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Having adopted the model of the French police, the papal regime also assumed all of the attending functions and responsibilities. Yet, the tactlessness and inefficiency with which the papal police executed those functions soon became a subject of resentment and eventually scandal. On the one hand, critics accused the police of not performing their primary task: protecting the citizens' lives and property from crime. On the other hand, such critics complained that the police were vessatorie, or oppressive. In the eyes of the public, the police had their priorities scrambled. Instead of controlling dangerous suspects and catching criminals, they spent their time prying into people's private lives and arbitrarily harassing reputable citizens for their political opinions. In a sense, Consalvi's early dream of the police as an instrument of political power backfired, becoming a nightmare in which the police symbolized the Papal States' inefficient absolutism. Unable to cope with either the political or the social problems of the regime, the police helped set the stage for the revolution of 1831. Indeed, the failure of the police to maintain public security directly contributed to the revolution by provoking the city's elites to take control of the government in the name of law and order. To appreciate this process, however, one must understand the variety and complexity of tasks assigned to the police, as well as the critical economic and political environment in which they were carried out. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the Congress of Vienna, Cardinal Ercole Consalvi, secretary of state to Pope Pius VII, amazed the world with his diplomatic prowess as he asserted the moral authority of the papacy against the armies and victories of the allied powers. While stressing the degradation and spoliation suffered by the Pope at the hands of Napoleon, he exploited the various participants' fears of imbalance on the Italian peninsula to defeat all contenders for control of the Legations. From a position of extreme weakness he had given lie to the early warnings of Lebzeltern, the Austrian ambassador in Rome, who had assured the Pope that he would never recover the northern provinces. By June, 1815, the diplomats in Vienna had agreed to reestablish, with only minor modifications, the Papal States as they had existed before Napoleon's armies had scrambled their borders. The Austrian provisional government therefore transferred the Legations to the Pope's authorities in July of that year. Having won the day diplomatically, Consalvi now faced the consequences of his hard-fought victory and turned his talents to the integration of the contested areas with those previously recovered, a prodigious task complicated by the administrative disparities separating the regions. On one hand, the Legations and the Marches had experienced French rule for some eighteen years, and the Austrian provisional government had little altered the changes wrought after 1796. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]