6 - Regions and communities in the Savoyard state, 1690–1720

Summary

State formation in early modern Europe was, as we have seen, an internal as much as an external process. This involved not merely the development of new administrative structures for the more effective control of subjects and mobilisation of resources but also the greater integration into those structures of traditionally independent provinces or communities, what Giorgio Chittolini has called the progressive ‘aggregation of particularisms’ and what Carlo Belfanti and Marzio Romani have called the domestic politica della frontiera, i.e. the removal of internal frontiers, matching the rationalising of external borders with other states. The Savoyard state, like so many early modern European states, comprised a number of different regions and communities, each with its own distinct sense of itself and of its relationship with its prince, and, therefore, one in which this process of integration was, in some respects, appropriate. And in fact, each region of the Savoyard state had its own distinct experience of state formation, not least in this decisive phase of the process between 1690 and 1713. Hitherto, what has most attracted attention has been the model of integration offered by the province of Mondovì, namely, the military conquest and definitive subjugation of a hitherto rebellious, and to a degree unintegrated, region of the state.