What makes this article particularly compelling is the author’s nuanced understanding of the island’s socio-political landscape and its resistance to revolutionary ideology. By emphasizing the lack of a strong bourgeoisie to translate Enlightenment ideals into action—and by highlighting the entrenched power of the aristocracy, the clergy, and the deeply rooted religious beliefs of the people—he convincingly argues that Sicily’s conservatism was not a reactionary stagnation but rather a coherent and organic response grounded in historical and cultural realities.
 |
| Viceroy Domenico Caracciolo by Gaetano Mangano |
“In 1780, when the Marquis Domenico Caracciolo became viceroy—an early forerunner of the deeds of the admiral from the same family—he began that extremely delicate process in which the politically valid forces of the island were shifted toward positions of such radicalism as to lead, in due course, to the fateful split, first emotional and then political, between Sicily and the Neapolitan mainland. Caracciolo, having spent a long time in Paris as a diplomat and deeply imbued with Enlightenment eclecticism (his friendships with the Jacobin intellectuals of the time are well known), came to Palermo with the conviction that a series of reforms and laws would suffice to bring the people ‘up to speed with the times.’ Demonstrating a remarkable capacity for action, he neglected the island’s historical, political, and social traditions, suppressed local religious orders and the Sicilian Tribunal of the Holy Office, promoted the construction of roads and the organization of convoys to make sea navigation—hindered by pirates—safer, increased the power of the police, and allied himself with the bourgeoisie in order to elevate it to a political class. His aim was explicitly to equalize all citizens in front of the authority of the State.”
Caracciolo’s attempt at modernization, undertaken without regard for the island’s historical rhythms, emerges not as visionary statesmanship but as a politically tone-deaf experiment, doomed to fail in the face of deep-rooted loyalties and social bonds.
“All this industriousness did not bring him popularity. Strangely enough, this earned him little, if any, sympathy—partly because he personally maintained a contemptuous attitude toward tradition, the aristocracy, and the culture of the Island. Before long, the antipathy he had stirred up turned into distrust and then into hostility, from the nobles who saw in him someone intending to diminish their political power, from the clergy alarmed by the suppression of religious orders, from the bourgeoisie closely linked by economic ties to the nobility, and from intellectuals who generally shared the views of the nobility and cultivated legal doctrines in defense of feudal rights and historical sciences that supported separatist arguments. He was eventually recalled.”
One of the article’s greatest strengths lies in its ability to balance political and cultural history. Ruta vividly conveys how the monarchy retained the loyalty of the Sicilian people not through coercion but through a complex web of historical memory, religious devotion, and aristocratic identity. He explains how, even in the face of Napoleonic aggression, the Sicilians did not merely defend a regime—they defended a worldview. His documentation of the popular resistance to French incursions, the failure of Jacobin propaganda, and the widespread abhorrence of Enlightenment radicalism is thorough and compelling.
“In Sicily, the French Revolution, despite the activities of emissaries and propagandists, did not give rise to subversive movements. It was rightly viewed as a seditious phenomenon. Writers such as Logoteta, l’ Ayala, the Controsceri, and Santacolomba encouraged Sicilians to remain faithful to religion and to their age-old devotion to the monarchy and thundered against ‘incendiary papers' while being pleased that their fellow countrymen were keeping themselves far away 'from the fire of an unbridled revolt...to overturn all the political ideas most solidly established by common sense and the experience of the centuries and to overthrow with one stroke the Church and the Monarchy under the lie of regeneration.’ These were clear ideas concerning the counterrevolutionary spirit, expressed by Antonino Pepi in his Discourse on the Natural Inequality Among Men.”
Furthermore, Ruta’s use of primary voices—such as Queen Maria Carolina and counter-revolutionary writers like Logoteta and Pepi—gives the article a grounded authenticity.
“How little the ideas from beyond the Alps suited the Sicilians was evident once again when the Neapolitan court moved to Sicily under pressure from the French army. In Sicily, Queen Carolina wrote to the Marquis Gallo, ‘THE VERY NAME OF THE FRENCH IS ABHORRED,’ while a lively polemic was underway, one in which Abbot Meli participated, against the "philosophers, Freemasons, know-it-alls, and politicians" from across the sea.”
The author’s recounting of the failed French military incursion at Mili and the noble-led popular resistance is as stirring as it is significant, highlighting the islanders’ willingness to defend their traditions with arms.
“The only military expedition attempted by the French against the Island ended in disaster: shortly after a division of 3,000 men under Marshall Cavaignac had attempted to establish a bridgehead, on September 18, 1810, at Mili (ten kilometers south of Messina), they were thrown back into the sea by a poorly armed populace led by the local nobles even before English troops under Campbell arrived.”
At a time when historical narratives often focus narrowly on revolutionary progress and liberal transformation, Ruta’s essay offers a welcome counterbalance. It challenges readers to reconsider the legitimacy of conservative and monarchist positions, not as mere reaction or inertia, but as coherent, deeply rooted worldviews worthy of serious engagement. Sicily, in Ruta’s hands, is not a backward province lagging behind modernity, but a conscious actor in European history, choosing continuity and faith over rupture and ideology.
“La ‘Vandea’ d’Italia” is a rich and thought-provoking contribution to the study of Sicilian history and counter-revolutionary Europe. By repositioning Sicily not as a passive backwater but as an active and conscious defender of the ancien régime, Salvatore C. Ruta offers readers a new lens through which to view one of Italy’s most misunderstood regions. This article is essential reading for historians of the Revolution, Monarchy, and the enduring power of tradition.
By Giovanni di Napoli, June 6th, Feast of St. Norbert
* Translations are my own
