4 - Government and politics in the Savoyard state, 1690–1720

Summary

Historians of state formation in early modern Europe have tended, applying the insights of the sociologist Max Weber, to emphasise the development of centralised, formal, impersonal, specialised and ‘bureaucratic’ structures within the polity, not least as instruments for the mobilisation of the resources (notably men and money) necessary for war. Federico Chabod, for example, saw the development of bureaucratic structures and mentalities in sixteenth-century Milan as the most significant contribution of the Renaissance to the emerging modern state, while, for Matthew Anderson, disunity and the failure to develop an effective central administration cast serious doubts on whether in 1713 the Austrian monarchy could be called a state at all. Since the 1960s, however, the concept of what has sometimes been called the ‘administrative monarchy’, i.e. a centralised personal royal absolutism based on a network of local agents, such as the French intendants, has come under attack from a number of directions.

Just how far both the older and the more recent approaches go to understanding the newly effective power of princes and the state – explanations which have largely been developed in relation to early modern France – is one of the concerns of the present chapter. It seeks, firstly, to understand just how far the process of Savoyard territorial state formation in these decades was accompanied by, even necessitated, the development of more bureaucratic, centralising and ‘rational’ administrative structures – what John Brewer has called the ‘hidden sinews’ of power – to mobilise more effectively the resources of the ‘fiscal-military state’.