Saroléa 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 Liège.
He moved to Edinburgh in 1894 as Head of French at the
University of Edinburgh (as Dr Sarolea). He initially lived in a flat at 74 Bruntsfield Place.[2]
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.[4]
Saroléa 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 publicly attacked the neutrality that the US was observing at the time with respect to
World War I.[5] 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.
Saroléa died in Edinburgh on 11 March 1953.
Family
Saroléa married twice: firstly in 1895 to Martha van Cauwenberghe, then secondly in 1905 to Julia Dorman.
His niece Marie Antoinette Saroléa married the cartographer
John Bartholomew.[3]
Samantha T. Johnson, Holy war in Europe: Charles Sarolea, Everyman and the First World War, 1914–17 in War and the Media: Reportage and Propaganda, 1900–2003 editors
Mark Connelly, David Welch
Sam Johnson,'Playing the Pharisee'? Charles Sarolea, Czechoslovakia and the road to Munich, 1915–1939,
Slavonic and East European review 2004, vol. 82, no.2, pp. 292–314
G.K. Chesterton writes about Sarolea in his Autobiography (1936), Grey Arrow edition 1959 p. 81f.