Francesco Ercole

Francesco Ercole (30 March 1884 – 18 May 1945) was an Italian historian and a Fascist politician who served as minister of national education of the Kingdom of Italy from 1932 to 1935.

Biography Ercole was born in La Spezia on 30 March 1884.

In 1925 he was among the signatories of the Manifesto of the Fascist Intellectuals, drawn up by Giovanni Gentile. He was elected to the Italian Chamber of Deputies in 1929 and again in 1934 until 1939, and served as minister of national education from July 1932 to January 1935. In 1934 he excluded from the school curricula any dialect or idiom or language other than standard Italian, in compliance with the linguistic nationalism imposed by the Fascist regime.

In 1935, after the end of his tenure as minister, he moved to teaching modern history at the Sapienza University of Rome and became President of the Italian Historical Institute for the Modern Age; on 18 June 1936 he became a member of the Accademia dei Lincei. A renowned historian of legal institutions and medieval political thought, he studied in particular the problems concerning the passage from the medieval commune to the signoria and the birth of the principality. He also wrote numerous studies on Dante Alighieri's political views. He died in Gardone Riviera in 1945.