by Eamon Duffy
There would be no re-run of the Jacobin attack on the Church, however. Napoleon had drawn his own conclusions from the religious chaos of revolutionary France, and he recognised that the claim to act in defence of religion against infidel France was one of the strongest cards in the hands of Austria and her allies. In December 1799 one of his earliest decrees as First Consul ordered funeral honours for the body of Pius VI, still lying unburied in a sealed coffin at Valence. Pius, Napoleon declared, was ‘a man who had occupied one of the greatest offices in the world’. The Pope, to Napoleon, was ‘a lever of opinion’, his moral authority equivalent ‘to a corps of 200,000 men’.
On 5 June 1800 Napoleon made a startling speech to the clergy of Milan. ‘I am sure’, he declared, ‘that the Catholic religion is the only religion that can make a stable community happy, and establish the foundations of good government. I undertake to defend it always … I intend that the Roman Catholic religion shall be practised openly and in all its fullness … France has had her eyes opened through suffering, and has seen that the Catholic religion is the single anchor amid storm.’3 All of this was intended for the Pope’s ears. ‘Tell the Pope’, Napoleon declared, ‘that I want to make him a present of 30,000,000 Frenchmen.’ Bonaparte needed to pacify France, and the parts of Europe occupied by France. He recognised that an accommodation with the Catholic Church was a precondition for any such peace. The counter-revolution in the west of France, in the Vendée, was a Catholic counter-revolution, its banners adorned with the emblem of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, its leader a peasant priest, the Abbé Bernier. Only a religious settlement could still such unrest, and only the Pope could deliver a religious settlement.
France had two competing hierarchies – the pre-revolutionary bishops appointed by the Bourbon kings, most of whom had fled abroad, and the bishops appointed under the Civil Constitution. Some of the Constitutional bishops had apostatised from the faith during the Terror and its aftermath, but the Constitutional Church itself had held together under the leadership of the courageous Bishop Henri Grégoire, and it too had its martyrs. Napoleon was accustomed to speak scathingly about the Constitutional bishops – ‘a bunch of brigands’, he called them, at least when talking to Rome. He could hardly abandon them altogether, however, without appearing to repudiate the Revolution itself. Yet there was no reconciling these two groups of bishops. The only way out of this dilemma was to wipe the slate clean, and to start again with a new set of bishops (to include former bishops from both camps) appointed by Napoleon himself. To have any chance of being accepted, such an arrangement needed the backing of the Pope. In return, Napoleon promised that the clergy of France would be paid by the state (though there would be no question of the return of confiscated Church property), and he would do all in his power to restore the Papal States.
Negotiations for a settlement were to drag on for eight months, and to go through twenty-six different drafts. They were the focus of fierce hostility in both Rome and Paris. Many of Pius’ cardinals rejected the thought of any accommodation with the Revolution, which had persecuted the Church, murdered its priests, stolen its property, and deposed and kidnapped a pope. Gregoire, leader of the Constitutional bishops, feared a sell-out. Committed Jacobins were revolted by the thought of the return of state-subsidised superstition and priestcraft. The French Foreign Minister was the former bishop of Autun, Talleyrand, with his English Protestant wife. He was determined that married priests must be left unmolested and their marriages validated.
Roman caution over the implications of every line and comma of the Concordat maddened Napoleon, feverishly concerned for a speedy resolution of the religious problem. He threw spectacular tantrums in Paris, threatening to turn Calvinist and to take Europe with him or, more worryingly because more plausibly, to imitate Henry VIII and establish a schismatic national church. In May 1801 the French Ambassador in Rome was instructed to deliver an ultimatum and then retire to Florence, where troops were waiting to march on Rome. Only prompt collaborative action between the Ambassador and the Cardinal Secretary of State, Ercole Consalvi, who hurried to Paris, rescued the negotiations. The Concordat was finally signed on 15 July 1801. It was to govern relations between France and the Holy See for a century, and to provide a pattern for the papacy’s relations with the new international order of the nineteenth century.4
The Concordat recognised Catholicism as the religion of ‘the vast majority of French citizens’. This comparatively weak statement was strengthened by a reference to the benefits the Church received from ‘the establishment of Catholic worship in France’, and from the profession of Catholicism by the Consuls. Catholicism was to be freely practised, though its public worship was to be subject to ‘police regulations’. Predictably, this clause caused a good deal of worry in Rome, but in fact it represented a diplomatic triumph by Consalvi, for in reality it limited government interference to matters of public cult such as processions, leaving the Church’s internal affairs and contacts with Rome otherwise unregulated. The Pope was to demand the co-operation of all existing bishops in reconstructing the French church, even if this involved ‘the utmost sacrifice’ of resignation. Within three months he was to institute new bishops to a streamlined diocesan system (ten archbishoprics and fifty bishoprics, in place of the pre-revolutionary 135).
