History: Giuseppe Garibaldi's military epic is encapsulated in two phrases: "Rome or death!" and "I obey".
If the first demonstrated a willingness to sacrifice everything in the pursuit of a united Italy, the second showed Garibaldi's acceptance of the House of Savoy as the custodian of that union, despite his own republican beliefs. But all men age, even the most famous revolutionaries of their day, and Daniel Pick, in his Rome or Death, examines the last years of Garibaldi's life, focusing on his failed campaign to transform Rome and its malaria-ridden environs by diverting the course of the Tiber away from the city centre.
The subject matter is fascinating. Garibaldi, after a career that had taken him all around the world, reaching its apogee with the destruction of the Kingdom of Naples in 1860, arrived in Rome in 1875 armed with plans for the transformation of the city - annexed by Italy in 1870 - only to be thwarted in his ambitions by politicians who wanted to keep him and his expensive plans at arm's length. For Garibaldi, this was proof of how the Italy for which he had fought had not come to fruition. Unrepresentative politicians and bureaucrats were, he believed, preserving their privileges by frustrating him, in a display of corruption and closed-mindedness which would hopefully be undone by his intended physical - and moral - transformation of the city.
Daniel Pick is at his best when writing about Rome and its surrounding countryside, the Campagna, at the time a malaria- ravaged wilderness which defied all attempts at improvement. Deprived of a modern infrastructure, subject to floods, and a hotbed of disease, Rome, for all its architectural and artistic wealth, fell short of the hopes invested in it by generations of Italian nationalists.
Garibaldi and his followers resented deeply the city's shortcomings, endlessly pointed out by the tourists who arrived every year. Pick moves easily within the extensive contemporary literature of Rome, marshalling the views of travel writers, novelists, doctors, and engineers, and pointing out the symbolic importance of the city, and the Campagna, to the nascent Italian state and to a Europe in political and religious turmoil.
But Pick goes further, delving into psychoanalysis: might there not be, he asks, an irrational dimension to Garibaldi's last enterprise? Might he not be atoning for early wrongs, for a life whose many achievements were built on family tragedy? Might he not be seeking forgiveness, above all, for the death of his first wife, Anita, in 1849, as they were chased across Italy by a host of foreign and Italian enemies?
History and psychoanalysis do not coexist easily. Historians are bound to their sources, written or otherwise; they cannot easily enter the inner recesses of the human mind. Therefore, a work of psychoanalytic history must overcome a number of hurdles. These include, of course, the obvious doubts about the psychoanalytic enterprise itself. But even if one is well disposed to psychoanalysis, the idea that an accurate portrait of a mind can be assembled from archival records and surviving testimonies, without the benefit of the all-important relationship between patient and analyst, is hard to accept.
These are serious difficulties, but, curiously, they have little bearing on Rome or Death. Perhaps because of a desire to reach as wide an audience as possible, Pick does not attempt to map out systematically Garibaldi's unconscious, leaving a theoretical and causal vacuum at the centre of this work.
Pick repeatedly argues that there must be more to the general's final campaign than traditional historians can account for. Garibaldi, he points out, was resolving unfinished business before he died. However, political, cultural and humanitarian motivations are more than sufficient to account for Garibaldi's enterprise. Having repeatedly tried to conquer and defend Rome, it was natural that the ageing Garibaldi should desire to see it turned into the city he had dreamed of for so long, a capital worthy of Italy and, eventually, in accordance with the Mazzinian model, of Europe.
As a nationalist, Garibaldi was mortified by the Eternal City's failings and by the poverty that surrounded Rome, and the whole Italian south, which forced thousands to emigrate yearly, contributing with their effort to the development of the American republics.
Finally, the frustration evidently felt by Garibaldi over the government's failure to adopt his plans need not be explained with recourse to the unconscious: it resulted from the inability of the man of action, adored by thousands across the world, to triumph over the political class that had most benefited, despite the general's misgivings, from his earlier sacrifice and daring. But having decided to obey the monarchy in order to safeguard a precarious national unity, Garibaldi had settled for an elitist Italy committed to a cautious brand of politics that he could never be a part of without destroying his heroic legacy.
Filipe Ribeiro de Meneses lectures in the Department of History at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth
Rome or Death: The Obsessions of General Garibaldi By Daniel Pick Jonathan Cape, 283pp. £16.99