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French volunteers in Italy,1848–49: a collectiveincarnation of the fraternity ofthe peoples and of the traditionof French military engagementin Italy and EuropeAnne-Claire Ignace aa Université de Savoie ,Published online: 20 Nov 2009.

To cite this article: Anne-Claire Ignace (2009) French volunteers in Italy, 1848–49: acollective incarnation of the fraternity of the peoples and of the tradition of Frenchmilitary engagement in Italy and Europe, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 14:4,445-460, DOI: 10.1080/13545710903281938

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French volunteers in Italy, 1848–49: a collective

incarnation of the fraternity of the peoples and of the

tradition of French military engagement in Italy and

Europe

Anne-Claire Ignace

Universite de Savoie

Abstract

Out of the thousands of Frenchmen who attempted to join the 1848–49 Italianrevolution movement, more than 1,200 actually played a significant role in thevarious revolutionary struggles. Based on the investigation of the participation of theFrench volunteers in the Italian revolutions of 1848–49, this article shows thatthe 1848 revolutions were European not in the sense that they spread across Europesimultaneously, but because of the presence of international volunteers who wereconstantly moving from one part of Europe to another. The enlistment of volunteersin France for the 1848 Italian cause is examined in terms of the circulation of politicaland military models that were inspired both by the idea of the ‘Fraternity of thePeoples’ in 1848 but also by an older tradition of French military involvement inItaly and Europe. The little-known case of the French volunteers who went to fightin Sicily in 1849, first ‘Expedition of the Thousand’, provides a case study forexplaining the enthusiasm that the French volunteers showed for the Italian cause.

Keywords

1848, France, Italy, Sicily, volunteers, warfare, revolutions.

Across Europe, the revolutions of 1848 and 1849 saw an important circulation

of men-at-arms, volunteers fighting within or outside regular armies. Some

were exiles returning to their country of origin in order to take part in the

struggle for national liberation, but others were international volunteers who

fought outside their homeland for a foreign cause. Throughout those years in

which the Italian peninsula was the theatre of both the first war of

independence against Austria and of liberal and democratic revolutions,

foreign volunteers arrived from a wide variety of geographical, social, and

political backgrounds. Several thousand Frenchmen attempted to travel to Italy

and more than 1,200 actually took part in one or other of the struggles that

opposed the Italians and the Austrians (in the North of the peninsula and in

Tuscany), Italians and other Italians (such as the Sicilians versus the Neapolitans

in 1849) or the Italians and the French (in Rome).1

While there are several recent publications on the role of volunteers in the

Italian Risorgimento, on the French and Italian National Guard and on the

Journal of Modern Italian Studies 14(4) 2009: 445–460

Journal of Modern Italian StudiesISSN 1354-571X print/ISSN 1469-9583 online ª 2009 Taylor & Francis

http://www.informaworld.com DOI: 10.1080/13545710903281938

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‘citizen-soldiers’ in Paris during the 1848 revolution2 – all essential when

considering the relationship between taking up arms, politicization and

citizenship – very little has been written on the links and contacts between

French and Italian participants of the 1848 revolution,3 classic works of

diplomatic history excepted (Boyer 1967; Jennings 1973; Chastain 1988).

However, the history of the French and Italian revolutions of 1848 takes on a

completely new form once we take into consideration these men who travelled

ready to fight across Europe. The 1848 revolution was European not only

because of the simultaneous eruption of revolutionary activity in various

countries, but also because of the circulation of men, weapons, and with them,

ideas.4

The volunteer fighters of 1848 must therefore be considered in terms of the

circulation of political and military models. This is especially true for the

French voluntary contribution, which was not exclusively spontaneous, but

was also encouraged and organized by several Italian states. What did the

Italians expect of these foreign reinforcements? The French were not the only

Europeans to offer military assistance to the different Italian governments and

these had not exclusively, nor always preferentially turned towards France

when they considered including foreign combatants. The French voluntary

contribution thus raises questions around competing military models that the

Italians had to take into account in 1848 in order to win their independence

through armed combat.

On the French side, mobilization for Italy was firmly anchored in the spirit

of the ‘Spring of the Peoples’ – at once its incarnation and its symbol. It was

also part of several other political, military and intellectual traditions: that of the

French commitment to the nations of Europe and the world, but also that of a

political friendship which linked the French and Italians in particular. By

combining prosopography and the analysis of these traditions and their 1848 re-

elaboration, we can explain the nature of French voluntarism for the cause of

the Italian Risorgimento. While they were present all across the Peninsula, the

French were particularly numerous in Sicily where they launched a first and

little-known ‘Expedition of the Thousand’.

