The Public Administration of the Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy
Quigley's 1938 Harvard doctoral thesis on Napoleon's Italian administrative apparatus
Also known as: Napoleonic Italy, Public Administration of the Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy
The Public Administration of the Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy is Carroll Quigley's 1938 Harvard Ph.D. dissertation — a close institutional study of the bureaucratic machinery Napoleon imposed on the Kingdom of Italy (1805-1814): prefectures, ministries, councils, judiciary, and finance system, with extensive Italian-language primary sources. Never published in Quigley's lifetime, it establishes the empirical-institutional method he would later apply to the The Milner Group and the structure of Western state-building generally.
Scope
The dissertation covers the Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy from its proclamation in May 1805 — when Napoleon crowned himself King of Italy with the Iron Crown of Lombardy in Milan Cathedral — to its dissolution in 1814. The Kingdom at its maximum extension comprised 24 departments and most of what is now northern and central Italy. Quigley's interest is not in the political narrative (battles, treaties, Eugène de Beauharnais as Viceroy) but in the administrative substructure: how a Napoleonic monarchy was actually run, what offices existed, who staffed them, how budgets were drawn, how laws were enforced. He works from Italian-language primary documents — the surviving records of the Kingdom's councils and ministries — and reads them comparatively against both pre-1789 Italian precedents (especially the Duchy of Milan, the Kingdom of Piedmont) and the French administrative model that the Napoleonic state imposed.
Structure
The dissertation is organized around the organs of government rather than chronologically. Chapter One is a short introduction. Chapter Two ('The Organs of Government,' the bulk of the dissertation) walks through each piece of the administrative apparatus in turn: the Constitution and constitutional statutes; the King, Viceroy, and Regalia; the Royal Household and Grand Officers of the Crown; the Electoral Colleges; the Censura; the Legislative Body; the Council of State; the Senate; the Ministers and Secretaries of State; the legislative process; and on through the prefectures, the judiciary, finance, and the gendarmerie. The 1971 revision adds reflections on the dissertation's reception and its place in Quigley's broader project.
Method — Quigley's Empirical Apprenticeship
The Napoleonic Italy dissertation is where Quigley learned the empirical-institutional method that he would later apply to the The Milner Group and to the comparative civilizational studies in The Evolution of Civilizations. The technique is prosopographical and documentary — reading the actual administrative paper trail and tracing the offices, their staffs, their budgets, and their changes over time. As Quigley later said of the dissertation, 'I discovered that the French state as it developed under Napoleon was based largely on Italian precedents. For example, while the French state before 1789 had no budgets or accounts, Napoleon's budgets in both France and Italy were strikingly similar to the budgets of the Duchy of Milan in the sixteenth century. Similarly, the unified educational system established by Napoleon in France in 1808 was anticipated in the Kingdom of Sardinia (Piedmont) in the 1720's' (Napoleonic Italy 2). The thesis is thus a study in how 'modern' administrative practice is actually built out of older, cross-border, institutional precedents — a methodological move Quigley would make recurrent in his later civilizational work.
Reception
The dissertation was never published. Quigley's later complaint, recorded in the Oscar Iden Lectures, is that 'over-specialized experts who read the version revised for publication persisted in rejecting the aspects of the book in which they were not specialists. The only man who read it and had the slightest idea what it was all about was Gaetano Salvemini (1873-1957), the great historian from the University of Florence, who was a refugee in this country at the time' (Napoleonic Italy 2). The methodological problem was the book's transnational scope: French scholars rejected the Italian-precedent claims; Italian scholars rejected the Risorgimento-as-Napoleonic-bureaucracy claims; the cross-period framing (pre-1789 administrative precedent → revolutionary and Napoleonic adoption) had no constituency. Quigley reports that the failure to publish this work pushed him toward 'the creation of the necessary conceptual paradigms, structures, and frameworks for understanding historical processes' — i.e., toward The Evolution of Civilizations as the necessary precondition for the work he had wanted to do.
Significance for Quigley's Later Work
The Napoleonic Italy thesis is the methodological seed of everything Quigley wrote afterward. The comparative cross-border institutional analysis prefigures the comparative civilizational method of The Evolution of Civilizations. The fine-grained tracing of who staffed which office, who answered to whom, who controlled the budget, prefigures the prosopographical reconstruction of the Milner Group in The Anglo-American Establishment. The interest in the state as an administrative apparatus, separable from its rhetorical or constitutional surface, prefigures the analytical core of Tragedy and Hope's chapters on finance and on the Anglo-American Establishment. The work is short on rhetorical flourish and dense with institutional detail — early Quigley, but recognizably the same historian.
Cited in
- napoleonic-italy · p. 1 Quigley
The Public Administration of the Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy — Carroll Quigley — Doctoral Dissertation, Harvard University, 1938 — Revised for Publication, ca. 1971.
- napoleonic-italy · p. 2 Quigley
My doctoral dissertation The Public Administration of the Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy (Harvard, 1938) was never published because over-specialized experts who read the version revised for publication persisted in rejecting the aspects of the book in which they were not specialists.
- napoleonic-italy · p. 2 Quigley
While the French state before 1789 had no budgets or accounts, Napoleon's budgets in both France and Italy were strikingly similar to the budgets of the Duchy of Milan in the sixteenth century.
- napoleonic-italy · p. 2 Quigley
Instead of writing the history of public authority, I got into what was, I suppose, my much stronger activity: the creation of the necessary conceptual paradigms, structures, and frameworks for understanding historical processes.
- napoleonic-italy · p. 3 Quigley
On May 26, 1805, in the cathedral of Milan... Napoleon Bonaparte crowned himself King of Italy with the Iron Crown of Lombardy.