Friedrich Engels
Giuseppe Garibaldi's statement and its effects
on the Working Classes in Italy

The Eastern Post. Nr. 163,
11. November 1871

The news from Italy was of a peculiar interest, letters were received from
a number of Italian cities, amongst whom were Turin, Milan, Ravenna, and
Girgenti. These confirmed in every respect the immense strides with which
the Association was advancing in Italy. The working-classes, in the towns
at least, were rapidly abandoning Mazzini, whose denunciations of the
International had no effect whatever upon the masses. But Mazzini's
denunciations had produced one good effect; they had caused Garibaldi,
not only to pronounce himself entirely in favour of our Association, but also,
on this very question, to come to an open rupture with Mazzini. In a long
letter addressed to M.Petroni, a Sardinian lawyer, who has been since
elected president of the Italian Working Men's Congress, now sitting at
Rome, Garibaldi expresses his indignation that the Mazzinians should
venture to speak of him as of an old fool, who always had done what ever
the men surrounding him, his satellites and flatterers, had pursuaded him
to do. Who were these satellites, he asks? Were they the men of his staff
that came with him from South America in 1848, those be found at Rome in
'49, or those of his staff of '59 and '60, or those who fought with him
recently against the Prussians? If so, he maintains they were men whose
names will for ever live in the memory of grateful Italy. But let them
re-enter these satellites and flatterers. "I repeat it, you have not even the
merit of originality, when you dig up again my satellites and flatterers have
always led that grey-headed baby from Nice by the nose. And while you,
Petroni, were suffering for eighteen years in the prisons of the Inquisition,
the people of your sect (the Mazzinians) were the very men accused by the
Royalists, of being my sattelites and followers. Read all the dynastic trash
published especially since 1860, and there you will find Garibaldi might be
good for something if he had not the misfortune of being led by Mazzini,
and to be surrounded by the Mazzinians. This is all false, and you may ask
those that have known me more closely and more intimately, whether they
ever found a man more obstinate than myself when I had made up my mind

Garibaldi's statement and its effects on the Working Classes in Italy

to do something which I had recognised to be right. Ask Mazzini himself,
whether he has found me to be easily persuaded whenever he attempted to
draw me over to some of his impracticable realities. Ask Mazzini whether
the origin of our disagreement is not this, that, in 1848,1 told him he was
doing wrong in holding back in the city, under one pretext or another, the
youth of Milan, while our army was fighting the enemy on the Mincio. And
Mazzini is a man who never forgives if any one touches his infallibility."
Garibaldi then states that Mazzini, in 1860, did everything in his power to
frustrate and to render abortive the general's expedition to Sicily, which
ended in the unification of Italy; that when Mazzini heard of Garibaldi's
success, he insisted upon the latter proclaiming the Republic in Italy, a
thing absurd and utterly foolish under the circumstances, and he finally
reproaches "the great exile, whom everybody knew to be in Italy," with his
meanness in bespattering the fallen of Paris, the only men who in this time
of tyranny, of lies, of cowardice and degradation have waved high, even
while dying, the sacred banner of rights and justice. He continues, "You
cry anathema upon Paris, because Paris destroyed the Vendöme Column and
the house of Thiers. Have you ever seen a whole village destroyed by the
flames for having given shelter to a volunteer, or a franc-tireur? And that
not only in France, the same in Lombardy, in Venetia. As to the palaces set
fire to in Paris by petroleum, let them ask the priests who, from their intimate acquaintance with the hell-fire about which they preach, ought to be
good judges, what difference there is between petroleum fire and those
fires which the Austrians lit in order to burn down the villages in Lombardy
and Venetia, when those countries were still under the yoke ofthe men who
shot Ugo Bassi, Ciceruacchio and his two sons, and thousands of Italians
who committed the sacrilege of demanding a free Rome and a free Italy.
"When the light of day shall once have dispersed the darkness which
covers Paris, I hope that you, my friend, will be more indulgent for the acts
caused by the desperate situation of a people which, certainly, was badly
led, as it generally happens to nations, who allow themselves to be allured
by the phraseology of the doctrinaires, but who, in substance, fought heroically for their rights. The detractors of Paris may say what they like, they
will never succeed in proving that a few miscreants and foreigners—as
they said of us in Rome in 1849 —have resisted for three months against a
grand army, backed as it was by the most potent armies of Prussia."
"And the International? What need is there to attack an Association
almost without knowing it? Is that Association not an emanation of the :
abnormal state of society all over the world? A society where the many
have to slave for bare subsistence, and where the few, by lies and by force,
appropriate the greater portion of the produce of the many, without having

Friedrich Engels

earned it by the sweat of their brow, must not such a society excite the
discontent, and the vengeance of the suffering masses."

"I wish that the International should not fare as did the people of Paris—
that is to allow itself to be circumvented by the concoctors of doctrines
which would drive it to exaggerations, and finally to ridicule; but that it
should well study, before trusting them, the character of the men who are
to lead it on the path of moral and material improvement."

He returns for a moment to Mazzini, "Mazzini and I, we are both old;
but no one speaks of re-conciliation between him and me. Infallible people
die, but they do not bend. Reconciliation with Mazzini? there is only one
possible way for it—to obey him; and of thatI do not feel myself capable."

And finally the old soldier proves by referring to his past, that he has
always been a true International, that he has fought for liberty everywhere
and anywhere, first in South America, then offering his services to the
Pope (aye, even to the Pope, when he played the liberal), then under Victor
Emanuel, lastly in France, under Trochu and Jules Favre—and he concludes, "I and the youth of Italy are ready to serve Italy, also side by side with
you, the Mazzinians, if it should be necessary."

This crowning letter of Garibaldi's, coming as it does after a number of
others, in which he has plainly expressed his sympathies for the International, but abstained from speaking plainly as to Mazzini, has had an immense
effect in Italy, and will induce many recruits to rally round our banner.

It was also announced that a full report of the working men's Congress
at Rome, would be laid before the next meeting of the Council.