The Italian quest for reinforcements and for military models

Appealing to international solidarity

While French voluntary mobilization was often spontaneous, it was also desired

and encouraged by some of the exiles living in France at the time of the

revolution. Italian political emigration had begun to organize itself during

the first weeks of the Second Republic in the ‘Italian National Association’ and

the ‘Italian Democratic Central Committee’, who both organized legions that

were composed in the majority of Italians who wanted to return to their

country of origin, but were also open to the French as we can see on a

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recruitment poster addressed to ‘all the citizens of the French Republic’: ‘We

ask for man-power, weapons and a little money to pay our way to the border’.5

From the outbreak of war against Austria and all the more so once the

Piedmont army showed its first signs of weakness, foreign voluntary support

appeared to the Italians as a kind of solidarity that respected their wish to

liberate themselves from foreign domination, while exerting military and

political influence on the conflict that opposed them to the Austrians. That is

the meaning conveyed in the following appeal by the Neapolitan exile

Giuseppe Ricciardi in January 1849 in the Socialist daily newspaper La

Democratie pacifique:6

Rather than sending her army across the Alps, France should come to our

rescue at the first signs of war by sending experienced officers and numerous

volunteers and also by using her influence in the various European counsels.

The former would, among other advantages, provoke lively emulation in

our soldiers’ minds and France would, by choosing this strategy do nothing

other than what royalist France did for Greece in days gone by. To be sure –

the Italian cause is surely no less noble than that of Hellas and Austria has

been no less iniquitous to us than Turkey had been towards the Greeks.

[Translation by Franziska Heimburger]7

Here we can see one of the main Italian expectations as far as the French

volunteers were concerned: to arouse fighting spirit through their example

among the Italians who were considered reluctant to take up arms. Volunteers

from France, the archetypal warrior nation, were to constitute a model of

military virtue and discipline. Furthermore, the arrival of volunteers is clearly

seen as an alternative to French military intervention – which many Italians

rejected for a long time as they considered with Charles Albert that Italy had to

‘fare da se’ (‘be made by its own efforts’) – and as complementary to traditional

diplomatic dealings. Indeed, in these lines Ricciardi appealed to a ‘diplomacy of

the peoples’, as it had been invoked during the 1820s for the Philhellene

mobilization, to which he makes an explicit reference, underlining the contrast

between the liberal mobilization in favour of Greece during the Restoration

and the pusillanimity of the 1848 Republicans towards the Italian cause. Carlo

Cattaneo also drew the same parallel between the European mobilization for

Greece and the failure of a similar mobilization for Italy, which he blamed on

the King of Piedmont who was guilty of ‘making Europe completely

indifferent to a cause that should have interested her even more than the Greek

cause in 1821’ (Cattaneo 1848: 166).

Volunteer recruitment committees in France

Piedmont, reputed to have a strong and disciplined army, considered the arrival

of volunteers from France with great mistrust and, indeed, rejected all offers

French volunteers in Italy, 1848–49

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that were made. Quite the reverse is true of other Italian states who were very

keen to have volunteers stream to their shores – especially in the case of

governments born out of revolution who had to hastily organize armed forces

capable of resisting the armed restoration.

It was in the Sicilian case that this recruitment policy was both best

organized and most efficient. After the Palermo revolution of 12 January 1848,

Sicily proclaimed the destitution of the King of Naples, Ferdinand II, and

prepared for armed combat with Neapolitan troops – although those in power

hoped until the last moment that Franco-British mediation undertaken after the

bombardment of Messina by ‘Re Bomba’ might lead to a peaceful resolution of

the conflict. The Sicilian government quickly decided to appeal to foreign

volunteers to organize the armed forces in a country that the Neapolitan

government was accused of having reduced to a state of dependence ‘to which

no other conquered country had yet been reduced to by its oppressors’ [my

translation].8

A recruiting committee was established and sent to France. It was presided

by the Modenese Paolo Fabrizi, the youngest in a series of brothers engaged

since early on in the Risorgimento struggles, of which the oldest, Nicola, was

one of the main theoreticians of national war in Risorgimento Italy (see Della

Peruta 1984). Paolo Fabrizi had travelled all across the Mediterranean, since

his participation in the 1831 Modena insurrection had forced him into exile,

and he had established links with Italian exiles living on these shores. He had

stayed in Corsica long enough to create a considerable network to which he

turned in 1848 in his quest for volunteer recruitment from the island. Fabrizi,

who was deeply influenced by Mazzini and a defender of the virtues of

international solidarity with the help of the Franco-Italian team around him

succeeded in organizing a thousand French volunteers who were sent to

Sicily.9

As far as the Sicilian government was concerned, the foreign volunteers

were to serve three purposes. First of all, to inspire some military spirit in

the islanders, deemed to have lost the same spirit over the course of years of

Bourbon domination that was generally considered to be military occupa-

tion; second, to transmit their technical competence to the Sicilians –

especially in the artillery – and to help command the young Sicilian army;

finally, to exert influence in the diplomatic sphere as the Sicilians estimated

they would be more strongly defended by the mediators if they held the

stronger military position. Furthermore, it is essential to take into

consideration that for the Sicilians, France was not only a recruitment pool

for volunteer combatants, but also a veritable model in military organization,

as we can see in this request for information addressed to a French general,

general de Trobriand (more of him later) about ‘fundamental military

institutions, . . . the functioning of General Headquarters in France, the

obligations of military supplies and [the functioning] of promotions’ [my

translation].10

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Switzerland, ‘William Tell’s daughter’:11 a competing military model

