<p>This article provides a history of the records classification scheme that launched modern records management systems in Italy. It describes the government administrative reforms in Austrian Lombardy (1749-1796) and during the Napoleonic period (1796-1814), when institutional and bureaucratic transformations were energized by an emerging administrative discipline. The techniques of exercising public power and the intellectual technology used to manage records shared a toolkit that featured the concepts of function and competence. The growing confidence of archivists in analyzing the nature of government and its production of records led to a methodology for categorizing governmental subject matters; a rational archival order was ideally to reflect a rationalized administration. One result was the initiation of a systematic synthesis of registration and classification that would culminate in the modern <i>protocollo-titolario</i> system. In a historical narrative, the article reveals the crucial political and social changes affecting governmental and archival practice and, reciprocally, how by establishing a uniformity of classification, the public-law administrations of this era solidified state authority.</p>