Michael Broers

The Myth and Reality of Italian Regionalism: A Historical Geography of Napoleonic Italy, 1801–1814

Napoleon Bonaparte was a breaker of worlds, shattering the European state system in a few swift military campaigns in the first years of the nineteenth century. He shoved regions and populations together to suit his immediate purposes, and the results of this cavalier attitude toward the map of Europe often had surprising ramifications, exposing many harsh geopolitical truths. These brusque shifts in borders revealed regional configurations hitherto obscured from view;¹ the very creation of a French empire herded different societies into closer contact than ever before. The particular conditions of this brief, convulsed period provide a remarkable laboratory for the study of political culture, imperialism, and of the place of geography within them. Although this essay may not be devoid of direct comparative interest, it is less a study of the Napoleonic period than an attempt to use its singular conditions as a methodological springboard. Its first task is to establish the usefulness of terms and concepts drawn from historical geography in this context; it then examines the consequences of a brutally swift change of regime in a definable region where geography was already a seminal influence on political culture. Finally, it points to the fluid, evolving character of European macro-regions, too often regarded as timeless.

History has not been the first discipline to borrow from historical geography; Anthony Giddens pointed to its usefulness in the development of social theory. Giddens saw that regionalization is not just a question of space but also "the zoning of time-space for routine social practices"; regions represent "the structuralization of conduct across time-space," contexts within which social interaction takes place.² The process of interaction between politics and physical geography in the particular context of those parts of Italy Napoleon annexed directly to France, a region subdivided into clear centers and peripheries, offers a useful arena in which to test this conceptualization. Whereas social theorists tend to examine the place of regions in the process of human interaction in the search for social routines, this is a study in dislocation. It examines the transition of a physical region from weak to strong government, exploring the consequences of the regional relocation of authority, of the interaction of old and new ruling elites, and how two different systems of government responded to the same physical environment. Italy in the Napoleonic period offers a useful example of the meeting of a determinedly centralizing, authoritarian form of imperialism with communities hitherto dominated by geography and largely immune from external control.

Any regional approach is particularist.³ Not without reason are local studies decried as villains in the fragmentation of history, but this essay tries to set itself against that trend. First, within its chosen period and area of specialization, it seeks to bring a degree of coherence out of seemingly incompatible micro-regions. Studies of Napoleonic Italy treat the two satellite kingdoms of Naples and Italy as wholes,⁴ the composite nature of the latter notwithstanding.⁵ The political unity created in the Kingdom of Italy by Napoleon, however short-lived, is assumed to out weigh the longue durée of the diversity of its geography and the past and future political history of its varied territories. Incongruously, the very large area annexed to France, the départements réunis (the reunited departments), as the French perversely called them officially, has never been treated as one. The Napoleonic reorganization of Italy brought together a group of states linked by the geography of the Apennine mountain chain in the seemingly most heterogeneous parts of the peninsula. On closer examination, however, they arguably constitute a coherent region. Their internal configurations were all marked by the existence of clear central urban and lowland or coastal cores and highland peripheries. In the terminology of historical geography, the Apennine spine created a natural periphery for the states of Piedmont, Liguria, Parma-Piacenza, Tuscany, and—in a more fragmented way—for the Papal States, just as the lowland or coastal regions adjacent to the Apennine highlands created traditional "nodal cores"—political, cultural, and economic foci —around the great urban centers of each state. Where political variety and formal borders may denote fragmentation on one level, a shared geography transcended a myriad of local particularisms.⁶

This is not to disclaim the differences among these states in their political institutions or traditions, for they were very real, and their importance is now being reasserted by historians.⁷ It is to argue, however, that the similarities among them outweigh the differences. The experience of direct rule from Paris revealed a common political culture shaped by their common geography. The formal, political borders of these ancien régime states were long established. Changes of dynasty did little to alter their territories and nothing to change the relationships between center and periphery within each of them. The new political framework revealed the existence of comparable—if still unintegrated—political cultures across those small and middle-sized Italian states lumped almost by chance by Napoleon into the départements réunis. To follow Giddens, the conditions of early modern Italy allowed the macro-region of the states of the Apennine spine to extend itself deeply in time; the Napoleonic upheaval allowed it to emerge in terms of space.⁸

The reconfiguration of the macro-regions of the peninsula challenges the tendency among historians to regard such regions as permanent and unchanging, almost in the way that a previous generation sought to pound heterogeneous units into the framework of nation-states. As historiography and contemporary politics enter a phase when regional identity vies with nationalism, or identify regions as the true nations, there is a danger of replacing one limiting concept with another. A wider purpose in what follows is to force European historians, in particular, to accept the possibility that there are not just regions hidden within nations but that such regions can changeover time to the point where they disappear or mutate beyond useful recognition.

The shifting character of regions has not been the basis of many classic analyses of modern Italy, however. The Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci crystallized the centrality of a north-south fracture for every aspect of modern Italian history during the Fascist period. Gramsci saw the durability of these regional divisions extended and further entrenched by the processes of urbanization and industrialization in his own times, to the point that "north and south" had become almost synonymous with "urban and rural." His territorial definitions have become almost axiomatic, but a new current of Italian historiography, "the new southern history," has done much to destroy the vision of the south as a monolith.⁹ This essay attempts to do the same for northern Italy, to shatter the concept of a "northern bloc," defined not on its own terms but as a counter image of an equally false vision of the south. The Italian example reveals that the "southern problem" was not always unique to the Kingdom of Naples, even in comparatively recent times, and that other factors both united and divided what is now Italy in ways not given the prominence they deserve. Geography remains central but not in terms of physical reductionism; regions are not just delimited areas but ones with long-established social and political traits.¹⁰ There are many affinities between conditions in the states of the future départements réunis and those in the southern kingdom, and they are of real significance for the history of modern Italy. That the states of northern and central Italy were possessed of isolated, recalcitrant mountain hinterlands is the most powerful proof possible that backwardness and the weakness of the state in such conditions were not the preserve of the southern part of the peninsula. This essay assents to Franca Assante's assessment, made primarily with reference to the economy, "Every province has its own 'South,' its own dualisms between backward and dynamic sectors." ¹¹ This in no way contradicts the importance of the political differences between Naples and the states of the north and center, but it does alter many general assumptions about the nature of regionalism.

Fernand Braudel detected a unique element in the Apennine spine by contrasting it to the Alps. He rightly insisted on the unique character of the Alps among the mountains of the Mediterranean basin as exceptional "from the point of view of resources, collective disciplines, the quality of its human population and the number of good roads." ¹² Although vital for local trade, the Apennines did not stand at any of the great crossroads of Europe. Neither were they drawn into the wider pattern of European politics, as were many Alpine communities in the Napoleonic period: whereas the great Tyrolean revolt of 1809 spread to parts of the Kingdom of Italy,¹³ the much larger risings in the central Apennines later that year had no wider affiliations or, indeed, any readily identifiable epicenter or leadership.¹⁴ The contrasting characters of these two revolts are emblematic of the different relationships of the Alps and the Apennines to the out side world in general and of their different political relationships to their respective "centers" in particular. The Alps were a busy crossroads; the Apennines—the core of "French Italy" —are much closer to Braudel's general dictum, "mountain freedom." ¹⁵ This is a defining element of the political culture of the Apennine periphery and its relationship to the urban cores of the states of the ancien régime.

It is not my purpose to judge the claims of some Italian politicians that a northern block—Padania—is a contemporary reality.¹⁶ However, there is a strong argument that such a concept has no relevance to Italy in the century before unification. Thus there may be a wider, if unpopular, historical lesson in this case study. This essay sets itself the unfashionable task of seeing the past on its own terms, and is suspicious of tracing too many contemporary assumptions even to the fairly recent past. The roots of regionalism—seen by many as the best antidote to the myth of nationalism—may be very shallow, indeed. So, too, might the notion among some proponents of "Orientalism" of Europe itself as a cultural whole.¹⁷ In other words, the past was different and, if seen on its own terms, does not always provide a ready guide to the present, save in the clouds it dispels.

It is well to remember the usefulness of the tools of historical geography in the task of rethinking regional configuration sand their historical significance. The profession has long embraced the importance of the frontier and its corollary, the heartland, often with seismic results.¹⁸ Indeed, history and geography mix best, but also most blatantly, in areas where there is a clear frontier, and where crude political expansion has dominated the history of a given part of the world. In such cases, historians must assume physical geography as the first given. However, there is a need, well understood by historical geographers, to make a clear distinction between frontiers and peripheries. Daniel Nordman, working in a French context, points to the unique character of the frontier, because it is inseparable from the idea of extension and expansion; its dimensions are elastic.¹⁹ This is not the same as the periphery, which is best understood as the hinterlands of a state or region, linked to a central core, perhaps not even distant from the core, but rendered relatively remote from it by permanent geographic conditions. Unlike the frontier, peripheries need not carry the connotations of emphatic rupture.