The Italian governments did not turn only towards France in their search for

instructors to their emerging armies. While the Sicilians appealed first and

foremost to France, they also sent a recruiting committee to Switzerland; the

Roman Republic did the same in sending Filippo de Boni whose corres-

pondence (kept at the Palermo Archivio di Stato) shows that the contribution of

Swiss officers and soldiers was no less fervently desired than that of French

volunteers (Pagano 1952). De Boni wrote to his minister on 27 March 1849

that he could immediately send ‘non-commissioned officers to instruct [his]

troops, the Swiss being practically unique in terms of instruction and rapid

disciplining’ [my translation].12 The French, therefore, were not unique.

De Boni also drew up a project of agricultural colonization and presented it

to his government in the following terms:

New elements of prosperity and could be introduced in the state: a colony

of agricultural labourers in peace time, soldiers during war – good, diligent

farmers like the Swiss would lead by example by cultivating our deserted

plains; Those soldiers, who would owe everything to us and the new order

of things, would be faithful and affectionate champions of the Republic.

[My translation]13

De Boni did not limit himself to planning to install Swiss colonists in Latium, but

went on to suggest that his government should introduce in Italy the Swiss

tradition that he considered best suited to ‘propagate the love for all things military

and make the [Italian] masses more warrior-like’ [my translation]:14 practice target-

shooting. The success of this project for military and civic education in unified

Italy under Garibaldi’s influence is well-known (Pecout 1990).

There were not only military reasons for the Italians to organize Swiss

volunteer recruitment. There was also a very clear political project: that of

singling out the mercenaries that traditionally fought for King of Naples and the

Swiss Guards in the service of the Pope, causing the line to break through

capitulation, but also encouraging the volunteers to win their compatriots over

to the Italian cause. The Lombards, in turn, hoped that by recruiting Poles

rather than French volunteers, they would be able to sway the Slavs enrolled in

the Austrian army to cross to the Italian side.15

The French volunteers: profiles and motivations

Typology of 1848 volunteers

The several thousand Frenchmen who fought or proposed themselves for fighting

as volunteers on the Italian peninsula in 1848 and 1849 do not form a single

homogenous group. Their modes of departure were very different: some set off on

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their own, while others signed up to the Italian legions or organized combat

legions of their own. The 1848 volunteers can be differentiated according to social

origin, degree of politicization and military experience, making it possible to

distinguish several distinct types rather than a single profile.

Among these types, the first we can distinguish is that of the ‘old combatant

for liberty’ who combines real military experience obtained in the ranks of the

French army with a sincere liberal conviction that had already led him to take

part in other national wars before 1848. This was the case, for example, of

Adolphe de Pontecoulant, co-founder with a certain Bonnefond of a Franco-

Italian legion in 1848, whose services were proposed to the Venetian and

Lombard governments. Having been a volunteer in Latin America and then the

founder of a Parisian legion that went to Belgium in 1830, Pontecoulant

emphasized in his letter of introduction to the Venetian government that ‘in all

the countries where [he has] served the cause of liberty, [he has ] made [his]

name through action and conviction of the cause of the independence of

nations’ [my translation from the French].16

A second type was that of the political activist whose faith – republican or

socialist – was stronger than his military qualities. A member of a Republican

society or involved in workers’ associations in France, this type of volunteer

had often seen his first combat in 1830, or in February or June 1848, so that

leaving for Italy was a prolongation of this political engagement, although the

distinction between military voluntarism and political exile is often unclear.

The greatest number of these highly politicized men was to be found among

the defenders of the Roman Republic and they had not necessarily served in

the army beforehand. Their priority was Republican solidarity and they

expressed their disagreement with French policy, considered to be fratricidal,

through their presence in Rome. The most famous French defender of the

Roman republic was Gabriel Laviron, alumnus of the Ecole Polytechnique,

painter and art critic, combatant on the June 1848 barricades, who was forced

to leave France after these events to escape police investigations (Aprile 2008:

79–84). In Rome he was the founder of the Foreign Legion17 which included

several hundred Frenchmen, and there were many accounts in both French and

Italian of his heroic death on the walls of Rome. They all present a sacrificial

conception of armed voluntarism, which was conceived as both testimony of

and radical protest against French policy.

