Heroes_Saviors, Traitors, and Supermen_A History of Hero Worship

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  The welcome he was accorded was astonishing. Alexander Herzen described it as a Shakespearean fantasy: “Prologue: Flourish of trumpets. The idol of the masses, the one grand popular figure of our age … enters in all the brilliance of its glory. Everything bows down before it, everything celebrates its triumph; this is Carlyle’s hero-worship being performed before our eyes.” As soon as the ship on which Garibaldi was traveling docked at Southampton the crowds who had been waiting on the waterfront swarmed up the ramps and besieged him in his cabin. “It was more boisterous than a battle,” wrote one reporter. He went to the Isle of Wight, staying there as the guest of the Liberal MP. He visited Alfred, Lord Tennyson, who had already written poems in his praise and who was delighted by his “majestic meekness.” “What a noble human being!” he wrote afterwards. “I expected to see a hero and was not disappointed. His manners have a certain divine simplicity in them such as I have never witnessed.” The photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, another inhabitant of the island, went down on her knees to beg him to pose for a portrait. Lady Tennyson worried that he might think Cameron was begging for alms, but Garibaldi, who had seen whole villages full of Calabrian and Sicilian peasants kneeling to adore him, accepted her obeisance without fuss.

  On April 11 he went to London, traveling in a special train draped with the Italian flag. There were reception committees, both official and unofficial, in each station through which he passed. As his train entered the suburbs it was engulfed by hordes of waving, cheering people. There were people on rooftops, people on railway wagons, people on bridges, people cramming the embankments. He got out at Nine Elms. On the platform a brass band was playing the Garibaldi hymn. He was escorted through the hubbub to the Duke of Sutherland’s carriage, in which he was joined by the duke and by some pushy Italian businessmen who clambered aboard uninvited. His progress across the Thames and through the center of London to the Sutherlands’ house in St. James’s, a distance of about three miles, took six hours. Half a million people had come to see him, more even than had turned out for the Prince of Wales’s wedding the previous year. There were banners. There were brass bands, their braying scarcely audible above the cheering voices. People pressed around the carriage so thickly it was repeatedly brought to a complete standstill. When it finally reached its destination it fell to pieces. The pressure of the crowds surging against it had lifted the sides off their hinges: the vehicle had been held together for the latter part of the journey only by the crush of bodies all around it.

  For the next week Garibaldi was the toast of all London society. He could do no wrong: even when he lit up a cigar in the Duchess of Sutherland’s boudoir he was excused. He met Palmerston and Gladstone, Lord John Russell, Florence Nightingale, and the Archbishop of Canterbury. He went to the opera (Norma). He twice addressed his adoring public in the Crystal Palace. The Prince of Wales visited him, slipping through the garden gate in a forlorn attempt to avoid the journalists who followed Garibaldi everywhere, and found him dignified, noble, and “un-charlatan-like.” He drove through more enthusiastic crowds to the Guildhall where the mayor gave him the Freedom of the City. He lunched at the Reform Club, where Lord Ebury described him as an “instrument of God.” He visited the House of Lords and was warmly welcomed by peers of all political persuasions. He attended a banquet at Fishmonger’s Hall, shaking hands with every one of the 350 guests; his sons, Menotti and Ricciotti, who had reasonably assumed the occasion was a dinner for fishmongers and had accordingly dressed down, were denied admission. He spent a weekend at Cliveden. “The triumphant ovations increase with every day,” wrote Herzen. “The people of England have gone really quite mad about Garibaldi,” wrote Queen Victoria in her diary. Like Lord Byron before him, Garibaldi, the new corsair, had inflamed all London. Everywhere he went he was greeted with a feverish excitement fueled by an eroticism which was all the more hysterical for the fact that in Protestant Britain it could be less easily expressed, as it had been in Italy, as quasi-religious fervor. A musical based on his adventures played to packed theaters. Babies were named after him. Sales of Garibaldi biscuits rose again. The Sutherlands’ servants were making small fortunes selling the hairs from his comb, the clippings from his toenails, even the scummy water from his bath.