Equally, the concept of the center—as serving political, cultural, or economic foci —offers historians nuanced possibilities of definition, particularly important in periods of convulsed political history, such as imperial expansion, when the roles of the ecumene can alter suddenly. Moving from the psychological to the political, Giddens equates the periphery with "back regions," by which those on the periphery "sustain a psychological distancing between their own interpretations of social processes and those enjoined by 'official norms,'"²⁰ a conceptualization well suited to the relationship between the Apennine valleys and their centers. Yet even so careful a formulation as this is not perfect in all circumstances. Social theorists stress the domination of center over periphery, either economically or through some form of social closure that rendered those on the periphery as inferior "others." ²¹ The example of ancien régime Italy shows the complexities of historical realities against which such broad theories must be measured, and nuanced. The Italian peripheries looked to their centers for judicial wisdom and arbitration, for noble patronage, and for food in times of crisis through the system of public granaries—the annona ²²—which were powerful weapons of social control under the old order. However, the peripheries had their own weapons in these games: as route centers, they controlled supplies and smuggling activities; physical remoteness made the state and official culture—sacred and profane—come to them, being adapted and altered in the process. Foreigners on the Grand Tour arguably had a more conventional view of the Italian centers than their hinterlands, recognizing at least their traditional cultural domination.²³

Nevertheless, if not slavishly applied as abstract models to complex historical sets of circumstances, these concepts drawn from historical geography can help the historian grasp the fluid nature of regional boundaries, particularly in parts of the world that have long been settled but where fundamental change is also inherent. Modern Italy provides an obvious example. Recognizing the distinction between frontier and periphery—and the complex nature of the center—has greatly illuminated the nature of ancien régime Italy;political historians of the post-unification period are also increasingly alert to their role as the determining agents in shaping the contours of Italian regionalism.²⁴ However, other studies have also pointed to the importance and further refinement of the concepts of center and periphery, as in Qing China and Massachusetts in the Early Republic.²⁵

The difference between frontiers and peripheries and their relationships to the center assume particular importance in the context of powerful states capable of changing political geography through conquest. When swamped and abolished by imperial expansion, border zones can become localized peripheries, now surrounded by and part of a larger, more powerful state. Their former central cores become the ecumene of the new empire, well-settled urbanized regions no longer synonymous with the centers of political power. The periphery, though a more fluid concept than either "frontier" or "central core," is of singular importance to the historian of empire, given the propensity for such regions to fuel unrest and change. An ever-widening "middle ground" was formed by the convergence of "Roman" and "barbarian" regions in northwestern Europe in late antiquity, which eventually saw this periphery swamp the Roman Empire when its central core weakened. In Britain, during the period prior to the union of the English and Scottish crowns in 1603, the "weak border zone" between the two countries, long a source of lawlessness, became an internalized periphery. Its marginal bandit society was smashed within a decade, while the real frontier of the British kingdoms became the Highland line, further north.²⁶ In each of these cases, their great diversity not withstanding, the importance of the periphery—as opposed to the true frontier—is clear for the process of state development.²⁷ It assumes a central place in the development of powerful, expansionist states, quite distinct from that of the frontier, simply because they have the power to transform "weak borders" into internalized peripheries. Indeed, peripheries in areas of small, exposed states are essentially "weak borders" between two similar communities on the edge of the irrespective states, as opposed to a true frontier, where very different societies face each other over enforceable lines of demarcation.²⁸ This is the first, most fundamental stage in the process of imperial expansion. It can be achieved gradually, as in British India or Qing China, or by swift, brutal conquest, as in Spanish Latin America; it emerges as the result of economic and social processes, as in Massachusetts, or through political consensus, as in Britain after the Union of Crowns in 1603.

The periphery reveals what powerful polities sweep away. They are often, if hardly universally, the product of the interaction of weak central control and difficult physical geography, imposed not only—and often not even—by geographic obstacles but by the weakness of the state. Such governments ruled only indirectly, and so the collective tradition of practical experience in most early modern European states was to rely on the politics of mediation and arbitration between local interests, mixed with sporadic incursions into their peripheries, best described as "government at one remove," in the context of early modern Scotland.²⁹ The states of ancien régime Italy, without exception, conform to this pattern. They had this in common with the Tudors, who faced none of the natural obstacles posed by the Apennine spine but needed "to persuade or convince their subjects to remain passive through a generally accepted theory of obligation and submission." ³⁰ Transforming this situation was exactly the purpose of imperial expansion, when conquest gave way to governance.

French imperial expansion in Italy offers just such an example of the role of geography during a brusque change of regime. Napoleonic imperialism was remarkable for its cultural coherence, based on an eclectic but very conscious blending of the cultural heritage of seventeenth-century French absolutism with the political and administrative centralism of the French Revolution of the 1790s, shorn of its democratic elements. However warped this view of its heritage may have been, it nonetheless gave the empire a well-defined center—France in cultural terms, Paris for practical administration—to which all else was subject and on which all else had to model itself. Thus all previously existing central cores, whether political or cultural in their influence, were now subordinate and superfluous in the new imperial order. Further, their peripheries were to be reduced to greater levels of conformity and administrative control, to the point—it was hoped—that they would cease to be peripheries.

The French were the first masters of Italy to lump the center and periphery together into an undesirable mass, but this, in turn, pulled their policy in two contradictory directions. Having utterly discredited and discarded the traditional cores of the départements réunis as all but spatial bases, rejecting them as sources of authority in terms of both personnel and values, they also exerted levels of control—as distinct from an authority—over the Italian peripheries never witnessed before. The French dispatched first their soldiers, then their gendarmes, and, finally, their administrators to the Apennine spine in unprecedented numbers and with unheralded potency. The resources of a huge empire were now flung at some of the most ungoverned parts of Europe, and French efforts were further aided by the very completeness of Napoleonic hegemony over Italy, which transformed the Apennine peripheries from weak border zones into islands surrounded by the lowland and urban central cores, now all under French control. The periphery had finally been breached by the state, but the French chose to do it almost alone. Here is the manifestation of a particular form of imperialism, where the ability to master geography allowed the new masters to all but dispense with indigenous collaboration. In this case, the ultimate failure of the imperial model to take root was not in its inability to master geography but in its very strength.

The intensive introduction of the people of the départements réunis to the ways of the modern state did not embrace meaningful participation in a model of public administration, much less an exercise in self-government. Their experience of Napoleonic rule was not one of "nation-building." John Davis rightly argues that the "advanced" northern regions of post-unification Italy provide "endless examples of the survival of forms of private power and influence that remained almost untouched by the presence or realities of the State until 1900 or beyond." ³¹ An examination of the north under Napoleon, sensitive to historical geography, helps answer why.

After 1814, arbitrational political culture and the independence of the periphery soon reasserted itself. The "natural unit" based on the traditional cores returned as a fact of life, and remained so after unification in 1859, although these natural units do not correspond readily with those regarded as axiomatic in modern Italy. The Catholic Church and the landowning elites, both outside the experience of Napoleonic rule, resumed the direction of the cores. It is not surprising that local elites schooled in the politics of intimate, personal relationships between rulers and ruled resented unification and "continued to address suppliche in the old style to indifferent offices." ³² Their powerful presence in local life soon forced the unitary state to abandon plans for regional devolution and drove it down a centralizing, authoritarian road.³³ The failure of the French to incorporate Italians into state service then made Italian regionalism the preserve of reaction.³⁴ Napoleonic rule made a powerful, if often blunt, impact on Italy, but in its workings were revealed more fundamental geopolitical truths.

Napoleon attacked Italian political geography with the same verve and audacity he showed in battle. French rule in Italy was a ruthless exercise in imperialism, conquest, and state-building. It was an assault on the routines of both space and time, as mapped by Giddens.³⁵ Between 1800 and 1814, Napoleon shattered the state system Phillip II had sanctioned in Italy during the sixteenth century, and that had endured ever since; there had been many changes of dynasty but few alterations to the borders of the Italian states. Napoleon now replaced its nine major polities³⁶ with three units. These were the satellite Kingdom of Naples, in the south, based on the existing territorial state there, which he gave first to his elder brother Joseph and then to his cavalry commander and brother-in-law Joachim Murat; the Kingdom of Italy, centered on Milan and Bologna in the north and center, of which he was himself king, but which he entrusted to his stepson Eugègene de Beauharnais, to which the Veneto was added in 1807; and finally, a third unit composed of many former states, all of which were annexed directly to France, the départements réunis.³⁷ This thoroughgoing attempt to break the mold ended with his fall in 1814, and there followed a general if not complete restoration of the pre-Napoleonic status quo.

