GALEOTTI, LEOPOLDO. — Writer and politician, born at Pescia on 13 August 1813, died at Florence on 28 August 1884. He was one of the most balanced neo-Guelphs in his booklet Della sovranità e del governo temporale dei papi, published in Paris in 1846.
G. was opposed to French constitutionalism as applied to the Papal States, since legislative power emanating from the people would have created “a complete transformation of sovereignty, which, although it might be attempted successfully in any other kind of principality, could not, under present conditions, suit the papacy” (ibid., 3rd ed. [1849], p. 297); moreover, the S. College, transformed into a Senate and a Chamber of Peers, would lose its intrinsic religious sovereignty. The crisis of the Papal States would have arisen neither from the papacy, nor from the Church, nor from temporal power itself, but solely from clerical government. He proposed the following remedies: the admission of laymen into the administration, broad municipal autonomies (drawing on Tocqueville’s thought, G. stressed how administrative centralism “enervates” peoples), the establishment of a consultative principality with the citizens’ right of petition, together with the rights of promulgation, notification, and rendering of accounts.
In 1848 G. was a member of the Tuscan Constituent Assembly; in 1859 he supported the transfer of Tuscany under the House of Savoy; in 1874 he was appointed a senator of the Kingdom of Italy.
BIBLI.: A. Gori, L. G., A. Mari e G. Montanelli, Firenze 1913; A. Anzilotti, Movimenti e contrasti per l'unità d'Italia, Bari 1930, pp. 131–66; G. Calamari, L. G. e il moderatismo toscano, Modena 1933; M. Petrocchi, Riflessi europei sul '48 italiano, Firenze 1946, pp. 28 ff., 126 ff.; A. C. Jamolo, Chiesa e Stato in Italia negli ultimi cento anni, Torino 1948, p. 43 ff. Massimo Petrocchi