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 (Napoleon Bonaparte, on the Caprices of Fortune)

“Profit by the favors of Fortune while her caprices favor you; fear only that she will change out of spite; she is a woman.”—French dictator Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821) quoted in Napoleon in His Own Words, edited by Jules Bertaut, translated by Herbert Edward Law and Charles Lincoln Rhodes (1916)

(The image accompanying this post, Adolph Northen’s painting Napoleon’s Retreat from Moscow, depicts the moment when Fortune turned away from the soldier who once held most of continental Europe under his thumb. It gives hope—a quality needed now more than ever—that, with enough time, even the mighty, with all their unscrupulousness and cruelty, can be brought to heel by fate.)

 

Waterloo at 200: Thackeray, on a Vanished ‘Great Game of War’

"His pulse was throbbing and his cheeks flushed: the great game of war was going to be played, and he one of the players. What a fierce excitement of doubt, hope, and pleasure! What tremendous hazards of loss or gain! What were all the games of chance he had ever played compared to this one?"—Captain George Osborne, anticipating the Battle of Waterloo, in William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair (1847).

Today marks the bicentennial of the Battle of Waterloo, which over the years has acquired reams of significance: as the making of one general (the Duke of Wellington) and the unmaking of another (Napoleon), as the closing of the dreams of one Continental power (France) and the opening of another (Prussia-turned-German), and even of the battle itself as a synonym for definitive disaster (“met his Waterloo”).

My post from five years ago gives the particulars of the battle. But more can be said for the significance of that day. Indeed it was, by William Makepeace Thackeray, in Vanity Fair, his satire published early in the Victorian Era.

Thackeray looked back from the perspective of 30 years with an irony that sounds like it could have come from the 20^th century, or our own.  The viewpoint in the above quote comes not from a general, but from a soldier. George Osborne is a gambler, a spendthrift, a snob and, despite marriage to Amelia, a ladies’ man. His feeling of remorse on the eve of battle, as he senses the possibility that he might leave Amelia a widow, is soon overcome by “a fierce excitement of doubt, hope, and pleasure.”

That rush feeling would be cruelly disabused by a battle where, as British man of letters A.N. Wilson noted in a retrospective for Britain’s Daily Mail, “The scale of the casualties involved is inhumanly shocking — one in four men on the battlefield was killed.” (The aftermath had its own horrors: So many teeth were removed from the corpses to supply the dentures of the living that the phenomenon became known as “Waterloo Teeth.”)

The carnage of the battle even shocked a hardened soldier like Wellington, who wrote afterward: “My heart is broken by the terrible loss I have sustained in my old friends and companions and my poor soldiers. Believe me, nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won.”

But somehow, the grand illusion of war continued half a world away even after Thackeray’s anti-heroic view, for American participants in the Civil War and the Spanish-American War. If the romance of war can be said to have died, it was 100 years after Waterloo, in the muddy trenches and gas attacks of WWI.

Not that war itself has died. Oh, no. But nobody will ever be able to rush off to arms again, as George Osborne did, without knowing beforehand that it would involve a grim, nasty business indeed.

(For a fascinating blog post on the battle, see “The Battle of Waterloo in 16 Objects” from the British Library’s “Untold Lives” blog.)

(The image accompanying this post comes from the 1998 British miniseries Vanity Fair, with Tom Ward as the doomed and dumb Captain Osborne.)

Flashback, June 1812: Napoleon’s Fatal Russian Error

In less than 20 years, a little Corsican—a nobody in the army of his adopted country, France—had come to cast such a mighty shadow over Europe that kingdoms fell, worldly-wide counselors quailed at a baleful glance from him, and foreign ministers tried vainly to cobble together shifting alliances that could defeat him on at least one battlefield.

Yet in a fit of pique, while still engaged with enemies in Western Europe, Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte led his feared Grande Armee of more than half a million strong on pontoon boats across the Niemen River from Poland into Lithuania, on their way to Russia, from June 24 to 26. The invasion of Russia--planned for the last year and a half, begun with soldiers in magnificent apparel loudly singing French patriotic songs--would unravel by the fall, depleting his forces and leading to his eventual loss of power.

