Cavour's Last Victory
I
THE first, symptoms of the redemption of Italy were seen in the abortive revolutions engineered by the secret societies, chief among which was the Carbonaria. Then Mazzini arose, as the prophet of unity and republicanism, and founded Young Italy, which worked, perforce, through conspiracy. The great; upheaval of 1848-49 seemed to promise independence and a federation, but its collapse left the princely rulers of the seven states, into which Italy was cut up, thoroughly discredited. Piedmont, however, under her ‘Honest King,’ Victor Emanuel, and her statesman, Cavour, soon became, for Italians and foreigners, a proof that the race which was supposed to be hopelessly effete had, instead, the sap of new life.
After 1850, Piedmont was the refuge of persecuted Italians, and the leader of the National Cause. To attain independence, Austria, mistress of Lombardy and Venetia, and virtual protector of all the despotic rulers, had to be driven out. Recognizing that the Italians by themselves could never expel the Austrians, Cavour secured the alliance of Napoleon III, and together France and Piedmont waged the War of 1859 against Austria. The immediate result was the liberation of Lombardy, the revolt of the Duchies, Legations, and Tuscany, and their annexation to Victor Emanuel’s Kingdom.
In the spring of 1860 the Party of Revolution organized an expedition to Sicily, which Garibaldi reluctantly consented to lead. But its course resembled a triumphal progress; the Bourbon armies dissolved before it; and in a few weeks Garibaldi was dictator of the Island. Meanwhile Victor Emanuel’s government, by Cavour’s adroit diplomacy, had prevented the Great Powers from intervening in behalf of the Bourbon King. It was imperative that the control of the National Movement should remain in the hands of the Constitutional Monarchy. Garibaldi’s Republican advisers, however, urged him to defer giving up his dictatorship until he had liberated not only the Neapolitan mainland, but also Rome and Venice. Long before he could have achieved that, Austria and France would have interfered, and the newborn Kingdom of Italy would have been rent asunder by Monarchist and Republican feuds. To prevent these calamities, Cavour planned his supreme audacity of sending Victor Emanuel and an army corps to Naples. On the approach of the King, Garibaldi consented to the annexation of the Two Sicilies, resigned his dictatorship, and, finding the King wisely indisposed to continue him in command of his army of Volunteers, with full powers over the South for an indefinite period, he retired to Caprera on November 9, 1860.
But before departing, he called on his Volunteers to be ready in the spring to join him in attacking the Pope and the Austrians; and he let the Royal Government understand that, unless his Volunteers were treated with lavish consideration, he should call it to account. For months the great problem before Italy, a problem which involved the very existence of the young nation, was whether the Party of Revolution would succeed in forcing the Monarchy into new expeditions — if, indeed, it did not actually undermine the Monarchy.
By far the most pressing duty, before setting out to redeem Venetia and Rome, was the consolidation and conciliation of the Kingdom which already acknowledged Victor Emanuel as sovereign. Although the national cause had triumphed, each of the new states contained minorities which still cherished the old régime, and would oppose more or less openly the effort to nationalize them. In the former Papal States and Naples brigandage, financed and directed from Rome, had by April swollen into a wide-spread insurrection. The relations between the King’s Government and the country had to be defined. The ingrained individualism of the Italians, expressed for centuries in their political particularism, must be overcome, if there were to be real national unity; on the other hand, it must, be treated with such deference that the citizens of the former States should not feel that, in becoming Italians, they had lost their identity.
Among French or Germans, the Tuscan wished, indeed, to be recognized as an Italian; but among Piedmontese or Sicilians or Romagnoles, he was a Tuscan. Such deep-rooted instincts could not be suddenly outgrown; least of all, could they be removed by statute. To discover the happy mean between centralization and local autonomy, was therefore the task. In every department similar problems had to be met. The finances must be reorganized. The army, the judiciary, the diplomatic service, must be enlarged or remodeled. Public works — railways, telegraphs, steamship lines, post offices — had to be planned on a national scale. New taxes were called for. Many of the recently emancipated Italians had supposed, in their ignorance, that Unity would mean Utopia — a happy state in which there would be no work, or imposts, or police, or restraint on their personal desires. After a few months of Unity, they began to perceive that free government cost more than despotic, besides laying upon them civic obligations which they did not understand and could not discharge. They felt deceived; they were inclined to cast the blame of this deception on their liberators, instead of on themselves.
No other statesman in the nineteenth century had to face such a complication of internal difficulties as challenged Cavour in the spring of 1861. Reconstruction with old materials is tenfold harder than construction with new. To William de La Rive, who invited him to visit Pressinge and refresh himself in that Swiss air, moral and physical, which always restored him, he replied, regretfully, ‘I greatly fear that, unless the Parliament which is about to meet [should] overthrow me, it will be impossible for me to cross the Alps. My task is more laborious and thorny than in the past. To constitute Italy, to fuse together the divers elements of which she is composed, to put North and South in harmony, offers as many difficulties as a war with Austria and the struggle with Rome.’
Even while he was writing, the tempest which had long been gathering was about to burst.
II
Garibaldi had passed the winter at Caprera, not wholly in bucolic peace of mind. Having turned his war-horse out to pasture and planted his seed-beans, he had much leisure, between one meal of salt codfish and another, to ruminate over his wrongs. The more he thought upon them, the more his heart grew wroth. His own patriotism loomed before him like a vast and shining cloud over-topping and dimming the exploits of everyone else. He was obsessed by the loss of Nice, as Achilles at being robbed of Chryseis. His own magnanimity made the ingratitude of the Government seem inexplicable. Had he liberated a kingdom, merely to see it pass into the control of Cavourian placemen? Had he told the world that in March he should return to lead half a million Italians against Rome and Venetia, only to learn that the Government would neither permit the enrolling of Volunteers in time of peace, nor hand over to self-constituted autocrats the direction of international relations which the Constitution imposed upon the Ministers, subject to Parliament? And when these grievances ceased to gnaw him for a moment, resentment at the slight put upon his Southern Army nettled him. And throughout the winter, every boat brought to Caprera visitors bursting with complaints and letters breathing indignation and revenge.
