Onore e mestiere--le riforme militari nel Piemonte del Settecento (review)

Piedmont—Duchy of Savoy until 1713, Kingdom of Sicily up to 1718, and finally Kingdom of Sardinia from 1718 to 1861—was the most important Italian state from a military standpoint, playing a relevant role in all five wars fought in Western Europe between 1690 and 1748. For this reason, a book on Piedmont's army like the one under review here should be of interest to Anglophone scholars who are studying the history of the region from the War of the League of Augsburg to the War of the Austrian Succession.

Dr. Bianchi has based her work on a long and exhaustive study of archival sources in Turin, and on consultation of a broad—if incomplete—range of secondary sources. To the ordinary reader interested in military matters, the results of all this digging may appear strange. In spite of the title, the main focus of the book is not on the periods when Piedmont was at war, but on the second part of the century, from 1748 to 1792, when the Piedmontese Army fought no war at all. Thus, the book revolves essentially around the House of Savoy's peacetime army.

This may be explained by the fact that the author is not a military historian, but a scholar interested in the history of political elites. As a result, while the book gives long descriptions of the links existing between various families with military backgrounds, as well as providing close examinations of individual careers, the reader remains completely befogged as to how the Piedmontese military machine was organized and how it functioned. Moreover, the eighteenth century that emerges from Dr. Bianchi's book differs substantially from the one that appears in the original documents, having become a victim of a preconceived structuralist vision of history.

However, while historical interpretation may be open to discussion, factual accuracy is not. Unfortunately, Dr. Bianchi's book contains more than its fair share of mistakes. Just to mention a few: on page 79, she confuses the Reggimento Guardie with the Compagnie delle Guardie del Corpo di Sua Mastà, the former being a legitimate infantry regiment, whilst the latter comprised a number of royal household mounted units, with various names and differing strengths; on page 113, she states that the War of the Polish Succession "broke the equilibrium that had existed since the beginning of the century," seemingly forgetting that no such thing as a military balance was possible before the middle of the eighteenth century; last but not least, she totally omits to mention the important army reform of 1751.

Finally, Dr. Bianchi's prose will be difficult to understand for readers with a less than superlative knowledge of Italian. But even virtuosos in Italian may find it difficult to make sense of the book, without previous knowledge of its subject matter. Since the Piedmontese Army has already been favoured by a good study by Christopher Storrs, it is hard to see how Dr. Bianchi's book may be useful; unless, perhaps, one wants to find out who was the second cousin of some officer or other.