GARIBALDI, GIUSEPPE (1807–82)

GARIBALDI, GIUSEPPE (1807–82)

The Italian soldier and freedom fighter Giuseppe Garibaldi was born in Nice in 1807 into

a seafaring family. He received little formal education, but was heavily influenced as a young man by Italian patriotic literature and poetry. In 1834 he became involved with GIUSEPPE MAZZINI and his revolutionary organization, Giovane Italia, and was sentenced to death for his part in an attempted insurrection in Genoa. Forced into exile,

he spent more than 10 years in South America fighting on behalf of the republican rebels of the Rio Grande and Uruguay, and gained an enormous reputation for fearlessness and military skill as commander of the red-shirted Italian Legion. With the outbreak of revolution in Europe in 1848, he returned to Italy, and fought alongside the Piedmontese army against the Austrians. In the early summer of 1849 he orchestrated a brilliant defence of the Roman Republic against the besieging forces of the French army.

Garibaldi’s achievements in South America and in Italy in 1848–9, together with his romantic life-style, simplicity of character and striking looks (which invited pictorial comparison with conventional images of Christ) gave him massive popular appeal, and during the 1850s (much of which he spent travelling in America and Asia, before settling down in 1857 on the small island of Caprera, off northern Sardinia) he was regarded by many Italian patriots as critical for winning mass support for the cause of Italian unity. Though by instinct a republican, his relations with Giuseppe Mazzini grew increasingly strained, and when war broke out in northern Italy against the Austrians in 1859, he offered his services to King Victor Emmanuel of Piedmont-Sardinia. He was given the rank of general and successfully commanded a corps of volunteers.

Encyclopedia of nineteenth-century thought 242 The abrupt end of the war and the cession by the Piedmontese prime minister, Count

Cavour, of Nice to the Emperor Napoleon III infuriated Garibaldi. In response to entreaties from followers of Mazzini, he agreed to lead an expedition to Sicily in a bid to wrest the initiative from Cavour and complete Italian unification. The campaign in southern Italy between May and October 1860 was an extraordinary military and political feat, and stirred the imagination of liberals and nationalists everywhere. It ended with the annexation to Piedmont of all of Italy, apart from Rome and Venice. Garibaldi quickly became disenchanted with the new Italian government, and especially with its repressive policies in the south of the country: in April 1861 he entered Parliament (an institution for which he had little regard—he preferred benevolent dictatorships) and accused the prime minister, Cavour, of waging a civil war.

Garibaldi spent much of the last 20 years of his life away from Italian politics on his island of Caprera. He made two abortive attempts to capture Rome—in 1862 and 1867— and in 1870 he fought for the French Republic against Prussia. An international celebrity (the crowds that greeted him on a visit to England in 1864 were unprecedented), he lent his name to many left-wing causes in the 1860s and 1870s, including that of international peace. He wrote no theoretical works, but his Memoirs (1872) consolidated his image as the quintessential romantic revolutionary. He died in 1882.