Arnaud Orain

Sophus A Reinert

Frisch

Statikk Og

In Fredona

Translating Empire. Reinert

Ann Robert Jacques

Ann Robert

Jacques Turgot

Small States in an Age of Empires: The Duchy of Parma's Colonial Moment, 1750-1770

Botero, Della ragion di stato; Campanella, La monarchia di

Introduction

The Norwegian Nobel Laureate in Economics Ragnar Frisch may have been the first to differentiate between what he called "Mikrokosmos" and "Makrokosmos" in economicsthat is between the individual and aggregate phenomena we now tend to address with the languages of micro-and macro-economics-but the basic intuition predated his obscure 1929 essay by centuries. 1 Even within the historical tradition of political economy, however, tendentially equated with the latter of Frisch's branches of economics, the sometimes tense relationship between parts and wholes and the multiple ways in which they might mirror each other was of foundational importance as the discourse of political economy was first codified in early modern Europe. It was a protean correlation, through which shifting rapports and analogies were theorized between humans, bodies politic, and humanity; between individuals, states, and the world. 2 The West inherited dreams of universal empire from the Middle Ages. 3 The Renaissance vogue for the esoteric inflected these dreams explicitly with Platonic and Neoplatonic notions of the microcosm and macrocosm, notions that privileged the similarity if not identity of things of radically difference size (e.g., the monarch and her empire), often effacing that which on a more down-to-earth scale we might call the merely small. 4 Almost as soon as Giovanni Botero in 1589 published his Della Ragion di stato, the age's best-selling primer for princes, his mystic acolyte and plagiarizer Tommaso Campanella would apply its insights to his call for Spain to establish a universal empire in the 1600-1601 Della monarchia di Spagna. 5 The strategies Botero had originally derived from Italian regional states struggling to flourish on a tightly-crowded peninsula were harnassed for an increasingly competitive international arena with the explicit purpose of establishing a universal empire to the 1750s and 1760s, which, though landlocked at the core of the Old World and often thought to exemplify the Enlightenment, an "Athens of Italy," nonetheless reflected many of the processes most often identified with overseas colonialism at the time, and which uniquely showcases the challenges that imperialism and early globalization posed for small states in world markets. 12 As Claudio Maddalena has suggested, Parma "represented a sort of microcosm in the larger macrocosm of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment." 13 To the extent that this is true, it is in part because of the ways in which questions of territorial scale and scope were often at the root of parallel questions about what constituted the "best" or ideal system of political economy.

Even though administrative and fiscal centralization made undeniable progress during the 18th century, for the most part European states remained "composite monarchies" at the time. Distant or newly added provinces, sometimes separated from "core" regions by other states and even oceans, thus retained parts-sometimes large parts-of their prerogatives, legislation, and autonomy. 14 As David Armitage has shown, this notion of "composite monarchy" facilitates thinking about the process of European imperialism as well. After all, numerous early modern writers thought of the evolution of the "British Empire" as a progressive accumulation of "provinces" and "colonies" over time, from the closest Celtic crescent to the furthest overseas possessions. Similarly, Ann Laura Stoler has also invited us to think of "empires" not simply as an extension of nation-states but rather as the result of a shifting and genealogical process beginning with the successful or abortive integration of more or less distant provinces. 15 Beginning in the late 1970s pioneering Italian historians have also shown how similar narratives had played out in the Middle Ages and Renaissance on the Peninsula, where the development by accretion of territorial and regional states from city-states left behind a patchwork of privileges and sovereignties assumed and jealously guarded by the powerful families and corporate and ecclesiastical institutions who contested the incipient state. 16 Global empires then, in their way, may also be like small states and vice-versa, in varying historical circumstances and on either end of a telescoping macro-micro scale. Different kinds 12 Maddalena, "Il governo del ministro Du Tillot," 128. For overviews, see Tocci, Il Ducato di Parma e Piacenza and the essays in Mora (ed.), I Borbone: Fra Illuminismo e rivoluzioni and now Bargelli, La città dei lumi. 13 Maddalena, "Il governo del ministro Du Tillot," 128. 14 Elliott, "A Europe of Composite Monarchies." 15 Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire, 22-25, 164-179; Stoler, "On Degrees of Imperial Sovereignty". 16 Chittolini, La formazione dello stato regionale; Cohn, Creating the Florentine State.

of empires coexisted and sometimes overlapped at the time, depending on what sort of power-military, economic, spiritual-was thought to create and sustain relations of dependence. 17 Moreover, there were and remain evident degrees of sovereignty, not to mention diverse holders of it, and, even in the twenty-first century, the "border" of an empire is anything but a clear and distinct line. 18 As such, it is not surprising that Ireland's uncertain status frequently led it to be described as a "colony" in the early modern period. 19 Similarly, a 1765 memorandum of instruction for French administrators could straightforwardly proclaim Portugal to be an "English colony." 20 For obvious diplomatic reasons, the French did not explicitly apply a similar language to the Duchy of Parma at the time. Beginning in 1748, however, and especially after 1756, they exercised an increasingly close control over the Duchy, even to the point of establishing de facto colonial relations with it. Indeed, a clergyman from Piacenza would bitterly bewail that Parma had become "a colony of the French" in a mid-century chronicle. 21 The text in question is part of a broader anti-French literature of pamphlets, posters, poems, songs, and clandestine newspapers. Historians of Parma have tended to read these materials anecdotally, interpreting them as an expression of a "cabal" that eventually undermined French influence in the Duchy, particularly following the 1769 arrival of an Austrian Princess to claim its throne. 22 Though Maria Amalia indeed may have sought to get rid of the Prime Minister Guillaume Dutillot (1711-1774) in order to bring Parma into the sphere of influence of the Habsburg Empire, our interpretation nonetheless takes this Francophobic discourse seriously. Not just as a means of returning some agency to Italian contemporaries, but also to better understand how the inhabitants of this diminutive state managed their own "colonial moment" and the vexing relations of states large and small during our first era of globalization. For the vibrant spectrum between open globality and closed locality constituted a veritable conceptual rift in early modern Parma, one which would propagate through debates of political economy there well beyond the traditional tectonic dynamics of protectionism and free trade. 17 Reinert, "Wars and Empires." 18 Fredona and Reinert, "Leviathan and Kraken"; Bryant et al (eds), Borderlands in World History; Miller,

Empire of Borders.

19 Ohlmeyer (ed.), Political Thought in Seventeenth-Century Ireland. 20 Archives Nationales d'Outre-Mer (ANOM), Ms B121, "Mémoire du Roy pour servir d'instruction au S. Cte

Parma and Empire

Unable to compete with Britain at sea, France lost Canada as well as most of its Indian and West African possessions at the end of the Seven Years ' War (1756-1763). Its empire was then limited to the sugar islands of the Caribbean, a few trading posts in India, Gorée in West Africa and the Mascarene Islands. This humiliation inspired a powerful sense of revanchism among French statesmen and military leaders, who at all costs sought to rebuild their country as a global power. Two of them in particular distinguished themselves in this undertaking: Étienne-François de Choiseul (1719-1785), Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs (1759-1761; 1766-1770), and for War, Navy and Colonies (1761-1766), principal minister of Louis XV for more than a decade, and his cousin with whom he exchanged the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (1761-1766) and that of the Navy (1766-1770), Jacques-Philippe de Choiseul-Praslin (1727-1789). The two men undertook an overhaul of the army and above all succeeded in freeing up extraordinary resources for the kingdom's arsenals. Their vigorous actions enabled France to have naval capabilities almost equivalent to those of the Royal Navy during the American War of Independence and paved the way for the continental successes of the Revolutionary armies in later decades. 23 Beyond these strictly military matters, Choiseul had a double ambition to restore French power: to indissolubly unite the Bourbon monarchies in Europe on the one hand, and to relaunch a successful colonial policy on the other. 24 With regard to his first project, a "family compact" was signed on September 15, 1761 on his initiative. It was a treaty of alliance between the Bourbons of France, Spain, Naples, and Parma. In the middle of the Seven Years' War, Choiseul, who was mistaken about Spain's naval capabilities, wanted to roll the dice one last time to reverse military fortunes which had taken a disastrous turn for the French. Nothing came of it, but the minister also had other ambitions with this compact. For him, it was a question of having influence in Madrid and of reorienting the policiesincluding the trade policy-of the Castilians.

As the political economist Jacques Vincent de Gournay had hoped as early as in 1747, the compact stipulated that the subjects should participate "in the advantages and liaison established between the sovereigns." 25 Thus, articles 23 and 24 of the treaty were devoted to trade. The first dealt with the "droit d'aubaine," which allowed a prince to collect the goods of a foreigner (aubain) who died in his kingdom, a right that was to be abolished for the subjects of the various crowns involved in the treaty. 26 The second was related to the taxation of goods transported between the states of princes of the same blood, according to which respective merchants were not to pay entry or exit duties different from those paid by nationals. In other words, a most favoured nation principle was to be reciprocally applied. It was not a matter of free trade in any textbook sense, but Choiseul's idea was certainly to facilitate the movement of goods and of merchants-to the advantage, he thought, of the French-between the states in question. Curiously, while France, Spain and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies were mentioned by name in these two articles of the treaty, the Duchy of Parma was not. 27 This is a real paradox, as these articles would give French diplomats great trouble in the subsequent negotiations with Spain and Naples.

If we are to believe the Abbé de Mably, a diplomat before turning philosopher, the Treaty of Paris of 1763 would have abolished articles 23 and 24 of the family compact. 28 This point is not clear, but the Duke of Choiseul certainly had to endure rebuffs when even attempting to implement them. 29 In fact, Carlos III took advantage of the compact to take away from the French merchants certain privileges that they had enjoyed until then, so that, contrary to what was expected, their situation in Spain did not improve after 1761. French diplomats had to renegotiate a convention in January 1768, and yet another one in March 1769, without much success, with the Castilians seeking by all means to put restrictions on the trade of French nationals. 30 Conditions were even worse in Naples. Despite sending his son as an extraordinary ambassador to Naples in 1766, Choiseul would never succeed in enforcing the compact in the kingdom in light of the sustained opposition of Bernardo Tanucci, the main minister of the Two Sicilies. 31 Choiseul's failures with regard to the family compact found parallels in those of his colonial misadventures.