Italian physical geography proved rather more difficult to reduce than the small, weak states that made up its political geography, however. The doyen of Annaliste history, Fernand Braudel, began his great "total history" of the Mediterranean thus: "It is, above all, a sea ringed by mountains," affirming the enduring presence of geography in politics in the early modern Mediterranean, Italy included.³⁸ Braudel's point is universal; it applies in any set of historical circumstances where a state must struggle to achieve a "deep and widely ramified impress upon the landscape by the functioning of effective central authority." ³⁹

That same Mediterranean topography had helped shape a subtle but tenacious political culture, and the need to crush that culture was brought home to the French very early. The pan-Italian, expressly anti-French revolts of 1799 were all launched from the periphery, but they also showed the French that, on their own terms and when they chose, the communities of the Apennine periphery could unite and come to the aid of the center, in its hour of greatest need.⁴⁰ On their return, after 1800, the French drew from this the obvious lessons that the periphery was hostile to them and capable of a collective resistance belied by its fragmented topography and vendetta-ridden local politics, as well as that their own network of ideological collaborators—the "patriots," or giacobini —were too lacking in local influence to provide real stability for the new regime, even if there were often enough of them to staff its administration. However profound the idealistic example set by the "Italian Jacobins" for future generations,⁴¹ their contribution to Napoleonic state-building, if hardly negligible, was essentially inadequate. What the new rulers did not discern was the complex relationship between center and periphery in ancien régime Italy.

The political culture of the periphery was highly atomized. Yet in this fragmentation of power lay its common identity. Bishops, magistrates, and enlightened reformers alike lamented any lack of clear leader ship beyond local heads of families over most of the Apennines, which set these areas apart from the hinterlands of the Kingdom of Naples, where there was not only an over-mighty baronage to block the center but also a ready "alternative": aspiring elites in the rural bourgeoisie, the galant'uomini, and in the municipal councils—the Universitates—where they contested power with the baroni, even if they ultimately proved ineffective without backing from a weak center. Although Napoleonic reforms were also thwarted by the feudal barons, they were not without support.⁴² Conversely, in the north, the absence of a powerful feudal nobility engendered local factions on the periphery that were independent of all authority and so traditionally less inclined to look to the center for leadership or support. The influence of the Genoese patricians on the clans of the Fontanabuona was just that—influence, not power. Without local power bases, their influence was so indirect that even Ernest Gellner's theory that patronage arises from "territorially incomplete centralisation" seems too structured.⁴³ All this is underpinned by the ways information flowed from the periphery to the center, the point being that it was on the periphery's terms. The Counter-Reformation church exercised great moral force on the periphery, as did many civil magistrates, but bishops, Inquisitors, and civil magistrates alike were dependent on denunciations of individuals or groups by others in what they were given to act upon, not on information gathered by their own agents.⁴⁴ When Italians chose to go to law, it was to use the courts as a way to attack their enemies; all the magistracy could often do was weigh the evidence before it, not pursue its own inquiries, nor was going to law any guarantee that vendettas were not pursued simultaneously.⁴⁵ The hard truth of political life was that what went up did not always come down, and, when it did, it was when the highlands so decided.

This Apennine spine was in great part defined by a political culture shaped by the ability of the periphery to force the center into are active style of government. Any examination of the relationship between the central governments of the Italian states and the communities of their peripheries prior to Napoleon is a salutary lesson for historians attracted to the concept of a steady advance of the modern state under the influence of enlightened thought. There was plenty of enlightened reform, at least on paper, in the late eighteenth century, although this varied widely from state to state; Tuscany was its fulcrum, Piedmont and Parma knew it only partially, Liguria not at all.⁴⁶ It did not move mountains, however, anymore than the religious zeal of the Counter-Reformation had done before it. This is not to argue that neither of these intellectual currents had no influence on the periphery, it was rather that the periphery was independent enough to absorb or reject them as it wished, and on its own terms. The response of the Tuscan periphery to the reforms of Peter-Leopold, in the 1780s, exemplifies this. While his attempts to free the grain trade and curb popular religiosity provoked ferocious—and successful—revolts, his legal reforms, which softened criminal penalties generally and abolished capital punishment, were well received and enhanced the reputation of the magistracy.⁴⁷ This contrasts with the relative ease he had in weakening urban guilds and confraternities.⁴⁸ On the periphery, direct attempts at change were unenforceable; influence, on the other hand, might endure.

The three main sources of influence at the disposal of the center were those of government at one remove. They were the moral authority of the church (and its information-gathering techniques), the ability of senior civil magistrates to arbitrate serious local disputes, and the informal links of patronage ( clientelismo ) exercised by wealthy patricians from the urban center on the hinterland. The Italian periphery, defined as a moral barrier to the values of the center—as opposed to an area of different social and economic character where state authority was ephemeral—was invented by the Jesuits and other missionary orders in the sixteenth century, when they compared the levels of spiritual, cultural, and moral degeneration they perceived in the communities of the Apennine spine with those they had first encountered among the native peoples of the New World.⁴⁹ In the centuries that followed, the burden of making real the concept of "social control" fell to the Counter-Reformation church, and it poured its missionaries and inquisitors into the periphery, as Napoleon later would pour his soldiers and police. Peripheral provinces and communities ignored or defied the center, but they were drawn into networks of patronage, informal in character but closely linked to the state and emanating from that same center. Peripheral communities and families were semi-dependent on members of ruling elites but not on the state as such. Generally, the Italian peripheries drew the center into local politics as a source of mediation or patronage, essentially on local terms, and through processes acquiesced in by the center rather than resented by it.⁵⁰

Even the Savoyard monarchy, an absolutism unique among Italian states, proved to have feet of clay in French eyes. The royal legislation, the Reali Costituzioni, neither negated nor replaced local statutes or the traditional norms of provincial legal culture,⁵¹ and, when the center challenged the independence of the periphery, it did not find lasting success.⁵² Thus a vibrant, atomized provincial political culture survived, underneath—and largely unhampered by—the monarchy.⁵³ Napoleonic administrators were struck more by the gaps in Savoyard absolutism than by any resemblance to their own ancien régime. They decried both the powerful influence wielded by noble patrons over senior magistrates and the more general leniency accorded criminals by the monarchy: "they avoid proper punishment for all these offences ... taking advantage of amnesties granted by the king, on various occasions" ⁵⁴— hardly an image of unbending absolutist centralism.

Influence made the world go round, not brute force or reforming initiatives, and there were many complex, intricate ties through which it could work.⁵⁵ Few of them were readily grasped by the French progenitors of the modern state, however. That they snapped them so readily was due more to their contempt for the cultural values of the ancien régime elites at the center than to the nature of the periphery.

Owen Lattimore observed in an essay on the frontier that, "whether two communities that are set apart from each other ... are similar in a general way like France and Italy, or notably dissimilar like India and Tibet, the maximum difference is to be sought near the center of gravity of each country and not at the frontier where they meet." ⁵⁶ That France and Italy are generally thought of as similar in a general way was not the perspective of those contemporaries involved most directly in empire-building. From their vantage point, Lattimore probably had it the wrong way 'round. The closer the imperial agents of the French center got to the old centers of the states of the Apennine spine, the less they found in common with them. The wider point, however, is that the real differences between cultures emerge when their centers meet and interact.

David A. Bell's vision of a French elite imbued with "the perception of God's withdrawal from the world," and their belief in "society" as an autonomous arena of human activity,⁵⁷ finds its fullest expression in their abhorrence of Italian elite culture in its traditional centers. Here lies the true break with the past under Napoleon: Italian elite culture was a thing of loathing to the new order, and so the central cores of the old states became obsolete for all but functional purposes. Rather, they became the ecumene, ciphers in an imperial system dependent on Paris. The French did not readily attribute the political culture of the Italian center to geography; they saw it as the result of cultural decadence, hastened by Baroque Catholicism.⁵⁸ Unlike the fury of the periphery, the passivity of the center was to be pitied rather than feared.⁵⁹ Confronted with this supposed heritage, the fundamental intellectual assumption of the new regime was, simply, that it had nothing to learn from the old order.

The French were confronted with alien political worlds in the départements réunis, with only the partial exception of Piedmont. A political culture shaped in accordance with the periphery, not the center, was anathema to them; thus the incompatibility of old and new ruling elites and their utter inability to work together had direct repercussions for how the French dealt with the periphery. First, they felt it imperative to push the old elites aside. The powerful state and vast human resources they possessed made it possible to do this by importing their own personnel into Italy at almost every level of the administration. They then systematically uprooted the subtle, opaque ties that bound the periphery to the center, even as they stamped their own authority on the former as no previous regime had ever been able to do. However, as an exercise in the policy of rallying and amalgamating local elites to the empire—apolicy cherished by the regime, in theory⁶⁰ —this was an abject admission of failure. A desire to work with and through traditional sources of authority is common among new imperial regimes; the French had this much in common with experiences as diverse from their own as the British in India or Hernando Cortés in Mexico.⁶¹ However, in their Italian provinces at least, they felt compelled to abandon such aspirations.

