MODERATI. - Those who, in the era of the Risorgimento, opposed on the political-social plane both total change and total preservation.
Precursors of this vision of political reality may be considered certain men of the post-Napoleonic restoration who were contrary both to the Jacobin abstractness that sought to make a complete tabula rasa of everything, and to the reactionary abstractness averse to any innovation, even a useful one: naturally these men of the restoration and their supporters (e.g., see Cardinal Consalvi) acted more out of an empirical tactic and a balanced good sense than out of a broad theoretical vision; and then in any case, if they felt the demands and tastes of a legacy of enlightened despotism (as would be the case for the moderates properly so called), they did not accept French doctrinaire liberalism. The true moderates, if they accept the persuasion of the men of the restoration that it is necessary to be both against the reactionaries and against the revolutionaries, are then frankly liberal in method (by which they wish to act in political life not with force but with the transformation of ideas) and in the very theory of the constitutional State. Evidently the term moderates is at times vague, because men of the most diverse formation fall within it: from Balbo, so typically anti-democratic, to D'Azeglio, a supporter of popular sovereignty. The moderatism does not coincide with Neo-Guelphism because it is a broader movement that also includes liberal Catholics who are not Neo-Guelphs, such as Capponi. The moderates are more or less intensely defenders of Christian civilization and convinced assertors of the common European unity, except, in this second motive, for the Gioberti of the Primato.
Bibliography4 works
Massimo Petrocchi