Garibaldi: The First Celebrity

Political leaders were among the earliest to exploit this new trend. Queen Victoria (the ‘first media monarch’ r.1837-1901), Napoleon, his nephew Napoleon III and Pope Pius IX all successfully promoted themselves to create a loyal public. Yet an equally striking sign of modern times was their inability fully to control their image and to guarantee a passive audience for it.

They faced stiff competition from ‘Great Men’ of a different kind who faced danger, loved women and fought tyranny with equal abandonment. These figures appealed to a growing alternative public which had less polite tendencies, a desire for racy entertainment and an appetite for daring romantic heroes. The alliance between politics and publishing was democratized. Radicals pioneered a new style of both which borrowed from popular culture and romantic conventions, and challenged traditional notions of deference, authority and good taste.

Perhaps the greatest, and certainly the most famous, of the new breed of ‘Great Men’ was the Italian nationalist and soldier Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807-82). Born to a family of sailors in Nice in 1807, he rose from relatively humble beginnings, and went on to become the most celebrated radical hero of the nineteenth century. He was perhaps the most successful, and certainly the most spectacular, military leader in the wars for Italian independence (1848-49). His victories helped bring about the unification of Italy, while the story of his battles during the siege of Rome in 1849, in the mountains of Lombardy in 1859 and during the conquest of southern Italy 1860 provided the basis of nationalist legend. As part of the struggle for Italy, Garibaldi became a symbol of Italian ‘resurgence’ (Risorgimento). Initially a political unknown with little, if any, official backing, and a leader who was in power for fewer than six months in his entire political career (in southern Italy in 1860), he was the first to achieve a truly international fame, and to reach a wide audience via the new technologies of mass communication.

At the high point of his fame in the 1860s, Garibaldi’s name sold newspapers and books in London, Paris, Berlin and New York, as well as in Italy, and both writers and readers became caught up in his adventures. Countless images of Garibaldi were produced. His appearances became the occasion for mass celebrations: according to The Times correspondent, as head of the 1860 revolution in Sicily, he enjoyed,  ‘one of those triumphs which seem to be almost too much for a man’; while his visit to London in 1864 ‘resulted in such a scene as can hardly be witnessed twice in a lifetime.’ Young men volunteered to fight and die with him in a long series of wars, and letters arrived at his home on the island of Caprera from adoring fans all over the world.

As told in countless cheap biographies, pseudo-histories and novels,  Garibaldi’s life had all the ingredients to make him popular among the radical reading public. He was a general who triumphed against terrible odds, an honest leader who cared for the common man and a romantic figure who had experienced his full share of personal suffering, loneliness and hardship. He represented the (handsome) human face of revolution; he was, in the words of an English volunteer who observed him in 1860, both a man of the people and ‘immeasurably above them all’.

Garibaldi’s fame was a media creation. It was made possible by the expansion in print culture and the increase in mass literacy, and of a fit between the genres of romantic popular fiction and the spread of radical ideas. There was little that was spontaneous about Garibaldi’s appeal or its meaning, although its popular reception took everyone by surprise. Rather, it was the result of a deliberate political strategy planned by the nationalist leader Giuseppe Mazzini, and implemented by him and a group of talented publicists. Using both the printed word and the image they set out to promote Garibaldi as a real-life radical hero, and to identify him with the plotlines and themes of Italian romantic literature.

By promoting Garibaldi in this way Mazzini sought to resolve the problem of political credibility. Scholars like Eric Hobsbawm and Benedict Anderson see nationalism as a recent recruit in human history, and modern nations as a conscious invention of new elites. But the symbols and traditions that might have reinforced and legitimized the new nationalist agenda were lacking in Italy. Many of the obvious markers of belonging to a national community – a single, secular monarchy, a common spoken language, a continuous history of national unity – were effectively absent, while the one truly national symbol, the papacy in Rome, seemed resolutely reactionary and was the representative of an alternative, transnational Catholic identity.