The new bishops would be appointed by the First Consul along lines laid down for the crown in the Concordat of Bologna of 1516, the Pope granting canonical institution (authorisation to perform spiritual functions). The bishops would appoint parish priests, choosing only men acceptable to government. They could also establish cathedral chapters and seminaries. Confiscated Church property would be left in the hands of the present possessors, but churches and cathedrals needed for worship would be ‘put at the disposal’ of the bishops. The bishops and clergy would receive state salaries. There was no provision for any reconstruction of monastic life.
The Concordat bristled with difficulties for Rome. The Pope had failed to secure a declaration that Catholicism was the state religion of France. He had had to renounce for ever the plundered property of the wealthiest church in Christendom, and for the first time the clergy were to be salaried officials of the state. Consalvi and the Pope, determined to avoid charges of simony and anxious that the fate of the church of France should not appear to have been made a bargaining counter for the recovery of the Pope’s temporal power, had not even raised the question of the return of Avignon or the Legations.
Nevertheless, the Concordat transformed the relationship between the Pope and the church of France in ways which would have been unimaginable even ten years earlier. The heart of this transformation was the reorganisation of the episcopate. During the negotiations, Consalvi himself had declared such an act impossible: ‘To get rid of 100 bishops is something that just cannot happen.’ Yet happen it did, by the sole exercise of papal authority. At his request, forty-eight bishops resigned. Thirty-seven others refused, on the grounds that they had been duly appointed by the crown, and to resign would be to recognise the Revolution. Pius declared their sees vacant, and most of them tacitly acquiesced in their own deposition. A few did not, and the resulting schismatic petite église would persist for the rest of the century. But this was the dying struggle of old Gallicanism, and it was largely an irrelevance. At a stroke, the entrenched resistance of the French church to papal authority was undone, the entire hierarchy reconstituted by an unprecedented exercise of papal power. Though few people grasped the full implications at the time, a new era in the history of the papacy, and the Church, had begun.
The new era, however, began stormily. As Napoleon pondered the terms which Consalvi had gained for the papacy, he became increasingly unhappy with the Concordat. Publication was delayed in France until February 1802, and when it came it was accompanied by seventy-seven ‘Organic Articles’, ostensibly spelling out the ‘police regulations’ mentioned in the Concordat, but in fact unilaterally imposing the very restrictions on the Church which Consalvi had
struggled to fend off. No papal acts, briefs or bulls could be received or published in France without the placet of the state. No nuncio or legate could exercise jurisdiction without permission. No seminaries could be established without the express permission of the First Consul, and he was to approve their regulations. All seminary staff must sign the anti-papal Gallican Articles of 1682, which made a general council superior to the Pope. Civil marriage must precede any church ceremony.
The Organic Articles were deeply repugnant to the papacy, but, although he protested against them, Pius did not repudiate the Concordat. However hedged round with restrictions, it made possible the reconstruction of the devastated Church in France, and over the next few years Pius went out of his way to oblige Napoleon. At his request, the Pope sent a docile cardinal (Caprara) as Legate a Latere to France. In 1803 five Frenchmen, including Napoleon’s uncle and former quartermaster, Monsignor Fesch, were made cardinals. The Vatican even accepted the establishment of a feast of ‘St Napoleon’ on 15 August, though it displaced a major Marian feast, the Assumption, and no one could come up with a convincing account of just who ‘St Napoleon’ was.