It has not escaped historians’ notice that the two masters of the European land mass over the last 2½ centuries, Napoleon and Adolf Hitler, both began to fall to earth with foolhardy invasions of Russia. The similarities between the two were, in fact, so extensive and pronounced that they became the subject of an entire book, Desmond Seward’s Napoleon and Hitler: A Comparative Biography (1990).

Certainly, the same question—What was he thinking?—arises from both Napoleon’s 1812 campaign and Hitler’s in 1941. Both invasions occurred when the strongmen, though they had continually outguessed opponents on the field, still had not overcome opponents in the West (Napoleon’s: a force of British soldiers and Spanish guerrillas, led by the Duke of Wellington; Hitler’s: Great Britain, in North Africa).  Both strongmen were determined to strike at Russian rulers they deemed either vulnerable or downright treacherous. Both ignored pointed warnings that they would face a brutal Russian winter. And both thrust deeply into Russia before slowing down and suffering stinging losses from which they would never recover.

Yet the story of Napoleon’s Russian misadventure is astonishing in and of itself, even without the comparison to Hitler. His motives, and those of his opponent, Czar Alexander I, were more complex than the Nazi dictator’s, and the losses were, proportionately speaking, as staggering as those endured by Germans under their ruler in WWII.

To start with: Napoleon was peeved at Alexander’s vacillating attitude toward the Continental System, a blockade in which all trade with Great Britain was forbidden. After a defeat at the hands of Napoleon in the Battle of Friedland, Alexander concluded the Treaty of Tilsit with him, agreeing to leave most of Europe to the French leader while he maintained a free hand in dealing with Finland, Sweden and the Ottoman Empire. Once foes, the two took to proclaiming their brotherhood to each other, united by disdain for Great Britain.

It didn’t last long. Alexander, discovering that the freeze on British trade was having an adverse effect on the economy of his own country, too, looked the other way when Russian merchants began to break the blockade, angering Napoleon.

What may have annoyed the French emperor even more, however, was the Romanov dynasty’s refusal to facilitate his offer of marriage to Alexander’s youngest sister, Grand Duchess Anna. Like Britain’s Henry VIII, Napoleon’s fear that a lack of an heir would produce discord in France after his death led him to contemplate divorce from the Empress Josephine. Additionally, marriage between two royal houses would enable him to consolidate power in Europe—something he was in a great hurry to do, following one battle after another.

But Alexander’s father, Czar Paul, had given his wife, Dowager Empress Maria, right of approval over prospective grooms for her daughters—and Maria could not abide the thought that her youngest daughter would marry someone she regarded as a scoundrel. Additionally, a rumor appears to have reached her—spread by Napoleon’s soon-to-be-ex, Josephine—that the general, all-conquering on the battlefield, was rather less triumphant in the boudoir. (Incidentally, the saying that spread after this choice bit of gossip—“Not Tonight, Josephine!”—became the initial, ultimately rejected title for one of cinema’s great comedies: Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot.) The Dowager Empress—and, hence, Alexander—refused to consent to a union so disadvantageous.

Imagine you’re Napoleon. Not only has your diplomatic maneuver been stymied, but also your very manhood has been questioned. (And unfairly maligned, at that: After his marriage to Josephine was dissolved, he sired a child.) How would you react?

Napoleon, guessing the outcome, went off and married Maria Louisa of Austria. But he was still furious over the slight from the Romanovs. And Alexander, already concerned about this reaction to the matrimonial mess, grew worried as he saw the man he had once marveled at massing more and more troops in Poland, just beyond his sphere of influence.

Faced with Napoleon’s blustering about the Continental System as well as these latest military maneuvers, Alexander carefully went over with one of his diplomats what he wanted to convey to the French emperor:  France might have better-trained troops and more skilled generals, but Napoleon could never hope to conquer Russia. In fact, the farther he penetrated inland, the more likely his defeat at the hands of a vicious winter.