Probably, Garibaldi honestly imagined that he had sacrificed his personal grievances and was moved only by those of his companions-in-arms. To understand his conduct we must remember that he had just achieved the most glorious feat of modern chivalry; that the whole world was showering him with praises and laurel; that he was fully conscious of the magnitude of his achievement; that he believed that, just as he had known better than the Government how to free the Two Sicilies, so he, and not it, should be followed in regard to Venetia and Rome. Majestically ignoring that Cavour, by warding off diplomatic intervention, had enabled him to triumph in the South, he defamed Cavour as a truckler to diplomacy, a timorous intriguer, if not a traitor, who danced attendance on the most loathsome monster living — Napoleon III. Garibaldi’s scorn of the regular army, and especially of the War Office, equaled his scorn of diplomacy. Had he not proved that volunteers were more than a match for disciplined troops? Field-marshals and corps commanders had gone down before his own superior military genius, and their army before his nondescript legions: ergo, the art of war must be revolutionized. The more he thought it over, the more outrageous it seemed to him that the Ministers, instead of accepting his merest suggestion as a command, actually paid no heed to him. Never doubting that he himself was infallible, he regarded their negligence as a proof of their lack of intelligence not less than of their honesty.
He had had, in truth, to suffer treatment which might have tried the temper of a Socrates. Farini and even the King had slighted him, he believed intentionally, before he quitted Naples. What purpose served a royal retinue, which holds etiquette in greater reverence than the Decalogue, if it failed, not in tact only, but in common courtesy towards the popular hero who, above everyone else, needed to be kept in good humor? Not even slaves are callous to contempt; much less hypersensitive Garibaldi, who discovered contempt in every act. When some of the Liberal press both criticized his Volunteers and went so far as to insinuate that he owed the victory of the Volturno to Piedmontese succor, his indignation knew no bounds. The publication by the French Government of a reference to the Chambéry interview, in which Farini was reported, and no doubt correctly, as urging upon Napoleon III that Piedmont was going to interfere in Umbria in order to check ‘the Revolution embodied in Garibaldi,’ further enraged the Paladin: for, although the definition was literally accurate, he liked to imagine himself as the incarnation of all Italians—except the hated Cavourians and the Papalists.
The disbanding of his Southern Army inevitably fed his wrath. The problem was indeed thorny. Victor Emanuel, who often promised more than his Ministers could perform, had assured Garibaldi in their last talks at Naples, that his Garibaldian army should be preserved on an equal footing with the regulars. The Cabinet, however, declared this to be impossible, and Victor Emanuel, being a constitutional King, bowed to their decision. The Minister of War, Fanti, — next to Cavour the man most detested by Garibaldi, — was an admirable organizer, a soldier of conscience, but rigid and uncompromising. He was right in protesting that the regular service would be seriously impaired, if thousands of redshirted guerillas, unused to discipline and restive under it, were distributed among the regiments. To perpetuate an independent corps of Volunteers would destroy that uniformity in the personnel and training which are indispensable to an army; but even this arrangement, intended to be provisional, was accepted by the Ministry in order to appease Garibaldian clamors. A joint commission examined the records of the Volunteers. When Garibaldi retired in November his rolls bore 51,000 names! Of these some 16,000 were of men who had seen little service or none. Barely 25,000 of the remainder had made up the real army with which, in Sicily and on terra firma, he conquered the Bourbons. He had issued commissions with such recklessness that his officials numbered 7002, of whom 3736 remained in the reorganized army—an indication that the weeding-out was not excessively thorough.
A special corps of Italian Volunteers was created, and the Garibaldian soldiers had the choice of enlisting in that or of being mustered out with six months’ stipend (162 francs) and sent home free of expense. Within two months all except 238 subalterns and common soldiers had disbanded. A few officers of proved ability — like Medici, Bixio, and Cosenz — received generals’ commissions in the regular army. The disbanding of the Bourbon Army, with provision for the reënlistment of the rank and file as well as for the immediate reception into active service of certain men of high rank, went on at the same time. The Garibaldian sympathizers denounced Fanti for treating the Bourbon troops as if they merited the same consideration as the Southern Army. If the Neapolitans were henceforth to be regarded as Italians, however, justice demanded that their oath of allegiance to Victor Emanuel should be recognized as entitling them to equal consideration with the natives of Lombardy or Piedmont.
That mistakes were made in this reorganization cannot be doubted. That Fanti was strict, and sometimes harsh, was inevitable. Among both Garibaldians and Bourbons, impostors, scamps, and deserters swarmed. Fanti’s general plan, which aimed at nationalizing the army in its personnel and at bringing it under a uniform system of instruction and discipline, does not need to be defended. His sternness, where he had so many rascals to deal with, was warranted. But the genuine Garibaldians had unique claims to national gratitude; like their leader, they were not deterred by patriotism or modesty from urging those claims, and they preferred to see ten fraudulent claimants rewarded rather than one honest Garibaldian slighted. The lugubrious Sirtori, Garibaldi’s agent in the transaction, repeatedly acknowledged that the Royal Commissioners’ charges were irrefutable, but he censured those commissioners for pressing them. ‘They treated us like enemies,’ he declared in Parliament; and Medici made a similar complaint. Later, when the issue had cooled, they were both less inclined to condemn unreservedly.
