Garibaldi by Lucy Riall

Author:Lucy Riall
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press

Once again, the epistolary formula is used to great effect here. Contrasting the intimate experience with the public pose, the humility of the man with his political fame, the letter serves only to intensify the reader's response to Garibaldi's personal greatness.

As if all this was not enough, Garibaldi was joined in June by Alexandre Dumas. Dumas was in the process of editing and embellishing Garibaldi's memoirs for publication, and had been enjoying a lengthy tour and cruise of southern Europe and the Mediterranean. He apparently decided to join Garibaldi in order to get more material.97 He had an agreement to publish his letters and reports in the French liberal papers, Le Constitutionel, La Presse and Le Siècle, and later, in Naples, he told Garibaldi that he had a ‘great ambition … to lend my activity to the profit of your popularity’.98 In effect, Dumas became the first, and self-appointed, historian of the Thousand, and he brought to the task the right blend of journalistic realism, poetic licence and narrative skill. As a clearly envious correspondent of The Illustrated London News put it:

[Dumas] is engaged in writing the history of the revolution, which will in reality be a Sicilian romance, with all the information gleaned right and left, and from opposite sources, crammed into it. No offence to our neighbours across the Channel, but they have a most extraordinary fashion of relating actual occurrences.99

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