Garibaldi: The Man and the Nation

By Paul Frischauer

First published in 1935, this is a biography of Giuseppe Garibaldi (4 July 1807 - 2 June 1882), the Italian general, politician and nationalist who played a large role in the history of Italy.

Widely regarded as one of the greatest generals of modern times and one of Italy’s “fathers of the fatherland,” Garibaldi has been called the “Hero of the Two Worlds,” thanks to his military enterprises in Brazil, Uruguay and Europe. He personally commanded and fought in many military campaigns that led eventually to the Italian unification.

Garibaldi was appointed general by the provisional government of Milan in 1848, General of the Roman Republic in 1849 by the Minister of War, and led the Expedition of the Thousand on behalf and with the consent of Victor Emmanuel II. His last military campaign took place during the Franco-Prussian War as commander of the Army of the Vosges.

An unmissable addition to your history collection.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Borodino Books
• Release date: Jan 12, 2017
• ISBN: 9781787208735

Paul Frischauer

Paul Frischauer (May 25, 1898 - May 7, 1977) was an Austrian novelist and journalist. Born in 1898 in Vienna into a publishing family—his father was the editor of the Neues Wiener Tagblatt and his mother hailed from the publishing house of the Wiener Sonn- und Montags-Zeitung—Frischauer studied history at the University of Vienna. In order to escape the National Socialist party in Germany, he emigrated to Great Britain in 1934 and from there to Brazil in 1940. He relocated again in 1945, this time to the United States, where he worked as a ghostwriter. He returned to Austria in 1957. As a novelist, he concentrated on historical novels such as Dürer and Prince Eugène. Whilst living overseas, he wrote a novel about Beaumarchais and the Napoleonic era, as well as on the Habsburgs. After his return to Austria, he wrote several German language textbooks for various publishing houses. He married his first wife Alma Wittlin, also an Austrian writer, in 1921. Following their divorce in 1932, Frischauer was married a further three times, including in 1958 to Austrian actress Gabriele Philipp, also known as Gaby von Schönthan. Frischauer died in Vienna in 1977 and was interred at Döblingen cemetery.

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Text originally published in 1935 under the same title.

© Borodino Books 2017, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

GARIBALDI

THE MAN AND THE NATION

BY

PAUL FRISCHAUER

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 3

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 4

MAPS 5

PART I—His earthly father and his spiritual fathers 6

CHAPTER I 6

CHAPTER II 10

CHAPTER III 21

CHAPTER IV 28

PART II—Apostles on a distant shore 44

CHAPTER I 44

CHAPTER II 59

CHAPTER III 68

CHAPTER IV 79

CHAPTER V 90

PART III—Rome eternal—Life ephemeral 100

CHAPTER I 100

CHAPTER II 118

CHAPTER III 133

CHAPTER IV 142

CHAPTER V 149

CHAPTER VI 165

PART IV—The Legend of a thousand and one men 180

CHAPTER I 180

CHAPTER II 193

CHAPTER III 207

CHAPTER IV 218

CHAPTER V 230

PART V—A second youth in old age 249

CHAPTER I 249

CHAPTER II 262

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 272

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL LIST 273

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 281

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

GIUSEPPE GARIBALDI

GIUSEPPE MAZZINI: AFTER THE DEFENCE OF ROME

THE STRUGGLE FOR ROME

COUNT CAMILLO CAVOUR

VICTOR EMMANUEL: THE FIRST KING OF ITALY

GARIBALDI FROM AN ORIGINAL DAGUERROTYPE

THE LANDING OF THE THOUSAND IN THE HARBOUR OF QUARTO

THE DEPARTURE OF THE THOUSAND FROM QUARTO

GARIBALDI IN THE YEAR 1869

ENTHUSIASM OF THE CROWD IN NAPLES

STREET FIGHTING IN PALERMO

GARIBALDI AND FAMILY

THE CASA BIANCA ON CAPRERA

GARIBALDI BEFORE CAPUA

GARIBALDI WITH CLELIA, HIS YOUNGEST DAUGHTER

GARIBALDI TWO MONTHS BEFORE HIS DEATH

MAPS

GARIBALDI’S SOUTH AMERICAN CAMPAIGN

ITALY BEFORE UNIFICATION

PART I—His earthly father and his spiritual fathers

CHAPTER I

WHEN Domenico Garibaldi, a captain in the coastal shipping service, set his signature to the birth certificate of his second son, Joseph—the future Italian hero, Giuseppe Garibaldi—in the Mairie at Nice, he was not in the least disturbed by the fact that the document was drawn up in the French language. Padrone Domenico, as the seamen in the Mediterranean ports called him, was neither a French nor an Italian patriot. The sea was the country of his choice and the motley collection of sailors and fisher-folk, who are at home in every port, was the nation to which he felt that he belonged.

