Charles of Bourbon, King of Southern Italy (1734–1759): The Resilience of the Neapolitan ‘Nation’, the Development of Reformism and the Strength of the Reaction

Abstract

From the 1730s, in Spain and southern Italy—both domains of the House of Bourbon—two very different versions of court culture emerged. In 1759, Ferdinand VI’s succession to the Spanish throne after his half-brother Charles III (formerly Charles of Bourbon, as king of Naples and Sicily) showed all the signs of the profound transformation taking place in early modern culture, and notably in its social mindsets and public opinion. This new Spanish course was helped by Charles III’s presence, who, during his years spent at the head of the Italian government, had developed an idea of sovereignty far more modern than the retrospective, traditionalist one still closely linked to medieval metaphysis that had inspired his parents: Philip V and Elizabeth Farnese.

From the 1730s, in Spain and southern Italy—both domains of the House of Bourbon—two very different versions of court culture emerged. Subsequently, in 1759, the succession to the Spanish government from Ferdinand VI to his half-brother Charles III (formerly Charles of Bourbon, as king of Naples and Sicily) was immediately affected and directed by the profound transformation taking place in early modern culture in the sphere of social mindsets and public opinion.

In Italy, from the 1950s, in contrast to the prevailing neo-idealist-inspired historiography, historians of the age of the Enlightenment and the reforms considered these years to be a decisive phase for the whole of western history since, after the mid-eighteenth century, the transition from medieval traditions to modern sociality seemed to reach exceptional results on the institutional and political levels.¹ Historians saw it as a substantial and radical change in conceiving individual and social knowledge and values, to the point of seeing it as the starting point of ‘modernity’. Moreover, these theoretical and cultural innovations, which had been developing for a long time since the sixteenth century, now affected those levels of social relationships that went far beyond the realm of the elites.

This new Spanish course was helped by Charles III’s presence, who, during the years spent at the head of the Italian government, developed an idea of sovereignty far more modern than the retrospective, traditionalist one still closely linked to medieval metaphysics, which had inspired his parents, the patres, Philip V and Elizabeth Farnese.² The government of Ferdinand VI (1746–1759) also confirmed the archaic characteristics of that monarchy; it had actually strengthened its more traditional aspects to where the plan to modernise the Spanish succession—that Louis XIV wanted—could not be considered a total success.³ Following the old culture, there was a system of privileged collejos, the conservative and retroactive consequences of which were immediately highlighted by the arrival of Charles III and strongly criticised by Queen Maria Amalia, from first contact with the court of the Iberian Peninsula.⁴

Therefore, many valid reasons, some of which have already received feedback in the international literature, lead us to think that the change of direction in the Spanish government since the 1760s is a direct consequence of the dialectic of ideas and political confrontation present in the government of southern Italy and in the court of Charles and Maria Amalia of Saxony. To be precise, from the Italian conquest by Charles of Bourbon, which took place in 1734, we can see evident and conspicuous signs of an extraordinary transformation in that kingdom, albeit not without moments of withdrawal, due to the strong reaction it unleashed among a conspicuous part of the ruling class (Fig. 8.1).

Fig. 8.1

Mariano Salvador Maella and Raphael Mengs, King Charles III of Spain (1716–1788). The king is dressed in the habit of the Order of Charles III which he founded in 1771.

There were far-reaching political and social consequences to the new monarchy, both domestically and internationally. Here I will limit myself to briefly describing the experience of a radical attempt to reform the law: the institution of commercial justice based on the model of the French judiciary, which was introduced by Charles IX in Paris in an edict of November 1563.⁵

The experiment of ‘secular’ justice, set in motion by King Charles III in the final months of 1738, and popular because it was an alternative to formal justice and the traditional system of the judiciary, was ended in 1746 due to strong resistance to its innovations. The abandonment of the commercial judiciary was due to the reactionary turn that the politics of Charles of Bourbon took in those years: an involution was created, on the one hand by the surrender of the young king to the pressure of the groups interested in maintaining the status quo, and on the other—the one that carried greater weight—by the change in Spanish policy towards Italy, now deprived of the ministerial guidance of the minister José Patiño. His death in 1736 was to have long-term consequences within Italian government.

