Garibaldi: Citizen of the World: A Biography available in Hardcover, eBook
Garibaldi: Citizen of the World: A Biography
- ISBN-10:
- 0691115400
- ISBN-13:
- 9780691115405
- Pub. Date:
- 09/02/2007
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0691115400
- ISBN-13:
- 9780691115405
- Pub. Date:
- 09/02/2007
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
Garibaldi: Citizen of the World: A Biography
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Overview
Scirocco tells how Garibaldi devoted his energies to the liberation of Italians and other oppressed peoples. Sentenced to death for his role in an abortive Genoese insurrection in 1834, Garibaldi fled to South America, where he joined two successive fights for independence—Rio Grande do Sul's against Brazil and Uruguay's against Argentina. He returned to Italy in 1848 to again fight for Italian independence, leading seven more campaigns, including the spectacular capture of Sicily. During the American Civil War, Abraham Lincoln even offered to make him a general in the Union army.
Presenting Garibaldi as a complex and even contradictory figure, Scirocco shows us the pacifist who spent much of his life fighting; the nationalist who advocated European unification; the republican who served a king; and the man who, although compared by contemporaries to Aeneas and Odysseus, refused honors and wealth and spent his last years as a farmer.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691115405 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 09/02/2007 |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 456 |
| Sales rank: | 539,243 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.25(h) x (d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Garibaldi: Citizen of the World A Biography
By Alfonso Scirocco Princeton University Press
Copyright © 2007 Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-11540-5
Chapter One Sailing the Mediterranean
When Giuseppe Garibaldi was born on 4 July 1807, Nice was a sleepy little town which had until recently been under the dominion of the dukes of Savoy for two centuries. Thus it had once been the port of Savoy and Piedmont, as they were separated from the sea by the Republic of Genoa, which extended for the full length of the Ligurian coast. It had retained this function and its related privileges when the dukes of Savoy enlarged their dominions and acquired the title of kings of Sardinia in 1722. In 1792, the armies of revolutionary France conquered Nice, and its destiny was changed. As a territory annexed by France, it found the republic's and Napoleon's grand experiments to be very disadvantageous. The empire's expansionist policy imposed high taxes to finance the war and a "blood tax" in the form of conscription, which reflected the national complexion that armies had then acquired. Its integration into the territory of France entailed an attempt to eradicate its Italian character: Joseph-Marie Garibaldi's birth certificate was written in French (but in other official documents he is called Giuseppe Maria). Competition from the large ports of Marseille and Genoa, which was also annexed by France, reduced Nice's share of trade.
Nice rejoiced at the fall ofNapoleon. The return of the ancient dynasty of Victor Emanuel I raised hopes of a return to the previous monopoly over sea trade with Piedmont and Savoy, but that was not to happen. The great powers that met at a congress in Vienna had to ensure a lasting peace for a continent that had suffered twenty-five years of bloody wars, and they therefore had to strengthen all the states that bordered on France in order to contain any future aggressions. In 1814 the Republic of Genoa disappeared and Liguria became part of the Kingdom of Sardinia. Genoa thus became the principal port of the enlarged state, and Nice a seaport of secondary importance.
The Garibaldi family took little notice of these political vicissitudes, immersed as it was in the immediacy of its daily grind. The family came from Liguria. Giuseppe's grandfather, Angelo, was from Chiavari, and his father, Domenico, was born there in 1766. He later moved to Nice, where in 1794 he married Rosa Raimondo who was ten years his junior and was from Loano, also in Liguria. They had six children: two girls, who died during infancy, and four boys, Angelo, Giuseppe, Michele, and Felice. Domenico and his family lived with his brother-in-law's family, the Gustavins. They did not own the house, which was demolished at the end of the nineteenth century when the port was enlarged. Around 1814, they moved to Aboudaram House in Quai Lunel, where the children grew up. The family's financial position was fairly good. Domenico was a sea captain and owned or partly owned a tartane, a small vessel with a lateen sail that was used in the Mediterranean. The ship was called Santa Reparata, and he used it for coastal trade with varying degrees of success. He was not very highly educated, and had few ambitions and limited abilities (indeed his business did not always go well), but he did not let his children miss out on their schooling. In this he was influenced by his more cultured wife. A practicing Catholic, she was charitable and compassionate to the poor, who returned her kindness with affection. Giuseppe, who was known as Peppino in the family, was to hold her memory dear; in his Memoirs he wrote, "I can claim with pride that she is an example to other mothers." He would also worry about her: "Take care of my poor mother if you love me.... My mother was always such a good woman," he exhorted his wife, Anita, who left for Nice before him in March of 1848. He also respected her beliefs, and in December of the same year he bought her a box of rosary beads in Loreto. He worried about her means of support but did not burden her with his concerns. In 1850, when he found himself in Tangiers at the start of another period of exile full of uncertainties, he rejected his cousin's advice that she had to be more frugal. He considered it improper "to sadden my aging and highly sensitive mother with reproofs that could only serve to afflict her and not to change her behavior." Instead, he asked his relation "to pawn or sell my sword-a gift from the Italian nation-should all other providential means be exhausted."
