Galeotti, Leopoldo

GALEOTTI, LEOPOLDO. - Writer and politician, b. at Pescia on 13 Aug. 1813, d. at Florence on 28 Aug. 1884. He is among the most balanced of the neo-Guelphs in his little volume, published in Paris in 1846, Della sovranità e del governo temporale dei papi.

G. is opposed to French constitutionalism being applied in the Papal State, inasmuch as legislative power emanating from the people would have created "a complete transformation of sovereignty, which, though it might be attempted with success in any other kind of principality, could not in the present conditions be suited to the papacy" (ibid., 3rd ed. [1849], p. 297); and further, the Sacred College, transformed into a Senate and a Chamber of Peers, would lose its own intrinsic religious sovereignty. The crisis of the Papal State would have derived neither from the papacy, nor from the Church, nor from temporal power itself, but only from clerical government. He proposed the following remedies: lay participation in the administration, broad communal autonomies (borrowing the thought of Tocqueville, G. emphasizes how administrative centralism "enervates" peoples), the institution of a consultative principality with the right of petition on the part of citizens, and with the rights of promulgation, notification and accountability.

In '48 G. was a member of the Tuscan constituent Assembly; in '59 he was favorable to the passage of Tuscany under the Savoys; he was appointed senator of the Kingdom of Italy in '74.

Massimo Petrocchi