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The Restoration in didacticsPage 1 of 1
There was also a return to the past in textbooks. Used books were immediately removed from the market, of which there had been two main types until that time: 1. Books produced in Piedmont during the brief revolutionary period, between 1798, when the people of Savoy were forced to leave Turin for Sardinia, and 1803, when Napoleon imposed an organic law to standardise the schooling system and content on all the countries that comprised the Empire. So textbooks by Girolamo Rostagni, Gaspare Morardo and above all the Primo and the Secondo libro by Giambattista Somis disappeared, the first school texts written in Piedmont based on the normal method. Books published in the Republican period that contained more or less explicit praise of the Revolution and the Republic could not be accepted for that reason within the school of a monarchy that was doing its utmost to make people forget the recent past. An eloquent example of how politics was present in the censored textbooks in 1814 is appears in Nuova introduzione alla geografia per uso delle scuole della XXVII Divisione militare by Girolamo Rostagni. When reviewing the various European countries, the professor from Piedmont presented France as the country of the “straordinaria rivoluzione di cui noi tutti siam testimoni” [extraordinary revolution of which we are all witnesses]1. It should be noted that Rostagni's textbook had already been censored at the time of its first edition, in 1803, when the Council of Education had ordered the removal of references to recent French history, to avoid incurring the wrath of Napoleon, who had just taken power, was seeking to appease France. 2. Books produced in France, as well as in French, such as those by Domergue, Wailli, Mantelle, Thouret, Rabaut, introduced by Napoleon, but also some classics, had always been used in Piedmont and which was traditionally bilingual, such as those by Fénélon, Rollin and La Fontaine. If the first ones were guilty of having been commissioned by Bonaparte for the schools of the Empire, the second ones were too dependent on French culture, against which the Savoy government was fighting a fierce battle. Actually from 1798, Piedmont had been annexed to France and as such the Republican governments, as Napoleon had tried to make the Piedmont people more like the French. Which books replaced the texts used in the French era? Of course there was no time to complete and publish new textbooks. For this reason, they resorted to existing books that had been used in Piedmont schools before the arrival of the Revolution. It was a de facto restoration, as it was led by the effective and urgent need that only the books of the past could offer. - the Latin textbooks of Charles François Lhomond (Epitome historiae sacrae, Degli uomini illustri romani) and Oliver Goldsmith (Compendio della storia romana e della storia greca); - more innovative scholarly texts produced in Piedmont in the last few years of the 1700s, in particular by Giuseppe Antonio Gallerone (Precetti scelti da' più valenti autori intorno all'abbellir il discorso, e all'esercitar lo stile) and Giuseppe Frencia (La declinazione italiana dei nomi e dei verbi, Brevi insegnamenti grammaticali), which, unlike those by Rostagni and Morardo, who were already also authors of innovative texts, had not complied so openly with the revolution. Those texts, which had represented a significant innovation in education in Piedmont at the end of the 1700s, were now largely surpassed. Their reintroduction in schools contributed to the approved return of the Savoy school system to a past that everyone now knew to be distant, but that was now proposed by the restored government of Savoy as the one safe harbour after the revolutionary storm. 1 Nuova introduzione alla geografia, per uso delle scuole della XXVII Divisione militare, by Girolamo Rostagni, in Turin, by the printworks of Felice Buzan, fiorile year X, p. 123. |