The new regime regarded the cities and plains as, at best, "safe bases," in a purely military sense. In contrast to its presence in the equally hostile environment of western France, for example, the Napoleonic state in the Italian départements réunis could not even claim to be a "regime of the towns" in terms of its sources of support.⁶² The French sought to shift the core, as a "phenomenon of the realm of values," ⁶³ even if they accepted the spatial logic of all the ancien régime capitals, by making them into imperial departmental and regional centers, but the authority working from them had changed utterly.

The French quickly introduced Gendarmerie brigades composed wholly of Frenchmen and, later, Piedmontese, into the countryside, together with their network of tribunals, whose criminal sections and highest officials were also usually French or Piedmontese. The highest tribunals, the Cours d'Appel, followed the same pattern. None of the major prefectures that centered on the ancien régime capitals of Turin, Genoa, Florence, or Rome was ever entrusted to an Italian, nor were any but French prefects deployed in Liguria, the duchies, Tuscany, or the Papal States.⁶⁴ Above them presided the real power in the land, the three regional directors-general of police for the départements réunis —all French—in Turin, Florence, and Rome. Moreover, these superior officials, both departmental and supra-regional, were not sedentary. The prefects toured their departments at every conscription levy, usually four times a year, and the directors-general of police also did extensive if less regular tours. Thus the French advanced the policing of the periphery well beyond anything conceivable under the ancien régime, within a few months of annexing a particular state.⁶⁵ Nor were these efforts always or universally unappreciated by Italians. French hopes of winning local support through effective, even-handed, and professional policing proved to be one of the few aspects of imperial rule to find indigenous approval, at least among the propertied classes, which often included the peasantry in many parts of the periphery. Their achievement in this area is all the more remarkable, because the work of the imperial security forces was seriously compromised everywhere by the hated policy of conscription,⁶⁶ and the ability of later regimes to match their standards of policing was often a yardstick of their popularity—or lack of it—among the propertied classes under the Restoration.⁶⁷ It was, nonetheless, a service provided for the ruled by the rulers, the work not only of a foreign institution but one staffed almost wholly by foreigners. The experience, even at its most positive, was, indeed, passive.

Effectively, the Italian elites of the départements réunis were allowed only the most subordinate role by the new regime. The two most powerful influences in the Napoleonic state were its repressive forces, concentrated in the Ministry of Police-General, and the Civil Code, administered by the Ministry of Justice. These two elements held each other in check, existing in a perpetual tension that was mediated in the Council of State, but few Italians played senior roles in either ministerial apparatus. When the realities of power and influence within the Napoleonic state are remembered, the empty experience of the departmental colleges for the Italian "notables" who composed them emerges in full.⁶⁸ In contrast, even if those Italian administrators who served the Kingdom of Italy at the local level were subjugated to French practices,⁶⁹ "the formation of a technically prepared, modern bureaucracy" recruited from the lower bourgeoisie and entrusted with extensive responsibilities marked the true contribution of the Napoleonic period in Lombardy and the Emilia-Romagna.⁷⁰ While stressing the problems the French had in creating a bureaucratic state in Naples, John Davis also notes the enthusiastic participation of the Neapolitan professional classes in the regime, the notable presence of native ministers such as Giuseppe Zurlo in the reform process, and the strengthened position of the rural bourgeoisie under Murat. Many later, distinguished administrators gained their training under the French.⁷¹

There were signs among the lower echelons of the administration in Piedmont and Tuscany, where local notables had to be employed, that French professionalism was taking root, but it often sat beside older traditions of entryism and clientelismo.⁷² However, very few Italians, most of them Piedmontese, were more than passive observers in the process of state-building initiated under Napoleon in the départements réunis.⁷³ The centralized, French-dominated nature of the regime in these regions did not allow the emergence of Piedmontese, Tuscan, Roman, or Parmense equivalents to Melzi, Prina, and Aldini in Milan, or Zurlo and Ricciardi in Naples, men who stood at the head of the satellite states.⁷⁴ The native administrators of the départements réunis were truly fonctionnaires, since genuinely executive office was denied them.⁷⁵ They had no central ministries of their own to control, and those few Piedmontese who rose high enough, such as Peyretti di Condove or Ugo Botton, were absorbed into the French elite, never returning.⁷⁶ The notorious collaboration of the Cavours gained them only the direction of the national stud farm.⁷⁷

Some Italians, once at the helm of the ancien régime, actively sought service in the imperial order but were then met with rejection born of incomprehension by the new rulers. The true extent of the alienation of the old centers of power from the new order emerges here, for this was not a question of dissident voices crying in the wilderness, be it disillusioned patriots or integrist clergy. Rather, it reveals a bewildered elite, who sought acceptance by a system it did not understand and that could find no place for it. This was especially so among the legal classes. Parma, with its prestigious university—closed by the French in 1805—was a poignant repository of a rejected ex-elite of jurisconsults.

It was in the exclusion of the old elites from the process of taming the periphery that French contempt for them really emerges, however. The periphery was something the French both feared and respected, and it is revealing that they tended to regard the problem of the peripheries as being an absence of conventional authority, whereas the traditional cores suffered from bad government. The director-general of police in Rome saw the former as much preferable to the latter, at least in the case of the upland communities of Umbria, part of the hinterland of the former Papal States. Their climate and their distance from Rome had allowed them "to preserve the purity of their original identity and the memory of their history." The ephemeral presence of papal authority had saved the Umbrians from a worse state than isolation: "being further from the metropolis, they have borne the yoke of the priests far less, and their industriousness has more easily resisted the influence of \[the\]government." ⁷⁸

The very existence of traditional forms of authority was, therefore, harmful to a people; despite the many problems involved, virgin soil was preferable to the presence of the ancien régime. The French despised the deposed Italian elites for the social degeneration produced by government at one remove. During the 1809 revolt in central Italy, the French police commissioner of Genoa declared it essential to impress on "these turbulent, unsubmissive valley folk" that "we are no longer in the age when a handful of peasant rebels from the valleys could frighten the city and dictate laws to the government." ⁷⁹ The legacy of the weak, intermittent rule of the old republic was, to the prefect of Genoa, "a country where heads are naturally hot, and where rifles don't wait to be fired," ⁸⁰ where the tail of the periphery wagged the dog of the center.⁸¹ Local magnates, too, had a laudable, if very worrisome, capacity to ignore authority, such as the Colonna, feudal barons in the Roman Apennines, "who have shaken off papal authority several times, and who have always been independent," with the net result that "there is even savagery among the richest landowners." ⁸² They were prime movers and patrons in the political culture of vendetta but hardly conventional sources of authority. The French had the power and determination to challenge this culture, but they lacked the ability to learn from any experience but their own.

On the periphery, it proved easier to establish the administrative skeleton of French rule where no great baronage impeded them, yet the absence of aristocratic authority posed problems of its own. The periphery lacked "the natural leadership of the local community by its nobles in the interests of staving off civil disorder, not promoting it." ⁸³ There was no one with the financial resources or inherent authority throughout the northern and central Apennines to provide such leadership for such ends.⁸⁴ However, the casting aside of the elites at the center, of their political culture and the methods of social control rooted in them, made the French presence less assured than it might outwardly appear. They compounded this by their deep suspicion of the church, acquired during the French Revolution. When this history of bad relations culminated in the excommunication of Napoleon by Pius VII in 1809, it destroyed even the pretense of a working partnership between church and state throughout Italy. The imperial regime could never count on the only Italian institution that had always transcended ancien régime borders, and that took a sustained interest in extending the influence of the center to the periphery.⁸⁵ Where once the confessional had been an almost standard source of information and a powerful instrument of social control,⁸⁶ the rupture with the church turned it into an active source of fear for the French. One senior French official called the Ligurian clergy nothing less than "this powerful corps, which from time immemorial has been able to rouse the people of town and country at its will," now able to turn on them the "ever more dangerous confessional, against which the police are powerless." They had a long experience of "using the conscience to manipulate the human passions ... of fostering ananathema for evidence, by recourse to superstition," and so were able to unsettle a government.⁸⁷ This is more than are cognition of influence, however; it is an admission of defeat.

In their determination to impose the Civil Code on Italy, the French snapped another effective link between center and periphery. Justice at every level in the small states of the ancien régime had been essentially arbitrational, because magistrates were respected as mediators, and they valued this role: "tribunals preferred to compose ... conflicts, because the judge saw himself as the arbiter responsible for public order." ⁸⁸ In Liguria, Osvaldo Raggio believes that "the administration of criminal justice was an area that assumed central significance and linked the government of the localities [with the center]." ⁸⁹ Only in this traditional way could the intellectually sophisticated jurisprudence of the center hope to penetrate the periphery. The instant imposition of the Code strangled at birth that process of "the carefully crafted legal pluralism," the working through a hierarchy of indigenous tribunals to the apex of foreign, imperial courts—the ultimate but not sole arbiters—which allowed the emergence of cultural intermediaries inside the legal system, as the British sought to foster in India.⁹⁰ Within and beyond the legal sphere, the French needed such intermediaries; the départements réunis were almost a paradigm of a state operating in "an idiom as yet unintelligible to a large part of its population, who need brokers (lawyers, politicians, or characteristically, both at once)." ⁹¹ This was all too alien, retrograde, and, arguably, too subtle, for the French to grasp.