As news of this business came to Garibaldi, his resentment grew hot. It was bad enough for the Liberals to refuse to hand over the government to him and his; it was worse to try to rob the Garibaldians of their glory; it was infamous to deprive them of those honors and rewards which they had earned with their blood. Garibaldi had reached that familiar stage of obsession when he no longer attempted to reason, but attributed all his injuries to Cavour. He could not be persuaded that Cavour had not instigated the royal chamberlain’s snub at Naples, or the uneffusive greeting of the King’s entourage, or Fanti’s inflexibility. Like other victims of the persecution mania, he found a simple explanation for his persecutor’s conduct. Cavour was jealous of his fame and influence. Unable to hold in longer, Garibaldi decided to go to Turin. ‘Let not thine hand draw the sword,’said bright-eyed Athene to his Homeric prototype, Achilles, ‘yet with words indeed revile him.’ Garibaldi’s counselors urged his going, because they too for a year past had kept pouring into his heart, hatred of Cavour: some honestly, being as unreasoning as himself; others, the larger number, from personal or partisan reasons.
During the last week in March a delegation of workmen visited Caprera, bearing an address which reeked with pessimism over the condition of Italy. Garibaldi replied that perhaps the situation was not so gloomy as they painted it. They still had Victor Emanuel for a pivot; but, he added, no nation ought to depend on one man. And the King, he went on, ‘is surrounded by people without heart, without patriotism, by men who have created a dualism between the regular army and the volunteers. . . . These wretches have sown discord and hate, have checked the work of fusion and of unification so well initiated by us. . . . But, I repeat, the King is deceived; he desires Venice to be free, and we desire to crown him in Rome.’ Garibaldi assured his hearers that he relied on the horny right hand of men of his condition, and not on the fallacious promises of the political intriguers. Having previously refused to be a candidate for parliament, he suddenly changed his mind, and on March 31 he telegraphed to Naples that he would stand for the first college of that city. On April 1 he crossed to Genoa, where he was irritated at hearing that the police had visited the rooms of a patriotic committee, and where his friends inflamed him further by their tale of wrongs. The next day he reached Turin — by invitation, one newspaper stated, of Count Cavour, a statement which Garibaldi promptly denied. Yet so natural was it to suspect his sudden movements that, the French journals insisted that he and Cavour were in collusion, an error which the Emperor seems for a moment to have shared.
III
Fearing an explosion, the King sent for Garibaldi, only to perceive that he was angrier than ever with Cavour for ceding Nice and Savoy. The King repeated that if he himself could bow to the loss of the cradle of his race, Garibaldi might do as much: but the Paladin was in no state to offer up his darling feud as a willing sacrifice on the altar of concord. That cession, he told Victor Emanuel, was the wickedest of all Cavour’s acts. Among his friends, during the next few days, he let his tongue play without restraint, attacking nearly everyone except his intimates. He forgot, however, that he was no longer dictator at Naples, beyond reach of criticism. His irresponsible arraignments — he even branded the deputies as a parcel of lackeys — could not pass unchallenged in the capital of the Kingdom. One citizen there was, the fittest of all, to call him to account in Parliament, the place where every Italian was amenable to the law.
That challenger was Bettino Ricasoli, the man of iron will, of self-control, of downright speech. On April 10 he rose in the Chamber of Deputies, a Puritan patrician, austere in dress, gloved, unruffled in demeanor, with the poise of a man who can never be thrown off his feet, but who shuns rather than seeks an expression of his opinion. Ricasoli had saved Tuscany and Emilia the year before: a positive achievement, second only to that of Garibaldi in the South. No one could question, therefore, his service; only the half-educated imagine that victories on the battlefield are nobler or more difficult or more important than those victories which statesmen may win.
Ricasoli spoke without rhetoric and without recrimination. He said that the conscience of every deputy had been wounded by words attributed to General Garibaldi — words which offended the majesty of Parliament and the inviolability of the King. But he refused to believe that Garibaldi could have uttered them. In the summer of 1859 he and Garibaldi promised each other to fulfil their duty to the country. ‘He has done his duty, I have done mine.’ It cannot be, Ricasoli continued, that Garibaldi could insult either the King or Parliament. The King being the Liberator of Italy, there was under him no first citizen and no last. If two or three or half a dozen had been privileged to perform their duty in a wider sphere of action, they ought not therefore to arrogate to themselves special glory, or to set themselves above the law, but humbly to thank God for granting them the larger opportunity, and for allowing them to declare: ‘To me belongs the example of abnegation and of modesty; the example of showing others how everyone ought to obey the law.’ It was impossible, therefore, Ricasoli concluded, to believe that Garibaldi had spoken the words imputed to him.
Never was sarcasm used more properly, seldom with better effect than on that day. Ricasoli’s unadorned sentences seemed as irrefutable as a selfevident axiom in geometry. They captured his audience, not by their sarcasm, but by their truth. The nation drew a long breath of relief, because it felt that one of its greatest citizens dared to announce that no citizen, not even Garibaldi, was above the law, above Parliament, above the King. When the session broke up, Cavour grasped Ricasoli’s hand and said, ‘Were I to die to-morrow, my successor is marked out.’ Massimo d’Azeglio, the amateur of genius, who had grown pessimistic during the last twelve-month, wrote, ‘Bravo, Betto! May God bless you! There was one post — the best and most useful in my opinion — to fill in Parliament. That of vindicator of the law, of the moral law, as well as the political and every other. This post is now no longer vacant. You occupy it, and you deserve to occupy it. Now I begin to hope.’
Suffering from rheumatism, Garibaldi delayed appearing in the Chamber. But he improved every hour of these days by conferring with his Radical friends. They hoped to use him to overthrow Cavour, and he was more than eager to aid them. As usual, they shrewdly allowed him to suppose that he, and not they, led. They proposed to accept the Monarchy, as the symbol of unity, but to insist that they should shape the foreign policy of the Government. Thus they should decide when to attack Rome, or to liberate Venetia, or to declare war on France in order to win back Nice. With Cavour out of the way, they might even hope to control the kingdom itself. They regarded their moderation as most magnanimous; for they held that the Revolution, which freed the Two Sicilies, had a supreme claim to Italy’s gratitude and obedience. In their secret conferences Rattazzi, Depretis, Brofferio, and others joined, whose primary interest was, not to set up a Mazzinian republic, but to get rid of Cavour, in order that their own ambition might have the right of way.