For a man who only by means of the greatest toil and effort managed to earn enough to maintain a household of the humblest nature, the times did not permit of political interests. People such as Padrone Domenico had enough to do to earn their daily bread, to provide for their families, and to keep themselves humbly and discreetly in the background lest one of these days, whether they wished it or not, they were caught unawares, thrust into uniform, and forced to serve as cannon-fodder in the army of the great Napoleon.

A few years earlier the inhabitants of Nice were still subjects of the King of Sardinia, and now in the year 1807, the decision regarding the annexation of the scented country around Nice, with its mountainous interior, to one or another territorial unit, did not in the least depend on the personal patriotism of the Niçois. It depended entirely on the unfettered choice of the man who, a few days after the birth of Giuseppe Garibaldi, at the Peace of Tilsit, had induced Russia to recognise his three brothers—one as King of Naples, the second as King of Holland, and the third as King of Westphalia. The all-powerful Emperor wielded his power over frontiers and peoples with such an imperious gesture, that, in the limited mind of a humble seaman such as Padrone Domenico, there was no room for any other thought than whether he was for or against the great Napoleon. The inhabitants of the Ligurian coast were mostly flattered by the spectacular career of their Corsican kinsman. They felt that one of their own kind had become Master of the world; had he not declared that every one of them carried a marshal’s baton in his knapsack! It might well have been that Padrone Domenico, like so many others of his countrymen, cherished ambitions of preparing his son for a career that would carry him to Napoleonic heights. But nowhere in the history of Garibaldi’s youth is there any suggestion or indication of ambition on the part of the boy’s father. He was a seaman and the son of a seaman. Apparently, after the birth of his second son, Padrone Domenico hoped that Giuseppe, too, would become a seaman and lead a placid life as a trader in the Mediterranean. Certainly he wished that the boy’s life might turn out to be a more successful one than his own, which had never been free of business difficulties. Padrone Domenico’s great ambition was to earn a modest fortune sufficient to free him from worry; to become prosperous enough for the education and upbringing of his children to be less of a burden to him. His wish was never fulfilled—there were always more and more hungry mouths to fill, and the uncertainty of the times diminished the profits earned by the little single-masted sailing ship commanded by this captain of the coastal shipping service. Padrone Domenico never reached the standard of a well-to-do bourgeois.

Looking back into the distant past, it seemed to Garibaldi as though his father had omitted nothing in order to educate him—at all events, nothing that lay within his power. After all, Padrone Domenico could not guess that his son would one day be offered the dictatorship of a kingdom as well as the title of a Prince of Calatafimi! In order to become either the commander or owner of a tartan or single-masted vessel, or even of a brigantine with two flag-bedecked masts, it was not necessary to learn more than the alphabet and the multiplication table. So that when the spiritual fathers of the diocese, or the lay teacher Arena, were good enough to offer to teach Giuseppe the rudiments of history and to instruct him in languages, they received the humble thanks of Padrone Domenico, a man of simple faith, who christened his ship Santa Reparata, after the Holy Patroness of Nice.

There was no apparent indication in his childhood that Garibaldi the seaman’s son would distinguish himself in any sphere outside the limits of Nice or the little world of the ships that he would command. If Giuseppe had lived in an era of political stagnation, or had grown up in an undisturbed period of history, probably his son would have been able to write of him as he wrote of his own father: He was a seaman and the son of a seaman. Luck and misfortune alternated in his life.

But the mysterious forces which fashion history chose to use Giuseppe Garibaldi as their instrument, and thus made use of a personality whose origins gave no hint of future greatness.

Napoleon himself, when, as a still youthful general, he set forth to conquer Italy, was responsible for marking out Garibaldi’s future sphere of activity, even before the boy was born. The orders for the day which he issued on the eve of every battle, and which reveal, more than anything else, the astounding nature of his career, provided the intellectual foundations for the proclamations which half a century later were to be made by Garibaldi.