In May 1804 the French Senate decreed that Napoleon was emperor of the French. For Napoleon this was a step on the way to world domination. He dreamed of becoming a new and more glorious Charlemagne. Yet he was in the end only a soldier of fortune; he lacked the aura of legitimacy. Pius was invited to Paris to anoint Napoleon emperor. This invitation posed an enormous dilemma for Pius VII and Consalvi. The monarchies of Europe had deplored the Concordat and the legitimation it had given revolutionary France. Already the Pope was being referred to contemptuously as Napoleon’s chaplain. The imperial coronation of this Corsican upstart would bring the Pope into disrepute from Moscow to London. In particular, the Austrian Emperor would be offended, and Austria had defended the Church from the Revolution.
Some of the cardinals thought that the Pope should refuse point-blank, most thought he should set stringent conditions before he agreed to go. Consalvi knew that any such conditions would be impossible to enforce. He was clear that the Pope must go to Paris, to secure whatever advantage to the Church could be won from the Emperor. It was a thousand years since a pope had gone to crown a king in France. The only precedent in living memory, Pius VI’s fruitless visit to Vienna, was not encouraging. Nevertheless, Pius set out for Paris in the autumn of 1804.
The slow journey through northern Italy and France was a triumph, and a revelation. Wherever the Pope went, he was mobbed by emotional crowds. His carriage drove between lines of kneeling devotees, men pressed forward to have their rosaries blessed, women married by civil rites under the Revolution to have their wedding-rings touched by the Pope. It was clear to everyone that the papal office had gained more mystique than it had lost in the flux and turmoil of Revolution. Napoleon was not pleased. Throughout the Pope’s stay in France Napoleon inflicted on him a series of petty humiliations, which Pius had to swallow as best he could.
The coronation itself took place in Notre Dame in Paris on 2 December. There were hitches. Napoleon refused to receive communion, being unwilling to go to confession first, and he did not allow the Pope to place the crown on his head. Pius anointed the Emperor and Empress, and blessed the crowns, which Napoleon then took from the altar with his own hands. The Pope had however won a minor victory the day before. A tearful Josephine had come to him to reveal that she and the Emperor had never been through a rite of Christian marriage. The Pope refused to proceed with the coronation till this was rectified. In utter secrecy, and without witnesses, Napoleon’s uncle Cardinal Fesch performed the ceremony in the Tuileries the day before the coronation.
There was little else tangible to show for the visit. Even the jewelled tiara presented to the Pope by Napoleon as a wedding-gift turned out to be a veiled insult, for it was decorated with stones looted from the Vatican in 1798. Napoleon was politely evasive about the question of sovereignty in the Legations, the Organic Articles remained in force, the religious orders were not restored. Yet Napoleon’s bad grace and offensive behaviour only served to underline the fact that, however much he disliked it, he had needed the Pope to be there. The papacy’s authority and holiness were still hard currency in the world of power politics. Indeed, the coronation, intended to underpin the authority of Napoleon, ultimately benefited the papacy more. Napoleon himself would bitterly complain of this. ‘Nobody thought of the Pope when he was in Rome. Nobody bothered what he did. My coronation and his appearance in Paris made him important.’5
When Pius entered Notre Dame for the coronation, a choir of 500 voices had sung ‘Tu es Petrus’, ‘Thou art Peter’. The kneeling crowds along his route back to Italy in April 1805 demonstrated that those words had not lost their power over the hearts and consciences of French men and women. It was perhaps symbolic that, as Pius passed through Florence in May 1805, the former bishop of Pistoia, Scipio Ricci, came to make his submission to the Pope, whose rule he had once denounced as Babylonian tyranny. The Synod of Pistoia and the Jansenist episcopalism it represented were now only a memory in Italy. The papacy had outlived its enemies.
In 1805 Napoleon was offered and accepted the crown of Italy, the northern Republic having been transformed into a kingdom. Italy, he declared, was a mistress he would share with no man. He began to style himself Rex Totius Italiae, King of All Italy, and he set about transforming that claim into reality. To secure the papal port of Ancona against British and Austrian forces, Napoleon annexed it in October 1805, a move which the Pope bitterly resented – he wrote to Napoleon calling for a French withdrawal, and speaking of his ‘disillusionment’ with Napoleon’s behaviour since the coronation: ‘We have not found in your Majesty that return of our goodwill which we had the right to expect.’ It was a turning point – to Napoleon the Pope had begun to speak in the tones of Gregory VII.
