In 1919, the war over, D’Annunzio led a volunteer army of deserters and mutineers on the Croatian port city of Fiume (now Rijeka) and in direct disobedience to Italy’s elected rulers annexed it in the name of Italy, as Garibaldi had taken the Two Sicilies for Italy in defiance of Italy’s king. He held it for over a year, thus drastically undermining the authority of the legitimate government. Meanwhile Mussolini’s fasti were reducing the nation to a condition of lawlessness as desperate as that which had persuaded Cato that even Pompey’s tyranny would be better than a prolongation of the chaos. Three years later Mussolini finished the political demolition job D’Annunzio had begun, bullying the demoralized and discredited government into offering him the prime ministership.
Dandy-poet and demagogue alike invoked the irreproachable and inspirational name of Garibaldi as patron of their attacks on the nation-state he had created. Garibaldi had appeared in Europe in 1848 in the character Mazzini had assigned to him of a latter-day paladin, an anti-Christian crusader, emissary from an simpler and grander era, his long hair streaming, his principles unsullied by contemporary reality. Two generations later the two showmen—D’Annunzio and Mussolini were both consummate performance artists—vying for leadership of Italy’s disaffected majority each attempted to claim his antique grandeur for themselves. Both of them adopted his oratorical style—the chanted questions and responses which transformed a political rally into a liturgy. Each of them designed a salute derived from the one-fingered “Garibaldi sign.” Both of them repeatedly referred to him, appropriating his glory to their own causes. In 1862 Garibaldi called for the formation of armed bands of citizen enforcers modeled on the fasti of ancient Rome: Mussolini adopted both the concept and the name. In 1915, at the climax of one of his speeches on the Capitol, D’Annunzio dramatically produced the sword of Garibaldi’s comrade Nino Bixio and kissed it as he swore to continue the fight Garibaldi had begun. Again and again he invoked Garibaldi’s Thousand, who had “set out, drunk on the beauty of Death, for Palermo.” He flattered the crowds with Garibaldi’s famous words “Soldiers of Italian liberty, with companions like you I can attempt anything.” Four years later, as he set off on his march for Fiume—the demoralized Italian army giving way before him or turning to follow behind him much as the Neapolitan army had melted before Garibaldi’s advance through Calabria—he proclaimed exultantly that the sunrise was suffusing the sky with Garibaldian red.
Garibaldi was not much of a democrat. He talked a lot about “the people,” but he also said, “Liberty itself must sometimes be forced on the people for their future good.” In Rio Grande do Sul, as his own account makes plain, he was fighting to impose independence on a populace who would manifestly have preferred to be left in peace. In 1849 he got himself elected to the Roman Assembly by finagling: he was voted in by his Garibaldini, few of whom were Roman citizens. In 1860, when a referendum was being held in Nice over the city’s proposed annexation to France, he conceived a plan of sailing into the harbor, raiding the polling stations, and destroying the ballot boxes. A year later, after his attack on Cavour in the Piedmontese parliament, a former comrade wrote him an open letter: “You are not the man I thought you were, you are not the Garibaldi I loved … You place yourself above Parliament, heaping with vituperation the Deputies who do not think as you do; above the country, desiring to drive it where and how it suits you best.” There is truth in the charges.
He was by nature an autocrat. His followers called him “il Duce,” a title Mussolini was to borrow from him. When established governments failed to satisfy him he acted against or outside them. When his redshirts first appeared on the European scene they seemed as quaintly colorful as a consort of ancient warriors or a fraternity of medieval knights. With hindsight they look less like throwbacks to a picturesque past, more like presages of an ugly future. Garibaldi meant well. He was as high-minded and disinterested as Cato, of whom Dio Cassius had written that he was the only one of his contemporaries who “took part in public life from pure motives and free from any desire of personal gain.” He was selfless, devoted, altruistic. When he sought power or raised irregular armed forces it was only so he could more effectively serve his cause. Yet a clearly visible line of descent connects him—his Million Rifles Fund; his illegal Armed Nation, which he called “the dream of my life;” his Rifle Clubs—with despotism and murderous brutality.
