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The capstone of five years of growing control by
Napoleon and delicate negotiations by the papacy, the coronation was both a
half-hearted throwback to medieval papal authority and a rude foreshadowing of
the threats Rome would endure in the next two centuries at the hands of
tyrants.
The pomp and spectacle of the ceremony could not
conceal Napoleon’s literal power grab and more subtle insulted aimed at the
pontiff.
Reaction against the French Revolution’s creation of a
state religion that would have supplanted Roman Catholicism left the nation in
a position not unlike Russia after the Marxist attempt to impose a godless
society: with a new regime eager for the credibility of the surviving
institutional church.
But, unlike the Russian Orthodox Church’s complicity
in Vladimir Putin’s strategy of Christian nationalism, Pius, in his
sweet-natured but firm way, resisted.
Gallic revolutionary fever had disrupted the Papal
States enough that a Roman republic had been declared and Pope Pius VI taken as
a prisoner of France, where he died in 1799. Even after the threat receded and
something like the status quo ante resumed, the papacy was unsure how to
counter this new force in Europe.
But in Pius VII, Napoleon faced an adversary he’d
never encountered on the battlefield or in state chambers. Unlike so many of
his haughty but maladroit predecessors in Rome, this pontiff exhibited genuine
Franciscan gentleness and piety, a onetime monk accustomed to making his own
bed and mending his own cassock. He met insults and threats with equanimity
rather than fear or burning resentment.
After staging a coup d’etat on 18–19 Brumaire (the
revolutionary calendar’s equivalent of November 9–10, 1799), Bonaparte had
consolidated power by degrees. As First Consul of the republic, he named the group
who drafted the laws, as well as ministers, ambassadors, army officers and
judges; created the national bank; and reorganized the bureaucracy.
In resorting to one-man rule, use of censorship and
propaganda, and strengthening of the military, Bonaparte crafted a blueprint
for 20th-century authoritarians—a regime of ruthless efficiency and
lightning-fast moves that the ancient, creaky, rules-based Vatican continually
found difficult to counter.
Victory over the Austrians at the Battle of Marengo
put Bonaparte in effective control of Italy. Even while celebrating military
victories abroad, the new strongman needed to quell unrest at home. Catholics
remained angry at the restrictions on the Church imposed by the revolutionary
regime, with some joining conspiracies and even assassination plots against
Bonaparte.
Not surprisingly, then, the dictator sent a signal that
he wanted a change in relations with the Holy See. “Tell the pope that I want
to make him a present of 30,000,000 Frenchmen,” he told an aide.
Whatever relief Pius VII felt over not suffering the
fate of his predecessor was short-lived, though. A Concordat concluded in September
1801 that recognized Catholicism as “the religion of the French majority” and
reopening churches proved to be far less than the Holy See had expected when it
signed the document, as Bonaparte soon issued 77 “Organic Articles” that
effectively nullified major concessions to the Church.
In 1804, after declaring himself emperor, Bonaparte
still wanted the credibility the Church could provide. His model for his
projected coronation was the ceremony for Charlemagne, who inaugurated a period
of order and learning after Pope Leo gave his blessing at a Christmas Day
ceremony in the year 800.
But, even as the emperor-in-name sought papal acquiescence
in the ceremony, Bonaparte wanted the pope—and even ordinary Frenchmen—to realize
who was in charge now. To that end, he:
*met the pope accidentally-on-purpose while out
hunting, so it would not appear to be a meeting of equals;
*gave Pius a wedding gift less substantial—and more
insolent—than it initially appeared: a jeweled tiara decorated with stones
stolen from the Vatican six years before; and,
*placed crowns on his own head and that of his wife, Josephine.
The prospective empress gave Pius his one point of minor satisfaction out of the whole affair: When she tearfully told him before the ceremony that Bonaparte had never gone through a Christian wedding ceremony, Pius said he would not go through with the coronation until this was taken care of first. The fuming dictator went through with it, with no witnesses present, the day before the coronation.
Pius' adventures with the pope were far from over. In 1808, French troops occupying Rome seized the pontiff and carried him off to the episcopal palace at Savona, where he was kept isolated from advisers. Relations remained tense between them until Bonaparte finally lost power at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815.
In the end, Pius did not merely outlast Bonaparte but triumphed over him. In the aftermath of the emperor's fall, when the pope offered his mother and sisters protection in the Papal States, Bonaparte had to acknowledge the goodness of the gentle man he had continually humiliated, calling him "an old man full of tolerance and light."
The pope’s conduct throughout the Napoleonic period
carried wider implications, too, according to Sir Nicholas Cheetham’s Keepers of the Keys:
“Pius' tenacious adherence to the principles of his
office, his fortitude in standing up to Napoleon and the patient humility with
which he had endured his sufferings had both enhanced his own prestige and
greatly encouraged the current Catholic revival throughout Europe.”
Pius’ strategy of passive resistance had repercussions
that extended to the end of the century, noted Eamon Duffy in his history of
the papacy, Saints and Sinners:
“In the light of the Napoleonic era…it was entirely
natural that the popes should identify the defence of the Papal States with the
free exercise of the papal ministry. On the lips of Napoleon the call for the
Pope to lay down his temporal sovereignty and to rely solely on spiritual
authority had been blatant code for the enslavement of the papacy to French
imperial ambitions. Without his temporal power, Pius VII…had come within a
whisker of signing away even his spiritual authority. If the pope did not remain
a temporal king, then it seemed he could no longer be the Church’s chief
bishop. That perception coloured the response of all the nineteenth-century
popes to the modern world.”
The image accompanying this post, The Coronation of
Napoleon, was created by French painter Jacques-Louis David from 1805 to
1807.
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