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The Context - The Savoy school after the RestorationPage 1 of 1
Before Victor Emmanuel I returned to Turin on 17 may 1814, the order had reached Prospero Balbo, who had held the office of Chancellor during the Napoleonic period to close the University. The sovereign’s decision was aimed, in truth, more at sanctioning the end of the revolutionary and Napoleonic experience, and resetting the events of the fifteen previous years and marking a new year zero in the history of the Piedmont school. The new government, however, didn't take long to notice the fact that it would not have been too difficult bring the Savoy school back to its situation prior to 1798, and that, with the French gone again, there were very few subjects of the royal family who deserved to be punished for having worked with the invaders. In any case, since he was borrowed to work for Napoleon, Balbo was removed, even if he laboriously managed to keep the Savoy school system almost unaltered and was sent away as Ambassador to the Court of Spain. Victor Emmanuel I reorganised the Magistrate of the Reform, putting the elderly Gioacchino Adami di Cavagliano at its head, who very quickly died and was replaced in the same year by Gian Carlo Brignole, who had no experience in the field, but who belonged to the Amicizia cattolica [Catholic Friendship] of Turin, a secret society, based on the model of the Aa Jesuits, who appeared in Piedmont at the end of 1700s and then spread throughout Europe, focussed on re-capturing the people, and the government for the Catholic religion. A considerable weight inside the Magistrate from the start was the censor Giambattista Viotti, he was also a member of the Amicizia cattolica and a great supporter of the Jesuits. Among the other members of the Magistrate was the decisive and straightforward figure of Gian Francesco Galeani Napione, a man faithful to Savoy and a promoter in the past of some important cultural initiatives, as the author of Dell’uso e dei pregi della lingua italiana (1791), in which claimed the exclusive use of Italian in Piedmont, and then Del modo di riordinare la regia Università degli studi (1799), with which, during the brief Austro-Russian occupation (1798-99), he had tried to guide the choice of the government in the educational field. The few measures the Savoy school system underwent between 1814 and the 1818, all eminently reactionary, had a purpose: in the first place, the Costituzioni per l’Università of 1772 came into existence, including the Istruzione per insegnare by Goffredo Franzini, a sort of Rosetta stone for didactics, which contained the Piedmont rules that teachers were to adopt in their classes. Therefore, the secondary school was closed, a Napoleonic institution for excellence, which returned to being one of the two colleges of Turin, entrusted moreover to the Jesuits, who had lost the College of Nobles, which closed in 1773. Finally, elementary schools in Latin were legalised again, which were cast away by both the revolutionary and Napoleonic governments, both of which had tried to replace them with schools in the vernacular, accessible to children of all social classes.
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