In Italy, during Count Santisteban del Puerto’s fall from government (1738), all the men of the ‘new’ Enlightenment culture (such as the magistrates Pietro Contegna and Francesco Ventura), the Cappellano maggiore (office equivalent to minister of education) Celestino Galiani, the economist Antonio Genovesi and the entrepreneur and banker Bartolomeo Intieri had unanimously judged the collaboration with Charles’s new Secretary of State—the Marquis of Salas José de Montealegre, former collaborator of the Patiño—to be extremely positive and productive. The new minister, of Sevillian origins, whose ‘troubles overwhelm everyone, attack all the old standards, turn the world upside down’, immediately gave a ‘national’ direction to internal and international initiatives, that aimed both at increasing trade and productivity and ensuring that the products and raw materials of local origin were also used by the court.⁶ This was an example for the whole of society, and it became clear the political strategy had diametrically opposite characteristics to those of the recent past. Before then, the central formula of Spanish domination had aimed exclusively at the creation of ever-more new tax revenue, selling all the shares of public debt to private individuals and also all public offices it could constitutionally sell, taking no other criteria into account.

The Birth of a Nation

Charles’s maturity and experience as king of Spain was the consequence of over twenty years on his previous throne in a social environment disintegrated, politically disunited and characterised by the general absence among its inhabitants of the public feeling that Baruch Spinoza had defined as obéissance. For the Dutch philosopher, the material constitution and existence of national law are determined by the power of the mass of the population, combined, however, with the equal progress of the ‘spiritual personality’ of the nation itself, ‘the most powerful political authority is one that rules even over the hearts of its subjects’; obedience, therefore, is a social behaviour that results from the attachment of subjects to political power, accepting their rules and their observance over time, and ‘resolving to carry out the orders of this other one, with the most sincere desire to do so’.⁷ This takes into consideration the fact that civil society constitutes a sort of collective identity that enjoys a natural right in all domains.

In southern Italy, the Spinozian obsequium, the form and substance of the political obligation typical of the great European monarchies, seemed in the eyes of contemporaries to have transformed into an opposite feeling: a deep hatred towards the representatives of the royal power.⁸

During its long dominion over southern Italy, the budgetary needs of the Iberian Crown forced Spain to adopt a policy based on the sale of state property and rents. For two centuries, unnecessary assets were also invented, including public offices often damaging to the functionality of the monarchical organisation itself. This policy was implemented with no prudence, and with a certain frequency, becoming the cause of the radical discredit that affected the entire public management. Thus, the southern state (especially the continental part, the kingdom of Naples, separate from the kingdom of Sicily) was increasingly judged by both internal and external observers to be a mass of inefficiencies and illogicism, and even accused of perjury against public faith and robberies committed against its subjects. Over time, these negative aspects made it increasingly difficult to govern.

According to credible historiographical reconstructions, this policy was the consequence of the pax hispanica made in Italy after 1553, after the Neapolitan revolution of 1547 had caused the fall of the authoritarian military government of Viceroy Pedro de Toledo, trusted politician of Emperor Charles V. From Viceroy Pedro Pacheco onwards, the Spanish court replaced its military, coercive policy with a different one: a compromise strategy, economic in nature, which Tanucci—the prime minister of Charles and later of his son Ferdinando IV—defined as ‘the contact of rottenness, the moral and political plague’.⁹ The sale of state property to the private sector was facilitated to increase state revenue and to make the wealthy share in the exploitation of the entire social fabric, and thus have an interest in being loyal allies of the government. This strategy highlighted the function of the togati, who promoted it not by intervening in support of the common good, but rather by accepting the arrangement based on deceit, compromise and parasitism. Francesco d’Andrea, the recognised leader of the togati, began the process of the historical reconstruction of the characteristic features of Neapolitan society, the particular configuration of its social structure, and the extreme concentration of power in the hands of the lawyers immediately after the great crisis of the mid-seventeenth century—after Masaniello’s revolt and the plague epidemic that scourged the kingdom in 1656.¹⁰ In his Avvertimenti ai nipoti, an autobiographical work that remained unpublished for a long time, even though the manuscript enjoyed extraordinary circulation for more than a century, Francesco D’Andrea proposed a number of interpretations that later critics have come to consider:

There is no part of the world where the ministers have greater authority than in Naples, since, as they are under no obligation to account for their actions except to our Lord the King, who is far away, nor do the lords viceroy have any jurisdiction over them; their power is recognised as being as great as it is independent, so that in ancient times they were commonly called landowners, and there is no lack of those who, no less proud, foolishly claimed this title as their own; hence the saying arose among the evil tongues, that they were earthlings, that is, devils, because there were none but devils on Earth.¹¹

