Un confronto sui sistemi di polizia politica nell’Italia preunitaria/A comparison among systems of political police in pre-unification Italy

The forum offers a multi-­handed reflection on the theme of political police in post-­Napoleonic and pre-­unification Italy, believing the historical studies ripe for a more articulated consideration of the role played, in the state-­forms typical of that phase of transition, from that branch of administration, which contemporary sources presented as the true figure of legitimist governments. It is proposed as a first comparative adjustment, which aims at grasping the many resonances existing among the political control devices employed by the state contexts of the peninsula, all heirs of the paradigmatic revolutionary experience and aware of the need to counteract the rampant subversive impulses across the continent with coordinated strategies. At the same time, the case analysis leads to a greater emphasis on the peculiar perspective in which each government placed the defense of its own security and thematized it in public discourse, thus confirming, alongside its compressive effect, the ductility and ambiva-­ lence the police function played within politicization processes of contemporary societies. The contributions focus respectively on the Reign of the Two Sicilies (Laura Di Fiore), on the Papal State (Chiara Lucrezio Monticelli) and on the Reign of Lombardy-­Venetia (Simona Mori), while Marco Meriggi concludes with an overall outlook on the pre-­unitarian political police as represented by memorialistic, literary and legal sources, as an instrument of a larger project of vertical government of society.