All the Garibaldi children found good positions. Angelo moved to the United States where he became a businessman and the consul for the Kingdom of Sardinia in Philadelphia. Michele (the only one to marry and remain childless) became a sea captain. Felice, a dapper womanizer, represented the shipping company Avigdor in Bari, a major center for the export of olive oil from Southern Italy. None of them reached old age, and Michele, who lived longest, only survived to fifty-six.
Although life separated them once they reached adulthood, they continued to correspond. Giuseppe was just like any other boy. "Like so many other lads, my childhood went by with a mixture of play, happiness, and misery.... There was nothing odd about my youth," he was to write in his Memoirs. However, aspects of his character were already emerging. He was a sensitive boy who cried when he unintentionally broke the leg of a cricket he had captured. He was generous and always ready to help others: as a teenager he saved a woman who was drowning in a canal; years later he rescued a sailor in Smyrna; at the beginning of his exile in Marseille, dressed for the promenade, he threw himself into the sea to aid a French fourteen- year-old; and he saved a black man in Rio.
He had a strong and independent character. He felt, as he himself was to admit, "a propensity to a life of adventure." Giving free rein to his imagination, he dreamed of daring escapades at sea and rejected his father's lazy routine. He resisted his parents' attempts to turn him into a provincial notable-a lawyer, doctor, or priest. When they sent him to study in Genoa, he found educational discipline insufferable and during the holidays, he took possession of a boat and sailed off toward Liguria with some other youths. He was soon caught and given permission to go to sea. Up to that time he had not taken much advantage of his schooling, and he acknowledged that he had been "more a friend of pleasure than of study." He regretted that his father had not made him engage in gymnastics, fencing, and other "physical exercises." Gifted with an athletic physique, he became an excellent swimmer, and used ships as his gym when they were in port. However, his early tutors did leave their mark on him. There were two clergymen one of whom taught him rudimentary English, but they were less important than a veteran of Napoleon's military campaigns, Signor Arena, who taught him Italian through readings of ancient history. Nice, positioned on a linguistic border, was not a town where Italian was particularly cultivated, but Garibaldi, at his brother Angelo's instigation, studied it in depth and developed an early interest in ancient Rome, an interest that was to remain with him throughout his life.
Giuseppe molded his unsystematic education according to his own needs and personal inclinations. He read a great deal during the hours of inactivity imposed by long sea voyages and during his moments of solitude. He studied various disciplines in such depth that when he happened on hard times, he was able to make a living by teaching them. He was a fund of scientific information, and when he farmed in Caprera, he bought treatises on agronomy. He loved literature and poetry: he memorized Foscolo's I sepolcri and Berchet's poetry, he often read André Chénier, and had a particu lar fondness for historians of Greece and Rome, and for novels full of patriotism and the desire for social justice by such writers as Victor Hugo and Francesco Domenico Guerrazzi. Once his intellectual horizons had widened and his knowledge of social doctrines and philosophical problems increased, he started to read more diffi cult texts: he declared himself a follower of Cesare Beccaria and considered Voltaire and Rousseau "veritable granite pillars on which universal intelligence was built." His book collection included Gaetano Filangieri's Scienza della legislazione, and he was well acquainted with the works of French radicals and socialists of his time. He was himself a prolific writer: he used his periods of enforced idleness to write novels, poetry, and his Memoirs.