In the imperial arena, Choiseul seemed to be heading in two different directions. In one, he pursued the path of the Colonial Exclusive, which granted monopolies to French overseas traders. Following an idea theorized by François Véron de Forbonnais in the article "Colony" in the Encyclopédie, and reformulated in 1765, colonies were primarily to be turned 26 See Cerutti, "À qui appartiennent les biens qui n'appartiennent à personne ?". 27 Blart, Les rapports de la France et de l'Espagne, 211. 28 Mably, Le droit public de l'Europe, 451. 29 Dupont, "Observations de M. Dupont de Nemours sur le pacte de famille". 30 Blart, Les rapports de la France et de l 'Espagne, 48, 218-234; Rambert, "La France et la politique commerciale de l' Espagne", 281-283. towards trade for the benefit of the metropolis. 32 This status quo galvanized heated debates between planters (strongly opposed to the Exclusive), the merchants of the large ports, the French administration (not always in agreement with its own ministers), and political economists. The public dispute led to a temporary derogation of the Exclusive but did not settle the fundamental question. More generally, the years 1765-1766 witnessed a real political crisis which led Choiseul to abandon the Ministry of the Navy and the Colonies. This because, quite apart from the question of monopoly trade and the Exclusive, the second pillar of his imperial ambitions collapsed with disastrous consequences. 33 At the turn of the 1750s and 1760s, the Physiocrats strongly rejected the idea that colonies should be purely commercial entities serving the metropoles. On the contrary, they argued that colonial territories ought to be treated on an equal footing with the provinces of the French metropolis, freed from both slavery and the Exclusive, and populated by smalltime white landowners focused on agriculture for subsistence. These Physiocratic colonial projects were not devoid of strategic and geopolitical aims, however, for, in the spirit of François Quesnay, they were to represent "asylums for the military navy to promote its wartime operations, and to at all times protect the nation's merchant navy from the insults to which it could be exposed." 34 As it happens, Choiseul's policies had similar goals. Thus, after commissioning studies of the conditions in French Guiana from a number of experts, the minister implemented and supervised the infamous Kourou expedition (1763-1765), during which thousands of settlers died as a result of the negligence of authorities. This now well-documented story shows Choiseul wishing to found a "white" colonial settlement.

And, in order for it to serve as a military outpost, including a naval outpost, for Guadeloupe and Martinique, it had to be oriented towards the production of subsistence goods rather than commodities for export. In his correspondence with Voltaire, the minister insisted on sending qualified scholars, workers and farmers to achieve a happy balance between the European virtues of obstinancy and hard work on the one hand, and the lush climate of French Guyana on the other. His ambition was to implant a "European system" overseas, a new Canada that eventually could rival the power and colonies of the British Empire. The extensive powers that he had granted himself in Guyana made Choiseul "a sort of viceroy," exercising 32 Røge, Economistes and the Reinvention of Empire, chap. 3; [Dubuc], "Mémoire sur l'étendue & les bornes des Loix prohibitive". 33 Tarrade, Le commerce colonial de la France, I, 283-285. 34 Quesnay, "Remarques", II, 877.

suzerainty over an immense territory. 35 Following the death of almost all the colonists from hunger and disease, however, he was left to rule, in a Herzogian manner, over only jungle.

In a memorandum addressed to Louis XV in 1765, Choiseul acknowledged that his actions here and elsewhere in the colonies had cost the crown a great deal and that his projects "have almost all been unsuccessful." He blamed the poor quality of the information which he had been given and felt that he was in the process of repairing the damage that had been done. 36 He was not entirely clear on how, however. What is certain is that Choiseul proceeded to take away the prerogatives of the French East India Company over the Mascarene Islands, instead entrusting them directly to the crown. And the instructions given their new intendant, the philo-Physiocrat Pierre Poivre, in 1767, were not very different from those informing the disastrous earlier Guyanese project, with the exception that no new settlers were to be sent there. The idea was still to develop cereal production and "useful" arts with the aim of making these territories both autonomous and able to feed French troops and squandrons, as well as to attach existing settlers to the land and make them faithful subjects of the king as a means of gaining a more sustainable foothold overseas. Poivre would enjoy some temporary success in this regard on Mauritius, a colony already oriented towards export crops such as coffee, but would ultimately leave the island embittered in 1772. This constant wish to "remake Canada" would still form the background for the expeditions at Bougainville (1766-1769), Marion-Dufresne (1771-1772) and Kerguelen (1771-1773), all embarked upon under the aegis of Choiseul. In spite of Kerguelen's reveries of a "Southern France," however, none of them would realize the ministerial dream of a white French colony overseas. 37 35 Rothschild, "A Horrible Tragedy"; Godfroy, "La guerre de Sept-Ans"; Id., [START_REF] Godefroy | le dernier r ve de l'Am rique française[END_REF]Choiseul, Mémoires, 410. 36 Daubigny, Choiseul, 39;Godfroy, Kourou, 1763, 49-50;Choiseul, Mémoires, 410. 37 Orain, "The Economics of the Antipodes".

Map 1: The Duchy of Parma in Europe, mid-18 th century.

These ultimately botched imperial gambits ought to be read in the context of Choiseul's ambitions for Parma. For this small Italian duchy was at the crossroads of his imperial policies. Through the family compact, he would not merely seek to influence the Duchy's policies but to direct them outright. And even if he would never realize his dreams of being a viceroy in South America, his approach to Parma in many ways mirrored that of his far-off colonial enterprises. Choiseul's global ambitions were to rebuild France's lost Bourbon empire with the collaboration of scientists, administrators, men of letters, craftsmen and soldiers. In this enterprise, Parma was his masterpiece. A landlocked exclave at the core of the Old World, Parma was nothing like the French Guiana or Macarene Islands of his fantasies and suppositions, overseas and devoid of civilization.

Between 1545 and 1731, Parma was in the hands of the Farnese family, but was above all at the heart of the rival strategies of influence of France, Austria and Spain (Map 1). The small state was in the satellite sphere of the Bourbons for most of the reign of Louis XIV, until the War of Spanish Succession (1701-1713) changed the political situation in Europe.

Occupied by the troops of the Emperor, who claimed suzerainty in 1708, it became independent again after the Peace of Utrecht (1713) before entering Spain's sphere of influence with the marriage of Philip V, former duke of Anjou and new Castilian sovereign, to Elisabetta Farnese of Parma in 1714. The power games between the three powers resumed in 1731, when the last duke in title, Antonio Farnese, died without an heir. Spain and Austria subsequently duked it out over the Duchy, until the Treaty of Aachen (1748) gave Parma to the Infant Don Philip of Spain (1720-1765), son of Philip V and Elisabetta Farnese, and his wife Louise-Elisabeth (1727-1759), daughter of Louis XV of France and Marie Leczinska.

The two branches of the Bourbons were thus united at the head of the Italian Duchy, though Versailles very quickly sidelined Madrid on its radar. 38 Don Philip would long await a bigger prize than the Duchy of Parma, but ultimately resigned to take possession of it in 1748. He is said to have been self-effacing and to have had difficult relations with his elder brother the King of Spain. His unambitious nature contrasted clearly with the enterprising and dominating character of his wife, who was also very close to his father. Not only did the daughter of Louis XV want Parma to adopt French etiquette and culture, however, she also wanted Versailles to have direct influence over the personnel, administration, and finances of the Duchy. 39 Paradoxically, this francophile enterprise not only survived her death in 1759, it was subsequently strengthened. For when Don Philip died in 1765, he was succeeded by their son Ferdinand (1751-1802), whose young age of 14 made the Duchy of Parma a direct vassal of France by default.

France had taken charge of part of the Duchy's expenses early on, and it was natural that Louise-Elisabeth succeeded in raising her protégé Guillaume Dutillot to the post of Minister of Finance in 1756, and then to the rank of "Secretary of State"-in other words head of government-in June 1759. From that time on, Dutillot was at the heart of France's Parmese system, other key element of which included Charles Augustin Ferriol d'Argental (1700-1788), whom Louise-Elisabeth had appointed Minister Plenipotentiary of Parma to 38 Mafrici, "Louise-Élisabeth de Bourbon." 39 Bédarida, Parme dans la politique francaise, 6-8, 129.

Louis XV in May 1759 and, after 1766, Mathieu de Basquiat, Baron de La Houze (1724-1793), ambassador of the King of France to Parma. 40 To complete the picture, Dutillot, d'Argental, and La Houze were all protégés of Choiseul. Born in Bayonne, Dutillot studied and befriended Choiseul's cousin César Gabriel de Choiseul-Praslin at the Collège des Quatre-Nations in Paris. When Choiseul was ambassador to Rome in 1754, he vigorously defended the interests of Parma, which he visited and in which he began a long friendship with Dutillot in 1757. 41 The two men exchanged letters directly during the period 1756-1770, without going through diplomatic channels, and it is evident that from 1759 onwards Dutillot hoped to receive Choiseul's approval on all important projects he undertook. Being close friends of the minister, D'Argental and La Houze were even more directly Choiseul's men. 42 And it was through this trio that he intended "to reign in Parma as in Versailles." 43 The tone of their correspondence adumbrates the Duke of Choiseul's shadowy reign of Parma. In July 1759, D'Argental wrote Dutillot to explain that one would admit "no mystery" between Parma and France, and that Choiseul "deserves that one acts with him with the greatest frankness, and full confidence." Indeed, during the early years of this special relationship the ambassador d'Argental sidestepped the Court in Versaille to instead depend on Choiseul directly for guidance on the affairs of Parma, and the latter's control of the Duchy only tightened following the death of Don Philip in 1765.

The great affair of the expulsion of the Jesuits from Parma provides a useful example of this.

