The eagle eye of the Habsburg family on the “Kingdom of Naples: Lights and Shadows of Queen Maria Carolina at Court

In the geography of the great alliances planned by Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, the government experiences of the various satellite courts of the Habsburg children, acted in a close relationship of brotherhood, through an interplay of information and decisions which had Europe as their object. The Kingdom of Naples claimed the need to aim for national independence and the desire to escape from heavy foreign economic influences. In the Kingdom of Naples we have the beginning of a historical cycle inaugurated by the entry into public life of a cumbersome figure: Queen Maria Carolina. Her image is essential for renewing the internal management of the Kingdom of Naples in the last decades of the eighteenth century. During the last quarter of the eighteenth century, in fact, many attempts made by government were the index of a very bold vision, which was open to radical reforms, although not entirely freed from the despotic tendency towards centralization which had never been manifested in the Two Sicilies. In fact, the Kingdom of Naples was disputed between the Bourbon court on one hand, and Habsburg-Lorraine on the other; So it is clear that the interest that the brothers of Maria Carolina, Joseph II and Leopold, showed in the Neapolitan Court and the Queen herself, was a manifestation of their intention to maintain the Neapolitan Kingdom in the orbit of their family sphere, without making their weight felt. Conflicting versions regarding private and public aspects of the action of Maria Carolina, might lead one to think that, probably, they are the results of partial interpretations influenced by personal beliefs regarding the events, by preconceptions and subjective judgments that prevent an overview of the family, private and political dimension of the Queen. As we have already had occasion to observe, Maria Carolina provoked diametrically opposed judgments, mainly among historians and politicians of her age. This might imply that they were influenced not only by their personal ideologies and their way of thinking, from the testimonies of persons of which, unfortunately is not possible to judge the reliability. For a great part of Italian and French historiography, Maria Carolina regency was annoying and disruptive, while in Austria she was considered the legitimate Queen; they are the effects of a perspective dominated by a national identity. This paper intends to present the first results obtained through the analysis of the correspondence which is the object of a larger ongoing monograph concerning correspondence between Maria Carolina with her brothers, covering the period between 1778 and 1789. The goal is to demonstrate how the Neapolitan politics of the eighties has been dominated, even in the most recent reconstructions, by a reading in a spirit of continuity between the seventies and the nineties, and as if the revolution of 1799 was the effect of direct and political choices that went back much earlier. In any case, a kind of dominance of the national component - both Italian, and Austrian - is preserved. And sot this image, which has been largely maintained even in recent years, although with different shades of meanings and more refined arguments, deserve to be reconsidered in light of different and unpublished documents.