Educating and punishing the nobles
It was an arduous task to educate but, above all, to punish the scions of the nobility who attended the colleges of the Society of Jesus.
The colleges, known as ‘colleges of the nobility’, were institutions dedicated to the education of the higher social classes, not only aristocrats but also the bourgeoisie, and the future ruling classes; they were fee-paying schools.
The fact that boarders belonged to these families did not exclude undisciplined and unruly behaviour on the part of the boys. The task of educating them and also of punishing them was entrusted to the fathers in a continuous mediation between the need to enforce the rules and the choice of punishments commensurate with rank.
An episode experienced by the ‘master’ Enrico Valle helps us to better understand the issue.
The young Jesuits who were destined, after the novitiate, to the colleges for the period of the magisterium as teachers and prefects of discipline and study were called ‘masters’.
The young Valle, who had entered the Society of Jesus eight years earlier, was engaged in 1846, at the age of 24, as a master of the nobles, finding it necessary to punish one of them, Mr. “Ostini’, a baron born in Rome who had entered the college two years earlier.
We reconstruct the story from some letters in the Jesuit’s personal file.
The punishment of the pupil Ostini had evidently aroused his father’s ire, which had even reached the Rector, so much so that he wrote to his confrere to admonish him and invite him to apologise.
Teacher Valle, in reply, writes:
Although the punishment I gave Mr. Ostini did not seem to me either undeserved or excessive, especially if one looks at the quality of his fault and the time when it was committed, nevertheless and from what I have heard and what I have seen myself, knowing how much disgust it has caused Your Reverence, I believe it is my duty to ask myself to be blamed and to humbly ask Your Reverence to forgive me. In truth I am very sorry to have failed in one of my obligations by transgressing the warning not to send nobles on their knees, and I am no less sorry to have caused Your Reverence so much displeasure and nevertheless I hope that Your Reverence will graciously condone this excess or importunate rigour of mine, all the more so since I was led by a lapse of passion and soon, but it was no longer in time to remedy it, I became aware of it. […] As for the rest, however, I protest and I am firm in wishing that Mr. Ostini or any other of his companions should not be subjected to the same rigour. Ostini or any other of his companions to be in the school as the outsiders are and as I want them to be.
The problem had not been the need to punish the convict, but the method, that of making him stay on his knees because evidently for the aristocrats it was not considered dignified, other times…
However, one must not think that the Jesuits indulged the scions of the best families. Often sons of nobles were expelled from Jesuit colleges for various reasons.