While waiting until he felt able to attend, Garibaldi, quite after the fashion of a sovereign communicating with his parliament, sent to the deputies a letter which Rattazzi, their President, laid before them. In this, after thanking the Prime Minister for postponing the debate on the Southern Army until he could be present, Garibaldi stated that he should protest against the disbanding of his old comrades, and that he was displeased to learn that his private remarks about the King and Parliament had been discussed by Ricasoli. He concluded by repeating, in a tone which many found patronizing, that his trust in the person of Victor Emanuel was known of all. This letter failed apparently either to relieve his own mind or to satisfy the large majority of deputies who had been roused by his virulent speeches. Accordingly, he wrote again to Rattazzi, to inform the Chamber that he still approved of the King, but that his conscience forbade him to condescend to justify himself either towards the King or the Parliament; that he was moved to indignation at the condition of the South and the abandoning of his comrades in arms; but that, in the presence of the holy National Cause, he should trample under foot any individual quarrel whatsoever. Ho enclosed suggestions in regard to the Southern Army, the foremost being that he should be appointed royal commissioner in the South for an indefinite period.
IV
On April 18, the day set for the debate, Garibaldi limped into the Chamber, accompanied by Macchi and Zuppetta, two of his Mazzinian friends. The deputies met at half-past one, but he put off his coming till nearly two, as if to be sure of a royal reception. Long before he reached the Chamber, his progress was marked by the cheers of the crowds in the streets. Instead of taking the main entrance into the hall, he chose to slip in by a small side door, which connected with the topmost row of seats occupied by the Left. In this most conspicuous position, all eyes were at once turned upon him. While the members of the Left and the Garibaldians in the tribunes cheered him for five minutes, the rest, of the House waited expectantly. He was dressed in his legendary bizarre costume, — red shirt, gray Scotch plaid poncho, and little Spanish hat, with its inverted teacup-and-saucer effect. Although his face was flushed, he bore no signs of illness, but he appeared older to those who had not seen him since he sailed from Quarto. The lion aspect ‘was sobered by a profusion of gray about the long mane.’ The ‘usual benignant, calm, supremely dignified look,’ which magnetized high and low, shone in his face. That air of self-confidence and relish of the fight which he always wore in battle, could be discerned in his glances to the right and left. Order being restored, he took the oath as deputy and sat down between his friends.
The debate on Fanti’s array bill, interrupted by Garibaldi’s theatrical entrance, was resumed. Ricasoli spoke. He exhorted the Chamber to concord, and declared again that the remarks recently attributed to Garibaldi must be calumnious. In questioning Fanti, he referred to the Volunteers in phrases which irritated the Garibaldians, but he equally irritated the War Minister by his criticism. Fanti read a long reply, — a businesslike presentation of the undesirability of maintaining in time of peace a corps of volunteers side by side with the regular army. He gave his reasons for each step frankly, so frankly that when he described many of the promotions in Garibaldi’s army as ‘fabulous,’ the Left, and especially Garibaldi himself, grew restive. If Fanti’s general scheme had been referred to an unprejudiced expert, like General von Moltke or General von Roon of the Prussian Army, it would have been upheld without a question. No military connoisseur, indeed, could approve of the creation of a corps of volunteers in a country where military service was compulsory. But for Garibaldi and his friends, sentiment and wounded vanity, mingled with a quivering sense of patriotic wonders performed and of threatened injustice, shut out a dispassionate consideration of the best military system.
Before Fanti had finished, Garibaldi, in spite of his outward calm, was near the point where he must speak or burst. Crispi and Bixio suggested that Fanti’s report be printed for public distribution, but to this both the War Minister and Ricasoli objected. Then Garibaldi rose. Deputies and spectators in the galleries, and the ministers at the table just below the President’s chair, knew that the storm, which had been visibly gathering, was about to break.
Garibaldi, from his topmost tier, could be seen clearly by all the deputies; for the Chamber was not large. He held in one hand several sheets of paper on which was written — by Rattazzi, many believed — the speech he intended to deliver. In order to read, he put on his glasses. Although he began pacifically, every one suspected that he was barely holding himself in. His rich and beautiful voice filled the hall; he spoke slowly, as an orator does who intends that his emphasis shall express neither more nor less than his exact idea. After the first few sentences, however, he hesitated for his words, tried to read them on his manuscript, failed to catch the whispered promptings of Macchi and Zuppetta, and then plunged into an extemporaneous invective. Having thanked Ricasoli for bringing the question before Parliament, he repelled the charge that he was responsible for the ‘dualism’ which existed. He had heard, he said, proposals of reconciliation — but only in words, for acts were always unconciliatory.
‘I am a man of deeds,’ he continued. ‘Whenever this dualism might have harmed the great cause of my country, I have yielded, and I always shall yield. And yet, considering me as not Garibaldi, but anybody you please, I appeal to the conscience of these representatives of Italy to say whether I can offer my hand to him who has made me a foreigner in Italy.’ Cheers of approval from the Garibaldians in the galleries caused the President to give warning that he should have the tribunes cleared if there were further disturbance.
Having now thrown discretion to the winds and scattered his written speech on the desk in front of him, Garibaldi proceeded, angrily, ‘Italy is not split in two; it is whole; because Garibaldi and his friends will always be with those who battle for it.’ Then he addressed himself to Fanti, whom he charged with asserting that he had to go to Central Italy to put down anarchy. After a brief dispute over Fanti’s phrase, he swept on to take up his real theme — the Southern Army. ‘ I ought, above all,’ he said, ‘to narrate very glorious feats. The prodigies wrought by it were overshadowed only when the cold and hostile hand of this Ministry caused its maleficent effects to be felt. When for love of concord, the horror of a fratricidal war, provoked by this very Ministry —’
At these words, a cyclone of passion whirled through the Chamber. The deputies jumped to their feet and beset the President with calls to order. Rattazzi, having rung his bell without avail, tried to speak: ‘I beg the honorable General Garibaldi — ’ His voice was drowned by the hubbub.