In 1922 Mussolini came to power after a mass demonstration which he himself grandiosely dubbed the “March on Rome.” He was fascinated by past great men (he wrote a play about Napoleon which was staged in London in 1932) and he liked to borrow their personae. Marching on Rome he was following the lead of Julius Caesar (whom he thought “the greatest man who ever lived”), and simultaneously laying claim to the glamour of a second Garibaldi, in imitation of whom he was to assume the archaic title of dictator. A man with an acute understanding of the paramount importance of presentation in gaining and keeping political ascendancy, Mussolini noted: “Words have their own tremendous magic power” and “Only the myth can give strength and energy to a people about to hammer out its own destiny.” When his moment of destiny came, he chose to model himself on Italy’s favorite hero. Garibaldi arrived by rail in Naples, way in advance of his army, to conquer a kingdom by the power of his personality. So Mussolini took the train to Rome a day ahead of the Fascists who were trailing in from all over Italy, his blackshirts tagging along behind their glorious leader as Garibaldi’s red-shirts had followed theirs.
A hero is helpless to choose in which causes his charisma will be employed once he is dead and gone. Rebecca West, an outspoken opponent of Fascism in all its forms, once wrote: “The men who excite adoration, who are what is called natural leaders (which means that people feel an unnatural readiness to follow them) are usually empty. Human beings need hollow containers in which they can place their fantasies and admire them, just as they need flower vases if they are to decorate their homes with flowers.” Neither Garibaldi nor any of the other heroes whose stories have been told in this book were actually hollow vessels, but all of them were to be used during the first half of the twentieth century as showcases for the display of others’ fantasies.
In Alfred Noyes’s epic Francis Drake addresses his crew in nationalist terms which would have seemed bizarre to an Elizabethan; like modern sports players they are understood to represent their country.
The world’s wide eyes are on us, and our souls
Are woven together into one great flag
Of England
Noyes’s Drake is intent on planting that flag all over the globe. In California he has a vision of his country as she will one day be:
A Power before the lightning of whose arms
Darkness should die, and all oppression cease
It’s a vision which closely echoes the prophecy Virgil has Aeneas’s father, Anchises, make for Rome. Virgil gave solemn validation to his master Augustus’s imperial ambitions by invoking a figure of the legendary past. So Britons of the imperial age lent themselves extra luster by remodeling Francis Drake into a figure they could admire—one patriotic and duty-bound like the pius Aeneas, swayed by no personal emotion but love of his country—and crediting him with having foreseen and helped to found their empire. In his lifetime grandees of the ruling class had looked down on the vulgar pirate their queen so irritatingly favored, but in 1933 Winston Churchill was at pains to point out in his biography of his ancestor, the first Duke of Marlborough, that the latter was distantly related to Drake (and so, therefore, was Churchill himself).
While Drake became a British imperialist, Rodrigo Díaz became a Spanish one. Immediately after his death his lifeless corpse was led on horseback back to Castile, there to add to the splendor of the monarchy which had rejected him and the prestige of the religion to which he may or may not have subscribed. The unassailable warlord who was twice outcast from Castile became the emblematic hero of a state which did not come into existence for some four hundred years after his death.
One of the Cid’s daughters had married the king of Aragon: through her the first monarchs of a unified Spain were able to claim the Cid as their ancestor. The Emperor Charles V ordered that his remains should be removed from Cardeña to the more illustrious site of Burgos cathedral and reinterred in a tomb appropriate to “the fame, nobility and deeds of the Cid, from whose valour honour redounds to all Spain.”
That tomb took on the significance, menacing or consoling depending on one’s viewpoint, of the only-temporary resting place of one who (ever “ware and waking” like Drake) might rise again. As the centuries went by the Cid’s historical reality was called into question. Miguel de Cervantes thought that although “it is not to be doubted that such men as the Cid existed, yet we have reason to question whether they ever performed those great deeds ascribed to them.” When Napoleon’s troops used his tomb for target practice in deliberate desecration of a shrine of Spanish nationalism, their general, anxious about the probable damage to relations with the local populace, offered to make amends, only to be reassured by a Spanish historian that there was no cause for concern: the Cid was a mythical figure and the tomb was empty. But, occupied or not, the Cid’s tomb was the repository of Spain’s military pride and its will to conquest and domination. In 1898, after Spain’s defeat by the United States and the loss of its American empire, when the liberal Joaquin Costa called upon all Spaniards to accept their country’s reduced status pacifically, he employed its image. “Let us lock the tomb of the Cid with seven keys.” In the next generation Francisco Franco was to employ it again in reverse. It was the great fear of cowards and mediocrities, he said, “that el Cid might arise from his tomb and be incarnated in the new generation.” That fear had been realized, for Franco was—or claimed to be—the spirit of the Cid once more made flesh.