In February 1806, using Ancona as a base, Napoleon annexed the kingdom of Naples and placed his brother Joseph on the throne. This was yet another insult to the Pope, for Naples was a papal fief, and the Pope had a right to be consulted about any transfer of rule. Finally, Napoleon wrote to the Pope demanding that he close all papal ports to the allies. He would not interfere with the freedom of the Papal States, he claimed, but ‘the condition must be that your Holiness has the same respect for me in the temporal sphere that I have for him in the spiritual, and that he abandons useless intrigues with the heretic enemies of the Church [Russia and England] … Your Holiness is Sovereign of Rome, but I am Emperor. All my enemies must be his’.6
Here Napoleon had reached the Pope’s sticking-point. To close the ports to the allies, Pius insisted, would be an act of war: ‘We are the Vicar of a God of peace, which means peace towards all, without distinction between Catholics and Heretics.’ He dismissed ‘with apostolic freedom’ Napoleon’s demand for deference in the temporal sphere. The Pope ‘has been such over so great a number of centuries that no reigning prince can compare with him in sovereignty’. Napoleon had no rights over the Papal States.
From this point onwards relations between Napoleon and the Pope deteriorated. Napoleon blamed Consalvi, whom he disliked, for Pius’ stand: to keep lines of communication with France open, Consalvi resigned as secretary of state. This was a victory for Napoleon, but a self-defeating one, for the Pope now had to rely on the advice of extremist Italians, like the new Secretary of State, Cardinal Pacca, far less diplomatic and far more hostile to France than Consalvi had ever allowed himself to be. Napoleon increasingly referred to the Pope as ‘a foreign prince’, and refused to allow French Catholics to travel to Rome to see him. The Pope must renounce all temporal power, and rely only on his spiritual authority.
In January 1808 French forces occupied Rome, and the Pope became effectively a prisoner within the Quirinal Palace, with eight French cannon trained on his windows. The Allies offered to rescue Pius in a British frigate, but the Pope feared that a flight under British protection would give Napoleon an excuse to renew a French
schism, and he refused to leave Rome. On 6 July a French general presented himself before the Pope and demanded his abdication as sovereign of the Papal States. On his refusal, he was bundled into a carriage, still in his ceremonial robes and without so much as a change of linen, and taken north, on the route Pius VI had followed eleven years earlier. The Pope and his Secretary of State, Cardinal Pacca, padlocked into the coach in the summer heat, turned out their pockets. They had less than twenty sous between them, not enough for a single meal. Their laughter annoyed their gaoler.
Pius was taken to the episcopal palace at Savona, on the Italian Riviera, and isolated from his advisers, where it was hoped that, left to his own devices, he would give way. It was a shrewd judgement, for the Pope was prone to self-doubt and indecision. Pius retaliated in the only way open to him. He reverted to being the ‘poor monk Chiaramonte’, saying his breviary, reading, washing and mending his clothes. Above all, he refused to institute any bishops nominated by Napoleon. This was a serious matter. Many of the bishops appointed in 1801 had been elderly men, and they were now dying in droves. By the summer of 1810, there were twenty-seven sees without bishops.
In the meantime Napoleon had annexed Rome, declaring it the second city of the empire. French law and customs were introduced into the Papal States, and all the cardinals were removed to Paris. This move prepared the way for another confrontation. Napoleon wanted an heir for the empire, and Josephine had not provided one. He decided to marry the daughter of the Austrian Emperor, and so he needed a divorce. There was no chance of Pius granting a divorce, but the fact that the marriage celebrated the day before the coronation had been at the Pope’s insistence, and without witnesses, provided an ideal pretext for annulment. It was duly granted by the obedient Church courts in Paris. In April 1810 Napoleon remarried. He invited the cardinals to attend, and more than half did. But thirteen absented themselves, including Consalvi. The ‘invitation’ had in fact been a command, and Napoleon stripped the absentees of their regalia and their stipends, and sent them into exile. These ‘black cardinals’ became a symbol for him of Roman intransigence, and his treatment of the Pope became more hostile. Napoleon appointed Cardinal Maury as archbishop of Paris. The Pope smuggled out a stinging rebuke, depriving Maury of all jurisdiction. Napoleon had the Pope’s writing materials and books confiscated, and Pius’ isolation increased.