Pellegrino Rossi

Papal States state institutions Liberalism and republicanism 1787–1848 ✕ Assassinated

Economist and diplomat of the July Monarchy who became Pius IX's interior minister and was assassinated in November 1848

Born in 1787 at Carrara, he studied at Pisa and Bologna and became professor of law at Bologna in 1812. He supported Joachim Murat's anti-Austrian expedition in 1815 and after Murat's fall went to Geneva, where he was naturalised and elected to the cantonal council. At Guizot's invitation he settled in France, succeeded Jean-Baptiste Say in the chair of political economy at the Collège de France in 1833, was naturalised French in 1834 and raised to the peerage in 1839. In 1845 Guizot made him ambassador to the Papal States; when the revolution of 1848 severed his tie to France he stayed in Rome and became Pius IX's minister of the interior. His moderate reforms, with a suffrage limited to the well-off, were blocked by the reactionary clergy and scorned by the revolutionaries, and on 15 November 1848, on his way to open parliament, he was stabbed to death.

Also known as: Pellegrino Luigi Odoardo Rossi