In speaking of priests and religion, the conversation led the Emperor to say: “Man, entering into life, asks himself: Whence do I come? What am I? Whither am I to go? These are so many mysterious questions, which urge us on to religion. We eagerly embrace it; we are attracted by our natural propensity; but as we advance in knowledge our course is stopped. Instruction and history are the great enemies of religion, deformed by human imperfection. Why, we ask ourselves, is the religion of Paris neither that of London nor of Berlin? Why is that of Petersburgh different from that of Constantinople? Why is the latter different from that of Persia, of the Ganges, and of China? Why is the religion of ancient times different from that of our days? Then reason is sadly staggered; it exclaims, O religions, religions! the children of man!... We very properly believe in God, because every thing around us proclaims him, and the most enlightened minds have believed in him; not only Bossuet, whose profession it was, but also Newton and Leibnitz, who had nothing to do with it. But we know not what to think of the doctrine that is taught us, and we find ourselves like the watch which goes, without knowing the watchmaker that made it. And observe a little the stupidity of those who educate us; they should keep away from us the idea of paganism and idolatry; because their absurdity excites the first exercise of our reason, and prepares us for a resistance to passive belief; and they bring us up, nevertheless, in the midst of the Greeks and Romans, with their myriads of divinities. Such, for my own part, has literally been the progress of my understanding. I felt the necessity of belief; I did believe, but my belief was shocked and undecided, the moment I acquired knowledge and began to reason; and that happened to me at so early an age as thirteen. Perhaps, I shall again believe implicitly; God grant I may! I shall certainly make no resistance, and I do not ask a greater blessing; it must, in my mind, be a great and real happiness.
“In violent agitations, however, and in the casual suggestions of immorality itself, the absence of that religious faith has never, I assert, influenced me in any respect, and I never doubted the existence of God; for, if my reason was inadequate to comprehend it, my mind was not the less disposed to adopt it. My nerves were in sympathy with that sentiment.
“When I seized on the helm of affairs, I had already fixed ideas of all the primary elements by which society is bound together; I had weighed all the importance of religion; I was convinced, and I determined to re-establish it. But the resistance I had to overcome in restoring Catholicism would scarcely be credited. I should have been more willingly followed had I hoisted the standard of Protestantism. This reluctance was carried so far that in the Council of State, where I found great difficulty in getting the Concordat adopted, several yielded only by forming a plan to extricate themselves from it. ‘Well!’ they said to one another, ‘let us turn Protestants, and that will not affect us.’ It is unquestionable that, in the disorder which I succeeded, upon which I found myself I was at liberty to choose between Catholicism and Protestantism; and it may also be said, with truth, that the general disposition, at the moment, was quite in favour of the latter: but, besides my real adherence to the religion in which I was born, I had the most important motives to influence my decision. What should I have gained by proclaiming Protestantism? I should have created two great parties, very nearly equal, in France, when I wished for the existence of none at all; I should have revived the fury of religious disputes, when their total annihilation was called for by the light of the age and my own feelings. These two parties would, by their mutual distractions, have destroyed France, and rendered her the slave of Europe, when I had the ambition to make her the mistress of it. By the help of Catholicism I attained much more effectually all the grand results that I had in view. In the interior, at home, the smaller number was swallowed up by the greater, and I relied upon my treating the former with such an equality that there would be shortly no motive for marking the difference. Abroad, the Pope was bound to me by Catholicism; and, with my influence, and our forces in Italy, I did not despair, sooner or later, by some means or other, of obtaining for myself the direction of that Pope, and from that time, what an influence! What a lever of opinion on the rest of the world!” &c. He concluded with saying; “Francis I. was really in a state to adopt Protestantism, at its birth, and to declare himself the head of it in Europe. Charles V., his rival, was the zealous champion of Rome, because he considered that measure as an additional means to assist him in his project of enslaving Europe. Was not that circumstance alone sufficient to point out to Francis the necessity of taking care of his independence; but he abandoned the greater to run after the lesser advantage. He persevered in pursuing his imprudent designs on Italy, and, with the intention of paying court to the Pope, he burnt Protestants at Paris.
“Had Francis I. embraced Lutheranism, which is favourable to royal supremacy, he would have preserved France from the dreadful religious convulsions brought on, at later periods, by the Calvinists, whose efforts, altogether republican, were on the point of subverting the throne and dissolving our noble monarchy. Unfortunately, Francis I. was ignorant of all that; for he could not allege his scruples for an excuse, he, who entered into an alliance with the Turks, and brought them into the midst of us. It was precisely because he was incapable of extending his views so far. The folly of the time! The extent of feudal intellect! Francis I. was, after all, but a hero for tilts and tournaments, and a gallant for the drawing-room, one of those pigmy great men.
“The Bishop of Nantes (De Voisins), said the Emperor, made me a real Catholic by the efficacy of his arguments, by the excellence of his morals, and by his enlightened toleration. Marie Louise, whose confessor he was, consulted him once on the obligation of abstaining from meat on Fridays.—‘At what table do you dine?’ asked the Bishop.—‘At the Emperor’s.’ ‘Do you give all the orders there?’—‘No.’ ‘You cannot, then make any alteration in it; would he do it himself?’—‘I am inclined to think not.’ ‘Be obedient then, and do not provoke a subject for scandal. Your first duty is to obey, and make him respected; you will not be in want of other means to amend your life, and to suffer privations in the eyes of God.’