Some were military rather than militant and they constitute a third type of

volunteer. The attraction of the profession of arms seems to have been primary

in their engagement and they set off to Italy if not exclusively motivated, at

least heavily incentivised by the prospects of promotion and an Italian career.

Colonel Lavelaine-Maubeuge who turned towards Lodovico Frapolli, the

representative of the Lombard government in France in 1848, is representative

of this group. He clearly explained that his forced retirement in France at the

age of 53 due to the reform of the officer corps in April 1848 had pushed him

into the arms of a foreign army.18 The case of this man who had served the Bey

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of Tunisia several years earlier, makes us think about the distinction between

volunteers and mercenaries, especially since his correspondence does not

indicate adherence to any particular cause. He did not primarily intend to

defend the Italian cause but rather to exercise his military profession, which the

reforms of the Second Republic no longer permitted him to do.19

In the case of these professional soldiers, voluntary engagement could also be

part of a career plan. At the end of June and the beginning of July 1848

hundreds of unemployed Parisian workers also saw fighting as a volunteer as a

professional opportunity. During that period, hundreds of men descended on

Marseilles and Toulon demanding passage to Piedmont in order to go and fight

Austria. These young workers were completely devoid of military equipment

or even the means of subsistence, and they were refused passage to Piedmont.

In a letter to the Prefect of Toulon that was printed in a local newspaper, they

therefore demanded to be sent to ‘Algeria or any other French colony where,

they said, we would be provided with the means of working or joining the

army in order to be of use to our country’.20 For these men, the profession of

arms was just a means like many others to escape poverty and unemployment in

the French capital during 1848. This is very interesting because it shows that

military voluntarism could be a form of economic emigration. However, since

these workers arrived in the South of France very soon after the June 1848

insurrection in Paris, it is likely that there was a link between the two events.

These men also declared that the French government encouraged them to

leave and the government may well have tried to send them away from the

capital because they were considered to be dangerous and subversive. That was

at any rate the opinion of many Italians. But the episode also how allowing

volunteers to leave for a foreign country enabled the French authorities to

restore stability after the revolutionary upheavals.

The origins of mobilization: the French tradition of international voluntary

engagement, the shadow of Bonaparte and Franco–Italian friendship

The question of voluntary engagement is not limited to the list of personal

motivations, be they political, professional, or economic. The mobilization of

volunteers in 1848 also had collective dimensions that were connected to

certain political, military and intellectual traditions that were more or less

explicitly invoked by the volunteers. Many of those wanting to set off saw

themselves as part of an international mobilization that in the period of the

Restoration had embraced Greece, the Latin-American countries and Belgium.

Some had taken part personally in one or other of these wars of independence,

and for the others they constituted the stock of images and experience that help

to explain their engagement. On the Italian side we most frequently find the

comparison between Italy in 1848 and Greece in 1821, while on the French

side the most frequent references were to mobilization in favour of the Poles,

‘revolutionary French’s favourite brothers’ (Agulhon 1975: 109). Thus we read

French volunteers in Italy, 1848–49

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in a March 1849 edition of the Democratie pacifique: ‘During the French

monarchy from 1830 to 1848 a great number of committees for the heroic

Poland were formed; will republican France in 1848 not do the same for the

unfortunate and noble Italy?’.21 This is the same line of argument that was used

by Ricciardi to mobilize the French and points to the paradox of a French

monarchy that was more liberal than the subsequent Republic.

More so than the Philhellenic volunteers or the liberal mobilization of the

Restoration years, it was the example of the armies of the French Directory and

their Italian campaign of 1796 that were most present in those two years.

Indeed, if the 1848 volunteers felt a shadow bearing on them, it was not that of

the Philhellene Fabvier who is only rarely mentioned, but rather that of

Bonaparte himself. The frequent references to the Italian campaign played on

two important themes: on the one hand, the campaign of 1796 was presented

first and foremost as a crucial moment that sealed the Franco-Italian fraternity

of arms; on the other hand, it was an essential source of glorious representations

as is evident in this call to arms:

Napoleon owed his rapid ascension to the conquest of Italy. We must today

follow in his tracks. We must, without delay, travel all over the fields and towns

that left forever their mark on his journey, and breathe in for a moment the

sweet Italian sky where the laurels of glory and religion await us.22

This text reminds us of Bonaparte’s address to his soldiers on 27 March 1796

when he promised them that they would ‘cross the most fertile plains in the

world, rich countries, great cities, and thus gain honor, glory, and fortune’

(Bonaparte 2001: 91). It is among the professional soldiers that the reference to

Bonaparte and the Napoleonic wars was the most frequent. For example,

Georges Moeller from Nancy wrote on several occasions to the King of

Piedmont and to those in charge in his military staff offering his services:

I took part, sometimes in the staff, in all the campaigns of emperor

Napoleon’s Great Army. I even occupied the function of Chief of Staff. I

attended more than one hundred battles and skirmishes, and, despite being

crippled by injuries, I am still ready to spill my blood for the regeneration of

Italy and the universe. (Moeller 1851: 501)

The following passage in the correspondence of Moeller with the Piedmont

military staff seems particularly interesting to us: ‘D’Apice has been made

commander of the Tuscan troops – he is nothing but a free corps leader like

Garibaldi, with no military knowledge and no experience in the great war. Will

you, General, consider the services of an old soldier. I will be worthy of it’.23

Far from glorifying irregular volunteer warfare, Moeller presents himself as an

‘anti-Garibaldi’, a veteran of the ‘great war’, i.e. the war of the Grande Armee.

