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  GARIBALDI

  Lucy Riall was educated at the London School of Economics and at Cambridge University. She has taught at the University of Essex, the École Nationale Supérieure, Paris, and at the Freie Universität Berlin. She is now Professor of History at Birkbeck College, University of London. Among her publications are Sicily and the Unification of Italy, 1859–1866 (1998) and Risorgimento: The History of Italy from Napoleon to Nation State (2008).

  GARIBALDI

  INVENTION OF A HERO

  LUCY RIALL

  YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS

  NEW HAVEN AND LONDON

  Copyright © 2007 Lucy Riall

  First printed in paperback 2008

  The right of Lucy Riall to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the US Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press) without written permission from the publishers.

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  Set in Minion by MATS Typesetters, Southend-on-Sea, Essex

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Riall, Lucy, 1962–

  Garibaldi: invention of a hero/Lucy Riall.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978–0–300–11212–2 (alk. paper)

  1. Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 1807–1882. 2. Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 1807–1882—Influence. 3. Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 1807–1882—Public opinion. 4. Generals—Italy—Biography. 5. Statesmen—Italy—Biography. 6. Italy—History—1849–1870. 7. Italy—History—1870–1914. I. Title.

  DG552.8.G2R514 2007

  945'.083092—dc22

  [B]

  2006032507

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978-0-300-14423-9 (pbk)

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  A Ciccio

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title

  Copyright

  Dedication

  List of Illustrations and Maps

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  Chapter 1 Nation and Risorgimento

  Chapter 2 In Search of Garibaldi

  Chapter 3 Revolution

  Chapter 4 Exile

  Chapter 5 The Garibaldi Formula

  Chapter 6 Independence

  Chapter 7 Fashioning Garibaldi

  Chapter 8 The Thousand

  Chapter 9 Making Italian Heroes

  Chapter 10 The Garibaldi Moment

  Chapter 11 Unification

  Chapter 12 Culture Wars

  Conclusion The Myth of Garibaldi

  Notes

  Select Bibliography

  Index

  ILLUSTRATIONS AND MAPS

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  1 Monument to Garibaldi in Rome (Emilio Galloni, 1895). Photograph by Francesco Filangeri. 5

  2 Portrait of Garibaldi in Il Mondo Illustrato, 5 February 1848. Museo del Risorgimento, Milan. 54

  3 ‘Suggestive effects’, Il Don Pirlone, 29 May 1849. Museo del Risorgimento, Milan. 88

  4 ‘Once again the knavish red devil has escaped through hell!’ Il Fischietto, 21 August 1849. British Library, London. 89

  5 ‘Garibaldi and his negro servant’, The Illustrated London News, 21 July 1849, p. 417. Senate House Library, University of London. 91

  6 Headquarters of Garibaldi at Rome, The Illustrated London News, 23 June 1849, p. 36. Senate House Library, University of London. 92

  7 Garibaldi in New York, engraving from a daguerreotype by Marcus Root, in T. Dwight, The Roman Republic of 1849; with accounts of the Inquisition and the siege of Rome (New York, 1851). 111

  8 Garibaldi as Christ Pantocrator, lithograph, Piedmont, 1850s, in E. E. Y. Hales, Pio Nono. A study in European politics and religion in the nineteenth century (London, 1954), p. 161. 150

  9 Garibaldi in 1859 by Gustave Doré, in Journal pour tous, supplement: La guerre d'Italie, 1, 4 June 1859, p. 20. Bibliothèque Nationale de France. 189

  10 Garibaldi and the defenders of Italy, cover of L'Italia e i suoi difensori. Album storico–biografico del'avv'Giuseppe Pistelli, ornato da ritratti e stampe litografiche, Florence, 1860. Museo del Risorgimento, Milan. 191

  11 Garibaldi as a Piedmontese general, in L'Italia e i suoi difensori. Album storico–biografico del'avv'Giuseppe Pistelli, ornato da ritratti e stampe litografiche, Florence, 1860. Museo del Risorgimento, Milan. 193

  12 Garibaldi the hero of the popular song: ‘Garibaldi’, in Souvenirs de la guerre d'Italie. Chants guerriers par messieurs Auguste Barbier, Pierre Dupont, Fernand Denoyers, Gustave Mathieu, Charles Vincent. Musique et accompagnement de piano par MM. Darcier, Pierre Dupont, Hector Salmon et Mme Mélanie Dentu, Paris, n.d. but 1859. British Library, London. 204