Cavour, who had listened with growing indignation to Garibaldi’s tirade, sprang up as if stung at the words ‘ fratricidal war,’ pounded on the ministerial table and called so loud that many heard him in spite of the din: ’No one has the right to insult us in this manner! We protest! We have never had such intentions. Mr. President — cause the Government and the nation’s representatives to be respected.’
At the first partial lull, Garibaldi, with characteristic egotism, said that he thought he had earned, by thirty years’ service to the country, the right to tell the truth to the Chamber. Rattazzi requested him to express his opinions so as not to offend any deputy or minister present.
In a flash Cavour protested: ‘He said that we provoked a fratricidal war. This is very different from the expression of an opinion.’
More outcries; more rushing to and fro, more gesticulations.
Garibaldi, who stood the effigy of glorified rage, wholly unabashed, bellowed unrepentantly, ‘Yes, a fratricidal war!’
From the Right came cries of ‘Order! Order! he has insulted the nation!’ while voices from the Left replied, ‘No! no! let free speech be respected!’
The uproar broke out afresh, not to be controlled. Rattazzi, after frantically ringing his bell to no purpose, put on his hat, the sign that the sitting was suspended. Then, as is the Italian fashion, the deputies poured down the aisles into the small semi-circle below the President’s dais, as close as they could to the Ministers. One Garibaldian supporter, beside himself with excitement, tried to strike Cavour, but was intercepted and carried out of the Chamber to cool off. Groups hemmed the Prime Minister in, approving, expostulating, advising, or merely yelling.
‘The mêlée in the centre of the hall, round the Minister’s table, was truly appalling,’ says a looker-on. ‘In the midst of it all, Crispi was seen bawling, gesticulating like a maniac.’ Friends surrounded Garibaldi on his upper platform, some to applaud, and some to pacify. The sanest deputies of every faction perceived that an outrage on parliamentary dignity had been committed: worse still, if the scene were renewed, irreparable harm might be done. The Red Shirts in the galleries had reached that pitch of resentment where, if they could not get what they demanded for themselves, they would gloat over the injury Garibaldi was inflicting on the Monarchy.
But the patriots of the Left joined with their least agitated colleagues of the Right to urge peace, and at four o’clock, after a quarter of an hour of pandemonium, Rattazzi, who with characteristic slyness pretended to be faint and had kept himself out of the way, called the Chamber to order.
Garibaldi still had the floor. Rattazzi neither reproved him, nor requested him, in the name of the Chamber, to retract his unparliamentary words. Garibaldi himself was perfectly unashamed. He had enjoyed the luxury of speaking his mind regardless of consequences — a performance in which the victim of obsession has a strange sense of discharging a public duty. Having once broken through the inhibitions of self-restraint, the danger that he would let himself go again was increased tenfold. And he had still much venom to rid himself of. He stood there defiant, with almost a peasant’s insensibility to the havoc he was creating.
To some his manner seemed leonine, to others theatrical. Oblivious of the larger issues, he was not to be diverted from the two objects he held to be paramount. — the venting of his grievances against Cavour, and the defense of the Volunteers. He attacked again Fanti’s law for disbanding the Southern Army. Those Volunteers, he said tauntingly, won two kingdoms for you: why accept the kingdoms and reject the army that gave them? He went still further, and demanded that the Government should arm the nation, creating perhaps half a million volunteers, who would outnumber the regular army three or four to one, and form an invincible weapon for the Paladin to use against Rome or Venetia. He urged that, without such a bulwark, Italy lay at the mercy of France and Austria.
Fanti replied that he could not agree with General Garibaldi’s views. The air grew thunderous again. Then Bixio, the fiery and impetuous Nino, the Second of the Thousand, rose ‘ in behalf of concord and of Italy.’ He made a very noble appeal that party and personal quarrels be sunk for the sake of national union. He said that, although the regular army must be respected, even in its prejudices, the element of strength offered by the Garibaldians ought also to be cherished. He deplored as a calamity that a multitude of mischief-makers had sown discord between Garibaldi and Cavour. ‘I would give my family and my own person,’ he concluded in a burst of patriotic emotion, ‘if I could see these men, and those who, like Signor Rattazzi, have directed the Italian Movement, grasp each other’s hands.’
V
Bixio’s appeal was not in vain.
Cavour rose instantly to speak. His face still showed the effect of the terrible agitation through which he had just passed. Never had a prime minister resisted a greater temptation than he that afternoon. Attacked in his personal honor, accused of being a traitor, charged with fomenting a fratricidal war, — all this but the culmination of nearly two years of calumny and malice aforethought, — his first impulse was to hurl back his assailants, cost what it might. But to do this, though the great majority of Italians might justify him and Europe approve, would lead straight to civil war. The unification of Italy, to which he had devoted thirty years of his manhood, would be shattered. To avert that, by a titanic exertion of will, he held his passion as in a vise. ‘If emotion could have killed,’ he said afterward, ‘I should have died during that hour.' Mingled with his patriotism was a noble pity for Garibaldi, the man of heroic stature in one field, the dwarf in others.
