'Roma o morte' Garibaldi, nationalism and the problem of psycho-biography

History Workshop Journal

Volumn 57, Issue 1, 2004, Pages 1-33

  Pick, Daniel ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ARTICLE; GOVERNMENT; HISTORY; ITALY; LITERATURE; POLITICS; PSYCHOTHERAPY; WAR;

BIOGRAPHY; GOVERNMENT; HISTORY, 19TH CENTURY; HISTORY, 20TH CENTURY; HISTORY, 21ST CENTURY; ITALY; POLITICS; PSYCHOTHERAPY; WAR;

EID: 3042779514     PISSN: 13633554     EISSN: 14774569     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/hwj/57.1.1     Document Type: Article

References (56)

1. Il Secolo, 26-27 Jan. 1875, p. 1.
2. Corresponding to the territorial limits of the Commune of Rome in the Middle Ages, the Roman Campagna is an area of about two-thousand square kilometres, traversed by the Tiber and Aniene rivers as well as a number of minor waterways. Also known as the Agro Romano, the Campagna's plain extends along the Lazio shoreline and is limited to the south by the Alban hills and the gulf of Terracina, to the north by the Tolfa and Sabatini mountains and to the east by the Sabini mountains. The American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, in The Marble Faun (1860) memorably described these circumscribing heights, 'which have gleamed afar, to our imaginations, but look scarcely real to our bodily eyes, because, being dreamed about so much, they have taken the aerial tints which belong only to a dream. These, nevertheless, are the solid frame-work of hills that shut in Rome, and its wide surrounding Campagna; no land of dreams, but the broadest page of history, crowded so full with memorable events that one obliterates another; as if Time had crossed and recrossed his own records till they grew illegible'.
3. George Sand, Garibaldi, Paris, 1859.
4. Jasper Ridley, Garibaldi, London, 1974, pp. 598, 628.
5. Giuseppe Garibaldi, Memorie autobiografiche, 4th edn, Firenze, 1888, p. 10;
6. Denis Mack Smith, Garibaldi (1958), Rome, 1993;
7. Gustavo Sacerdote, La Vita di Giuseppe Garibaldi, Milan, 1933, pp. 66-7.
8. Quoted in Christopher Hibbert, Rome: the Biography of a City (1985), London, 1987, p. 254.
9. Giuseppe Mazzini, Italy, Austria and the Pope: a Letter to Sir James Graham, Bart (pamphlet), London, 1845, p. 6.
10. Giuseppe Mazzini, The Duties of Man (1860), transl. Mrs E. A. Venturi, London, 1862, p. 27. Cf. 'He who can deny God either in the face of a starlight night, when standing beside the tomb of those dearest to him, or in the presence of martyrdom, is either greatly unhappy or greatly guilty.'
11. Quoted in Hibbert, Rome, 1987, p. 254.
12. G. M. Calabrò, La Dottrina religioso-sociale nelle opere di Giuseppe Mazzini, Palermo, 1911, p. 66.
13. Hibbert, Rome, 1987, p. 324. For details of Garibaldi's first encounter with the Saint-Simonians
14. see Donn Byrne, Garibaldi: the Man and the Myth, (n. p.), 1988. For Garibaldi's reading
15. see also Alfonso Scirocco, Garibaldi: battaglie, amori, ideali di un cittadino del mondo, Rome and Bari, 2001.
16. For Garibaldi's Latin American years, see Ridley, Garibaldi;
17. Scirocco, Garibaldi. Garibaldi fought for the republic of Rio Grande do Sul. In 1842, he became an officer in the Uruguayan navy.
18. For Anita: Anthony Valerio, Anita Garibaldi: a Biography, Westport, 2001.
19. Their children, Menotti, Riciotti, Rosita (who died as a child in 1845) and Teresita, lived for years with their grandmother in Nice, during the period of Garibaldi's second exile. They eventually rejoined him on his return to Caprera during the 1850s;
20. Valerio, Anita Garibaldi.
21. Sand, Garibaldi; Garibaldi: an Autobiography, ed. Alexandre Dumas, London, 1860.
22. Gabriele D'Annunzio, La Canzone di Garibaldi, Milan, 1901;
23. Giosué Carducci, Discorso per la morte di Giuseppe Garibaldi, Viterbo, 1911.
24. Sacerdote, La Vita.
25. G. M. Trevelyan, Garibaldi and the Making of Italy, London, 1911;
26. David Cannadine, G M. Trevelyan: a Life in History, London, 1992, pp. 68, 69, 82-3.
27. Leonardo Sciascia, A ciascuno il suo, Milano, 1988, p. 75.
28. Stendhal, Promenades dans Rome (1829), Paris 1980, 2 vols, vol. 1, p. 48. He also describes how flood and fever were seen as punishments for transgression.
29. R. De Cesare The Last Days of Papal Rome, 1850-1870, transl. Helen Zimmern, London, 1909, p. 98.
30. Guido Cremonese, Malaria: New Views on Doctrine and Therapeutics, Rome, 1924, p. 8.
