Page 39 - Changing Living Spaces

The Privatization of the Common Real Estate in Lombard Alpine Valleys

The Economic Changes in the Lombard Alpine Valleys During
the French and Austrian Domination
The economic context that allowed the maintenance of social and demo-
graphic equilibrium in the Lombard Alpine valleys changed greatly in the
nineteenth century: political choices and technological innovations led to
a gradual reduction of Alpine self-governing institutions and their role in
the maintenance of common resources. As a result, the area of common
real estate and its economic function decreased for the people living in
the Alpine valleys. The increasing financial needs of the state and the con-
sequent increase in real estate taxation made it more and more difficult
to manage Alpine common land;4 this means that the progressive reduc-
tion of common real estate was attributable to the state, i.e. to the same
institution that had previously allowed Alpine communities to manage
the commons thanks to the rights granted to villagers to most (and of-
ten all) of the fruits.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, real estate taxation in-
creased sharply due to the new Napoleonic cadastre, and this reduced the
actual revenues that Alpine villages could distribute to their communi-
ties. The Napoleonic wars reduced the public funds available to local ad-
ministrations and, consequently, their control over the exploitation of
common real estate as well as investments, to obtain the same yields.
Moreover, the first decades of the century were characterized by the adop-
tion of new laws based on the bourgeois ideology that assumed that the
improvement of production depended on the abilities of entrepreneurs,
which were considered better than those of collective institutions from
the Middle Ages. The French (and after the fall of Napoleon, the Austrian)
authorities considered that private owners were better able to exploit the
real estate than the Alpine communities, and so they favoured the sale of
the commons, or its lease if it was not possible to find new buyers and if
the majority of the villagers managed to prevent the sale.
In 1820, new Austrian legislation favoured the sale or lease of commu-
nal land, and a further reduction of communal land was related to the
law enacted in 1839, which provided for the forced sale of a large part of
Lombard common real estate (Raccolta Atti Governo 1820; 1839; Pitteri
2005); the goal was to increase the output of these common lands through

4 About the relevance of public institutions’ choices for the social and economic
evolution of a State or a region see, among others, North (1990; 2005). Concern-
ing the Lombard case during the nineteenth century, see: Locatelli and Tedeschi
(2017; 2018a; 2018b; 2022).

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