His testimony, which gave rise to divergent interpretations in the past, shows that the evolution of the political tension between the centre and the periphery of the Spanish empire, and the dialectic between statuses within the kingdom led the model of the togati to prevail over the modus vivendi of the nobility, and the legal virtus to prevail over the aristocratic one. Let us follow our author for a while along the path of his reasoning intended for his descendants, whom he addresses, to ensure the continuity of his lineage (‘house’) to ‘that need for eternity’ which is proper to the aristocratic modi vivendi: ‘The path of callback, if it is very useful to all orders, is absolutely necessary to nobles outside the square’ (chap. XXXIX); he responds negatively and in great detail to the claim that the legal profession has fallen into decline (chap. XL); that the sphere of government be more easily opened to those who follow the cursus honorum of the magistracy, starting with the practice of law, which makes them particularly familiar with procedures, and which also enables them to accumulate the capital to acquire offices (chap. XLI); and that there has always been family continuity in career choices (chap. XLII).

Later, in the eighteenth century, the line of critical thinking grew and developed enormously, and there was a consensus that the togati were to be envied, as head also of all other branches of public administration and of the management of the entire public debt; it was an extreme and distorting concentration of state power and the related symbolic capital, which had been accumulating between the age of Charles V and the first king of the House of Bourbon in Naples, Charles the Infante. Among the many analyses available that are useful for a better understanding of the overwhelming power of the supremacy of the courts, the togati and the lawyers, an effective and particularly incisive synthesis of the historical precedents of the socio-institutional anomaly of southern Italy was made by Giuseppe Maria Galanti, a follower of the Enlightenment, at the end of the eighteenth century. A lawyer by profession and considered a ‘prince’ of the Neapolitan bar, he offers a brief and very effective explanation of the origin of the single dominion of law over the entire kingdom, symbolically presented under the metaphysical forms of religio juris and humanarum atque divinarum rerum notitia:

The magistrates [already] by the laws of Roger and Frederick formed another order between the nobility and the people, which above all was favoured by the government. The frequent changes in the state meant that the heads of these courts were held in high regard, because they had to be depended on for everything that concerned the entire economy. It was still necessary to consult the jurists, who professed knowledge of the laws, and knew the history of the country better than others. Thus their reputation was well established, and the country became full of jurists of all kinds.¹²

At the end of the Middle Ages this social component already enjoyed great prestige and power. Spain intervened and the Viceroy Pietro de Toledo began the political operation aimed at elevating ‘the courts to great authority’, in order to ‘lower the nobility’.¹³ Toledo not only expelled the baronage from the highest court of justice in southern Italy, but also excluded the normal, automatic presence of the high nobility of the kingdom (the legos, meaning the laymen of law, the non-experts) from the Council of State and War, unless its members were expressly called by the viceroy. The Madrilenian dispatches of 5 May 1542 and 30 October state that ‘los regents’, meaning the Regents, the jurists of the Collateral, the supreme organ of justice of the kingdom ‘enter and be in the Council ordinarily with the Visorrey’, while the cavalleros, the noble component who wore the short toga to show their aristocratic origin with the hilt of their swords, ‘henceforth, enter the Council when the Visor-king calls you’.¹⁴

The jurisdictional sphere had influenced all the institutions originating from the royal power, giving the togati the exclusive exercise of enormous power over political, social and economic life. The abnormal weight of jurisdiction had changed the structure of the southern region, making the capital, Naples, the apex of the kingdom’s political and territorial hierarchies. The city, Europe’s fourth largest metropolis in terms of population (estimated at 450,000), was home to over 30,000 lawyers.

At the local level, in the urban and rural peripheries of the kingdom, the situation was no better: Gérard Delille’s decades-long analysis of peripheral power, carried out with a fine methodological approach and based on an impressive amount of unpublished documents, shows that in southern Italy the ‘stability pact’ stipulated with imperial Spain had constructed a political system for which the appeal to the state apparatus projected local concerns and confrontations onto the centre and not vice versa.¹⁵ It is evident that all avenues of justice—to restore equilibrium following a violation or to obtain compensation and satisfaction—led to the capital. The major courts of the kingdom subjected the entire region to strict surveillance, even though there was no need for police, which was limited to Naples, entrusted to the Vicaria, and had no investigative or repressive autonomy regarding the jurisdictional powers.

