“Ah, General,” said Lafayette to him, “what you want is that the little vial should be broken over your head.”
It all led up to that.
Monarchy was to be restore, and its natural supports—the aristocrat and the priest—were needed to give it strength. By coming to terms with the Pope, Napoleon would win, and the Bourbons lose, the disciplined hosts of the Catholic Church.
Therefore the Concordat was negotiated, and the French Church, which even under the Bourbons had enjoyed a certain amount of independence, was put under the feet of the Italian priest, under the tyranny of Rome.
By this compact the Pope held to himself the right to approve the clerical nominees of the State, while the tax-payers were annually to furnish $10,000,000 to pay clerical salaries. By this compact was brought back into France the subtle, resistless power of a corporation which, identifying itself with God, demands supreme control.
Napoleon himself soon felt the strength of this released giant, and the France of to-day is in a death grapple with it.
The time may come when the Concordat will be considered Napoleon’s greatest blunder, his unpardonable political sin. It was not faith, it was not even philanthropy which governed his conduct. It was cold calculation. It was merely a move in the game of ambition. At the very moment that he claimed the gratitude of Christians for the restoration of religion, he sought to soothe the non-believers by telling them that under his system religion would disappear from France within fifty years.
It is not true that a majority of the French clamored for a return of the old forms of worship. On the contrary, the vast majority were indifferent, if not hostile. In the army it caused a dangerous conspiracy among the officers, against Napoleon’s life.
When the Concordat came to be celebrated by a pompous pagan ceremonial in the cathedral of Notre Dame, it required all of his authority to compel a respectful attendance, as it had required the utmost exercise of his power to secure the sanction of the state authorities to the Concordat itself. More than one saddened Frenchman thought what General Delmas is reported to have said, when Napoleon asked his opinion of the ceremonial at Notre Dame; “It is a fine harlequinade, needing only the presence of the million men who died to do away with all that.”
Yes, a million Frenchmen had died to do away with that,—the worst feature of the Old Order,—and now it had all come back again. Once more the children of France were to have their brains put under the spell of superstition. They were to be taught the loveliness of swallowing every marvel the priest might utter, and the damnation of thinking for oneself upon any subject ecclesiastical. They were to be crammed from the cradle, on one narrow creed, and incessantly told that hell yawned for the luckless wight who doubted or demurred.