Flashback, December 1804: Napoleon Disses Pope in Crowning Himself Emperor

In solidifying his hold on power but surpassing anything he had done previously in audacity, Napoleon Bonaparte compelled Pope Pius VII to come to Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris in December 1804 to consecrate him as Emperor of France—then simply crowned himself.

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 20^th-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.