Napoleon spoke of himself as revoking the Donation of Constantine; his intention was to make of Paris the religious head of the world with himself the director of its religion as well as of its secular affairs. Pius VII’s reply was a bull of excommunication against the Emperor, who, however, was not mentioned by name in the document. It only spoke in general terms of those who were guilty of deeds of violence in the States of the Church. Napoleon affected to pay little attention to the Papal protest, but he acted promptly, first by appealing to the old principle of the Gallican Church, that denied the right of the Pope to excommunicate a sovereign of a state. Then he had the person of the Pope seized by the commander of the Roman gendarmerie. No resistance was offered, and Pius was conducted as a prisoner, in a closed carriage with drawn shades, to Savona on the western Riviera near Genoa. Here he was kept carefully guarded, but he refused all terms of settlement that insisted on his surrender of the temporal power. No one was allowed to see him except in the presence of his guards. When Napoleon desired canonical institution for some newly appointed bishops, the Pope refused, on the ground that he was deprived of the advice of his cardinals. The situation was embarrassing, for there were, in August, 1809, twenty-seven vacant sees in France. Efforts were made to find a solution by calling a council at Paris; but the ecclesiastics, on assembling there, declared that the Pope’s consent was necessary. Napoleon then ordered the bishops to take charge of their dioceses without institution from the Pope. But a brief came from Savona to Cardinal Maury, the archbishop designate of Paris, enjoining him from administering his diocese without the Pope’s consent. The Emperor now treated the prisoner of Savona with even more rigor, put in prison the clergy whom he suspected of bringing the Papal brief, and deprived Pius of all means of corresponding with the outside world.

At this time the divorce of Napoleon from Josephine took place. The difficulties of the civil law were got over easily, although the Emperor had to violate the provisions of his own code, and the ecclesiastical committee of the diocese of Paris showed itself equally obliging, by recognizing the two imperial claims, that there had been an absence of consent to his religious marriage of 1804, and that there were defects of form in the ceremony itself. When the marriage with the Austrian archduchess was celebrated on April 2, 1810, thirteen of the twenty-six cardinals present in Paris refused to be present at the religious ceremony. This behavior excited Napoleon to an act of personal revenge, by which the recalcitrant princes of the Church were deprived of the insignia of their office, were placed under police supervision, and had to forego their allowance.

In 1811, a council was held in Paris to decide on the question as to the rights of the Pope in the matter of institution. Some of the bishops showed independence, urging the Emperor to restore Pius to liberty. There was a general agreement that Papal consent was necessary. In the meantime the Pope had been cajoled or bullied into accepting a clause, to be added to the Concordat, that canonical institution should be given within a fixed period, and if it were not given, it might be granted by the metropolitan or oldest bishop of the province. Just before the invasion of Russia the aged Pope was brought incognito from Savona to Fontainebleau. During the trip, though he was seriously ill, no consideration was shown him, and for many months after his arrival he was confined to his bed. Only cardinals and prelates who were partisans of Napoleon were allowed to see him. The defeat in Russia brought about a radical change; Napoleon now saw the advantage of arranging some terms of peace, because the harsh treatment of the venerable head of the greatest Christian communion was being used against his persecutor, both at home and abroad. Negotiations were resumed, and under personal pressure from Napoleon, Pius, on condition that the domains of the Holy See were restored to him, made large concessions. He gave Napoleon the right to fill all the bishoprics of France and Italy, except those in the vicinity of Rome, and he allowed metropolitan institution. Afterwards, on consulting with his advisers, the Pope published a retraction of his consent, by which the provisions he had made were annulled. No attention was paid by the Emperor to this change of attitude except that he ordered the imprisonment of the Cardinal de Pietro, who he thought had persuaded Pius to change his mind.