The Army...will proclaim the principles of freedom and will stir up Italian patriotism to set Italy free from the yoke of foreign domination. The nobility, townsmen, and peasantry...all will be called upon to unite in order to work together for the reconstruction of the Italian Fatherland. The words ‘Italia, Italia’ proclaimed in Milan, in Bologna, and in Verona will work magic!

The text was almost word for word the same as Napoleon’s, but the mind that dictated the proclamation was a very different one. For Napoleon, though a natural predilection bound him to the Roman motherland, Italy was only one of the many countries comprised in his vast schemes, for Garibaldi, Italy was, in one word—everything. Napoleon approached the problem critically, from the psychological standpoint; Garibaldi attacked it passionately, from the standpoint of pure feeling. His passion for the Italian nation was of so fanatical a nature and of such driving power, that he could never have considered its problems in the calm matter-of-fact manner in which Napoleon dispassionately prophesied the future of Italy—the future which was later to be realised by Garibaldi.

Napoleon’s prophecy was expressed in these words: Surrounded by natural frontiers, separated from the rest of Europe by the sea on the one side and by high mountains on the other, Italy is a country destined by nature to become the abode of a great and important nation. In its natural formation there is one fundamental weakness, which may well be regarded as the parent of all its troubles and the cause of the dismemberment of this beautiful country into so many independent principalities: the physical length and breadth of Italy are disproportionate. But in spite of this geographical disadvantage which separates the South from the North, Italy represents a single nation. The unity in language and literature and the uniformity of customs will one day—whether in a near or distant future—merge the inhabitants into a single Union of States; and, without doubt, Rome will be chosen by the Italians as their capital.

Shortly before the solitary genius on the island of St. Helena, in a mood of prophetic vision, foresaw the future of Italy, the authorised Ministers of all the European Powers gathered together at the Congress of Vienna to reorganise the world which the Giant had thrown out of gear. They were responsible directly for the fate of Napoleon, and indirectly for the fate of Garibaldi, who was then eight years old and beginning to learn Italian.

In front of the Princes Metternich and Talleyrand, carefully traced on parchment, lay the map of Italy with new frontiers drawn through the vast territorial mass of the Napoleonic era. All those rulers who were still unprovided for in the new European constellation must be given territories, dominions, and subjects, and for this purpose Italy, considered as a map—and a map of separate States offered the simplest solution of the problem, inasmuch as she could be still farther dismembered. The unprincipled Ministers were not obliged to take note of any actual legitimate claim for the unification of the country, since, even in pre-Napoleonic times, Italy had not been a single State. The diplomatic game of cutting up and piecing together again may have satisfied the aspirations of the rulers, but it determined at the same time the destinies of twenty million people, who had been recognised by Napoleon as constituting a single nation, and who, in consequence of the geographically handled Italian affair, as it was expressed in diplomatic terminology, were split up once more into small monarchies. No one considered the effect of the statesmen’s arrangements on twenty millions of people. In the atmosphere of the Congress of Vienna no thought of the people intruded. The people? What is that; asked the Emperor Franz; I only know subjects. Peoples, reiterated ironically his almighty Minister Metternich; and defined the people as Nervous women and children.

A gifted contemporary criticised this definition as being a short-sighted one. Statesmen would one day be made aware of the fact that nervous women give birth to children and that children grow up to be men. What did the foreign princes, by the grace of Metternich, understand—they and their retinues—of the needs of the human beings over whom they ruled? They were forced upon the people, and the natural consequence of this compulsion was distrust, followed by penal decrees and severe laws which, originating in countries inhabited by people of quite another temperament, appeared completely incomprehensible to the Southerners.

In the year 1848 the prophecy was fulfilled. The Italian nation, which had been casually dismembered by Metternich and Talleyrand, rose as one man in the struggle for independence. At the head of a people of twenty million souls, marched the living banner of the Risorgimento, the child of the people—Garibaldi.

CHAPTER II

GARIBALDI spent his childhood in the harbour, amongst the ships that sailed in and out, and between the bales of merchandise that were eternally being loaded and unloaded. The sea was his element, his school, and his playground. Sea urchins, mussels, algae, crabs, and sea spiders were his toys. When he was asked at what age he had first learned to swim, he replied, I think that I must have been born an amphibian, the sort of creature which is as much at home in the water as on land. Diving to the bottom of the sea was the first dangerous experiment attempted by the little Giuseppe—handling the oars his first display of strength; and both soon became as natural to him as the movements of swimming or of walking. As companion to his father on several voyages, he learned the practical side of seamanship. He learned to handle the tiller, to give commands, and to obey them: The star-spangled infinity of the heavens was no mystery to him, and night at sea presented no dangers to his mind. With outstretched hand he measured the strength of the wind, knew how to determine his course, and to set his sails accordingly.