And yet, within this new realm, an up-to-date culture had been operating for some time, that was perfectly in line with the advanced, even radical, content coming from influences beyond the Alps. This was a decisive factor in the favourable climate for the new monarchy, and the Neapolitan environment was very open to innovation. Plainly, one of the decisive factors that characterised Charles III’s government in a positive way was the high cultural preparation and administrative capacity of his collaborators, both those who had accompanied him from Spain, men trusted by the reforming minister, José Patiño, and the locals. The Spanish statesmen had a chance to govern in a way that would have been unimaginable at home, because in the Two Sicilies there were the conditions to create an apparatus of power and state institutions from scratch, and to make a clean sweep of the past: the king, government, court, army, fleet, even the financial budget (largely subsidised by Elisabeth Farnese, as long as she could) were new and ‘national’. The situation was nothing like that in Spain, where the monarchy was loyal to a rigid system defending established reputations and ancestral privileges.

Following Bernardo Tanucci’s judgement, more recent historiography has recognised that the main concern of Charles of Bourbon and Maria Amalia of Saxony was to create a ‘new people’ in the Two Sicilies, reformed in customs, ‘inculcating a common spirit’.¹⁶ These theses were confirmed by the recently published correspondence between Maria Amalia, queen of Spain from 1759, and Tanucci.¹⁷ Their correspondence shows that, from the time of her arrival in Naples in 1738, Maria Amalia played a leading role in the political dynamics of southern Italy, especially as she formed a close emotional bond with the young monarch. Moreover, the young Saxon queen established real, intense friendships in Naples, particularly with Tanucci, who was among the few courtiers and rulers to show himself worthy of that intimacy. On the other hand, on her arrival in Naples from Germany, the young Maria Amalia, endowed with a very acute intuition, immediately felt a strong popular feeling of goodwill towards the new monarchy. The people proved supportive of her, and this affectionate relationship is strongly imprinted in the pages of the same correspondence. This sentiment was reciprocated by the reigning couple, as seen from the total absence of empty rhetoric in Maria Amalia’s Spanish letters, and in the recurring expression with which the young queen called the Two Sicilies the ‘pupils of my eyes’.¹⁸

In Naples, perhaps the most popular and bureaucratic city in Europe, public support had always been lacking, at least until then. The young monarch understood that she had to cure the people’s tendency towards ‘joyful melancholy’; she wanted to create a strong flow of popular sympathy, more sentimental than political, towards the independent monarchy, which had been longed for and awaited for over two centuries. Tanucci, the Pisan statesman, for his part considered the love of the people for the young Ferdinand IV to be excessive, and one fact in the aforementioned correspondence is surprising: both interlocutors were certain a strong alliance existed between the monarchy and the entire social body, a phenomenon never before reported in southern Italy. With Charles, who was now the national king, the ‘hatred’ towards the Spanish, the last illustrious victim of which was the Gallispanic Philip V, changed into sincere empathy. There is further evidence of the positive public spirit of that period in the sincere support of the men representing the Enlightenment culture of the government of Montealegre, which they called upon them to contribute to the construction of the new monarchy.¹⁹

Reform, Resilience, Defeat

The study of the reform of justice, the introduction of the commercial judiciary desired by the group of reformers who supported the new political course of Minister Montealegre, its failure and the restoration of conservative forces demonstrated the ‘resilience’ of the old system of power and its apparatuses. The potestative macrostructure that had endured for centuries was a mixture of the judicial–political institutions of the capital, a financial capitalism based on the control and exploitation of a large part of the state apparatus, and a mentality of the ruling class crystallised within a formalistic, ontological legal logic. After the initial defeat of the conservative forces in 1738, they showed great resilience, which enabled them to quickly restore the status quo in 1746.

In southern Italy—a veritable republic of jurists under Spanish rule—certain general principles were adopted by a ministerial class which persisted for many centuries. They governed the entire system of law: both its general spirit, and every rule and its most minute application. In the face of this great stability of structure, any legislative intention of the political power was nullified, precisely because the juridical techniques in use led the lawyers to prefer the predominant part of the entire legal architecture. Thus the new, spurious legislative element was incorporated and modified to bring it into harmony with the whole—to annul it.