On rising Cavour paid due tribute to Bixio’s generous words. Then he confessed that he had been profoundly moved by the accusation leveled at him, especially because his accuser was Garibaldi. But who, he asked, created the Volunteers whom he was charged with wronging? Was it Garibaldi? No, it was Cavour himself, who more than two years before had summoned Garibaldi from Caprera to organize that corps. It was he who, despite the opposition of the War Department, despite also grave political difficulties, had seen the Volunteers equipped for the War of 1859. Garibaldi made no attempt to deny this. Cavour acknowledged the great service rendered during that war by the Hunters of the Alps, because they showed Europe that Italians from all sections knew how to fight and die for the cause of Liberty. Having created and upheld this corps on his own responsibility, he felt the more keenly the injustice of certain accusations. ‘ In spite of that,’ he said with great feeling, ‘ I will be the first to accept the appeal made me by General Bixio. For me, the first part of this sitting is as if it had never been.' Prolonged cheers greeted this magnanimous avowal. Four fifths of the deputies breathed easier, hoping that the worst had passed. Garibaldi, however, sat immovable through it all, nor could he ‘be got to say one generous word.'
Cavour went on to explain the plan of military reorganization. He showed how impossible it was to continue the Southern Army in active service as a volunteer corps. The Garibaldians had enlisted for no specified term: at Garibaldi’s call they rushed to battle; the fighting over, they as quickly dispersed; they neither were qualified for routine service nor did they desire it: their strength lay in their very mobility. The Government proposed that the Volunteer Corps should consist of skeleton regiments, each having a permanent staff which should summon the Volunteers in time of war. Another reason forbade adopting Garibaldi’s scheme: to continue the Garibaldians under arms would be almost equivalent to a declaration of war; and he stated emphatically that the Government would not countenance that.
Garibaldi followed Cavour, but without a hint of retraction or apology or of meeting half-way the Premier’s conciliatory speech. Confronted by arguments which he would not accept and could not refute, he fell back on that store of grievances which was his obsession. He accused the War Department in 1859 of having taken all the able-bodied volunteers for the regular army, leaving him only the humpbacked and the halt. Cavour might have retorted by asking how it was that at all times, except when he was attacking the Ministry, Garibaldi boasted that these alleged cripples — to wit, the famous Hunters of the Alps — were the finest soldiers in the world. But Cavour refrained from sarcasm, merely stating that whilst the enrolment was going on, Garibaldi had frequently expressed himself as well satisfied. He explained that the ordering of Garibaldi and the Hunters of the Alps into Valtellina was made against his express advice, and that, to avoid a similar blunder, he himself sent them to the Mincio, where they might take part in battle against the Austrians. The Paladin had cherished this grievance as one of the early proofs that Cavour was jealous of him, and wished to shelve him; he now professed to be satisfied with the explanation, but he continued to perpetuate the falsehood to the end of his days.
Cavour prefaced his explanations with the words: ‘ I do not indeed flatter myself that I can bring about that concord to which the honorable deputy Bixio invited us. I know that there exists a fact which creates between General Garibaldi and me perhaps an abyss. I believed that I performed a painful duty, the most painful of my life, in advising the King and proposing to Parliament to approve the cession of Nice and Savoy to France. By the pain I felt, I can understand what General Garibaldi must have felt; and if he does not forgive me for this fact, I shall not bear him a grudge.’
To Garibaldi, however, the idea of forgiving Cavour for the crime of ceding Nice never occurred as a possibility. In his reply, he remarked that he did not doubt that Cavour also loved Italy; and that the disputes between them could be quickly removed if the Prime Minister, accepting Garibaldi’s project for arming the nation, would send the Southern Army back to active service in the Two Sicilies. ‘That,’ he said, quite as a sovereign might, ‘is my desire.’ In other words, Garibaldi yielded nothing, felt no thrill of magnanimity, had no glimmer of realization of the jeopardy in which his violence was placing Italy. At the end of the debate, as at the beginning, he clung with bull-dog stubbornness to the demand that justice as he saw it should be done to his Volunteers, and that his will must prevail, cost what it might.
After adjournment, as he was walking home, Cavour remarked to a companion, ‘And yet, if war came, I would take Garibaldi’s arm in mine, and say to him, “Let us go and see what they are doing at Verona.”’ So habitual was it for him to subordinate personal passion for the good of Italy!
The next day and the next the discussion was continued. Orators of the Left attacked Fanti’s plan from many angles; Ministerialists defended it. Garibaldi introduced another resolution, to the effect that the Ministry should recognize the commissions issued by him as dictator, and should call out the Volunteers as early as it deemed best. On both sides there was much latent heat, with occasional explosions, and the purpose, evident although tacit, to avoid an open rupture. On the twentieth Cavour spoke twice, answering objections and restating with great clearness the intentions of the Cabinet, in order that, under the momentary glamour of assumed conciliation, there should be no misunderstanding. On April 21, the Chamber passed Ricasoli’s resolution by 190 votes to 79. Garibaldi’s policy was thus overwhelmingly repudiated by the representatives of the nation, to whom he had appealed. ’Who Garibaldi is,’ Ricasoli wrote to an intimate friend, ‘is shown in these last debates; but what whoever was absent could not see is the expectation of all honorable hearts, after Cavour’s generous and chivalric words, that Garibaldi would withdraw his resolution, and quitting his seat would go and grasp Cavour’s hand.’
VI
That afternoon General Cialdini sent to the newspapers an open letter to Garibaldi. Garibaldi despised parliament men; Cialdini was a soldier. Garibaldi was the sworn enemy of Cavour and Fanti; Cialdini had been his friend, his loyal admirer. Garibaldi regarded the Piedmontese as banded together in a conspiracy against him; Cialdini, though he had long served in Victor Emanuel’s army, was a Modenese. And now Cialdini wrote: —
‘Your reply to the address of the Milanese workmen, your words in the Chamber, caused me a very painful but complete disillusion. You are not the man that I thought, you are not the Garibaldi I loved. With the breaking of the spell, the affection that bound me to you has vanished. . . .
‘You dare to put yourself on a level with the King, speaking of him with the affected familiarity of a comrade. You mean to place yourself above usage, presenting yourself to the Chamber in a very outlandish costume; above the Government, branding its ministers as traitors because they are not devoted to you; above Parliament, heaping vituperation on the deputies who do not think as you do; above the country, desiring to drive it whither and how pleases you best. Very well, General! There are men disposed not to tolerate all that, and I am with them. The foe of every tyranny, whether it be clothed in black or in red, I will combat even yours, to the end.
