Research: Political cultures and economic cultures in Napoleonic age: the knowledge circulations between Europe and Roman departments
Research: Political cultures and economic cultures in Napoleonic age: the knowledge circulations between Europe and Roman departments
The research project aims to investigate Italian society’s politicization processes during the age of transition from 1750 to 1850, following the methodological suggestions offered by global history and the long age of revolutions history. These recent historiographic points of view insist on circulations of knowledge, men and models and enable us to rethink historical processes in their continuity rather than in terms of rupture.
The project perspective partially contradicts the Napoleonic phase vision consolidated by Italian historiography: the revolutionary triennium is considered a period of politicization and polity discovery for the Italian society, while the emphasis on the imperial season typically falls on administrative monarchy legacy left to the restored states. The research aims to demonstrate through the analysis of archive sources that the Napoleonic government did not completely inhibit the politicization processes of society, even though it prevented its partitioning and hindered free speech. Beyond the elimination of factions (that must be reconsidered according to contemporary political categories), the project esteem possible to trace the political dimension of the imperial experience in top-down policies, in the flourishing associationism encouraged by the regime, in the periodical press, in the practices of citizenship experienced in the administration and the army. Among the expected results of the research is the recovery of political discourses in the Napoleonic era through the study of typical cultural manifestations of the entire age of revolutions: the economic and scientific debates. The intertwinement between political cultures and economic and scientific cultures is a field that must still be investigated: a proper historicization of the problem must point out the political tension that underlay the origin of economic and scientific debates and their circulations.
Rome is identified as a base from which to broaden the research horizon: the pope's city as an observation point of political and cultural transformations represents a challenge to understand the pervasiveness level of ideals and models circulations in the age of revolutions. The Roman case of study also fits into the interest for marginal areas of imperial transformation processes according to the anti-diffusionist perspective of global history. Against the immobility and isolation stereotypes of eighteenth and nineteenth-century Rome stated by traditional historiography, there are opportunities to revalue the city’s history, which has already been revisited by the most recent studies on the years of French influence and domination. The Accademia dei Lincei and the Società di Agricoltura activities are particularly interesting for this research. These academies can be interpreted as politicization agencies because they promoted the public utility of economic, agricultural, mathematical and physical sciences.