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.

Quote of the Day (Charles de Gaulle, on Courage in the Face of Obstacles)

“Let us be firm, pure and faithful; at the end of our sorrow, there is the greatest glory of the world, that of the men who did not give in.”—French soldier and statesman Charles de Gaulle (1890-1970), Bastille Day Speech, July 14, 1943, Algiers

Flashback, June 1958: De Gaulle Returns to End 4th French Republic, Begin the 5th

Sixty-five years ago this month, Charles de Gaulle returned to power as Premier of France at the start of June 1958, much in the same manner in which he stepped into the public eye in 1940: to rescue the country he loved with mystical fervor.

The WWII Resistance movement commander had stepped away from the government he was widely expected to lead in 1946 and stayed on the sidelines.  The dozen intervening years confirmed his opinion that the Fourth French Republic created after the war would be fatally flawed by legislative wrangling and executive impotence.

Only two Socialists were included in de Gaulle’s government and no Communists, reflecting the general’s suspicions of the latter party dating back to WWII, when, despite its critical support of his leadership of the Resistance, he came to view it as a dangerous revolutionary force.

Though the National Assembly had voted 329 to 224 to put him in power, nobody knew exactly how the 67-year-old de Gaulle would implement the unlimited powers it gave him for six months. Part of his agenda—or at least what could be ascertained from his sometimes vague public utterances on the subject— was to prepare a reform of the republic to be ratified by referendum.

What was still unclear was how he would resolve the crisis that had convulsed the nation and precipitated his return to leadership: the Algerian war of independence. When the conflict broke out in 1954, 1 million European settlers (the pieds-noirs, “black feet”) lived on Algerian land. With so many Frenchmen there, the government was reluctant to leave its colony.

What resulted was one of the most vicious conflicts in postwar decolonization, with a cycle of insurgency followed by counterinsurgency marked by torture. By the time the conflict ended in 1962, 25,000 French troops had died and hundreds of thousands of Algerians.

In France itself, the unrest exacerbated the instability that de Gaulle foresaw would plague the Fourth Republic. Twenty-four cabinets were formed under 16 prime ministers during the 12-year regime. Just as bad, according to a 2004 analysis in the British Journal of Political Science on the republic’s cabinets by John Huber and Cecilia Martinez-Gallardo, they were also staffed by ministers who were relatively inexperienced.

Understandably chafing at this inexperience and instability, reactionary elements in the French military, learning nothing from its recent debacle in French Indochina, resisted this new anti-colonial movement, especially when the latest French government indicated it was prepared to negotiate with the National Liberation Front, or FLN.

The anger of the military brass had climaxed on May 13, 1958 with an uprising of French partisans in Algiers, supported by the 10th paratroop division of General Jacques Massu. It was, in essence, a putsch, with Massu and his movement forming a Committee of Public Safety, calling for de Gaulle to return to power in Paris.

The instincts towards Catholicism, conservatism, and monarchism that de Gaulle inherited from his father may have steered him away from many radical or even liberal currents in 20^th-century thought. But above all, the general was a realist.

His growing realization that the economic, political, and human costs of the Algerian War could no longer be contained moved him towards overtures to the Algerian independence movement that deeply disappointed his most revanchist followers.

De Gaulle’s final acknowledgement of Algerian independence sparked another putsch, this time an August 1962 assassination plot against him—the most serious of more than 30 attempts on his life over two decades. (The latter plot inspired Frederick Forsyth’s bestselling 1971 political thriller, The Day of the Jackal.)

Washington watched the developments around de Gaulle with special interest, remembering well the prickly relations the Free French leader had maintained with the Western Allies during WWII.

Winston Churchill had been annoyed by the general but ultimately tolerated him as the best alternative to the collaborationist Vichy regime in WWII. Franklin Roosevelt abided him only on sufferance, with the President’s son Elliott quoting him in the 1946 memoir As He Saw It: “de Gaulle is out to achieve one-man government in France. I can’t imagine a man I would distrust more.”

Amory Houghton, U.S. Ambassador to France, sent a June 1, 1958 telegram that functioned as a flashing yellow light about the general to the U.S. State Department. While noting that “the interests of the United States will be served by de Gaulle’s success,” Houghton also warned that “the General’s character suggests that problems will increase and it is doubtful how well the General grasps and will comprehend the complexity of military and political relationships which have grown up since he retired from the political scene.”

