MODERATI. — Those who, during the period of the Risorgimento, opposed both changing everything and preserving everything on the political and social plane.
Some men of the post-Napoleonic Restoration, opposed both to Jacobin abstractism, which wanted to make everything tabula rasa, and to reactionary abstractism, hostile to any even useful innovation, may be regarded as precursors of this view of political reality. Naturally, these men of the Restoration and their supporters (e.g., vedi il card. Consalvi) acted more out of empirical tactics and balanced common sense than from any broad theoretical vision; moreover, although they perceived the needs and tastes of an inheritance from enlightened despotism (as would be the case with the moderates properly so called), they did not accept French doctrinaire liberalism. The true moderates, while accepting the conviction of the men of the Restoration that it was necessary to oppose both reactionaries and revolutionaries, were then genuinely liberal in method (for they wished to act in political life not through force but through the transformation of ideas) and in the very theory of the constitutional State. Evidently, the term moderate is at times vague, since it includes men of very diverse backgrounds: from Balbo, so typically antidemocratic, to D'Azeglio, a supporter of popular sovereignty. The
Moderateism does not coincide with Neoguelfism, since it is a broader movement that also includes liberal Catholics who were not Neoguelfs, such as Capponi. The moderates were more or less ardent defenders of Christian civilization and convinced advocates of European unity, except, with regard to this second motive, for the Gioberti of Primato.