A very unromantic vision of voluntarism is clearly being suggested, one that is

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very far from the image of Laviron dying on the walls of Rome wearing the

Red Shirt of the Garibaldini. Moeller instead looked to promote here a military

and not a political tradition.

As well as the memory of 1796, there was also that of the volunteers of 1792

and the 1793 mass conscription (‘levee en masse’). In asking, rather indignantly,

‘if the soldiers of 1848 could be less brave than those of 1793’, the author of a

pamphlet calling on France to ‘save Italy’ (Martin 1848) sought to reactivate the

myth of the ‘Grande Nation’, calling on the generation of 1848 to emulate its

glorious ancestors.

In the discourses in which volunteers explained the reasons for engagement,

the Franco-Italian friendship was not only traced back to the campaign of 1796

but it was also linked to more ancient times and drew on the theme of Italy as

the cradle of civilization and culture. That theme was strongly developed and

led to a mobilization that can be described as ‘intellectual’ since it appealed

especially to the students who had been actively involved in the Parisian events

of 1848 (Caron 1991). That said, with the notable exception of Jules-Jacques

Dumontet, a Parisian student who set off to defend Venice with an Italian

legion, having decided to support the Risorgimento because of his admiration for

Latin culture (and whose experience is well-known through a biography

written by one of his descendants – Dumontet (1953)), there do not seem to

have been a great number of students among the volunteers of 1848. For

example, Jules Jacques Dumontet, a Parisian student, set off to defend Venice

with an Italian legion, having decided to support the Risorgimento because of

his admiration for Latin culture (his experience is well-known through a

biography written by one of his descendents – Dumontet 1953). His example,

however, was not followed and few students joined the ranks of volunteers to

Italy in 1848, while they tended to contribute largely to the ranks of volunteer

legions during other episodes of international military mobilization.

There is one French region where views on Franco-Italian fraternity had a

greater resonance: Corsica. Rather than its geographical proximity, it was the

Italian past of the island and its late incorporation into the French territory that

determined the mobilization of the Corsican population in favour of the

Risorgimento during the revolution of 1848, all the more so since the historic

connections between Corsica and the peninsula had continued during the first

half of the nineteenth century owing to the important presence of Italian

political exiles on the island. Numerous volunteer legions were thus set up on

the island and offered their help to one or other of the Italian states in 1848.24

The French in Italy

Military support or political activism?

French volunteers were present on most of the battlefields and took part in the

majority of revolutionary or insurrectional episodes that shook the Italian

French volunteers in Italy, 1848–49

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peninsula between 1848 and 1849. On all of these fields of operation they were

faced with very diverse political and military situations and they did not all

experience the same ‘Italian campaign’: siege warfare in Rome and Venice,

urban insurrection in Milan in March 1848 and in Naples in May 1848, in

Genoa and Livorno in the spring of 1849.

In these different contexts and owing to their wide range of competences, the

French were of diverse military benefit to the Italians. Some of those who had

learnt their trade during the Parisian revolutionary period were ‘masters of the art

of the barricade’ [my translation]25 and were to be found in charge of the

Livorno insurrection at the end of 1848, and also in May 1849, resisting the

Austrian troops that arrived to restore the authority of the Grand Duke. Most of

the Italian sources underline the essential part played by the French in the

organization of the defence and in the mobilization of the local population.

Pietro Martini notes that ‘the arrival of the French was of inestimable value . . . .

The newly arrived guests wasting no time, devoted themselves to hastening the

fortification works and the arming of the barricades. Their energy did miracles to

reinvigorate the partisans of resistance and gave courage to numerous men who

were beginning to lack it’ [my traduction].26 During a 1916 commemoration of

the resistance to the Austrian siege – which remained for a long time a central

episode of the history of the Risorgimento for the inhabitants of Livorno – the

name of the Frenchman who directed the operations, Seignan de Sere, was still

cited (Vaturi 1916: 20). In Palermo, it was a French Navy officer who in 1849

both set up cannon foundries which were to remedy the dramatic lack of Sicilian

armament and gave artillery classes to National Guard soldiers.27 Thus, even if

their number was fairly limited, the French could, locally at least, play a major

role as purveyors of industrial and military techniques.

