Naples and Napoleon Southern Italy and the European Revolutions, 1780-1860 [Paperback]

Naples and Napoleonrewrites the history of Italy in the age of the European revolutions from the perspective of the South. In contrast to later images of southern backwardness and immobility, Davis portrays the South as a precocious theatre for political and economic upheavals that sooner or later would challenge the survival of all the pre-Unification states. Focusing on the years of French rule from 1806 to 1815, when southern Italy became the arena for one of the most ambitious reform projects in Napoleonic Europe, Davis argues that this owed less to Napoleon than to the forces unleashed by the crisis of the Ancien Regime. However, an examination of the earlier Republic and the popular counter-revolutions of 1799, along with the later revolutions in Naples and Sicily in 1820-1, reveals that the impact of these changes was deeply contradictory.

This major reinterpretation of the history of the South before Unification significantly reshapes our understanding of how the Italian states came to be unified, while Davis also shows why long after Unification not just the South but Italy as a whole would remain vulnerable to the continuing challenges of the new age

Introduction: Naples, Napoleon and the Origins of the Two Italies
Part One: Absolutist Naples
1. The Ancien Regime in the South
2. Projecting Reform
3. Undermining the Old Order
4. 1799: The Rise and Fall of the Republic
5. Jacobins and Patriots
6. The Counter-Revolution
Part Two: Napoleonic Naples
7. Naples in the Imperial Enterprise
8. The Costs of Empire
9. The Promise of Change
10. A Kingdom Remodelled? The Provinces and the Capital
11. Disorder
12. Legacies of Empire
Part Three: Restoration & Revolution
13. Losing Naples
14. Restoration
15. Revolution
Conclusion: States of Insecurity

This is a radical book; it turns the question of political change in Italy in the centlS$