Naples Lazzaroni

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The Naples Lazzaroni is used as a generic term to include various kinds of the lower class people in Naples, Italy. Described as "street people under a chief", they were often depicted as "beggars"—which some actually were, while others subsisted partly by service as messengers, porters, etc.

No precise census of them was ever conducted, but contemporaries estimated their total number at around 50,000, and they had a significant role in the social and political life of the city (and of the kingdom of which Naples was the capital). They were prone to act collectively as crowds and mobs and follow the lead of demagogues, and proved formidable in periods of civil unrest and revolution.

At the time of the French Revolution, the Naples Lazzaroni were staunchly monarchist in their political inclination—the diametrical opposite of the contemporary Parisian Sans-culottes—with their (sometimes lethal) mob violence being directed against supposed republican and Jacobin sympathisers. For that reason, republicans at the time and later dismissed them as "tools of the absolutist government".

The Lazzaroni were fiercely loyal to the House of Bourbon and specifically to the person of King Ferdinand I who—unlike most monarchs of his and other times—did not keep an aristocratic distance but liked to mingle among the Lazzaroni and sport with them.

During the French military campaigns of the late 1790s, designed to export the Revolution to Italy (as to other parts of Europe), the regular Neapolitan troops did not particularly distinguish themselves against the French Army. The Lazzaroni, to the contrary, clamored to be armed and made a valiant effort to defend the city against the French—even though the royal family had already fled to Sicily. Some sources put as high as 2000 the number of Lazzaroni who were killed on a single bloody day.

Though unable to stand in face to face fighting with trained troops (a contemporary drawing shows Lazzaroni being mowed down by a volley from French guns), their resistance ensured that the Parthenopaean Republic which was estalished in Naples had no popular base of support and could only rely on the repressive power of the French Army. Thus, it collapsed when the French needed to shift much of their troops elsewhere in Italy—whereupon the Lazzaroni exacted acts of retribution upon that republic's adherents.