Napoleon ignored the warning and thrust his army into Russia. It seemed like a juggernaut, but that was a bit deceptive—only two-fifths were French. The other soldiers, as well-trained as they were, were not as highly motivated to fight for their country.

Alexander’s Minister of War, Barclay de Tolly, adopted a “Fabian” strategy (named for the ancient Roman general Quintus Maximus Verrucosus Fabius) of avoiding pitched battles and frontal assaults in favor of a war of attrition. In the American Revolution, George Washington’s patient implementation of this strategy bore positive results at Yorktown.

The strategy was meant to minimize the Russian Army’s huge liabilities, which, as summarized in Curtis Cate’s fine history of the campaign, The War of the Two Emperors, included the following:

*archaic army regulations dating back to Czar Peter the Great in 1716;

*widespread gambling, drunkenness, and dissipation among the officers;

*foot soldiers, taken from the vast population of serfs, recruited by their masters for 25 years—and, consequently, with low morale;

*inadequate food that left soldiers so weak they could not withstand disease or low marches;

*field artillery forces commanded not by skilled, trained officers, but by favorites of the hierarchy.

Again, Napoleon was warned about the nature of the strategy facing him. Again, he chose to plunge ahead, sure he could carry all before him.

Speed was required to make Napoleon’s strategy of enveloping the Russian army work, but that was precisely what he could not achieve in the coming campaign.  His opponent would simply pull back, denying him the decisive battle he wanted. His men became exhausted from the increasingly dire conditions of the march (clouds of dust that, after downpours of rain, could turn roads into mudfields; dying horses; mosquitoes; dysentery; etc).

Napoleon regularly pushed his men to their physical limits (e.g., their heavy wool uniforms made them wilt in the early summer heat). But the supreme strategist of the era had made a great error, and continued to do so, as he pursued an enemy that would never really give him the fight he wanted.

  

Most important, he lost time. A campaign that began in summer heat was continually delayed. After the Russian Army left Moscow with the city in flames, he waited for weeks for a surrender that never came, leaving him less time to pull out of the nation before the Russian winter.

The names of the battles in the subsequent campaign—Smolensk, Borodino, Maloyaroslavets, Berezina—would enter Russian legend, most memorably in Leo Tolstoy’s epic novel, War and Peace. The truth, though, was that the campaign was marked by terrible mistakes and hideous casualties on the part of generals on both sides. (The commander that Alexander eventually appointed to lead his armies in the field, General Mikhail Kutusov, pursued the withdrawing Napoleon in a leisurely manner that enabled the French emperor to escape utter destruction.)

Once Napoleon straggled home to France, John Quincy Adams, serving as America’s ambassador to Russia, remarked of the campaign that there was “nothing like it in history since the days of Xerxes.”

The toll on Napoleon’s army was astonishing. By mid-January, the once-Grande Armee—now placed under the command of General Joachim Murat—numbered a mere 40,000 organized troops and another 20,000 stragglers—physical, and often mental, shells of their old selves. In another year, Napoleon would be forced from his throne following another defeat. Even an escape from a prison at Elba could not regain the domination of the continent he once had, as the Duke of Wellington and his allies defeated him, at last, at Waterloo in 1815.

(The image depicts Napoleon's retreat from Moscow, in a painting by Adolph Northen.)

This Day in Military History (Napoleon Meets His Waterloo)

June 18, 1815—The European monarchies brought to an end two decades of on-and-off warfare with France—and the hopes of Napoleon Bonaparte for re-establishing an empire that straddled much of the continent—as Britain’s Duke of Wellington and Prussia’s Gebhard Leberecht von Blucher defeated the Little Corsican 12 miles south of Brussels, Belgium at the Battle of Waterloo.

Even a genius eventually makes mistakes. It was Napoleon Bonaparte’s misfortune to make at least two on the same day. His subordinates—including brother Jerome Bonaparte and trusted commander Marshal Ney—contributed to the loss, too. But none compared in magnitude with those of the military commander who had once made mincemeat of his opponents by tearing up the old military rulebook.

