Enti locali e Stato in Italia sotto Napoleone. Repubblica e Regno d'Italia (1802-1814)

It is a study which analyses various aspects of administrative, financial and social life in Italy in Napoleonic times, when a vast nation State, the ‘Italian Republic’ (1802-1805), then transformed into the ‘Kingdom of Italy’ (1805-1814), had a surface that covered a third of the Italian peninsula, with 6,700,000 inhabitants and an army of 80,000 men. Under Napoleon in Italian peninsula a radical transformation of the public order is performed. The Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy offers a vast field of study which the book is dedicated. Based on surveys of powerful archival, as well as scientific literature to date, you will retrace the history of significant profiles of institutions - state and local - considered in their actual functioning. The complex tax and financial dynamics are also the subject of an original investigation. The first part provides a concise profile of political institutions in the Italian Republic (1802-1805) and the Kingdom of Italy (1805-1814), with the aid of diagrams. It then focuses on the functions and activities of the State Council (Consiglio di Stato) and in particular on a branch of it, the Board of Auditors (Consiglio degli Uditori), for the special responsibility of this central body: financial control of the most important towns. It also explains the genesis and evolution of the department, the largest administrative unit, according to the French model. The second part of this book is devoted to the topic, neglected by historians, of fiscal and financial policy. Budgets of many cities are investigated in connection with the prevailing needs of a rapidly expanding state power. The huge military spending of the Napoleonic regime, in particular, interacts heavily with the daily lives of the subjects of the Italian state, prompting mixed reactions: covert resistance, politics opposition, violent protest, until the insurrection. Specific attention is paid to the true amount of the Napoleonic taxes in comparison with the perceptions of taxpayers. Reality and perception: a gap between the two fields soon appears. In the third part the analysis moves to smaller municipalities as a mirror of a rural setting, yet a substantial majority in the national scene, in the arduous search for the new socio-political balance. In the Appendix the reader finds two unpublished archival sources: the index of all towns in the Kingdom of Italy in 1811; the statement of revenue and expenses of the municipalities in 1808, which offers an overview of Italian finances of that time.