In 1814, before the last campaign on French territory, Napoleon gave the Pope permission to leave Fontainebleau, and shortly before the final defeat he restored the Papal States. There were no further relations between the two, the restored Pope and dethroned Emperor, except that Pius VII, after the Hundred Days and Waterloo, magnanimously offered the Bonaparte family an asylum in Rome, and later on made representations to the English government with a view to reduce the severity of Napoleon’s captivity at St. Helena.

It is customary to ascribe to Napoleon creative originality as a lawgiver. This is a part of the Napoleonic legend that has been upset by the industrious investigations of the partisans of the French Revolution, working under a famous professor at the Sorbonne. In many ways these scholars have rescued from obscurity the positive achievements of the Revolutionary statesmen, and it is now certain that the various codes of Napoleon carry out the principles of procedure and justice foreshadowed in the preliminary work done by the Constituent Assembly and the Convention. Napoleon’s own temperament is seen in the influence he brought to bear upon his lawyers to provide for rapidity in procedure and in execution of judgment, and in the increase of tribunals in which business men played an important rôle.

In education the Emperor’s influence was not so beneficial. He had little sympathy with any type of training that was not practical, and he had no sympathy at all with professorial free speech. Indeed, he expected the teaching profession to take its model from the Grand Army. There was to be little chance for personal development, each man marched in an appropriate rank under orders from a superior. The result of the iron-clad educational régime is acknowledged to have been most unsatisfactory, and it has been one of the most brilliant and most arduous achievements of the Third Republic to abolish the Napoleonic ideals of university teaching, and to substitute for them a system which encourages local and personal freedom. The change has already justified itself, for France is now close to Germany as the home of erudition in many fields of research in which Germany for years justly claimed an uncontested primacy.

The supreme position of Napoleon as a military commander has often led his admirers to affirm that he was infallible in his strategy. He encouraged this tendency at St. Helena, for, when he was composing his Memoirs, he invariably shifted the responsibility for errors in his battles to the shoulders of his lieutenants. He was an expert in manipulating figures, and he had such a good memory that he could always compose a most plausible lie. For years people supposed that the Russian expedition failed because of the extreme cold, and that the defeat at Waterloo might have been turned into a victory if the Emperor’s orders had been strictly carried out by Grouchy and if Ney had advanced more rapidly, as he was bidden to do by his commander-in-chief. These are misrepresentations—are the efforts of a man who wished to manipulate history for his own benefit. When, however, he was not dictating as an exile, Napoleon often enough expressed the truth about himself spontaneously. He allowed, for example, that he had been repeatedly defeated, and on more than one occasion he conceded to his marshals the possession of military talent superior to his own. One year after the Russian disaster he owned that the invasion had been ruined by blunders of his own. He was just as sweeping, too, in condemning various critical phases of his policy. He condemned the attack upon Spain not only as a wholesale blunder, but as a series of blunders in detail, and he characterized the invasion of Russia, while the Spanish War was unfinished, as a hopeless undertaking. Once, speaking to Talleyrand, he said, “I have made so many mistakes in my life that I am not ashamed of them.” It was a characteristic trait of his outlook on his own career that he imagined himself carried on as the instrument of deeds and acts which he could not justify. “I am not,” he once exclaimed, “a man, but a thing.”

Napoleon’s lack of appreciation of moral standards both in public and in private life is notorious, but he was no hypocrite. The one pleasing side of his character was his devotion to his family. Here the clear light of his intellect could not reach. It is true he made grotesque mistakes in putting his brothers into positions for which they were manifestly unfitted, but this sign of weakness shows that, after all, Napoleon was not entirely selfish. He seems to have had little actual patriotism. He was not a Frenchman either by descent or by sympathy, and what he accomplished was done at the expense of the French people. He understood some of their characteristics, but his own point of view was so practical that there were whole fields of achievement signalized in the records of French genius that he never appreciated. On lower planes of action, however, his driving power was immense, and the very terror he created by the success of his concentrated individualism prepared the way for that progressive acknowledgment of public justice and social righteousness which characterized the civilization of the nineteenth century. In spite of all his limitations, it seems impossible to point to a more marvelous career in the annals of humanity.

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