Jansenist Jurisdictionalism and Enlightenment: two Ways of Thinking politics in Mid-Eighteenth Century Naples

At the end of the ‘60s, the government wished to modernize Naples’ state framework, just like the
imperial court of Vienna and the other Bourbon monarchies of Madrid and Paris. Perhaps with
some schematization, but it can be said that there the politics of reforms was inspired by an
ideology that may be defined jansenist jurisdictionalism. It was different from Enlightenment; it
was a sort of Giannonism without Giannone, but with a strong Jansenist influence and which had widened its initial
perspective of civil history to economic and social problems from the 1740’s. In this effort those
governments tried to hold talks with Enlightenment thinkers. Also in Naples. The creation of the
King’s Advocate (Avvocato del Re), a new office wanted in 1768 by minister Tanucci and
supported by Neapolitan Enlightenment thinker Antonio Genovesi, was part of this European
process. As we shall see, it arose amid controversy that revealed the disparity between the idea of
reformation that Bourbon courts had in mind at the time, and the one that Enlightenment culture had
spread across Europe. It also showed the ways in which Enlightenment culture and the policy of
absolute governments tried to reach a point of contact. When this effort, too, ended in failure in
1776, with Tanucci’s fall in Naples and Turgot’s in Paris, it proved the degree by which the
languages and horizons involved were different. The political language of the governments could be
that of jurisdictionalism; but it could not be that of Enlightenment.
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