Guglielmo Ferrero papers, 1871-1944, 1981, bulk 1890-1942

Italian journalist, historian and novelist Guglielmo Ferrero (1871-1942) wrote for several European and Latin American newspapers and published more than ten books on ancient and modern European history. His interests included history, criminology, politics, religion, and literature.

On his early works, Ferrero worked with Cesare Lombroso on topics such as Criminalist and Sociological Theory. Lombroso—who was his father-in-law—published with Ferrero his first essay Criminal Woman, the Prostitute and the Normal Woman. In the turn to the twentieth century, however, after a number of trips throughout Europe, Ferrero became interested in the study of the constitution of the European history and started to write extensively on topics of social, cultural and political formation of the continent.

In 1907, Guglielmo Ferrero, accompanied by his wife Gina Lombroso, left Europe for almost a year and gave more than twenty lectures in Argentina and Brazil. In the following year, Ferrero was invited by American president Theodore Roosevelt to speak in the White House.

As an outspoken critic of Fascism in the middle of the 1920s, Ferrero increasingly received threats from the Italian government. In 1925, Ferrero was placed under house arrest for refusing to leave Italy. After intense negotiations and the support of King Albert of Belgium, Ferrero and his family were exiled to Switzerland in 1929, and he accepted a professorship at the University of Genève. His lessons and lectures at this time focused mostly on the topics of formation of the European order from end of the Nineteenth Century to the end of the World War I. In the beginning of the 1930s Ferrero, who already wrote regularly for many French newspapers, began to write for several newspapers in Latin America. By the end of the decade Ferrero published a series of books that follow the topics of his lessons from University of Genève. L'Aventure, Bonaparte en Italie, Reconstruction: Telleyrand a Vienne and Pouvoir focus on the French Revolution and the ascension of Napoleon, but reflect his concerns of absolute power and lack of balance in the structure of the modern State.

Ferrero died in 1942, in Switzerland.