BOTTA, CARLO. — Italian politician and historian, b. at S. Giorgio Canavese on 6 November 1766, d. in Paris on 10 August 1837. A physician of considerable literary and scientific culture (in Corfu he would pursue studies in natural history; later he would write a historical poem, the Camillo), he compromised himself in 1794 in an attempt to overthrow the Piedmontese government. After a year in prison he took refuge in Switzerland and subsequently entered the French army as a physician. With it he returned to Italy, where he took part in the famous competition won by M. Gioia (1796) with his Proposizione al Lombardi di una maniera di governo libero, in which he called for annually elected magistrates, distributions of towers, and a financial minimum for every family. From Corfu, where he lived between 1797 and 1798, he then went to Valtellina and subsequently to Turin, as a member of the provisional government established by Joubert and a supporter of the annexation of Piedmont to France. The French catastrophe of 1799 forced him into exile in Grenoble and Paris, where, disappointed in his former hopes, he declared himself disgusted with the French, who, after fleecing Italy under the guise of liberty, left the patriots to starve. Together with eighteen other exiles, in July 1799 he addressed a petition to the Council of Five Hundred, protesting against “the proconsuls worthy imitators of Verres” and urging it to accomplish “an immortal work,” to create “a great republic, worthy of your wisdom and of the majesty of the people whom you represent.” But this idea of Italy’s unity and independence was poorly received in official French circles and B., threatened with expulsion, had to confine himself to his studies and profession. Returning to Italy after Marengo, he was a member of the Piedmontese Executive Commission and, after Piedmont was incorporated into France, deputy for the department of the Dora to the Legislative Body (1804). Hostile to Bonaparte and ardently patriotic, having resolved to write history, around 1806 he began the Storia della guerra dell’indipendenza degli Stati Uniti d’America (1809), in which information abounded and a certain doctrinaire tendency was accompanied by eloquent speeches and vivid descriptions. A vigorous writer, even if overly bombastic, and an admirer of the Latin and Italian classics, he held a Tacitean-humanistic conception of history, which led him to emphasize interpretation and the moral purpose. Thus, in narrating the youthful history of the United States, he set Washington against Napoleon and declaimed sententiously in praise of the American revolutionaries. During the Hundred Days he was rector of the College of Nancy and, after the Restoration, of the university Academy of Rouen from 1817 to 1822.
In 1824, the product of personal experience rather than of more reliable investigations (for he was little inclined to “ransack the archives”), he published the Storia d’Italia dal 1789 al 1814, in which he revealed himself increasingly as a reactionary and a moralist dissatisfied with everything, and hostile to institutions other than a revival of the reforms of the eighteenth century, understood in the manner of the Enlightenment thinkers and royalists, and consequently in an anti-papal and anti-ecclesiastical sense. Uncertain and weak in its fundamental principles is the Storia d’Italia continuata da quella del Guicciardini fino al 1789, which, also for the reasons set out above, provoked the severe criticisms of Balbo and Gioberti. These works were placed on the Index.
In the second work as well, secular moralism prevails. Yet Croce rightly claims for B. mastery of writing and nobility of language, opposed to the slovenliness of the eighteenth century, as well as a certain passionate eloquence and a certain vivid descriptive color. Well regarded by Carlo Alberto, who named him knight of the civil merit of Savoy and granted him a pension, he returned to Piedmont in 1832. His pronounced conservatism is demonstrated by a highly undemocratic opinion on the reorganization of the State and by the approval he gave to the ruthless repression of the liberal attempts of 1834.