  This reception, so hectically rapturous, was almost unmitigatedly frivolous. Garibaldi’s hostility towards the Pope and his priests agreed well with British anti-Catholicism, but otherwise neither the crowds of hoi polloi who mobbed him in streets nor the grandees who flirted with and condescended to him in their drawing rooms cared a whit about his politics. They approved in a general way the notion of “liberty,” of which the British had for two centuries liked to consider themselves the protectors, and most of them had an idea that Garibaldi had done splendid things for the sake of that abstraction. Beyond that they did not inquire. The cause to which he had dedicated his life, that of Italy’s unity and independence, was a matter of indifference to all but a few of them. They neither knew nor cared whether they adored him as Italy’s hero or as the seditionary who was such an annoyance to Italy’s legitimate government. They did not ask themselves what his passionate advocacy of the rights of nations to self-determination and independent sovereignty might lead him to think of British policy in Ireland, or in India. They did not bother themselves with the question of whether, as law-abiding citizens of a monarchical state, they should be so eager to salute a man who had so recently, and so inveterately, rebelled against his king.

  They loved him for his looks. They acclaimed him as a focus of erotic excitement, a time traveler from an archaic world of epic adventure and romantic passion, and a tragic victim. “He came,” remarked the Countess Martinengo Cesaresco astutely, “the prisoner of Aspromonte, not the conqueror of Sicily.” He was a nationalist revolutionary but, wounded and impotent, he was a welcome guest even in the metropolis of an imperial power. He had all but died for his cause, and the pathos and grandeur of his sacrifice were affecting enough to obscure the nature of that cause from those who would otherwise most vehemently have disapproved of it, freeing them to luxuriate in a delirium of hero worship.

  In the 1960s students all over the Western world pinned posters of Che Guevara to their walls, not because they took an informed interest in Latin American politics, but because he had a beautiful face and because as he glared bravely upwards and outwards beneath his beret he picturesquely embodied the stirring myth of the brave freedom fighter slain by oppressors. The fashion was not for a political program, but for a poster. Similarly Garibaldi in London became a sign which signified nothing, or nothing that the man himself would have recognized as having validity or weight. It seemed only three people in London that April Fools’ week declined to be swept away by Garibaldi-mania, and what distinguished them from the crowd of their fellow Londoners was the fact that they did him the justice of taking his convictions seriously. One was the queen, another her prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli, and the third Karl Marx. To Queen Victoria, although her son and heir and several of the princesses had succumbed, it seemed evident that a monarch could not condone and should not meet a man of his political stamp: “Honest, disinterested and brave, Garibaldi certainly is,” she noted in her diary. “But a revolutionist!” The extravagant adulation accorded him made her feel “half-ashamed of being the head of a nation capable of such follies.” Marx was entirely of her mind. As one who deplored both nationalism and sentimentality he found the reception accorded to Garibaldi a “miserable spectacle of imbecility.” He flatly refused to deliver a greeting from the German socialist association to the visiting hero.

  While Garibaldi was gallivanting around the metropolis, fêted by the high and mighty, Mazzini and his British associates observed his appropriation by the establishment with growing dismay. Mazzini had visited him on the Isle of Wight. Garibaldi, to the disapproval of his aristocratic mentors, received him warmly, but Mazzini had failed to take control, as he had wished, of the hero’s itinerary. Nearly fifty rallies had be
en planned in Newcastle, Glasgow, Birmingham, Manchester, and Salford, events which promised to be immensely beneficial to the self-confidence of the British radical movement and financially profitable to any cause for which Garibaldi could be persuaded to solicit donations. These rallies, in their organizers’ eyes, were the real purpose of Garibaldi’s visit. They never took place.

