There seem to be a number of points on Vassalli's life that are still shrouded in mystery. You seem to have zoomed in on one of them. Can you tell us more?

Yes, I would agree. There are indeed many points in Vassalli's life about which we know either very little or else about which conjecture has taken the place of circumstantial evidence, if not even direct evidence.

One such instance has been whether Vassalli was married or not. We have direct evidence from at least four contemporary sources indicating that Vassalli was not married.

First, a few days after Vassalli died, the Reverend C.F. Schlienz – one of the missionaries of the Protestant Society which had engaged Vassalli as a translator – wrote in a letter "that Vassalli had never been legally married". It is difficult to impose two meanings on this unequivocal phrase. Why should there be any doubt on the truthfulness of Schlienz's words?

Secondly, Giuseppe Cannolo, a fellow translator, but possibly also a distant "in-law", chided Vassalli for not having married. Again, the obvious question to ask is, Why not believe Cannolo? Why would Cannolo chide Vassalli for not doing something that Vassalli would have actually done? It doesn't add up!

Thirdly, the parish priest responsible for Gwardamanġa wrote "suspicious" ("sospetto") next to Vassalli's name in the parish's Book of Souls. According to the late Professor Dun Karm Sant this most probably meant that Vassalli was not married. Again, why doubt the word of the parish priest? What interest could the parish priest have in writing down one something that differed from the facts? Why attempt a laborious interpretation, when the "law of parsimony" dictates that the simplest or most economical explanation is usually the correct one?

Lastly, Vassalli never converted to Protestantism. And yet, documents tells us that the Catholic Church did not accept to give him a Catholic burial... because he was not legally married! Was the Catholic Church also involved in some conspiracy to declare a married man unmarried?

I decided that this incredible approach to the question should be consigned to history. This a priori stance – that is, a historical figure has to conform to preconceived ideas about him – had to be done away with and replaced by a more scientific, a posteriori approach, i.e. you reach conclusions once you see what the evidence (be it direct or circumstantial) is. So I decided to investigate.

What clues did you follow?

Vassalli was exiled from Malta and went to live in France at a time when the First French Empire was seeking to establish cotton growing on French soil in order to supply cotton to the French spinning industry. Vassalli's son Michel Antonio even proudly claimed that he was "a son of him who had the honor [sic] to receive the appellation by the Great Napoleon Bonaparte of Le Fondateur du Coton en France par Napoléon Bonaparte". French Professor Alain Blondy conducted research on Vassalli's cotton-industry endeavours, and reported that Vassalli tried his experiments in a town that lies a few kilometres away from Marseille, called La Ciotat. The years that Vassalli spent in La Ciotat coincide with the years in which two of his children, Gabriele and Michel Antonio, were born.

It was obvious to me that if one wanted to solve Vassalli's civil status mystery, one had to go to La Ciotat and make searches in the Public Registry over there. I am still hugely surprised that this obvious course of action had not occurred to anybody else... Professor Blondy wrote in the 1990s – that's almost 30 years ago!

I also considered Majorca, where Vassalli's youngest son, Saverio, was born (according to a declaration Saverio himself made on an 1860s notarial deed). However, I discovered that the Majorcan registries of those years do not exist, probably because of the Napoleonic Wars.

 What did you find at La Ciotat?

Professor Blondy tells us something more that is tantalising. In one of Vassalli's letters to the public administration concerning his cotton-growing experiments, he refers to a female relative ("une malheureuse parente"). Who is this "unhappy female relative"?

At the Public Registry of La Ciotat I met an extremely helpful and friendly director, M. Thierry Mabily, who not only opened wide the doors of his archives but also shared with me a few insights on the Provençal dialect. Friendliness and readiness to go that extra mile were also the characteristics of M. Mabily's staff.

The first thing that I discovered was that there were no residents' registers for the year 1816. I looked up 1814 and 1815, but could not find Vassalli, either in the town itself or in the faubourgs. There were no records on residents of the open countryside.