However, it took time for him to open his mind to a political commitment and a comprehensive perception of the world. The first part of his life was characterized by routine professional activity, which he fulfilled with enthusiasm. He prepared for his exams to captain a ship while still in his teens. As a grown man, he found that practical knowledge of the sea was not enough for him. He took the trouble to learn the theory required for commanding a ship, unlike his father, who in his opinion did not have "the kind of knowledge that men of his class are endowed with in our generation." During his long career at sea he had no difficulty in adapting to a shift from Mediterranean routes to oceanic ones or from sailing ships to steamships. He had complete command of Italian and French; he spoke Spanish and Portuguese well, having learned them in South America; and he could express himself quite adequately in English and German. At all times, he was able to act confidently in whatever circles circumstance was to place him.
His apprenticeship started early. He was registered as a trainee in 1821, and his first officially recorded voyage took place in January 1824 on the brigantine Costanza when he was sixteen. The ship, which sailed under a Russian flag but was run by an Italian crew, was to remain deeply imbedded in his imagination. He always remembered its wide beam and narrow masts. Its captain, Angelo Pesante, whom he would meet again later in life, was "the best sea captain I have ever known." This initiation to maritime life-an exciting experience for an adolescent with a fertile imagination-took him as far as the Black Sea, a voyage that he was to repeat many times. When maritime routes were reopened at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the markets were flooded with cheap wheat from the Ukraine, where it had been produced since the late eighteenth century. Odessa and even more distant Taganrog, which lies at the other end of the Sea of Azov, became regular destinations for ships supplying Mediterranean countries. In addition to wheat from the Black Sea region, Nice imported wheat from Southern Italy; less essential cereals, spices, and dried fruit from France, Sicily, and Calabria; and marble from Tuscany. Its main trading partner was France, which sent alcohol, leather, clothing, and livestock. The port also developed a very buoyant business with France, Southern Italy, and North Africa involving the import and reexport of olive oil used as the raw material in the production of soap. There was, therefore, coastal trade with Provence and the Languedoc in one direction, and with Tuscany and Southern Italy as far as Romagna in the other.
Small ships were used along the coasts of the Gulf of Lions, the Tyrrhenian Sea, and the Adriatic.
One of these was Domenico Garibaldi's tartane. Giuseppe's parents had been anxious about him during his long voyage on the Costanza. When he returned in July, the young man stayed with his family. In November we find him on the Santa Reparata for a less demanding voyage along the French coast as an unpaid apprentice in a crew of five men. The following year he made an unforgettable journey with his father. Since 1300 when Boniface VIII called the first Jubilee, the great manifestation of faith had been held at the end of each century. In 1800, it was not possible to celebrate one because of the wars that were afflicting Europe. Leo XII therefore proclaimed 1825 a Jubilee year. Captain Domenico took a cargo of wine to Rome to supply the pilgrims. The small ship this time took on a crew of eight, and Giuseppe received his first pay. Hugging the coast, it stopped off at Livorno, Porto Longone, and Civitavecchia. On 12 April it arrived in Fiumicino and was drawn up the Tiber by buffaloes to berth in the city at the port of Ripetta. A dispute over the remuneration to the contractor who provided the buffaloes extended their stay in the city for some weeks. Giuseppe was able to admire the remains of ancient Rome, about whose greatness he had read so much. He was intoxicated by the "capital of the world" and the "relics of all that was greatest in the past." Many years later, Rome was to become for him "the symbol of united Italy."
Breaking away from his family's orbit, he signed on with the crews of much bigger ships than his father's tartane. They were always sailing ships of average size, a little over two hundred tons with crews of between fifteen and twenty men. They were cargo ships but occasionally carried passengers. His frequent voyages took him to almost all of the Mediterranean, as is made clear by his Memoirs and the well-documented ships' log. In 1827 he passed through the Strait of Gibraltar on the Coromandel and reached the Canaries. That same year, he joined the crew of the Cortese, which set sail from Nice in September bound for the Black Sea. It was already late in the year, and there was a risk of being trapped by the ice. As it turned out, ill fortune was to dog the voyage: the ship was boarded by pirates on three occasions. As the Greeks had risen up against their Turkish rulers, the Aegean was infested with privateers fighting their enemies and pirates who plundered neutral merchant ships. Everything was taken from the Cortese, including the navigational instruments and the crew's clothing. Garibaldi contemptuously recalled the captain's failure to resist, even though the ship was armed, albeit with only twenty- four rifles. In 1832, however, the captain of the Clorinda, armed with two cannon, four heavy mounted rifles, and thirty handheld rifles, engaged in battle and the pirates fled the sustained fire. Garibaldi, who suffered a grazing wound to his right hand, noted this skirmish down as his first military engagement.
