Boncompagni di Mombello, Carlo

BONCOMPAGNI di MOMBELLO, CARLO. - Politician, b. in Turin on 25 July 1804, d. there on 14 Dec. 1880. Having graduated in law in July 1824, he entered the state administrative career.

Being particularly versed in questions concerning the education and instruction of youth, and a promoter in Piedmont of infant asylums, for whose implementation he had recourse to the advice of Aporti, Lambruschini, and Rayneri, B. became minister of education in the first constitutional cabinet of C. Balbo (1848), and held the same office in the Alfieri ministry, formed in the second half of the same year. In that capacity he submitted on 4 Oct. for the king's signature the law on the administration of public instruction, by which every true freedom for the religious Orders in matters of teaching was abolished, every just possibility of supervision by ecclesiastical authority over state schools was removed, and the validity of studies completed in seminaries was restricted to those who intended to dedicate themselves to the priestly ministry. In the second d'Azeglio cabinet (May-Nov. 1852) he held, in addition to the portfolio of education, also that of grace and justice. As keeper of the seals he proposed the law on civil marriage, which also provided for the institution of the civil registry later introduced with the Code of 1865, a bill that was approved by the Chamber but rejected by the Senate. President of the Chamber of Deputies from 1853 to 1856, and Sardinian minister plenipotentiary to the Grand Duke of Tuscany from 1857, he prepared and carried out, also through conspiracies and uprisings, the union of the States of central Italy with Piedmont. After 1860 he dealt several times in Parliament with relations between State and Church, and maintained the necessity of resolving the Roman question by means of the suppression of the temporal power of the Papacy.