Bourbon rule in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies

Bourbon rule in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies is portrayed as a monarchy of personal audiences, courtly favor, and bonds of loyalty, but also as a system whose authority is failing before the political changes of 1860. Through Don Fabrizio Corbera, Prince of Salina, and the contrasting memories of his dependants, the novel presents the end of the dynasty not as a clean passage from despotism to representative government, but as a contested change in rulers, institutions, and the language of power.

The court and the monarch

The Prince recalls audiences granted by Ferdinand II at Caserta, Capodimonte, Portici, and Naples. Access to the sovereign leads through successive rooms, passageways, and waiting chambers, from a crowded public court to a small private study where papers await the King’s signature. The route embodies the monarchy’s hierarchy: petitioners and police informers wait outside, while the sovereign’s personal presence is the final point at which the kingdom’s administration takes effect.

The room itself makes the monarchy’s character visible. Its plain walls hold royal portraits alongside religious images and devotional objects, while the desk is crowded with documents in several colors. The setting joins formal government to the household and personal authority of the King. Don Fabrizio sees a kingdom whose administration culminates in a signature, rather than an impersonal institution operating independently of its ruler.

The audience also shows how political and familial concerns coexist at court. Ferdinand II asks after the Prince’s daughters, especially his goddaughter Concetta, then praises the Prince’s scientific distinction before turning to the political situation in Sicily and asking what people there think of the Lieutenant-General. The Prince avoids supplying intelligence against the official, answering in general terms. The King’s friendly manner gives way to displeasure when he realizes that the Prince will not act as an informant; he then revives the cordial tone by inviting him to bring Concetta to meet the Queen. Royal favor is personal and changeable, and its warmth does not erase the sovereign’s expectation of political service.

The King also reminds the Prince that he is responsible for his young ward, Tancredi, and warns him to keep the young man safe. On leaving the court, the Prince feels neither friendship nor royal majesty in the familiarity he has just experienced. He wonders what will replace the monarchy and suspects that a government based in Turin may differ from the Neapolitan one chiefly in dialect. Even the possibility of a republic seems to him to threaten his status: he imagines becoming simply Signor Corbera rather than remaining a prince. His unease is not confidence in the Bourbon system; it is a recognition that its successor may change the signs of authority without changing the conditions he distrusts.

Loyalty, patronage, and local power

The old regime survives in the memories and expectations of people far below the court. Don Ciccio Tumeo recalls his father’s service in the royal household and the assistance his family received from the court during hardship. He remembers royal gifts as a concrete return for loyalty, not merely as ceremony. Under the new political order, he fears that the old reciprocal bond will be dismissed as an embarrassment, while the money and security it once supplied will not be replaced.

The Prince’s conversations with Don Pietro Russo reveal a different relationship to political change. Russo speaks approvingly of the revolutionary movement and expects lighter taxes, greater security, and more opportunity for trade, yet he also assures the Prince that his estate will be protected through Russo’s local connections. The Prince knows that Russo has concealed three hundred baskets of the Prince’s lemons and is seeking to buy another estate. Their exchange exposes how public allegiance and private advantage coexist: Russo can profess sympathy with political change while using personal access and commercial opportunity to advance himself. The Prince feels diminished by the suggestion that his safety depends on Russo’s friends, and even by the thought that his chief value may be his guardianship of Tancredi.

Such scenes set inherited loyalty against the emerging power of local wealth. Don Fabrizio Corbera, Prince of Salina, regards Russo as representative of a class gaining influence, while Russo’s assurances suggest that old property and rank can still be useful to new political actors. The monarchy’s weakening therefore does not simply remove established hierarchies. It opens room for people who can turn money, local networks, and practical leverage into political standing.

The plebiscite and the loss of a genuine choice

At Donnafugata’s plebiscite, the Prince goes to the Town Hall with Father Pirrone and Don Onofrio Rotolo. His black frock coat is the same one he wore when he visited Ferdinand II at Caserta two years earlier. Remembering the dead King as he walks to vote, he considers whether the monarchy’s failures arose from incapacity alone. He recalls Ferdinand struggling with floods of official documents and feels that the King’s unattractive public image concealed a human appeal that the Prince understands only after the dynasty has fallen.

The voting scene gives the transition a public ritual. The Prince casts a yes vote; Father Pirrone does not vote, having avoided registration as a resident, while Don Onofrio votes as the Prince wishes. The Mayor’s study displays portraits of Giuseppe Garibaldi and Victor Emmanuel II, and the three colors of the new national flag are echoed in glasses of rosolio. This small ceremonial arrangement turns an official gathering into a staging of national unity, even as the Prince’s private response remains troubled.

The announced figures—515 voters, 512 votes cast, all 512 in favor, and no votes against—make the result appear unanimous. Don Ciccio Tumeo later tells the Prince that he voted no and that his vote was recorded otherwise. His account makes the announced total politically suspect and gives the plebiscite’s apparent consensus a human cost: one voter’s stated choice has been erased. The Prince concludes that the central loss is not a different outcome, since the dissenting votes could not have changed it, but the destruction of good faith. For him, the new order has already compromised its promise by making citizens’ expressed wishes conform to an official result.

The monarchy’s end and its successor

After the plebiscite, the old royal cause persists in private grief and practical complaints. Father Pirrone tells friends in Palermo that the Bourbon flag still flies over Gaeta, but the fortress is under blockade and its prospects are poor. He warns of the new state’s confiscation laws and conscription, while local landowners and an herbalist describe the financial burdens they already face. Their concerns are concrete: the herbalist has been told to pay twenty lire annually to sell remedies he gathers and prepares himself. The loss of the monarchy is thus registered not only as a constitutional change but as a change in taxes, permissions, and the everyday relation between inhabitants and authority.

The Prince’s account of Sicily places that political change within a longer history of rule by outsiders. He describes a landscape and society shaped by rulers who arrived by force, were obeyed, later detested, and never fully understood. He regards the Sicilian character as formed by events beyond local control and by isolation. In this view, the end of Bourbon government does not end the conditions that make political reform difficult; a new government may inherit the distance between authority and those it governs.

That uncertainty returns when Cavaliere Aimone Chevalley di Monterzuolo offers the Prince a seat in the Senate of the new Kingdom of Italy. Chevalley describes a chamber intended to examine laws and represent Sicily alongside other parts of the country. The Prince acknowledges the civic case for supporting the new state but refuses the appointment. He considers himself bound to the old ruling class and to the Bourbon regime by decency, though not necessarily affection, and describes his generation as caught between an old world and a new one. Rather than accept a role in which he believes he lacks the necessary legislative experience and self-deception, he recommends Don Calogero Sedàra, whose practical power and political usefulness, he argues, better suit the institution. Sedàra later does enter the Senate. The recommendation makes the transfer of influence explicit: hereditary standing yields ground to local wealth and political effectiveness, while the new state absorbs figures already adept at using power.

The novel’s Bourbon monarchy is consequently neither idealized as a just order nor reduced to a discarded tyranny. Ferdinand II’s personal kindness and the court’s remembered acts of assistance coexist with political surveillance, administrative weakness, and the Prince’s sense that the system bears the marks of death. Its successor offers new institutions and national symbols, yet the manipulated plebiscite and Sedàra’s advancement leave unresolved whether political change has restored popular agency or chiefly rearranged who can exercise power.