45 Facts About Napoleone Colajanni

Napoleone Colajanni was an Italian writer, journalist, criminologist, socialist, and politician.

Napoleone Colajanni has been called the father of Sicilian socialism.

Napoleone Colajanni was born in Castrogiovanni in Sicily, then part of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, in a family of intense patriotic feelings.

At a young age, Napoleone Colajanni was inspired by Giuseppe Garibaldi and attempted to join the Redshirts in the Expedition of the Thousand for the unification of Italy in 1860, escaping to Palermo at the age of 13, but without success.

In 1862, two years later, when Garibaldi passed by Castrogiovanni in his expedition against Rome, Napoleone Colajanni joined the troops.

Napoleone Colajanni reached the Battle of Aspromonte, where he was captured by government troops and deported to the island of Palmaria.

Napoleone Colajanni made contact with the republicans of Giuseppe Mazzini and started to write for Il Dovere.

Napoleone Colajanni arrived too late when the Battle of Mentana, in which Garibaldi was defeated by Papal troops and a French auxiliary force, had already ended.

Napoleone Colajanni took up his study in medicine, this time in Naples.

Napoleone Colajanni returned to his home town, Castrogiovanni, where he practiced medicine and managed some sulfur mines owned by his mother.

In 1875, Napoleone Colajanni was among the participants at the Republican Congress in Rome to revive the movement.

Napoleone Colajanni started to collaborate with the magazine La rivista repubblicana of Arcangelo Ghisleri, which put him in contact with the exponents of republicanism and socialism in Milan.

Napoleone Colajanni became one of the protagonists of the Italian positivist and evolutionary socialism, inspired by Darwinian evolution.

Napoleone Colajanni's socialism was not based on the scientific Marxist approach but was closer to the ideology of Mazzini, one of the fathers of Italian unification, with some influence of French utopian thinkers such as Georges Sorel, and in terms of practical politics resulted in a kind of radical-democratic reformism.

In 1892, Napoleone Colajanni was appointed Professor of Statistics at the University of Palermo.

Napoleone Colajanni published many books and essays on social and political problems, and exposed the unscientific theories of Cesare Lombroso and his Scuola positiva, as well as Enrico Ferri on criminology.

Napoleone Colajanni was particularly critical of Lombroso's biological determinism, in particular the alleged inferiority of Southern Italians, and he put a much greater emphasis on social conditions as a cause of offending.

Napoleone Colajanni was the first to publish a book with criminal sociology in the title.

Napoleone Colajanni belonged to the Terza scuola and argued that in order to curtail the level of crime in a society there should be a certain level of security with regard to sustainable living conditions, economic stability, and a more equal welfare distribution.

Napoleone Colajanni unleashed a smear campaign and scientific crusade against Colajanni while blocking access to academic journals to prevent Colajanni's replies.

Napoleone Colajanni argued that the high rates of criminality in Southern Italy, which were seen as evidence of alleged Southern racial inferiority, could simply be explained by social conditions and levels of education.

Napoleone Colajanni opposed the notion of racism and racial superiority as an ideological tool to legitimise dominance and exploitation, which would lead to the destruction of other races instead of its alleged progressive transformation.

In 1879, Napoleone Colajanni had been appointed as a municipal councillor in Castrogiovanni.

In 1890, Napoleone Colajanni was elected in the Kingdom of Italy's Chamber of Deputies in the district of Caltanissetta for the first time.

Napoleone Colajanni was re-elected in all subsequent Italian Parliaments until his death in September 1921.

Napoleone Colajanni sponsored initiatives like the parliamentary inquiry on colonial adventure in Italian Eritrea and the Banca Romana scandal.

Napoleone Colajanni argued against the incipient colonial policy of the moderate Historical Left, and anti-colonialism was one of his favourite themes.

Napoleone Colajanni played an important role in the Banca Romana scandal.

On 20 December 1892, Napoleone Colajanni read out long extracts in Parliament and the then Historical Left prime minister Giovanni Giolitti was forced to appoint an expert commission to investigate the bank.

Napoleone Colajanni supported the Fasci Siciliani, a popular movement of democratic and socialist inspiration, which arose in Sicily in the years between 1891 and 1893.

Napoleone Colajanni took the Fasci under his political protection, defending them in parliament and in the press.

When riots on the island got out of hand, Crispi asked Napoleone Colajanni to undertake a mission of appeasement on Sicily.

Napoleone Colajanni condemned the Fasci leaders for lacking to keep the peace.

Napoleone Colajanni argued that the government was engaged in bettering the working conditions and deserved their confidence, at least for a while.

Napoleone Colajanni called fools and traitors those breaking the peace.

Disillusioned by the spread of violence in Sicily, to which he believed the PSI's discourse of class struggle had contributed, Napoleone Colajanni reverted in 1894 to his original republicanism.

Napoleone Colajanni identified the root of the backwardness of the region in power groups of landowners of the rural estates and the Sicilian Mafia, which were closely connected to each other and in a close relationship with public administration on the island.

In 1900, Napoleone Colajanni wrote a j'accuse directed at the magistracy, the police, and the government in relation to the trial about the 1893 murder of Emanuele Notarbartolo, the ex-mayor of Palermo and ex-governor of the Bank of Sicily.

Napoleone Colajanni wrote that the Italian government did everything to consolidate the Mafia and render it omnipotent.

Napoleone Colajanni continued to reject the ideological underpinnings of orthodox Marxism, which he considered to be a contradiction to democracy.

Napoleone Colajanni remained a social-Darwinist throughout his life, convinced that socialism would be a product of a natural process of evolution and social selection.

Napoleone Colajanni did not consider himself a materialist, as the social question was not only an economic issue but an ethical one.

Napoleone Colajanni did not deny that there was a struggle, but he saw it as the first stage of evolution, which was not be encouraged, but passed in favour of a greater spread of altruism.

Napoleone Colajanni opposed revolutionary syndicalism and severely criticized the 1904 Italian general strike.

Napoleone Colajanni strongly opposed the Italian Communist Party that had left the PSI in January 1921, and felt certain sympathy for Italian fascism in its initial phase.