Franco Venturi

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Franco Venturi (born May 16, 1914 in Rome , † December 14, 1994 in Turin ) was an Italian historian, essayist and journalist. He was an active member of the Resistancea in Italy. From 1951 he taught history at the universities of Cagliari, Genoa and Turin.

family

Venturi was born into a Roman academic family. He was the grandson of the art historian Adolfo Venturi (1856-1941), his father Lionello Venturi (1885-1961), was a curator in the Galleria Borghese and taught art history at the University of Turin from 1915 until he left his chair in 1931 because of his anti-fascist attitude was removed, first went to France and then emigrated to the USA, where he taught at several renowned universities. Venturi was married to Gigliola Spinelli († 1990), a sister of Altiero Spinelli .

Venturi's son, Antonello Venturi, is also a historian. He teaches history at the University of Pisa, specializing in Russian socialism and the history of the Soviet Union.

Life

After the family moved to Turin, Franco Venturi attended the Liceo Massimo d'Azeglio, where he a. a. Augusto Monti (1881–1966), around whom a group of young anti-fascists had formed, including Giulio Einaudi . After graduating from high school, he studied history at the University of Turin. During his studies he came into contact with the association "Giustizia e Libertà", founded by Carlo Rosselli in 1929, which propagated liberal socialism and thus distanced itself from orthodox Marxism. The "Quaderni di Giustizia e Libertà" was the magazine in which they spread their ideas and for which Venturi also wrote articles.

In 1932 he went to Paris with his father, where he attended lectures at the Sorbonne .

Stay in France

At the Sorbonne he attended lectures a. a. by Paul Hazard , Daniel Mornet and Henri Hauser , and he got to know the philosopher and historian Élie Halévy (1870–1937), who in his last publications dealt with liberalism, one of the constants of his research, especially with dictatorial forms of rule and the Post-war socialism grapples.

Venturi's fascination with socialism and the ideas of freedom of liberalism drew his scientific interest to the authors of the French Enlightenment . From 1937 to 1938 he edited some previously unpublished writings by Diderot . In 1939, in collaboration with Jean Thomas, the Benedictine and utopian Dom Deschamps published the book "Le vrai système, ou le mot del l'énigme méthaphysique et morale", in which he paints a picture of a society that is free from property and oppression. The fruit of his preoccupation with Diderot was his first book “Jeunesse de Diderot”. In 1946 the book “Le origini dell'Enciclopedia” came out. In 1940 Venturi had completed a thesis on the Piedmontese Dalmazzo Francesco Vasco (1732–1794), who in 1791 had propagated a constitutional reform in a pamphlet. He wanted to do his habilitation with this thesis, but this did not materialize because of the invasion of German troops in northern Italy. However, the work was accepted as a dissertation by the University of Paris in 1946.

Political Resistance

When German troops marched into Paris in 1940, he was able to move to the still free Marseille in good time, where he tried in vain to obtain a visa for the United States . While trying to get through to Portugal via Spain, he was captured by the Spanish police, held in a Frankist prison for almost a year , extradited to Italy in 1941, spent two months in Turin in prison and then taken to the Monteforte Irpino camp . Despite difficult external circumstances, he worked there on his translation of Herder's " Also a Philosophy of History ", which Einaudi published in 1951 .

Only after the fall of Mussolini in 1943 did he return first to Milan and then to Turin. In Turin, through the Libertà e Giustizia resistance movement, he joined the partisan troops who fought against the German occupation forces primarily in Val Pellice in Piedmont. During this time he also wrote political articles and edited underground magazines for the partisans and the local population.

After the end of the war he became head of the left wing newspaper des Partito d'Azione , which took a stand against the still virulent fascism and propagated communist and socialist ideas until the Partito d'Azione disbanded after its defeat in the 1946 elections.

The roots of the revolution

From 1947 to around 1950 Venturi stayed in the Soviet Union as a cultural attaché at the Italian embassy in Moscow. Here he was given access to the historical archives of the Tsarist era. The result of his research is a work on pre-revolutionary Russia. In 1952 he published the voluminous book Il populismo Russo in Italy, which was published in the USA in 1964 after its first American edition with the title The Roots of Revolution , in a translation by Francis Haskell and an introduction by Isaiah Berlin , and in 2001 in one new edition was released. The book is still considered a standard work for this period. There he describes the history of Russia from the uprisings of 1848 to the assassination of Tsar Alexander II. In 1881. Populism is here in the narrow sense of a specific political and intellectual movement. a. Hearts , Bakunin and Chernyshevsky - to understand who in Russia pursued the idea of ​​a union of intelligentsia and peasantry with the aim of overthrowing autocratic rule in Russia. In the book, Venturi goes into detail on the intrigues, conspiracies and power struggles within the movement.

