Later, during the wars of Italian unification, the Redshirts won several battles against the armies of the Austrian Empire, the Kingdom of Two Sicilies and the Papal States.

According to A Cultural History of the Modern Age: The Crisis of the European Soul, "For a considerable time Garibaldi was the most famous man in Europe, and the red shirt, la camicia rossa, became the fashion for ladies, even outside Italy".

In later years, it was claimed that in Uruguay the legion first sported the red shirts associated with Garibaldi's "Thousand", which were said to have been obtained from a factory in Montevideo that had intended to export them to the slaughterhouses of Argentina.

Red shirts sported by Argentinian butchers in the 1840s are not otherwise documented, however, and the famous camicie rosse did not appear during Garibaldi's efforts in Rome in 1849–1850.

The New York Tribune sized them up: The officers of the Guard are men who have held important commands in the Hungarian, Italian, and German revolutionary armies.

That gave inspiration to Adolf Hitler's units of Brownshirts, the Sturmabteilung (SA) and the quasi-fascist Irish Blueshirts, led by Eoin O'Duffy.

Although they were vaguely nationalistic in tone, Garibaldi and his men were not proto-fascist but radical liberals of the era, supporting independentists in the Americas and Europe.