IV. The Pope, Napoleon's employee.
Other services expected of the Pope.—Coronation of Napoleon
at Notre-Dame.—Napoleonic theory of the Empire and the Holy
See.—The Pope a feudatory and subject of the Emperor.
—The pope installed as a functionary at Paris, and
arch-chancellor on spiritual matters.—Effect of this for Italy.
Over and above this positive and real service obtained from the sovereign pontiff, he awaits others yet more important and undefined, and principally his future coronation in Notre Dame. Already, during the negotiations for the Concordat, La Fayette had observed to him with a smile:[5133] "You want the holy oil dropped on your head"; to which he made no contradictory answer. On the contrary, he replied, and probably too with a smile: "We shall see! We shall see!" Thus does he think ahead, and his ideas extend beyond that which a man belonging to the ancient régime could imagine or divine, even to the reconstruction of the empire of the west as this existed in the year 800. "I am not Louis XIV.'s successor," he soon declares,[5134] "but of Charlemagne.... I am Charlemagne, because, like Charlemagne, I unite the French crown to that of the Lombards, and my empire borders on the Orient." In this conception, which a remote history furnishes to his boundless ambition, the terrible antiquitarian finds the gigantic and suitable framework, the potent, specious terms, and all the verbal reasons he requires. Under Napoleon, the successor of Charlemagne, the Pope can be only a vassal: "Your Holiness is the sovereign of Rome, but I am its emperor," the legitimate suzerain. "Provided with "fiefs and counties" by this suzerain, the Pope owes him political fealty and military aid; failing in this, the endowment, which is conditional, lapses and his confiscated estates return to the imperial domain to which they have never ceased to belong.[5135] Through this reasoning and this threat, through the rudest and most adroit moral and physical pressure, the most insidious and most persevering, through spoliation, begun, continued and completed by the abduction, captivity and sequestration of the Holy Father himself, he undertakes the subjection of the spiritual power: not only must the Pope be like any other individual in the empire,[5136] subject by his residence to territorial laws, and hence to the government and the gendarmerie, but again he must come within the administrative lines; he will no longer enjoy the right of refusing canonical investiture to bishops appointed by the emperor,[5137] "he will, on his coronation, swear not to take any measures against the four propositions of the Gallican Church,"[5138] he will become a grand functionary, a sort of arch-chancellor like Cambacérès and Lebrun, the arch chancellor of the Catholic cult.—Undoubtedly, he resists and is obstinate, but he is not immortal, and if he does not yield, his successor will: it suffices to choose one that is manageable, and to this end things work in the next conclave.
"With my influence and our forces in Italy," Napoleon says afterwards,[5139] "I did not despair, sooner or later, by one means or another, of obtaining for myself the control of the Pope, and, thenceforward, what an influence, what a lever on the opinion of the rest of the world!"
"Had I returned victorious from Moscow, I intended to exalt the Pope beyond measure, to surround him with pomp and deference. I would have brought him to no longer regretting his temporality; I would have made him an idol. He would have lived alongside of me. Paris would have become the capital of Christendom, and I would have governed the religious world the same as the political world.... I would have had my religious as well as legislative sessions; my councils would have represented Christianity; the Popes would have been merely their presidents. I would have opened and closed these assemblies, sanctioned and published their decrees, as was done by Constantine and Charlemagne." In 1809, the restoration of the great Carlovingian and Roman edifice had begun; its physical foundations were laid. By virtue of a decree,[5140] "the expenses of the Sacred College and of the Propaganda were declared imperial." The Pope, like the new dukes and marshals, was endowed with a landed income on "property in different parts of the empire, two millions of rural revenue free of all taxation. "Necessarily" the Pope must have two palaces, one at Paris and the other at Rome. He is already nearly fully installed in Paris, his person being all that was lacking. On arriving from Fontainebleau, two hours off, he would find everything belonging to his office; "the papers[5141] of the missions and the archives of Rome were already there." "The Hôtel Dieu was entirely given up to the departments of the court of Rome. The district around Notre Dame and the Ile Saint-Louis was to be the headquarters of Christendom!" Rome, the second center of Christendom, and the second residence of the Pope, is declared[5142] "an imperial