ANTI-SLAVERY, ITALIAN SOCIETY. - The founding of antislavery societies in Europe is connected with the antislavery movement and with the part played in it by Leo XIII. When the Pope received an African pilgrimage in 1888 led by Card. Lavigerie (v.), Archbishop of Carthage, he entrusted to him the task of beginning a campaign against the slave trade. At once the cardinal set to work in France, England, Belgium, Holland, Germany, and Spain, and promoted the establishment of groups (designated by various names) for antislavery action. Such groups were something new, because only in London did an antislavery society exist (founded in 1839). Lavigerie's propaganda concluded in Italy, with conferences at Palermo, Naples, Milan and Rome, in Dec. 1888. In Jan. 1889 a group was formed in Rome, on the initiative of Filippo Tolli (v.), which in Apr. took the name S. A. I., coordinating the action of the committees already existing and founding others in the principal Italian cities.
The possibilities of action of the antislavery societies were defined at the free antislavery congress that Lavigerie organized in Paris (Sept. 1890) and in which delegations took part from the societies of Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal and Spain, plus that of the English society. The free congress followed the antislavery conference of Brussels (also in 1890), which the King of the Belgians, at the invitation of England, had convened and in which 19 States participated. That conference recognized for religious missions, for "national associations and individual initiatives" (art. 4), and for "refuge foundations" for liberated women and children (art. 88), the faculty of coordinating the activity of governments. On the basis of these provisions, the societies founded by Lavigerie (organized and directed by Catholics, but open to all) fixed a program of action and determined the zones of vigilance according to the possessions and influences of the respective States; thus to the Italian society fell the vigilance of Tripolitania, Ethiopia and certain routes of the Near East. The society immediately founded a committee at Tripoli and agencies at Benghazi, Derna, Misrata, Zliten, Tobruk, Salonica, Smyrna, Piraeus, and Canea. The Brussels conference authorized the society to have suspected ships visited by the consuls of the signatory nations, to remove from them the slaves hidden there, and to have them declared free.
In the first 25 years of its life the antislavery society was thus able to liberate over 2000 slaves. With the Italian conquest of Libya, it supported both the action of the government and that of the missionaries, especially favoring the apostolate of Fr. Apolloni (v.). In the Benadir the organs of vigilance reported very grave accusations of slavery against an industrial enterprise and, while clamorous polemics alternated, the antislavery society sent one of its members, the explorer Luigi Robecchi-Bricchetti, who brought the truth to light in a documentary book (1904), and the government intervened with energy. The establishment of an apostolic prefecture was also urged, entrusted to the Trinitarians, erected, amid insuperable difficulties, by Fr. Leandro dell'Addolorata. In the Eritrean colony the antislavery society ascertained that the Arabs were carrying on the slave trade in the Red Sea: in a raid 32 children were abducted who, liberated by Italian arms, were sheltered, with the society's contribution, at Massawa, with the Capuchins and the Daughters of St. Anne.
Through the press, through national congresses (1905, 1907, 1921, 1926), and through political action, the society has made its voice heard at the Conference of Algeciras (1906), and since 1920 it has followed, also with a large contribution of studies, the Geneva initiatives of the League of Nations and of the International Labour Office. The war of 1914 led to the violation of not a few antislavery provisions of the Conference of Berlin (1885) and of that of Brussels; the Treaty of Versailles and the Convention of St-Germain (1919) restored them, but to an insufficient degree. The League of Nations accordingly set up a commission for the study of slavery, which prepared the antislavery convention of Geneva (1926), by which a radical revision of the matter was carried out, confronting the study of forced labor, considered as a virtual return to slavery. At the congresses of 1921 and 1926 of the antislavery society these problems were studied and the solutions envisaged were accepted by the Italian government.
The antislavery society, over which the Holy See places a cardinal protector, has always proceeded in the closest connection with the Catholic missions and, often, with the National Association for the Assistance of Italian Missionaries. Especially precious was the contribution of the missionaries in the education of liberated slaves and, in general, of the natives, for free labor. To this end, the society has promoted the founding of "villages of liberty" in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan (with the Sons of the Sacred Heart) and in Ethiopia (with the Missionaries of the Consolata): apart from the structure, which varies, these are stations or schools of agricultural and vocational instruction, which have yielded excellent results. Collaboration with the Italian government - which in the early years of the antislavery society was made difficult by political diffidence - after 1900 became continuous and progressed with the development of the Italian colonies.
The antislavery society participated in expositions and in colonial and geographical congresses and published the journal Antischiavismo and various monographs. It was not unconnected with the pontifical mission entrusted to one of its members, Fr. Giovanni Genocchi (v.), which had the purpose of studying the conditions of the native workers in the Putumayo (1911): a mission that gave rise to the encyclical Profondamente commosso (7 June 1912), in which Pius X denounced slavery horrors surpassing "the most extreme examples of pagan turpitude." In the same regions, another member, the explorer d. Giuseppe Capra, returned in 1937 and published a report. In 1935 the antislavery society set up within itself a Committee for Colonial and Missionary Studies. The Italian antislavery society is the only one, among those founded by Lavigerie, that still exists; the others disappeared with the war of 1914.
BIBL. Bollettino antischiavista (then the journal Antischiavismo) published by the S.A.I., Rome (from 1888); Atti dei Congressi Nazionali della S.A.I., 4 vols., 1905, 1907, 1921, 1926, published by the S.A.I., Rome. - Actes du Congrès libre antischiaviste, Paris 1891; C. Bianchetti, L'antischiavismo alla fine del sec. XIX, Turin 1893; L. Robecchi-Bricchetti, Dal Benadir, lettere illustrate alla S.A.I., Milan 1904; F. Tolli, Nel XXV della S.A.I. (ricordi), Rome 1912; G. Capra, Schiavitù e lavoro libero negli Stati del Sud America, Rome 1932; E. Martire, L'Italia contro la schiavitù (discorso), Rome 1936.
Egilberto Martire