Dall'antico regime alla Restaurazione. Profili di storia costituzionale e sociale in area lombarda tra Sette e Ottocento

The essays here gathered show a remarkable homogeneity of contents which gives reason and meaning to the collection. Firstly, they are concerned with the evolution of the local administrative institutions between the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries in places included in the Lombard area: in fact, they refer to major and lesser municipalities of the former Dukedom of Milan, such as Varese and Vaprio d'Adda, as well as to provincial capitals of the same Dukedom, such as Como, which, at the end of the eighteenth century, became part of the new Napoleonic-French arrangements, together with other towns, such as Bergamo, which had so far belonged to the Lombard area of the Venetian Republic. The different institutional traditions which such places had behind them produced different problems at the arrival of the French in Italy and at the reception of the new administrative pattern imported from beyond the Alps. Secondly, all the contributions collected cover the span from Mary Theresa of Austria's reforms to the Napoleonic age and some stretch so far as the first years of the Restoration. The idea of connecting them answers a precise historiographical aim: to re-consider the idea itself of the socio-constitutional continuity in Italy between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and to verify the common elements existing in the policies of the Habsburg, of Napoleon and finally of Francis I of Austria after 1814, as well as the results in the long term of the reforms started in the three different historic times. In the wake of Otto Brunner's well-known lesson, inspired from the equally known concept of verfassung (material constitution), the collected essays are meant to outline, in conclusion, the actual articulateness of the political and social forces in Lombardy in the transition from the old forms of class self-administration typical of the old regime to the new state administration of French origin. The result is a reading of the new institutions and of their evolution in time which can be defined as “constitutional” since it brings into focus the redefinition of the social order and of the power relations in the lands considered.