1828, gli occhi degli Asburgo sulla rivolta del Cilento. : Polizia, cospirazione politica, brigantaggio

Abstract

Based on unpublished documents and published but little-valued sources, the article examines the revolt in Cilento (province of Salerno, 1828) from the perspective of Austrian diplomacy, where the political conspiracy of the Filadelfi, a revolutionary secret society, was intertwined with the criminal action of local brigand bands. The analysis is carried out in the light of a profoundly renewed historiographical panorama about transnational security systems in post-Napoleonic Europe; political policing and anti-system conspiracies; territorial control, crime fighting and brigandage. At least three points worthy of reflection emerge: 1. the representation of the crisis offered to the Austrians, it seems convincingly, by the Bourbon officials; 2. the Philadelphian sect, an undoubted reality in Southern Italy, but with indefinable origins or foreign ties; 3. the mixture of political conspiracy and common delinquency, useful for a rhetorical construction of political subversives as criminals, as well as the ways used by the government of the Two Sicilies to eradicate them.