  On Sunday, April 17, ignoring the attempts to dissuade him made by the Duke of Sutherland’s coachman, Garibaldi went to lunch with Alexander Herzen. The occasion was a gathering of exiled revolutionaries from all over Europe, Mazzini among them. Garibaldi made a speech in which he acknowledged Mazzini to be his first teacher, “My friend, my master!” The following day he called on the exiled French republicans Ledru-Rollin and Louis Blanc. He had demonstrated that he was not just an aristocrat’s plaything, but he was to do no more. One week to the day after he had arrived in London he issued a public statement to the effect that he would not be traveling to the provinces as planned, but would leave forthwith for home.

  The circumstances surrounding his abrupt decision are ambiguous. His grand friends seemed anxious to put it about that he was too ill and exhausted to make the projected tour, but Garibaldi himself confided in a trusted friend that he was leaving “because I am not wanted,” and when a radical organizer arrived posthaste from Newcastle to try to persuade him to change his mind Garibaldi told him that Gladstone had made it plain to him that if he persisted in acting the politician rather than the anodyne celebrity he would become an embarrassment to the British government.

  It is unquestionably true that he was physically frail. It is also true that powerful people were determined to prevent him touring the north if they possibly could. His politics were those of nationality, but the British radicals had hoped to enlist his image to support their very different politics of class, and in doing so they had made him a threat to the country’s rulers. Besides, he had unwittingly come athwart Britain’s sectarian divisions. He was a friend to the common man and an enemy of the Pope, but a great many of the common men and women to whom he would be speaking in Liverpool and Glasgow were Irish Catholics who were likely to be infuriated by his anticlericalism. Foreseeing trouble, the forces of law and order resolved to head him off. But his sudden abandonment of his plans seem to owe as much to his own disenchantment as to either illness or political pressure. The wishes of ministers and monarchs had never before deterred him from doing what he wanted to do, but this time he meekly allowed himself to be turned away.

  Mazzini was all for campaigning against his “expulsion,” but Garibaldi himself forestalled any protest by publishing a declaration that no pressure had been put on him to leave. It seems that, acquiescent though he had been, he was tired of being used by others, whether as a political totem, a fund-raising device, or, above all, as the occasion for outbreaks of wildly enjoyable hysteria. He asked one of his radical contacts why the English people, who had accorded Kossuth a welcome almost as rapturous as the one they had granted him, had done nothing to help Hungary. Too often in his life Garibaldi had ridden into a town to be received with demonstrations of frantic adoration only to ride out of it again with no new recruits, no donated money, and no real political support. He would not be fooled that way again. “It is not with flowers, fêtes and illuminations that the warlike and disciplined soldiers of a despotism are fought, but with soldiers still more warlike and more disciplined than they are,” he wrote. He was beginning to understand just how superficial was the British people’s interest in him.

  The powerful patronized him. Gladstone found his “simple nobility” and “naturalness” and, above all, his “perfect consciousness of his position” (his inferiority in other words) “very striking and very fine.” Lord Granville told Queen Victoria, “Garibaldi has all the qualifications for making him a popular idol in this country,” but added, “He is a goose.” The gentlemen condescended; the ladies swooned. Both the dowager Duchess of Sutherland and her daughter-in-law, the young duchess, seem to have fallen in love with Garibaldi. Another of his hostesses wrote to him to tell him how she had gazed, her heart full of anguish, at the pillow where his head had rested, and how she treasured the handkerchief she had found beneath it. “Your visit is truly the greatest glory of my life!” It was not for this that Garibaldi had come to England, to provide fodder for the erotic fantasies of women to whom he was a picturesque curiosity, women who were enraptured by him while unconsciously looking down on him, adoring him precisely because he was so far from being socially acceptable, thrilled by his political fervor just because it seemed to them so outlandish and transgressive.