So I was not able to establish who the "unhappy relative" could have been.

However, I was luckier with the birth registrations book, finding the records of Vassalli's sons Gabriele and Michel Antonio. In each case, the parents are described as "non mariés" - "not married".

I think this closes the discussion on this particular aspect of Vassalli's life once and for all.

Who was Caterina Formosa de Fremaux?

Caterina Formosa de Fremaux was the mother of Vassalli's three children Gabriele, Michel Antonio, and Saverio. She died in 1851, aged 66, and was buried by the Protestants. It would seem that she was the daughter of Agostino Formosa de Fremaux and Paolica née Mamo. Agostino, known as the Count of Saint Sofia, was the Comptroller of the Order's Customs, Consul of a number of foreign countries, representative in Malta of the Jews of Leghorn, and Treasurer of a Masonic lodge of which many Knights and important Maltese were members. The Mamo family was very well connected. Interestingly, Paolica was a relative of Don Gaetano Mannarino's, a leader of the 1775 Uprising of the Priests, in which Dominus Michele Apap, Vassalli's confirmation godfather, had taken part. Tellingly, from 1764 until 1780, Dominus Apap had had no other godson apart from Vassalli.

I said that "it would seem" because I have found no record of her birth in the three parishes to which her purported family seems linked: Valletta (St Paul's), Żejtun, and Ħal Għaxaq. Furthermore, she does not appear in either Charles Gauci's books on the genealogy of Maltese noble families or Agostino's and Paolica's unica charta will. I want to point out that when Dr Gauci omits to mention certain members of a family, he consistently declares that there are other members whom he is leaving out. There seems to be no such indication with regard to the Formosa de Fremaux family.

Despite this lack of direct evidence, circumstantial evidence would seem to indicate that Caterina was indeed the youngest child of Agostino and Paolica spouses Formosa de Formosa.

For instance, when Vassalli returned from the exile (accompanied by Caterina and the children - who apparently were four, not three, but we seem to know nothing about Lorenzo), he approached the Bishop to help him in a land-related dispute. The Bishop of the time was Ferdinando Mattei, whose first-degree cousin was married to a purported sister of Caterina's.

(Interestingly, even the lawyer approached by Vassalli was a Mattei, and probably the brother-in-law of Caterina's purported sister. However, here I have to alert the reader to the need for caution, as advocate Mattei was also what we would today call the "lawyer for legal aid".)

Vassalli seems to have been introduced to the Protestants by Cleardo Naudi, who had married into the Formosa de Fremaux family. Furthermore, Giuseppe Cannolo, who also translated for the Protestants, was a distant "in-law" of the same family, and, to make things even more interesting, when Saverio Vassalli grew up, he married a Maria They, a descendant of a previous marriage of the wife of a Giuseppe Cannolo, who most probably was a relative to Giuseppe Cannolo the translator.

(Indeed, the network of family relations is dense – let us keep in mind that (i) the population was small and (ii) other concomitant sociological factors.)

Upon his entry from the exile, Vassalli wanted to issue a new book, and sought the services of a notary to make a public call for subscriptions. This was notary Ignazio Molinas. Was it a coincidence that the baptism godfather of notary Molina's father had been Caterina's maternal grandfather Melchiorre Mamo, Paolica de Fremaux's father?

Let us not forget that in those times – but even up till a few decades ago – people used to know who the members of their family (or clan, to be more precise) were, and even who was whose godfather or godmother. This was very important, vital information in pre-social-services societies, in which you might survive a bout of bad luck if you sought and found your family, be they blood or spiritual relations, or in-laws.

Why do you think that Vassalli did not marry?

I am tempted to say because he was a faithful son of the Revolution, and the Revolution, that sought equality in the eyes of the law, abhorred the family, the vehicle of inequality. Just consider the first article of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen: "Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions can be founded only on the common good." This article clearly means that birth does not confer social distinctions.

