CHARLES FELIX, King of Sardinia. - B. at Turin on 6 Apr. 1765, d. there on 27 Apr. 1831. Fourth-born son of Victor Amadeus, who was the third king of this name, and of Maria Antonia Ferdinanda, daughter of Philip V of Spain. In 1798 he left Turin in the retinue of his brother King Charles Emmanuel IV, from whom the French had extorted the renunciation of the throne. The sovereign, having withdrawn to Sardinia, remained there no more than six months, and then returned to the mainland. On the island C. F. assumed the office of viceroy (19 Sept. 1799) and kept it even after the abdication of Charles Emmanuel IV (5 June 1802) until the arrival of the new sovereign, his brother Victor Emmanuel I (18 Febr. 1806).
A rigid guardian of the established order, C. F. strove to restore calm and tranquility on the island, which had not been immune to the influence of revolutionary ideas. Upon the coming of the new sovereign, C. F. withdrew from public life, but reassumed the office of viceroy in Aug. 1815, after the return of the sovereigns to Turin, and remained such nominally until 1821. Upon the abdication of Victor Emmanuel I (March 1821), following the uprisings that demanded the constitution and war against Austria, C. F. was at Modena; he began his reign by ordering his nephew Charles Albert, appointed regent, to break off every relation with the revolutionaries and to go to Novara to the government army. For his part C. F., once the uprisings had been exhausted and repressed, inaugurated an iron-handed political action against all those who had compromised themselves in the recent events, displaying on that occasion a severity at times even excessive. During his reign he took care to settle the question of ecclesiastical property, which had remained unsettled from the French Revolution onward, and to that end sent a plenipotentiary to Rome. The negotiations had a happy outcome, and Leo XII approved in May 1828 the compensation of the ecclesiastical properties confiscated by the State and the new distribution of capital and funds in the dioceses of the kingdom.
Bibliography4 works
Silvio Furlani
