Charles Saroléa


Prof Charles Louis-Camille Sarolea FRSE DLitt was a Belgian philologist and author.

Life

He was born in Tongeren on 24 October 1870 the son of Dr Jean Pierre Sarolea MD. He was educated at Lycee Athenee at Hasselt. He then studied at the University of Liege.
He moved to Edinburgh in 1894 as Head of French at the University of Edinburgh. He initially lived in a flat at 74 Bruntsfield Place.
In 1903 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. His proposers were George Chrystal, Alexander Crum Brown, Sir Francis Grant Ogilvie and James Gordon MacGregor. He was also a member of the Scottish Arts Club.
In 1910 he moved to 21 Royal Terrace on Calton Hill. He was an avid book collector, and his library grew to such proportions that he took an adjoining property on the terrace to accommodate it.
He wrote on Russia and edited a library of French authors for the publisher J.M. Dent. From 1912 to 1917 he edited Everyman, a weekly literary magazine favourable to the doctrine of distributism.
In 1915, he was sent by the Belgian government to the United States to support the veracity of atrocity stories in circulation about the German occupation of Belgium. The mission was not a success, in that Sarolea unwisely and publicly attacked the neutrality that the US was observing at the time with respect to World War I. Recent academic interest has been on his political views.
In 1918 he was given his professorship by the University of Edinburgh which he held until retiral in 1931.
He died in Edinburgh on 11 March 1953.

Family

He married twice: firstly in 1895 to Martha van Cauwenberghe, then secondly in 1905 to Julia Dorman.
His niece Marie Antoinette Sarolea married John Bartholomew.

Artistic recognition

His portrait by William Leadbetter Calderwood is held by the University of Edinburgh.

Works