BUT GARIBALDI IS DEAD:

Garibaldi Strikes Back: A champion of national self-determination and worldwide democracy. (Eugenio F. Biagini, 12/12/2008, Christianity Today)

In his day Garibaldi was compared to George Washington, who stood up to stronger enemies and conquered them. In many respects, he was closer to his contemporary Abraham Lincoln, who, unlike Washington, was not a member of the gentry but a man sprung "from the people," an advocate of the oppressed, and one who fought for his country's national unity. In 1860, Garibaldi briefly ruled Italy's southern half, which he had single-handedly liberated from a sort of police-state a few months before, and led it to join the northern constitutional monarchy established by Cavour and Victor Emmanuel: with this merger a new nation state was born (though the differences between North and South were to plague the new country for the next 150 years). Unlike Lincoln or Washington, however, Garibaldi was primarily neither a statesman nor a soldier in the ordinary sense of the word but rather a self-made champion of national self-determination and worldwide democracy. [...]

Garibaldi was conscious of the importance of creating and cultivating his own public persona. What turned out to be an enormously successful propaganda operation was started not by Garibaldi himself but by that other secular saint of the Italian Risorgimento, Giuseppe Mazzini, then eager not only to invent role models for Italian youth but also to counteract foreign stereotypes of the Italian national character as effeminate, unwarlike, and weak. The gaucho values adopted by Garibaldi in his Latin American incarnation suited Mazzini's needs perfectly. Furthermore, in his romantic struggle against the Argentine dictator Rosas, Garibaldi championed all the other Mazzinian values—"Liberty, Equality, Independence, Unity, Humanity"—to such an extent that his actions there amounted to a sort of morality tale in which the ideals of Young Italy (Mazzini's republican organization) were acted out before a world audience. Journalists and soon novelists also adopted him as their hero, a saintly warrior whose sword was ever at the service of the oppressed worldwide, while the illustrated press started to popularize his bearded, long-haired, poncho-clad features.

Riall agrees with Scirocco and argues that Garibaldi acted his role because he was of the stuff from which heroes are made, but she also stresses that he understood the wider media significance of war and the celebrity which he acquired in fighting it. Indeed, far from being the gullible guerrilla leader of contemporary anti-revolutionary propaganda, he was a shrewd impresario of his own mythology. He worked at it consistently over the years. Riall studies "his speeches, his memoirs, his novels and poetry, his clothes, his appearance and the photographs of it, his actions on the battlefield, his behaviour in parliament, his lifestyle on Caprera" to show that "[his] celebrity was the result of a political and rhetorical strategy" which was both sophisticated and highly appropriate to the spirit of the age.

Soon he started to make use of his fame quite independently of Mazzini, to the latter's chagrin. Thus when the red-shirts and their general returned from exile to fight in the 1848 revolutions in Italy, they were operating within a clearly defined set of literary and cultural parameters, which were promptly adopted and widely broadcast by the media of the day. Hero worship reached a climax with the defense of the 1849 Roman Republic—Italy's first democratic experiment, proclaimed after the pope, Pius IX, fled his capital to seek the protection of the counter-revolutionary powers. Garibaldi soon emerged as the Republic's most valiant general, who rolled back foreign invasion and defeated, successively, the armies sent against democratic Rome by Naples, Spain, and France. Eventually the Republic succumbed to a second, larger French force. Yet, as much as Mazzini and his parliament, Garibaldi and his volunteers had shown that there was the potential for a new Italy, a nation in the making which could be resolute on the battlefield, restrained in revolution, magnanimous in victory, and dignified in defeat. It was a public relations triumph in the midst of a military disaster. But the "democratic initiative"—the idea that a revolution could liberate the country—had clearly missed its best opportunity.

In the following years Garibaldi revised his public persona in order to appeal to a wider and politically moderate public. His hair and beard neatly trimmed, his clothes less sensational if not altogether conventional, he left his guerrilla image behind to become a more gentlemanly figure, a man with whom the party of moderate liberals—in power in Piedmont-Sardinia—could do business. He embodied the national alliance between aristocratic and democratic liberalism and the rejection of what was now dismissed as Mazzinian "sectarianism."

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 8, 2009 11:06 AM