The absence of a national, secular political culture explains why Mazzini’s proposals for a united Italian nation were often considered foolish by his contemporaries. In order to realize their unitarian aims, Mazzini and his followers had first to persuade Italians that these aims were realistic. Garibaldi, who had made a small name for himself in Uruguay fighting against the Argentine dictator Rosas in the early 1840s, was intentionally taken-up and sponsored by Mazzini as the embodiment of ‘Italian-ness’ (italianità), and living proof of the national risorgimento which Mazzini promoted in his writings.

As a result of his revolutionary activities Mazzini was forced to live as a political exile in London for almost his entire career, from 1837 until his death in 1872. In London, he created an extended radical network, which included most of the foreign exiles in the capital, and  extended throughout Europe and  the Americas as well. It was through this network that Mazzini contacted Garibaldi, and through the same network that he spread Garibaldi’s fame. Indeed, from the moment he first heard of Garibaldi’s military exploits in Uruguay, Mazzini set out to celebrate them. He published two articles about Garibaldi and his Italian Legion in his London paper, Apostolato Popolare. Garibaldi was a man who ‘brings honour on the Italian name’, the paper announced, ‘and we name him with praise and pride ... since we are sure that he considers his career in South America as but an apprenticeship for the Italian war which will call him back to Europe one day’ (to his mother, Mazzini wrote that Garibaldi and his men ‘should die for Italy and in Italy’).

In January 1846, Mazzini wrote a letter to The Times applauding the bravery, honesty and patriotism of Garibaldi’s Italian Legion. In July  the same year, he wrote a new introduction to this letter, published it as a pamphlet and translated it into French, so as to circulate it in Continental Europe and encourage those ‘good people who have strong feelings of charity towards the fatherland’. In the two years before the outbreak of European revolution in 1848, Mazzini promoted Garibaldi relentlessly. With Mazzini’s encouragement, the Swiss-based radical, Filippo de Boni, published a celebration of Garibaldi in his new magazine Così la Penso. Giovann Battista Cuneo, a Mazzinian journalist based in Uruguay, produced for the Italian press what Mazzini termed ‘a short historical outline’ of the Legion; in reality it was a lengthy narrative of courageous deeds, battles won and national honour reclaimed, which bore a striking resemblance to contemporary romantic narratives. Mazzini also wrote to the Turin publisher and prominent reformer, Lorenzo Valerio, with documents and letters about Garibaldi which Valerio duly published in his newspapers and circulated to other journalists and activists. Finally, Mazzini commissioned a portrait of Garibaldi (‘it will be useful to increase his fame’, he commented), which was lithographed and circulated to raise money for the nationalist cause.

As a result of these efforts, when Garibaldi returned to Italy in the spring of 1848, arriving just after the outbreak of revolution and in time for the self-styled national war on Austria, he was already a well-known figure, celebrated for his exploits upholding Italian honour and political freedom in ‘foreign lands’. Thanks to Mazzini’s efforts with the press, Garibaldi had become identified with courage, generosity and moral righteousness – virtues exalted as inherent elements of italianità. A heroic script had been established, and radical journalists in Italy and elsewhere were on hand to produce the requisite narrative and to counteract any negative publicity (the Catholic press in France were especially hostile to Italian unitary nationalism).

It helped enormously that Garibaldi himself looked and acted the part. He was good-looking, with long hair, a strong, athletic body, charming manner and flamboyant clothes, notably a bright red blouse that he wore loosely tied around his waist. Perhaps the best description of Garibaldi at this time is given by a British naval officer, who saw him ‘in the full vigour of his manhood’ shortly before he left South America for Italy, and who commented on his:

... firm well-built frame which sat his horse like a centaur. He wore his hair and beard long; they were then of a dark brown colour, with a reddish tint in the latter. His countenance was remarkable for its serenity, and the lips pressed close together denoted a strong will, whilst his eyes were steadfast and piercing in their gaze. In stature he was of medium height, and was altogether the beau ideal of a chief of irregular troops.