Two years later, an intelligence report prepared in the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research was equally skeptical about the outcome of de Gaulle’s Algerian maneuvering:

“Even if de Gaulle is able to establish autonomous organs in Algiers, it is unlikely that peace could be restored, at least in the short run, without political negotiations with the FLN, which both he and the army strongly resist. de Gaulle’s policy, unless it is modified on this point, is therefore probably inadequate to bring peace to Algeria in the foreseeable future.”

What the State Department did not foresee was that, within five months, de Gaulle would squelch a "Generals' Putsch" intended to seize control of Algeria and topple his own regime. That strengthened his hand internally, leading to the Evian Accords with the FLN in 1962.

On a broader front, de Gaulle delivered on his promise to deliver a new constitution, in effect ushering in a new Fifth Republic--or, as Lara Marlowe characterized it in a September 2018 Irish Times article, "The Beginning of French Politics As We Know It." The French President effectively ended the chaos that had characterized his nation's postwar era, partly through the executive-oriented measures of the new constitution, partly through his own considerable mystique.

That mystique, erected on the basis of the general’s indomitable defiance of his nation’s Nazi occupiers, was maintained by his height and hauteur. It was a fearsome thing for another politician to look up at the high forehead and Cyrano nose of the six-foot, five-inch head of government. He didn’t leaven his interactions with charm, as FDR and Churchill could do.

Washington and London, as they anticipated, had to get used to this prickliest of allies—one so intent to preserve France’s ability to act unilaterally on the world stage that he pushed his country to become a nuclear power, withdrew from NATO, and kick-started the Canadian separatist movement with the cry, “Vive le Québec libre!"

According to biographer Jean Lacouture, de Gaulle was a "grand nomad" who sometimes had to "take to the wilderness for his true stature and the sheer gap left by his absence to be perceived." 

If confirmation were needed of this contention, it came through the events of late spring 1958--and, indeed, since 1969, when his resignation as President after a decade in power left a vacuum in moral authority that his successors, for all the constitutional authority he bequeathed them, have struggled to fill.

Fortunately, he did not turn into a Bonaparte but something like a French George Washington--a military leader who withstood the siren call of absolutism, a President who left those who followed him in office with enormous executive power to be used for good or ill, and a leader with a grand vision for his country--or, as de Gaulle described it on the first page of his war memoirs, "France is like a princess in a fairy story, Madonna in a fresco.”

This Day in WWII History (Churchill, de Gaulle Rally Demoralized Countrymen)

June 18, 1940—With France overrun and British forces only narrowly making it back across the English Channel, Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle appealed to their beleaguered countrymen to continue the fight against their Nazi foes. 

Their inspirational speeches became an essential part of their legends. Churchill’s address to the House of Commons especially echoes to the present day with its ringing closing: “Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.’” De Gaulle’s “Appeal of June 18” is still taught to French schoolchildren as the birth of the Resistance movement.

The British Prime Minister had been a fixture in his nation’s politics for the prior four decades, so his speech in the House of Commons was heard and absorbed immediately by the electorate. But the French general at this point was still relatively little-known, so his words were not recognized as the official kick-off of the Resistance until well into the war.

In recent weeks, statues of Churchill and de Gaulle have been defaced by vandals who decried their racist attitudes. To be sure, both men were imperialists who did not regard colonials (often non-white) as equal to their rulers.

Speaking before the Peel Commission in March 1937, Churchill said: "I do not admit that wrong has been done to these people [Native Americans and blacks in Australia] by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly-wise race, to put in that way, has come in and taken their place.” In 1959, while noting that the presence of Moslems testified to France’s tolerance, de Gaulle also warned against admitting them in mass numbers, scoffing: “Those who advocate integration have the brain of a hummingbird.”

But both acknowledged frankly that the survival of their countries depended on colonies that could help sustain the fight against the Nazis. Moreover, for all their paternalism towards subject peoples, their battle against Nazism was the most important victory over racism in the 20^th century.

In addition to paternalism, Churchill and de Gaulle exhibited swollen egos. But for all their large and real faults, they are remembered rightly as heroes to their countrymen. The desperate situation they faced in June 1940 brought their leadership into sharp focus. It is worthwhile recalling the several ways in which this quality manifested itself:

*Patriotism. Advocacy of imperialism was the negative side of Churchill and de Gaulle’s abiding faith in Britain and France. The positive side was their belief in the best parts of their nation’s heritage. De Gaulle was careful to distinguish between patriotism and the nationalism that fueled the rise of Fascism: “Patriotism is when love of your own people comes first; nationalism, when hate for people other than your own comes first.”

