G.M. Trevelyan's Garibaldi

This article is the text of a talk given at the University of Urbino, Italy, during the Conference, Garibaldi e i movimenti democratici internazionali, 9-10-11 November 2007. My intention was to bring Trevelyan's great trilogy Garibaldi's Defence of the Roman Republic, Garibaldi and the Thousand and Garibaldi and the Making of Italy, to an Italian audience, to explore the often passionately enthusiastic relations between English and Italian lovers of democracy and freedom at the time of the Risorgimento, and to place the author and his vision in the very English but also pan-European liberal tradition. For this reason, my study opens with a discussion of Trevelyan's admiration for Lord Byron, aristocratic champion of revolutionary movements in Italy and Greece, and two of his other Italophile heroes, the Liberal statesmen Gladstone and Russell. I explore how Trevelyan's prefaces to his volumes, that for the first written for its first edition, and that for the second written for a reissue eleven years after its first publication, develop his ideas of a "people" which may be the English or the Italian people, his ideas of emerging nationhood and of the perennial and international struggle for freedom. This inquiry therefore opens out to embrace his Great War experience as a military ambulance commander on the Italian Front, and his insistence that without the Risorgimento the French and British would have had no united Italy as their ally during the climactic fight against German and Austro-Hungarian autocracy and militarism. Vital to Trevelyan's thinking here is his concept of "the living stream of history" as, alas, war, and of the past as a still living force. This brings my study to how Trevelyan wrote of the war of 1914-18 that "We have been at war with Metternich and Bismark," both of these national leaders being long dead, and his delight at having had for his own war enemy that same Kaiser Franz Joseph whose soldiers had hunted Garibaldi and the dying Anita in 1849. I conclude with an analysis of how rebellious and anti-establishment our distinguished Whig professor and author can be, who when he calls Garibaldi "a guerrilla figher" is offering the highest praise he can think of, and for whom the Bourbon and Hapsburg monarchies and the Vatican are merely disgusting tyrannies with no redeeming features.