Botta, Carlo

BOTTA, CARLO. - Italian politician and historian, b. at S. Giorgio Canavese on 6 Nov. 1766, d. at Paris on 10 Aug. 1837. A physician richly endowed with sound literary and scientific culture (at Corfu he would complete 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 land and a financial minimum for every family. From Corfu, where he lived between 1797 and 1798, he then moved on to the Valtellina and thence to Turin, 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 was said to be disgusted with the French, who, after having plundered Italy under the guise of liberty, were letting the patriots die of hunger. With 18 other exiles he addressed in July 1799 a petition to the Council of Five Hundred, protesting against «the proconsuls, worthy imitators of Verres» and urging them to accomplish «an immortal work», to create «a great republic, worthy of your wisdom and of the majesty of the people you represent». But this idea of the unity and independence of Italy was poorly received in official French circles, and B., threatened with expulsion, had to confine himself to his studies and his profession. Having returned to Italy after Marengo, he was a member of the Piedmontese Executive Commission, and, after the annexation of Piedmont to France, deputy for the department of the Dora to the Legislative Body (1804). Hostile to Bonaparte and full of patriotic feelings, having resolved to write history, around 1806 he set to work on the Storia della guerra dell'indipendenza degli Stati Uniti d'America (1809), in which he abounded in information and a certain doctrinairism was accompanied by eloquent harangues and colourful descriptions. A robust writer, even if too turgid, an admirer of the Latin and Italian classics, he held a Tacitean-humanistic conception of history, which led him to emphasize interpretation and the moralistic aim. For this reason, in narrating the young history of the United States, he sets Washington against Napoleon and sententiously extols the revolutionaries of America. 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 experiences, if not of more reliable investigations (he was little inclined to «rummage through the archives»), he published the Storia d'Italia dal 1789 al 1814, in which he now revealed himself ever more clearly as a reactionary and a moralist discontented with everything and averse to any institutions other than the revival of the reforms of the eighteenth century, understood in the manner of the Enlightenment thinkers and the royalists, and therefore in an anti-papal and anti-ecclesiastical sense. Even more uncertain and weak in its fundamental principles is the Storia d'Italia continuata da quella del Guicciardini fino al 1789, which would provoke, also for the reasons set out above, the severe criticisms of Balbo and Gioberti. These works were placed on the Index.

In the second work too, lay moralism prevails. But Croce rightly claims in B.'s favour his mastery of writing and the nobility of his language, which stand in contrast to the slovenliness of the eighteenth century, and a certain impassioned eloquence and a certain vivid descriptive colour. Well regarded by Charles Albert, who named him a knight of the civil merit of Savoy and assigned him a pension, he returned to Piedmont in 1832. His pronounced conservatism is evidenced by a scarcely democratic opinion on the reorganization of the State and by the approval he gave to the ruthless repressions of the liberal attempts of 1834.

Alberto Maria Ghisalberti