Mercanti francesi e “nazione” francese a Napoli nel primo Ottocento

My contribute focuses on the French merchants living and working in the nineteenth century Naples. Social and economic behaviour (matrimonial strategies, networks of friendships, professional choices, business partners, etc.) of such a large business community (about one hundred people) are studied by the light of other studies concerning other foreign business elites (Swiss, British, etc.) in order to check likenesses and differences in carrying on their business and living their everyday life in the Neapolitan kingdom. While their Swiss and British colleagues show a very strong sense of identity and of belonging to a self-contained and distinct community which has no interest in local integration and supplies them the ethnic-based resources to back their own firms, French immigrants integrate very quickly in the host society, whose most influent members often become their principal partners/sponsors. In fact, through a common elite sociality and several mixed marriages, they can build networks which are very dense in the Neapolitan capital as well as very wide all over Europe and exploit the natural match between their own forms of capital and Neapolitan colleagues’ ones. This cooperation – together with an opportunistic-situational use of their own foreigner status - enables most of them to get both a satisfying stay and the economic success.