“He also behaved in the same way with respect to a public communion, which some persons put into Marie Louise’s head to celebrate on Easter-day. She would not, however, consent, without the advice of her prudent confessor, who dissuaded her from it by similar arguments. What a difference, said the Emperor, had she been worked upon by a fanatic! What quarrels, what disagreements might he not have caused between us! What mischief might he not have done, in the circumstances in which I was placed!”
The Emperor remarked to us, “that the bishop of Nantes had lived with Diderot, in the midst of unbelievers, and had uniformly conducted himself with consistency; he was ready with an answer to every one; and, above all, he had the good sense to abandon every thing that was not maintainable, and to strip religion of every thing which he was not capable of defending.—He was asked, ‘has not an animal, which moves, combines, and thinks, a soul?’ ‘Why not,’ was his answer. ‘But whither does it go? For it is not equal to ours.’ ‘What is that to you? It dwells, perhaps, in limbo.’ He used to retreat within the last intrenchments, even within the fortress itself, and there he reserved excellent means for defending himself. He argued better than the Pope, whom he often confounded. He was the firmest pillar, among our bishops, of the Gallican liberties. He was my oracle, my luminary; in religious matters, he possessed my unbounded confidence. For, in my quarrels with the Pope, it was my first care, whatever intriguers and marplots in cassocs may say, not to touch upon any dogmatic point: I was so steady in this conduct, that the instant this good and venerable bishop of Nantes said to me, ‘Take care, there you are grappling with a dogma,’ I immediately turned off from the course I was pursuing, to return to it by other ways, without amusing myself by entering into dissertations with him, or by seeking even to comprehend his meaning; and, as I had not let him into my secret, how amazed must he not have been at the circuits I made! How whimsical, obstinate, capricious, and incoherent, must I not have appeared to him! It was because I had an object in view, and he was unacquainted with it.
“The Popes could not forgive us our liberties of the Gallican church. The four famous propositions of Bossuet, in particular, provoked their resentment. It was, in their opinion, a real hostile manifesto, and they accordingly considered us at least as much out of the pale of the church as the Protestants. They thought us as guilty as they, perhaps more so, and if they did not overwhelm us with their ostensible thunderbolts, it was because they dreaded the consequences—our separation. The example of England was before them. They did not wish to cut off their right arm with their own hand, but they were constantly on the watch for a favourable opportunity; they trusted to time for it. They are, no doubt, ready to believe, that it has now arrived. They will, however, be again disappointed by the light of the age and the manners of the times.
“Some time before my coronation,” said the Emperor, “the Pope wished to see me, and made it a point to visit me himself. He had made many concessions. He had come to Paris for the purpose of crowning me; he consented not to place the crown on my head himself; he dispensed with the ceremony of the public communion; he had, therefore, in his opinion, many compensations to expect in return. He had accordingly at first dreamt of Romagna and the Legations, and he began to suspect that he should be obliged to give up all that. He then lowered his pretensions to a very trifling favour, as he called it, my signature to an ancient document, a worn-out rag, which he held from Louis XIV. ‘Do me that favour, said he, in fact, it signifies nothing.’ ‘Cheerfully, most holy father, and the thing is done, if it be feasible.’”[feasible.’”] It was, however, a declaration, in which Louis XIV. at the close of his life, seduced by Madame de Maintenon, or prevailed upon by his confessors, expressed his disapprobation of the celebrated articles of 1682, the foundations of the liberties of the Gallican church. The Emperor shrewdly replied, that he had not, for his own part, any personal objection, but that it was requisite for him, as a matter of form, to speak to the bishops about it; on which the Pope repeatedly observed, that such a communication was by no means necessary, and that the thing did not deserve to make so much noise. “‘I[“‘I] shall never,’ he remarked, ‘shew the signature, it shall be kept as secret as that of Louis XIV.’ ‘But, if it signifies nothing,’ said Napoleon, ‘what use is there for my signature? And if any signification can be drawn from it, I am bound by a sense of propriety to consult my doctors.’”
With the view, however, of avoiding the imputation of a constant refusal of every request, the Emperor wished to seem rather inclined to grant the favour. “The Bishop of Nantes and the other bishops, who were really French, came to me in great haste. They were furious, and watched me,” said the Emperor, “as they would have watched Louis XIV. on his death-bed, to prevent him from turning Protestant. The Sulpicians were called in; they were Jesuits au petit pied, they strove to find out my intention, and were ready to do whatever I wished.”[wished.”] The Emperor concluded with observing;—“The Pope had dispensed with the public communion in my favour, and it is from his determination in that respect that I form my opinion of the sincerity of his religious belief. He had held a congregation of cardinals for the purpose of settling the ceremonial. The greater number warmly insisted upon my taking the communion in public, asserting the great influence of the example on the people, and the necessity of my holding it out. The Pope, on the contrary, fearful lest I should fulfil that duty as if I were going through one of the articles of M. de Ségur’s programme, looked upon it as a sacrilege, and was inflexible in opposing it. ‘Napoleon,’ he observed, ‘is not perhaps a believer; the time will, no doubt, come, in which his faith will be established, and in the mean time, let us not burthen his conscience or our own.’