CARLO EMANUELE IV of Savoy, King of Sardinia. - Born 24 May 1751 in Turin, died 5 Oct. 1819 in Rome. He was the son of Vittorio Amedeo III and Maria Antonia Ferdinanda of Spain and reigned from Oct. 1796 to June 1802. The young prince’s education was entrusted to the Barnabite Father Giacinto Sigismondo Gerdil, later a cardinal, from whose teaching he received a lively sense of piety that stayed with him all his life, sustained him through the hard years of exile, and prepared him to don the religious habit a few years before his death. In 1775 he married, with ecclesiastical dispensation, Maria Clotilde of Bourbon, sister of Louis XVI, a woman of outstanding virtue who was declared Venerable by Pius VII in 1808.
When he ascended the throne in Oct. 1796, after his father’s death, C. E. IV found the state in an especially difficult diplomatic and political situation. The French were in effective control of Savoy and Piedmont and hoped to secure legal cession of Sardinia through negotiation. In this state of affairs, the new king’s only remaining option was to ally with France—a necessity made more urgent by the growing attempts of republican circles in the kingdom to undermine the monarchy. Thus, after the defeats of Wurmser and Alvinzi and the Peace of Tolentino, in the spring of 1797 the king agreed to cede Sardinia to France, pending the conclusion of a general European peace, in exchange for a vague promise of territorial compensation elsewhere in Italy; he also undertook to contribute troops to France’s wars. Yet the neighboring republics, the Ligurian and the Cisalpine, could ill tolerate the persistence of monarchical institutions in Piedmont, and their envoys in Turin, backed by the French representative, openly encouraged the innovators to rebellion. Indeed, conspiracies and uprisings broke out in various parts of the kingdom, but all were quickly suppressed. The émigrés, however, gave C. E. IV no respite, and one of their incursions from near Carosio led to war with the Ligurian Republic. France, intervening under the pretext of ending the conflict, demanded as a guarantee of the king’s good faith the surrender of the citadel of Turin. At this juncture, Paris and Vienna considered with interest a plan to make C. E. IV King of Rome to protect the Pope and the Catholic religion, thereby leaving France as arbiter of Piedmont. The king, however, would have none of this transfer.
Toward the end of 1798, fear of a rear attack by the Piedmontese army led France to cast off all pretense. On the night of 7–8 Dec. the king was forced to sign an act of abdication. He then left for Parma, thence to Florence, and finally to Cagliari. During his journey he stopped at the Charterhouse in Florence and offered asylum in Sardinia to the exiled Pius VI. Once he reached his overseas dominion, he protested the French violence and declared null the act of abdication extorted from him by force and threats. After his wife’s death in Naples on 7 March 1802, he settled permanently in Rome and on 4 June 1802 abdicated the throne in favor of his brother Vittorio Emanuele I. On 1 Feb. 1815 he entered the Society of Jesus, residing in the novitiate house at Sant’Andrea al Quirinale, in whose church he was later buried.