England's political/institutional influences on Neapolitan constitutionalism, 1820–21

Abstract

SUMMARY This article examines England's political/institutional influences on the rise and development of Neapolitan constitutionalism and the attitude taken by the English government toward the Neapolitan constitutional experiment in 1820–21. The Neapolitan Constitution of 1820 was lifted almost entirely from Spain's Cadiz Constitution of 1812. It called for a single-chamber system: a national assembly elected by three-degree universal suffrage, endowed with broad legislative powers only weakly checked by the sovereign. It was a model quite different from the British one, but the central role that the Parliament assumed during this constitutional experiment (it had to supervise both the political and administrative life of the Neapolitans, and to give them justice for the wrongs they had suffered) represented an important point of contact with British political customs. The Neapolitan Constitution was also a reaction against the centralist state that the Bourbon Restoration had inherited from the Napoleonic era. In this sense, England's self-government model was more present among the Neapolitans' desiderata than they themselves even knew. English public opinion was in favour of the Neapolitan Revolution, and the Neapolitans believed that there was a precise link between the enthusiasm with which British public opinion had welcomed the revolution and the political conduct of its government. That was not the case: the attitude of the English government was characterized right from the start by considerable ambiguity. It adopted an ambiguous policy of neutrality and offered no help to the Neapolitan revolutionaries in the difficult time when they were fighting the Holy Alliance's armies.