Stefano Franscini - Political Career (1824-1848)

Political Career (1824-1848)

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.

His writings were not well received by the authoritarian cantonal government under Landamano Giovanni Battista Quadri, but his ideas were shared by a majority of the Ticino’s legislative body, and they helped effectuate a constitutional reform and change of government. In the following years of reform, Franscini held several cantonal political offices: As a state secretary, from 1830 to 1837 and from 1845 to 1847, he prepared resolutions and laws for the cantonal government. He himself was an elected member of this government between 1837 and 1845, and again between 1847 and 1848. Franscini also represented the canton of Ticino at the Tagsatzung in 1841, 1843, 1845, and 1846. During his various tenures of office, Franscini was frequently sent on extraordinary missions, such as relief and calming missions in the Mendrisiotto during a cholera epidemic in 1836, and again during the famine of 1847. That same year he helped establish the armed defense in the Ticino to meet an unruly retreat of the Sonderbund’s troops who were losing the War of the Sonderbund. On a national level, he attended intercantonal conferences on trade, customs, and postal services, and, in 1847, received a mandate to mitigate a peaceful change to liberal order in the Valais after its defeat in the War of the Sonderbund. The Tagsatzung also sent him on a fact-finding mission to Naples, where Swiss mercenaries had been accused of atrocious behavior while suppressing uprisings preceding the revolutions of 1848.