Thus a child grew up, tanned by the Mediterranean sun, one of many sailors’ sons of the same age. A youth developed, waxed strong and healthy, and, like all the others, with no guiding hand to help him; but by means of natural sport and play, both in the sea and out of it, trained himself for the calling of his father, who was away at sea for the greater part of the year.

On a summer day in the year 1822, a fair, blue-eyed youth of fifteen embarked on his first voyage as a cabin-boy. It was customary amongst the Niçois to celebrate with great festivity the departure of a mozzo on his first voyage. The sea—the foster-father of all seafaring folk—assumed from that moment the responsibility for the spiritual and bodily well-being of those entrusted to it, and according to an ancient custom, the real father was supposed to celebrate with becoming jubilance his child’s dedication to the sea. But the friends and relations who accompanied Garibaldi’s parents from the harbour back to their home after Giuseppe’s departure were disappointed. Padrone Domenico and Donna Rosa, who had celebrated with fitting exuberance the departure of both their eldest and their third sons, were on this occasion quiet and depressed. The men and women present-humble folk as far as their standard of living was concerned, but who, in the matter of social etiquette, belonged to the exacting middle class which criticises even the slightest departure from customary behaviour—complained of the depressed humour of Garibaldi’s parents. Surely it was strange enough that his parents should permit such a strong capable youth to stay at home until his fifteenth year! A boy who wished to become a seaman must enlist as early as possible in the service of an experienced captain, and two or three years before this, Giuseppe would have been quite strong enough to go to sea as a ship’s boy. Could it be true, after all—they wondered—that Donna Rosa would have preferred to send this son—who was physically more capable than all the others—to a monastery school rather than have put him into the rigging of a sailing-ship? A youth as intractable, as impetuous, and as adventure-loving as Giuseppe, to lead a cloistered life? A swashbuckler to become a priest? Impossible!

Everyone who knew Giuseppe, as friends and relations of the family learn to know the sons of the house, would willingly have attempted the task of convincing his mother of the vanity of her aspirations. It was ridiculous to think that Giuseppe would return after his first voyage, full of regrets at his choice of a career. The ship which carried him away was still visible as a fast vanishing point on the horizon when the guests raised their glasses and expressed the wish that henceforth Giuseppe might belong to the sea. His mother responded outwardly to the toast, but inwardly she prayed that his first voyage as a seaman might be his last.

This pattern for all mothers, as Garibaldi called her, acknowledged the force of the objections. It was true enough that Giuseppe could not become a priest, but it was equally true that he could not remain a seaman. Her instinct revolted at the idea. She had no faculty of self-expression, and would have found it very difficult to explain the real reasons for her opposition to such a career for him. Giuseppe was both more and less than a seaman. She compared him with her other sons who had taken after their father and had developed into hardy efficient youths with a capacity for business—inwardly stolid and not easily roused from lethargic acceptance of their destiny. But whether other people believed it or not, Giuseppe, who was not a whit less muscular than his brothers, was handicapped by the possession of finer feelings, by an extreme readiness to help anyone in need, and by an almost abnormal sympathy, which Donna Rosa likewise possessed, with every other living creature. This sensitiveness of Giuseppe’s was not apparent to everyone; but the plain reserved woman with the dark deep-set eyes was conscious of every change in mood and emotion of her growing son who, unlike her in appearance, was so like her in character. Donna Rosa was pale-faced and dark-haired—she represented the slender type of Italian women of the Ligurian Coast. Giuseppe, on the other hand, was fair and blue-eyed, a strongly built youth with red cheeks. His mother kept her narrow lips nearly always pressed tightly together, while Giuseppe’s were full and sensual. In spite of dissimilar appearances, Donna Rosa felt more kinship with him than with any other of her sons. She watched him constantly, and at the slightest pretext began to brood over him. He was so full of contradictions! A strife-loving lad who liked nothing better than a scrap, and yet so sensitive as to be found crying bitterly when he accidentally broke the leg of a butterfly which he had caught! That, however, was not a sufficiently decisive characteristic for her to offer to her friends and relations as a reason for her opposition to Giuseppe’s enlisting as a seaman. She could only plead with Padrone Domenico and attempt to convince him that her opinion was the right one, and that the boy was not cut out for the life of a sailor. No! notwithstanding the fact that he could swarm up every mast in the harbour of Nice, that no pine tree on land existed which he could not climb, and that he could keep his balance on the yard-arms like a tight-rope walker in a circus, Donna Rosa knew—for she also came of seafaring folk and had lived amongst them all her life—that the life of seamen and of ships’ commanders was one of perpetual battle with the elements. Such a calling demanded a particularly cool, unexcitable temperament. After all, in God’s name, she had given both her sons Angelo and Michele to the sea without a murmur: Giuseppe was another matter.

