GIANNONE, PIETRO. - Born on 7 May 1676 at Ischitella to Scipione and Lucrezia Micaglia, died at Turin on 17 March 1748. He studied law at Naples, took his degree there in 1698, and began to practice the legal profession with success. At the same time he occupied himself passionately with jurisdictional questions, which he wished to reconsider in their historical antecedents and in their overall framework. The result was a work of vast design, the Istoria civile del Regno di Napoli (published at Naples in 1723), in which the author set out to narrate the vicissitudes of southern Italy from the origins of Christianity to the end of the 17th century. These vicissitudes, moreover, were reinterpreted by G., who was inspired by his political passion, in a single light, that of the conflict between State and Church, systematically placing all good on the side of the State and all evil on the side of the Church. Hence a series of distortions and grave deficiencies, which make the work debatable and ephemeral from the historical-scientific standpoint. It is instead fundamental in the history of political-ecclesiastical thought for its jurisdictionalism, intimately linked in G.'s vision to the alliance of monarchical absolutism and the middle class. The work had immediate resonance, received emphatic praise from the anti-curialists and became one of their dearest texts, and was translated into many languages (placed on the Index on 1 July 1723).
G., excommunicated by the archbishop of Naples in 1723, went to Vienna, where he was received by Charles VI, who granted him an annual pension. At Vienna he wrote several polemical short works, all aimed at deepening and clarifying individual points of the previous work and which also present, on the whole, a concrete program of political action, which in subsequent times found application at Naples and elsewhere (full exercise of the regio exequatur, reduction of the ecclesiastical forum, gradual suppression of mortmain, etc.). Also at Vienna he wrote another work of greater importance, known by the title Triregno: there he developed the thesis that, in order to ensure a free and uncontested development of state sovereignty, it was advisable to abolish the papacy and the ecclesiastical hierarchy, to deprive the clergy of every temporal good, and to subject it entirely to the State.
When the Viennese pension ceased in 1734, G. resolved to return to his homeland. But he was forbidden entry into the Kingdom, so that, after adventurous brief stays at Venice, Modena, Milan, he went to Geneva (1735), where he resisted the enticements to convert to Calvinism. G. having long been opposed for his ideas and his programs by the Roman Curia, the prime minister of the king of Sardinia thought to acquire merit with the latter by imprisoning him. Indeed, having lured him by deceit, through an emissary, to a place near Geneva but subject to Savoyard jurisdiction, he had him arrested there and then taken to prison at Chambéry and to the castle of Miolans (Apr. 1736). There he remained until the following year, the Savoyard authorities having refused to hand him over to the Roman Chancery, which had requested him (but G.'s papers were sent to Rome). Transferred to Turin, there he signed, overwhelmed by threats and blandishments, an act of abjuration of his former ideas (March 1738). From Turin he passed to the prison of Ceva, where he remained until 1744, occupying himself with the drafting of new historical short works, in which, despite some professions of Catholic faith, the old polemical themes return. Brought back to Turin, he died in the prison of the citadel.
G., in his major and minor works, in his initial sensationalism, in his jurisdictionalism, in his very Socinianism, must be considered as one of the writers who made an effective contribution to the affirmation of lay positions in the 18th century.
Bibliography6 works
Mario E. Viora