In 1936, when Franco and his fellow Falangists launched their rebellion against the elected government of the socialist Popular Front they could be sure of support in the Cid’s birth and burial place, Burgos, where as one citizen proudly declared, “The very stones are nationalist.” A journal named Mio Cid was launched there. Its first editorial, urging the people to support Franco, called for the “Raising of the standard of the Cid throughout Spain.” Franco understood as well as Mussolini did the importance of propaganda and presentation. Throughout the civil war ballads emanating from his public relations office circulated, coupling his name with that of the never-defeated Rodrigo Díaz, while his publicists ensured that he was everywhere hailed by his supporters as the “Cid of the 20th century.” The tomb, it seemed, had opened. The hero was once more among his people.
In 1939 Franco made his triumphal entry into Madrid, after first issuing a press release declaring the occasion would “follow the ritual observed when Alfonso VI, accompanied by the Cid, captured Toledo in the Middle Ages.” (When Alfonso took Toledo, Rodrigo was actually still in exile, serving the kings of Zaragoza.) Franco’s victory parade lasted five hours and extended over a sixteen-mile processional route illuminated by towering bonfires. Two hundred thousand troops, some carrying huge crucifixes, marched past the general. The climactic moment came when Franco proceeded to the cathedral of Santa Barbara and solemnly laid his sword on the high altar “following in the tradition of the Cid Campeador after the liberation of Toledo.” That there was no such tradition was unimportant. The substantial fact was that the general had identified himself as the new incarnation of the qualities which for him the Cid epitomized, “all the mystery of the great Spanish epics: service in noble undertakings: duty as norm; struggle in the service of the true God.”
A ruler with unprecedented and unconstitutional powers needs a title with illustrious precedents to lend the authority he has grabbed the semblance of legitimacy. Mussolini appropriated Garibaldi’s epithet “il Duce.” Franco dubbed himself “Caudillo,” a title he borrowed from the medieval kings of Asturias. A primary-school textbook authorized for use under his regime explained that “a Caudillo is a gift that God makes to nations that deserve it… an envoy who has arisen through God’s plan to ensure the nation’s salvation.”
Alcibiades attempted to persuade the Athenian Assembly that all Athenians should feel themselves magnified and empowered by his personal glory; similarly, it was a tenet of twentieth-century Fascism and its allied political creeds that a great man’s greatness is something for which his followers should feel reverently thankful, and which makes them great by association. “Honour comes to all through him / Who in a happy hour was born,” wrote the author of the Poema de Mío Cid, a line which Ramón Menéndez Pidal—the nationalist historian whose tremendously influential book La España del Cid was first published in 1929 and was required reading in military training colleges throughout Franco’s ascendancy—took to express the “mystic union of the hero with his Spain.” In acquiescing in such a man’s assumption of almost unlimited power, an entire people can participate in his splendid destiny. One of Franco’s associates told the Cortés, “God granted us the immense mercy of an exceptional Caudillo as one of those gifts which, for some really great purpose, Providence makes to nations every three or four centuries.” As Hegel had written, great men’s “aims embody the will of the world spirit.” The very existence of such a man puts his followers beyond criticism. They are divinely privileged, and uniquely licensed. His appearance among them is the manifestation of God’s blessing upon them, and proof that their actions, however deplorable, are means towards a manifest destiny, a “really great purpose.”
In Germany, too, a new superman was borrowing the persona of a past one. In Wallenstein’s lifetime there had been prophecies abroad about a great Teutonic hero who would enforce peace and unify all Europe under a German emperor. “And in the hour of Mars,” proclaimed Simplicissimus, “Vulcan shall forge him a sword, with which he will subdue the whole world.” At the zenith of his success Wallenstein had envisioned the empire transformed. All power would be centralized, all petty princelings terrorized into docility and vast new territories annexed. Secure within its enormously extended borders, the once ramshackle Holy Roman Empire would have metamorphosed, had he been allowed to realize his vision, into a new and far more awe-inspiring institution, a brand-new Reich.