Garibaldi, who was later to give proof of his iron nerve in a hundred battles and innumerable skirmishes, seemed to both his parents—not only to his mother but also to his father, who was certainly not guilty of undue consideration for weakness of any kind—to be too emotionally sensitive and too full of fancy to be really suited for the profession of a seaman. Before Giuseppe was allowed to go to sea as a cabin-boy, he had to overcome his parents’ opposition by force and, by means of an unsuccessful flight from home, to prove his determination at all costs to become a sailor, and to convince them once and for all that he was fully fledged and nothing and no one could hold him back.

The discords in Garibaldi’s nature which were inexplicable to his contemporaries, made their appearance at a very early stage in his development. Nevertheless, people satisfied themselves with the simple explanation that his was a unique nature. He was evidently a man not cut out after any pattern—in other words, his like did not exist elsewhere in the world! The reflected glory of his fame was like a searchlight which left the background of his essential nature in shadow. Even his closest friends were puzzled by his seemingly callous shedding of blood, and by the anomaly that, whilst the bayonet thrust and hand-to-hand fighting were his favourite methods of combat, he yet listened to the complaints of the flowers when their leaves sought space to breathe. Brutal force and quivering tenderness were united in one personality! This mingling of contradictory traits, manifesting themselves in rapid alternation, is shown by Garibaldi himself in his autobiographical notes, without any comments from him. For instance, on one occasion, in marching against an enemy who was expected to attack at any moment, he suddenly commanded a halt. The men following him thought that the thrilling moment for the encounter had arrived. Instead, he had given his men the command to halt and to keep as quiet as mice...why? Because a nightingale had begun to sing and Garibaldi wished to stop and enjoy to the full the melodious notes which he loved so much and had not heard for so long. The nightingale’s song threw him into a tender ecstasy....And yet, an hour later, he dealt a human being, a man of flesh and blood, a blow on the head with his naked sword! An astounding combination of qualities contained in one person! Was there a cleavage through Garibaldi’s character denoting good and evil qualities, crude heartlessness and lyrical exaggeration of sentiment? In this dual nature of his, the manifestation of one characteristic was very closely followed by its opposite. For instance, after every act which strained his nerves and his willpower to the uttermost, he experienced a natural reaction which in its turn was transformed into a complete revulsion of feeling. Both before and after every great emotional excitement, his poetic sensibilities became receptive to every kind of impression and suggestion. His sensibilities were like a chord which is set in vibration by the slightest stimulus. Later, in his old age, when his opportunities of fighting were over and his strength was no longer equal to wielding a sword, Garibaldi took to his pen and worked off his inner conflicts by unburdening himself in verse.

Even in earliest youth Garibaldi had been both dreamer and fighter at the same time. A contemporary said of him fifty years later that as a boy, in spite of his high spirits, his adventurousness, and his skill in tunny-fishing, Giuseppe would often lapse into silence and become immersed in thought. For instance, when a book came into his hands, he would betake himself to the shade of an olive tree to read. It would then be impossible to tear him away from his reading. The over-excitable youth had fallen unexpectedly into the habit of daydreaming.

The lad of twelve or thirteen, who had hitherto found it so difficult to learn and in whom all scholarship provoked such repugnance, now suddenly began to read with a passionate intensity and concentration. The child of nature forgot his environment and lost himself in dreams. Violent changes of mood hurled him from one extreme to another. This unexpected transformation of the fair-haired, care-free, play-, loving Giuseppe into the opposite type of brooding, meditative dreamer, lost in contemplation, might readily have been attributed to the natural phenomenon of puberty, were it not that Giuseppe retained his contradictory extremes of character to the end of his life.

As a boy he led a dual life: on the one hand he was the care-free playmate and companion of the young Niçois, and on the other he was the enthusiastic pupil of the lay teacher Arena.

