Margaret Fuller & the Revolution of 1848
Margaret Fuller, world's first woman foreign war correspondent, was in the crossfire. Early on, she was Bronson Alcott’s deputy, running his progressive school when it was attacked because Alcott supported the abolition of slavery and equal rights for women. Then she became Ralph Waldo Emerson’s co-editor of the Dial Literary Magazine – the first woman allowed to use the Harvard College library. She knew Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne – the leading writers of her time. Her best-selling book, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, was the first book on feminism.
Author Zann Gill learned about Margaret Fuller, great aunt of Buckminster Fuller, while she working for Fuller
as a graduate student at Harvard and realized that her heroic story could be an inspiring book and screenplay.
In Rome Margaret met the love of her life, Giovanni, who had renounced his nobility to fight in the Revolution. He persuaded her to use her skill as a writer to secure a petition to Pope Pius IX with 700 American signatures, including then US President James Polk. Margaret also knew guerilla fighter Giuseppe Garibaldi and his Redshirts, Cristina Trivulzio di Belgiojoso, Italy’s Joan of Arc, whose statue was unveiled in Milan in 2021 – the first woman honored among 120 men – and revolutionary leader Giuseppe Mazzini. When she warned him that Napoleon III was marching with the French army toward Rome, he refused to believe her.
Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote of Margaret Fuller:
October 12, 1841: “…whom I always admire, most revere when I nearest see, and sometimes love, – yet whom I freeze, and who freezes me to silence, when we seem to promise to come nearest.”
August 20, 1842: “Last night a walk to the river with Margaret, and saw the moon broken in the water, interrogating, interrogating.”
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Paintings above:
Top: Giuseppe Garibaldi’s Redshirts charge Neapolitan troops during the Battle of Volturnus in Garibaldi’s “Expedition of the Thousand, 1860 by Peter Dennis.
Below: The Breach of Porta Pia in Rome, September 20, 1870 by Carlo Ademollo.
Margaret Fuller interacted with some of the great leaders of her day. Left to right above: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Pope Pius IX, Cristina Trivulzio di Belgiojoso (Italy’s Joan of Arc), Giuseppe Garibaldi (leader of the Redshirts Guerilla Army), Margaret Fuller. Others not pictured figure in her story, including: Bronson Alcott, 1st Duca di Avezzano, Thomas Carlyle, Giuseppe Mazzini, Harriet Martineau, Giovanni Ossoli, President Louis Napoleon (about whom Margaret warned Giuseppe Mazzini), who later crowned himself Emperor Napoleon III, Henry David Thoreau.