Cesare Correnti

While employed in the public debt administration, he flooded Lombardy with revolutionary pamphlets designed to excite hatred against the Austrians, and in 1848 proposed the general abstention of the Milanese from smoking, which gave rise to the insurrection known as the Five Days.

Until the reoccupation of Milan by the Austrians, he was secretary-general of the provisional government, but afterwards, he fled to Piedmont, whence he again distributed his revolutionary pamphlets throughout Lombardy, earning a precarious livelihood by journalism.

After the annexation of Lombardy he was made commissioner for the liquidation of the Lombardo-Venetian debt, in 1860 was appointed councillor of state, and received various other public positions, especially in connection with the railway and financial administration.

He veered round to the political Right, and in 1867 and again in 1869 he held the portfolio of education; he played an important part in the events consequent upon the occupation of Rome by Italy and helped to draft the Law of Guarantees.

[2] As minister of education, he suppressed the theological faculties in the Italian universities, but eventually resigned office and allied himself with the Left again on account of conservative opposition to his reforms.