Stefano Franscini

Stefano Franscini (23 October 1796 – 19 July 1857) was a Swiss politician and statistician. He was one of the initial members of the Swiss Federal Council elected in 1848 and Switzerland's first native Italian speaking federal councillor. Franscini was affiliated to the Liberal Radical Party of Switzerland. During his office tenure he held the Department of Home Affairs. Important elements of his political legacy include political reforms in the Ticino during the 1830s and 1840s, Switzerland's first federal population census in 1850, and the creation of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in 1854/1855.

Franscini was born in the village of Bodio, to a farmer's family with humble backgrounds. Until the age of eleven, he visited a winter school run by a priest in the neighbouring village Personico. From 1808 to 1814, he attended the priests' seminary in Pollegio, from where he was sent to continue his education and training at the archiepiscopal seminary for priests in Milan. In 1819, he abandoned his religious classes for the sake of studying history, law, political economics, and pedagogy, financing his studies by working as a teacher and author of textbooks. He became friends with Carlo Cattaneo, who was a member of the liberal Carboneria at the time, and who introduced Franscini to Milan's liberal political circles as well as to the works of political economist Melchiorre Gioia, sparking Franscini's lifelong interest in economical statistics. In 1823, he married Teresa Massari, with whom he had two children before she died in 1831.

Franscini returned to Bodio in 1824, where he continued his work as a teacher and author, also writing articles on history, economics, and statistics for the Gazzetta Ticinese. He and his wife founded a girls' school in Lugano based on the popular but controversial Bell-Lancaster method of mutual instruction. In 1827, Franscini published Switzerland's first comparative statistical analysis ever in Statistica della Svizzera ("Statistics of Switzerland"). The explicitly liberal text and interpretation were also translated to German, and helped build Franscini's reputation in the political scene. One year later, he wrote Della pubblica istruzione nel Cantone Ticino ("On public education in the canton of Ticino"), in which he strongly criticized the backwardness of the cantonal government's education policy. Another political text of his was published in Zurich in 1829, this time anonymously: Della riforma della Costituzione ticinese ("On the reform of the Ticino's constitution"), a call for reform, including an outline of how a liberal constitution should be drafted, and a strong criticism of the canton's restaurative and conservative institutions. Franscini continued to write for liberal journals such as L'Osservatore del Ceresio and Il Repubblicano della Svizzera italiana and between 1837 and 1840 published La Svizzera italiana, a reform program for the canton of Ticino, based on a comprehensive statistical analysis of its political and economic condition.

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