On January 6, 1768, d'Argental wrote Dutillot to explain that Choiseul immediately demanded an edict (from Parma) and "that it is no longer possible to postpone it. I even confess, Sir, that I have difficulty in appearing before the Duke of Choiseul without having precise news to give him in this regard." Dutillot answers that "we will conform here, Sir, to what the Duke of Choiseul prescribes to us," and, after having excused himself, concludes that he is "imbued with the testimony of satisfaction that this Minister (in a letter which he honored me with), whom I respect so much, and to whom I am so attached, gives to my conduct." 44 This policy of almost direct administration of the Italian Duchy is best understood when placed in the larger context of Choiseul's vision of global order. When the minister 40 Maddalena, Le regole del principe; Bargelli, La città dei lumi. 41 Bédarida, Parme et la France, 135. 42 Beauriez, Une fille de France, 165-166; Archives des Affaires Étrangères (AAE), Archives diplomatiques, 95CP-29, f°21. 43 Nisard, Un valet ministre, 65. 44 Biondi, La Francia a Parma, 28-29; Nisard, Un valet ministre, 66. confessed to the king that he sensed that the alliance with the Empire was precarious in 1765, he clearly explained to him that in "Italy, tranquillity can only be disturbed by the House of Austria." The latter reigned over Milan, and the sovereigns of Sardinia, in Turin, were all too close to Britain. 45 The Duchy of Parma under the tutelage of the Bourbons blocked Piedmontese aims on the right bank of the Po River and could involve the King of Sardinia in case of new conflicts. As such, Parma would have to be made a true colony rather than simply a satellite state in the Bourbon sphere of influence. To be clear, we are not suggesting that the French approach to Parma was somehow equivalent to its actions in Senegal. There is, simply put, no trace in the Duchy of the very real violence perpetrated in overseas possessions. Yet, similar technologies of empire and control informed both, and we maintain that there may therefore still be some value in considering the relations between the two. For in the longer conceptual history of empire, Parma both reflects and refracts the tortuous process by which some territories are absorbed-however violently-as extensions of a metropole while others are treated-however unequally-as more informal satellites.

Parma's Colonial Moment

By many accounts, the implementation of a "colonial moment" generally goes through three stages. The first is what Frederick Cooper calls the "Orientalization" of the territory to be progressively integrated into an imperial space. 46 In this context, Ireland was often compared to the islands discovered by Spain in the New World in the early modern period: a world without a state, arts, or sciences, a wild land to be civilized by the more advanced English nation. Napoleon would eventually employ a similar rhetoric for Italy in the early nineteenth century, but few have noted that Choiseul's men employed the very same strategy in Parma forty years earlier. The second and third stages of a "colonial moment" refer to the division proposed by Bruce Berman and John Lonsdale around the distinction between "statebuilding" and "state-formation." 47 "State-building" is the conscious establishment of a control apparatus with a distinct history. "State-formation" refers to a more diffuse deployment of colonial authority; it is less dependent on state institutions than on commercial and cultural practices that open up spaces for negotiation, appropriation, acculturation, and conflict with local populations. Given the incredible bureaucratic will and ambition of the French on the 45 Choiseul, Mémoires, 392. 46 Cooper, "Provincializing France". 47 Berman and Lonsdale, Unhappy Valley, chap. 1 and 2; Bertrand, "Politique du moment colonial". one hand, and their explicit cultural imperialism on the other, this distinction between "statebuilding" and "state-formation" is exceedingly relevant in the case of Enlightenment Parma.

Let's start by considering the issue of "Orientalization." One of the most frequent verdicts that administrators and men of letters made about the colonial world in the mideighteenth century was that there existed a great division between the indolent and the laborious. On one side were natives, enslaved people, and many aristocratic colonists who quintessentially were lazy and wished to get rich without work. On the other were a few dedicated soldiers, craftsmen, engineers, merchants, and active settlers who would work themselves to exhaustion in an attempt to develop the new territories. The abundant and fertile nature of many colonial countries was thought to lay at the origin of this curse, leaving the select few people of industry to face the apathy of the rest of the population. 48 Choiseul's network in Parma would pass wholly homologous judgment on Italy. Thus Alexandre Deleyre, a man of letters close to Voltaire and librarian of the Duchy, published a letter in the Literary Gazette of Europe in 1765 explaining that it is not "because the masters and their cooperators are filled with zeal and activity for the progress of the Enlightenment & of reason," that "this spirit of life is suddenly communicated to the subjects & spreads in less than twenty years in a country where nature by its very fertility for centuries has maintained the laziness of its inhabitants." This abundance, coupled with the "corruption of morals," "servitude" and religious fanaticism, does not "leave enough energy for souls to do exemplary deeds." A historical cycle had, in short, brought Italy back to a form of primordial laziness that could only be re-civilized by the actions and examples of external elements. First of all, it would be a matter of bringing in scholars, philosophers, professors and artists, whose task would be to improve morals and to promote a policy of emulation. Secondly, it would be necessary to encourage the immigration of foreigners talented in practical arts and industries neglected by local inhabitants. 49 As it happened, Deleyre's letter succinctly expressed Dutillot's own feelings and policies on the matter. To the Venetian man of letters Francesco Algarotti, for example, the Prime Minister of Parma had written in February 1762: "I have tried many things; some succeed; but I have to combat a sort of indolence, and a restricted state of faculties. It takes a lot of patience, and after many years, there will be progress, but not very noticeable: we must 48 Fludernik and Nandi, Idleness; Pilar López Bejarano, "Hommes fainéants et indolents, femmes dissolues";

Charles and Cheney, "The Colonial Machine Dismantled". The Chevalier de Mirabeau wrote to his brother the Marquis of Guadeloupe on July 12, 1754 "that no country is more beautiful, more susceptible to embellishment, to be magnificent, even, but men are worth very little there." Arbaud Museum, Volume 23, p. 151. 49 Deleyre, "Lettre écrite de Parme", 337-353. not be discouraged; but we die in pain. What a life, Sir." Algarotti himself was not entirely averse to this line of thinking, which anyway was widely discussed by his Italian contemporaries, especially in light of his land's unique history of dual decline: first following the fall of Rome, then in the wake of the Renaissance. He famously explained Italy's relative position at the time with the statement The Italians have conquered the world with arms, they have enlightened it with sciences, made it beautiful with arts and they have governed it with ingenuity. At this moment, it is true, they do not cut such a fine figure. But it is quite natural that he who has worked hard needs to rest a bit, and that he who has gotten up before the others in the early morning sleeps a bit during the day. 50 When Dutillot wrote to d'Argental a year later, he was less poetic and less forgiving, if also more optimistic about the possibility of foreign agency to reform Italy: enclosed within narrow limits". The famous astronomer Jérôme de La Lande in turn wrote that "M. du Tillot, [...] has, so to speak, created this new state by his economy, & by the establishments he made there." 52 There is not even any question of regeneration here, since the verbs used are "to form" and "to create", not "to reform" or "to recreate", "to establish," not "to restore." Starting from a proverbial blank page, for the French it seemed less a question of reforming a state than of founding it ex novo. Perhaps, to echo Reinhard Koselleck and François Hartog, the French discourse around the Italians' "nonchalance" and "idleness" even betrayed a different temporal framework. 53 Not surprisingly, Koselleck's views were forged in a German 1960s marked by "reform-euphoria" and were first fully formulated in relation to Prussian reform between 1780 and 1848 when contradictory approaches to reform emerged from the interaction of the Old Regime's traditional time and bourgeois, industrial, reformist time. 54 Jacques Le Goff had similarly seen conflict in the interaction between merchant's time and church's time in the Middle Ages. 55 Today, it is not uncommon to speak of capitalist time. 56 Reform time, reformer's time, imperial administrator's time, colonial administrator's time: all interacted uncomfortably with the indigenous temporal frameworks they sought to master and suppress.

The would-be imperialist French may, indeed, have seen their plans detached from the arc of actual Parmese history and oriented towards an ideal future populated by "improvements," while the latter remained anchored in a "repetitive" time harder to differentiate from the past and the present.

Contemporaries would long play on this elite metadiscourse of idleness and decline.

"The people are indolent," La Lande wrote, while Dutillot led a Herculean effort to get stores to open, to make people work, and to reduce the number of official holidays, described by historian Benassi as "enormous." The caustic barber and chronicler Antonio Sgavetti repeatedly ridiculed these efforts in his diary. "They don't want to work," he explained in 1763 and again in 1769, "neither the agricultural workers, nor the youth." Indeed, he recounts how, on days when the French minister ordered people to work, laborers played bocce in the streets and women strolled around, everyone in ostentatious disobedience of Dutillot's wishes. This attitude, blamed on laziness and religion, can obviously also be read as a form of resistance to the political and economic order imposed by the French, judged to be 52 Richard, Description, I, liij-liv; La Lande, Voyage d'un françois en Italie, I, 477. 53 have witnessed the sort of violent invasion that so often inaugurated colonial moments elsewhere, but beginning in 1748, and particularly after 1759, a total of about 4,000 French émigrés descended upon it. The majority of them settled in the city of Parma itself, which in 1765 housed around 40,000 of the approximately 300,000 inhabitants of the Duchy. The French expats in other words represented 10 percent of the population of the city, and 1.5 percent of that of the Duchy itself, occupying many of the most important positions in the public and private spheres, from the state administration to the skilled trades. Such a presence made it absolutely necessary for the French to evade Parma's "droit d'aubaine." These efforts came to fruition in a treaty of early 1769, which explained that in order to "perpetuate the most tender friendship and the most perfect intelligence" between the king of France and the duke of Parma, their subjects would henceforth be treated "as the natural subjects of the power in whose countries they reside," including in the case of their deaths and even if they did not have a will. 59 This convention was to the advantage of the thousands of French citizens in Parma, whose descendants henceforth would be able to inherit without difficulty.

