ABSTRACT
It remains to place the conflict between the Napoleonic regime and the Italian Church in the wider pattern of the history of Church and state both before and after the epoca francese.
The French reforms sat in a long line of attempts to ‘civilize’ the Italian peripheries and to educate the urban masses. Almost all of these initiatives were the work of the post-Tridentine Church, itself the object of French persecution by the end of the occupation. Yet, at the end, that cannot allow the significant – if highly paradoxical – identity of interest between that Church and the Napoleonic state to go unremarked. Here it is essential to make distinctions within the forces of the Catholic Reformation, the better to evaluate the aspirations of the ‘Napoleonic project’ for the regeneration of the Italian masses. There can be no other viable conclusion than that a project for the moral regeneration of the Italians – coherent and sustained, if ultimately futile – existed among the French. Beyond the conflict that engulfed Church and state in the epoca francese was the longue durée of the civilizing mission, in which the Napoleonic reforms have their place. Looking forward, it must also be asked to what extent the conflict between Church and state was a watershed for the future, in the formation of the turbulent history of Church-state relations in the succeeding century.
