Smoke (and Mirrors) Without Fire?

This year is the two hundredth anniversary of the birth of Giuseppe Garibaldi, born in Nice in 1807. When Garibaldi was born there, Nice (or Nizza) was Italian-speaking and had been ruled by the House of Savoy (Casa Savoia) since 1388; it was ceded to France in 1860 as a trade-off in the Unification of Italy under the Savoy monarchy. Thinking perhaps of the lack of self-interest and the talent for self-effacement that he shared with Roman Republican hero Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, British historian A. J. P. Taylor declared: “Garibaldi is the only wholly admirable figure in modern history.”

Cincinnatus was appointed dictator in an emergency in 458 B.C., when Minucius was besieged by the warlike Aequi tribe on Cold Mountain (Mons Algidus) in the Alban hills. He defeated the Aequi but, despite invitations to stay on, he resigned his dictatorship after sixteen days and returned to the relative obscurity of his farm across the Tiber. In Garibaldi’s case, the place he went to to step out of the public eye was the barren wind-swept little island of Caprera off the northeast shore of Sardinia, where you can still visit his house and his tomb.

A. J. P. Taylor’s enthusiasm for Garibaldi has not always been shared by contemporary historians. It was certainly shared by George Macaulay Trevelyan, Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, who devoted a classic trilogy—Garibaldi’s Defence of the Roman Republic (1907), Garibaldi and the Thousand (1909) and Garibaldi and the Making of Italy (1911)—to the Hero of Two Worlds, as the Italians know him. Come to that, the whole of the Italian Risorgimento has met with a mixed reception from the revaluators or professional debunkers.

This week’s New Yorker magazine (July 9 & 16, 2007) features a review, entitled “The Insurgent: Garibaldi and his Enemies,” of another academic historian’s somewhat jaundiced view of Garibaldi. The reviewer is novelist and essayist Tim Parks, author, among several other fine books, of Italian Neighbours: An Englishman in Verona (1992), who lives and teaches in Italy and knows Italian mores like few others. The volume under review is Lucy Riall’s  Garibaldi: Invention of a Hero (Yale, 2007, published more or less simultaneously in Italian by Laterza), which presents Garibaldi’s career in Brazil and Uraguay—the two countries recently issued commemorative postage stamps—as well as in Italy as so much smoke and mirrors, a well-managed Victorian publicity stunt. Parks defended General Garibaldi against another skeptical account—cultural historian Daniel Pick’s Rome or Death: The Obsessions of General Garibaldi (Jonathan Cape, 2005, Random House, 2006)—in the July 21, 2005 issue of the London Review of Books. There, Parks’ article, which discussed among other things Garibaldi’s support for a well-meaning but anti-historical public health project to reroute the Tiber away from Rome, was entitled “Stewing Waters”.

As Parks points out, there was certainly no need to defend Garibaldi against his followers. Garibaldi fancied himself as an author of historical fiction, and one of his admirers was a literary colleague, the most important Italian fiction writer between Alessandro Manzoni and Giuseppe Verga. Ippolito Nievo (1831-61) joined the Expedition of the One Thousand and fought alongside the General in Sicily. He died in fact at sea between Palermo and Naples, carrying the records of the Sicilian campaign back to the north, when the ship on which he was a passenger foundered. His ironically named Confessioni di un septuagenario (he died at 29) was published posthumously in 1867. The work was partially translated into English as The Castle of Fratta and is available in a Greenwood Reprint.

Nievo dedicated a naively enthusiastic poem, entitled “The General”, to his commander and companion in arms.  It goes in part like this: “He has something in his eye / that shines forth from his soul / and seems to incline people / to go down on bended knee; / even in a thronging square / I have seen him step courteously and humanely through the crowd / and offer his hand to the girls. // Whether on flower-strewn streets / or in the midst of songs and music / or among whistling bullets / and the blasts of cannons, / he was born with a smile / and he cannot change his nature. / Only to the enemy is his eye terrible, / and to the coward. // Exhausted, in disorder, / they sometimes mill around him, / the soldiers press him. / With a word he revives them, / he shares their many hardships, / he shares their scanty sleep, / and never once did it occur to him / to observe that they were ragged. // His horse, aware perhaps / of who is in the saddle, / gallops over all terrain / and never sets a foot wrong. / Sometimes, white with foaming lather, / he halts, and on either side / the jostling soldiers / applaud their living god.”

Generals Washington or Wellington could hardly have asked for greater adulation. But then, maybe Nievo was part of the scam.