time came round, braved the danger with their children, and when the towns were emptied of their priests, they used to send their families into the country to serve this apprenticeship in Christianity." A great many priests remained in France disguised, and such was the respect which they inspired, that even the gens-d'armes were known, in spite of their employers, to beg of them to exercise their holy functions. The exiled bishops in very many cases, governed their diocesses, through vicars general, in the very teeth of the constitutional intruders; the faithful, then, were not deprived of the sacraments, though they had to obtain them at the risk of their lives. Glorious, indeed, was the state of the Church when the very children were confessors from their infancy, and when being a Catholic was equivalent to being a candidate for martyrdom. Many specious arguments might have been urged for the constitution; it was said that no essentials were touched, that only the external machinery of the Church was changed. The French bishops, however, were well aware that the real question at issue was, whether the French Church should be materialized, and as it were absorbed into the world; they suffered for their adherence to the holy see, the proper medium of communion with the Catholic Church. It was not, however, in France alone that the great antichristian power of the French republic aimed at extirpating Christianity; the Church suffered also in the person of its head, Pius VI. The directory, amongst the conditions of a treaty, required of him to withdraw his condemnation of the constitutional clergy. As was expected, he refused, and the French general in Italy, on some assumed grievance, received orders "to make the tiara shake on the head of the pretended chief of the Universal Church." The Pope was made prisoner and dragged from place to place till he died at Valence, August 29, 1799.

The French directory now flattered themselves that the Church was dead with the earthly representative of her divine head; short-sighted men! they set their signet on the tomb and placed a watch around itcould they have looked forward but two VOL. II.-No. 2.

short years, they would have seen their own idol, whom they had set up, lending his hand to restore the Church to the earthly honors of which they had robbed her, only to make her heavenly glories the more radiant. Little did the imperial despot know with what powers he was meddling when he re-established the Church; he fancied that he was only adding a lustre to his own triumph, but he was all the while but a blind instrument in the hands of God. Our limited space will not allow us to go fully into the details connected with the concordat of 1802; we shall confine ourselves to such circumstances as are proper to bring out the nature of Napoleon's relations with the holy see. It is strange that he should have recourse to Rome at all in the matter, especially as many persons about him are known to have urged him to set up a Gallican church, without communion with the rest of Christendom. With that strange instinct, however, which extraordinary men possess, he rejected the idea; he would have his church Catholic, since such was the will of the majority of the nation, and the notion of a Catholic Church out of communion with Rome does not seem to have struck him. "Many persons," said he to Bourienne, "would have me found a Gallican church, and make myself its head; but those men do not know France; if they had known it they should have known that the majority are very far from this rupture with Rome. The Pope must push me to extremities before I make up my mind to it; but I do not think it will be so." The same conversation records his reasons for restoring religion. "In all countries religion is useful to the government; it must be used as an instrument for acting upon men. As a matter of police the religion of a state should be absolutely in the hands of him who governs it." From Rome alone could the despot obtain possession of the heavenly powers of which he wished to make use as a stepping-stone to his exaltation; to Rome, therefore, he applied. His anxiety for the success of the negociation may be inferred from his instructions to his ambassador; "Treat the Pope," he said, as if he were master of two hundred thousand men." On this most 11

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military estimate of the greatness of his holiness the ambassador acted, and the concordat was concluded. We are not going to enter into its details; suffice it that it corrected the crying evil of the constitution, by prescribing that canonical institution was to come from Rome, on the same footing as before the revolution. One of its provisions we must notice, because it was the origin of that lamentable schism of the French church noticed by M. Rio under the name of "la petite église." In order to facilitate the arrangements of the concordat, all the bishops of the old diocesses of France who had survived the revolution were required to send in their resignations to the Pope. Of the one hundred and thirty-five bishops, fifty-one were dead, forty-five obeyed the command, thirty-six refused ;* no attention, however, was paid to their remonstrances, and the sees of France were remodelled without their concurrence. We are not, of course, in a situation to judge how far the exigencies of the case called for this harsh measure, but we can at all events see that none but the sternest necessity could justify a deed which at one blow cut off from their flocks the pastors who had borne the brunt of the revolution, and that at the very moment that they expected to be united to them. La petite église was, and we believe is still composed of the few priests who refused to accede to the concordat, principally on account of this measure; the bishops, who at first refused to send in their resignation, have deprived them of all pretext for their schism by abstaining from the exercise of their jurisdiction, and by placing their resignation in the hands of Louis XVIII, preparatory to the concordat of 1817.