‘I know the orders given by you, or by yours, to Colonel Tripoti to receive us in the Abruzzi with musket volleys; I know the words uttered by General Sirtori in Parliament; I know those spoken by you; and by these successive tracks I travel surely, and I penetrate the intimate thought of your party. It wishes to get control of the country and of the Army; threatening us, otherwise, with a civil war. I am not in a position to know what the country thinks of this, but I can assure you that the Army does not fear your threats — it fears only your government.
‘General, you achieved a great and marvelous undertaking with your Volunteers. You have reason to be proud of it, but you are wrong in exaggerating its true results. You were on the Volturno in the very worst conditions when we arrived. Capua, Gaeta, Messina, and Civitella did not fall by your work, and 56,000 Bourbons were beaten, dispersed, and made prisoners by us, not by you. Therefore, to say that the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies was wholly liberated by your arms is inexact. . . .
‘I will end by telling you that I have neither the pretension nor the mandate to address you in the name of the Army. But I think that I know it well enough to count on its sharing the feeling of disgust and of pain which your own intemperance and those of your party have roused in me.’
This letter came as a godsend to multitudes throughout the country, who were either disgusted with Garibaldi’s vanity, or alarmed at the prospect of civil war. The inner circle of his intimates read it with justifiable rage. There was even talk among them that the deputies of the Left should resign in a body. But the saner heads saw that they had already gone too far. Garibaldi himself began to suspect that his Radical friends had misused him. There were neither resignations, therefore, nor retractions. But Garibaldi addressed to the doughty Cialdini this reply: —
‘I too was your friend and the admirer of your deeds. To-day I will be what you choose; not being willing certainly to condescend to justify myself so far as regards what you point out in your letter as indecorous on my part towards the King and towards the Army: strong in all that, in my conscience as soldier and as citizen. As to the style of my dress, I shall wear it until I am informed that I am no longer in a free country where everyone wears what he pleases. The message to Colonel Tripoti I hear for the first time. I know no other orders than that given by me — to receive the Italian soldiers of the Army of the North as brothers; although we knew that that army was coming to combat the Revolution personified in Garibaldi (words of Farini to Napoleon III). As deputy, I think I have exposed to the Chamber the very smallest part of the wrongs received by the Southern Army from the Ministry. The Italian army will have one soldier more when there is question of fighting the enemies of Italy — and that will not come as a novelty to you. We were on the Volturno on the eve of our most splendid victory, obtained in Southern Italy before you arrived; and quite otherwise than very badly off. So far as I know, the Army has applauded the free and moderate words of a deputy-soldier for whom Italian honor has been a religion during his whole life. If, however, anyone takes offense at my manner of procedure, I, speaking in my own name only, and alone responsible for my words, await calmly a demand for satisfaction on account of them.’
It would be unjust to many soldiers to call this a soldier’s letter. Put in a nutshell, it announced that Garibaldi refused to recognize that any one had the right to criticize his words, acts, or dress; that whoever insinuated that the Garibaldian Army was in a bad condition when Victor Emanuel’s corps reached the Volturno, lied; that the Dictator would prove these things by fighting a duel with the first person who challenged him.
The public, to whom Garibaldi’s letter seemed weak, waited anxiously for the next move. Early on the twentyfifth, the Dictator himself, restive at being in an unpopular position, sent his future son-in-law, Canzio, to inform Cialdini that they must fight. Meanwhile, friends of both worked to prevent a meeting. Through Trecchi the King had had news of Garibaldi’s intention. Trecchi intimated, however, that if appearances could be saved, the Paladin would not decline a double reconciliation. At noon Cavour saw the King, who told him that that same evening Garibaldi would meet him in the Royal Palace. Cavour replied that, as a public man could not refuse to see anyone, he consented to the interview. At seven o’clock they met in one of the ground-floor rooms of the Palace. Garibaldi was polite, if not affable. Cavour treated him with much courtesy, and once more outlined the general policy of the Government towards Rome, Venice, and Army reorganization. Garibaldi reiterated his demands for the Southern Army and for national armament. They parted amicably. Knowing that Garibaldi had sworn that rather than take Cavour’s hand he would chop off his own, Cavour made no advances. He did not wish to expose himself to a refusal, nor Garibaldi to the obligation of carrying out so foolish a vow. A few hours later, at Pallavicino’s palace, Garibaldi and Cialdini made up with an effusiveness that appeared to be genuine.
VII
Garibaldi’s onslaught had failed. Someone described him as having the heart of a child and the head of a buffalo, a creature which, when it sees a red object in the distance, charges it with indiscriminate fury, and gores and tramples it, though it be his red-cloaked master, the farmer, or the farmer’s little daughter picking flowers. Equally insensate was Garibaldi’s fury in this final duel with Cavour, and in his conduct for nearly two years previous. He might plead that he honestly believed that Cavour was persistently trying to destroy him; yet serious judges can have no respect for a public personage, wielding a mighty influence, who does not feel the obligation of verifying his accusations, and even dispenses with reason. Statesmen and soldiers may engage in life-or-death antagonisms over vital principles, but when they are impelled by personal pique, or vanity, or ambition, they cannot expect history to absolve them.
