Saroléa was born inTongeren on 24 October 1870 the son of Dr Jean Pierre Saroléa MD. He was educated at Lycee Athenee atHasselt. He then studied at theUniversity of Liège.
He moved to Edinburgh in 1894 as Head of French at theUniversity of Edinburgh (as Dr Sarolea). He initially lived in a flat at 74 Bruntsfield Place.[2]
In 1910, he moved to 21Royal Terrace onCalton 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 publisherJ.M. Dent. From 1912 to 1917 he editedEveryman, a weekly literary magazine favourable to the doctrine ofdistributism.
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 Saroléa publicly attacked the neutrality that the US was observing at the time with respect toWorld 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.
Samantha T. Johnson,Holy war in Europe: Charles Sarolea, Everyman and the First World War, 1914–17 inWar and the Media: Reportage and Propaganda, 1900–2003 editorsMark 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.
Media related toCharles Saroléa at Wikimedia Commons