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In his day Garibaldi was compared to George Washington, who stood up to stronger enemies and conquered them. In many respects, he was closer to his contemporary Abraham Lincoln, who, unlike Washington, was not a member of the gentry but a man sprung "from the people," an advocate of the oppressed, and one who fought for his country's national unity. In 1860, Garibaldi briefly ruled Italy's southern half, which he had single-handedly liberated from a sort of police-state a few months before, and led it to join the northern constitutional monarchy established by Cavour and Victor Emmanuel: with this merger a new nation state was born (though the differences between North and South were to plague the new country for the next 150 years). Unlike Lincoln or Washington, however, Garibaldi was primarily neither a statesman nor a soldier in the ordinary sense of the word but rather a self-made champion of national self-determination and worldwide democracy. Here we have a paradox: he spent most of his life fighting to liberate his country from foreign and domestic despots (including the pope), and, as a consequence became and has remained to this day—despite Benedict XVI's latter-day "Counter-Reformation"—one of modern Italy's few national heroes. Yet his "nationalism" was unusual in that one of its leading features was "cosmopolitanism," as the French utopian socialist Louis Blanc put it.
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Perhaps cosmopolitanism ran in his veins, given that he was born a subject of Napoleon's multinational Empire before his native city reverted to the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia in 1814 (eventually Cavour was to cede it again to France in 1860, in exchange for Napoleon III's endorsement of Piedmont's annexation of Central Italy). He hailed from a family which had recently moved to Nice from Genoa. The latter was a hotbed of republican and democratic feeling and the home of Giuseppe Mazzini (1805-1872), who, with Garibaldi and Cavour, was to become one of the three main architects of Italy as a united nation. Scholars and journalists have often commented on the apparent oddity that the three leading champions of the emerging Italian movement all came from the far northwest corner of the peninsula, a peripheral region hardly renowned for its contribution to Italian culture or even language. Yet there are obvious reasons why early 19th-century Piedmont-Sardinia should prove a fertile seedbed for effective patriotism. In 1796-1814, this area had been deeply affected by the French Revolution and the subsequent Napoleonic experience. Then from 1814-59 it constituted the only Italian state that combined effective independence with a strong military tradition. Striving to imitate Prussian policies and mores, for centuries its warlike rulers (the House Savoy) had pursued an expansionist strategy, eventually incorporating the territories of the old Republic of Genoa, which provided it with a substantial coastline and major ports. Geographically located at the crossroads of western and central Europe, Piedmont-Sardinia could not escape being involved in the cultural ferment first of Jacobinism and then, from 1814, Romanticism and liberalism.
Thus when young Garibaldi became involved in politics, his views took shape against the background of the radical Enlightenment, modified rather than fully replaced by a Romantic awareness of nations as the harbingers of universal values. It seemed to him that a true Italian patriot must also be a champion of what we now call the globalization of democratic nationalism. Indeed he first established his reputation in Latin America in the 1830s, when, as a refugee from a failed republican rising in Genoa, he and his brigade of red-shirted Italian exiles fought for the independence of fledgling republics on the Plata River. Forty years later, at the end of his career, his internationalism remained as vigorous and idealistic as ever, as shown by his last two campaigns. In 1870-1, after the fall of Napoleon III, he fought for the French Republic against what he saw as German imperialism: it was a magnanimous gesture, given that for years the French had frustrated his dream of making Rome the capital of Italy, and had crushed his volunteers in battle twice, first in 1849 and then in 1867. A few years later, in 1876, he championed the cause of the Bulgarian rebels against the Ottomans (he was one of the few Europeans to echo Gladstone's campaign to end the "atrocities" in the Balkans). By then "the General" was an invalid and a national icon, but there was a feeling abroad that, as suggested by the subtitle of one of the books reviewed here, he deserved to be regarded as a "citizen of the world."
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