The Pursuit of Italy

by David Gilmour

  Angry and humiliated after the last episode, Garibaldi was luckily distracted by the call of Sicily, which he answered by sailing with his Thousand to vanquish the Bourbons. After conquering a kingdom, he returned to Caprera and resumed life as a farmer with his fields, his cowsheds, his henhouse and his horses. Published accounts of his fondness of animals made him still more popular with the British, but devout Catholics were not amused by the names of two of his donkeys, Pius IX and the Immaculate Conception.

  Nothing else in Garibaldi’s life could compare with the adventure in Sicily and Naples. Although tempted by an offer to fight for the Union in the American Civil War, he refused it when informed that he would not be made commander-in-chief or given the power to abolish slavery. Both his attempts to capture Rome were failures, and after the second in 1867 he returned in despair to Caprera and remained there for three years. His career as a soldier came to an end in 1871 after campaigning for the French Republic against Prussia, though for several years he dreamed of an expedition to ‘liberate’ the Trentino and the South Tyrol from the Austrians.

  Garibaldi died in 1882, ten years after Mazzini. By the end of their lives both men had become disillusioned with the Italy to which they had dedicated their years. The revolutionary conspirator had ‘hoped to evoke her soul’ and admitted he had failed; the state that emerged in 1861 was ‘only the phantom, the mockery of Italy’. The soldier’s disenchantment was equally intense. Shortly before his death he wrote scornfully: ‘It was a very different Italy which I spent my life dreaming of, not the impoverished and humiliated country which we now see ruled by the dregs of the nation.’10

  A man of many talents, Garibaldi was also honest, modest and uninterested in money; in battle he was brave and inspiring; and in speech he was charming and articulate except when making a garbled attack on Cavour in parliament. In many of his views he was notably ahead of his time: he was a supporter of female emancipation, of racial equality and of the abolition of capital punishment. As with Mazzini, his patriotism was not a boastful, chauvinistic form of nationalism: both men would have liked to see the creation of a union of European states. Also unusual were his vegetarianism and his approval of cremation, which was illegal in Italy.

  Garibaldi claimed he was an anti-militarist, that he was ‘born to be an agriculturalist or a sailor’ and that only ‘tyrants and priests’ had made him a soldier.11 The explanation is somewhat disingenuous. Garibaldi may have been a humane warrior who took care to avoid civilian casualties, but he was not a pacifist manqué. His sword-arm became stiff with inactivity and soon itched to find people to liberate and oppressors to overthrow. He was an inspirational leader who enjoyed battles and was good at fighting them; he was also by far the best soldier that modern Italy has produced, winning his actions through decisiveness, boldness, improvisation and combative skill. Yet his tactical range was limited, and his habit of charging uphill against superior numbers did not always bring victory. Perhaps his military talents are fairly reflected in the calculations of one of his biographers, Jasper Ridley: of the fifty-three battles he fought in South America and Italy, he won thirty-four, lost fifteen and drew four.12

  Garibaldi was regarded by many as politically naive, and sometimes he was. Yet he was more realistic than Mazzini and often more clear-sighted than Cavour. In Sicily and Naples in 1860 he governed calmly and wisely while simultaneously fighting a war against the Bourbons and dealing with the provocations of the Piedmontese government. His military feats, his courage and example, his ability to arouse patriotic enthusiasm – all were crucial to the success of Italian unification; without him, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies might still be with us. Garibaldi was a man of the people who could inspire his fellow men to fight for a cause they might not otherwise have cared about. He was indeed the hero the Italian patriots had been searching for; he became the legend it was forbidden to doubt; and his aura prompted Mussolini to claim that he and his blackshirts were the descendants of Garibaldi and his redshirts. His most dramatic achievement – the conquest of the south – certainly made modern Italy. Whether this was beneficial for either northerners or southerners is a subject for later consideration.