*Conservative, but not reactionary, politics. Churchill and de Gaulle were not only fierce anti-Communists but had little use for Socialism. But they refused to ally with the sizable far-right movements in their countries. Churchill spoke repeatedly throughout the 1930s against appeasement, which assured that he would remain without a leadership position among the Tories throughout the decade. A devout Roman Catholic, de Gaulle never became infected with the anti-Semitism displayed by so many French co-religionists in the wake of the Dreyfuss Affair of the 1890s. Unlike many in the French military, though de Gaulle scorned most politicians, he accepted the legitimacy of the French republic itself. As David Bell noted in a 2018 article in The Nation, he “never embraced the viciously intolerant reactionary nationalism so common among monarchists on the prewar French right.”

*Realism about their nations’ dire crises. Particularly in the case of Churchill, admirers have pointed to the hope the two leaders provided when little appeared on the horizon. But—unlike current leaders on both sides of the Atlantic—that did not mean that they sugarcoated, let alone denied, the catastrophic losses their nations’ armed forces had just sustained, nor what could happen if they lost. The very first line of Churchill’s address spoke of “the disastrous military events which have happened during the past fortnight.” He went on to spell it out: “Our Army and 120,000 French troops were indeed rescued by the British Navy from Dunkirk but only with the loss of their cannon, vehicles and modern equipment. This loss inevitably took some weeks to repair, and in the first two of those weeks the battle in France has been lost.” Similarly, de Gaulle acknowledged in his London radio address: “It is quite true that we were, and still are, overwhelmed by enemy mechanized forces, both on the ground and in the air.” Later, during his political career, he observed, "Politics is nothing else than the art of realities."

*Identification of their countries’ real sources of continuing strength. These frank admissions of losses bolstered the credibility of Churchill and de Gaulle when they explained how they thought Britain and France would defeat Adolf Hitler in the end. Churchill cited the many troops that had escaped the Nazis’ trap in France, the million and a quarter men currently under arms in Britain, the logistical difficulties that would face the Nazis during a cross-channel invasion, the powerful Royal Navy, and the cooperation of the British Empire’s self-governing dominions: Canada, Australia, South Africa, and New Zealand. De Gaulle pointed to the assistance of Great Britain, the support of France’s colonies, and the industrial strength of the United States.

*Calls for collective action. With the crises facing their country so utterly grave, neither Churchill nor de Gaulle was foolhardy enough to say, as one Western leader proclaimed several years ago, “I alone can fix it.” Churchill consulted with his generals and the self-governing dominions, who agreed the fight could be continued. De Gaulle summoned “all French officers and men who are at present on British soil, or may be in the future, with or without their arms,” as well as “all engineers and skilled workmen from the armaments factories who are at present on British soil, or may be in the future.”

*Refusal to compromise with evil. Influential voices in both Great Britain and France contemplated giving up the fight against the Nazis. In May 1940, two members of Churchill’s Cabinet, Neville Chamberlain and Lord Halifax—who, before the outbreak of hostilities, had pursued appeasement of the Nazis—proposed negotiating peace with Hitler. Several weeks later, they had to be persuaded that De Gaulle, only recently promoted to Brigadier General, should be allowed to speak on the BBC for a Free France, rather than Marshal Henri Petain. (The latter would see the honor gained through his WWI service effaced by his leadership of the infamous Vichy collaborationist regime.)

*Refusal to break constitutional norms. Crises offer dictators the opportunity to seize total power. But unlike Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin, who exploited unrest in their countries to seize total power (or by current European and American leaders who have tried to do likewise), Churchill and de Gaulle continued to work, as far as possible, within the constitutional systems of Britain and France.

*Heightened eloquence. Churchill’s powers of rhetoric were such that he won the 1953 Nobel Prize for Literature. De Gaulle’s eloquence is less well-known to Anglophones, but his vision of his country called out the most unexpectedly romantic sentences from this hard-headed general and politician. His War Memoirs begins with this famous paragraph: "All my life I have had a certain idea of France. This is inspired by sentiment as much as by reason. The emotional side of me tends to imagine France, like the princess in the fairy stories or the Madonna in the frescoes, as dedicated to an exalted and exceptional destiny. Instinctively, I have the feeling that Providence has created her either for complete success or for exemplary misfortunes.” 

In calling fellow citizens to arms in their June 18 addresses, Churchill and de Gaulle marshalled the weapons immediately at hand to them: words that expressed truth--an appropriate response to a dictatorship that used propaganda to incite attacks on religious and racial minorities and to devastate an entire continent. 

