BiographyFrom Italy's partial unification in 1860 until the first World War, nation-building, an essential task for those who wished to see the new state flourish and join the ranks of the great powers, faced a number of hurdles.
There was the attachment to city and region (reflected, for example, in the multiplicity of dialects), and the north-south divide; there was the strained relationship with the papacy, which split the loyalties of the country's Catholics; and there were conflicting explanations of how unification had come about, and whether or not it had been a success. Those who did not believe that the Risorgimento had ended satisfactorily, and who viewed the reigning House of Savoy as unfit for the task of "making Italians", were the heirs of a long republican and nationalist tradition that had Giuseppe Mazzini as its theoretician and Giuseppe Garibaldi as its man of action. Their shared vision of Italy as an unfinished country, ruled by a narrow and self-serving elite was, when combined with the shock of the first World War, to play a significant role in the appearance of fascism.
Historians have tended to see in Garibaldi a puppet of either Mazzini or of Piedmontese statesman Camillo Cavour, who made the "Italian Question" one of the dominant issues of European politics in the 1850s and 1860s. An able and enthusiastic military leader, Garibaldi is usually dismissed as naive - unable, in the final instance, to succeed in peacetime politics. For that precise reason, it is argued, Garibaldi was useful: his patriotism and courage could be turned on whenever Europe's leading powers expressed their doubts about Italian unification (or Piedmontese expansionism), and off when Cavour could afford to move openly. In Garibaldi: Invention of a Hero, Lucy Riall invites us to revise this opinion, and to see Garibaldi as an able politician, who understood better than his contemporaries how popular literacy, and the romantic movement, had transformed the political expectations of the Italian (and indeed, European) population.
RIALL EXPLAINS THE intricacies of Italian unification, and marshals successfully the enormous amount of Garibaldian literature produced all over the world from the 1840s onwards. Weaving together private correspondence, memoirs, biographical writing and press sources, Riall demonstrates that Garibaldi enjoyed tremendous international popularity, that this popularity was carefully built up by marketing Garibaldi as a personification of Risorgimento qualities of heroism, abnegation, and patriotism, and that it was Garibaldi himself who took the lead in this process, carefully cultivating the journalists, writers and artists who would report and illustrate his daring accomplishments. Garibaldi was especially popular among women, whose potential contribution to politics he, ahead of his time, understood and welcomed.
Riall also shows the limits of this campaign. Garibaldi could not control his own message all the time: in some accounts he became an apolitical action hero; in others, more implausibly, Garibaldi was described as the champion of the reformed churches, fighting to destroy papal power once and for all. Not surprisingly, moreover, his enemies learned from his success; few men were as viciously criticised in their lifetime as Garibaldi. Wherever the Catholic Church was strong, including in Ireland, his reputation was systematically denigrated by conservative writers, who portrayed him as the harbinger of a new, diabolical age.
Riall is correct in identifying Garibaldi as a pioneer of the manipulation of the popular press for his gain, in so doing clarifying the link between the romantic movement (with its emphasis on the national over the universal) and concrete political goals. Garibaldi sought to embody the struggle for unity and independence, to bring together in his person the hopes of thousands across Italy, and to set in motion a new secular religion, with the Patria as the object of cult. Riall is also able to show, through the example of Garibaldi, that the radical left's ability to generate its own cults of personality and invent its own traditions is older than generally believed. Che Guevara had in Garibaldi a worthy predecessor. But Riall is not always convincing. Her portrayal of an aged Garibaldi knowingly using his battered body as a metaphor for an incomplete and imperfect Italy, although poetically striking, seems overly ambitious, and is unnecessary; her point has already been made.
MORE IMPORTANTLY, RIALL should account better for Garibaldi's political mistakes. Garibaldi, in October 1860, controlled southern Italy, where efforts were being made, under his overall guidance, to win over the population to the idea of national unification; he also enjoyed an enormous following in the north, home to most of his volunteers. His strategic position was thus a strong one, but Garibaldi surrendered the lands he had conquered to Cavour, representing the House of Savoy and its restrictive constitution, without a fight, or even negotiations. Dreams of a democratic Italy, maybe even a Republic, were shelved; Garibaldi's army was decommissioned and scattered. In 1866, when military defeat against Austria had led to disappointment among all nationalists and the Italian government was at its weakest, Garibaldi failed to seize the initiative, submissively cabling a one-word message to the king: "Obbedisco" (I obey). A year later he was gradually forced by the government into an ill-conceived invasion of the Papal States and defeat at the hands of French forces stationed there. These, and other episodes, sit uncomfortably with Riall's depiction of a politically astute Garibaldi. Was it simply the case that, like many after him, Garibaldi found it easier to spin than to deliver?
Filipe Ribeiro de Meneses lectures in the Department of History, NUI Maynooth
Garibaldi: Invention of a Hero By Lucy Riall Yale University Press, 482pp. £19.99