The name Arena is mentioned with gratitude in Garibaldi’s notes; but, so far as posterity is concerned, it remains a name only. It has never been known for certain whether the mathematician and calligrapher was young or old, nor whether he came originally from Nice or from Rome. The life of the first man who felt a premonition that the merry ship’s boy would become the leader of a people was spent in the greatest obscurity. Arena only stepped once into the light of history, and that was when Garibaldi said of him: I have to thank him for the little that I know...he taught me the Italian language, and introduced me to Roman history.…

The hours during which the lay teacher kept the fair-haired youth at his side and steeped his imagination in the myths and legends of the history of the Roman World-Empire, were responsible for the first decisive crisis in Garibaldi’s development. This stranger, whose duty was to teach the boy reading, writing, and arithmetic, went voluntarily beyond his province and bound the gay and vivacious lad to him. Giuseppe had begun to learn Italian at the age of eight, and now spoke and wrote it perfectly. That was the first step. But Arena went further. The history of Rome was far more important than the language. The world of the past, built up of men and deeds, must be made to live again for Giuseppe, to seize his imagination and fill his mind with images and comparisons.

Giuseppe stood at the crossroads. When reality claimed him and love of living drew him to the sea and to the shore, and when boisterous games and rough play in the company of friends of his own age proved more attractive than the serious face of the teacher Arena who demanded a task of him—then he resembled all his other friends, untroubled and unburdened by knowledge—a simple seaman’s son like his brothers, whose only interests were connected with the sea and trade.

But the choice as to what his life should become did not depend solely on himself. The power and influence of Arena’s personality reinforced the mysterious influences which were shaping his career. Giuseppe was the only one among his friends in Nice who studied with absorbed interest the story of the Eternal City.

His contemporaries could not understand his habit of dreamy introspection; they did not know that while his body was standing on the shore and his eyes looking out to sea, in spirit he was standing on the Forum Romanum and declaiming a speech, the text of which he had woven with laborious care from the stories told him by Arena. In his vivid imagination, it was he himself who led the legions across the Rhine and flung the advancing Gauls back into their forests. The sand of the Libyan desert crunched beneath his step and his horse pranced and curveted in front of the gigantic figure of the Sphinx. He was Scipio who defeated the Carthaginians, Cæsar, Cicero, and Mark Antony in turns.

In his heated imagination his own personality grew so portentously that he soon felt capable of assuming the rôle of every Roman hero of the past.

All through his life, Garibaldi was able, by means of his imagination, to throw himself into a state of intoxication, which burst the bounds of his own personality. In such a state he felt capable of any achievement. He was in a state like this when, with a ridiculously small company of volunteers and inadequate munitions and material, he challenged a mighty host of well-equipped troops. He felt confident of victory. When he grew up he realised all his dreams just as naturally as, in the sordid atmosphere of his parents’ house, he fancied himself in the garb of a Roman Consul or wearing the toga of an orator in the Capitol.

In later years the Italian national hero realised what an enormous advantage he had gained by learning to speak Italian as a lad. In those days it was a rare thing for a Niçois to think of himself, fully and consciously, as an Italian. In consequence of the decisions of the Congress of Vienna, Nice had again been ceded to the Kingdom of Sardinia. The question which a Niçois had to decide was whether he should continue to consider himself a Frenchman or whether he should transfer his loyalty to Italy. The majority of the inhabitants of the port adopted an attitude of indifference towards the problem. They felt that, as their native town was apparently fated to change hands so often, their personal attachment to one country or another was a matter of very little importance.

Considered from the purely political standpoint, the choice was not an easy one, for in a few years’ time, Nice might fall once more into the possession of France, which is what actually did happen; so that whoever in the year 1815 had voted for Sardinia would be regarded subsequently as a traitor, or at least as an unsatisfactory Frenchman. The only way out of the difficulty—and the one chosen by Padrone Domenico and most other Niçois—was the cultivation of an attitude of cautious indolence. Others, however, who felt that they were part of the hoary tradition of Rome, the mother of the world, and belonged to the Roman sphere of civilisation—such as the lay teacher Arena, who infected his pupil with his own enthusiasm—were drawn towards Italy without realising the political consequences of their attachment. Rome was a legend that had grown sacrosanct; the Eternal City embodied the idea of fatherland for all Italians who, owing to the rapid changes in their political destiny, were deprived of any local patriotism. The lower middle classes, who all too often found themselves under the yoke of foreign princelets, revelled in the idea that they were Roman citizens in the widest sense, or, in other words, Italians and citizens of a great nation, which only through the unfortunate sequence of historical events had been cut up into a number of small States. They had a presentiment that sooner or later they would be united once more as citizens of a new and mighty Roman World-Empire.

