Una riforma di fine Antico Regime alla vigilia dell'annessione. Moreau de Saint-Méry e il problema della giustizia criminale nel ducato parmense

The essay aims to analyze the criminal reform enacted in Parma in 1803 by Moreau de Saint-Méry, the state’s administrator on behalf of the French Republic. The law is known for the abolition of torture, but in fact its contents, although quite specific, have represented a revision of the inquisitorial model which – though not entirely distorting it – opened to the contribution of the defense. Far from being a revolutionary rupture, Moreau’s reform is in continuity with the ideas gained within the duchy of Parma in the last decades of the eighteenth century. Its genesis and drafting, which involved many lawyers already active under the reign of the Bourbons, is a tangible evidence of this fact.