For citizens of Parma, whose presence in France largely is anecdotal, the treaty remained of limited relevance. Giulio Gandini, a clergyman from Piacenza who do not pass on an opportunity to castigate the French occupation, was proud to see through the "scheme" of the "droit d'aubaine." Dutillot, he mused, in order to obtain from our Prince this privilege for his nationals, extracted from the Court of France a similar reciprocal privilege since last February granted to all the subjects of the Duke of Parma, declared true French nationals. Just like it is beyond doubt that this privilege greatly will benefit the French in these states, so it is equally certain that it will yield nothing to the citizens of these states in France, since they do not have a valid protector there, the way the French have in Parma. The aim of this scheme is to enrichen the French in these states, by thus enabling them to make purchases and to inherit; to obtain offices, dignity, and even ecclesiastical benefits. gentleman of the Chamber of the Infant, had the final say with regard to appointments in the Duchy's small army. Thus, the various martial commands, from palatial guards and regiments to local militias, were systematically placed under the command of French officers. 61 The stables and the Parmese carriage factory were also entrusted to French personnel, both civilian and military. 62 Needless to say, such relations are redolent of contemporary colonial security measures, whereby local chiefs were replaced by foreigners to ensure the transmission and delimitation of imperial power. This point is essential when one is interested in the question of the physical and invisible "borders" of state-building. The taxation of the subject territory is always and everywhere the crucial stage of state-building, one which aims at simultaneously financing and justifying the administrative and military apparatus necessary to control local populations.

This was precisely how Dutillot approached it: he needed funds to "build" the state (just as, we should add, the state in France had been built), and from 1756 on he embarked on a process well known to the great European monarchies: the establishment of a bureaucracy for controlling borders and collecting customs duties on trade (Maps 2 and 3). At a time of increasing globalization, its aim was to take full advantage of the ongoing consumer revolution. Even if it was progressing with less alacrity in Italy than in France or Great Britain, a veritable consumer society was certainly developing there in the middle of the 18th century, and Dutillot wanted to both encourage it and benefit from it in terms of taxation. This necessitated drastically reforming the rather lax fiscal heritage of the Farnese and Spanish monopolies on the import and export of certain products, such as tobacco, and the establishment of a robust and coherent customs policy. What used to be a matter of private trade or tolerated exchanges, for example, to which the Farnese authorities long had turned a blind eye, was now criminalized as "smuggling." 63 61 The services of the French general officers at the court of Parma are considered, explains Choiseul to Dutillot, "as rendered to the king, and will also serve them to rise in rank. They are therefore in Parma as if they were in the French army, see AN, K1356, n°64-110, Lettres de Dutillot, Parma le 29 avril 1764. 62 Bédarida, Parme et la France, 166-176. 63 Benassi, "Guglielmo Du Tillot -Capitolo III: Il periodo della preparazione", 215. See also Bargelli This was a mountainous territory, and on several occasions soldiers and customs officers exchanged shots with the local population, described as "rebel communes" in official correspondence. It was not until 1765 that Dutillot succeeded in disarming the inhabitants and granting them a pardon. Other border territories were difficult to "pacify" by the government of the Duchy, with villages and small towns calling on the Pope to rescue their "privileges" from the fiscal stranglehold of the French military. 68 As in any state-building process, there could be confusion about who was in charge: the military, customs officers, or the administrators. Similarly the colonial state was no infallible Leviathan, but rather one power in a field of acting and resisting forces of authority asserted and contested.

Pamphlets denounced and mobilized colonial imagination around the alleged enrichment of French expatriates in Parma by the French tax policy. The Duchy was explicitly compared to a "new Peru," whose occupiers could draw on rivers of gold and silver. 66 Benassi, "Guglielmo Du Tillot -Capitolo III: Il periodo della preparazione," 216. 67 Gandini, Compendio Storico di Piacenza, II, 637. 68 Benassi, "Guglielmo Du Tillot -Capitolo IV: Guglielmo Du Tillot ministrod'Azienda: le finanze", 26-32. On Humor can of course serve to narrate and give meaning to oppression, as well as to unite sentiments of resistance through its carnevalesque functions. Here, for example, the threat is no longer that of Italian "smugglers" but rather the French "corsairs" ostensibly safeguarding the Duchy-undoubtedly a reference to the Barbary Coast corsairs who, in the period, brought 1-1.25 million Europeans into slavery in the Maghreb. 70 Far from enlightened administrators, Dutillot and his henchmen were cast as the morally bankrupt plunderers of a settled territory, its inhabitants metaphorically enslaved. To mark Dutillot's death, Gandini noted that his name would "forever be a hated memory among us, every day feeling the weight of the extortions, the poaching, and the unbearable aggravations imposed on us by the hand-handed Minister." 71 In his desire to increase the resources of the small Parmese state, Dutillot embarked on another crusade in the mid-1760s. This time it was a matter of taxing a large amount of ecclesiastical property amassed over the foregoing centuries. These lands, farms, and sometimes factories were normally exempt from taxation from the moment they were purchased or donated to a convent or bishopric. Now the Minister decided by an edict of January 13, 1765 that all assets acquired by such religious communities since 1561 henceforth would be subject to taxation. From a theoretical point of view, Dutillot followed the reasoning of a work he had brought to Parma entitled Traité des droits de l'État et du Prince sur les biens possédés par le Clergé (1755). The book was the fruit of the reflections of the Jansenist Abbé Etienne Mignot, a member of the "liberal" current of the party. Mignot preached the submission and subordination of the clergy to civil authorities and explained that ecclesiastical goods could not possibly be excempt from taxes on the grounds that the fiscal burden thus would fall on the laity, impoverishing them against the dictates of charity. In his Mémoire on the justification of his policy, Dutillot explained that "there was imposed on the 69 Archivio di Stato di Parma (ASP), "Discorso generale sul merito di monsieur Du Tillot," Ms. Parm. 21010; Benassi, "Guglielmo Du Tillot -Capitolo IV: Guglielmo Du Tillot ministro d'Azienda: le finanze," 47; Benassi, "Guglielmo Du Tillot -Capitolo V: Gli elementi del progresso economic", 82. 70 Davis, Christian Slaves, 23. 71 Gandini, Compendio Storico di Piacenza, III, 94. clergy the real contribution from the lands they owned and the proportional sharing of tributes, which for a long time had been falling more and more forcefully on the secular as the religious class acquired more funds." 72 In order to implement his edict, he established a Supreme Court, a "jurisdictional junta," to take an inventory of ecclesiastical assets and to redistribute the tax burden more equitably across the stakeholders of society. [START_REF]Le regole del principe[END_REF] Unsurprisingly, Rome and the Parmese clergy vehemently resisted the policy.

Choiseul nonetheless supported Dutillot throughout the fight that followed, summoning cardinals, writing letters to Madrid and Rome, and exchanging letters regularly with his minister in Parma to assure him of his total support in the affair, which he considered a key part of the struggle to definitively subordinate ecclesiastical authority to "public order." [START_REF] Aea | [END_REF] As we will see, the ensuing conflicts, which intertwined with the question of the grain trade, took on a strong dimension of resistance to the French authorities in their insubordination. But before turning to this point, it is worth considering how this particular Parmese "colonial moment" evolved in relation to the question of "state-formation." The term is often used to refer to a more diffuse conception of imperial power, as the case was elsewhere when religious missions, schools, and trading posts came to represent points of acculturation for local populations reckoning with the demands of new authorities. Their aim, in short, was to create new spaces of allegiance, with questions of "culture" taking centre stage. In this case of French imperialism in particular, it was a crucial part of the overal project. [START_REF] Berman | Unhappy Valley[END_REF] French was spoken at court, and it could hardly have been otherwise given almost all of the gentlemen in the Infant's room were French, along with the doctors, confessors, valets, barbers, wigmakers, and even the laundresses. The posts of Grand Huntsman as well as the hunting crews were in the hands of Bretons who had fled to Spain after the discovery of Pontcallec's conspiracy in 1719, the Rohans first, the Pontuals later. Many of the musicians in the chapel of the Oratory came from France, not to mention all the artists and craftsmen in the service of the court: architects, upholsterers, decorators, tailors, cabinetmakers, carpenters, and gardeners. The same was true, of course, of the food trades, with the Count of Argental himself choosing the chefs. 76 (usually Italian), and, when the Jesuits were expelled in 1768, he re-established it on the model of French universities. And beginning in 1766, French scientists began to be invited to give lectures there. The first were the Abbés Jacquier and Le Seur, mathematicians and physicists of European renown, not to mention personal correspondents of the Duke of Choiseul. Abbé Fourcaud, a naturalist, subsequently deposited his collections and drawings there. 80 These changes infuriated Gandini, who resented the ungodly French imports. Indeed, he lamented the "youth perverted" by "enlightened philosophers" from across the Alps:

The University of Parma, once celebrated and faithful to its religion, is no longer itself, all ruined by ultramontane systems and maxims spread by erroneous ideas contrary to the sentiment of the Catholic Church… In other words is seems that Dutillot aims to maintain the ignorance of these peoples, and to instruct them to unbelief. 81 As it turns out, however, Dutillot had an ulterior motive for inviting these scholars, for their most important charge was to serve as tutors for, and contribute to the education of, the young Prince Ferdinand. Two men in particular were in charge of it. The first was Auguste de Kéralio (1715-1805), a career soldier and mathematician specialized in fortifications.

Between 1757 and 1769 he was the prince's closest tutor, bearing the title of deputy governor (the governor in title was the Italian lord Sigismondo Bergonzi). 82 The second tutor was 1). 80 Bédarida,Parme et la France,[392][393][394][395][396][429][430]AEA,Diplomatic Correspondence,f°111;f°162. 81 Gandini, Compendio Storico di Piacenza, II, 628, 562. 82 Badinter, L'Infant de Parme. . 83 Orain, "Decline and Progress"; AN, K 1356, n°47 "Memoirs on the feudalism of the Duchy of Parma".