The French volunteers were first and foremost representatives of a warrior

nation and in that function equipped with military competence useful to the

Italians. They were also sons of the Republic: some of them had fought for the

proclamation of the Republic in February and for a social republic in June.

Some naturally sought to spread the republican ideas that had motivated their

engagement on the Italian peninsula. Thereby, some French volunteers

organized a republican parade in Tuscany in the spring of 1848: they dressed a

woman who accompanied them as a ‘Madonna liberta’ and wore a Phrygian

cap; the cortege sang the Marseillaise and progressed shouting ‘Vive la

Republique’. The Tuscan Giovanni La Cecili, who witnessed this scene, notes

how little impact it had among the local population as they, he explained, had

revolted ‘not for the Republic of Livorno but for the War of Independence’

(La Cecilia 1851: 62).

This illustrates the potential discrepancies between the expectations of the

Italians and intentions of the French volunteers. The Sicilians, who were aware

of this problem, wanted to exclude the risk of revolutionary contamination

from the outset. That intention is expressed in a message sent by Paolo Fabrizi

in October 1848 to one of his Corsican friends, who was recruiting volunteers:

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‘Note that we need very disciplined and orderly men who will not start asking

political questions about the republic or the constitution. Here, the Republic is

only known as the Terror – there is a constitution without a king, and it should

satisfy everyone for now. The war of independence needs unity and that is the

crucial point’ [my translation].28 The Marseillaise and the Song of the Girondins

(Chant des Girondins) were sung, however, on the Sicilian battlefields.

A first Expedition of the Thousand – without Garibaldi

The largest number of French volunteers was to be found in Sicily: nearly

1,000 men landed on the island arriving from France between the end of 1848

and March 1849. This was due to the efforts made by Paolo Fabrizi and his

agents to recruit men in France. The different types of volunteers we

distinguished earlier all appeared in Sicily in 1849. Among the 1,000

Frenchmen present on the island, there were approximately 400 professional

soldiers who had left the service in 1848–49, usually to retire. Fabrizi would

have liked to recruit younger soldiers, but the French government was

absolutely opposed to the departure of still active soldiers to Italy. The man

who was recruited to share command with the Pole Louis Mieroslawski was a

French officer called Jacques Pierre de Trobriand. He was nearly 70 years old

and, like some of the volunteers we have already encountered, he had learnt

the trade during the Napoleonic Wars, before fighting, along with Bolivar, in

the wars of independence in Latin-America.29 He then pursued a career in the

French African Troops: most of the volunteers who served in Sicily were

recruited like him in Algeria, where Fabrizi had organized a recruitment

committee. The Sicilians considered that men who were used to fighting on

the arid lands of Northern Africa would be very useful in Sicily, as the terrain

and the type of war in the two places were similar. Some of them openly took

position in the Sicilian press against the French government’s Italian policy.

The fact that their adversaries in Sicily were the Bourbon troops of Naples

galvanized the French, who were driven by strong anti-monarchical and anti-

bourbon feelings. We can see this in an extract of the newspaper Le Peuple in

March 1849: ‘Mieroslawski reviewed the French Legion in Sicily. Its

republican enthusiasm leads us to hope that they might complement against

the Naples Bourbons the triple victory of Paris against the French Bourbons’.30

The second group of French volunteers in Sicily consisted of nearly 700

young men who had been part of the mobile troops of the National Guard in

France that had been organized during the first weeks of the Second Republic

to maintain order as much as to protect the borders of France in case of attack.

The mobile National Guard had also been designed to keep some of the

unemployed population of Paris busy. The fact that it became famous in France

for having participated actively in the suppression of the workers’ insurrection

in June 1848 does not seem to have been an obstacle for the Sicilian

commissars, who were eager to recruit troops that were already organized and

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ready for combat. As soon as he heard that several of this guard’s battalions were

to be disbanded, Paolo Fabrizi decided to recruit massively many ex-members

of this corps, who were already fully equipped.

The foreign reinforcements from France and Poland were not enough to

win the fight against the Bourbon army in Sicily and the day after the defeat of

the Sicilians one of the Poles who had fought in Sicily wrote:

An implacable but fair lesson for all peoples who aspire to liberty without

possessing the strict virtues that it implies. The best measure of such virtues

is in our opinion the capacity to raise quickly a disciplined and intrepid army

from the nation in revolution. Any nation incapable of converting into

regular troops the multitudes, victorious in one insurrection, has done

nothing but surprise liberty, but she is not seriously worthy of it.

(Jerzmanowski 1849: 2)

This testimony raises, in a polemic fashion, the question of whether it is

possible to provoke, by exterior impulse, the uprising of a population that was

still insufficiently politicized. For the Sicilian recruiters there was no

contradiction in using foreign volunteers and foreign military models in order

to found a ‘national army’, a term constantly used by Sicilian political

protagonists in 1848. After the failure of the revolution, there was no further

discussion about possible transfers of political and military models through

international volunteers, although the actors of the revolution violently settled

their accounts with each other. Sometimes there were hints of xenophobia, as

in Jermanowski’s account in which the Pole was openly dismissive toward the

Sicilians.