But I do not think that, in the 1810s, when Napoleon was intent on restoring order after the excesses of the Revolution, Vassalli would have opted for such a decision basing himself on ideology.

I say the excesses of the Revolution because in the ten years spanning from 1789 to 1799 in which the French experimented with different types of laws seeking personal freedom, France witnessed a huge spike in divorces and illegitimate births, and other manifestations of social chaos that were certainly not conducive to the type of stability that a bourgeois-capitalist society required. If indeed the French Revolution was the revolution of the bourgeoisie, aided by the lawyers, then the bourgeois needed a certain degree of freedom to pursue business at a playing level field but did not need so much freedom as to destroy the efforts to build and maintain capital. The playing level field the bourgeoisie needed was mainly that all businessmen would have the same conditions (e.g., under the former system, noblemen would benefit from better loan repayment conditions, say) and that there would be one legal system throughout all of France (under the former system, there were more than 300 legal systems in France).

The freedoms finally concretised by the French Revolution gave rise to the phenomenon of fraudulent bankruptcies. Napoleon sought to impose order; the Code of Commerce promulgated in 1807 "moralised" bankruptcy, in the sense that all bankruptcies were considered criminal, and were punishable by imprisonment and even hard labour. The bankrupt was deemed a dishonourable man, who would have cheated his creditors – the idea of economic downturns and genuine mismanagement was totally discounted. Not only were the businessman's possessions take away to make good for his debts, but also the businessman's wife's dotal property; and not only was the business himself jailed, but his wife too. (A conundrum for the feminists!)

When the French government decided to discontinue the cotton-growing experiments, Vassalli decided to persevere, no longer as government agent but in his own name thereby exposing himself to the possibly of bankruptcy. He was undoubtedly aware of the hundreds of businessmen arrested every year for bankruptcy, as this was public knowledge and cause for public anxiety.

I therefore think he did not marry not out of moral but legal considerations. As a good family man, he must have reckoned that it was a higher moral goal to protect his young wife and children than to adhere to formalities which implied many risks and few benefits. I think he was pragmatic. 

Furthermore, let us remember that the Civil Code (the Code Napoléon) had been enacted only 10 years before, and the Commercial Code only 7 years before. The people of those times had seen so much legislation enacted and abrogated, that their sense of stability must have been deeply shaken. What guarantees did Vassalli have, in the 1810s, that the law would not change again, for the worse, endangering even further his young family? Vassalli was not a fool; I have written a 6,000-word-long essay on one entry in his Lexicon – the term "midheb" – arguing that the precise definition given by Vassalli demonstrates his versatility also in legal matters. I think it is reasonable to presume that he was keenly interested in current affairs, in legal developments, and other events that occupy the minds of people of higher intelligence.

Vassalli is a national symbol. Should we be prying into his private life?

This is a highly important question, to my mind. Needless to say, Vassalli is a national symbol, as you are saying. His monument in Ħaż-Żebbuġ was erected by the Labourites; the Nationalists have called their club in that locality after him.

In a sense, Vassalli is an abstraction – which is why certain historians and admirers project unto him all the characteristics they deem "perfect", e.g. being married. As an abstraction, he has become a symbol of our young nation, the "Father of the Maltese Language". And like all abstractions, he approaches the level of myth.

But Vassalli was also a human being. Is it ethical to seek the details of his private life?

I would contend that yes, it is. By understanding his personal choices and the vicissitudes he went though, we can understand the man, and therefore his message and ideas.

Nobody chooses to become a hero. Actually, many heroes try to escape their destiny. I do not think that Vassalli wanted to be a hero. Vassalli simply wanted the best for his homeland. We are his moral heirs; we need to understand him as a person to understand his ideas.

The information found in this interview was presented in a slightly different form during a lecture this January hosted by the Malta Historical Society. I would like to thank the Society and Ms Simone Azzopardi MSt (Oxon), in particular, for her unstinted support.