his oars wrapped in rags to deaden the sound he passed so close to the ships that he could hear the seamen talking on board. He was sixty years old and barely able to walk, but he succeeded in making his way—hiding out in a cave for a day and a night, crossing Sardinia on horseback (a seventeen-hour ride), persuading a naval patrol that he was just a fisherman—onto the mainland. When the news of his escape got out Rattazzi again resigned.
Garibaldi went to Florence, by this time the capital. He spoke publicly, declaring, “We have the right to Rome! Rome is ours!” The government, leaderless after Rattazzi’s resignation, made no move to arrest him; to have done so might well have provoked civil war. He joined Menotti’s men inside the Papal States and defeated the papal garrison at Monte Rotondo, but on November 2, at Mentana, his force of some forty-five hundred men met an army of some eleven thousand French and papal troops. “It is Garibaldi’s custom never to count either the enemy or his own men,” one of his most devoted officers once wrote, but he had lost his ability to communicate his faith to his followers. Seeing the odds against them, at Mentana the invincible Garibaldini turned and fled.
Garibaldi was devastated. He appeared transformed, wrote an observer afterwards, “gloomy, hoarse, pale … I have never seen anyone age so quickly as he did at that moment.” He led his men back over the frontier and took a train for Livorno, intending to go straight home, but he had defied the law and the government was determined, now that his charisma had failed him, to make a show of its recovered power to treat him as it would any other citizen. At Perugia he was arrested, taken off the train, and imprisoned for the third time. Once released, he went quietly back to Caprera under orders to stay there.
Three years later Victor Emmanuel finally took Rome, but Garibaldi had no part in his triumph. Instead he wrote novels, so badly that the first one was turned down by nineteen publishers, even though its author was one of the most famous people in the world. He revised and updated his autobiography, the bitterness of his added commentary reflecting his disenchantment with the new Italy he had helped bring into being. “Every hero becomes a bore at last,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Garibaldi in old age became, not boring exactly, but as cantankerous and complaining as he had every right to be. He married his housekeeper. He fought once more: when France became a republic again, and came under threat from Prussia, he cabled the French government: “What remains of me is at your service, dispose of me.” His offer was accepted: the great Garibaldi would be an invaluable asset
to any cause. A French radical managed to break the blockade of Caprera, whisking him off the island in a little sailing boat. He served loyally, even though he was so crippled by rheumatism and his old wounds that he had to be carried around the battlefields on a stretcher, but he had fought both Catholicism and France too often for Catholic Frenchmen to forgive him. To the majority of his new allies he was at best an enemy, at worst a criminal. When he was elected to the National Assembly he was shouted down, and so was Victor Hugo, who tried to defend him. He left the next day for Caprera, where he stayed, virtually imprisoned, for the rest of his life.
He had long outlasted his finest hours and had lived to make the degrading and disorientating transition from antique hero to modern celebrity. In 1864, a few months after his traumatic defeat by his own countrymen at Aspromonte, he visited London. Britain was hospitable to foreign revolutionaries in exile. Garibaldi had been kindly received here in 1854. Ten years later, wounded, depressed, and unwanted at home, he agreed to make another visit.
To Mazzini, who was living in England once again, and to his allies in the British radical movement, Garibaldi’s visit represented an invaluable propagandist and fund-raising opportunity. They planned a whole series of mass open-air rallies in the north of England where he would speak, generating enthusiasm for radical causes and large sums of money. But he was not only a political totem and a salable spectacle: he was also a toy of fashion. The Duke and Duchess of Sutherland invited him to stay. Lord Shaftesbury planned a banquet in his honor. Everyone who was anyone wished to meet him. Even before he arrived he was being fought over. His itinerary was much disputed, and not only because his time might be limited. His visit would carry a very different symbolic significance if he appeared first at a workers’ rally in the industrialized north than if his first stop in England were a ducal residence. What Garibaldi himself, who was never much interested in the niceties of politics and whose English was rudimentary, wanted from the visit is uncertain. As so often in peacetime, he seemed to be passive and infinitely suggestible—going where he was invited, politely allowing himself to be used.
Heroes_Saviors, Traitors, and Supermen_A History of Hero Worship Page 56