The subsequent acculturation of Italy's literary elite in contact with this small worlda veritable "culture shock" 84 -was real. Frugoni, in particular, never ceased to praise the merits of the minister and of the French of Parma. The hybridization sought by Dutillot seemed to be taking place, because, as Abbé Richard observed, "we can already see that a jargon is being formed that mixes Italian and French," a tendency confirmed by the historian Henri Bédarida, who has noted the innumerable French expressions that made their way into Parmese epistolaries at the time. 85 Not everyone rejoyced at the establishment of this new cultural hegemony, and local Italians increasingly became second-class citizens in their own polity. When an Italian manufacturer from Piacenza sent a sample of soap from his new factory to Dutillot, for example, he unsurprisingly favored French interests, though in a surprising manner. Perhaps a feminist before his time (and against all the evidence of the Old Regime), 86 the minister entrusted the realization of the project to a very young chambermaid, unmarried and a commoner, but, of course, French. It is easier to understand, then, what Sgavetti notes in his chronicle on May 3, 1760: "I cannot fail to memorialize that I have seen two people arrive, at the expense of the Court, specially from France to (who would believe it?) fatten the chickens in the coop serving the royal masters. Poor Parma, that does not have a subject able even to feed capons!" 87 84 Maddalena, "Il governo del ministro Du Tillot," 135. 85 Richard,Description,40;Bédarida,Parme et la France,[579][580][581] See Shapin, A Social History of Truth, 87-91. 87 Bédarida, Parme et la France, 157-158; Benassi, "Guglielmo Du Tillot -Capitolo V: Gli elementi del progresso economicos," 82, note 3.

Economic Strategies in Parma

Undoubtedly, however, it is in economic matters that Dutillot's ideas have been interpreted most differently. Frugoni probably contributed to this confusion by comparing the minister to two titular figures of French history. In 1756, the Italian poet referred to Dutillot as the "new Colbert," inspired by Louis XIV's famous Comptroller General of Finance. A few years later, the same Frugoni called Dutillot "an immortal Sully," after Henry IV of France's famous minister. 88 In 1756, Quesnay's article "Grains," with its powerful attack on Colbert and his legacy, had not yet been published in the Encyclopédie, let alone received in Parma. But Quesnay's Physiocrats and their numerous opponents would instrumentalize both in the subsequent decades: Louis XIV's minister would become the emblematic supporter of manufactures, international trade, and monopolies, while Henry's became the tireless defender of agriculture and, according to some, even free trade. These debates were known in Parma, and it may be that Frugoni finally decided, after years of economic reforms, that the figure of Sully simply corresponded better to Dutillot's policies than that of Colbert. That said, we have our doubts, though great confusion continues to reign over the nature of Parma's political economy at the time. Indeed, later historians have both argued that Dutillot was a "pro-free trade economic policy maker" whose "modernization of the little Duchy of Parma was carried out according to the physiocratic theory of 'government by natural order'," 89 and that there existed "no trace of any Physiocratic influence upon either Ferdinand, Duke of Parma, or his celebrated minister Du Tillot." 90 A similar tension of course exists for nearby Tuscany. In the late 1760s, the Marquis de Mirabeau, a disciple of Quesnay and one of the fathers of the physiocratic movement, was close to ministers of this Italian duchy then under Austrian domination. In 1769 he dedicated his work Les économiques to the Tuscan sovereign, Peter Leopold of Habsbourg-Lorraine, whom he called "Solomon du midi" and "Prince pasteur," and the two men began a correspondence. Though some scholars today continue to reiterate a dated vision according to which Enlightenment reformism in Tuscany was of a strongly Physiocratic bent, this derives more from Physiocratic propaganda of the eighteenth-century than from any consideration of the actual policies pursued there, and Physiocracy must ultimately be considered one of many influences on the political economy there, and a minor one compared to the self-consciously Neo-Colbertian currents represented by the Neapolitan Antonio Genovesi and the group 88 Frugoni, Opere Poetiche, IV, 285; Frugoni, Supplemento alle Opere Poetiche, 382. 89 Rothbard, Economic Thought, 409; Anderson, Pope Pius VII. 90 Blair, The influence, 31. gathered around Vincent de Gournay in Paris. 91 The case of the Duchy of Parma is even clearer.

There are no Physiocratic works in the inventory of Dutillot's library (Figure 2 97 It is, therefore, not that Physiocratic ideas were unknown to Dutillot and the reformers of Parma, but rather that, as in most places, they were not put into practice. 98 91 Carvalho, "'L'ami des hommes et le prince pasteur'". 92 Notice des principaux articles de la bibliothèque de feu M. le Marquis de Felino. With the exception of the Encyclopedia, which contains articles by Quesnay, and the Monde primitif by Antoine Court de Gébelin, which contains some elements of the physiocratic doctrine. The latter, however, was published after Dutillot left Parma. 93 These include Child and Gournay, Traité sur le commerce, avec un petit traité contre l'usure (1754); Forbonnais, Élémens du commerce (1754); Forbonnais, Principes et observations économiques (1767); Butel-Dumont, Histoire et commerce des colonies anglaise dans l'Amérique septentrionale (1755); Hume, Essays and Treatises on several subjects (1753-1754); Duguet, Institution d'un prince (1739). 94 Venturi, Settecento riformatore, vol. II, 217. On the Pugni and their political economy, see Reinert, Academy of Fisticuffs. 95 Orain, Choix individuels, 290. 96 Guazzi,Corrispondenza,788;Boschi,77,211. 97 Orain, "Directing or Reforming behaviors?". 98 See, more generally on this, Kaplan and Reinert (eds.), The Economic Turn. Dutillot and his companions were too pragmatic to simply implement this or that economic doctrine, but even so his policies were far removed from any supposed Physiocratic precepts. To better understand why, it may be useful to examine the economy of Parma more carefully. According to a large statistical study conducted at the end of Dutillot's ministry, the Duchy's grain yields were low compared to those of neighbouring states, and Parma was regularly short of grain. Three-or even two-year crop rotation was still the rule, and large landowners had little interest in agricultural innovations. About two thirds of the country's salt consumption came from the Salso Saltworks near Parma, with the rest imported from the Adriatic Sea. 99 The cultivation of flax and hemp maintained a small textile industry organized on the principles of the putting-out system. Mines and forges were rare and small, while large establishments dedicated to the manufacture of carriages, crockery, leather, and more generally to fashion and luxury were non-existent. The only real industries of the Duchy, which allowed for limited exports via Genoa, were those dedicated to woollen textiles and, with the arrival of Dutillot, silk. 100 Indeed, his main efforts in the economic realm would 99 Bargelli, "'Teatro d'agricoltura'"; La Lande, Voyage d'un françois en Italie, II, 496-497. 100 La Lande, Voyage d'un françois en Italie, II, 496; Richard, Description, II, 43; Cipelli, "Storia dell'amministrazione," 155; Benassi, "Guglielmo Du Tillot -Capitolo V: Gli elementi del progresso economic"; Benassi, "Guglielmo Du Tillot -Capitolo VI: L'agricoltora e l'annona", 11-13. revolve around developing the potential of this last industry. And, yet again, he would depend on the French community in Parma to do so.

As the Abbé Richard explained, "[t]he number of French craftsmen who have settled in Parma have brought to it this luxury & frivolous industry which reigns more in Paris than in any other place in the world." 101 The verdict is probably an exaggeration, but what is certain is that Dutillot carried out a real, concerted and strategic immigration-policy in industrial and commercial matters to secure technical know-how for the Duchy. He ordered memoranda from his correspondents in France, such as Bonnet, or from employees of the General Tax Farm, such as François Destienne Blégier, and then he solicited or approved the installations of manufacturers in the Duchy in explicit emulation of French models. The full list would be too long to catalogue, but it is worth mentioning the glove factory set up by Pierre Barthélémy from Grenoble in 1761, the hat factory of Jean-Pierre Calloud in 1763, and the painted Indienne women's hat factory of Roger and Lebrun, of which Dutillot was particularly fond. As early as 1757, he granted the two Frenchmen and their workers ducal buildings free of charge as well as subsidies to settle in Parma. He also began to sponsor a leather factory in 1766, even though his focus would remain on promoting textile industries and, secondarily, metallurgy. With regard to textiles, he essentially implemented a thoroughly "Colbertist" program aiming to establish industries, boost production, and harmonize the quality of finished products while encouraging local farmers to supply the necessary raw materials in the form of flax, hemp, and especially mulberry trees. 102 His project would enjoy a certain success with the establishment of a series of new factories directed by Frenchmen (François Goin, Guillaume Rouby de Cals, Claude Gaillard), and the production and the export of textiles, and especially silk ones, increased substantially by 1770. Yet, almost nothing would remain of his project following his fall from grace the following year. His second focus was on the development of mines and forges in the Duchy. In 1765, Dutillot subtracted the ironworks of Plaisance from the direction of the General Tax Farm of Parma, which had little to do with them, and entrusted them to the skilled French metallurgist Dominique Chazotte. The establishment developed considerably under his direction, soon allowing the Duchy to be self-sufficient in the production of iron and steel. Again, however, following the departure of Chazotte and his French workers in 1770, and that of Dutillot himself in 1771, the industry quickly declined. 103 In the area of agricultural policy, Dutillot's approach was a mix of agronomical innovations and traditional recipes for subsistence management. Following the recommendations of Duhamel du Monceau, he promoted experiments with innovative agricultural machinery, notably a cylinder sieve for sorting wheat, but above all he made an attempt to disseminate new varietals and new techniques for cultivation. He organized the printing and distribution of a booklet in favor of potatoes, and, no doubt aware that Parmese farmers and landowners would not readily visit the Duchy's library to consult books on agronomy, created a special section on the subject in the Gazetta di Parma under his direct authority in January 1760. 1 The periodical published translations of French newspapers on these issues, but Dutillot also inquired in Paris about the creation of the new royal agricultural societies. He long sought to create such an academy in Parma with the support of local clergymen and the Parmese General Tax Farm. The project, which repeatedly was initiated but always aborted, never came to fruition. The same was true of his attempts to establish a chamber of commerce and a commercial court. 104 The more general question of the grain trade reveals the extent to which Dutillot opposed any generalizable ideals of economic liberalism. His epistolary is particularly hesitant on the subject. After the famous French edict of July 1764 authorized the exports of grain outside the kingdom, 105 Dutillot wrote to d'Argental on August 4 that "it would not be surprising if the export of grain from France caused some pain to the English, who have seized this branch of trade; we can only admire the wisdom of the king, who is thinking of disputing it." Mere months earlier, however, he had praised "the provisions of the Infant [i.e., of Parma] to prevent the exit of the grain which the wise foresight of H.R.H. has brought into his States" as a means of ensuring the subsistence of his subjects. 106 Perhaps the Minister saw no contradiction between these two judgments, the small Duchy not being in the same position as its powerful sponsor. In any case, the export of grain was forbidden in Parma under his ministry, and, more surprisingly given the diminutive size of the territory, even 103 Cipelli,"Storia dell'amministrazione,[11][12][13]Bédarida,Parme et la France,[180][181][182][183][184][185][186][403][404]; De Luca, Linee de sviluppo. 104 Benassi, "Guglielmo Du Tillot -Capitolo IV: Guglielmo Du Tillot ministro d'Azienda: le finanze", 6;

