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Garibaldi, Giuseppe

Born: July 4, 1807

Military and political leader.
Born in Nice, present day France.

Giuseppe Garibaldi (died June 2, 1882) was an Italian military and political leader. In his twenties, he joined the Carbonari Italian patriot revolutionaries, and had to flee Italy after a failed insurrection. He then contributed to the independence of Uruguay, leading the Italian Legion in the Uruguayan Civil War, and afterwards returned to Italy as a commander in the conflicts of the Risorgimento.

He has been dubbed the "Hero of the Two Worlds" in tribute to his military expeditions in both South America and Europe. He is considered an Italian national hero.

Garibaldi's popularity, his skill at rousing the common people, and his military exploits are all credited with making the unification of Italy possible. He also served as a global exemplar of mid-19th century revolutionary nationalism and liberalism. But following the liberation of southern Italy from the Neapolitan monarchy, Garibaldi chose to sacrifice his liberal republican principles for the sake of unification.

Garibaldi subscribed to the anti-clericalism common among Latin liberals and did much to circumscribe the temporal power of the Papacy. His personal religious convictions are unclear to historians; in 1882 he wrote "Man created God, not God created Man" yet in his autobiography he is quoted as saying "I am a Christian, and I speak to Christians- I am a true Christian, and I speak to true Christians. I love and venerate the religion of Christ, because Christ came into the world to deliver humanity from slavery..." and "you have the duty to educate the people- educate the people- educate them to be Christians- educate them to be Italians... Viva Italia! Viva Christianity!".

An active freemason, Garibaldi had little use for rituals, but thought of masonry as a network to unite progressive men as brothers both within nations and as members of a global community. He was eventually elected the grand master of the Grand Orient of Italy.

Garibaldi Monument in Taganrog, Russia.Giuseppe Garibaldi died at Caprera in 1882, where he was interred. Five ships of the Italian Navy have been named after him, among which a World War II cruiser and the current flagship, the aircraft carrier Giuseppe Garibaldi.

Statues of his likeness, as well as the handshake of Teano, stand in many Italian squares, and in other countries around the world. On the top of the Gianicolo hill in Rome, there is a statue of Garibaldi on horse-back. His face was originally turned in the direction of the Vatican (an allusion to his ambition to conquer the Papal States), but after the Lateran Treaty in 1929 the orientation of the statue was changed upon request of the Vatican.

English football team Nottingham Forest designed their home kit after the uniform worn by Garibaldi and his men and have worn a variation of this design since being founded in 1865.

In a recent book review in the New Yorker (July 9&16, 2007) of a Garibaldi biography, Tim Parks cites the eminent English historian, A.J.P. Taylor, as saying, "Garibaldi is the only wholly admirable figure in modern history."