La repubblica in collegio. Gli scolopi a Roma tra Lumi e Rivoluzione

Abstract

The Roman Republic of 1798-99, the first experience of lay government in the city of the Pope since the end of the Middle Ages, saw an involvement of the clerics of the Pious Schools which may be at first glance surprising. This book reconstructs the phenomenon in its amplitude and investigates its roots and meaning. On the one hand, the openings of the Piarists toward democratic government appear to be in continuity with the history of a “learned” order, traversed in the eighteenth century by the ferments of Jansenism, modern science and Enlightenment culture, whose centrality in the Roman educational system was strengthened over the months of the Republic. On the other hand, they represent a response to the crisis of the old institutional order that is reflected in a wide range of individual attitudes and includes radical ruptures from the rules of consecrated life but also adhesions to the Republic aimed at confronting its most radical tendencies from within.