and free city, the second city of the empire"; a prince of the empire, or other grand dignitary, is to reside there and "hold the court of the emperor." "After their coronation in the cathedral of Notre Dame at Paris, the emperors" will go to Italy before the tenth year of their reign, and be "crowned in the church of St. Peter at Rome." The heir to the imperial throne "will bear the title and receive the honors of the King of Rome." Observe the substantial features of this chimerical construction. Napoleon, far more Italian than French, Italian by race, instinct, imagination, and souvenirs, considers in his plan the future of Italy, and, on casting up the final accounts of his reign, we find that the net profit is for Italy and the net loss is for France. "Napoleon wanted to create the Italian kingdom over again,[5143] combining Piedmont, Tuscany, etc., in one united independent nation, bounded by the Alps and the sea.... This was to be the immortal trophy erected in his honor.... He awaited impatiently the birth of a second son that he might take him to Rome, crown him King of Italy and proclaim the independence of the great peninsula under the regency of Prince Eugene." Since Theodoric and the Lombard kings, it is the Pope who, in preserving his temporal sovereignty and spiritual omnipotence, has maintained the sub-divisions of Italy; let this obstacle be removed and Italy will once more become a nation. Napoleon prepares the way, and constitutes it beforehand by restoring the Pope to his primitive condition, by withdrawing from him his temporal sovereignty and limiting his spiritual omnipotence, by reducing him to the position of managing director of Catholic consciences and head minister of the principal cult authorized in the empire.
V. State domination of all religion.
Services which Napoleon desires or expects from the French
clergy.—His Roman idea of civil power.—Development of this
conception by the jurists.—Every religious association must
be authorized.—Legal statutes which fix the doctrine and
discipline of the four authorized Churches.—Legal
organization of the Catholic Church.—Its doctrine and
discipline to be that of the old Gallican Church.—New
situation of the French Church and new rôle of civil power.
—It sets aside its ancient obligations.—It retains and
augments its regalian rights.—The Church of France before
1789 and after 1802.—Increased preponderance and complete
dominion of the civil power.
In carrying out this plan, he will use the French clergy in mastering the Pope, as the Pope has been made use of in mastering the French clergy. To this end, before completing the Concordat and decreeing the Organic Articles, he orders for himself a small library, consisting of books on ecclesiastical law. The Latin works of Bossuet are translated for him, and he has drawn up an exposition of the Gallican parliamentary doctrine. The first thing is to go down to the roots of the subject, which he does with extraordinary facility, and then, recasting and shaping all theories to suit himself, he arrives at an original, individual conception, at once coherent, precise, and practical; one which covers the Cæsar and which he applies alike to all churches, Catholic, Lutheran, Calvinist, and even Jewish, to every religious community now existing and in time to come. His master-idea is that of the Roman legists and of ancient imperial jurisprudence; here, as elsewhere, the modern Cæsar goes back beyond his Christian predecessors to Constantine, and farther still, to Trajan and Augustus.[5144] So long as belief remains silent and solitary, confined within the limits of individual conscience, it is free, and the State has nothing to do with it. But let it transgress these limits, address the public, bring people together in crowds for a common purpose, manifest itself openly, it is subject to control; forms of worship, ceremonies, preaching, instruction and propaganda, the donations it calls forth, the assemblies it convenes, the organization and maintenance of the bodies it engenders, all the positive applications of the inward reverie, are temporal works. In this sense, they form a province of the public domain, and come within the competency of the government, of the administration and of the courts. The State has a right to interdict, to tolerate, or to authorize them, and always to give them proper direction. Sole and universal proprietor of the outward realm in which single consciences may communicate with each other, it intervenes, step by step, either to trace or to bar the way; the road they follow passes over its ground and belongs to it; its watch, accordingly, over their proceedings is, and should be, daily; and it maintains this watch for its own advantage, for the advantage of civil and political interests, in such a way that concern for the other world may be serviceable and not prejudicial to matters which belong to this one. In short, and as a summary, the First Consul says, in a private conversation: