Crime, Disorder, and the Risorgimento
The Politics of Policing in Bologna

This 1994 book is a close examination of the papal police in the city and province of Bologna before Italian unification.

Steven C. Hughes (Author)

9780521893817, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 4 July 2002

304 pages, 5 b/w illus. 2 maps 2 tables
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.7 cm, 0.45 kg

"...the arguments are provocative and cogent ones which will force historians of the Risorgimento to look beyond the political activities of the liberals and radicals, and consider how the failure of governments in the peninsula to address the concerns of public safety was a significant factor in directing elites toward a unitary solution for Italy. Hughes has produced a model study written with verve and persuasiveness which merits a prominent space among the studies emerging on social disorder and criminality in nineteenth-century Europe." Marion S. Miller, Journal of Modern Italian Studies

This 1994 book provides a meticulous examination of the ideology, structure, and functions of papal police as they operated in the city and province of Bologna in the period before Italian unity. In doing so, it also offers an important new perspective on the Risorgimento in the region. The author argues that after the Restoration the papal government maintained much of Napoleon's police apparatus in order to enhance its absolute power as an administrative monarchy; but the new police soon found themselves incapable of dealing effectively with the prevailing problems of the day, including political conspiracy, rampant unemployment, widespread poverty, and endemic crime in city and countryside alike. In 1828 and 1847 the papal government was forced to allow Bologna's elites to arm themselves in posse-style 'citizen patrols'. On each occasion the patrols became a rallying point of reform and, eventually, revolution.

Introduction
1. Setting the stage: Bologna, the ancien regime, and Napoleon
2. Consalvi's troops
3. Functions and failures
4. Public order and the revolution of 1831
5. Reform and failure
6. Reform and revolution
7. The search for stability and the turn to Piedmont
8. Epilogue: risorgimento, freedom, and repression
9. Conclusion.

Subject Areas: Modern history to 20th century: c 1700 to c 1900 [HBLL], European history [HBJD]