Giuseppe Garibaldi

Giuseppe Garibaldi was an Italian soldier and revolutionary, the most popular hero of the Risorgimento, the movement that united Italy in the nineteenth century. After years of fighting in South America, he defended the Roman Republic in 1849 and in 1860 led a small force of volunteers, the Thousand, which conquered Sicily and Naples and handed southern Italy to King Victor Emmanuel II. A republican who accepted the monarchy for the sake of unity, he became one of the most admired figures of his age across Europe and the Americas.

Garibaldi was born on 4 July 1807 in Nice, then part of Napoleonic France and from 1814 part of the Kingdom of Sardinia, ruled from Turin. His family came from the Ligurian coast and worked in coastal shipping, and he went to sea as a young man, qualifying as a merchant captain. On a voyage to the Black Sea in 1833 he met a follower of Giuseppe Mazzini, whose secret society, Young Italy, aimed to create a united Italian republic. Garibaldi met Mazzini that year and took part in a failed rising in Piedmont in February 1834. He fled to France and was sentenced to death in his absence.

In 1835 Garibaldi sailed for Brazil, where he joined the rebels of Rio Grande do Sul, known as the Ragamuffins, in their war of secession against the Empire of Brazil. He commanded small ships and fought on land, learning the guerrilla tactics he would use for the rest of his life. There he met Ana Maria de Jesus Ribeiro, known as Anita, who rode and fought beside him. They married in 1842.

The couple then moved to Montevideo, where Garibaldi took the side of the government of Uruguay in its long civil war, which was entangled with the ambitions of the Argentine ruler Juan Manuel de Rosas. He commanded the small Uruguayan navy and formed an Italian Legion from the city's exiles. Its members wore red shirts, reportedly bought cheaply from a factory that made them for slaughterhouse workers, and the red shirt became the emblem of his followers. Reports of his exploits, especially at San Antonio in 1846, made him famous in Italy before he had fought there.

When revolutions swept the Italian states in 1848, Garibaldi returned home. King Charles Albert of Sardinia, then at war with the Habsburg Monarchy, received him coolly, and he fought a brief campaign of his own against the Austrians in Lombardy. After the pope fled Rome, a Roman Republic was proclaimed in February 1849 in the former Papal States, led by Mazzini and others. Garibaldi took charge of much of its defence. On 30 April his troops threw back a French expeditionary force sent by Louis Napoleon, but French reinforcements laid siege to the city, which fell at the end of June.

Garibaldi refused to surrender and led several thousand men out of Rome, hoping to reach Venice, which was still holding out. Pursued by French, Austrian, Spanish and Neapolitan troops, the column dwindled until he disbanded it in San Marino. Anita, pregnant and ill, died near Ravenna on 4 August 1849. The retreat became one of the founding legends of Italian nationalism.

Expelled from Piedmont, Garibaldi spent several years abroad. He worked for a time in a candle factory on Staten Island in New York, then captained merchant ships in the Pacific, sailing as far as China. Returning to Europe in 1854, he bought land on the small island of Caprera, off Sardinia, which became his home.

By now he had concluded that unity could only be won with the help of the Piedmontese monarchy, and he broke with Mazzini's strict republicanism. When Piedmont and France went to war with Austria in 1859, he commanded a volunteer corps, the Hunters of the Alps, winning victories at Varese and San Fermo. The peace that followed gave Lombardy to Piedmont, and in 1860 the prime minister, Count Cavour, ceded Nice and Savoy to France as the price of French support. Garibaldi never forgave him for giving away his birthplace.

In April 1860 a revolt broke out in Sicily, part of the Bourbon Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. On the night of 5 May Garibaldi sailed from near Genoa with just over a thousand volunteers, most of them students, artisans and professionals from the north, and landed at Marsala on 11 May. Cavour's government neither openly supported nor stopped him. After defeating a larger force at Calatafimi on 15 May, Garibaldi declared himself dictator of Sicily in the name of Victor Emmanuel and, with the help of an uprising in the city, took Palermo by early June. Victory at Milazzo in July gave him almost the whole island.

He crossed to the mainland in August and advanced through Calabria with little resistance, entering Naples by train on 7 September after King Francis II had withdrawn. At the Volturno at the beginning of October his volunteers, about 24,000 strong, held off the reorganised Neapolitan army, the largest battle he ever fought. Meanwhile Cavour, afraid that Garibaldi would march on Rome and provoke France, sent the Piedmontese army south through the Papal States. Plebiscites approved union with Piedmont, and on 26 October Garibaldi met Victor Emmanuel near Teano and saluted him as King of Italy. He handed over his conquests, declined titles and rewards, and went home to Caprera. The Kingdom of Italy was proclaimed in March 1861, the decisive stage in the unification of Italy.

Rome, protected by a French garrison, and Venetia, still Austrian, remained outside the new kingdom. In 1862 Garibaldi raised volunteers in Sicily under the slogan "Rome or death", but the Italian government, anxious about France, sent regular troops to stop him. At Aspromonte in Calabria in late August he was shot in the foot and taken prisoner, then later released. In 1864 he visited England, where huge crowds greeted him in London. In the war of 1866 against Austria he led volunteers in the Trentino and won at Bezzecca, but obeyed an order to withdraw when the armistice came, replying with a single word, "I obey". Venetia was gained through Prussia's victory. A new march on Rome in 1867 ended in defeat by French and papal troops at Mentana on 3 November. Rome finally became Italian in 1870, after the French withdrew during their war with Prussia, without Garibaldi's involvement.

Despite his earlier quarrels with France, Garibaldi offered his services to the new French Republic in 1870 and commanded a volunteer Army of the Vosges against the Germans. He was elected to the French National Assembly in 1871 but soon resigned. He also sat for many years in the Italian parliament, on the left, supporting causes such as universal suffrage, the emancipation of women and the abolition of the pope's temporal power, and he was fiercely anticlerical. He wrote memoirs and several novels. In 1880 he married Francesca Armosino, the mother of several of his younger children. He died on Caprera on 2 June 1882 and was buried there.

Garibaldi was celebrated in his lifetime as the "hero of two worlds", and later Italian regimes of every kind, liberal, fascist and republican, claimed him. Historians stress both his gifts as a guerrilla leader and his political naivety, and note that his campaign in the south did little for the Sicilian peasants, whose land revolts his officers sometimes put down. His readiness to put national unity before his own republican convictions, and his refusal to profit from his victories, did much to make him the most enduring symbol of modern Italy.