The Franco-Polish expedition of 1849 in Sicily was a failure: its

protagonists hardly sought to analyze it, nor could they learn anything from

it considering the political reaction that broke over Europe. They did not

even try to preserve its memory, which explains why it is practically

unknown today. However, in retrospect, the presence of international

volunteers in Sicily in 1849 anticipated Garibaldi’s victorious expedition in

1860. Had the memory of the events of 1849 been reactivated when the

Thousand landed in Marsala and volunteers from all over Europe came to

join them? Some men took part in both expeditions suggesting continuities

in volunteer engagement between these two dates. This was the case of Hugh

Forbes,31 an Englishman who wrote in 1860: ‘This time our leader is

Garibaldi and I am more confident because he is less of a poet than some of

the leaders in 1848 and 1849’.32 In 1911, the biographer of Luigi Orlando,

one of Paolo Fabrizi’s main collaborators in recruiting Frenchmen in 1848,

wondered what would have happened if ‘eleven years before the 11th of May

1860 [Garibaldi] had breathed in the warm Sicilian breeze and had led the

combatants, rather than Mieroslawski and Trobriand’ [my translation].33 Here

we have another example of the connections that contemporaries might have

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been able to establish between the two expeditions. It remains to be seen

whether these examples are isolated or whether they are evidence of a real

persistence throughout the nineteenth century of the memory of the 1849

first expedition of the Thousand.

Notes

1 These numbers have been determined after going through the French and Italian1848 newspapers and after researches in the main Italian archives: Archivio di Stato diVenezia (ASV), Archivio di Stato di Roma (ASR), di Firenze, di Livorno, di Pisa, diTorino, di Genova, di Napoli, and di Palermo (ASP), Museo del Risorgimento in Milan(MRM) and Rome (MCRR), Ufficio storico dello Stato Maggiore dell’Esercito in Rome(USSME). For the French side: files of the Archives nationales in Paris, the Servicehistorique de l’Armee de terre in Vincennes (SHAT), the Archives du Ministere des Affairesetrangeres in Paris, and several archives at the departmental level.

2 On military voluntarism within Risorgimento Italy, see, among the most recentpublications, Cecchinato and Isnenghi (2007). On French and Italian NationalGuards, see Bianchi and Dupuy (2006) and Francia (1999). On taking up arms andits significance during the Second Republic, see Hincker (2008).

3 Let us still mention Aprile (2008).4 For a discussion on the European character of the 1848 revolution, see Korner

(2000).5 Comite central democratique italien, Appel aux amis de l’independance et de l’unite

italienne, Paris, 14 May 1848, National Library of France (BnF), FOL-LB54-113.6 This is not an isolated article. Ricciardi criticized French policy in Italy a great

number of times in La Democratie pacifique.7 Giuseppe Ricciardi, article in La Democratie pacifique, 11 January 1849.8 ‘[C]ui nessun paese conquistato e stato finora ridotto dai suoi oppressori’, article published in

the Sicilian daily newspaper La Luce, 23 January 1849.9 A fundamental source concerning Paolo Fabrizi’s contribution to the Sicilian

policy of foreign volunteers recruitment is the account he himself wrote about it,which remained unpublished until the 1930s (Mordini 1937). Numerous archivalsources kept at the Archivio di Stato di Palermo and at the Museo Centrale del Risorgimentoin Rome, as well as a great number of Italian testimonies gave us the opportunity tounderstand precisely both the development and the results of his mission.

10 ‘[Q]ueste istituzioni fondamentali militari, . . . lo scopo dello Stato Maggiore generale inFrancia, . . . gli obblighi della Intendenza militare . . . e alcune linee per una legge sullepromozioni’, ASP, Carte Cattaneo (CC), b. 33, f. 59, ‘Piani di ordinamento e decretisull’organizzazione dell’esercito Siciliano, 1848–1849’, document neither signed nordated, but probably produced in March 1849.

11 ‘La figlia di Guglielmo Tell’: expression used by Filippo De Boni. ASP, CC, b. 32, f.56., s. f, I., doc. 10, Filippo De Boni to Doctor Furrer, President of the FederalCouncil, Bern, 19 March 1849.

12 ‘[B]assi uffiziali per istruire le vostre milizie, essendo gli svizzeri per istruire e disciplinarerapidamente quasi unici’. ASP, CC, b. 32, f. 56, s. f, I, doc. 15, Filippo de Boni,27 March 1849.