For Garibaldi, the doctrine—then in a somewhat legendary stage—of the rebirth of Rome was the keynote of his existence; it became the foundation of his career, and fed the flame of his fantasy. In later years, as a grown man, and after he had actually become the leader of the people, he still remained spiritually a disciple, the instrument of a higher power and the medium through whom the problems of the age were made manifest.

Almost instinctively Giuseppe became intoxicated by the Italian folk-songs sung by the sailors in the harbour. The language seemed a wordless melody; it fascinated him and played on his heart-strings. Only in later days did he express the wish that the sailors had sung, not only in Italian, but about Italy. But who had taught them to be Italian patriots and defenders of humanity? Who? Garibaldi asked the question where it concerned others, but gave no reply regarding himself. He merely recorded that his own patriotism had developed much later, and that he did not become conscious of love for his fatherland until long after he had left school. As far as knowing the state of his feelings was concerned, the statement is certainly true. Garibaldi’s personality was still completely devoid of intellectuality; he had so far absorbed no theories of any kind. His teacher Arena revelled only in the mythology of Rome, without drawing, either for himself or for his pupil, any practical inferences connected with the rebirth of Italy. But the unconscious preparation of Garibaldi’s mind had been thorough, and had strengthened enormously his receptive powers. The period was one of transition for the Peninsula. At first, the French Revolution had only gained supporters for the rights of man among the Italian educated classes through the enlightening influence of its writings. The populace, sluggish in all matters, both intellectual and spiritual, was only very gradually enlightened, chiefly through their association with the troops quartered amongst them, some of whom had previously been soldiers of the Revolution; while others were sufficiently developed mentally to be capable of assimilating the new ideas. But the seeds had been sown, and the plant developed slowly, but inevitably. The spreading of the Revolution revived in the people a national consciousness. In the receptive period of puberty, with every sense quickened, Garibaldi absorbed, unawares, the gradual but ever-strengthening national consciousness of twenty million Italians, of whom at first only a few, but then ever more and more, rebelled against the dictates of the Congress of Vienna.

Rumours of every kind were spread abroad, but nothing of any certainty was generally known. The police system throughout the small Italian States was so perfectly organised that it had become almost impossible for people to speak their thoughts. In his parents’ house Garibaldi learned nothing definite. Padrone Domenico remained true to his determination not to allow himself to be drawn into political life; his private life afforded him enough care without bothering about public problems. Nevertheless, it is certain that both the captain of the coastal service, who now and then put into port along the coast of the Peninsula and here and there loaded and unloaded his merchandise—and his son, who occasionally accompanied him—forgathered with members of larger or smaller groups, who discussed the independence of Italy and the aims and principles of Republicanism.

The statesmen of the Congress of Vienna had decreed that the events of the last ten years should be erased from the memories of their subjects, and obliterated by rules and regulations. As far as the outward show went, they were successful. They set up thrones, clothed princely emigrants in the purple, just as though the Most Christian King Louis XVI had died in his bed and the Bastille had never been stormed. But not even with the aid of the most stringent police measures in the world, nor by the punishment of all free speech and writing, could they recreate the ignorance of the masses as it was prior to the Revolution.

Viewed from the angle of the rulers, the reaction lay like a dark film over the peoples: to them it appeared as if the old state of affairs had been fully restored. But gradually the police reports became more frequent, more disquieting—even alarming. It was reported that here and there, in this village or in that town, a society had been formed, but the police were on its track. Distinguished men belonged to these societies, as well as porters, workmen, and simple fishermen. The people were leading a dual life. Outwardly, they were worthy burghers who punctually paid their taxes to the authorities, were excellent fathers of families, honest, upright, professional men, and irreproachable in their private lives; they gave the authorities no excuse to interfere with them. But it was known that at night-time they left their homes, apparently to go for a harmless walk, to meet and chat with their friends in a neighbouring café or to drink with them in a tavern. Actually, they left the town or village where they lived, and met together under cover of darkness in the woods in order to...yes, in order to do what? the police officers, the police superintendents, and the Ministers of Public Security of the various Italian States all asked themselves this question. They were well aware of the answer, but none wished to admit it; the latent power which resided in the vast numbers of the conspirators was too great. It soon became known that not only were persons associated with the officials amongst the members of the secret society called the Carbonari, but that some of the officials themselves were included amongst its members. The astonished Ministers of Police could hardly believe their eyes as they read the report in which it was stated that Charles Albert de Carignan, a Prince of the sovereign House of Savoy, belonged to the confederation.

