Giuseppe Garibaldi

By 1848, the scent of revolution was drifting across the Mediterranean, and Garibaldi returned to a peninsula in flames. His relationship with Mazzini was already showing its first fractures; while Mazzini was an unyielding republican theorist, Garibaldi was a pragmatist who understood that the dream of a unified Italy required bayonets, even if those bayonets belonged to a king. He offered his sword to Charles Albert of Sardinia, who received the condemned rebel with cold suspicion. Rebuffed, Garibaldi took his volunteers to Rome, where a short-lived Roman Republic had been declared after the Pope fled. Here, Garibaldi performed military miracles, defeating a superior French army at the Porta San Pancrazio on April 30, 1849, remaining in his saddle all day despite a painful wound in his side. But the weight of French, Austrian, and Neapolitan arms was too great. When the Roman Assembly debated surrender, Garibaldi entered the chamber covered in dust and blood, declaring, "Wherever we will go, that will be Rome."

What followed was a retreat of Homeric proportions. Pursued by four foreign armies through the rugged spine of the Apennines, Garibaldi’s force of four thousand volunteers dwindled to a handful. Most of his captured legionaries were summarily shot. In the pine forests near Ravenna, Anita, pregnant and burning with malaria, died in his arms. Devastated, hunted, and unable to reach the besieged republican holdout of Venice, Garibaldi was smuggled across the peninsula by sympathetic peasants and fishermen to Tuscany, escaping once more into exile. In New York, the great general of the Roman Republic worked quietly as a candle-maker and trading skipper, saving enough money to return to Italy in 1854 and purchase half of the barren, wind-swept island of Caprera off the coast of Sardinia. It was here, among the rocks and wild rosemary, that he built a simple whitewashed house that would remain his emotional anchor for the rest of his life.

The climax of Garibaldi's life came in 1860, a year of political theater and raw military audacity that stunned Europe. Nominally allied with the Piedmontese prime minister Camillo Benso di Cavour and King Victor Emmanuel II, Garibaldi grew furious when Cavour ceded his native Nice to France to secure French support against Austria. Determined to force the pace of unification, Garibaldi, alongside conspirators like Francesco Crispi, planned an invasion of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. On May 5, 1860, he sailed from Genoa with two small steamers and a mere 1,070 volunteers—the legendary "Expedition of the Thousand." Landing at Marsala under the protective, silent gaze of two British warships, Garibaldi proclaimed himself dictator of Sicily in the name of Victor Emmanuel II.

The campaign was a succession of impossibilities. At Calatafimi, his outnumbered, poorly equipped Redshirts routed Neapolitan regulars with bayonet charges up steep terraces. By late May, they had taken Palermo; by July, they had forced the capitulation of twenty thousand royal troops at Milazzo and Messina. Crossing the Strait of Messina in defiance of Cavour's attempts to restrain him, Garibaldi marched north through Calabria in what became a triumphal procession. On September 7, he entered Naples not at the head of an army, but in a train carriage, cheered by ecstatic crowds while the Bourbon King Francesco II fled to the fortress of Gaeta. On the Volturno River, Garibaldi's now swollen army of volunteers shattered the final, forty-thousand-strong remnant of the Bourbon forces.

Yet the ultimate test of Garibaldi's patriotism was not victory, but surrender. As he prepared to march on Rome to complete the unification, Cavour and Victor Emmanuel, terrified that an attack on the Pope would provoke a French invasion, sent Piedmontese troops south to intercept him. Rather than plunge his newly born nation into a civil war, Garibaldi chose self-effacement. On November 7, 1860, he rode into Naples side-by-side with Victor Emmanuel II, handing over a conquered kingdom of nine million subjects to the Piedmontese monarch. Refusing all titles, land, and wealth, the "Hero of the Two Worlds" boarded a ship back to Caprera with nothing but a bag of seed corn and a small supply of dried cod.

The final two decades of Garibaldi's life were defined by a restless, often bitter impatience with the kingdom he had helped create. Twice, in 1862 and 1867, he grew frustrated with the diplomatic delays regarding Rome and raised volunteer armies to seize the city. Both times, the Italian government, fearing international ruin, stopped him by force. At Aspromonte in 1862, he was shot in the foot and taken prisoner by the very Italian troops he had once led to victory. Yet whenever a legitimate war of liberation broke out, his sword was ready. During the Third Italian War of Independence in 1866, his Alpine volunteers won a string of victories against the Austrians, but just as he was poised to take Trent, he was ordered by the regular army to retreat. His reply was a single, famous telegram: Obbedisco—"I obey."

Giuseppe Garibaldi died on his beloved island of Caprera in June 1882, surrounded by the sea that had defined his youth. He left behind a world that had made him a secular saint of the nineteenth century, admired by figures as diverse as Victor Hugo, Charles Dickens, and Abraham Lincoln, who had once offered him a command in the American Civil War. Unlike the calculating Cavour or the monarchical Victor Emmanuel II, Garibaldi belonged to the romantic, popular imagination. He was a revolutionary who fought not for dynasty or territory, but for the self-determination of peoples, leaving behind the blueprint of the citizen-soldier and a name that would inspire liberation movements across the globe for a century to come.