With his sun-bleached auburn hair, heroic exploits and easy charisma, Guiseppe Garibaldi was adored from London to New York, hailed as the man who turned the 19th-century dream of a united Italy into reality.

His admirers wore his trademark red shirt, while poets and painters immortalised him in their works. Even Queen Victoria reportedly found him very handsome.

But, as historian Dr David Laven explains on the HistoryExtra podcast, Garibaldi’s magnetism was more than skin-deep. His courage, compassion and populist flair made him not only a romantic icon, but

the embodiment of the new Italian nation that was taking shape.

The fracturing of Italy

“Garibaldi is probably the most famous Italian of the 19th century,” says Laven. “He’s famous for a series of events from the late 1840s through to the 1860s, in which he’s one of the key drivers of Italian unification.”

Understanding his importance to Italy depends on understanding what the region looked like before unification.

“Italy in the 19th century had been divided into many smaller states for a very long while,” Laven explains. For centuries, the peninsula had been a mosaic of duchies, city-states and foreign-ruled territories. The north lay under Austrian control; the Papal States dominated the centre; and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies ruled the south.

“Briefly, it was semi-united under Napoleonic rule in the early 19th century, but basically it was a divided peninsula.”

It was the fragmented nature of the region that caused the emergence of the Risorgimento (‘the resurgence’), a political and cultural movement seeking national rebirth. It blended liberal reform with revolutionary zeal, and its leaders included not only Garibaldi, but figures such as Giuseppe Mazzini and Camilo Benso, Count Cavour.

Garibaldi, as a sailor-turned-soldier whose daring captured the public imagination, was by far the most recognisable face of the movement. But before he became a national hero, Garibaldi was an outlaw.

Garibaldi’s exile

As a young man, Garibaldi joined Giuseppe Mazzini’s radical organisation Young Italy, which plotted to overthrow foreign influence and unite the peninsula under a republican flag. When a revolt failed in 1834, Garibaldi was condemned to death in absentia and fled to South America. But his revolutionary spirit was still very much alive.

While in Brazil and Uruguay, Garibaldi fought for independence movements, commanding volunteer forces in small-scale but ferocious conflicts.

“He developed [a] reputation while in exile in Latin America …”, Laven explains, “he was a really effective guerrilla fighter and leader.”

But that doesn’t mean he was a cold or ruthless guerilla warrior. “He really enjoyed fighting,” Laven notes, “but he’s not a bloodthirsty man. He’s an incredibly kind and decent man. Almost everyone agrees this about Garibaldi. He gets ever so upset about hurt animals.”

That slightly strange combination of daring and decency became central to his image.

The hero of Italian unification

When multiple revolutions to secure constitutional liberty, individual rights, and unity for nations swept through Europe in 1848, Garibaldi returned home to join in.

Over the next two decades, he became the military heart of Italian nationalism, leading volunteer armies against far larger foes.

His most celebrated campaign came in 1860 with the Spedizione dei Mille (the Expedition of the Thousand), a daring campaign to liberate Sicily and southern Italy from Bourbon rule. With roughly a thousand poorly armed volunteers, Garibaldi defeated royal forces many times the size of their army, and handed control of the south to King Victor Emmanuel II of Piedmont-Sardinia. When Garibaldi met the man, saluting the monarch and declaring him ‘King of Italy’, it became the symbolic moment of unification that many regard as the birth of modern Italy.

How the ‘people’s general’ became an unlikely sex symbol

Garibaldi’s appeal reached far beyond the battlefield, but why was he so uniquely successful, and able to wield such power and influence?

“He was not just a successful leader of men, he’s a successful leader of women too,” Laven says. “To start with, he was dead handsome. He’s tall and broad-shouldered, he has reddish-brown hair, he’s got a lovely smile. He’s sexy.”

This particular part of his appeal, says Laven, caused a stir among the upper echelons of society upon his visits to Britain. “Lots of posh women think he’s the perfect bit of rough,” he says, describing Garibaldi as the “perfect sexy fantasy.”

But the revolutionary’s striking good looks weren’t his only weapon. “He also uses language well … he’s quite an inspiring speaker,” says Laven, and that was combined with his penchant for underdog fights. “He's also got this incredible record of bravely fighting against the odds. He was always fighting against bigger armies with ill-equipped troops and pulling it off”

In all, Garibaldi was uniquely charismatic, courageous and intelligent. That combination turned him into an international sensation, and he found particular fame in Britain and the United States where bakers sold Garibaldi biscuits, and newspapers compared him to the first US president, George Washington.

However, not all of his methods of leadership were so benign, and behind Garibaldi’s fame lay the hard realities of running a rebellion. His armies were volunteer forces, and that meant having the right enforcers around him. “He was very good at picking his lieutenants,” says Laven. “He gets good men around him.” One of those men was Nino Bixio, a fierce and pragmatic officer whose ruthlessness contrasted with Garibaldi’s idealism.

“Bixio was basically a bit of a psychopath,” Laven remarks. “When Garibaldi needed someone to be nasty, he could get Bixio to be nasty.” When certain groups or people needed to be repressed, says Laven, “Garibaldi doesn’t go and shoot peasants; Bixio does it.”

Delegating such brutality allowed Garibaldi to preserve his image as a noble revolutionary, which was necessary to maintain his power.

Ultimately, Garibaldi lived long enough to see his dream realised. By the 1870s, Italy was officially unified under Victor Emmanuel II, and Garibaldi had become its most celebrated son.

But, never willing to slot easily into authority, he remained restless, supporting democratic reforms and championing causes of national freedom abroad.

Dr David Laven was speaking to Spencer Mizen on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.