Benassi, "Guglielmo Du Tillot -Capitolo VI: L'agricoltora e l'annona", 19; Bargelli, "'Teatro d'agricoltora'", 9-internal circulation was limited and indeed much more complicated than in France. To understand this state of affairs, one must remember that, like most of the peninsula, the Duchy of Parma suffered insufficient and even catastrophic harvests between 1763 and 1767. Far from thinking that free trade would solve the crisis by ensuring the circulation of cereals where prices were high and by encouraging farmers to produce more, Dutillot set up a "Junta d'Annona," a special commission with military powers to supply Parmese markets with grain. 107 Much as Ferdinando Galiani would in his best-selling 1770 Dialogues sur le commerce des bleds, Dutillot relied on the language of "public health," the "first of all laws," to justify the junta being allowed to force open granaries, including those of convents and nobles, to set prices, and to buy grain from outside markets. In the midst of the crisis in 1764, Dutillot obtained funds and grain from France through the banker Bonnet. He saved the Duchy from the famine that ravaged much of the peninsula, and organized clandestine grain transports through neighboring states. The minister did not fail to publicize this policy, and to praise the aid he was able to offer Tuscany and Modena. This propaganda did not fail to arouse the irony of Sgavetti, who dubbed Dutillot the "new Joseph of Egypt."

The junta prevented any transport of grain into the Duchy that it had not ordered itself, and established a public storage warehouse in Parma in July 1767. Unfortunately for Dutillot, the good harvests of 1768 and 1769 caused grain prices to plummet, and the sale of grain from the state stores subsequently ran up huge losses. The management of the subsistence crisis would be forcefully denounced during the anti-French turn of 1770-1771, but more importantly for our purposes was the denunciation of a kind of unnamed "famine plot." 108 In 1770, Dutillot was apparently on the verge of authorizing the free internal circulation of cereals. He may have felt forced to by the growing movement denouncing the Junta at the time. This is how Gandini, living in Piacenza, introduced this "plot":

On the day of 3 February the Junta d'Annona was closed, and so also the fatally important wheat warehouse erected in the shadow of Minister Dutillot, which had received the spacious title of aid to the poor, and abundance of the city. But a certain Giovanni Porta and some of his partners gathered in Parma to amass wheat, gave their word that the Minister was involved in ensuring that wheat nonetheless would be abundant; the availability of wheat would increase along with prices, to be used for illicit gains from exporting out of the state, to double costs and squeeze the poor who had to pay high prices like in times of penury. 109 The Junta was presented as an instrument to starve Piacenza and the small towns for the benefit of Parma in light of the Junta's all-out purchases to fill the public store and stock the capital's markets. Again though, the subtext of these complaints was clear, as Parma was home to 90 percent of the Duchy's French community these measures were interpreted as feeding the colonial interlopers at the expense of the local population. 110 During the crisis of 1767, the Junta had to carry out real military operations against certain rebel provinces of the Duchy. In April, Baron de la Houze wrote to the Duke of Choiseul to explain that the Chevalier de Virieu was leading a detachment of 600 men to suppress a revolt in the Valle dei Cavalieri and in the small town of Monchio in the south of the Duchy (Map 3). The local bishop, his parish priests and numerous clergymen raised a part of the population against the taxation of church goods and authorized the export of grain to Tuscany. Against these acts of blatant disobedience, priests were arrested and troops stationed to maintain order. Choiseul demanded the utmost firmness. In a letter to Paciaudi, he complained bitterly about these passing rebellions: "One has no idea of sovereignty, nor of what a king is; one ignores the power that God has granted him. All the abusive rights of the clergy are sacred and inviolable in the spirit of a Parmese; those of the Prince are regarded as usurpations." Draped in ideals of the Enlightenment, Dutillot wrote condescendingly of the "countless prejudices" of the people and the "ignorance" of the local clergy. He seemed unable to grasp that the uprisings could be understood as a form of resistance to the French presence in the Duchy, a struggle for control of space and identities. Achille Mbembe has theorized a similar point in his study of the night in colonial Africa. It is first in this night world, the world of dreams and of the imaginary, that revolution becomes possible. The night overturns the values of the day in a religious communion of the colonized with their ancestral deities, forming a space of subtraction from imperial domination. 111 Finding a way into the imaginary in which Monchio first resisted before openly doing so is impossible, but the town might offer a homologous phenomenon: the rural inhabitants of the Duchy, far from Parma and even further from Paris, joined forces with their bishops and pastors to resist the new 109 Gandini, Compendio Storico di Piacenza, II, 562. 110 Benassi, "Guglielmo Du Tillot -Capitolo VI: L'agricoltora e l'annona", 57-68; Cipelli, "Storia dell'amministrazione", 218. 111 Benassi, "Guglielmo Du Tillot. Un ministro riformatore del secolo XVIII", 215-224; Mbembe, "Domaines de la Nuit"; Bertrand, "Politique du moment colonial". regulations and all that they stood for. These revolts may have been less about prejudice and ignorance than about the affirmation of indigenous agency and historical understanding rooted in a traditional imaginary. The rebels sought to give meaning to an identity weakened by French domination over the Duchy and to recover the lost social order of an idealized, imagined past.

If Dutillot sought to increase textile exports though, it was precisely to insert the small state into world markets, the case of Indienne and silk being emblematic of the consumer revolution of the 18th century. But this undertaking, as well as his intention to facilitate imports and the internal freedom of grain at the end of the 1760s, presupposed the existence and embrace of that great question of the century which pertained to "circulation." 112 The term had been championed around Europe and recently theorized by the likes of Richard Cantillon, the authors of the Gournay circle, and the Academy of Fisticuffs in Milan, giving renewed impetus to projects to build roads and to render rivers navigable. Fittingly, Dutillot launched several road-building operations, which he considered among his greatest achievements in the Memoir he wrote to justify his ministry. He explained that "one followed, in agreement with the Republic of Genoa, the important object of a great road which, for the ease of trade and the good of the State, led from the Po River opposite Cremona, to the sea at Sestri Levante." 113 As it happened, however, the talks he began with the Genoese on the matter in early 1761 dragged on and eventually stalled over the road's exact route. In an Access to the sea via Sestri (Map 4) was crucial for the Duchy of Parma, allowing for a much more direct connection to the Kingdom of France. From this point of view, the great road had both commercial and military objectives. Dutillot referred explicitly to the grain trade, but also to the need to better control the interior of the small Duchy. The construction of communication routes was indeed one of the great priorities of the colonial authorities at all times: it was a matter of increasing the speed, volume, and reliability of communications with the aim of controlling a territory. 115 Yet, it quickly became evident from the epistolary of the ambassador La Houze that, despite French pressure, the construction met resistance from 115 Blais, "Coloniser l'espace"; Bertrand, "Politique du moment colonial".

the Genoese and aroused the hostility of Tuscans as well as some Parmese. Count Firmian immediately understood that this new communication route would reduce the trade and thus customs duties of Milan, and did what he could to slow the work down. The road was still not completed by the time Dutillot fell from grace in 1771 and would not be so for several decades. Was this again a question of Italy's stereotypical lethargy at the time, out of which only an enlightened French minister could have shaken it? Probably not. By 1770-1771, complaints about the road were legion: the minister was accused of having squandered important funds (more than a million lire), of having expropriated local owners, and above all of having mobilized Parmese peasants by force, or for starvation wages, all for a project whose usefulness for the Duchy remained difficult to discern. As Gandini would put it, "who can tell how tiring, and how expensive it is to buy what will not last?" 116 So how do all these economic policies relate to the "colonial moment" we envisaged above? Forbonnais, whose main works Dutillot owned, defined several types of colonies in his Encyclopédie article and in his Elements of Commerce (1754). As he saw it, the conquest of the Americas had inaugurated a new type of colony, at the same time agricultural and commercial, which he particularly identified in the sugar islands and other islands focused on export crops. These had been created only for the benefit of the metropolis and should therefore not hold any production, whether agricultural or industrial, that might compete with the latter. Nor ought they trade with rival nations. Choiseul did not question this type of colony during his ministry and did not wish to put an end to the regime of the Exclusive. That said he did, as we have seen, experiment with different colonial models as well, in which white settlers were meant to produce for their own subsistence, become self-sufficient, and be able to support the French navy and infantry in the case of overseas conflicts. while at the same time securing Parma with French financial and cultural capital. Importantly, however, his ostensibly Colbertist industrial policies-as vigorous as they would prove ephermeral-would over time have made the Parmese colony ever less dependent on the metropolis, and thus ever less an example of Forbonnais' "American" colonies and ever more like his "ancient" ones. With time, Parma might one day have emerged as a supporting and constituent province of a rejuvenated French Empire. This vision did not escape to Gandini, who saw in Dutillot's industrial policy yet another attempt to subject the Duchy to France:

In order to better appreciate Dutillot's desire to enrich the French, consider the ban he had previously given to the spinning of silk in these states for the purposes of exporting to Lombardy use always practiced here. The reasons given in doing this, however, were all shrewd, though to all appearances honest; but in reality his idea was that no other trade of this kind should be opened except with France. And behold, the happiest branch of traffic in these parts of Italy was thus truncated, and they covertly gave all the rights to establish this kind of industry to French partners. 118 Above all, however, Dutillot may have had in mind David Hume's essay "of Commerce," which he possessed: "the chief advantage which arises from a commerce with strangers", is that "[i]t rouses men from their lethargic indolence; and presenting the gayer and more opulent part of the nation with objects of luxury, which they never before dream'd of, raises in them a desire of a more splendid way of life than what their ancestord enjoy'd." 119 By adding thousands of industrious Frenchmen to a fertile but poorly exploited territory, Dutillot thought he could bring the Duchy of Parma out of its so-called indolence.