  In 1997 a photograph was published in newspapers all around the world showing Nelson Mandela, by then president of South Africa, with the British girl band the Spice Girls. Mandela’s image conforms more closely than that of almost any other public figure of the recent past to the ancient ideal of the hero. A rebel against unjust authority, he struggled courageously and suffered patiently in a cause of profound and deadly seriousness. During his years in prison his fame spread far beyond South Africa. He was internationally celebrated, pitied, and revered as one who had stood up against tyranny and staunchly borne his cruel punishment, and he was awaited as a messiah who would rise again from the living death of Robben Island and redeem his people. The Spice Girls, on the other hand, were an unpretentious group of pretty young women who never pretended to be anything other than a phenomenally well marketed show business act. In the photographs of the president’s meeting with the pop singers, tragic history was juxtaposed with light entertainment; the two were presented with disturbing blandness as equivalent—just two different ways of being world famous. In London Garibaldi, who had been a Mandela, found himself being accorded the reception due to a Spice Girl. He pleaded illness, and he fled.

  He could escape London, but he could not escape the process which was transforming him from free subject to helpless object available for use in others’ propaganda. During his two-month dictatorship in Naples in 1860 he had introduced a raft of liberal legislation—children’s homes, price controls on bread, free education, religious tolerance, savings banks to replace the lottery, freedom for the press. Cavour, determined to erase all trace of dangerous radicalism, instructed the new governor “mercilessly to sweep away all the shit left in that stable.” After Garibaldi left, every single one of his measures was repealed. He had promised the people of southern Italy their liberty, but it soon seemed to him (and to many) that their compatriots of the north, into whose keeping he had delivered them, exploited them as callously as the ousted regime had done. In 1865 he wrote to Victor Emmanuel that “the government is now more hated there than the Bourbons.” It was a sad admission from the man who had done so much, and with such good intentions, to impose that government. An aging Achilles, he condemned modern politicians as “the sons of Thersites.” In his last years he felt himself living in “days of shame and misery,” in a “mephitic atmosphere of robbery and intrigue.” Modern Italians appeared to him merely the “degenerate descendants of the greatest of nations,” a people to whom he was ashamed to belong, and their rulers were a “government of thieves.”

  He died in 1882. The Italian parliament, organ of the state which had condemned him to death, which had driven him into exile, which had three times imprisoned him, which had led out its armies against him and confined him to his little island for years, adjourned itself for two weeks in sign of mourning. He had wished his body to be burned, like Shelley’s, on an open pyre by the sea. His wish was disregarded. It was decided that his corpse belonged not to him but to his country. He was buried with all due, and much undue, pomp.

  “All whose brilliance has made them prominent are unpopular in their lifetimes,” Alcibiades told the assembled Athenians in 416 BC. “But later you will find their countries boasting of them.” Dead heroes are often more useful, and always more malleable, than living ones. In 1860, while Garibaldi was steaming towards Marsala to make Italy, Victor Emma
nuel wrote: “Of course it would be a great misfortune, but if the Neapolitan cruisers were to capture and hang my poor Garibaldi… it would simplify things a good deal. And what a fine monument we should erect to him!” In the event Victor Emmanuel was disappointed of his hope. He predeceased “poor Garibaldi” by four years. It was he himself who was honored with a “fine monument,” the grandiose structure of sugar-white marble which stands in the very center of Rome, upstaging Michelangelo’s Piazza Capitolina, dwarfing the ruins of the ancient Forum. At the center of the huge edifice rises the equestrian statue of Victor Emmanuel, thirty-seven feet tall (in life he was a little man) and splendid in gilded bronze. Behind and below is the entrance to the Museum of the Risorgimento, where alongside copious Garibaldiana are displayed albums full of photographs of Garibaldi’s Thousand. After Patroclus’s death Achilles slaughtered twelve Trojan prisoners and immolated their bodies on his dead friend’s pyre. Garibaldi and his Thousand, their memories entombed in the base of Victor Emmanuel’s monument, are the sacrificial victims who, dead and no longer troublesome, fuel a glory which the majority of them—republicans like their leader—would surely have found abhorrent. Two years before he died, contemplating the country he had brought into being, Garibaldi was to own bleakly, “It was a different Italy that I had dreamed of all my life.”