Heroes of Europe: Clemente Solaro of Margarita

source: Piergiorgio Seveso

Born in Cuneo on 21 November 1792 to a noble family unrelated to the Turin court, he experienced firsthand the Franco-Jacobin invasion of 1796 with the consequent expulsion of the King and the harsh years of subjugation to the Napoleonic empire. Already imbued with anti-revolutionary sentiments, along with some of his peers, he worked to ensure that Pope Pius VII’s bull of excommunication against Napoleon was disclosed as widely as possible. Having enrolled at the University, he delayed his degree so as not to have to recognize the Corsican usurper in the documents and therefore obtained his doctorate in Law in 1814, after the restoration had taken place. A dazzling diplomatic career therefore began for the young Solaro della Margarita. Secretary of the Legation in Naples in 1816, he found himself having to experience the revolutionary uprisings of ’21 up close, receiving the worst impressions. Chargé d’affaires in Madrid from 1826 to 1834, he remained consistent with his doctrinal positions, siding with the Carlist legitimists against the liberal supporters of Isabella and in Portugal for the reactionary supporters of Don Miguel. While he was being preached to become ambassador to Vienna, he was called by Charles Albert to the post of Foreign Minister of the Sardinian kingdom, a post which he held for twelve years.

In his ministerial commitment he was a staunch defender of the independence of Piedmont, in a policy of equidistance between the great powers, he supported all the anti-liberal causes in Europe, starting with the revolt of the Catholic cantons in Switzerland and was instead substantially hostile to the bourgeois monarchy of Louis Philippe in France.
A convinced legitimist, he always rejected the idea that Piedmont could begin an expansionist policy towards the other Italian states, working if anything for an ever greater collaborative collaboration between the states of the Peninsula, primarily to fight with greater vigor the revolutionary and Mazzinian uprisings, secondly to avoid having to delegate the maintenance of political order in the Peninsula to the interventions of the foreign powers of the Holy Alliance.
It was therefore, as you can well imagine, impossible that Solaro could follow Carlo Alberto in his inexorable march towards the most liberal positions in domestic politics and the most “Italian” (in the Risorgimento sense of the term) in foreign policy.
The now unstoppable rise of the Count of Cavour’s star was necessarily accompanied by the eclipse of the Solarian star..

Clemente Solaro della Margarita definitively lost the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1847 but this did not mean he ceased his political activity, entering the subalpine parliament as one of the most feared and embattled leaders of the anti-Cavourian far right.

He accompanied the parliamentary battles against the secularization of the state with an intense journalistic activity first and then with political education, which saw him at the center of very violent controversies with various exponents of the political-cultural establishment of those years. Hostile to the Statute which he considered revocable at any time and to the elective Parliament which he considered an inadequate instrument for advising the sovereign in the responsible and effective exercise of his authority, Solaro is not a supporter of a royal absolutism, authoritarian and divorced from respect for the laws, but of a vast and complex theocratic system in which everyone, King and people, are subjected to divine judgment in the exercise of their rights and duties. If the only source of law is God himself, it is also the source of political-juridical systems (certainly adaptable to temporal variables but unalterable in their substance).

The whole of humanity (even with its legitimate and natural inequalities) is therefore inserted into a framework of immutable, reasonable and positive principles and laws which, if continuously affirmed, favor every single man in his own eschatological path. Eschatology and political action can therefore never be distinguished, otherwise politics will be reduced to a mere exercise of immanent and therefore ultimately anti-human power (for those who practice it and for those who suffer it).

Reading his works, unfortunately not yet reprintedand (the last reprint of the Memorandum was in 1930), one perceives a style that is the fruit of complex studies and full of that all-round humanism that characterized the cultural education of nineteenth-century scholars, alongside a clear and adamantine and non-aporetic vision of political problems and their resolutions.

Solaro, after having largely fulfilled his duty as a politician and scholar in decades of revolutionary drunkenness and brutalization, laid down his sword forever on 12 November 1869, fortunately before having to witness the culmination of Italian unification with the great Twenty-September Sabbat of Porta Pia.

bibliography:

[Clemente Solaro della Margarita] “The day of the liberation of Piedmont. Written reasoning and addressed to his fellow citizens”, Turin, 1814 (published anonymously)

Clemente Solaro della Margarita “Historical political memorandum”, Turin, Speirani, 1851

Clemente Solaro della Margarita “Appendix to the historical political memorandum in response to the pamphlet of the Marquis Gualterio on the negatives given to him by Count Solaro della Margarita”, Turin, Speirani and Tortone, 1853

Clemente Solaro from Margarita “Political Advice”, Turin, Speirani and Tortone, 1853

Clemente Solaro from Margarita “Questions of State”, Turin, Speirani and Tortone, 1854

Clemente Solaro of the Margarita “Address to the nation”, Turin, Speirani and Tortone, 1856

Clemente Solaro della Margarita “Speech according to the nation”, Turin, 1857

Clemente Solaro della Margarita “Address to the conservative voters of the whole state”, Turin, 1857

Clemente Solaro della Margarita “Address to the voters of the constituencies of San Quirico, Borgomanero, Carrù and Varazze who elected him as their deputy in the national Parliament on 15 November” Turin, 1857

Clemente Solaro della Margarita “Response to the pamphlet The Pope and the Congress”, Turin, Speirani and Tortone, 1860

Clemente Solaro della Margarita “Opinion on the annexation of some states to the Monarchy and on the cession of Savoy and Nice to France”, Turin, Speirani and Tortone, 1860

Clemente Solaro della Margarita “The statesman, addressed to the government of public affairs”, Turin, Speirani, 1863

Clemente Solaro della Margarita “Political view of Count Solaro della Margarita, Minister of State, on the Franco-Italian convention of 15 September 1864”, Turin, Speirani, 1864

Carlo Lovera di Castiglione – Father Ilario Rinieri SJ “Clemente Solaro della Margarita”, Turin, Bocca, 1931, (in three volumes)

“Moderantism is an act of solemn cowardice; the pusillanimous ones who fear everything and try to save themselves with the theories of a false wisdom are moderate; servile flock that does not give help to friends, does not fight adversaries, does not have the courage to hold strong opinions, does not dare to repress parties; it forms a third, pale and powerless towards good; flatter the winners, caress the vanquished, always ready to serve whoever prevails”

«I agree with the Author of the Essay on Socialism, who expresses himself thus: “In all times there have been men and parties who desired and promoted social changes. We call them revolutions when the principle on which a given society is constituted changes; do this peacefully or violently; the manner of execution does not change the nature of the thing”.

Clemente Solaro of Margarita