Esprit public in the annexed departments of the Ligurian Apennines : from submission to laws to attachment to the government

Abstract

The establishment of the First French Republic was accompanied by a policy designed to direct the "esprit public". In the years that followed, local administrators were given the task of drafting reports using this administrative category. Under the Napoleonic Empire, this policy was applied to the annexed departments. From the apparent plasticity of the "esprit public" category, the author examines the meaning attributed to this term by divers administrators, and the tools they used to objectify it. The case of the three Italian departments of the Apennines, Genoa, and Taro makes it possible to account for the way in which this policy, forged in France under the Republic, was adapted in a context of annexation and outside the republican system. By investigating the uses of the "esprit public " category it is possible to show how administrators understood the society on which their surveys were based.