Friedrich Schiller’s Wallenstein trilogy was first performed in 1800, a year after Napoleon Bonaparte seized power as France’s first consul: several critics understood it to be a veiled allusion to this latter-day generalissimo with imperial aspirations. During the First World War Alfred Döblin wrote an epic in which Wallenstein is a modern industrialist and speculator, “a wild marauder who makes a profit from inflation,” but he was also accorded a more august character. In 1918 Oswald Spengler saluted him as the personification of the “emperor-idea.” There was no emperor anymore, but that idea persisted. “Germany’s search for a leader is a part of history,” wrote an English biographer of Wallenstein in 1938, “and it is natural that now more than ever she should turn back to the lonely figure of Wallenstein, probing his plans, exalting the Führerprinzip which he may be thought to represent, investing his vast ambitions with a mysticism.” The new Führer agreed. “We Germans should learn by Wallenstein’s example,” Adolf Hitler told his aides.
The British historian C. V. Wedgwood, whose classic account of the Thirty Years’ War was published in 1938 and is full of echoes of the time in which it was written, noted that “Wallenstein, first perhaps among European rulers, had conceived of a state organised exclusively for war.” Now he had an emulator. Wallenstein had started a school for gentlemen’s sons, training his own future followers in his own way; Hitler had his Hitler Youth. Wallenstein had made of his country estates a vast factory for the provisioning of his armies; Hitler transformed all Germany into a “Wehrwirtschaft,” an economy organized expressly for the support of his war machine. Wallenstein had told the emperor that although a moderate-size army would be a financial liability an enormous one would feed itself; Hitler, expansive and expansionist, declared his intention to follow Wallenstein’s
lead—“Like him we Germans must learn to free ourselves of half-measures, and set our course towards greatness.”
“Among men I hate most of all soft-walkers and half-and-halfers,” wrote Nietzsche. It is heroic to despise half measures, to be absolute in one’s pursuit of greatness, or racial purity, or world domination, or whatever one’s aim may be. It is also, if human society is to survive, impermissible. Shakespeare’s Ulysses eloquently denounces Achilles’ heroic insubordination. It has untuned the string of “degree” and so made a cacophony where there should be the harmony of a group organized for the benefit of all. In refusing to take his place in the orderly structure of his community the hero has ruptured the delicate bonds of duty and responsibility which link one individual to another and opened the way to a Nietzschean chaos where
Everything includes itself in power,
Power into will, will into appetite,
And appetite, an universal wolf,
So doubly seconded with will and power,
Must makes perforce an universal prey
And last eat up himself.
Sophocles’ Antigone chose death, and we are moved by her nobility. But Ismene, in choosing life, took the harder option. The European dictators of the 1930s chose death and set their course towards greatness. Their understanding of the latter concept was crude—all three of those I have mentioned equated it more or less exactly with grandiosity—but their pursuit of it was recognizably heroic. Carlyle’s On Heroes was required reading for German students under the Nazi regime. “Better to live one day as a lion than a hundred years as a sheep,” declared Mussolini, endorsing Achilles’ dreadful choice and echoing Addison’s Cato, whose first words are “A day, an hour, of virtuous liberty, is worth a whole eternity in bondage.” They were as inflexible as Cato, as solipsistic as Alcibiades, as violent and furious as the splendid Achilles, as lawless as Drake. Britons had laundered Drake’s image to make an acceptable national hero of him, but abroad he was still the criminal adventurer who, at Port San Julian, had abolished all legitimate authority and made himself a despot ruling what one of his mariners called a “society without class or law.” Mussolini had the highest regard for him. On meeting Neville Chamberlain he was greatly disappointed to find the British prime minister so unlike “Francis Drake and the other magnificent adventurers who created their Empire.” In 1938 an editorial writer in the London Daily Mail paid him a compliment which he must have found particularly pleasing: “Mussolini is an Elizabethan. He stands to modern Italy as Raleigh and Drake did to England in Elizabeth’s day.”
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