Leopoldo Franchetti
| Leopoldo Franchetti | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
31 May 1847 Livorno, Italy |
| Died | 4 November 1917 (aged 70) Rome, Italy |
| Nationality | Italian |
| Occupation | Publicist and politician |
| Known for | Inquiry into the Sicilian Mafia |
Leopoldo Franchetti (Livorno, May 31, 1847 – Rome, November 4, 1917), was an Italian publicist and politician. He was a deputy in the Italian Chamber of Deputies and later became a Senator. He was very active in promoting education and concrete solutions for economic, social and political problems in Italy.
Baron Franchetti was born in Livorno into a family in good standing. The Franchetti family came to Livorno from Tunisia in the last decades of the eighteenth century. From the Napoleonic era to the second half of the 1830s they were one of the most important families in the local Jewish community.
Leopoldo Franchetti was influenced by the ideas of John Stuart Mill and became a liberal. His relation with his Jewishness was so conflictual that no trace of it can be found in his public activity. In 1873 he took a sabbatical in southern Italy and became one of the foremost authorities regarding the "problems of southern Italy", and pioneer of meridionalism.
In 1876, Franchetti travelled to Sicily with Sidney Sonnino to conduct an unofficial inquiry into the state of Sicilian society. In 1877, the two men published their research on Sicily in a substantial two-part report. In the first part Sonnino analysed the lives of the island's landless peasants. Franchetti's half of the report, Political and Administrative Conditions in Sicily, was an analysis of the Mafia in the nineteenth century that is still considered authoritative today. Franchetti would ultimately influence thinking about the Mafia more than anyone else until Giovanni Falcone over a hundred years later. Political and Administrative Conditions in Sicily is the first convincing explanation of how the Mafia came to be.
Franchetti saw the Mafia as an “industry of violence” and described the designation of the term “Mafia”: “the term mafia found a class of violent criminals ready and waiting for a name to define them, and, given their special character and importance in Sicilian society, they had the right to a different name from that defining vulgar criminals in other countries”. He saw the Mafia as deeply rooted in Sicilian society and impossible to quench unless the very structure of the island’s social institutions were to undergo a fundamental change. The Franchetti-Sonnino report was attacked, disbelieved and labelled as ‘unpatriotic’. It is now considered one of the most coherent and comprehensive accounts of the Sicilian mafia and its surroundings.
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