The French mastered the Italian periphery more than any previous regime. It is a tribute to their powers of organization, the ruthless professionalism of their bureaucracy and police, and the sheer resources at their disposal that they did so without significant help from the traditional elites of the region. They advanced the presence of the state in places and in ways their predecessors had never dared to go. Even in areas they occupied for only a few years, such as Tuscany or the Papal States, their ability to wring taxes and conscripts from the periphery, or to catch its bandits, was extraordinary. The Napoleonic state was able to overcome the perennial obstacle of Italian geography prior to the invention of the railroad or the telegraph, to say nothing of more modern technologies. Yet, although they changed the way the départements réunis were ruled, their failure to win support for their methods, or to impart them to Italians, ensured that the older realities of geography reasserted themselves after 1814, although those realities were not identical to the accepted regional divisions of Italy today. The French controlled their Italian provinces, but they did not acculturate them.

Although the French imposed a single system of government on these hitherto-diverse states, their reconfiguration of Italy also revealed regional complexities, and this is a lesson in the shifting nature of supposed demarcations that historians and politicians take too readily for granted. In part, new political boundaries can expose established realities. The new circumstances of imperial rule, then, were a catalyst for exposing the half-hidden truths of geohistory, in this case, the underlying unity of the Apennine spine. Macro-regions may appear to be traditional subdivisions of nation-states, almost to the point of being submerged nations themselves. In reality, however, they can have far more fluid histories.

Methodologically, the case of Napoleonic Italy both vindicates and qualifies the assertion of Anthony Giddens that "regions of considerable span necessarily tend to develop upon a high degree of institutionalisation." ⁹² It is disproved, in one sense, by the revelation that a macro-region can exist across the boundaries of states with differing institutional histories, as under the ancien régime. Equally, the relative—if transient—triumph of the Napoleonic state on the Italian periphery fits it perfectly. Such are the perils and profits of applying theory to historical realities.

The accepted concepts of historical geography can add consider able understanding to the process of imperialism. Specifically, the penetration of the center by the periphery underlines imperial expansion as a process of discovery for the new rulers and identifies the area of most intense change for their new subjects. Like many explorers, however, the French often failed to understand what they found, and respected it even less. Simultaneously, the interaction of old and new centers, transformed by empire-building, locates the public and private space where the capacity for acculturation is tested most. Above all, the terms themselves open up new perspectives for the historian, if applied with due respect to differing historical circumstances. When the periphery is distinguished carefully from the frontier, the former, more than the latter, emerges as the sector where a powerful state can be differentiated from a weak one, because peripheries are where states must work to assert their authority. They are the "testing grounds" of brute force. By contrast, the interactions of centers, to return to Lattimore's insight, are the testing grounds of the possibilities of acculturation; by identifying them, and gauging their relationships, the cultural and political similitude between cultures, or lack of it, can be gauged at their respective hearts. Imperial relationships, particularly, respond to the tools of historical geography. New dimensions of the process of imperialism can emerge once it is conceived of in terms of geographic space.

The author wishes to thank Professors Allan Macinnes, William A. Speck, Karen Kupperman, Alan Forrest, and Steven Hughes, who were all kind enough to read earlier versions of this article. Thanks areal so owed to all the anonymous readers of the AHR the most critical among them first and foremost. They all offered invaluable help and elucidation. Special thanks to Sue Broers, for her patience and proofing skills.

Michael Broers is a reader in the Department of History, King's College, University of Aberdeen, Scotland. Among his books are Europe under Napoleon, 1799–1815 (1996) and The Politics of Religion in Napoleonic Italy: The War against God, 1801–1814 (2002). He has also published in Past and Present, The English Historical Review, and The Historical Journal on Piedmontese, Italian, and wider European themes in the Napoleonic and Restoration periods. He is currently writing an archival monograph on the Napoleonic state in Italy for Palgrave-Macmillan (provisionally for 2005). Broers isespecially interested in relating interdisciplinary and extra-European fields to Napoleonic history. He will be a visiting member at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, in the fall of 2003.

Notes

¹ For an exploration of this at the supra-regional level, see Michael Broers, "Napoleon, Charlemagne, and Lotharingia: Acculturation and the Boundaries of Napoleonic Europe," Historical Journal 44, no. 1 (2001): 135–54.

² Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration (London, 1984), 118–19, 122.

³ Such a juxtaposition was not typical of the whole of Napoleonic Europe; conditions in the Rhineland, for example, appear very different. See Michael Rowe, "Between Empire and Home Town: Napoleonic Rule on the Rhine, 1799–1814," Historical Journal 42, no. 3 (1999): 643–74.

⁴ The Napoleonic reordering of Italy left the southern Kingdom of Naples intact territorially, and the natural response of historians has been to continue to treat it as a historical and geographical unit, despite the change of regime.

⁵ The Kingdom of Italy lumped together the Habsburg province of Lombardy with the Duchy of Modena, the papal provinces of the Legations around Bologna, and, after 1807, the Italian territories of the Venetian Republic.

⁶ This is not to argue that other parts of Italy did not share many characteristics with the states of the départements réunis, any more than it is to dispute the importance of intense localism, campanilismo, by positing the existence of macro-regions. Modena was entirely part of this complex, separated from it only by the new Napoleonic political boundaries that placed it in the Kingdom of Italy. The mainland Kingdom of Naples, too, was part of the Apennine spine, and had much in common with these states. Neapolitan political culture was somewhat different from that of the states of the northern Apennine spine, however, for reasons more historical than geographic. The prevalence of feudalism in the southern kingdom and a deep-rooted political culture of opposition to it, both among the educated elites of the capital, Naples, and within the rural bourgeoisie, the galant'uomini, were elements of much less significance in the states of the future départements réunis. Geography could unite on the one hand, but political conditions, shaped by political history, could also divide.

⁷ For Adrian Lyttleton, "The territorial states of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries each had their distinctive style of government and 'political personality.' These differences in state traditions were decisive for the constitution of regional identities"; Lyttleton, "Shifting Identities: Nation, Region and City," in Italian Regionalism: History, Identity and Politics, Carl Levy, ed. (Oxford, 1996), 33–52, 33. For a regional study of different legal traditions at work in one state, see Giovanni Santini, Lo stato estense tra riforme e rivoluzione (Milan, 1987).

⁸ Giddens, Constitution of Society, 122.

⁹ Italian scholars in this group are centered on the journal Meridiana. For its major exponents in English, see the collection of essays in Italy's "Southern Question": Orientalism in One Country, Jane Schneider, ed. (Oxford, 1998). See also John Dickie, Darkest Italy: The Nation and Stereo types of the Mezzogiorno, 1860–1900 (London, 1999), for a fine analysis of the "southern problem" in cultural terms.

¹⁰ Giddens, Constitution of Society, 122.

¹¹ Franca Assante, "Le trasformazioni del paesaggio agrario," in Il mezzogiorno preunitario, Angelo Massafra, ed. (Bari, 1988), 22; cited in English in Lucy Riall, The Italian Risorgimento (London, 1994), 58.

¹² Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, Sîan Reynolds, trans., 3 vols. (London, 1975), 1: 33. This judgment is supported by recent local studies. Of particular relevance in this context is Pier Paolo Viazzo, Upland Communities: Environment, Population, and Social Structure in the Alps since the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge, 1989).

¹³ F. Gunther von Eyck, Loyal Rebels: Andreas Hofer and the Tyrolean Uprising of 1809 (New York, 1986).

¹⁴ Alex Grab, "State Power, Brigandage and Rural Resistance in Napoleonic Italy," European History Quarterly 25 (1995): 39–70. It should be noted that, although the epicenter of the 1809 revolt fell within the Kingdom of Italy, this same area in the Apennines west of Bologna had belonged not to the Habsburgs but to the Papal States prior to Napoleonic rule.

¹⁵ "The mountains are as a rule a world apart from civilisations, which are urban and lowland achievements. Their history is to have none, to remain almost always on the fringe of the great waves of civilisation, even the longest and most persistent, which may spread over great distances in the horizontal plane but are powerless to move vertically when faced with an obstacle of a few hundred meters." Braudel, Mediterranean, 1: 34.

¹⁶ For a prescient, realistic analysis of the reemergence of the politics of division, written early in the process, see the unjustly neglected Giorgio Bocca, La dis Unità d'Italia (Milan, 1990). More recent scholarship includes Anna Cento Bull, "Ethnicity, Racism and the Northern League," in Levy, Italian Regionalism, 171–87; Ilvo Diamanti, La lega: Geografia, storia e sociologia di un nuovo soggetto politico (Rome, 1993).

