1 - Garibaldi: an Inhabitant of Nice between two cultures

Nice (Alpes-Maritimes, France): Joseph Garibaldi's family house, demolished in 1882.

By Hubert HEYRIES
Lecturer
University Paul-Valéry/Montpellier III

Garibaldi was born French in the city of Nice which had been annexed in 1792. He became Piedmontese in 1814 when the Inhabitants of Nice, exhausted by the conscriptions and the effects of the Continental System, returned with satisfaction to the realm of Piedmont - Sardinia after the first treaty of Paris. The painful recollections of the First Empire and the situation of the borders of Nice probably contributed to the fact that Giuseppe Garibaldi gave greater importance to the patriotic culture of Nice. The influence of his environment as well as that of his education also directed him towards the Italian culture.

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Joseph Garibaldi's baptismal certificate kept in Saint-Martin-Saint-Augustin church, in the Old Nice:
The year thousand eight hundred and seven, the day nineteen of July was baptized by me, undersigned Joseph Marie, born the fourth of the current month, son of the Sir Jean Dominique Garibaldi, merchant and Mad. Rose Raymondo, married in front of the church, in this branch. The Godfather was Sir Joseph Garibaldi, merchant, the Godmother Miss Julie Marie Garibaldi his sister, my parishioners, the godfather signed, the godmother declared not being able to sign. The father who was present signed. Mess. Félix Gustavin and Michel Gustavin witnesses signed.
Pie Papacin, vice-chancellor of Saint Martin

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2 - A well-off family of Nice

Second of five children, he had three brothers who became either sailors or merchants (Angelo, the elder brother, sailor then merchant in New York, ended his career as consul of Piedmont - Sardinia in Philadelphia). His father Domenico, owner of coastal navigation ship, belonging to an old family of Nice, and qualified as merchant in Giuseppe's birth certificate, would have wanted that Giuseppe became a lawyer or a doctor. His mother Rosa Raimondo, a Piedmontese from Loano, fervent Christian, would have wished him to become a priest. His parents had been able to acquire enough wealth to give their children a good education in the point to recruit three private tutors, two priests and a layman, for Giuseppe, and a nurse for the youngest daughter Teresa who died in a fire at the age of two years.
Garibaldi did not belong to the low classes, but to this social fringe which had not totally broken its links with the previous plebeian history and which meant marking its difference by a more intense sociocultural environment. The three tutors of Giuseppe played a determining role in the making of the young man’s personality. Priest Giaume had a recognized scientific quality but lacked authority on his young pupil, which brought Garibaldi to have, at the end of the life, a particularly hard judgment on the clerical tutor ship: "I believe that the physical and moral inferiority of the Italian race results especially from this custom which consists in giving priests as private tutors to the children " (quoted by Max Gallo, Garibaldi, la force d'un destin; Paris, Fayard, 1982, pp. 34-35). On the other hand, the recollection of mister Arena was much stronger. Giuseppe owed him the knowledge of Italian, considered as his " maternal " language, without neglecting French, and rudiments of national history concerning the greatness of the eternal Rome. In fact, the young Giuseppe lived in the town of Nice which was disturbed by the convulsions of the end of the Empire and which in 1814-1815 changed of country, culture and history. The laic tutor knew how to give him the intellectual powers to understand the world which was changing under his eyes.

Joseph Garibaldi's apocryphal representation listening to mister Arena

3 - A sailor's career which begins in Nice

The port of Nice at the beginning of the XIX-th century

Garibaldi was therefore a man stemming from two cultures, French and Italian, cultures which brought him to open to the world and to go out of his home town. The profession of sailor which he chose by necessity urged him to travel in all the Mediterranean Sea.
At the age of fifteen, he took a job as a ship’s boy, and made his first journey to Odessa. His second journey to Rome, at the age of eighteen, in 1825, together with his father and on the family tartan, the Santa-Reparata, was for him at the same time a revelation and a disappointment. The Rome of the popes, white, corrupt and in ruins, was very different from the one he had imagined, but Rome became his obsession.
He began his sailor's career by ensuring relations with the East, Constantinople or Taganrog, (a Russian port on the Azov sea). He was an excited, independent and curious young man, speaking different languages. He belonged to this generation smothered by the counter-revolutionary, mystic and reactionnary order imposed by the Congress of Vienna and the great powers victorious of Napoleon Ist, Austria, Russia, Prussia and United Kingdom, this generation which was twenty years old under the Restoration, and which in 1830-1831 flooded Europe and the Italian peninsula of their dreams and their romantic hopes.

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