His insistence on manufactured goods and even luxury items fits with the overal goal of emulation, and from the hybridization of the two peoples he hoped to see the past splendor of Italy be reborn. These dreams were ultimately dispelled when he was expelled form Parma in 1771. The new Duchess, who had arrived from Austria in 1769, had skillfully played on the Francophobia of Parmese people who increasingly felt prey to a foreign elite.

With Dutillot (or, as Gandini called him, "the traitor (le félon)") gone, many of his countrymen left the Duchy, a number of factories fell into disuse, the administration was re-Italianized, and numerous reforms were put on ice by Don Ferdinand, a devout man not 118 Gandini, Compendio Storico di Piacenza, II, 572. 119 Hume,Essays and Treatises,IV,14. particularly inclined to new ideas. 120 But it was hardly the end of the saga of Parma and French imperial ambitions, and with the spark of revolution similar dynamics would begin anew.

Epilogue: Parma's Continuing Colonial Moment

The ethnographer Ernesto de Martino begins his famous study of tarantism in Apulia with reports of counter-reformation Jesuits describing a mountainous region of Sicily as "estas Indias de por ac ." 121 Parma is now firmly in the industrious North, but the so-called Southern Question in Italy was often understood in blatantly "orientalist" and "neoorientalist" terms. 122 Even Christ, in Carlo Levi's famous novel, stopped at Eboli. 123 Colonial tropes were marshalled in the last century also against the empty and ignorant lands of Brittany, and Francization often meant internal colonialization. 124 This process is sometimes strikingly called séparisianisme. Making the periphery the center. Narratives of backwardness and indolence are not only for overseas territories. Nor are processes of expansion, uniformization, centralization, discipline, and moralization. Nor are rebellion and what have been called "everyday forms of resistance." 125 It is impossible here not to think of the great work of Eugen Weber, where we read that France "can itself be seen as a colonial empire shaped over the centuries: a complex of territories conquered, annexed, and integrated… some of them with traditions that were specifically un-or anti-French," but we should keep in mind too that Weber explicitly compares this colonial experience with the one described by Fanon in Les Damnés de la terre. It is race, violence, and time that separate them. 126 In finding a "colonial moment" in Parma we have intentionally been provocative: for every similarity we have highlighted, there are two differences, not least the roles played by race and slavery and violence in Europe's colonial experience. But the similarities are nonetheless very real. Similarities between nation-making at home and state-building abroad, between reformism and colonialism, between a small landlocked European state and a colony. 127 In a devastating picture of Germany military culture, Isabel Hull has shown how the Germans learned their extreme conduct in war in Europe from the extreme practices of colonialism in Africa. 128 When we think about Parma's colonial moment, the experience is more complex. It is not enough to say that France "colonized" Parma, using languages and tools from their overseas colonies in Europe. It is not enough to speak, even now, of "bringing the empire back home," with all that that means. 129 Instead, the interplay between the languages and tools of reform and nation-making at home and those of colonialism and state-building abroad were in a constant dialogue. Empire was learned and taught at home and abroad, it was exported and imported, over a period of centuries. The story of this dialogue is always a historia condenda, a history in the making, even up to the contigent present.

The Duchy of Parma's "colonial moment" did not end with the fall in 1771 of Dutillot and, with him, what Franco Venturi called his "political laboratory." 130 Dutillot had of course seen that his fiscal, commercial and industrial policies were in frontal conflict with the Church and with the interests of parts of the Parmese people, but he had caricatured their opposition in terms of fanaticism, backwardness, indolence, and prejudice. He was seemingly unable to grasp that his thousands of French expatriates could be seen as a threat to civic pride, local identities, and traditional imaginings. This drama would be replayed in the wake of the French Revolution, with a slightly different vocabulary but with similar results.

In 1801, Talleyrand, a great admirer of Choiseul then Minister of Foreign Affairs under the Consulate, sent Moreau de Saint-Méry (1750-1819) as general administrator to the recently conquered Duchy of Parma. The man was a former planter from Martinique, a fierce defender of the colonial lobby during the Revolution, and publisher of a Description of Santo Domingo in which he had sought to "theorize" racial differences. This is more than a coincidence, and Moreau de Saint-Méry's verdicts of Italy frequently echoed those he had expressed about the West Indies. He had no qualms asserting that "the climate of Italy produces there a languid disposition that is more or less noticeable in the peoples of warm countries." And, upon arrival at the head of the Parmese state under the control of the Republic, Moreau de Saint-Méry published a booklet entitled De la danse, in which he explained that it was dance alone that brought the Creoles of the sugar islands out of indolence. Italians were not that different: only "music," he proclaimed, could move them out 128 Hull, Absolute Destruction. 129 Lebovics, Bringing the Empire Back Home; Magubane, Bringing the Empire Home. 130 Venturi, Settecento riformatore, II, 214-236; Cont, "Il potere della tradizione." of their "horror of work." 131 Like Dutillot, he portrayed a backward country prey to indolence and religious fanaticism, the equivalent of an overseas colony in the middle of Europe. The Duchy's tempestuous history would continue even after Napoleon's exile to St. Helena, buffeted by changing geopolitical forces until it eventually was incorporated into a unified Italy in 1860 and, more recently, into the waxing and waning political entity that is the European Union.

"[Y]our Pan-Germanism is no more imaginative than is our Imperialism over here," argues the character of Uncle Ernst, a German expatriate in Britain, in Howard's End; "It is the vice of a vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness." 132 Leopold Kohr has announced that "small is beautiful" and that populations of small and relatively powerless states are happier. 133 But on the international stage, empire (in twenty-first-century forms) and (vulgar? vicious? ugly?) bigness still reigns, and small states remain vulnerable even if resilient. 134 The kind of economic flexibility that Katzenstein saw as essential for the political stability of Europe's wealthy small states is a poor match for and has not similarly benefitted the microstates of the Caribbean and Pacific, remnants of the dismemberment of European colonial regimes, where instead a high level of precarity is endemic. Nonetheless, it is the larger question of "small states in world markets" that remains paramount, no less so than that of the ostensible universality of economic theory. 135 What happened in eighteenth-century Parma may be seen as a microcosm of what happened during the Enlightenment; it was the tiny arena for some of the most trenchant practical and conceptual battles of its time, whose resolution has never arrived. 131 Moreau de Saint-Méry, "De l'influence de la musique"; Moreau de Saint-Méry, De la danse, 18-19. 132 Forster, Howard's End, 35-36. 133 Kohr, "Small is eautiful"; Kohr, The Breakdown of Nations. 134 Two key terms of analysis in Cooper and Shaw (eds.), The Diplomacies of Small States. 135 See still the classic Katzenstein, Small States in World Markets, and for the eighteenth century Garibbo, La neutralitá della repubblica di Genova and Whatmore, Against War and Empire.

  After 40 years of misfortunes and revolutions, this country is hardly in a position to nurture the arts: its poverty is a new obstacle. Education is bad. Idleness is great. All this produces nonchalant and lazy people. [...] If [the Duke of Parma] did not have to fight against poverty and limited means, the country would soon change face. It changes every day and the excellent projects of His Royal Highness to provide emulation, application and excellent education to a part of his young nobility, will surely change spirits and morals here within a few years. 51 This discourse of improvement and regeneration pursued by an alleged elite among a lazy people fallen into decadence explains a great deal about the attitude of the French during their period of domination, as well as their eventual fall. They imagined the country as a virgin land whose past splendors had been buried by successive sediments of time. The judgment of contemporary French travelers is striking in this regard. Having passed through the Duchy in the early 1760s, Abbé Richard, a future member of the Institute, explained that "[t]he small state of Parma is still forming. The infant Don Philip, assisted by a skillful minister, worked to establish trade & industry, & to increase the resources of a country 50 Francesco Algarotti, Pensieri diversi, 46. See, more broadly, Reinert, "Lessons on the Rise and Fall of Great Powers." 51 Dutillot to Francesco Algarotti, February 14, 1762 and Dutillot to d'Argental, May 21 1763, quoted in Bédarida, Parme et la France, 90.

  detrimental to the freedom and well-being of local communities.57 As such, it is an Old World parallel of what has been called petit marronage, the act of running away from the plantation and returning, a kind of voluntary passivity around the interstices of the law imposed by colonial authorities.58 Map 2: The Duchy of Parma and neighbouring States, mid-18 th century.A similar parallelism between the microcosm of Parma and the macrocosm of contemporary global empires is evident in the realm of state-building. The Duchy may not 57 La Lande, Voyage d'un françois en Italie, I, 481, Benassi, "Guglielmo Du Tillot -Capitolo V: Gli elementi del progresso economico", 116-117.58 Debbasch, "Le Marronnage"; Debien, "Le Marronnage aux Antilles françaises"; Craig, Timepass; Roberts, Freedom as Marronage; Lagji, "Marooned time".

60

  Whether militarily or in terms of the civic administration, the echelons of power were practically completely manned (also in the literal, gendered sense) by French envoys, and Dutillot gradually elevated his trusted secretaries to important positions. The case of François Treillard, a former soldier from the Dauphiné, is emblematic. He was first in charge of the accounts of the Duchy, and became Dutillot's right-hand man with the title of "commissaire général au commerce et à l'agriculture" (General Commissioner for Trade and Agriculture) in May 1768. The role of Commissioner for War was also in the hands of a Frenchman, Jacques Dupré de la Balme, and Monsieur d'Antoine de Blacas, Count de Belvédère,59 Archives Nationales de France (AN), K 1356, n°15-16.60 Gandini, Compendio Storico di Piacenza, II, 499.