¹⁷ This important point has been raised recently in the pages of the American Historical Review, in relation to concrete historical contexts in a series of articles: "Review Essays: Orientalism Twenty Years On," AHR 105 (October 2000). A perceptive analysis in an imperial context broadly contemporaneous with the present one is Ussama Makdisi, "Ottoman Orientalism," AHR 107 (June 2002): 768–96.

¹⁸ The classic studies remain William H. McNeill, Europe's Steppe Frontier, 1500–1800 (Chicago, 1964); McNeill, The Great Frontier: Freedom and Hierarchy in Modern Times (Princeton, N.J., 1983).

¹⁹ Daniel Nordman, Frontières de France: De l'espace au territoire (Paris, 1998), 514–15.

²⁰ Giddens, Constitution of Society, 126.

²¹ In sociology, see Giddens, Constitution of Society, 130–31. In historical geography, Sidney Tarrow, Between Center and Periphery: Grassroots Politicians in Italy and France (New Haven, Conn., 1977), offers an important, pioneering critique of traditional models in historical geography and political science, which depend on diffusionist models that characterize the periphery as isolated and dependent on the center, politically, culturally, and economically. For political dependency, see Michel Crozier, The Bureaucratic Phenomenon (Chicago, 1964). For cultural dependency, Alessandro Pizzorno, "Amoral Familialism and Historical Marginality," in European Politics: A Reader, Mattei Dogan and Richard Rose, eds. (London, 1971), 87–98, which is deeply indebted to Gramsci. For a Marxist approach to economic dependency, Ronald J. Johnston, Geography and the State: An Essay in Political Geography (London, 1982). Edward Shils, Center and Periphery: Essays in Macrosociology (Chicago, 1975), is, perhaps, the classic statement of the diffusionist view of center-periphery relations, but is more sensitive to regional and historical nuances than many later studies.

²² An institution common to all the great cities and states of the Italian ancien régime, well defined by Gregory Hanlonas "the array of government intervention mechanisms and regulations in the sector of provisioning and distributing food and essential items to the population, indispensable because of frequent dearth." Hanlon, Early Modern Italy, 1550–1800 (London, 2000), 421. For an overview of the workings of the annona, see 96–102. For the annona in Turin, where the municipality and the royal government worked in close partnership—and where the state often had to prod the municipal officials to extend its charity beyond the walls of Turin in times of acute crisis, see Donatella Balani, Il vicario tra città e stato: L'ordine pubblico e l'annona nella Torino del settecento (Turin, 1987). On the dominant role of the church in the administration of charity in Parma, and the general absence of the secular state in this form of social control in the duchies, see Michela Dall'Aglio Maramotti, L'assistenza ai poveri nella Parma del Settecento (Parma, 1985). For the Papal States: Alberto Guenzi, "Sistema annonario e controllo sociale a Bologna nei secoli XVII e XVIII," Ercole Sori, ed., Città e controllo sociale in Italia tra XVIII e XIX secolo (Milan, 1982), 293–305; Gregori Fiocca, "Struttura urbana e controlo socialea Roma nel '700 e nel primo '800: Mobiltà sociale, paesaggio urbano ed enti di sorveglianza pontifici," in Sori, Città controllo sociale, 381–99. On Liguria: Giovanni Assereto, "Igruppi dirigenti liguri tra le fine vecchio regime e l'annessione all'Impero Napoleonico," Quaderni storici 37 (1978): 73–101, 76–77.

²³ On the cultural attraction of the center, see Jeremy Black, The British Abroad: The Grand Tour in the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1992); Wolfgang Leppmann, Winckelmann (London, 1970). See, above all, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Goethe's Travelsin Italy: Together with His Second Residence in Rome and Fragments on Italy, A. J. W. Morrison and Charles Nisbet, trans.(London, 1885). On the traditional concept of the Renaissance cultural centers, Peter Burke, The European Renaissance; Centers and Peripheries (Oxford, 1998), 1–17.

²⁴ For the ancien régime, see Osvaldo Raggio, Faida e parentela, lo stato genovese visto dalla Fontanabuona (Turin, 1990); Giovanni Tocci, Le terre traverse: Poteri e territori nei ducati dei Parma e Piacenza tra Sei e Settecento (Bolgona, 1985). For modern Italy, see the collection of essays in Levy, Italian Regionalism.

²⁵ Robert L. Edmonds, Northern Frontiers of Qing China and Tokugawa Japan: A Comparative Study of Frontier Policy (Chicago, 1985); David P. Szatmary, Shays' Rebellion: The Making of an Agrarian Insurrection (Amherst, Mass., 1980). These studies are all the more important because they make the clear distinction between frontier and periphery, and between center and ecumene.

²⁶ Keith M. Brown, Bloodfeud in Scotland, 1573–1625: Violence, Justice and Politics in an Early Modern Society (Edinburgh, 1986).

²⁷ The significance of the frontier to the central core of states has been much debated, and the nature of such relationships remains in dispute. This has largely centered on the Turner thesis as applied to American history, but the implications of this thesis for European borders might have relevance for the formation of national identities, as well as regional ones. Together with Turner's own oeuvre, those who initiated the debate were George R. Taylor, The Turner Thesis: Concerning the Role of the Frontier in American History (Boston, 1956); Ray A. Billington, The Frontier Thesis: Valid Interpretation of American History? (New York, 1966); David W. Noble, Historians against History: The Frontier Thesis and the National Covenant in American Historical Writing since 1830 (Minneapolis, 1965). For several European studies moving in this direction, see Peter Sahlins, Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees (Berkeley, Calif., 1989); Alex V. Murray, Crusade and Conversion on the Baltic Frontier, 1150–1500 (Ashgate, 2001); Graeme Murdock, Calvinism on the Frontier 1600–1660: International Calvinism and the Reformed Church in Hungary and Transylvania (Oxford, 2000).

²⁸ Owen Lattimore, Studies in Frontier History: Collected Papers, 1928–1958 (London, 1962), 470.

²⁹ Jenny Wormald, Court, Kirk and Community: Scotland, 1470–1625 (Edinburgh, 1991).

³⁰ Anthony Fletcher and Diarmaid MacCulloch, Tudor Rebellions, 4th edn. (London, 1997), 7.

³¹ John A. Davis, "Casting Off the 'Southern Problem' : or The Peculiarities of the South Reconsidered," in Schneider, Italy's "Southern Question," 205–24, 217.

³² Lyttleton, Italian Regionalism, 44.

³³ Lyttleton, Italian Regionalism, 37–38. Lyttleton also underlines the disappointment of many liberal supporters of unification, particularly in Lombardy and Tuscany, who had hoped to seethe end of Austrian centralization, only to find it replaced by a unitary state equally committed to stifling regional autonomy; 39–43.

³⁴ Ironically, the presence of effective parliamentary institutions—unthinkable under Napoleon—provided the conduit through which the old culture of patronage survived and national political parties remained coalitions of local interests. Levy, Italian Regionalism, 3–5, stresses the regional nature of both Christian Democrat and Communist support in modern politics. See Alessandro Pizzorno, "Amoral Familialism," on the consequences of the absence of patronage for a region. Tarrow, Between Center and Periphery, emphasizes the positive nature of the relationship between center, periphery, and political patronage.

³⁵ Giddens, Constitution of Society, 114–18.

³⁶ The mainland possessions of the House of Savoy, collectively known as Piedmont; Liguria, officially known as the Republic of St. George; the united Duchies of Parma, Piacenza, and Guastalla; the Duchy of Modena; the Grand Duchy of Tuscany; Venice, officially the Republic of St. Mark; the Habsburg territories centered on the Duchy of Milan, or Lombardy; the city-state Republic of Lucca; the Papal States; the mainland possessions of the Kingdom of Naples.

³⁷ This process began in Piedmont, which was occupied definitively in 1800, and shifted progressively south to Liguria and the duchies of Parma and Piacenza in 1805, to Tuscany in 1808, and finally to the Papal States in 1810. These territories eventually became the fourteen imperial departments of the Italian section of the French empire: Dora, Stura, Po, Marengo, and Sesia, carved from Piedmont; Montenotte, Genoa, and Apennines, from Liguria; Taro, made up of the Duchies of Parma, Piacenza, and Guastalla; Mediterranean, Arno, and Ombronne, from Tuscany; and Rome (first called Tiber) and Trasimeno, from those parts of the Papal States not already annexed to the Kingdom of Italy. One Piedmontese department, Tanaro, was dissolved in 1804.

³⁸ Braudel, Mediterranean, 1: 25.

³⁹ Derwent Whittlesey, "The Impress of Effective Central Authority upon the Landscape," Annals of the Association of American Geographers 25 (1935): 85–97, 85.

⁴⁰ For an overview in English, see Michael Broers, "The Parochial Revolution: 1799 and the Counter-Revolution in Italy," Renaissance and Modern Studies 33 (1989): 159–73.

