Giuseppe Garibaldi

Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807–1882) was the foremost military leader of the Risorgimento, the nineteenth-century movement that achieved Italian unification. Born in Nice, then under Piedmontese rule, he was an early adherent of Giuseppe Mazzini's "Young Italy" (Giovine Italia, founded 1831) and was sentenced to death in 1834 for his part in a failed Genoese insurrection. He fled into a long South American exile (1836–1848), fighting in the Rio Grande do Sul and Uruguayan civil wars, where he formed his red-shirted Italian Legion and acquired the guerrilla skills that later made him legendary. Historians conventionally cast him as the "sword" of unification, alongside Mazzini the "soul," Count Camillo di Cavour the "brain," and King Victor Emmanuel II the figurehead.

Garibaldi's defining achievement was the Expedition of the Thousand (Spedizione dei Mille) of 1860. Sailing from Quarto near Genoa in May with roughly one thousand red-shirted volunteers (i Mille), he landed at Marsala in Sicily, defeated Bourbon forces at Calatafimi, and within months conquered the entire Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, entering Naples in September 1860. Earlier, during the revolutions of 1848–49, he had defended the short-lived Roman Republic against French troops and conducted a celebrated fighting retreat. The decisive political moment came at the meeting at Teano (26 October 1860), where Garibaldi handed his southern conquests to Victor Emmanuel II, hailing him "King of Italy," and subordinated his republican ideals to the monarchical settlement engineered by Cavour. The Kingdom of Italy was proclaimed in March 1861.

Garibaldi twice attempted to seize Rome from papal control, raising the cry "Roma o Morte" ("Rome or Death"), but was halted at Aspromonte (1862), where Italian royal troops wounded and captured him, and again at Mentana (1867), defeated by French and papal forces armed with new chassepot rifles. Rome was finally annexed in 1870 after the French garrison withdrew during the Franco-Prussian War. In old age Garibaldi commanded French volunteers in the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71) and sat in the Italian parliament. His enduring international fame made him a symbol of liberal nationalism across Europe, admired by figures from Abraham Lincoln (who reportedly offered him a Union command) to later anti-colonial nationalists who studied his volunteer methods.

For UPSC World History (General Studies Paper I and the optional), Garibaldi appears in the unification of Italy, frequently in comparison with Bismarck's "blood and iron" unification of Germany. Typical question angles ask candidates to distinguish the contributions of Mazzini, Cavour, Garibaldi and Victor Emmanuel; to evaluate whether unification was achieved "from above" by diplomacy or "from below" by popular revolution; and to analyse the significance of 1860 and the Teano meeting. Examiners also test the role of foreign intervention—Napoleon III at Plombières (1858) and the French defence of Rome—and the tension between Garibaldi's republicanism and the monarchical outcome. Knowing precise dates (1848–49, 1860, 1862, 1867, 1870) and place-names secures full marks.