13 ‘Potrebbesi nello stato introdurre nuovi elementi di prosperita e di forza: una colonia diagricoltori in tempo di pace, di soldati in tempo di guerra – buoni e solerti agricoltori come sonogli svizzeri che darebber l’esempio a coltivare diserti della nostra pianura, soldati che tuttodovendo a noi e al nuovo ordine di cose, sarebbero fidi e amorosi campioni della repubblica.’ASP, CC, b. 32, f. 56, s. f. II, doc. 13, Filippo de Boni, 12 April 1849.

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14 ‘a diffondere l’amor della milizia, a rendere pi�u guerriere le moltitudini nostre’. ASP, CC, b.32, fasc. 56, s. f. I, doc. 15.

15 ‘Una squadra polacca ordinata militarmente . . . potra pi�u facilmente muovere le popolazionislave che combattono contro di noi, potra formar nucleo a quanti amano la liberta slava.’ [‘Amilitarily organized Polish brigade . . . could more easily reach the Slav populationsfighting against us, and could serve as a cadre for those who appreciate Slavs’liberty.’]. MRM, Governo Provvisorio di Lombardia (GPL), b. 15, f. 1, LodovicoFrapolli to the Provisional Lombardian Government, undated [May 1848].

16 ‘[D]ans tous les pays o�u [il a] servi la cause de la liberte, [il s’est] fait connaıtre par[son] activite et [son] attachement a la cause de l’independance des nations’. MRM,GPL, b. 15, f. 1, letter by Pontecoulant, 11 May 1848.

17 Laviron, ‘Legion etrangere’, Rome, 6 May 1849, Biblioteca di storia moderna econtemporanea, Rome (21.5.I.3).

18 MCRR, b. 292, f. 21, Colonel Lavelaine-Maubeuge’s letter to the LombardianProvisional Government, 22 May 1848.

19 On the reforms of the French officer corps in April 1848, see Serman (1978: t. II:1197–209).

20 ‘[E]n Algerie ou dans toute autre colonie francaise . . . o�u l’on nous procurera lesmoyens de travailler, ou [d’] entrer dans les rangs de l’armee afin d’etre encore utilesa notre pays’, La Democratie du Midi, 7 July 1848.

21 ‘La France monarchique a vu de 1830 a 1848 se former dans son sein un grandnombre de comites pour l’heroıque Pologne; la France republicaine de 1849 n’enfera-t-elle pas autant pour la malheureuse et noble Italie?’, La Democratie pacifique,25 March 1849.

22 Borme fils, Liberte, egalite, fraternite. Appel volontaire adresse aux parisiens de l’age de 18 a30 ans, Paris, 1848, BnF (LB53-1319).

23 USSME, Campagna 1848–1849, vol. 24, G. Moeller, 22 February 1849.24 The Corsican mobilization in favor of Italy is an aspect of the French mobilization

which has been studied by Italian historians in the 1930s, in a time when the linksbetween Corsica and Italy were deliberately emphasized. See, among others,Mordini (1936).

25 ‘[M]aestri in asserragliamenti’. La Cecilia (1851: 61).26 ‘L’arrivo de’ [suoi compagni] francesi era una fortuna inestimabile . . . I nuovi ospiti, senza

mettere tempo in mezzo, si dettero a sollecitare i lavori delle fortificazioni e l’allestimento dellebarricate – e la energia loro rinvigorı meravigliosamente i partigiani della resistenza, e detteanimo a parecchi che cominciavano a non averne pi�u.’ Martini (1849: 269).

27 La Luce, 23 March 1849.28 ‘Bada che ci vogliono uomini ordinatissimi, disciplinati e che non vengano a far quistioni

politiche di Repubblica o Costituzione. Cola non si conosce la Repubblica che come Terrore –vi e una costituzione senza Re, e puo contentare tutte le coscienze per ora, mentre la guerradell’indipendenza ha bisogno di unione, e questa e la quistione perentoria.’ Paolo Fabrizi toA. S. Padovani, 20 October 1848, cited by Mordini (1936: 360).

29 SHAT, 8 Yd 2750: ‘Trobriand (de), Jacques-Pierre, Romain, Marie, Denis deKerdern, General de Brigade’.

30 ‘La legion francaise en Sicile a ete passee en revue par Mieroslawski. Sonenthousiasme republicain fait esperer qu’elle saura completer sur le Bourbon deNaples la triple victoire de Paris sur les Bourbons de France.’ Le Peuple, Journal de laRepublique democratique et sociale, 26 March 1849, pp. 2–3.

31 On this British volunteer in the Risorgimento wars, see Michel (1953).32 MCRR, b. 522, f. 54, Hugh Forbes to Luigi Fabrizi, 20 September 1860.33 ‘[S]e undici anni prima dell’11 maggio 1860, [Garibaldi] avesse aspirato le calde aure

siciliane, e ne avesse guidato i combattenti, invece del polacco Mieroslawski e del franceseTrobriand.’ Anon. (1898: 45).

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