Garibaldi became ill on the return voyage of the Cortese, and in August 1828 he left his ship in Constantinople. He stayed there for almost three years, and returned to Nice only in the spring of 1831. We do not know the reason for this long sojourn, which may have been partly caused by the outbreak of the Russo-Turkish War, but this conflict was brought to a close by the Treaty of Edirne in 1829. We know only that he was helped by the city's large Italian community, and in particular by Luisa Sauvaigo, who also came from Nice-"one of those creatures who have convinced me that women are the most perfect of all beings." He earned his living by teaching Italian, French, and mathematics to the children of a Mrs. Timoni. Ten years earlier he could hardly have imagined himself in the role of a tutor!
He returned to sea and the usual routes, which often took in Smyrna and Constantinople as well as the Black Sea ports. His career in the merchant navy brought him promotion and financial advantage. In February 1832 he was issued with a second-class master's ticket. He recalled his first command as the brigantine Nostra Signora delle Grazie destined for Gibraltar and Constantinople, but we cannot find any record of this. We do know, however, that in that same February 1832 he signed on as first mate on the Clorinda (which had a crew of twenty men), with a monthly pay of fifty Piedmontese pounds, half the salary of his captain, Simone Clary. It was a six-month trip to Constantinople and Taganrog. In 1833, it was calculated that he had completed seventy-two months of effective employment at sea. It was a hard school, and we can well imagine the kind of life he led during his long absences from Nice. In fictional accounts, ships are portrayed scudding across the waves and manned by colorful sailors in red linen shirts. The reality was exhausting work on the sails, long watches, pump duty when water seeped through the joins in the wood, the tedium of flat calm, repetitive diet, the discomfort of restricted space, and the difficulties of personal hygiene. During the epic undertaking known as the Expedition of the Thousand, General Garibaldi was seen crouching over the side of the ship with his trousers unbuttoned so that he could defecate directly into the sea, a practice that he had learned in his youth.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Garibaldi: Citizen of the World by Alfonso Scirocco
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Table of Contents
Introduction ix
Chapter 1: Sailing the Mediterranean 1
Chapter 2: From Conspiracy to Exile 17
Chapter 3: The Rio Interlude 27
Chapter 4: Privateer 39
Chapter 5: In Rio Grande 54
Chapter 6: Loves, Friendships, and Amusements 74
Chapter 7: The Costa Brava Expedition 82
Chapter 8: Montevideo 95
Chapter 9: San Antonio de Salto 108
Chapter 10: His Fame Spreads 125
Chapter 11: Italy in 1848: The General Call to Arms 138
Chapter 12: The Rome Events of 1849 151
Chapter 13: The Bold Defi ance of 1849 168
Chapter 14: The Gray Years 182
Chapter 15: In the King's Ser vice 203
Chapter 16: Po liti cal Frustrations and Disappointments in Love 221
Chapter 17: The Epic Campaign of the Thousand 236
Chapter 18: The Dictator of Sicily 263
Chapter 19: Master of a Kingdom 287
Chapter 20: From the Solitude of Caprera to the Drama of Aspromonte 309
Chapter 21: Triumph in London 331
Chapter 22: Bezzecca, Mentana, and Dijon 343
Chapter 23: Pacifi sm, Socialism, and Democracy 364
Chapter 24: The Final Years: Family, Literary Activities, and Financial Concerns 388
Chapter 25: Epilogue 400
Chronology of Events 411
Bibliography 417
Index 431
What People are Saying About This
"The most difficult achievement for anyone writing on Garibaldi is to compose a biography that does not sound like a novel or a legend but at the same time captures one of the most extraordinary figures of the nineteenth century. Alfonso Scirocco has succeeded in this task. He combines historical depth with a writing style that is both elegant and captivating."—Maurizio Viroli, author of Niccolò's Smile: A Biography of Machiavelli
The most difficult achievement for anyone writing on Garibaldi is to compose a biography that does not sound like a novel or a legend but at the same time captures one of the most extraordinary figures of the nineteenth century. Alfonso Scirocco has succeeded in this task. He combines historical depth with a writing style that is both elegant and captivating.
— Maurizio Viroli, author of "Niccolo's Smile: A Biography of Machiavelli"