Such was the measure by which the Church was recognized by the state in France; we shall see how Bonaparte dealt with the heavenly powers with which he had come in contact. His first act was to publish a set of articles called organic, which made the bishops dependent on himself for the exercise of their functions; they could not even confer orders without his consent.

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It is probable that these articles were never perfectly obeyed; some of the bishops, it is true, were guilty of even profane adulation to the emperor, but they do not seem to have gone so far as to submit their powers of ordination to the civil power; in every diocess but one, in spite of his known will, orders were conferred before the age of twenty-five, and dispensations even procured from Rome for the ordination of deacons under age,* in order to fill up the breaches which the revolution had caused in the ranks of the clergy. Napoleon not only published these articles without the knowledge of the Pope, but even published them in such a way as to make it appear that they were a part and parcel of the concordat, which the holy see had sanctioned. Another piece of treachery on the part of the empe ror was the appointment of twelve of the constitutional bishops to the new sees. The Pope has been blamed for his want of firmness in quietly allowing these men to become rulers of the church of France. was, however, deceived by one of the emissaries of Napoleon, who assured him that they had renounced the constitution. However yielding Pius VII was in other respects, on this one point he was firm, and made a vigorous stand against the imperial will. Every thing else the Pope was willing to give up; Cardinal Gonsalvi in his name declared that "his holiness is ready to pass over all canonical rules, all but doctrine;" he acknowledged that one concession which he made "had no example in the eighteen centuries of the Church," but he would not accept the constitutional bishops without a retractation of their errors. "Such a measure," he says, "would wound the substance of the deposit of the faith; besides which the conscience of the holy father and the obligations of his apostolic office oppose insurmountable obstacles to it." By the year 1804, when the Pope was at Paris, all but two had submitted themselves to the holy see. Napoleon did his best to entrap the Pope into receiving these, in spite of their refusing to do what was required of them. * Lecanu, Histoire des Eveques de Coutances, p. 510. † Mem. pour servir a l'Hist. Eccl. vol. 3, p. 421.

The formula which they were ordered to sign contained a declaration that they “adhered and submitted themselves to the decisions which had emanated from the holy see, on the ecclesiastical affairs of France." It appears that the refractory bishops were by express agreement to be excluded from the ceremony of the coronation;* on the evening, however, before the emperor was crowned, he read over to the Pope in a hurried manner a paper purporting to be the retractation of one of the refractory bishops. His holiness took home the paper, and on reading it discovered that the word " ical" had been substituted for "ecclesiastical." He immediately wrote to Napoleon to signify that he could not accept it, and to beg him to take measures that nothing should "trouble or stain the august ceremony which was to take place the next day." Napoleon felt that he was foiled, and fretted exceedingly at the power which the quiet dignity of the Pontiff exercised over him; the result was that before Pius VII had left Paris, all the bishops had, at least externally, submitted to him.

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Such was Napoleon's conduct before he broke with the holy see: he flattered himself that the benefit which he had conferred upon God's Church, by raising it from a state of persecution, was to be repaid by its abject submission. The Church was to be one of the steps under his imperial throne, and to be satisfied with being covered with cloth of gold and velvet, as the price of being trodden under his feet. He little knew athwart what powers he had come; the poor passive Church became an earthquake, which opened under him and swallowed his ill-gotten throne. After his coronation, he delighted to compare himself to Charlemagne; and in the whole of his relations with Rome there is a grotesque attempt to play the part of the holy protector of the Church, an affectation of pious language which betrayed how unfitted he was for the post which he had assumed. Napoleon was a man fitted to rule by his strange and almost supernatural acuteness, by his stern

* Artaud, Vie de Pie VII, from which the greater part of this account is taken.

