Episode 17: Giuseppe Garibaldi: ‘The Only Hero the World Needs’
Professor Lucy Riall explains Garibaldi’s mastery of revolutionary war by harnessing military, political and populist levers of power to become a ‘father’ of modern Italy.
Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807-1882) was one of the world’s greatest revolutionaries, leading resistance movements with irregular armies such as the Ragamuffins and the Red Shirts in Latin America and Europe. A crucial figure of 19th century liberalism and nationalism, he inspired millions. Che Guevara claimed that he was ‘the only hero the world needs’.
As one of the ‘fathers’ of modern Italy, Garibaldi was the Risorgimento’s Sword, to Count Cavour’s Brain and Giuseppe Mazzini’s Soul. Untrained as a soldier and often over-matched by his opponents, he nevertheless achieved victories against the French and Austrian Armies, the Papal States and in Sicily. Perhaps as impressively, he maintained the effectiveness of irregular forces in numerous retreats that might, under a lesser commander, have lost the morale of his citizen fighters against professional armies. Historian AJP Taylor described Garibaldi thus: ‘He evoked from the people, and even from the politicians, a personal devotion almost without parallel in modern history; . . . and he showed himself the greatest general that Italy has ever produced.’
Professor Lucy Riall is a leading expert on modern Italy. She has written extensively on Italy’s formation, as well as on Giuseppe Garibaldi. She is currently at the European University institute in Florence and a Visiting Professor at the National Museum of Ethnology in Japan.
Recommended Reading
Lucy Riall, Garibaldi; Invention of a Hero (Yale University Press, 2007).
Denis Mack Smith, Cavour and Garibaldi 1860: A study in Political Conflict (Cambridge University Press, 1985)
George Macauley Trevelyan, Garibaldi and the Thousand Men, May 1860, (Thomas Nelson, 1909)
George Macauley Trevelyan, Garibaldi and the Making of Italy, (Longmans, 1911)
George Macauley Trevelyan, Garibaldi’s Defence of the Roman Republic 1848-9, (Longman, 1919).
Lucy Riall, ‘Hero, saint or revolutionary? Nineteenth-century politics and the cult of Garibaldi’ Modern Italy 3.02 (1998): 191–204.
HOSTS
Paul O’Neill CBE
RUSI Senior Associate Fellow
Professor Beatrice Heuser
Senior Associate Fellow