The old régime, before it died out, made trial of rebellion against the church. Frederick the Great was certainly as able as M. von Bismarck; he had the world at his feet, and the church in Germany, infected with the doctrines of Fébronius, was apparently in the pangs of death. The last act recorded in history of the then three ecclesiastical electors of Mayence, Cologne, and Trèves had been to meet with the Archbishop of Salzburg, Primate of Germany, for the purpose of drawing up the Punctuations of Ems (1786), which were a code of rebellion against the Holy See. What a contrast with the present assembling of the German bishops at Fulda! These servile Punctuations of Ems were beginning to be carried out, when the armies of the French Republic came down and inflicted upon the authors of them the punishment they deserved.
Every one knows about Pombal, Choiseul, and Charles III., who confined the Jesuits within certain territorial limits, drove them away, cast them into prison, or sent them into exile, pretty much in the same way as M. von Bismarck is doing.
The power which did all this was swallowed up by the French Revolution.
This revolution, satanic, to use M. de Maistre's term, out and out anti-Christian, as M. de Tocqueville calls it, in its turn drove out, exiled, put to death, whether in the massacre of September, the drownings of the Loire, by the axe of the guillotine or the dagger of ruffians, the priests, Jesuits, and religious whom the old régime had spared.
But this sanguinary revolution went down in the slough of the Directory, and Napoleon put an end to it.
That extraordinary man perceived that persecution wounds the hand which uses it; he sought to make peace with the church; he reopened the churches, recalled the priests and the bishops, and signed the concordat. This was the great epoch of his reign: Ulm, Austerlitz, and Jena.
But the potent emperor, intoxicated by glory and by pride, having become master of the world, thought he would be master of the church as well; his rule was over bodies, he sought to extend it over souls; which is the dream of all founders of empire. He stretched out his hand to the States of the Church, and annexed them to the French Empire; for which he was excommunicated by that gentle Pope Pius VII. He seized the pope, bore him away from Rome into exile at Savona and at Fontainebleau, and he found that under the lamb-like exterior of his victim there beat the heart of a lion. He summoned together the council of 1811, thinking that it would be an easy matter to form a national church of which he would be Supreme Pontiff.
This took place in 1811. The next year brought the campaign of 1812, to be followed by the events of 1813 and 1814; Leipsic, Elba, Waterloo, and the rock of St. Helena last of all.
There is another example nearer to our times, upon which I have looked as a witness, and which I submit for the meditations of the Emperor of Germany.
King William I. of Orange fell into precisely the same blunder which William IV. is now repeating. He ruled over the beautiful kingdom of the Netherlands, so easy for him to maintain, and which through his mistakes was broken up. He, too, sought to constitute national unity through unity of language and of religion. So he suppressed, in 1825, the Catholic schools and colleges in [pg 500] Belgium, drove out the Jesuits and the brothers of the Christian schools, founded at Louvain the Philosophic College in which the clergy of the future national church were to be trained, violated the right to teach and of association, prosecuted the Bishop of Ghent, Mgr. de Broglie, got him condemned, and he was pilloried, in effigy, on a public square of Ghent, between two felons. This reckless and blind policy excited in Belgium a movement of resistance similar to that which we remark at the present moment in Germany. Five years later, in 1830, the Catholic liberal union was brought about, and every one knows the events to which it gave birth.