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Garibaldi: Invention of a Hero

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I have been obsessed about Garibaldi for some years now and have read numerous biographies him and histories of the Risorgimento. Lucy Riall is one of the best of a new breed of historians of modern Italy. Her earlier book on the historiography of the Risorgimento is one of the best introductions to the subject. I am a professional historian, but not a specialist in Italian history, so I come to the subject with the interest and knowledge of an avid amateur. I love Italy and find the story of Garibaldi and the Risorgimento full of romance, tragedy, hope, and disappointment.

I admit, I was bracing myself for a post-modern deconstruction of my hero, Garibaldi. Instead, I found her book confirming most of what I admired about the man and his reputation. Garibaldi believed in simple liberal principles of equality, liberty, self-rule, and he despised tyranny, slavery, and religious oppression.

Riall is primarily interested in the fascinating story of how this man emerged as an international hero, a symbol not only of Italy's struggle for national unity and independence, but also of the international struggle of liberal nationalists. She is superb at analyzing how propagandists of the Risorgimento, Mazzini chief among them, made good use of Garibaldi to create a romantic figure that personified Italy's cause. Out of his otherwise unremarkable guerilla fighting in far off South America during the 1830s and 1840s came a legendary figure who, by the time he returned to Italy in 1848, was a figure of international fame. Garibaldi had a magical appeal to women, and Riall is at her best in examining not only his popularity among women but also his rather complicated love life. I read this book last summer at night and could not put it down and get to sleep. It was one of the few history books I've read in years that I really did not want to end.
--Don H. Doyle

This interesting book is a study of the formation of nationalism and nationalist ideas. It touches upon nation formation as well. Riall uses the life and career of Garibaldi as a focal point of the dissemination of nationalist and radical political ideas in Risorgimento Italy. This is not a conventional biography of Garibaldi and anyone who expects a conventional biography will be disappointed by this book. Riall, in fact, draws extensively on prior standard biographical studies, including those of GM Trevelyan and Denis Mack Smith.

Riall is an expert on Risorgimento Italy who has written extensively on nation formation in 19th century Italy. Her point of departure is the fact that Italy, as a nation, did not exist, and that there was only a modest Italian national consciousness prior to the unification of Italy. When the 19th century opened, a sense of Italian national consciousness was only rudimentary and largely restricted to the relatively small number of people. Similarly, Italian as a language was spoken only by a small number of educated Italians and Tuscans from whose region modern literary Italian developed. In the aftermath of the post-Napoleonic reaction, Italian nationalists, who were usually also political radicals, faced the problem of building national consciousness in inhospitable circumstances. The Italian nationalists, like Mazzini, were also children of the Romantic movement and a romanticized view of the French Revolution that emphasized conspiratorial movements and incitement of popular uprisings. In this atmosphere, the public image of Garibaldi became an important tool in building both popular enthusiasm for nationalism and political revolution and in building national consciousness. Riall has a very nice description of how Mazzini, Garibaldi, and others developed Garibaldi's international reputation, based on his adventures in South America, to boost their cause. Riall is careful to specify that Garibaldi's reputation was based solidly in reality. Garibaldi really was a romantic idealist, remarkably brave, strikingly charismatic, sexually magnetic, and his military achievements were real. Garibaldi was also no puppet but rather a shrewd participant in the construction of his reputation.

Riall goes on to show how both Garibaldi's actual achievements and his public persona played important roles in the attainment of Italian unification. Following the failure of the 1848 revolutions, Garibaldi's reputation and the stories of his adventures during the revolutions were important in maintaining the flame of Italian nationalism and radicalism. In the 1850s, Garibaldi achieved a rapprochment of sorts with the pragmatic Piedmontese monarchy and lent his considerable prestige to boost the legitimacy of the Piedmontese cause. Garibaldi was later disillusioned with the Piedmontese compromise with the French and Austrians. In 1860, he embarked on the remarkable expedition to Sicily, which ultimately and unexpectedly toppled the Bourbon kingdom of Southern Italy. Riall shows how important Garibaldi's public image, as well as shrewd military leadership, was for the success of the expedition. Riall shows as well that Garibaldi attempted to wrest the national cause away from the relatively conservative Piedmontese and their moderate supporters in a more radical and democratic direction. Again, Garibaldi's public image and publicity campaigns were crucial in this effort.

Riall's analyses are careful, well documented, and sophisticated. She is very good on the interactions between Garibaldi's actual and very substantial achievements and the publicity campaigns they elicted. The important role of Romanticism in the construction of his heroic image, and the role of emerging popular print media in the mid-19th century are discussed nicely. In her zeal to provide documentation, however, some of her analysis gets lost in repetitive documentation of publicity surrounding Garibali's career. While she is a generally clear writer, there are some examples of the unfortunate tendency to use post-modernist jargon as technical language.

Malicious, cynical, manipulative; these are the words that would describe someone who invented their own hero status and those that collaborated and this is what this book would have us beleive Garbialdi did. But did Giuseppe Garibaldi need someone to invent him as a hero? After working on a ship he found himself in Piedmont(north Italy) in 1933-4 where he was first sentenced to death for revolutionary activities. In 1842 he was in Uruguay leading an Italian 'legion' fighting in a ten year siege of Montevideo against Argentinian forces. In 1849 he was in Rome fighting once again for revolution in Italy. In 1854, after buying an island to become a farmer he was once again fighting in Italy at lake Como. In 1860 he landed in Sicily with a 1,000 'red shirts' and began the process of uniting Italy. He was a dynamic swashbuckling warrior who spent his life in adventure. This was not invented. His life was as dashing as it was later protrayed. It was not a suprise that in a time when the world needed revoltuonary heroes fighting against absolutist oppression that Garibaldi became one of Europe's most famous men.

This book pretends that journalists and biographers and Garibaldi himself all cosnpired to 'invent' and create this fame, that he played up his adventures and his sexual conquests in a cynical way to manipulate the press and perceptions, as if he had sex just to make people think he was a playboy. Perhaps this makes since from the year 2007 when politicians do such things, but perhaps he really was a playboy and a revolutionary and this book is overly cyinical in its attempt to revise history and tear down a hero.

Seth J. Frantzman

Do not bother reading this book. Riall's jaundiced view of history is boring. Tearing down Garibaldi, one of the greatest political figures in nineteenth-century European history, is obviously Riall's pathethic stab at gaining, or perhaps retaining, tenure. If anything, this book should be used as an example of what is wrong with academic literature in our day and age.
If you want to understand Garibaldi, read George Macaulay Trevelyan's "Garibaldi: A Great Life in Brief."