Garibaldi: Hero of Italian Unification — A Biography Review

Introduction and Hibbert's Biographical Approach

Christopher Hibbert's award-winning biography Garibaldi: Hero of Italian Liberation is arranged chronologically to cover each phase of the freedom fighter's career: his early life as a sailor, his participation in the 1848 Revolution and in liberation struggles in South America; his great victories in Sicily, Naples, and southern Italy in 1860; and his later years from 1861 to 1882. Hibbert's historical methodology always focused on "individual personalities" — as seen in his biographies of Queen Victoria and the Duke of Wellington — far more than on the social and economic conditions that led to the Risorgimento (Hibbert xiv). He prefers the romantic image of Garibaldi and his Red Shirts marching on Rome, even though that image was also somewhat reminiscent of Benito Mussolini's seizure of power in 1922. Of course, Garibaldi's radical and social democratic views should never be confused with those of the later fascist tyrant, and he almost certainly would have gone to war with the Duce had he still been alive at that time.

Hibbert made good use of primary and secondary sources in preparing this biography, including memoirs, newspapers, and Garibaldi's own autobiography, and he was also able to write in a highly engaging narrative style that few professional historians could match. Although he clearly admires his subject for rising from very humble beginnings as a cabin boy to becoming one of the great nation-builders of history, Hibbert was not blind to his character flaws, such as his vanity, "susceptibility to flattery," and tendency toward excessive conflict with other unification leaders (Hibbert xv).

Early Life, Education, and Political Formation

Giuseppe Garibaldi was the son and grandson of sailors, born into a very poor family that did not even own a house. He had a deep and abiding love for the ocean and went to sea at age sixteen, although he was better educated than many other boys of his social class. Throughout his adult life he was rabidly secularist and anticlerical, yet he had been educated in a Catholic seminary in Genoa and his parents had hoped he would become a priest. Garibaldi tried to conceal this aspect of his early background and always referred to priests as the "pestilent scum of humanity" and the "enemy of the whole human race" (Hibbert 4).

Even as a young man, his character was restless, courageous, and adventurous; he traveled all over the world, from Constantinople to South America. Garibaldi was athletic, powerfully built, well groomed, and highly attractive to women, but also a very serious and humorless personality. Even as a teenager he bragged about having saved the lives of those who were in danger more than once, commenting that "I have never shrunk from helping any fellow creature in danger, even at the risk of my own life" (Hibbert 5). As a young sailor and later an officer in the merchant marine, he became a follower of Saint-Simon's New Christianity and its ideas of sexual freedom, industrialization, emancipation of women, and improving the social and economic conditions of the lower classes. He was an early supporter of the Young Italy movement, although ironically for an Italian nationalist, he grew up speaking French and the Ligurian dialect and only learned standard Italian as an adult.

South American Campaigns and the Birth of the Red Shirts

No matter that the South American phase of his career is little known today, Garibaldi learned the methods of guerrilla warfare there that later served him so well in the wars of Italian unification. In 1836–40, he fought for the independence of the southern region of Brazil against the empire of Dom Pedro II, and later for the radical and democratic party in Uruguay against the dictator Manuel Oribe and his ally Juan Manuel Rosas — the tyrant who ruled Argentina. His army of freed slaves and European exiles that defended Montevideo was the first force he led that wore the distinctive Red Shirts.

During this time, he also had an affair with a married woman named Anna Ribeiro da Silva and eventually married her in 1842 — a bigamous marriage. She accompanied him to Europe when he fought in the 1848 Revolution, during which he temporarily controlled Rome, but she died crossing the Alps the following year as his army was being pursued by Papal and Habsburg forces (Hibbert 45). He had heroically led the defense of the Roman Republic for three months in 1849 against the forces of France, Spain, Naples, and Austria — all of which sought to restore the traditional authority of the Pope against the "Red" Republic (Hibbert 81). It was during this period that he first became an international hero and celebrity, at least in the liberal and democratic nations.