  FATHER OF THE NATION

  Cardinal Angelo Roncalli, the Patriarch of Venice, visited Turin in 1953 and was astonished by the abundance of enormous monuments he saw there. Officiating in a city whose republic had forbidden statues in public places, the future Pope John XXIII was perplexed. What were they doing, he asked a Torinese, all these warriors on horseback, waving their swords as if charging at the head of their troops?13

  Most of the equestrian sword-wavers, cast in bronze and dominating their piazzas, are members of the House of Savoy. They include Emanuel Philibert, the sixteenth-century duke, who is thrusting his weapon back in its scabbard after a victory in alliance with Spain against France; Charles Albert who, despite his brief and disastrous military career, is depicted as a conqueror guarded by the figures of a gunner, a lancer, a grenadier and a bersagliere; and Ferdinand of Genoa, Victor Emanuel’s brother, who is urging his men forward even though his horse has been mortally wounded and is already on its knees. The most majestic is of Victor Emanuel’s second son, Amedeo, who, after a bizarre invitation to become King of Spain, duly took up his duties in Madrid and remained there for just over two years before abdicating in 1873. He sits high on a prancing horse in the Valentino park beside the River Po, the plinth beneath him ringed by dozens of horsemen representing the most illustrious members of the family since the founding of the line in the early Middle Ages. It is a tremendous tribute to a dynasty that over the centuries acquired the titles of Count of Savoy, Duke of Savoy, King of Sicily, King of Sardinia, King of Cyprus and Jerusalem, King of Italy, Emperor of Ethiopia and King of Albania.

  Victor Emanuel is the only rival to Garibaldi in the number of statues in Italy. He too is frequently shown on a stallion, the helmeted image of a conqueror flourishing his sword, but he is often portrayed also as a standing figure, regal and uniformed, one hand holding his helmet, the other resting on his sword-hilt. This is how he poses in Turin in the gigantic monument which you see looming above the trees as you walk along the Corso Vittorio Emanuele towards its intersection with the Corso Galileo Ferraris. The king himself, on top of a column, is nine metres tall; the whole structure reaches a height of thirty-nine metres.

  The statues of the king, like his many portraits, were executed as acts of homage and propaganda. Yet they seldom attempted to disguise their subject’s unhandsome appearance or to romanticize him or make him look intelligent. The monarch had a squat figure, a red face and unprepossessing features – a fat nose, a round face, bulbous eyes and an enormous moustache. So dissimilar was he to Charles Albert – who was tall, pale, thin-faced and aristocratic – that a biological connection between the two of them must be questionable. Rumours were whispered shortly after the boy’s birth in 1820, before Charles Albert became king, that they were not father and son. A persistent one suggests that the royal infant perished in a palace fire and was substituted by a butcher’s baby, a theory that was advanced to explain the coarse features and the unlikely story that a tiny child had escaped unscathed from a fire which had consumed his cradle and burned his nurse to death. Yet it would have been strange for the parents, who were extremely young, to have adopted an heir rather than wait to produce another one of their own. In fact they did have a son two years later, that Ferdinand on the dying horse, whose daughter Margherita married Victor Emanuel’s heir, her supposed first cousin Umberto. So even if, for whatever reason, the king was illegitimate, the Savoia blood returned with his grandson, Victor Emanuel III.

  In character and tastes the first King of Italy resembled few members of previous peninsular dynasties such as the Medici, the Farnese and the Habsburg-Lorraine. Indeed he seemed unItalian in a number of ways: apart from his inability to speak the national language properly, he was an uncouth figure who despised art and books. He had courage and a certain blustering ch
arm but little else to recommend him as a sovereign. Much as he had desired to capture Rome, he did not like to visit the city or live there with his court: the people whose company he most enjoyed were his huntsmen, his mistresses and his Piedmontese generals, whom he liked to entertain whenever possible in one of his hunting lodges. Many of these places were inherited, along with castles and palaces, from the Savoia, and many more were acquired through conquest from the Bourbons and other deposed dynasties: by the end of his life he possessed so many properties that, beginning in January, he could have spent just a single day in each of them without returning to any until December. His extravagance was such that, although Italy was a much poorer country than Great Britain, the expenses of himself and his entourage were twice the size of Queen Victoria’s.

