NEO-GUELPHISM. - The antecedents of N. must be sought in Romanticism, which asserted itself in various ways in the new culture and the new post-revolutionary politics throughout Europe. The intertwining of historicist motifs with the revaluation of popular traditions, with the liberal and patriotic ideology born of the French Revolution itself and of the wars of the Napoleonic period, provides its essential premises. The defense of historical rights leads, in the first counter-revolutionary Neo-Guelphs, to legitimist-conservative arguments, as in De Maistre's essay on the Pope, written on the eve of the Piedmontese liberal revolution of 1821. But in the new generations the "national mission" of the papacy, the concepts of "freedom of the Church" and "national freedom," of "civilization" and "Christian progress," already acquire an entirely different meaning. When Foscolo celebrates the spiritual force of the papacy, abandoning sensationalist premises, and Rosmini doctrinally perfects Romantic spiritualism, with motifs drawn from the currents of Christian natural law, true N. is born, with its characteristic historiographical and political "myths."
The various regional shadings are noteworthy: in Piedmont the Catholic-Italian legitimism of a Vidua is possible, or the liberal legitimism of a Cesare Balbo; in the Lombardo-Veneto, Rosmini's polemic against jurisdictionalism; in Naples, or among Neapolitan émigrés, the utilization of a Vichian heritage (which nevertheless cannot make one forget the traditional anti-curialism, as is already evident in an article by Cuoco, though aimed at praising Napoleon's concordat policy, recalling that the Church preached "humanity and liberty" in the Middle Ages: Scritti vari, I, Bari 1924, p. 66).
The central nucleus of Neo-Guelph culture, which progressively transforms itself into a political force, remains the new vision or the new historical sense, which matures in an attentive study of the Christian Middle Ages, the "sacred age" of religious and political origins: the Church, mother of nations and of civilization, the glories of the free Communes and of the Lombard League, model of national confederation, the fruitful conflict between Church and Empire, are the great historical symbols on which the impassioned discussion of the "Catholic-liberal" school turns, from Manzoni to Balbo, to Troya, to Tosti and to Capponi. Gioberti, with the "Galeotto book" on Italian Primacy, inaugurates the great "literary conspiracy" of the moderate Neo-Guelphs in 1843: but the elaboration of a rhetorical-political myth also closes and limits the process of elaboration and enrichment of the movement in its broadest cultural and moral significance. An internal opposition then takes shape between liberal Catholicism and N., whose terms it is not easy to define precisely.
The principal element of the dissent, on account of which no solidary Neo-Guelph-liberal political current is constituted, and still less an embryo of a party (setting aside also the political situation in the individual Italian States before 1848), is precisely the different approach that individuals and groups, scattered across the various political and cultural centers, give to the problem of temporal power: for some Neo-Guelphs, e.g. Rosmini, temporal power had a positive function, beyond the Renaissance itself, and even into the Risorgimento age. The polemic against the Jesuits is the second myth that Gioberti arouses, with the famous Prolegomeni of 1845, in order to bind to the Neo-Guelph current a broader host of cultured liberals (G. Montanelli, Memorie..., I, Turin 1853, p. 133). The most acute adversaries of Giobertism are not deceived, those who regret the sincerity of earlier attitudes (Correnti in 1846 evokes the philosophy of Genovesi, who "sincerely aspires to religion," while others now seem to him to submit to a religious tutelage not deeply felt: Scritti scelti, I, Rome 1891, p. 482), nor are those who, like Galeotti, judge it opportune to descend from the "magnanimous dream" to more concrete analyses. Even one who poses the problem of nationality in terms of natural law, like Fr. Luigi Taparelli, a Jesuit, can bring to bear motifs in a certain sense realistic against Giobertian ideology. There remains to Gioberti the initiative of penetrating better the demands of the contingent polemic, and of freeing himself at times even from the dogmas of the doctrinaire.
The election of Pius IX (1846), who had and nourished far-sighted Neo-Guelph sentiments, and the early years of his pontificate mark the beginning of a new moment, or are indeed the prologue of the entire European revolution of 1848. Tommaso and Cattaneo, from different sides, arrive at the conclusion that the myth of the national mission of the papacy moved the popular soul to its depths: nor are genuinely religious demands lacking alongside the political and national ones. Even the uncertain "separated Catholics" aim rather at spiritualizing the Church than at creating an agnostic State: many Neo-Guelphs wish to "harmonize the two institutions, to see them live in symbiosis" (Petrocchi). The dissension between national politics and the politics of legitimacy and of treaties, which seems better suited to the demands of Catholic universalism, undermines from the outset the efforts of Pius IX and of the pro-Italian advisers, from Corboli Bussi to Rosmini. In the catastrophe of 1848 perish the hopes placed in the weak reformism of the regional States and the sometimes fraudulent equivocations about the task to be entrusted to the "liberal pope."