Garibaldi’s ostensible purpose in attacking Cavour on April 18 was to secure what he regarded as justice for his Volunteers. Grant that they had cause for grievance, grant that he had not received the full measure of official recognition which he hungered for, was it patriotic to precipitate a conflict which might shatter his country? Is Achilles, who sulks in his tent, or hurls taunts at his opponents, or threatens to blast the national cause unless he is gratified — is this barbarian product of the youth of Greece the best model of patriotism for civilized men? Garibaldi’s Red Shirts risked life and fortune on their splendid enterprise: was it becoming that, even before they had finished their task, they should begin to clamor for rewards? Was it edifying in them to attempt through Garibaldi’s agency to seize the state by the throat and bid it yield or perish? Why is it that the very men who, in an ecstasy of devotion, sacrifice everything in order to save or create a nation, will not sacrifice their selfish claims to it after they have weathered the crisis? Better, a thousand times better, like Leonidas and his Three Hundred, to sleep in glory on the field of a lost battle, enshrined forever in the gratitude of mankind, than to go forth under the spell of patriotism at the call of duty, and having performed deeds of undying lustre, to come back and pose as heroes, demanding pensions and honors and offices, and by vanity and greed to make patriotism odious!
But the indictment against Garibaldi goes deeper than his hatred of Cavour: it concerns Italy itself. National unification was achievable only through the cooperation of the two elements — the Monarchy and the Revolution. By promoting the National Society, and by enlisting Garibaldi on the side of the Monarchy, Cavour secured this indispensable coöperation. Garibaldi undertook to lead the Revolution in the name of the Monarchy, but, though loyal at heart to the King, he rebelled against the policy of the King’s Government. Dictatorial by nature, he neither understood nor respected the prosaic working of a constitutional régime. Relying on his emotions, with hardly the reasoning power of a child, he despised or resolved to ignore facts which, like his bugbear, diplomacy, incommoded him; as if a bridge-builder should find the law of gravity troublesome and go to work disregarding it.
When tested by the touchstone of patriotism, Garibaldi’s outbreak in Parliament must be unqualifiedly condemned. He made the interest of his few thousand Volunteers paramount to the welfare of Italy. If they had been treated unjustly, they might have waited to have their wrongs redressed. But Garibaldi, in order to secure commissions for his officers, and pay and a billet for his soldiers, was ready to wreck his country. What Italy needed above all was harmony: his speeches to his friends, his harangues to visiting delegations, every sentence that he uttered in the Chamber, was a warning that there should be no harmony until the Garibalclian demands were appeased. With Sicily and Naples in a state of insurrection, and the possibility of a reaction still in sight ; with all the new provinces eying each other and Piedmont suspiciously; with the Austrian army increased and mobilized on the Venetian frontier; with the Pope intriguing among the Catholic Powers to recover his lost territory; and with the intentions of the French Emperor uncertain. Garibaldi decided that the most patriotic thing he could do was to stride into the Parliament of his justcreated nation and threaten ruin unless the minor projects on which he had set his heart were granted him. He held further that, instead of welding together the twenty-two millions of Italians, — peoples as mutually unrelated as Scotch Highlanders and Cornishmen in the days of the Stuarts, — instead of even ascertaining whether they could be welded together, this new, tentative Italy must be put in jeopardy in order to rush to the liberation of three million Venetians and of four hundred thousand Romans. The annals of patriotism have no counterpart to this Ganbaldian outbreak, because it was not patriotism; as must appear if we ask, How would Hampden or Washington, Lincoln or Vettor Pisani, have acted?
The best excuse we can find for Garibaldi is that, like the small boy who does a great injury, he did not mean to. His obsession of hatred for Cavour, his innate megalomania, his inability to reason, from which came his lack of historical perspective, his accessibility to flatterers, and his unwavering devotion to whatever plan he adopted, predestined him to threaten the very existence of Italy in April, 1861.
But more was involved than the explosion of his personal wrath. The Party of Action, which made him their tool, hoped, under the cover of his immense prestige, to shape the foreign policy of the new Kingdom, as they might have done had their move for the enrolment of a half-million volunteers, to be led by him, been successful. Garibaldi was their willing dupe. In resisting him and them, at the risk of his own popularity and, as it proved, of his life, Cavour performed the best service that a patriot could perform at that crisis; he taught that under a constitutional régime no man, not even the monarch, is above the law; and that was the lesson which the Italians, and Garibaldi above all, most needed to learn.
That admiration of Garibaldi is best which admires him for his noble qualities, not that which idolizes his failures, his blunders, his defects. He belonged by nature to the simple, Homeric brood, but Fate placed him in the complex nineteenth century, amid rotting tyrannies and an effete ecclesiasticism. He loved liberty, he loved the ideal of country, with a consuming passion. Not understanding the intricacy of the modern problem, he plunged ahead and expected that the system which had sufficed for patriarchal or tribal life, VOL. 108-NO. 4 would suffice still. So he lacked that tact for the possible which is the first mark of a statesman, and saves those who are privileged to achieve inestimable benefits from doing irreparable harm to their countrymen. But he infused into the Italians a passion for his sane ideals. He let the world see that the youth of Italy could fight. He bequeathed to the story of his country’s redemption the aureole of a legendary exploit.
After lingering a few days at Turin, still muttering threats and imprecations, Garibaldi returned to Caprera, where he slowly calmed down. On May 18, he wrote Cavour a friendly letter, urging him to declare a dictatorship, to summon to the standard of Victor Emanuel the half million or more volunteers who were straining at their leashes to fight, and to rest assured that Italy would not only free herself in a twinkling from Papal and Austrian trammels, but take her place among the Great Powers. This letter had scarcely reached Turin, when Cavour, who had never recovered from the ordeal of April 18, was seized with a sudden illness. In a week, thanks to numerous bleedings and other medieval medical practices, he died, on June 6, 1861.
Little though he suspected it, the person to whom that death proved the greatest calamity was Garibaldi himself. For without Cavour’s real but unacknowledged protection, the Paladin’s subsequent enterprises — snuffed out ignominiously at Aspromonte and at Mentana — were a menace to Italy; and his words, growing more and more lawless, were brands of discord which have not yet been quenched. To be indispensable to the glory of Garibaldi — though unrecognized by him and even spurned — marks both the masterfulness and the generosity of Cavour.