More and more police spies managed to creep into the society, and they reported that its members consisted of politically discontented persons, who were antagonistic to the decisions of the Congress of Vienna, which they regarded as a flagrant injustice, inasmuch as they had broken up the united Italy created by Napoleon. In place of an independent, united government, the Congress of Vienna had sanctioned the rule of a number of arbitrary despots. It was against this arbitrary despotism that the aggressive activities of the Carbonari were directed. The Italian was powerless; he was deprived of all rights, and it was against this impotence that he wished to protest. He did not want to be ruled by foreign princes and their cliques, who, as often as not, were ignorant even of the language and yet occupied the highest positions in the State. The revolutionary opposition merged itself more and more into the nationalist aspiration. On the other hand, as a counter-measure, the police arranged to increase the number of treacherous members of the confederation, and by this means managed to frustrate a revolt which broke out in Piedmont in the year 1821.

Only the initiated—the actual members of the Carbonari, or those who heard of it by chance, like Giuseppe Mazzini, Garibaldi’s future spiritual leader, who was sixteen years of age at the fateful moment of his encounter with a fugitive conspirator in Genoa—in short, only those who were either directly or indirectly affected by it, were ever aware of that unsuccessful attempt. For the mass of the population, which as yet read no newspapers (in any case, the publication of any news relating to the revolutionary outbreak and its suppression was forbidden), this important event might never have happened. The fourteen-year-old Garibaldi never heard of it; the range of his ideas was not touched directly by events. Only in imagination and with all the strength of his feelings and intuitions did he dream, ever more clearly—with the whole intensity of his nature—of the Roma Eterna which would be born again, if only the great figures of the Rome of the past could be reincarnated in the persons of himself and his friends.

They were harmless friends, those boys who had been the companions of his youth. They had responded so wholeheartedly to his love of scrapping that in later years, as an expert in the material out of which soldiers are made, Garibaldi ascribed to them a special talent for the profession of arms. But although they fought and scrapped with Garibaldi, they did not share his dreams. His frank open face never betrayed to them the conflict which raged within.

Did you ever see a good-looking graceful youth, wearing a red linen shirt and blue trousers, with a straw hat on his head, balancing himself on the boats swaying in the harbour? The man who spent his evenings at his writing-table on the island of Caprera, pursued by a flock of memories, clear-sighted, experienced, and world-famous, asked the somewhat pathetic question, as a literary device to present an attractive picture of himself as a ship’s boy. Not only did he surround himself with a romantic aura; he included in its radiance the ship on which he sailed, his daily tasks, his work, and the whole little world in which he had lived. He described his ship as caressingly as a cavalier describes his horse; he expatiated on its wide beam, tapering mast, roomy deck, and curving bow. The great man described it all as though his life as cabin-boy had never been a prosaic one, even when, as a volunteer, he had served under a captain who was a friend of his own family. The sturdy youth had to do all the dirty work and all the rough jobs of an ordinary hand, before he was promoted either to the rank of seaman or to that of steersman and captain’s right hand. It is true that he was favoured; Signor Pesante, the owner of the Constanza, treated him as the owner of a business house would treat the son of a fellow merchant who was apprenticed to him. Giuseppe had to work like any other mozzo, but, on the other hand, he was allowed to spend his free time in the company of his superiors.

Pesante liked the energetic lad, who felt no kind of work to be derogatory and who assimilated so quickly all that the captain could teach him about navigation, admittedly not a lot, and put it to practical use. Whenever Giuseppe took the night watch, Pesante was able to sleep in peace. The seasoned mariner noted with pleasure that, in spite of his intelligence, the boy developed physically, remained frank and unspoiled, and took part in the athletic amusements of the crew. Giuseppe had a native wit, was adaptable and quick at repartee; it was not necessary for him to set a distance between himself and the comrades of his work and destiny. If it ever occurred to one or another of his companions that Giuseppe was more than an ordinary seaman, the thought was certainly not inspired by the outward behaviour of the lad. After all, there was nothing extraordinary in the fact that a cabin-boy should suddenly stare out across the sea, as though the sight intoxicated him. If a sailor