Naples and Napoleon: Southern Italy and the European Revolutions, 1780-1860 Book

Naples and Napoleon: Southern Italy and the European Revolutions (1780-1860) is John A. Davis' most recent contribution to the historiography of Napoleonic rule in Italy. While his first work, mentioned above, adopted a thematic approach to the entire peninsula, this new monograph argues forcefully against one of the strongest held stereotypes about southern Italians using the circumstances created by three Bourbon restorations, a Republic violently repressed and a program of unprecedented reform. Davis emphasizes the problems inherited from the Bourbon monarchy, undermined by its attempts to challenge feudalism and and financial insolvency.
[T:]he short period of French rule cannot be considered either as a clean break with the past or as a simple exercise in 'rational' modern governance, as the French and their supporters like to claim. Indeed, despite appearances the initiatives of the new government were not driven by the neatly interlocking templates that it introduced, nor even by the remarkable zeal shown by many of its agents. Ideology provided the models but contingent necessities dictates the priorities. The greatest and most pressing problems facing the new regime were direct consequences of the collapse of the ancien régime monarchy, which was the principal reason political and administrative change in the South took different and distinct forms.
Davis analyses the (at least) three instances when Murat, Napoleon's brother-in-law, was threatened with removal for failure to comply with the demands of the French government. The importance of the Kingdom of Naples, threatened by British protection of Sicily, may explain why Murat was not deposed, but the demands of a nearly bankrupted treasury, a countryside in open revolt and ecological disasters account for Murat's repeated challenges to the Emperor's authority. Naples and Napoleon interprets demands for constitutional reform from a large group of the populace, introduced to political action by the Bourbon monarchy's attempts at abolishing feudalism, as radically contradictory to depictions of southern Italy as backward or pre-modern. It was, in fact, the extent of reform rather than its lack which made southern Italy exceptional.