John A. Davis
The Legacy of the Napoleonic Wars in Italy
As in the rest of Europe, the legacies of a decade and more of French rule and empire left deep but conflicting legacies in the Italian states. This paper wild focus in particular on the ways in which the experience of French imperialism inspired new forms of democratic liberalism in Italy which through the complex and in large part still unwritten histories of the secret societies acquired a remarkably wide following in the closing years of French rule and especially in its aftermath. In particular, the revolutions of 1820–1 in southern Italy, Sicily and Piedmont indicate how the experiences of French imperialism had encouraged the search for alternative political models—in particular the Spanish 1812 Constitution of Cadiz. But in seeking to avoid the autocratic centralism of Napoleonic France, Italian liberals were ever mindful of the dangers not only of war and its disasters, but more specifically of counter-revolution. Hence in 1820 their concern to seek ways to pursue liberal ends in alliance with—not opposition to—the Church, the legitimist rulers and the People.
John A. Davis holds the Emiliana Pasca Noether Chair in Modern Italian History and is Editor in Chief of the Journal of Modern Italian Studies. His book Naples and Napoleon. The European Revolutions in Southern Italy (2006; Italian edition: 2013) won the American Historical Association’s 2007 Helen & Howard Marraro Prize for the best book on Italian history in any period, the Premio Sele D’Oro and the International Napoleonic Literary Award. His most recent book is The Jews of San Nicandro (2010; Italian edition 2013). He is currently working on a book on the South from unification to the present.
