Man in the Red Flannel Shirt

GARIBALDI & HIS ENEMIES by Christopher Hibbert. 423 pages. Little, Brown. $7.50.

Compared with the grand simplicities of the American Revolution, Italy's struggle for nationhood was an operatic business; the absurd plot seems almost irrelevant to the magnificent sound effects. Its chief character had none of the natural authority of a born grandee like Washington; he was a bizarre, penniless, oratorical adventurer with a wild beard, red shirt, cloak and cutlass.

Giuseppe Garibaldi was also a pure and noble man, whose goodness reproaches a 20th century in which revolutionaries have been most notable for wickedness. His story has been superbly told by Christopher Hibbert, a 42-year-old British historian of the kind called "popular" because he is prolific (this is his fourth major work), he is readable, and he does not clutter the text with academic expertise.

Village Patriotism. Italy was a Napoleonic satrapy in 1807 when Garibaldi was born. After the Congress of Vienna (1814-15), the peninsula was controlled by three entities: France, the Papacy and the House of Savoy. Garibaldi himself was born in Nice; he spoke and wrote the Ligurian dialect, but never quite mastered Italian. Few Italians spoke anything but a regional dialect; an Umbrian peasant found it hard to communicate with a Venetian or a Neapolitan. Patriotism stopped at village limits.

A political conviction that Italy was a nation was not enough; Italy had to become a religion before it became a fact. The gospel was supplied by Giuseppe Mazzini, a doctrinaire zealot of secular but mystical nationalism. Among his converts was Garibaldi, who as a young seaman in the Piedmontese navy first heard the revolutionary phrase, "The Italy of all the Italians." He felt, he recalled, "as Columbus must have done when he first caught sight of land."

Discovery provoked action; in 1834 Garibaldi was sentenced to death as an agitator in an abortive mutiny. He departed for Rio de Janeiro not so much a hunted refugee as an "apostle" of Mazzini's creed. Rarely has a political sorcerer had so gifted an apprentice. Mazzini called for bands of guerrillas to free the nations of Europe. Garibaldi carried the concept to South America, fighting for ten years in Brazil and Uruguay. When he sailed in 1848 with 60 men to unite Italy, he expected to land on a hostile shore. In Roverbella (near Mantua) he found the unexpected: Charles Albert of Savoy, King of Sardinia, welcomed him, but gave no employment to his ragged company.

Innocent Dictator. From there on, Garibaldi's career is farce, confusion and grandeur in that order, although Historian Hibbert tries in his cool British way to make a coherent narrative. During the next 23 years, he fought a bit, governed a bit, endured exile a bit and agitated endlessly for Italian nationhood. Where he appeared with his troops, the village bands struck up, flowers were thrown, speeches were made, five village lads volunteered, and six stragglers deserted from his rear guard. His legend grew, and often he was hailed as "the second Jesus Christ" --although he had serious doubts about the credentials of the earthly representatives of the first.

Italy was finally united in 1870 under the House of Savoy. The unity was perhaps inevitable, but without Garibaldi the Risorgimento would have lacked a popular hero. He was a good commander of men; Abraham Lincoln even offered him an army corps with the Union forces. (Garibaldi turned him down; he wanted supreme command and immediate abolition of slavery.) He was, however, too much of an innocent to be a good administrator. He was installed only briefly as "Dictator" of Sicily. Yet if the prophet-in-arms was a nuisance in his own country, he received great honor elsewhere. In 1864, London put on an unprecedented jamboree for the visiting lion of liberty. He was given splendid receptions, pronounced "noble" by the poet laureate, and half a million Londoners yelled their heads off. He had the good sense and bad taste to wear his red shirt nearly everywhere. There were only two sour notes. Queen Victoria was "deeply shocked" by the high-level attention paid to this subverter of established order. Karl Marx, then organizing the First International in England, huffed: "A miserable spectacle of imbecility."

When he retired to the granitic little island domain of Caprera, between Corsica and Sardinia (much of it paid for by English friends), Garibaldi dreamed of a Shelleyan end--to be burned, like the poet, on the beach. When he died in 1882, he was instead given the usual Christian burial on Caprera. Nature supplied the Garibaldian touch. A melodramatic storm came up, and the vast granite block that now covers his body cracked and broke.

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