Giuseppe Garibaldi was an Italian military and nationalist leader. Through his conquest of Sicily and Naples with his guerrilla Redshirts, he contributed to the achievement of Italian unification under the royal house of Savoy. He has been hailed as one of the ‘Fathers of the Fatherland’ for his contribution to the Italian Risorgimento.
Background
Giuseppe Garibaldi was born on July 4, 1807, at Nice, which was at that time a French town, to the Ligurian family of Domenico Garibaldi from Chiavari and Maria Rosa Nicoletta Raimondi from Loano. His mother was a pious woman, who wanted Giuseppe Garibaldi to join priesthood.
Education
In 1832 Giuseppe Garibaldi acquired a master’s certificate as a merchant captain.
Career
The son of a sea captain who had intended for him a career as a professional, Garibaldi very early betrayed his father's aspirations and, at the age of sixteen, began to traverse the length and breadth of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, as far as Smyrna, Istanbul, Odessa, and Taganrog. In 1832, far from Italy, the young sailor first heard of Henri de Saint-Simon and Giuseppe Mazzini, of socialism and nationalism, and he was smitten. Two years later, when the partisans of Mazzini organized an insurrection at Genoa, Garibaldi, who was serving on a ship anchored in the harbor, debarked and attempted to participate in the escapade. The revolt, however, came to naught, and Garibaldi, never having returned to his ship, ended up being accused, tried in absentia, and condemned to death. He thus became an exile and a martyr in the cause of liberty, and the following year, after joining Giovine Italia (Young Italy, a revolutionary organization founded by Mazzini in 1831), he departed for Latin America.
He arrived at Rio de Janeiro at the end of 1835, welcomed by Mazzini's supporters as the "hero of Genoa," and two years later joined the republicans of the Rio Grande do Sul, a province of the empire of Brazil that was struggling for its independence. Employed by the rebels to command the small separatist fleet, at the head of a crew of adventurers and buccaneers, Garibaldi conducted forays against Brazilian ships, laid daring ambushes, suffered reprisals, conquered cities, endured arduous retreats, and was wounded, imprisoned, and tortured. In 1840, when the Brazilians looked to have bested the rebels, he left the Rio Grande province and arrived at Montevideo in the following year, after an adventure-filled march of five months. There, he promptly threw himself into the bitter civil war that had broken out in Uruguay in the wake of independence, a war intertwined with the conflict between Argentina and the liberal powers of Europe. In Montevideo, the adventure recommenced. Having taken command of the naval squadron of the progressives of José Fructuosa Rivera, Garibaldi took up the fight against the Argentine fleet, together with English and French contingents. He was brash, daring, and capable. He attacked the enemy and quickly retreated, requisitioned civil and military vessels, hid in the great fluvial network of the Paraná, organized impossible forced marches through the forest, occupied cities and villages, and was accused by the Argentine press of theft and violence against the civil population. Hero or brigand, his fame in Montevideo grew by the day, and his name appeared ever more frequently in the European and North American press.
Finally, in 1848, Garibaldi left South America, attracted by events in Italy and strengthened by an experience that had taught him the art of war and guerilla tactics; tempered him in the command of men; accustomed him to dangerous situations, unequal contests of force, and public violence; and, not least, made him suspicious of the complex games of the political arena. He returned from South America with a concept of a military dictatorship that he hoped would provide an antidote to those games but that, even though ennobled by appeals to classicism, would be difficult to transplant from its Latin American context to a European milieu.
In Italy, in 1849, Garibaldi was a protagonist in the desperate struggle of the Roman Republic against the French, Neapolitans, and Austrians. His deeds were on the lips of all, and even his flight from Rome became legendary: the perilous journey north, the death of his wife, Anita, along the way, and his long wandering through Tuscany, Liguria, and the North African coast. As always, there was no repose for Garibaldi. In 1850 he went to New York, then to Peru, and from there to China. Yet in 1854 he was again in Europe, and in the following year he bought part of the island of Caprera, a refuge from the delusions of public activity and, obviously, a classic site of pilgrimage for the devout of the whole globe, aiming to see and meet their hero. Meanwhile, giving testament to his realism and entering on a collision course with Mazzini, he decided to support the nationalist project of the Savoyard monarchy. In 1859, having been named a general, he led his Cacciatori delle Alpi (Alpine Hunters) to war against the Austrians. Shortly thereafter, on 11 May 1860, Garibaldi landed with a thousand volunteers (the Redshirts) on a Sicily in the throes of revolution. In the span of two months, thanks to a rapid series of military successes that laid low the far more numerous Bourbon army, Garibaldi conquered Palermo and the entire island. He then went to Calabria, rapidly traversed the south of Italy, and on 7 September entered triumphantly into Naples, capital of the Bourbon king, Francis II.
The conquest of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies was stunning, on a military level, because of the disparity of the forces in the field and the blinding speed of events. On a political level, the situation was more complex because Garibaldi was operating on a razor's edge. Though he was a democrat, Mazzini was deeply suspicious of him. Garibaldi was supported by the newly proclaimed king of Italy, Victor Emmanuel II, but failed to prevail over the subtle political and diplomatic maneuverings of Count Cavour, who while interested in the success of the undertaking had to repudiate it officially in front of his French allies, and who had no intention of granting any leeway to the democrats. Little wonder, then, that after 1861 - the year of Italian unification - Garibaldi became both a national hero and a source of grave embarrassment for Italy's right-wing government. His priority was to liberate Rome from papal rule, an unrealistic objective in light of existing Italian alliances. Yet the general moved of his own accord, and in the summer of 1862, he assembled a small army of volunteers and attempted a surprise attack. He landed in Sicily and then moved to Calabria, where he prepared to set out for the north, but was intercepted by regular Italian troops in Aspromonte, who opened fire, wounded him, and arrested him. Five years later, in 1867, he again planned to use force to regain Rome. To prevent this he was arrested, but made a theatrical escape only to flee in improbable fashion and be defeated by the French at Mentana.