31. As a contemporary French diplomat, who had observed the King at close quarters, noted dryly but incontrovertibly, 'Le roi était entré dans Rome, mais n'y avait pas dormi!': Cte H. D'Ideville, Victor-Emmanuel II: sa vie, sa mort: souvenirs personnels, Paris, 1878, p. 27.
32. Giuseppe Garibaldi, The Rule of the Monk; or Rome in the Nineteenth Century, London and New York (1870);
33. also repr. London, 1882. Original title: Clelia. Il governo del monaco. Roma nel secolo XIX. Romanzo storico politico, Milan, 1870.
34. Angelo Celli, The History of Malaria in the Roman Campagna from Ancient Times, edited and enlarged by Anna Celli-Fraentzel, London, 1933, p. 120.
35. Paul Ginsborg, Italy and its Discontents, 1980-2001, London, 2001, p. 67
36. Giulio Savelli, Che cosa vuole la Lega, preface by Umberto Bossi, Milan, 1992;
37. cf. Anna Cento Bull and Mark Gilbert, The Lega Nord and the Northern Question, London, 2001.
38. Speech of 20 Sept. 1922;
39. Giorgio Pini, The Official Life of Benito Mussolini, transl. Luigi Villari, London, 1939, p. 114.
40. Speech of 20 Sept. 1922;
41. Pini, Official Life, 1939, p. 114.
42. Cf. Peter Bondanella, The Eternal City: Roman Images in the Modern World, Chapel Hill and London 1987, chap. 7.
43. In a speech in 1932, Mussolini insisted on fascism's special claim on Garibaldi. The blackshirts were the 'legitimate descendants' of the redshirts and their great leader: 'Never did he give way, never was he forced to surrender his high ideal - not by men, not by the sects, not by parties or ideologies, nor by the declamation encountered in parliamentary assemblies. These assemblies Garibaldi despised, advocate as he was of an "unlimited" dictatorship in difficult times.' Mussolini noted how Garibaldi had worked on a scheme for draining the marshes around Rome. And then, speaking of the future moral transformation of the capital, the fascist leader mused on how it would have pleased the old General to see what had happened in inter-war Italy: 'With what pleasure he would look upon our present-day Rome, luminous, vast, no longer torn by factions, this Rome which he so deeply loved and which from his earliest youth he always identified with Italy!'
44. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900, Standard Edition, vol. 5, p. 429.
45. The Times, 5 June 1882, pp. 5-6
46. reproduced in Garibaldi, ed. Mack Smith, London, 1969, pp. 149-52.
47. Miri Rubin, 'What is Cultural History Now?', in What is History Now?, ed. David Cannadine, Basingstoke, 2002, p. 82.
48. In the opening volume of his revised, collected essays, Visions of Politics (2002), Skinner provides one or two unexpected and intriguing asides on Freud. Notably, he mentions psychoanalysis as an example of a theory that may indeed constitute an advance of understanding, enabling the historian to go beyond the agent's own self-justifications or rationalizations, to make sense of certain actions, in ways that would not have been immediately conceivable at the time of their utterance. He does not commit himself to pursuing a psychoanalytic approach, but introduces at least the possibility that it may be a worthwhile route for the historian to take: 'If we believe, for example, that Freud's concept of the unconscious represents one of the more important of these enrichments [in our own intellectual tradition], we shall not only want to do our best to psychoanalyse the dead, but we shall find ourselves appraising and explaining their behaviour by means of concepts that they would have found, initially at least, completely incomprehensible.' He goes on to suggest circumstances in which such explanations may be of help.
49. Gareth Stedman Jones, introduction to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, London 2002, p. 72.
50. Matilde Serao, The Conquest of Rome, London 1902, p. 8.
51. Serao, Conquest of Rome, pp. 8, 12, 10, 15, 29.
52. Letter of 31 Dec. 1840, in The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols, London, 1903-1912, vol. 1, pp. 380; 381-2.
53. Cf. Tim Hilton, John Ruskin: the Early Years, 1819-1859, New Haven and London, 1985, p. 58.
54. Hippolyte Taine 1867, p. 66;
55. Emile Zola, Rome, transl. by E. A. Vizetelly, London, 1896.
56. Elpis Melena (Baroness von Schwartz), Garibaldi: Recollections of his Public and Private Life, London, 1887, p. 308.