FRANSONI, Luigi. — Archbishop of Turin, b. 29 March 1789 at Genoa, d. 26 March 1862 at Lyons. In 1797 he took refuge in Rome. On his return to Genoa in 1814 he donned the ecclesiastical habit and was ordained priest on 11 December of the same year. He then entered the Congregation of the Urban Missionaries and was appointed Bishop of Fossano by Pius VII on 13 August 1821. After the death of Msgr. Chiaverotti in August 1831, he was sent to Turin as Apostolic Administrator and became Archbishop following the Conciestro of 24 February 1832. He took particular care to improve studies in the seminaries and to enforce stricter ecclesiastical discipline.
In March 1848, owing to hostile demonstrations, he was obliged to leave Turin, returning in February 1850. To King Victor Emmanuel II, who had sought to dissuade him from this return, he replied that he could not abandon his diocese any longer without failing in his most pressing duties.
Once back in his see, upon the promulgation of the Siccardi laws, on 18 April he issued a pastoral letter in which, recalling that civil law could not dispense ecclesiastics from the special obligations imposed upon them by canon law, he prescribed the conduct to be observed by parish priests and clergy in certain cases. When the Sardinian government learned of these instructions, it ordered Franson’s arrest; he was confined in the citadel. Meanwhile, a civil trial was brought against him; he was found guilty of offending the laws and sentenced to one month’s imprisonment and a fine of five hundred lire. He was released on 2 June, but shortly afterwards Franson was subjected to even harsher trials. When the gravely ill Minister of Agriculture, Pietro Sarà-tarosa—one of the principal promoters of the Siccardi laws—was brought to him, Franson, after consulting a commission of canonists, consented to administer the last Sacraments only after a public act of retraction. The minister refused and died without religious consolation.
Two days after Santarosa’s death, on 7 August 1850, Franson was taken from his palace by a Carabinieri major and conveyed to the fortress of Fenestrelle. With only the barest necessities, in the company of a cleric and a young layman, the archbishop remained there until 28 September of the same year. Meanwhile, the Sardinian government had sent Pier Dioniqi Pinelli to Rome in a vain attempt to reach a modus vivendi with the Holy See. To the Piedmontese proposal—which declared that one of the chief obstacles to an agreement was Franson himself and that therefore the archbishop should be transferred—the Cardinal Secretary of State Antonelli replied that Franson’s conduct had been fully in accord with the demands of his ministry. The government then acted on its own initiative and expelled the prelate from the Kingdom. Franson took up residence in Lyons, where he remained, far from his diocese, until his death.