  13 ‘Landing in Marsala of General Garibaldi with 800 men’, in Il 19 luglio 1860. Festa popolare in Palermo pel giorno natalizio del generale Giuseppe Garibaldi, Palermo, 1860, p. 12. Società Siciliana per la Storia Patria, Palermo. 234

  14 ‘Garibaldi hands Sicily over to the gentleman King’, in Il 19 luglio 1860. Festa popolare in Palermo pel giorno natalizio del generale Giuseppe Garibaldi, Palermo, 1860, p. 21. Società Siciliana per la Storia Patria, Palermo. 235

  15 ‘Garibaldi the Liberator; or, the modern Perseus’, Punch, or the London Charivari, 16 June 1860. Birkbeck College Library, University of London. 250

  16 ‘The revolution in Sicily. Narrow escape of our special artist’, The Illustrated London News, 4 August 1860, p. 111. Senate House Library, University of London. 255

  17 ‘Garibaldian volunteers’, The Illustrated London News, 20 October 1860, p. 371. Senate House Library, University of London. 256

  18 ‘The hero and the saint’, Punch, or the London Charivari, 22 September 1860. Birkbeck College Library, University of London. 257

  19 ‘Garibaldi's departure from Genoa for Sicily’, Album storico–artistico. Garibaldi nelle due Sicilie ossia guerra d'Italia nel 1860. Scritta da B.G. con disegni dal vero, le barricate di Palermo, ritratti e battaglie, litografati da migliori artisti, Milan, 1860–2. Società Siciliana per la Storia Patria, Palermo. 260

  20 ‘The taking of Milazzo’, Album storico–artistico. Garibaldi nelle due Sicilie ossia guerra d'Italia nel 1860. Scritta da B.G. con disegni dal vero, le barricate di Palermo, ritratti e battaglie, litografati da migliori artisti, Milan, 1860–2. Società Siciliana per la Storia Patria, Palermo. 261

  21 ‘Garibaldi's landing in Marsala’, Album storico–artistico. Garibaldi nelle due Sicilie ossia guerra d'Italia nel 1860. Scritta da B.G. con disegni dal vero, le barricate di Palermo, ritratti e battaglie, litografati da migliori artisti, Milan, 1860–2. Società Siciliana per la Storia Patria, Palermo. 262

  22 Garibaldi as a cover hero: F. Mistrali, Storia popolare della rivoluzione di Sicilia, Milan, 1860. Società Siciliana per la Storia Patria, Palermo. 263

  23 ‘General Garibaldi spearing fish by night off Caprera’, The Illustrated London News, 26 January 1861, p. 67. Senate House Library, University of London. 309

  24 ‘The hermit of Caprera’, Giuseppe Garibaldi da Caprera ad Aspromonte, 1860–61–62. Memorie Storiche raccolta da Felice Venosta, Milan, n.d. Museo del Risorgimento, Milan. 310

  25 ‘A young Spaniard who prefers to kill himself than leave Garibaldi’, Giuseppe Garibaldi da Caprera
ad Aspromonte, 1860–61–62. Memorie Storiche raccolta da Felice Venosta, Milan, n.d. Museo del Risorgimento, Milan. 311

  26 ‘An insatiable Saturn who devours his children big and small indiscriminately one after the other’, Il Fischietto, 4 September 1862. British Library, London. 323

  27 ‘Cain and Abel’, by Adolfo Matarelli, Il Lampione, 10 December 1862. Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, Milan. 326

  28 ‘Aspromonte 28 August 1860’, cartoon, Italy 1862, in G. Sacerdote, La vita di Giuseppe Garibaldi, Milan, 1933, p. 843. 327

  29 ‘This is the noblest Roman of them all’, Punch, or the London Charivari, 9 April 1864. Birkbeck College Library, University of London. 333

  30 ‘Garibaldi at home’, Staffordshire portrait figure, c.1864. The Potteries Museum and Art Gallery, Stoke-on-Trent. 334

  31 The transportation of Garibaldi's bust to the Campidoglio in Rome, lithograph, Italy 1882. Istituto per la Storia del Risorgimento Italiano, Rome. 359

  32 ‘2 June 1882’, colour lithograph, Francesco Casanova, Italy 1882. Istituto per la Storia del Risorgimento, Rome. 360