Academic and journalistic career in Italy

With the beginning of his academic career, Venturi's political activities came to a standstill, and he devoted himself almost exclusively to his scientific work. However, he closely observed both domestic and Soviet politics and occasionally wrote articles on the events in the Soviet Union of Stalin and Khrushchev. In 1951 he received a professorship for Medieval and Modern History at the University of Cagliari , moved to the University of Genoa in 1955 , was appointed to the Philosophical Faculty of the University of Turin in 1958 , where he taught New History until his retirement in 1989 and was Director of the Institute for History of the Risorgimento was. In 1962 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 1970 as a corresponding member of the British Academy .

One academic project on which he worked throughout his academic teaching career is a multi-volume history of the reform movements of the 18th century in Italy and Europe.

From 1959 to 1994 he published the Rivista Storica Italiana , for which he was able to attract numerous renowned scholars and which, under his direction, developed into one of the most important journals for historical studies.

Motorsport

Venturi competed twice in the Mille Miglia as an amateur racing driver . In 1939 he was 20th and in 1949 as co-pilot of Consalvo Sanesi 12th overall.

Works

  • Jeunesse de Diderot (de 1713 à 1753) , Paris, Skira, 1939.
  • Dalmazzo Francesco Vasco (1732-1794) , Paris, Droz, 1940.
  • Le origini dell'Enciclopedia , Roma-Firenze-Milano, Edizioni U, 1946.
  • L'antichità svelata e l'idea di progresso in Nicolas-Antoine Boulanger , Bari, Laterza, 1947.
  • Jean Jaurès e altri storici della Rivoluzione francese , Torino, Einaudi, 1948.
  • Il populismo russo , 2 vols, Torino, Einaudi, 1952. English translation under the title
The Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populist and Socialist Movements in 19th Century Russia . Univ. Press Chicago 2001. ISBN 0-226-85270-9
  • Alberto Radicati di Passerano , Torino, Einaudi, 1954.
  • Il moto decabrista ei fratelli Poggi , Torino, Einaudi, 1956.
  • Esuli russi in Piemonte dopo il '48 , Torino, Einaudi, 1959.
  • Discussion entre historiens italiens et soviétiques , Paris, Droz, 1966.
  • Settecento riformatore , 6 vols. 1969–1990.
  1. Da Muratori a Beccaria, 1730-1764. 1969. New edition Turin 1998. ISBN 978-88-0614832-4
  2. La chiesa e la repubblica dentro i loro limiti, 1758-1774 .
  3. La prima crisi dell Antico Regime. 1768-1976 . Turin 1979.
  4. 1. Tl I grandi stati dell Occidente ; 2. Tl Il patriotismo repubblicano e gli imperi dell'est. 1984.
  5. Tl 1. L'Italia dei lumi, 1764-1791 ; Tl 2. La repubblica di Venezia. 1761-1797. Turin 1987.
  • Alessandro Galante Garrone, Franco Venturi: Vivere eguali. Dialoghi inediti intorno a Filippo Buonarroti . A cura di M. Albertone, Reggio Emilia, Diabasis, 2009 ISBN 978-88-8103-663-9

literature

  • Edoardo Tortarola: Franco Venturi . In Classics of History: From Fernand Braudel to Natalie Z. Davis . Munich: Beck 2006. pp. 77-95. ISBN 3-406-54104-6
Contains a detailed bibliography.
  • Giuseppe Ricuperati: The historiographical legacy of Franco Venturi (1914-1994) . In: Journal of Modern Italian Studies. Vol 2.1. 1997. pp. 67-88. doi : 10.1080 / 13545719708454940
  • Michael Confino: Franco Venturi's Russia . In: Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History. Vol 11, No. 1, 2010 (New Series). Pp. 77–105 ( PDF )
  • Christof Dipper : Franco Venturi and the Enlightenment . In: The Eighteenth Century. 20, 1996. pp. 15-21.
  • Gisela Schlüter: Settecentistics: Franco Venturi today . In: Romance Studies. Vol. 2.1. 2016. pp. 575-582.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Antonello Venturi Società italiana per lo studio della storia contemporanea, accessed on April 12, 2018
  2. ^ Élie Halévy: L'ère des tyrannies. 1938.
  3. ^ Franco Venturi: Les aventures et la pensée d'un idéologue piémontais, Dalmazzo Francesco Vasco (1732–1794). En appendice textes de Dalmazzo Vasco: Choix de notes à "L'Esprit des lois" (Italian texts et trad.) Dissertation: Thèse Université Paris. Lettres. 1946.
  4. ^ JG Herder: Ancora una filosofia dell storia. Einaudi, Turin 1951.
  5. ↑ Tortarola 2006. p. 79.
  6. ^ Fellows: Franco Venturi. British Academy, accessed August 12, 2020 .
  7. ^ Franco Venturi at the Mille Miglia

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Venturi, Franco
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Italian historian, essayist and journalist
DATE OF BIRTH May 16, 1914
PLACE OF BIRTH Rome
DATE OF DEATH December 14, 1994
Place of death Turin