De Gaulle invoked “the flame of the Resistance” against the enemy, while Churchill’s speech gave rise, in addition to “their finest hour,” this famous sentence that called for ending the hunt for scapegoats for Britain’s military calamity: “If we open a quarrel between the past and the present, we shall find that we have lost the future.”

De Gaulle’s arrogance and humorlessness alienated Franklin Roosevelt, and often he sorely tried the patience of Churchill. But in encountering de Gaulle for the first time in June 1940, the British leader was impressed by the lonely, courageous stance that this newly minted brigadier general and under secretary of state took as the only member of the French government willing to carry on the fight against Hitler from Great Britain. 

Churchill and de Gaulle may have been egocentric, stubborn and not always enlightened towards those who fell outside the whites they saw as integral to their countries' history and governance. But they also recognized in each other brilliance, fortitude and a sincere, steadfast devotion to their countries’ highest ideals—enough to sustain them through their subsequent stormy wartime partnership.

This Day in French History (Birth of Talleyrand, Machiavellian Statesman)

February 2, 1754—Observers of the Continental diplomatic scene believed, watching his machinations, that he had nine lives, but Charles Maurice Talleyrand-Perigord began the only one actually allotted to human beings as the scion of a family of nobles. 

Physically lame, he had demonstrated, by the time he breathed his last 84 years later, perhaps the most remarkable political and moral nimbleness of any politician of his time.

Somewhere, I heard it said in a spate of dark jesting, that the only creature that would survive a nuclear apocalypse would be the cockroach. Well, in his amazing survival instincts, Talleyrand might have been the closest human equivalent of the cockroach.

At first, I thought that Talleyrand’s longevity might have been surpassed by the Soviet Union’s V.M. Molotov, who lived to age 96. 

But most of the Communist diplomat’s career was spent in the service of Joseph Stalin, and once removed from power by Nikita Khrushchev, he had the good sense to live quietly in retirement as something of a U.S.S.R. “nonperson.”

Consider the following different masters Talleyrand served:

* His aristocratic parents sloughed him off on the Catholic Church once they became convinced he was not made for their life.

* Rising from priest to bishop, he was among the clergy at the Estates-General called by King Louis XVI to consider what to do about the worsening domestic situation in 1789.

* He ingratiated himself with the revolutionaries by a) proposing that the French assembly assume ecclesiastical lands, and b) accepting the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. For his pains, Talleyrand was excommunicated. (Over a decade later, the Church rescinded the excommunication—though Talleyrand remained laicized).

* While in England in 1792, negotiating on behalf of the young republic, the French monarchy was overthrown. When matters became too hot in France, Talleyrand journeyed to England as a private citizen. He wasn’t out of France long when he was branded an émigré—a designation that, at the time, was often assigned to monarchists. It wasn’t a comfortable class to which to belong, and the former aristocrat decided to bide his time.

* The English, not trusting him, forced him out in 1794, compelling Talleyrand to journey across the ocean to the U.S. There he remained for more than a year.

* With the Reign of Terror over, Talleyrand managed to work his way back into the good graces of the five-member Directory, which, in need of an experienced foreign-policy hand (even if that experience had been only for a few years), appointed the returned diplomat as foreign minister.

* Later in 1799, Talleyrand resigned his post—but his shrewd recognition of the coming power in the land, Napoleon Bonaparte, and the latter’s coup resulted in Talleyrand resuming his old ministerial portfolio.

* Talleyrand plied his arts with Napoleon, and for awhile they got along because they needed each other. But a very public reconciliation between Talleyrand and an old enemy led the man who, by now, had gotten himself named Emperor, to wonder if the two might be conspiring against him. In 1809, at a meeting of the privy council, Napoleon launched into a half-hour harangue, climaxing with a denunciation of Talleyrand as “dung in a silk stocking.” Talleyrand didn’t say a peep, before or afterward. The emperor continued to consult with him, but for all intents and purposes Talleyrand had lost much of his influence.

* At the Congress of Vienna, with Napoleon overthrown, Talleyrand represented post-imperial France in a diplomatic assemblage of reactionaries whose guiding spirit was Prince Metternich.

* Napoleon’s return from Elba resulted in Talleyrand resigning again. The wily old diploat waited, then waited some more. It looked as if his diplomatic career was over.

* Er, not quite yet. In the July Revolution of 1830, Talleyrand persuaded Louis Philippe to accept the offer by that year’s group of radicals to become King of France. The grateful new sovereign tried to get the old diplomatic dog to become foreign minister again, but Talleyrand said that minister to England would do fine. He held that last post for four years before taking leave of government, this time for good, in 1834, four years before his death.