and unbending resolution in pursuing his objects; he was most dangerous from his wily and unscrupulous policy, and the fascination of his smile, which was celebrated for its sweetness, was only a type of the smooth treachery of his conduct; but with all these qualities of the successful usurper, there is nothing princely about him; the insignia of Charlemagne, from which he copied his coronation robes, hung awkwardly on the shoulders of the bold soldier of fortune. All this only serves to show how misplaced seemed in him the language and bearing of the feudal head of "the holy Roman empire," of the first Christian prince, which he endeavored to assume in his relations to the holy see. The first occasion on which the Pope and he came into direct collision seems to have been the marriage of one of his brothers, who had, during a journey to America, privately married an American lady and a protestant; Napoleon, for reasons of state, wished the Pope to pronounce a divorce. In his exceeding zeal for Catholicism he urged his request on the plea of the disparity of religion. "It is important," he writes, "that no protestant girl should be in such close relation to me." The Pope, however, refused his request; the sanctity of marriage amongst Christian princes is the point of all others which the holy see has most scrupulously guarded. It will be found that half the quarrels of the Popes with kings in the middle ages resulted from the inflexible justice with which they defended the cause of queens whom their husbands wished to repudiate; Innocent III and Ingeburga will at once suggest themselves to every one. In a long and dignified letter, Pius VII endeavored to make Napoleon understand the unreasonableness of his request. The Church, he argued, however it condemned mixed marriages, did not divorce those who had contracted them. "That difference of religion, which is considered by the Church to be an impediment involving separation, has no place in the case of baptized persons, even though one of them be not in the Catholic communion."

Napoleon chafed and fretted at distinctions which were too subtle for his military understanding, but in vain ; the Pope was immov

able. It was not long, however, before the emperor's aggressions entirely altered even the outward show of friendly relations between the two powers. Only six months after Pius had left France, the imperial troops took possession of Ancona; in violation of a concordat which had been passed for the Italian republic in 1803, he seized on the property of the Church, suppressed monasteries, and decided every thing according to his sovereign will even in churches immediately dependant on the holy see; the Pope only answered by refusing to grant bulls to the Italian bishops of his nomination. It was not long before he took steps to swallow up the papal states in the empire which he was forming on the continent; he proposed to the Pope to join the Rhenish confederacy, and demanded that the ports of Ancona and of Civita Vecchia should be shut against the English; in other words, he ordered the Pope to quit the neutrality which became the head of the Church, and to become a partisan in his wholesale system of oppression. The answer of his holiness was as firm as it was dignified. In a letter to the emperor he says, "We cannot yield to anything which interferes with the guardianship of the deposit of the patrimony of the Roman Church, which has been transmitted to us through so long a series of ages by our predecessors, and which, in the presence of Almighty God, at the foot of the altar, and with the most sacred oaths, we have promised to transmit inviolate to our successors." To Napoleon's demand that the English should be expelled from the ports, he answered in a strain of holy indignation: "We, Vicar of the Everlasting Word, who is not the God of quarrel, but the God of concord, who is come into the world to expel enmities, and to preach the gospel of peace' both to those who are near and to those who are far off,' (such are the words of the apostle) how can we in any way deviate from the instruction of our divine Founder? How can we belie the mission to which we have been appointed?" He declares that he is prepared to retire to a convent, or into the catacombs, after the example of the first successors of St. Peter, rather than give up the trust which had

been put into his hands. Napoleon's anger at this unwonted opposition to his will may well be conceived; at one moment he was even discontented at the narrow bounds assigned to him in the division of power into spiritual and temporal, and thus protested against the usurpation: "Think of the insolence of these priests, who in their partition of authority with the temporal power, as they call it, keep for themselves the power of acting on the intellect, on the noble portion of man, and pretend to confine my sphere of action to the body; they take the soul to themselves, and then throw me the carcass." Such a man was not likely to have much respect for the chair of St. Peter. He takes the tone of an injured person, as thus, with a curious mixture of cant, he details his grievances:-"I will always preserve towards your holiness, the head of our religion, that filial deference which I have shown to you in all circumstances; but I am accountable before God, who has, in his goodness, willed to make use of my arm in re-establishing religion; how can I then without groaning see religion endangered by the delays of the court of Rome, where affairs are protracted without end; where for the sake of worldly interests, of vain prerogatives of the tiara, souls, the true foundation of religion, are left to perish? They shall answer for it before God, who leave Germany in anarchy; they shall answer before God whose zeal for the protection of protestant marriages is so great, that they would oblige me to bind my family to protestant princes; they shall answer before God who delay the despatch of bulls for my bishops, and give up my diocesses to anarchy."