  33 Garibaldi at the Augustus Mausoleum, 1875, photograph by P. Tagliacozzo. Istituto per la Storia del Risorgimento Italiano, Rome. 363

  34 Garibaldi in 1866, in Album della guerra del 1866, Milan, 1866–7. Museo del Risorgimento, Milan. 366

  MAPS

  1 The South America of Garibaldi.

  2 The Unification of Italy, 1859–70.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I wish to thank the following organisations for their generosity in funding the research on which this book is based: the Leverhulme Trust, the British Academy, the University of London Central Research Fund, and Birkbeck College Faculty of Arts Research Fund. I am also grateful to the staff of the Archivio di Stato and the Archivio Comunale, Palermo; the Istituto per la Storia del Risorgimento Italiano, Rome; the Museo del Risorgimento, Milan; and the National Archives, London. My thanks also to the librarians of the Società Siciliana per la Storia Patria, Palermo; the Biblioteca di Storia Moderna e Contemporanea, Rome; the Biblioteca Nazionale, Florence; the Museo del Risorgimento, Genoa; the Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, Milan; the Staatsbibliothek and the Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut, Berlin; the Bibliothèque Nationale de France; the New York Public Library; the University of London Library; Birkbeck College Library (especially Aubrey Greenwood); and the British Library.

  I owe a very real debt to my colleagues in the School of History, Classics and Archaeology at Birkbeck College for providing me with an intellectually stimulating and socially relaxing environment in which I could think about, and carry out the research for, this book. They were also kind enough to allow me long stretches of leave so that I could write it. I would like to thank John Arnold, Joanna Bourke, Filippo de Vivo, Catherine Edwards, David Feldman, Marybeth Hamilton, Daniel Pick, Jan Rüger, Chandak Sengoopta, Julian Swann and Frank Trentmann for answering all my questions and requests for information. As well as providing muchneeded scholarly advice, Sean Brady, Emma Dench and Naoko Shimazu were a great source of personal encouragement; Sean Brady was also kind enough to read the entire manuscript and encouraged me to clarify many points and avoid as many errors. My thanks also to Jon Wilson for his help with the illustrations.

  A long series of discussions with Alberto Banti, Paul Ginsborg, Stephen Gundle, Brian Hamnett, Maurizio Isabella, David Laven, Adrian Lyttelton and Silvana Patriarca helped me to formulate the questions and ideas on which the book is based. Stephen Gundle, Silvana Patriarca and John Foot read and made very valuable comments on the manuscript. Colin Barr was an obliging source of information on Irish Catholics and Garibaldi, and let me see the letters of Paul Cullen that he is editing for publication. Nicola Miller and David Rock helped me with the South American material; Rohan McWilliam advised me on British popular politics; Axel Körner told me about popular theatre; Derek Beales helped me understand nineteenth-century British Protestantism; and Patrizia di Bello did the same for nineteenth-century photography. Marta Bonsanti chased a number of hardtofind references in Italy and Christopher Duggan answered questions about Crispi. None of the above is responsible for my errors, but I am grateful to all of them for their advice. I want especially to thank Denis Mack Smith, who gave me the contents of his Garibaldi library at the beginning of my research, and who has been a very generous supporter of my version of the Garibaldi legend.

  One of the pleasures of writing a book about a figure of international popular renown has been the contacts which I have been able to make with other scholars. Much of the material in this book has been tried out on audiences in seminars, conference papers and lectures at the University of Cambridge, the University of Oxford, the Institute of Historical Research London, the British Academy, Columbia University, Princeton University, Vanderbilt University, Wofford College, the British School at Rome, the University of Pisa, the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, and the Freie Universität, Berlin. The final result has benefited considerably from all their comments and criticisms. My thanks to Gilles Pécout at the Ecole Normale Supérieure and to Oliver Janz at the Freie Universität for arranging for me to spend longer periods of time as a visiting professor at both institutions and for their patient advice and encouragement. I hope that at least some of my enjoyment and appreciation of these broader cultural opportunities is conveyed in what follows.

