The recent historiography of the Peasant movement in Napoleonic Piedmont
Mitrofanov Andrei
At the end of the 18th century the Sardinian kingdom had a number of specific features that distinguished it from other Italian states. A small but steadily developing state, claiming the role of «Italian Prussia», experienced a period of economic crisis, which worsened after the outbreak of Revolutionary wars. In the article the author refers to the historiography of the protest of the Piedmont peasants during the French Revolution and Napoleonic domination in Italy. In the last decades of the 20th and the first decades of the 21st centuries, this topic attracted the attention of such historians as M. Ruggiero, R. Davico, G. Ricuperati, M. Broers, V.S. Bondarchuk, B.A. Raviola. The central problem for researchers at the end of the 20th century was the change in the economic structure in the Piedmont countryside, the crisis of the sharecropping system (mezzadria) and the introduction of capitalist principles in agriculture, the development of large land leases and the functioning of local markets for agricultural products. That is why Davico, Ricuperati, Bondartchuk and Raviola tend to view the social conflict in the Piedmont countryside through the prism of economics rather than political history. The problem of the anti-French peasant uprisings of 1799 turned out to be more difficult for researchers. For some historians, the period of Napoleonic rule is a time of economic stagnation, loss of state independence and adversity, while for others it is an era of progressive reformism, of continuation of the transformations of the period of enlightened absolutism of the middle and second half of the 18th century. It is no coincidence that M. Broers shows that in the era of Napoleon the peasantry continued to rebel, banditry flourished, but in general the policy of social reconciliation and social control bore fruit. Society by 1814 was completely different. In this concept, the role of the peasantry, which rose to the defense of the church and the king in 1799, was extremely important. But the change in peasant sentiment in 1802-1807 played a decisive role in achieving social peace in this peripheral region of the Napoleonic Empire.
The study is realized in the State Academic University for the Humanities within the framework of the state task of the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation (project FZNF–2023–0003 Traditions and values of society: mechanisms of formation and transformation in the context of global history).
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