Volunteers’ Employment and Counterinsurgency in Italy: The Case the Hungarian Legion (1861-1862)

Abstract

In South-Italy the brigandage is a complex phenomenon, deeply popular and culturally reactionary: a “great
brigandage” emerged in dangerous and structural forms after the fall of the last Bourbon king and the Italian unification under the
Savoy dynasty, in 1861. From the “Mille” expedition and the conquest of redshirts leaded by Garibaldi, the Southern Army and
the Italian Army fought against the brigandage as a real insurgency movement supported by Bourbons’ loyalists and Catholic
environments. In the campaign of banditism’s repression a particular case was the employment of volunteers, as the former
Garibaldi’s Hungarian Legion. From the General Staff Army’s Historical Archive the documents show both Command’s strategy
and local tactics in the Hungarian practices. The concentration of the legionaries in Nocera (March 1861) and the growing
number of effectives in few months (less than 1 thousand) gave the opportunity of their employment for more than 1 year in a
large area of Southern regions. The Hungarian legionaries’ mutiny, in July 1862, rised at the same time of the Garibaldi’s
expedition from South to Rome, blocked in August at the Aspromonte. After the disarm of the soldiers, the calling back to Torino
meant the risk of his dissolution. Only a complete reorganization, in 1863, allowed to employ back a new Legion until 1867.