The military undertaking of 1867 was Garibaldi's last, other than his participation on the French side in the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871). But the last twenty years of his life, from 1862 to 1882, took an increasingly schizophrenic form, between the already worldwide scale of his myth and the great difficulties of integrating a charismatic leader of his ilk into Italian political life. In the words of the American ambassador in Turin, he had become "a great power." London welcomed him in 1864 with the largest crowd ever seen in the British capital; Abraham Lincoln sought, unsuccessfully, Garibaldi's participation in the battle against slavery; Poles fighting for independence sought his aid. And his Memoirs were translated into eleven languages. Meanwhile in Italy, everyone adopted his iconic image, but neither democrats nor moderates were disposed to follow him in his initiatives or in his strident denunciations of parliamentary government.
Even after his death on Caprera on June 2, 1882, the icon of Garibaldi continued to be invoked in very different political contexts. It was the banner of those who pressed for Italy's intervention in World War I in 1915, of Fascists preaching dictatorship, and of the Socialists and Communists who in 1948 vied for control of the government with the Christian Democrats of Alcide De Gasperi. In the late twentieth century, the story of the general would be reprised by Bettino Craxi, another controversial and innovative leader. Yet the changing and often contradictory uses to which his image has been put illustrates, if not the ambiguity, then certainly the political fragility of Garibaldi.
Garibaldi himself was intensely anti-Catholic and anti-papal. His efforts to overthrow the pope by military action mobilized anti-Catholic support. For example, there were major anti-Catholic riots in his name across Britain in 1862, with the Irish Catholics fighting in defense of their Church. However, in some writings, he supported Christianity: "I am a Christian, and I speak to Christians – I am a true Christian, and I speak to true Christians. I love and venerate the religion of Christ, because Christ came into the world to deliver humanity from slavery…"
However, his approach to Christianity was more individualistic with little interest in the church.
Politics
During the 1830s, Garibaldi became involved in the "Young Italy" movement led by Giuseppe Mazzini. The party was devoted to the liberation and unification of Italy, large parts of which were then ruled by Austria or the Papacy.
Garibaldi’s forthright innocence colored his politics in his senior age. Not interested in power for himself, he nevertheless believed in dictatorship as a result of his South American experiences. He distrusted parliaments because he saw them to be ineffective and corrupt. Actually, his own dictatorship of southern Italy in 1860, though much criticized, compares surprisingly well with the subsequent administration by the Kingdom of Italy. There was little of the intellectual about Garibaldi, yet his simple radicalism sparked the first political awareness in many of his fellow countrymen and brought home to them the significance of nationality.
Views
Notwithstanding his turn toward socialism, Giuseppe Garibaldi remained primarily a nationalist - but the object of his nationalism was always the liberation of peoples and not patriotic aggrandizement. To his embodiment of this aim he owes his eminent place in Italian history.
Quotations:
"Give me the ready hand rather than the ready tongue."
"The priest is the personification of falsehood."
"I offer neither pay, nor quarters, nor food; I offer only hunger, thirst, forced marches, battles, and death. Let him who loves his country with his heart, and not merely with his lips, follow me."
"Bacchus has drowned more men than Neptune."
"The day the peasants will be educated in the truth, tyrants and slaves will be impossible on earth."
"You, too, women, cast away all the cowards from your embraces; they will give you only cowards for children, and you who are the daughters of the land of beauty must bear children who are noble and brave."
Membership
Garibaldi joined Freemasonry during his exile, taking advantage of the asylum the lodges offered to political refugees from European countries governed by despotic regimes. At the age of thirty-seven, during 1844, Garibaldi was initiated in the L'Asil de la Vertud Lodge of Montevideo. This was an irregular lodge under a Brazilian Freemasonry not recognized by the main international masonic obediences, such as the United Grand Lodge of England or the Grand Orient de France.
While Garibaldi had little use for Masonic rituals, he was an active Freemason and regarded Freemasonry as a network that united progressive men as brothers both within nations and as a global community. Garibaldi was eventually elected as the Grand Master of the Grand Orient of Italy.
Garibaldi later regularized his position in 1844, joining the lodge Les Amis de la Patrie of Montevideo under the Grand Orient of France.
Masonic lodge
Personality
A man of the people, Giuseppe Garibaldi knew far better than Cavour or Mazzini how to reach the masses with the new message of patriotism. Furthermore, his use of his military and political gifts for liberal or nationalist causes coincided well with current fashion and brought him great acclaim. In addition, he attracted support by being a truly honest man who asked little for himself.
Connections
In 1841 Garibaldi met his wife, Anita, who became his inseparable companion and mother of four children, Domenico Menotti (1840–1903), Rosa (1843–1945), Teresa Teresita (1845–1903), and Ricciotti (1847–1924).
On 24 January 1860, Garibaldi married an 18-year-old Lombard woman, Giuseppina Raimondi. Immediately after the wedding ceremony, she informed him that she was pregnant with another man's child and Garibaldi left her the same day.
In 1880, he married Francesca Armosino, with whom he previously had three children.