  , La città dei lumi, 46-51 and, for the broader Italian context in terms of contemporary political economy, Reinert, Academy of Fisticuffs, 205-267. On smuggling and the construction of a fiscal-military State through taxation, see alsoKwass, Contraband. Map 3: The Duchy of Parma and its borders, mid-18 th century Thus the small Duchy followed in the footsteps of its protector, the Crown of France: Dutillot wanted to take advantage of emerging world markets and put Parma on the map of fiscal-military states. To do this, he gave the customs and tax collection to a French company organized on the model of the Ferme Générale, with Parisian capital, and directed by François d'Astier de Saint-Alban. After 1765 he was succeeded by a mixed company, which nonetheless was closer to the Farm than to the tax office, under the direction of two other Frenchmen, Pierre-Louis Foacier de Betteville and David-François de Laborde, in addition to two Italians.64 The General Tax Farm was poorly tested even in France, and its employees confessed to Dutillot their "little knowledge" of Parma, "where we remain foreigners."65 Unsurprisingly, it quickly became the object of loathing on the part of the Parmese. Again though, what was at stake was not only a deep distrust of taxes and customs policy but 64 Bénassi, "Guglielmo Du Tillot -Capitolo IV: Guglielmo Du Tillot ministro d'Azienda: le finanze", 177-179.65 Bédarida, Parme et la France, 565. sometimes instead a conscious strategy of opposition to the destruction of a local and civic identity by what was perceived to be an occupying force. As one invective had it,We love the Spanish, and PatriotsWe abhor the French, and Customs Guards And along the way, where we find them all of them, by God, we will murder.But the threats are sometimes more serious: "Warning Protectors… Customs Guards and Frenchmen, if you do not leave the state, you will hear the Sicilian Vespers."66 The allusion is clear. The "Sicilian Vespers" refer to the 1282 Easter Monday uprising in Palermo against French soldiers and tax collectors after Charles I of Anjou wanted to administer his new state on the centralized model of the Capetians. The memory of this revolt, which drove the French out of Sicily, was thus mobilized in a similarly identitarian struggle half a millennium later. With the same verse, Gandini would lament that the Parmese were "oppressed with tariffs, and duties, and crude laws, systems, and unsound maxims." 67 Thus Count Firmian, the Habsburg Plenipotentiary of Milan, denounced the presence of "smugglers" in the border valley of Tolla, south of the Duchy of Parma, to Dutillot in 1762.

Firmian

  's larger challenge with smuggling and banditry at the time, see Reinert, Academy of Fisticuffs, 250-257. Some anti-French texts took the form of false book titles (a classic satirical process of the time). These included The Pigeon in Italy, or The New Discovery of Gold Mines in the River Parma, Dug at the Public Expense; The Work of the Sublime Genius of the Expert Monsieur Laborde; The Requiem aeternam without Lights said… by the Fortunate Subjects of the Bourbon Hero while Burying the Cadavers of those who were French; and The Great Wall of China Transported to the Borders of Genoese Territory to Defend us from French Corsairs. 69

  already a philosopher of European-wide fame when he arrived in Parma, Etienne Bonnot de Condillac (1714-1780), author of the Traité des systèmes (1749) and the Traité des sensations (1754). Kéralio and Condillac were chosen by Louise-Elisabeth on the recommendations of her close friend the Duke of Nivernais. The philosopher's teaching focused on sensationist empiricism, grammar, logic, and history. On this last theme, Condillac also called upon his brother, the Abbé de Mably, whom Dutillot also sometimes called upon on diplomatic matters. 83 Paciaudi, Deleyre, Kéralio, Condillac and the Italian poet Carlo Frugoni (1692-1768) constituted the group of prominent scholars Dutillot protected at the court of Parma (Figure

Figure 1 :

 1 Figure 1: Strategies: Parma and the Enlightenment

  ), 92 but several texts by members of the Gournay circle as well as Hume's Essays and several works of agronomy. 93 As Franco Venturi noted, Dutillot read the journal Il Caffè of the Accademia dei Pugni (Academy of Fisticuffs) from its first issues in 1764, and looked to the Milanese coterie of political economists gathered around Pietro Verri and Cesare Beccaria at the time as a "model." 94 Yet, as early as 1758, Dutillot and Paciaudi ordered works by Quesnay and Mirabeau for the Ducal Library. Requests for works on rural and domestic economy were legion, and in 1761 the minister even requested Bonnet to send "all that will appear again on agriculture and commerce." 95 It is worth taking note, for example, of the arrival in Parma of Duhamel du Monceau's Culture des terres selon les principes de M. Tull, the Éléments d'agriculture, and the Corps d'observation de la société d'agriculture of Brittany. In 1763, the library subscribed to the Gazette du commerce and, in 1765, to the Journal d'agriculture, whose editor was none other than the Physiocrat Dupont. At the end of the 1760's, Dutillot furthermore brought Quesnay and Mirabeau's Philosophie rurale to the library. 96 Finally, Condillac's own course of studies for Prince Ferdinand clearly had a Physiocratic orientation, one which the philosopher would not abandon until the 1776 publication of his Commerce and government.

Figure 2 :

 2 Figure 2: Dutillot's Library by Topic (as Percentages)

  attempt to strengthen his position Dutillot succeeded in luring the great engineer Pierre-Paul de Cotte to Parma from the Republic of Genoa in 1765, entrusting him with the route and the task of supervising the construction site. Ultimately, however, it was the direct intervention of the French crown in Genoa that made it possible to reach an agreement and begin the actual work. 114 112 On this notion see Lepetit, Chemins de terre et voies d'eau. 113 AN, K 1356, n°111, "Memoir of Dutillot on his ministry." 114 Palumbo, La strada, 77-120; Cipelli, "Storia dell'amministrazione", 224-226. Map 4: "Topographic Map of the Great New Road Marked in Red from Sestri to Pò" (ASP, Mappe e disegni, 28/3, undated).

  Dutillot's Duchy of Parma lay at the crossroads of these two types of colony and was not very far from what Forbonnais had in mind when he described ancient colonies which only had been meant to support the trade and defense of their metropoles. 117 Indeed, Dutillot in the end showed little interest in cereal cultivation, and it is hard to imagine the Duchy providing much help to a French army in need of manpower. Given its imports from France, the Parmese colony could anyway serve to enrich the metropolis, though Versailles also disbursed great sums to secure its domination of the Duchy. What remains clear is that Dutillot sought to make the Duchy increasingly less dependent on neighboring Italian states 116 AAE, Correspondance diplomatique, 95CP-29, f°173-181; Palumbo, La strada ; Gandini, Compendio Storico di Piacenza, II, 424.117 Forbonnais, Elemens du commerce, II, 2-23.

Chaussinand-Nogaret, Choiseul; Cottret, Choiseul; Villiers, La Marine de Louis XVI.

Singh, "L'importance stratégique des colonies antillaises".

Skornicki, "Le pour et le contre".

Reinach, Recueil, 166; Brunetière, "Étude sur le XVIIIe siècle"; Skornicki, "Le pour et le contre ».

Richard, Description, II, 41.

See, for his Colbertism, Maddalena, "Il governo del ministro Du Tillot," 116; Bargelli, La città dei lumi, 17-72. See also Tocci, Il Ducato di Parma e Piacenza, 84. On French Colbertism, see Minard, La fortune du colbertisme.

; Benassi, "Guglielmo Du Tillot -Capitolo V: Gli elementi del progresso economico", 143-145 ;Bédarida, Parme et la France,[397][398][399][400][401][402][403][404][405][406][407][408][409][410] On this issue in France, seeKaplan, Bread, Politics and Political Economy. 106 AN, K 1356, n°64.-110, "Lettres de Dutillot".

AAE, Diplomatic Correspondence, f°162.

Concerning the "famine plot" in France, see Kaplan, Le complot de famine.

In 1756, Dutillot brought a troupe of French theater actors and singers, the Delisle Company, to Parma and established himself as a veritable minister of culture. He himself chose the plays (all French), had them translated and printed in Italian, was interested in costumes and staging, and wished to police the morals of the theater. It was forbidden to shout, whistle, go to the dressing rooms, or carry a sword, and it seems, if the great playwright Carlo Goldoni is to be trusted, that Dutillot's rules were even respected. Rahul Markovits has gone so far as to speak of "cultural Colbertism" in this context, Parma itself made a stage for French absolutism in a literal sense when Dutillot chose Racine's Mithridate, Louis XIV's favorite tragedy, as the first play to be performed in the city. For, as Argental reminds us, "taking care of the performance must be part of a good administration." By using a French dramatic repertoire to structure Italian music, Dutillot sought not merely to symbolically express France's regeneration of Italy, but also to celebrate and deploy the contemporary cultural capital of Paris and Versailles. Needless to say, the policy aroused ambivalent feelings among Italians. Even sardonic Sgavetti was forced to admit that people rushed to the theater and that the Italian version of Rameau's Les Indes Galantes was a public success. At the same time, he resolutely held back, claiming he would not even have gone had they paid him. He may have held a minority position, but still wielding his bitter irony, he mocked Dutillot's demeanor and rules for the theater, all too aware of the symbolic power they carried.

"I think it would please the Lord," he noted, "to be equally respected in his Church." 77 Along similar lines, Dutillot invested heavily in the sphere of public education in Parma. The centerpiece of his policy was the Parmese Library, begun by Philip and first opened under Ferdinand. As Dutillot put it, this monument to culture "will, in one or two generations, ensure a revolution most favorable to public education." To this end, he entrusted Fr. Paolo Maria Paciaudi (1710-1785), a famous antiques dealer, to run it with Deleyre. 78 These men brought hundreds of books and newspapers from France through the intercession of Claude Bonnet, Parisian banker and tax farmer at the court of Parma. 79 What is today the Palatine Library contains almost everything that was published in France at the time in the fields of science, belles-lettres, philosophy, commerce, and agriculture. Next, Dutillot turned his attention to the College of Nobles. The institution had been founded under the Farnese and was directed by Jesuits, but Dutillot took control of the appointment of professors there 77 Markovits,Civiliser l'Europe,[134][135][136][137][138][139][140][141][142][143][144]Butler,chap. 3. For perspectives on such dynamics in the early modern period, see Inger Leemans and Anne Golgar (eds.), Early Modern Knowledge Societies as Affective Economies, London: Routledge, 2021. 78 AN, K 1356, n°111, "Mémoire de Dutillot sur son ministère". 79 Mandich, "La diffusion des savoirs dans la correspondance de d'Argental".