Celebrating Garibaldi
Denis Mack Smith
aiibaldi during his lifetime was more /1/4—I widely admired in our country than in his own. When half a million Londoners gathered to greet his arrival in 1864 it was estimated that no larger crowd had been seen in the whole of world history. He was invited home to dinner by the Prime Minister, something that would have been quite inconceivable in Italy; and to other meals by Gladstone and the Foreign Secretary. He also accepted invitations to stay at Cliveden and Lancaster House, where receptions for him were en- thusiastically attended by half a dozen dukes and scores of the lesser aristocracy. As well as being formally banqueted by the Lord Mayor at the Mansion House, he was given the freedom of the City of London, and this was before any Italian town had of- fered him a similar honour. It was all too much for poor King Victor Emmanuel, and the Italian ambassador in London was ordered to protest against such favours be- ing heaped on a rebellious commoner.
The centenary of Garibaldi's death falls on 2 June next week, and the planned celebrations indicate that official Italy has at long last been infected with what Cavour disparagingly called garibalditis. All major towns are now competing to do him honour: only Marsala, where the famous Thousand landed to conquer Sicily in 1860, has refused, on the grounds that being an- nexed by northern Italy brought little gain to the south. All the main political parties have been attempting with varying degrees of plausibility to annex his name and reputation. Even the Christian Democrats are trying to forget his anti-clericalism. The parties of the Left, glossing over his condem- nation of collectivisation and the class struggle, are emphasising that he sometimes called himself a socialist. At the other ex- treme the conservatives and neo-fascists seek to depict him as an uncompromising nationalist and authoritarian who once rul- ed for six months as a self-appointed 'Dic- tator of the Two Sicilies'. None of the Italian nationalists ever wanted to remember that this great patriot was far ahead of his contemporaries in desiring a united Europe and an international court of justice. He used to say that if Italy ever threatened the freedom of other countries he was ready to fight against her, but such remarks were omitted from school text- books lest the official patriotic myth be called in question.
A hundred years ago an idealised and ex- purgated Garibaldi was allowed into the pantheon of the founding fathers of modern Italy, but grudgingly. Officialdom and the bien peasants regarded him until his death as a dangerous radical. They were slightly
ashamed of someone they thought of as an uncouth, publicity-conscious eccentric who was little more than an inspired leader of ir- regular troops. Even his success as a soldier was strongly resented by regular army of- ficers who had learnt fighting in the or- thodox military academies and thought his novel guerrilla tactics to be not quite fair; they did all they could to discredit his thoroughly deserved reputation as the most successful Italian general of modern times.
Most politicians had equal reason to be afraid of him while he was alive, and some did not stop short of doctoring the record by the fabrication of documents. Those politicians who were Catholics disliked his belief in religious toleration and his con- tempt for priests. Even the more secular- minded conservatives feared him as a potential rebel, an egalitarian, and a dangerous challenge to their monopoly of politics. Some Italians resented that he bludgeoned or blackmailed them into becoming patriots; others just resented that he forced them into patriotism faster than they would have liked; whereas the Mazzi- nians, though approving of his patriotism and nonconformism, could not forgive him for selling out to the monarchy. Garibaldi's subsequent disillusionment with united Ita- ly was a particularly sore point. When the Italy of his dreams fell almost at once into the hands of what he called a corrupt oligarchy of second-raters, his comments had to be kept as secret as possible.
He himself was in part to blame if con- tempories were able to disregard him or tar- nish his reputation. His lack of sophistica- tion led him to write many foolish things and he was often exploited by people cleverer and less honest than himself. His
wearing of red shirt and South American poncho among the top-hatted and befrock- ed members of parliament was taken to be a false exhibitionism. Many of his ideas seem- ed equally original and eccentric. Few Ivo' ple at that time were ready to take seriously someone who, as well as being a religious freethinker, believed in racial equality, universal education, female emancipation, and the abolition of capital punishment. His reverence for nature was another anachronism that had to wait for recogni- tion by the environmental ecologists of to- day. His utter disdain for both money and political power seemed a challenge to ac- cepted morality that was very hard for con- ventional politicians to forgive. This great soldier was also in his own way a pacifist who campaigned for international disarma- ment and called war an absurd and out- moded way of solving national conflicts. Today public opinion has moved much closer to his own views on such matters. It is also easier now to understand his contribu- tion to the risorgimento, because the old patriotic myths are no longer so necessary as they may have been in the early years of a new nation. For instance there is the way he attracted popular support to what was the handiwork of a tiny minority. Italian na- tionality meant little or nothing to the great majority; the very word 'Italy' was unknown to them and Italian was a foreign language to over 90% of the people. But Garibaldi caught the popular imagination and shrewdly exploited his reputation in order to neutralise the opposition of a eon; servative peasantry. Where the liberal politicians feared the effects of any social revolution, he feared rather that, without some popular involvement, the patriotic movement might fail altogether. Only later was it possible to see that a popular revolu- tion in 1860 was an essential ingredient of success. By deliberately stirring up a peasants' revolt in Sicily, Garibaldi suc- ceeded in conquering the south from a large, army, and subsequently, with equal political skill, persuaded the reluctant Sicilian landowners to accept a united ItalY by showing them that he alone could tame this peasants' revolt in time for the harvest.
Another element in Garibaldi's contribu- tion to the risorgimento was his effect on sentiment abroad. Unlike any other Italian soldier, he earned a very respectful con' sideration from experienced generals to Austria and Germany, and was genuinelY feared by Pope Pius IX. In other countries he attracted enormous enthusiasm. The man who Abraham Lincoln wanted as a general in the American civil war, who for several years was in command of the Uruguayan fleet, and who (according to
i Bakunin) was a household name even n Siberia, was almost certainly the best known and admired person in the world.
Foreign help was very important for Ita- ly, and Garibaldi had an indispensable role in popularising Italian patriotism elsewhere. Cavour by comparison never en" tirely overcame the reputation of being thought untrustworthy, while many foreign statesmen were antagonised when they saw him trying to stir up a European war for the enlargement of Piedmont and for what ap- peared to be reasons of dynastic egoism. Garibaldi on the contrary convinced many foreigners that the risorgimento was a movement for freedom, not territorial ag- grandisement. He it was who proved to others that Italians were ready to fight and die for their own patriotic cause and not
rely like Cavour on the dangerous ambitions of imperial France. So doing, he persuaded Gladstone and Palmerston that Italian unification, since it was bound to come eventually, ought to be supported in the in- terests of European peace.
The portrait of Garibaldi is reproduced by permission of the Illustrated London News picture library
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