La Franc-maçonnerie et le droit à l'instruction: de l'Unité italienne jusqu'au début du XXème siècle

On the morrow of Italy’s unification, the new state found itself having to confront a long series of severe and important problems. Certainly one of these was illiteracy. This phenomenon was measured in very worrisome percentages, especially in several regions of the South. The first years of government were used to build a unitary system of education instead of the various organisational forms that had prevailed in the several pre-unification states. The problem of education of the masses, starting from the basic elements of literacy, was confronted especially by politicians and intellectuals who belonged to (or were close to) freemasonry. It is believed that almost all the ministers who followed one after the other in public education were masons and that, particularly in the second half of the nineteenth century, Italian freemasonry took on a stronger and stronger role within the state and in political and cultural life. The social question and the education question were recurrent themes in these streams of thought. They were expressed particularly in the work and writings of Francesco De Sanctis, Pasquale Villari, and Michele Coppino. It was specifically the latter who, during his many appointments as minister of public education, not only conducted intense organisational and cultural activity, but also succeeded in bringing about passage in 1877 of a law that decreed compulsory elementary education up to the age of nine (10 years after his first attempt). The parliamentary debate over compulsory education, in part inspired by legislation in other European countries (sometimes referring to America too), was very wide-ranging and stormy. The positions being argued were in fact contradictory and irreconcilable: on one hand, it was held that compulsory education would be a useless imposition on families in the countryside that could not economically do without the labour of their children; on the other hand, it was held that only compulsory education would open the road to literacy to the people and would convince them of its real benefits. All this should be read within a historical context characterised by a hostile, problem-ridden process of separation between State and Church and by a strong contrast between religious and secular positions. Both sides expressed themselves in fact in terms of absolute opposition. And that had a direct impact on all educational subjects. This article demonstrates the contribution of masonic thought and the importance of the compulsory education law, inspired by the principle of equal access to education. This law, thanks to education being free of charge and to the expanding presence of schools, formed a turning point (and a point of discontinuity) in Italian education, improving the condition of the population in a real way, and preparing for the industrial development of the beginning of the twentieth century. [30th Session of the International Standing Conference for the History of Education, Education and Inequality. Historical Approaches to Schooling and Social Stratification, Rutgers University, Newark, NY, July 23-26, 2008]