An excellent example of the power of the central courts of the kingdom was the usurpatio jurisdictionis of the proceedings administered in the provinces of the kingdom. It consisted in removing civil and criminal trials from the peripheral instances, concentrating the costs of procedures in Naples. The Sacred Royal Council (the highest court, based in the Neapolitan capital) prevented the Vicaria (the lower Capitoline court) and the Udienze (lit. hearings, the provincial courts) from proceeding with a case, and referred the proceedings to them; the Vicaria inhibited the Udienze and local courts (including feudal ones), and arrogated; the Udienze, finally, inhibited local courts, and arrogated the proceedings. The movement of inhibition and arrogation was centripetal, so that an overwhelming number of disputes reached the courts in the capital, disturbing what today would seem to be the normal order of jurisdiction, violating the principle of hierarchical control by degrees through appeals, and accentuating the unease and insecurity of the provincial jurisdictions and their inhabitants. Injunctions, with the instruments of arrogation and delegation, represented the normal means of exercising the sovereignty of the high courts over the periphery in the legal–political field.²⁰

A new judicial body with broad and flexible powers, such as the Supremo Magistrato del Commercio (Supreme Commercial Court), which could easily be controlled by the executive, would undermine a highly conservative judicial system resistant to government and reform. So, after the failure of the revolutionary experience of Minister Montealegre, as Tanucci well understood, the only realistically viable alternative had to be found in the system itself. Throughout the eighteenth century, the preferred tactic of the royal government to deal with new situations was the setting up of special juntas, customary mixed bodies appointed directly by the Secretary of State. However, these institutions were in addition to the numerous other courts. The latter immediately clashed with the councils over the definition of their respective spheres of competence. The appropriation of a certain number of trials was necessary to provide sufficient financial income for judges and their officers. While the juntas were not the best of political instruments for reducing the excessive power of the judiciary and the bureaucratic apparatus, they were the lesser evil needed to push through any reform, and Tanucci was forced to resort to them continuously. As the Prammatica instituting the Supreme Commercial Court spelled out, introducing a commercial justice system was part of

intricate, troublesome and lengthy litigations, which necessarily take place in the ordinary courts by reason of the infinite multitude of affairs with which they are forcibly charged, in such a way it is not possible, by any diligence one may wish to use, to give the term of office in the ordinary courts to the pleas of the merchants; all the more so because it often happens, due to the variety and diversity of jurisdictions enjoyed by each court, that it is not easy to discern to which court the litigation, born in matters of commerce, belongs.²¹

Besides the many advisory and administrative activities carried out alongside its judicial work, the new court was to assess all disputes relating to contracts of sale, goods and supplies, prices, foreign exchange, trading companies, bankruptcies, insurance, maritime freight and shipwrecks. The large range of tasks and attributions of the court would inevitably compete with other instances, a situation made even more difficult by certain radical innovations. Proceedings were conducted in Italian and were simplified and rapid—for which read ‘prompt’ and ‘summary’. It should be added that the largest innovation was the presence of judges who were ‘shopkeepers’ with no legal background—individuals who were merchants in life, who were chosen by the town assemblies. The inspiring criterion of the reform initiative was that of commercial justice resulting from the ‘representative democracy’ of bodies and classes, as pointed out by the high magistrate Pietro Contegna, one of the creators and managers of the bold reform.

Thus, the members of these courts of justice not only came from the same background as those they were judging, but they were still part of it at the time of the proceedings. Their common feature was that they were close in terms of interests and cultural milieu. What was challenged by the reform was the functioning of the ordinary courts, the high cost of justice for litigants and its unhealthy slowness: all mechanisms that made the value of social litigation high, with disastrous consequences for the economy. As written in the edict for the creation of the Supreme Commercial Court, ‘among the inconveniences which disturb [commerce], the lack of a truly expeditious and prompt administration of justice is chiefly considered’. For Montealegre, promoting a ‘very valuable’ trade in the kingdom meant putting an end to those ‘intriguing and long quarrels’.