  The Piedmontese constitution of 1848 had reserved more powers for the king than was normal in constitutional monarchies. Victor Emanuel was determined to retain these and exercise his authority as head of government as well as head of state. He wanted to have governments that did what he told them and implemented the policies he put forward; despite his obvious boredom at cabinet meetings, he often insisted on presiding over these occasions. Naturally he seldom got his way with men such as Azeglio, Cavour and Ricasoli, but his constant interference in government exasperated all his prime ministers, drove several to resignation and encouraged others to avoid personal dealings with him.

  The king’s chief service to the Italian cause was performed in 1849, at the beginning of his reign, when he allowed Azeglio to persuade him to keep the constitution. Later he claimed the Austrians had put pressure on him to abolish it and that he had stood up to Radetzky and defied him. This was simply not true: there was no Austrian pressure. Victor Emanuel always disliked the constitution, its restraints and the system it produced, especially the members of parliament. There were only two ways to govern Italians, he informed the British ambassador, ‘by bayonets and bribery’; the people did not understand parliamentary government and were anyway unfit for it. As potent as the legend of the eager constitutionalist is that of the patriot king. Victor Emanuel was in fact a monarch who liked to tell the Austrians how much he preferred them to the Lombards and who had even congratulated them for their repression of a Mazzinian insurrection in Milan in 1853. Fortunately, few patriots heard these opinions or his denunciations of Mazzini and Garibaldi whom – along with their followers – he described as ‘vermin’ that he would like to ‘exterminate’.14 Like Cavour, the king was a Piedmontese nationalist but not an Italian one.

  Victor Emanuel was very conscious of the military traditions of the Savoia, although the royal house had gained little recent glory and the family’s most illustrious soldier, the great Prince Eugène – ally of Marlborough, vanquisher of France and saviour of Hungary from the Turks – had served as an Austrian field marshal. The latest member of the dynasty had had a military education but little personal experience and no aptitude for the job of commander. Yet he had extraordinary delusions about his abilities. Other crowned heads in Europe such as Napoleon III liked presiding over battles without wishing to direct operations; no British king had led his troops on the field since George II at Dettingen in 1743. Yet Victor Emanuel insisted on acting as commander-in-chief in 1859 and, despite his unskilful performance in that year, on resuming the post in 1866. Earlier he had offered to command the combined allied forces in the Crimea and ascribed his subsequent rejection to British fears that he might be too successful and put their generals in the shade. Self-deception on a similar scale was evident twenty years later when he offered to solve the ‘Eastern Question’, which he proposed to do by expelling the Ottoman sultan to central Asia and carving up his empire between the European powers.15

  Foreign ambassadors were surprised and sometimes alarmed by the king’s compulsive urge to go to war, by his endless talk about future battles in which he would lead his troops to victory. Once he told the Austrians, at a time when he wished for their support, that fighting wars was the only thing that gave him true pleasure. Like his generals and politicians, he wanted wars for the sake of Italy, but he desired them also for his personal delight. The boastfulness of his conversation was consistent and often astonishing. In 1862 he talked of fighting not only Austria but also France, his recent ally, and even Britain, his chief diplomatic supporter. Two years later, he told the incredulous British that Italy could defeat the Austrian–Hungarian Empire by itself and even take on the French Empire at the same time. Two years further on, he was fighting the Austrians in alliance with the Prussians and, a few years later, he was trying to fight the Prussians on the side of the French. This last folly was thwarted by the current prime minister, Giovanni Lanza, who may thereby have saved the dynasty and even the state. Both Bismarck and Napoleon had believed that another Italian defeat would lead to the break-up of the country.16

  Like Cavour in the 1850s, Victor Emanuel became a meddler in the Balkans, stirring up trouble in Serbia and plotting to get his son Amedeo (the future King of Spain) on to the Greek throne. He enjoyed pursuing his own diplomacy, independent of the foreign ministry, and did so deviously through agents and secret missions. At the beginning of 1867 he was inciting Paris and Berlin to attack each other, each with Italian support, while suggesting to the Austrians that they should ally themselves with him against both the French and the Prussians. Later that year, the British foreign secretary, Lord Clarendon, talked to politicians in Italy and reported ‘universal agreement’ among them that the king was ‘an imbecile’, a ‘dishonest man who tells lies to everyone’ and, at the current rate, would ‘end by losing his crown and ruining both Italy and his dynasty’.17

