Garibaldi

The foremost military figure and popular hero of the age of Italian unification known as the Risorgimento with Cavour and Mazzini he is deemed one of the makers of Modern Italy. Cavour is considered the "brain of unification," Mazzini the "sou," and Garibaldi the "sword." For his battles on behalf of freedom in Latin America, Italy, and later France, he has been dubbed the "Hero of Two Worlds." Born in Nice, when the city was controlled by France, to Domenico Garibaldi and Rosa Raimondi, his family was involved in the coastal trade. A sailor in the Mediterranean Sea, he was certified a merchant captain in 1832. During a journey to Taganrog in the Black Sea, he was initiated into the Italian national movement by a fellow Ligurian, Giovanni Battista Cuneo. In 1833 he ventured to Marseilles where he met Mazzini and enrolled in his Giovane Italia or Young Italy. Mazzini had a profound impact on Garibaldi, who would always acknowledge this patriot as "the master."



In February 1834 he participated in an abortive Mazzinian insurrection in Piedmont, was sentenced to death in absentia by a Genoese court, and fled to Marseilles. The exile sailed first to Tunisia eventually finding his way to Brazil, where he encountered Anna Maria Ribeiro da Silva, "Anita," a woman of Portuguese and Indian descent, who became his lover, companion in arms, and wife. With other Italian exiles and republicans he fought on behalf of the separatists of the Rio Grande do Sul and the Uruguayans who opposed the Argentinean dictator Jan Manuel do Rosas. Calling on the Italians of Montevideo, Garibaldi formed the Italian Legion in 1843, whose black flag represented Italy in mourning while the volcano at its center symbolized the dormant power in their homeland. It was in Uruguay that the legion first sported the red shirts, obtained from a factory in Montevideo which had intended to export them to the slaughter houses of Argentina. It was to become the symbol of Garibaldi and his followers. The formation of his force of volunteers, his mastery of the techniques of guerilla warfare, his opposition to Brazilian and Argentinean imperialism, and his victories in the battles of Cerro and Sant'Antonio in 1846 not only assured the freedom of Uruguay but made him and his followers heroes in Italy and Europe. The fate of his patria continued to preoccupy Garibaldi.



The election of Giovanni Mastai-Ferretti as Pope Pius IX in 1846 led many to believe he was the liberal pope prophesied by Gioberti, who would provide the leadership for the unification of Italy. From his exile Mazzini applauded the first reforms of Pio Nono. In 1847 Garibaldi offered the apostolic nuncio at Rio de Janeiro Bedini, the service of his Italian Legion for the liberation of the peninsula. News of the outbreak of revolution in Palermo in January 1848, and revolutionary agitation elsewhere in Italy, encouraged Garibaldi to lead some sixty members of his legion home. He offered his services to Charles Albert and the

Piedmontese who initiated the first war for the liberation of Italy, but found his effort spurned. Rebuffed by the Piedmonese, he and his followers crossed into Lombardy where they offered assistance to the provisional government of Milan. Special Thanks to...
Steve Saviello & Communes of Italy:

Popular Participation, Italy, 1848-49

The Italian revolutions of 1848-49 enveloped artisan, working class and peasant men and women in the myriad of activities within and outside the piazza. Before the events of March 1848 the poor harvest of 1846-47 produced protests in food riots from north to south, and since the 1820s Calabria and Basilicata had been engulfed in peasant uprisings against landowners' usurpations of communal lands. Forms of Ludditism appeared in textile areas of Lombardy before the "Five Glorious Days," and anti-foreign feelings were expressed against Swiss companies in Salerno or, in September 1847, against porters from outside Livorno by its dock workers. Freedom of the press and the establishment of innumerable political circles, especially democratic ones, helped to mobilize this social protest to the politics of revolution, especially in Venetia, Lombardy, Tuscany and southern Italy. Thus artisans joined day laborers and sharecroppers in early phases of the revolution; the "Five Glorious Day" in March 1848 forced the Austrians out of Milan, while Venetian arsenal and tobacco workers and artisans precipitated the revolution in support of Daniel Manin's republic. Earlier in January, popular participation supporting Neapolitan liberals provoked Ferdinand II on January 18 to decree a constitution. Liberal governments, as they were instituted, debated whether to include workers and peasants in the national and civic guards being established. In Sicily and Tuscany, peasants and workers were excluded while in the more radical parts of Calabria peasants were recruited with unfulfilled promises of land. Workers, artisans and peasants shouted "Vivas" to constitutions falsely perceived as guaranteeing the right to organize, the right to work in the case of Livorno, or the right to land ownership in Basilicata where the sharecroppers claimed that Ferdinand II's constitution freed them of services to the clergy. While peasants in Lombardy answered the recruitment call for national defense, Tuscan landowners were reluctant to arm their sharecroppers and feared the attempts by radicals, especially in their stronghold of Livorno, to recruit the day laborer. In April and May 1848 artisans and workers demonstrated for better wages or working conditions or food price controls in major cities and towns as peasant agitation enflamed Calabria, Basilicata and Puglia demanding the restoration of communal lands and civic uses. Republicans like Francesco Guerrazzi enlisted artisan and worker support in driving the landowning liberal Florentine government from power in October and establishing a republic by February 1848; yet Guerrazzi stopped short of meeting the demands of an economic program disruptive of Tuscany's sharecropping system. Manin's Venetian republic failed to create a peasant army and radicals in Calabria hoped to maintain the support of the peasantry without addressing the question of land redistribution thus driving many into "sanfedism" and the hands of the church. Republican governments in the early months of 1849 attempted to eliminate some consumption and salt taxes or to favor wage increases, but much popular political support became alienated. Though the Tuscan republic enlisted a massive urban support of workers and artisans for the constituent assembly in Rome and in February 1849 staged republican festivities for the symbolic planting of trees of liberty in many Tuscan communes, the sharecropper remained loyal to the landowner who supported the grand duke's restoration. While the patriotic songs of the Italian revolutions addressed idyllic themes of Italian fraternization across the peninsula, the popular particularism with political regionalism serving as a cloak.

By Marion S. Miller