Guillaume du Tillot

Out of the Ducal purse, he conceded tax relief, patronage and financial support for the new industries, and offered state pensions for craftsmen who had taken on apprentices in Parma.

In agriculture, partly in response to the famine years of 1763-67, which devastated the Mezzogiorno and were felt in the North,[4] he encouraged cultivation of the potato, still a novelty in Europe.

Tillot placed his influence with the Bourbon courts of France, Spain and Naples, in reducing antiquated ecclesiastical privileges, even the freedom from taxation of properties of the Church.

Tillot instituted an Académie des Beaux Arts, a museum of Antiquities, a ducal printing-press, which produced the Gazzetta di Parma.

[6] Around Tillot an Enlightened circle gathered: Condillac, Paolo Maria Paciaudi, the typographer and publisher Giambattista Bodoni, the sculptor Jean Baptiste Boudard, and Tillot's guest at the court of Parma, the architect Ennemond Alexandre Petitot, who arrived in 1753 and provided designs for the renovated face of Parma.

[7] In 1756, Tillot invited to court Guillaume Rouby de Cals, whom he employed first in the financial administration, then as his personal secretary and aide.

He had made deep political enemies in the Church, and the new Duchess effected a shift away from Bourbon influences towards conservative Austria, though his replacement, Jose de Llano, was Spanish.