BOTTA, CARLO. — Italian politician and historian, born in S. Giorgio Canavese on 6 Nov. 1766, died in Paris on 10 Aug. 1837. A wealthy man of good literary and scientific culture (he studied natural history in Corfu; later he wrote a historical poem, *Carmillo*), in 1794 he became involved in an attempt to overthrow the Piedmontese government. After a year in prison he fled to Switzerland and subsequently entered the medical corps of the French army. With this force he returned to Italy, where he took part in the famous competition won by M. Gioia (1796) with his *Proposizione ai Lombardi di una maniera di governo libero*, in which he advocated annual elective magistrates, land distribution, and a minimum financial provision for each family. From Corfu, where he lived between 1797 and 1798, he then moved to Valtellina and subsequently to Turin, as a member of the provisional government established by Joubert and an advocate of the annexation of Piedmont to France. The French catastrophe of 1799 forced him into exile in Grenoble and Paris, where, disillusioned by his earlier hopes, he is said to have been disgusted with the French, who, after having cut Italy to pieces under the guise of liberty, left the patriots to die of hunger. In July 1799, together with 18 other exiles, he addressed a petition to the Council of Five Hundred, protesting against «proconsuls worthy imitators of Verres» and urging them to accomplish «an immortal work», to create «a great republic, worthy of your wisdom and the majesty of the people you represent». But this idea of Italian unity and independence was poorly received in official French circles, and Botta, threatened with expulsion, had to limit himself to his studies and his profession. After Marengo he returned to Italy and became a member of the Piedmontese executive commission; and after the incorporation of Piedmont into France, he was elected deputy for the Dora department to the Legislative Body (1804). Hostile to Bonaparte and full of patriotic feeling, he ended his political career by devoting himself to historical writing. Around 1809 he began work on *Storia della guerra dell'indipendenza degli Stati Uniti d'America* (1809), in which a wealth of information and a certain doctrinaire approach are combined with eloquent orations and vivid descriptions. A robust writer, albeit somewhat bombastic, and an admirer of Latin and Italian classics, he had a Tacitean-humanistic conception of history, which led him to emphasize moral interpretation and purpose. For this reason, in narrating the young history of the United States, he contrasts Washington with Napoleon and grandiloquently extols the American revolutionaries.
During the Hundred Days he was rector of the College of Nancy, and at the Restoration, of the University Academy of Rouen from 1817 to 1822.
In 1824, the fruit of personal experience rather than thorough research (he was not inclined to «plunder the archives»), he published *Storia d'Italia dal 1789 al 1814*, in which he now clearly appears as a reactionary moralist, dissatisfied with everything and opposed to institutions that were not a revival of the reforms of the eighteenth century, understood in the manner of the Enlightenment and regalists, and thus in an anti-papal and anti-clerical sense. Uncertain and weak in its fundamental principles, the *Storia d'Italia* continued from that of Guicciardini up to 1789 is even more so, and it provoked, also for the reasons stated above, severe criticism from Balbo and Gioberti. These works were placed on the Index.
In the second work too, secular moralism prevails. But Croce rightly vindicates in Botta’s favour his mastery in writing and the nobility of his language, which stand in contrast to the slovenliness of the eighteenth century, as well as a certain passionate eloquence and vivid descriptive colour. Well regarded by Carlo Alberto, who made him a knight of the Order of Civil Merit of Savoy and granted him a pension, he returned to Piedmont in 1832. His pronounced conservatism is evidenced by a decidedly undemocratic opinion on the reorganization of the state and his approval of the merciless repression of liberal attempts in 1834.