  Victor Emanuel died of malaria in 1878 at the age of fifty-seven, at a time when he was again proposing to the Germans that they should ally themselves with Italy and take on both Austria and France. He died in the capital the month before Rome’s other court, the Vatican, buried its leader, Pope Pius IX. Observers noted that far larger crowds turned out for the dead pontiff than for the defunct king, who was buried in Hadrian’s Pantheon, far from the tombs of his ancestors in the basilica of Superga near Turin. The myths were created early and were soon emblazoned throughout Italy: Victor Emanuel, il padre della patria, father of the fatherland, a successor to Julius Caesar, the pater patriae; Victor Emanuel, il re galantuomo, the chivalrous gentleman-king; Victor Emanuel who was, according to one historian, ‘the greatest Christian sovereign in all history’.18 He was not in reality any of these things, not even il padre della patria. Italy was created during his reign but not by him.

  SOME GENERALS AND AN ADMIRAL

  Speaking to parliament in 1850, Massimo d’Azeglio observed that Piedmont was ‘an ancient home of honour, an ancient warrior country’.19 Although not much of a warrior himself, the prime minister understandably chose to emphasize his country’s military ethos. Turin was not an imperial capital like Rome or an artistic capital like Florence or a capital of a maritime republic like Venice. It was the most military city in Italy, capital of a country in which the army had for centuries been identified very closely with the state.

  The Piedmontese were eager to continue this association when they formed the new Kingdom of Italy. Distinctions between civil and military were quickly blurred by the presence of twenty-five generals and four admirals in the new parliament, some of them as elected deputies, others as senators nominated by the king. The chiefs of the army and navy could be parliamentarians and even cabinet ministers. There was thus little time for them to do their jobs properly and no chance of political neutrality. In June 1866 General Alfonso Lamarmora was not only prime minister and foreign minister but also chief-of-staff of an army on the verge of fighting a war.

  The officer corps of the Italian army was dominated by Piedmontese veterans eager to implant their particular ethos in the new force, many of whose soldiers came from despised areas that had traditionally produced poor fighters. Unfortunately the Piedmontese themselves seemed recently to have lost thei
r fighting skills, and their generals were fusty and unimaginative men who distrusted flair and initiative (especially when displayed by Garibaldi) and relied too much on conventional tactics and use of the bayonet. A typical example was General Alfonso Lamarmora, who had been prime minister after Cavour’s resignation in 1859 and who was appointed again to the post in 1864. A commander with no sense of strategy, he was obsessed by drill and invariably hostile to innovation.

  Lamarmora’s statue in Turin, soaring in one of the city’s finest squares, is an object so impressive that foreign visitors would be forgiven for believing that they were viewing a great conqueror, a sort of Piedmontese Hannibal. Like the Savoia, he rides a fine steed, and the plinth below him is decorated with lions’ heads and inscriptions commemorating his career. The general made his name by his rough suppression of the revolt in Genoa in 1849, an action which hinted that the Piedmontese, recently defeated by Austria, might be venting their frustration on one of their own cities. Having established his reputation as a tough and reliable soldier, Lamarmora was rapidly promoted and selected to lead the expedition to the Crimea, where his brother Alessandro, founder of the plume-hatted bersaglieri, died of cholera. As chief-of-staff in 1859, serving loyally if awkwardly under Victor Emanuel, he won the small Battle of Palestro before his army arrived too late to fight at Magenta and later performed poorly at San Martino. Shortly afterwards the king, who longed for his premiers to be pliant generals rather than difficult politicians, appointed him prime minister. Lamarmora then spent the next seven years in politics, a sphere where his lack of skills and vision were all too evident. In June 1866 he resigned his political posts to concentrate on his duties as chief-of-staff and travelled to Lombardy eager for the much-trumpeted ‘baptism of blood’. Almost everyone seemed confident of the outcome, partly because the Austrians were concentrating on Prussia and had only a small army in Venetia, a region they no longer wanted and had already offered to give up. Italy, by contrast, had been expanding its forces in recent years and could now outnumber its enemy by more than two to one for the contest which took place near Verona.