⁴¹ There is a vast historiography on the Italian Jacobins. For a recent discussion of "the canon," see the introduction to Michael Broers, Napoleonic Imperialism and the Savoyard Monarchy, 1773–1821: State-Building in Piedmont (Lampeter, 1997).

⁴² Well analyzed in John A. Davis, "The Napoleonic Era in Southern Italy: An Ambiguous Legacy?" Proceedings of the British Academy 80 (1991): 133–48.

⁴³ Raggio, Faida, is a study of such a northern region. According to Ernest Gellner, "A state may have partial control of out lying geographic areas ... It may then hand over power in them to individuals who in name may be its officials, but who in fact possess a local power base, and who mediate between central requirements and local interests"; Gellner, "Introduction," in Patrons and Clients in Mediterranean Societies, Gellner and John Waterbury, eds. (London, 1977), 1–7, 3.

⁴⁴ On the ecclesiastical need for denunciations, see Elena Brambilla, Alle origini del sant'Uffizio: Penitenza, confessione e giustizia spirituale dal medioevo al XVI secolo (Bologna, 2000), 504–13, 541–44. On the more general, negotiation culture of Italians, see David Gentilcore, "The Ethnography of Everyday Life," in Early Modern Italy, John A. Marino, ed. (Oxford, 2002), 188–205, 191–93.

⁴⁵ Hanlon, Early Modern Italy, 298–99.

⁴⁶ The classic general study remains Franco Venturi, Settecento riformatore, 5 vols. (Turin, 1969–90), Vol. 1: Da Muratoria Beccaria (1969); Vol. 2: La chiesa e la repubblica dentroi loro limiti, 1758–1764 (1976); Vol. 5: L'Italia deilumi (1987, 1990). On Tuscany, see Eric Cochrane, Florencein the Forgotten Centuries, 1527–1800 (Chicago, 1973); Furio Diaz, Francesco Maria Gianni: Dalla burocrazia alla politicasotto Pietro Leopoldo di Toscana (Milan-Naples, 1966); Bernardo Sordi, L'amministrazione illuminata: Riforme delle comunità e progetti di costituuzione nella Toscana Leopoldina (Milan, 1991). On the collapse of Guillaume Du Tillot's work in Parma, see Giovanni Tocci, "Il Ducato di Parma e Piacenza," in I Ducati padani, Trento e Trieste, Lino Marini, Giovanni Tocci, and Cesare Mozzarelli, eds., vol. 17, Storia d'Italia, Giuseppe Galasso, ed. (Turin, 1979), 306–07. On Liguria, see Giovanni Assereto, La Repubblica ligure: Lotte politische e problemi finanziari (1797–1799) (Turin, 1975).

⁴⁷ On the collapse of the economic reforms, see Gabriella Turi, "Viva Maria!" La reazione alle riforme leopoldine, 1790–1799 (Florence, 1969). On the religious reforms, see Carlo Fantappiè, Riforme ecclesiastiche e resistenze sociali: La sperimentazione istituzionale nella diocesi di Prato alla finedell'antico regime (Bologna, 1986), which points to the importance of rural revolt as a spur to urban protest. On the later reaction, Franz Pesendorfer, Ferdinando III e la Toscana in età napoleonica, Franca Cattaneo and Marco Nardi, Ital. trans. (Florence, 1986). Later French officials often remarked on the "lax" and lenient character of Tuscan justice and the popular support it received; see Michael Broers, "Cultural Imperialism in a European Context? Political Culture and Cultural Politics in Napoleonic Italy," Past and Present, no. 170 (February 2001): 152–80.

⁴⁸ On the guilds, see Corine Maitte, "Le réformism eéclairé et les corporations: L'abolition des Arts en Toscane," Revue d'histoire moderne et contemporaine 49(2002): 56–88. On the confraternities, Fantappiè, Riforme ecclesiastiche.

⁴⁹ Adriano Prosperi, "Otras Indias: Missionari della Contra-Riforma tra contadini e selvaggi," in Scienze, credenze, occulte, livelli di cultura, Atti del Convegno Internazionale di Studi, Florence, 1980 (Florence, 1982), 205–34.

⁵⁰ Raggio, Faida, ix. The importance of the informal nature of the ancien régime state—and of flexible relationships that blur the boundaries of Jürgen Habermas's public and private spheres—interests historians of the court while still stressing the centrality of the transition from medieval to modern institutions, as in the collection of essays Princes, Patronage and the Nobility: The Court at the Beginning of the Modern Age, Ronald G. Asch and Adolf M. Birke, eds. (Oxford, 1991). In the concluding essay of this volume, Robert J. W. Evans notes the importance of courtly patronage as a link between center and periphery: "Patronage provided the social rationale of the court, but also distributing it through vertical networks of client age, a two-way bond between the greater courtiers and their private retinue of supporters on the fringe or in specific regions. Such patronage proved a necessary mechanism even for the most efficient and devoted of rulers." Evans, "The Court: A Protean Institution and an Elusive Subject," 481–91, 488.

⁵¹ On the legislation, see Mario Viora, Le costituzioni piemontesi (Rome, 1928). On the attempts to enforce it, La guerra del sale, 1680–1699: Rivolte e frontiere del Piemonte barocco, Giuseppe Lombardi, ed., 3 vols. (Milan, 1986). This is not to deny the continued presence of a reforming, statist impulse within the Savoyard state, which bridged the gap between an older generation of absolutist officials and the emergence of civil servants more influenced by currents of the Enlightenment during the late eighteenth century. Their impact remained marginal, at the level of practical social control, however, despite their shared determination to advance state power; see Giuseppe Ricuperati, "Gli strumenti dell'assolutismo sabaudo: Segretarie di stato e consiglio delle finanze nel XVIII secolo," Rivista storica italiana 102(1990): 796–873. There was a conscious, deliberately fostered and reinforced division between the higher, royal magistracy in the Senate of Turin and the judges of the provincial and municipal courts, which resurfaced again, after the end of Napoleonic rule; see Isidoro Soffietti, "Sulla storia dei principi dell'oralità del contraddittorio e della pubblicità nel procedimento penale: Ilperiodo della Restaurazione nel Regno di Sardegna," Rivista distoria del diritto italiano 59 (1971–72): 125–241.

⁵² The Savoyards coerced many imperial fiefs in the Apennines, insofar as they constituted a challenge to their own power, but they could neither uproot them nor effectively reduce their local authority. For this problem in the Ligurian and Piedmontese Apennines, see Giuseppe Bracco, I feudi imperiali del Tortonese (sec. XI–XIX) (Turin, 1956). Practical control of the related problems of smuggling and banditry also eluded Turin, despite the ferocity of its legislation. The monarchy had an almost traditional antipathy to the collective, public aspects of popular religion, but its persistent attempts to curb such excesses had little lasting impact; see Angelo Torre, "Politics Cloaked in Worship: State, Church and Local Power in Piedmont, 1570–1770," Past and Present, no. 134 (1992): 43–92; Luciano Allegra, "Stato e monopolio del controllo sociale: Ilcaso del Piemonte fra '700 e '800," Emarginazione, criminalità e devianza in Italia fra '600 e '900, Angelo Pastore and Paolo Sorcinelli, eds. (Milan, 1990), 77–84.

⁵³ Michael Broers, "La crisi delle Comunità piemontesi fra ancien régime e Impero Napoleonico," in Quando San Secondo diventò giacobino, Atti del Convegno "Asti repubblicana: Bicentenario della Repubblica astese: 1797–1997," Giuseppe Ricuperati, ed. (Alessandria, 1999), 399–411.

⁵⁴ Archives Nationales de Paris (hereafter, ANP), F⁷ 8919 (Police-Générale, dépt. Sture), d'Auzers to Min. 3^e arrond., Police-Générale, July 11, 1811.

⁵⁵ Indeed, the importance of communication networks is now increasingly recognized by historians in many periods and contexts; see Brambilla, Alle origini; Christopher A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge, 1996).

⁵⁶ Lattimore, Frontier History, 470.

⁵⁷ David A. Bell, "Culture and Religion," in Old Regime France, William Doyle, ed. (Oxford, 2001), 78–104, 90–91.

⁵⁸ Broers, "Cultural Imperialism."

⁵⁹ For an exploration of this in a military context, see Michael Broers, "Noble Romans and Regenerated Citizens: The Morality of Conscription in Napoleonic Italy, 1800–1814," War in History 8, no. 3 (2001): 251–70.

⁶⁰ Frédéric Bluche, Le Bonapartisme: Aux origines de la Droite autoritaire, 1800–1850 (Paris, 1980).

⁶¹ Bayly, Empire and Information; Hugh Thomas, The Conquest of Mexico (London, 1993).

