Peasants of Piedmont in the Civil War of 1799

A wave of anti-French and anti-revolutionary uprisings swept Italy in the spring and summer of 1799. A coalition of antagonistic forces, unimaginable just a few years ago, opposed the occupiers and their local Republican allies. This coalition included landowners, tenants and landless peasants, the bourgeoisie and nobility, officials of the central and provincial administration, and the parish clergy. A new “social configuration” emerged in which they all found their place. Characteristic in this regard is the example of Piedmont, which suffered the most during the French occupation, where, as in the south of Italy, a fierce civil conflict unfolded, in which the peasantry was the main force. The purpose of this article is to propose a new classification of groups of combatants participating in the civil war in Piedmont. Unlike traditional historiography, the author does not offer a traditional narrative about famous events, but an analysis of a number of groups in the social context of the era. Methodologically, this approach is justified in the studies of M. Broers, G. Turi and G. Cirillo. The problem of classifying peasant groups is one of the pressing problems of modern historiography, since its solution allows us to look from a new perspective at the entire history of the popular movement of 1799, that is, to do this not only through the analysis of well-known social categories, but through the analysis of groups of combatants, which included a variety of, sometimes antagonistic, social strata. At the same time, the author pays priority attention to a complex of social and economic reasons that pushed the masses of the population to uprisings and active resistance

Archaeology · Context (archaeology · Criminology · Political economy · Political science · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · European Political History Analysis · Historical Studies in Latin America · History · Law · Medieval and Early Modern Justice