The underlying idea was obviously that judicial culture would be deeply shaped and influenced by the social identity of individuals. There was a conviction in Turin that ‘such a jurisdiction does not suit legal persons, because the Code and the Digest are absolutely useless, indeed very prejudicial’. The reason for the ‘prejudicial’ presence of court judges and lawyers in the court of the Savoy capital was the predictable expectation that, over time, the use of ‘judicial styles and forms’ would become established in the commercial courts, which they wanted to eliminate. To use ordinary magistrates in commercial courts ‘would be like setting fire to commerce’, which, by its inherent qualities, does not permit treating as a ‘point of reason what is simply a fact’.²²

It should also be borne in mind that the founding rules stipulated that councillors from the aristocratic and merchant classes did not have the right to vote on purely judicial matters, yet the daily practice of the Supreme Commercial Court was destined to overturn this rule. It was not long before the court was flooded with requests from parties for ‘speedy and expeditious justice’, so that the cases were routed by the President of the Court to the other members, as ‘commissioners’ (investigating judge and rapporteur), in an undifferentiated manner, because it was intended as a practical solution to the problem of congestion at the new body. The Enlightenment lawyer Giuseppe Maria Galanti explained that in the Neapolitan judicial system, the preliminary phase of determining the competent judge was the most complex, and, for the purposes of the judgement, also the most influential of the entire procedure: once the preliminary question was resolved, all uncertainty as to the outcome of the trial disappeared. Thus, in a few months, the body had already run through the internal mechanisms and psychological mechanisms of its judges, so their social roles, togati and mercatores, had blurred into the commercial ‘spirit’ that pervaded the institution.

Montealgre’s reforms affected several ancient privileges that the Neapolitan ruling classes had long enjoyed. Not limited to the economic sphere, his reforms went even further and touched on other interests. Besides the multiple jurisdictional conflicts, consequences of a judicial pluralism asserting a form of justice, that in the end was almost non-existent because it was simultaneously self-referential and the guarantor of every ‘right’ of resistance put in place by the juridical actors (from the confugium, the instrument preferred by the poorer classes, to the recusal of the judge, favoured instead by the great nobility), other deep causes would call into question the innovative tribunal and would end with the definitive closure of this experience. Just like the commercial law invoked by the Sevillian secretary to remedy the Neapolitan jurisprudential disorder, the factors that closed the revolutionary experience were the product of a mixture of domestic and international politics, and psychological and mental elements.

The bold design of the commercial courts was finally blocked by the censorship imposed by King Charles III and the men of the Neapolitan court (not least among them, Tanucci, who only belatedly understood and repented), and this condition was as much political and coercive as it was ideological and theoretical. As soon as Marquis Giovanni Fogliani took over from the disgraced Duke of Salas, Charles of Bourbon supported the request of the Neapolitan Piazzas, who in January 1746, in exchange for a donation of 300,000 ducats, had asked for the competences of the Supreme Commercial Court to be limited to foreign trade cases only. Most of the commercial courts and maritime commercial courts were also abolished, and only those of the capital, Barletta, Manfredonia, Gallipoli, Crotone and Reggio remained in operation. Therefore, the discussion of commercial, maritime and international law was prevented or, at best, evaded, and ended up by getting lost in the courts of the other judicial systems in insignificant and dispersive technical details, compared to the substantive legal rationes.

The end of the experiment of the Supreme Commercial Court meant the return to a metaphysical justice very distant from a social and empirical conception of law, and from a practical viewpoint the gaps in political powers were filled by the elevated priestly authority of the togati. It was up to them and their minister Tanucci to meddle with the souls of the people. However, neither Tanucci nor the togati ministers could solve the root of the problem, and continued to implement their interests by elaborating a jurisprudential law, with characteristics of disorder and lack of clarity, aimed at attributing modest space to legislative activity. This dialectic was instead intense on the doctrinal level: here the solutions and scholarly indications were subtle and specious, because they were dictated by competing ideal and material interests. They were irreconcilable positions, and therefore the legal dialectic was rarely screened and phased by legislative declarations—by an act of synthesis. How could reliable jurisprudence supporting trustworthy social and economic relations be created under these conditions?

It was only when the prime minister realised that the world had changed rapidly and that impatience from below, from people no longer willing to be passively governed, threatened the entire European political system, that he issued the dispatches of 1774, which required the patriarchal Neapolitan and Sicilian judiciary to justify their sentences. The act had a definite constitutional intent, which was shown by the Maupeou Reform. However, the one initiated in Paris three years earlier ended in total failure, in other words in full restoration. Due to strong opposition from the judiciary, Tanucci’s initiative soon failed. Then, two years later, the old minister was dismissed from the government of the Sicilies.

In a more general reformist framework of criminal justice, the objections of the judge were dealt with in an excellent manner by two southerners: Gaetano Filangieri, whose work would exert a great influence throughout the Western world, and Francesco Mario Pagano. He saw his ideas for a radical reform of criminal justice realised, albeit for a few months, for the brief duration of the Neapolitan Republic of 1799.