⁶² The two studies that stress the town-country nature of the political divide in the west are Charles Tilly, The Vendée (Cambridge, Mass., 1964); and Paul Bois, Paysans de l'Ouest: Des structures économiques et sociales aux opinions politiques depuis l'époque révolutionnaire dans le Sarthe (Le Mans, 1960). On the urban "siege mentality" in the Vendée during the Hundred Days, see Robert S. Alexander, Bonapartism and the Revolutionary Tradition in France: The Fédérés of 1815 (Cambridge, 1991), 42, 60, 107–54, 238. Donald Sutherland, The Chouans: The Social Origins of Popular Counter-Revolution in Upper Brittany, 1770–1796 (Oxford, 1982), reveals that these divisions reached deep into parts of the countryside as well, while not negating the urban core of the revolution in Brittany. For a fine overview of the Vendée, see Jean-Clément Martin, La Vendée et la France (Paris, 1987).

⁶³ Shils, Center and Periphery, 3.

⁶⁴ Whereas all prefects in the two kingdoms were natives, only three Piedmontese served as prefects for any length of time in the départements réunis: San Martino della Motta, in the Sesia (1803–14), and Degregori-Marcoregno (1801–04) and Arborio-Biamino (1804–10), both in the Stura. A Ligurian noble, Brignole, served briefly as prefect of Montenotte, 1813–14.

⁶⁵ Indeed, even before Gendarmerie units arrived in the Tuscan departments, the French had deployed regular Tuscan cavalry and their own troops to do this service on an interim basis: Archives de la Guerre, Correspondance, Armée d'Italie, C⁴–93: Correspondance du Général Reille pendant sa mission en Toscane (1807–08).

⁶⁶ For an overview of this in the départements réunis, see Michael Broers, "The Police and the Padroni: Italian Notabili, French Gendarmes and the Origins of the Centralised State in Napoleonic Italy," European History Quarterly 26 (1996): 331–53.

⁶⁷ For an overview, see Clive Emsley, Gendarmes and the State in Nineteenth Century Europe (Oxford, 1999), 191–207. For local studies in the ex-Kingdom of Italy, see Steven C. Hughes, Crime, Disorder and the Risorgimento: The Politics of Policing in Bologna (Cambridge, 1994); David Laven, "Law and Order in Habsburg Lombardy, 1814–1835," Historical Journal 39, no. 2 (1996): 383–403. On areas formerly in the départements réunis, see Broers, Napoleonic Imperialism, 513–20; Alan J. Reinermann, "The Failure of Counter-Revolution in Risorgimento Italy: The Case of the Centurions, 1831–1847," Historical Journal 34, no. 2 (1991): 21–41.

⁶⁸ For a succinct overview of the social composition of the electoral colleges of the départements réunis and the two kingdoms, see Carlo Capra, "Nobili, notabili, élites: Dal 'modello' francese al caso italiano," Quaderni storici 37 (1978): 12–42. For regional studies in the départements réunis, Louis Bergeron, "La place des gens d'affairesdans les listes de notables du premier empire, d'après les exemples du Piémont et de la Ligurie," Annuario dell'Istituto storico italiano 23–24 (1971–72): 316–34. Marco Violardo, Il notabilato piemontese da Napoleone a Carlo Alberto (Turin, 1995), regards participation in the lower levels of the local assemblies as an important step forward for municipal leaders in gaining political experience, in contrast to the general indifference of the "higher notables" to the departmental colleges;98–102.

⁶⁹ Armando Saitta, "Appunti per una ricerca sui notabili nell'Italia napoleonica," Critica storica 9 (1972): 53–91.

⁷⁰ Capra, "Nobili, notabili."

⁷¹ Davis, "Napoleonic Era in Southern Italy."

⁷² On Piedmont, see Broers, Napoleonic Imperialism, 459–65. Giovanni Fabbroni was a Leopoldine bureaucrat, well respected by the French for his reform of the Tuscan Mint, who used his position in the imperial administration to further the fortunes of his family, and extend his network of clients, in a very traditional manner. His network of clients survived the fall of the empire and protected himunder the Restoration. Renato Pasta, Scienza, politica erivoluzione: L'opera di Giovanni Fabbroni (1752–1822), intellettuale e funzionario al servizio dei Lorena (Florence, 1989), 535–80.

⁷³ The problem of staffing the lowest echelons of the administration—the maires, communal councils, justice ships of the peace—was a problem intrinsic to all regimes in this period. It was common to the "interior" of the Napoleonic empire, that is, France itself, as well as to the Italian departments and the satellite kingdoms. As such, it was not a specifically "imperial" problem;see Isser Woloch, The New Regime: Transformations of the French Civic Order, 1789–1820s (New York, 1994), 35–36, 113–43, 307–12.

⁷⁴ Alex Grab, "From the French Revolution to Napoleon," in Italy in the Nineteenth Century, 1796–1900, John A. Davis, ed. (Oxford, 1999), 25–50, 36–37. In Naples, Murat sought to confine all senior posts to natives of the kingdom; see Grab, 42. On Zurlo and Ricciardi, the ministers of finance and justice respectively, of the Napoleonic Kingdom of Naples, see Pasquale Villani, Mezzogiornotra riforme e rivoluzione (Bari, 1973), 209 and following. On Melzi, see John M. Roberts, "Francesco Melzi d'Eril, and Italian Statesman (1796–1806)" (D. Phil. thesis, University of Oxford, 1954); Carlo Zaghi, Napoleone e l'Italia (Naples, 1966); on Aldiniand Prina, Livio Antonielli, I prefetti dell'Italia Napoleonica (Bologna, 1983).

⁷⁵ For an important reevaluation of the prefects, which actually stresses even their subordinate status in the structure of imperial government, see Edward A. Whitcomb, "Napoleon's Prefects," AHR 79 (October 1974): 1089–1118.

⁷⁶ On Condove, see Broers, Napoleonic Imperialism, 449–50. On Botton, Giorgio Vaccarino, "Ugo Vincenzo di Castellamonte: L'esperienza giacobina di un illuminista piemontese," Bolletino storico-bibliografico subalpino 63 (1965): 161–202.

⁷⁷ Charles Boyer, "La famille de Cavour et le régime napoléonien," Revue historique 185 (1939): 326–45; Rosario Romeo, Cavour e il suo tempo, 4th edn., 3 vols. (Bari, 1969–84), vol. 1.

⁷⁸ ANP, F⁷ 6531 (Police-Générale, dépt. Rome), D. Gen. Police, Rome, to Min. 3^e arrond., Police-Générale, October 10, 1812.

⁷⁹ ANP, F⁷ 8818 (Police-Générale, dépt. Gênes), Comm.-Gen. Police, Genoa, to Min. 3^e arrond., Police-Générale, June 24, 1809.

⁸⁰ ANP, F⁷ 8818 (Police-Générale, dépt. Gênes), Prefect of Genoa to Min. 3^e arrond., Police-Générale, April 14, 1808. The work of Raggio on the valley of the Fontanabuona in the early modern period lends a fair degree of accuracy to the opinion of the prefect; see Raggio, Faida.

⁸¹ The anti-French revolt of 1797 in Liguria actually reveals the partnership between the urban elites and the highlanders, an example of center and periphery influencing each other, along traditional patterns, already evident during the anti-Austrian rising of 1746; see Assereto, La Repubblica ligure, 56–58. The classic account of the 1746 revolt makes no attempt to hide this; Gian-Franco Doria, Storia di Genova, 1745–1750 (Genoa, 1747), 174 and following.

⁸² ANP, F⁷ 6531 (Police-Générale, dépt. Rome), D. Gen. Police, Rome, to Min. 3^e arrond., Police-Générale, November 3, 1812.

⁸³ Jonathan Powis, Aristocracy (Oxford, 1984), 104. Powis follows the thesis of Kenneth B. McFarlane, The Nobility of Later Medieval England (Oxford, 1973).

⁸⁴ The concept of feudal justice had not penetrated the scattered Apennine imperial fiefs, beyond financial impositions; see Braudel, Mediterranean, 1: 38–39. On the medieval Apennines, see Chris Wickham, The Mountain and the City: The Tuscan Apennines inthe Early Middle Ages (Oxford, 1988).

⁸⁵ See Michael Broers, The Politics of Religion in Napoleonic Italy, 1801–1814: The War against God (London, 2002).

⁸⁶ Brambilla, Alle origini, 503–13.

⁸⁷ ANP, F⁷ 8826 (Gêenes), "Rapport administratif et politique de la ville de Gênes," January 1811; cited in Broers, Politics of Religion in Napoleonic Italy, 173.

⁸⁸ Hanlon, Early Modern Italy, 304.

⁸⁹ Raggio, Faida, xvi.

⁹⁰ Louise Benton, "Colonial Law and Cultural Difference: Jurisidictional Politics and the Formation of the Colonial State," Comparative Studies in Society and History 41 (1999): 563–88.

⁹¹ Gellner, Patrons and Clients, 5.

⁹² Giddens, Constitution of Society, 122.

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