  It is a truism that writing a book is a strange and solitary, if satisfying, experience, and this one has been no exception. So I am very happy to thank all my friends for their help and support during some not always easy times. Both my parents died before I finished the book but it owes a great deal to my father's fair-mindedness and my mother's passionate enthusiasm. For their generous hospitality during overseas research trips, I would like to thank Annliese Nef, Cesare Garaffa, Marliese Eckau, Christian Garaffa, Maria Luisa Garaffa and Marilyn Nicoud; and I must add a special thank-you to Elena Pezzini, Rosa di Liberto and Sergio Aiosa for their company and conversation during the long Palermo evenings after the libraries closed. George and Fernanda Herford were an unfailing source of support and friendship, while Matthew Brettler and Sarah Gavaghan were never far from the other end of a telephone line. Andrew Hudders gave me a place to stay in New York, and has followed attentively the book's progress in London, Palermo and Berlin. The biggest thank-you must go to my husband, Francesco Filangeri. He took many of the photographs for the illustrations in this volume, and was an informative and lively guide through the wealth of visual material on Garibaldi. More generally, his advice, comments, criticisms and humour all proved indispensable, and I hope that the book is a sufficient expression of my love and appreciation.

  INTRODUCTION

  I have seen to-day the face of Garibaldi; and now all the devotion of his friends is made as clear as day to me. You have only to look into his face, and you feel that there is, perhaps, the one man in the world in whose service you would, taking your heart in your hand, follow blindfold to death.

  (Harriet Meuricoffre, Naples, August 1860)1

  An exemplary life

  The life of Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807–82) spanned the defining events and places of the nineteenth century. He was born in Nice, at that time under Napoleonic rule, and spent much of his youth travelling as a merchant sailor through the Mediterranean from Nice to the Black Sea and back again. It was through travel that he acquired a political awareness, mainly through encounters with French political exiles and with Italian revolutionary conspirators. He became a follower of the Italian nationalist, Giuseppe Mazzini, and embraced republican nationalism. In 1834, involvement with an abortive ‘Young Italy’ uprising in Genoa against the Piedmontese government obliged him to leave Europe altogether, and he was to spend much of the formative period of his life (from twenty-eight to forty years of age) in South America. South America was where Garibaldi first began to get a name for himself. By the early 1840s, newspaper reports had already begun to speak of Garibaldi as a romantic ‘bandit leader’ and to tell of (and
often condemn) his adventures in Brazil and of his formation of an ‘Italian Legion of Montevideo’ to defend liberal Uruguay against the aggression of Buenos Aires. Garibaldi then won international fame during the 1848–9 revolutions in Italy. Returning to Italy from South America to fight for the revolution, he helped mastermind the heroic, if doomed, defence of the Roman Republic against the French army sent to restore the Pope in the summer of 1849. His lastditch attempt to march north to save the besieged Venetian Republic, his daring exploits in eluding the enemy when all was lost and the tragic death en route of his pregnant wife Anita added to the growing legend surrounding Garibaldi.

  During the early 1850s, already a celebrity and increasingly pursued by journalists and assorted admirers, Garibaldi went once more into exile and into a form of political retirement. He spent almost two years living quietly among the Italian community in Staten Island, New York, and then travelled again as a merchant sailor to central America and around the Pacific Ocean to China and the Philippines. In 1854 he returned to Nice via England and settled in a new home on the isolated island of Caprera off the northern coast of Sardinia. In the more liberal climate of Italian politics from the mid-1850s onwards, he seemed to abandon his republican convictions and to distance himself from Mazzini; he came gradually out of retirement to form close links with the Piedmontese government – with the Piedmontese prime minister Cavour, with his Italian moderate liberal colleagues and with the king of Piedmont, Vittorio Emanuele II. He appeared to endorse the ‘Piedmontese’ or monarchical formula for Italian unification. In 1859, he even became a general in the Piedmontese army, and led a volunteer army into the ‘Second War of Independence’ against Austria. Yet in 1860, in what was probably his greatest triumph, he defied Cavour and the king of Piedmont to head an expedition of a ‘Thousand’ volunteers, which sailed across the Mediterranean from Quarto near Genoa to Marsala in Western Sicily in order, as he put it, to help his ‘brothers in danger’,2 or in an attempt to save a revolution in Sicily from certain defeat. These dramatic actions completely overturned the status quo in Italy and in Europe as a whole. The surprising success of Garibaldi's expedition led in under six months to, successively, the collapse of the Bourbon monarchy of the Two Sicilies, the overthrow of papal power in central Italy and the creation of an Italian nation state, with Vittorio Emanuele II of Piedmont as its monarch.