Beati Paoli

by Luigi Natoli

introduction

The modest goal of this project is to introduce Luigi Natoli's Beati Paoli to an American audience. The index has links to a machine translation of the romance novel. Correcting the text into a proper translation is a task for a future agenda.

In Italy, Natoli's romance novel was an extraordinary success, across all social classes. And I think it will captivate an American audience too.

As a work of (well-documented) historical fiction, the romance novel Beati Paoli describes how people respond when commoners cannot obtain justice from the courts. They form secret societies. Part 3 chapter 7 articulates the ideology of the Beati Paoli, explaining that the sect arose in response to the injustice that commoners face.

Natoli describes a feudal society in which a commoner may not testify against a nobleman. He was describing Sicily in the early 18th century. At that time in Europe, philosophers of the Enlightenment were discussing the principle of equality under the law.

Later in the 18th century, on the western side of the Atlantic, the American Revolution abolished the nobility. Then in the 19th century, slavery was abolished after the American Civil War. But Reconstruction was abandoned in 1877 and the doctrine of "separate but equal" allowed states to deny the "equal protection" guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment.

Only recently, in 1954, Brown v. Board of Education abolished the doctrine of "separate but equal" in public education. Ten years later, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex and national origin.

Today, the legal distinctions that privilege certain people over others have been abolished, but economic power still gives the wealthy an advantage in a court of law. And as income inequality widens, that advantage will grow and common people will face more injustice.

So I invite Americans to read the Beati Paoli, learn about feudal society and develop a society without secret societies.