From the tone of this letter Napoleon would have us believe that it was a holy zeal for Catholicism which induced him on the 2d of February, 1808, to send his troops to take possession of Rome, and the next year by a formal decree to unite the patrimony of St. Peter to the French empire. This last deed exhausted the patience of the holy father, and he excommunicated the emperor. Amidst the astounding events which follow one another with lightning speed in the history of Napoleon, this little

act of the Pope's is almost imperceptible, but who knows what unseen powers fought with England against him whom the Church had condemned? With all his indifference Napoleon showed great uneasiness when he heard the news; he, however, assumed a lofty tone, and wrote to Eugene Beauharnais in the same hypocritical strain which had characterized his letters to the Pope; "Does the Pope think," says he, "that the arms will fall from the hands of my soldiers?" Could he have looked forward a few years, he would have seen that this was precisely what did happen to him; the numbed fingers of his soldiers refused to bear their arms in the memorable Russian campaign.

The events which followed this excommunication show more than ever the real object of Napoleon in restoring the Church in France; since he could not make the Pope his liege vassal, he determined to destroy the line of St. Peter. On the 6th of July the Pope was dragged from Rome and conveyed to Savona. In the case of Pius VI the Directory had allowed the cardinals to disperse themselves, and thus to get beyond their power; on the death of that Pope a sudden fortune of war had driven the French from Italy and enabled the cardinals to assemble for the election of Pius VII; scarcely had he taken possession of Rome, when the battle of Marengo put the north of Italy again into the hands of the French; it seemed as if Providence had swept them away on purpose to clear the way for the election of a new Pontiff. Napoleon determined that this should not happen again; all the cardinals except those whose age rendered the journey impossible, were conveyed to Paris; the annulus Piscatoris was also taken thither and shown in triumph. If ever Rome seemed on the eve of perishing, it was then. Napoleon's whole efforts were now bent on effecting a separation between the French Church and the holy see; for this purpose he turned theologian; he raked up all the old maxims of the Gallican Church, and the famous four articles of 1682, which may be called the

* Bourienne, vol. viii, c. 14.

symbol of Gallicanism, were ever in his mouth. The Pope, however, was by no means impotent; though all communication between the Church and her head was strictly cut off, though the cardinals and even his confessor were removed from him, though he was obliged to write by stealth, and pens, ink, and paper were removed from him, still he had only to suffer and remain passive; he alone had powers which were necessary to his enemies, and his mere inaction was sufficient to vanquish the emperor. He refused canonical institution to the bishops appointed by Napoleon, and issued mandates annulling the jurisdiction of Cardinal Maury who had taken upon him the archbishopric of Paris. What Napoleon had now to do was to make it appear that the chapters might give jurisdiction without the Pope; to this end he imprisoned cardinals, bishops, and theologians who held a contrary opinion; he drew his sword on the vicargeneral of the diocess of Paris (that Abbé d'Astros mentioned by M. Rio), who obeyed the Pope in rejecting Cardinal Maury. This new reformer must needs uphold the primitive discipline and the privileges of chapters, and declaim about the Gallican liberties at the very time when he was imprisoning French bishops and forcing them to send in their resignations.

In order to further his views, he at length conceived the plan of a national council, that is, a council of the bishops of France and Italy. Ninety-five bishops accordingly assembled at Notre Dame, on the 17th of June, 1811; they were not, however, so tractable as Napoleon expected; it is true that a party of bishops was found disposed to pay a servile obedience to the civil power, and the remonstrances addressed to the emperor on the subject of the imprisonment of the Pope were but feeble; still the principles of the Roman see were upheld in a manner which entirely foiled the despot's purpose. He endeavored to overawe them by the unexpected presence of his Ministre des Cultes, who even claimed a voice in the council; the bishops, however, silenced him. Napoleon next manœuvred to obtain the assent of the council to an address to himself, favoring his views; it was,