In the July 2010 issue of Armchair General Magazine (table of contents only in this link; you’ll have to buy the issue for the article), military historian Bevin Alexander analyzes how the ancient Chinese military sage Sun-Tzu might have assessed the decisions of Napoleon and Wellington on this history-changing day.

To be sure, the Duke of Wellington made a questionable decision before the battle when he didn’t link up quickly enough with ally Blucher. By not massing his forces right away, he allowed Napoleon—who had escaped from exile on the island of Elba to return as emperor and reconstitute the Grand Army—the opportunity to defeat their forces in turn. This, in turn, could have dealt a devastating blow to the plan of the Seventh Coalition—the governments of Britain, Prussia, Russia, Sweden, Austria, The Netherlands and a number of German States—to crush Napoleon with overwhelming force.

But, compared with Wellington's, Napoleon’s errors were more numerous, more stubborn, more damaging, and more just plain inexplicable.

First, as Alexander explains, instead of executing a flanking maneuver that might have achieved surprise, Napoleon launched a massive frontal assault, preceded by enormous artillery fire to soften up the British, against an enemy led by a highly competent commander and well entrenched atop a formidable ridge.

(Alexander doesn’t mention the similarity, so I will: Napoleon’s Grand Army faced the kind of odds against dislodging Wellington’s forces that Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia would against George Meade’s Army of the Potomac on Cemetery Ridge.)

Second, worsening his chances of victory, Napoleon waited until mid-day before issuing the order to attack. If he was going to carry the day, he should have acted before Wellington and Blucher could join forces.

Following the lead of most historians, Alexander ascribes that decision to the emperor’s need to wait until the field—slick and mud-spattered from a recent downpour—dried. But I wondered how much that would restrain a normally audacious leader.

It took a fascinating review of the battle from, of all places, the Web site for the International Museum of the Horse (located—but naturally!—in Lexington, Ky.) for me to figure out why the emperor acted with such uncharacteristic slowness.

French cavalry forces actually outnumbered Wellington’s and Blucher’s 16,000 to 13,000. And Napoleon ascribed special importance to them, believing that “without cavalry, battles are without result."

Wellington was not so enamored of it as his opposite number. As an avid equestrian and military commander, the Duke knew all too well how horse and rider could lose their heads. Animals could react skittishly on fields affected by inclement weather, while cavalry leaders, like aristocrats on a fox hunt, could get caught up in the thrill of the chase.

One action during the heat of battle confirmed Wellington in his caution. Two British cavalry brigades, acting without orders, pursued the French down the road toward the Grand Battery. A counterattack practically decimated the two British brigades (the Scottish Greys came back with only one-sixth of their original 300 men), knocking them, for all intents and purposes, out of commission for the rest of the battle.

Throughout the battle, Wellington moved up and down his line, telling his men to wait and be ready. To one group, desperate to advance so they could at least move forward in the face of punishing artillery fire, he cautioned: “Wait a little longer, lads, and you will have your wish.”

I would add one last error to the ones enumerated by Alexander about Napoleon: the emperor underestimated the resolve of Blucher. The 72-year-old leader of the Prussian forces had led previous coalition forces to victory against him at the Battle of Leipzig, then had retired to farming when it appeared Napoleon had been forced out of power. The emperor’s “Hundred Days” after the escape from Elba led Blucher to re-join the fight.

Two days before Waterloo, Napoleon had beaten Blucher at Ligny, but the two corps he had dispatched to deal with the Prussian commander couldn’t catch him. In the early part of the battle, then, Napoleon was operating under powerful illusions: that Blucher’s forces had been not merely checked but roundly devastated, and that there was no way they could move 12 miles to the battlefield, with all their columns of infantry, cavalry and artillery, over muddy roads, fields and swamps, in time to make any difference.

By mid-to-late afternoon, Napoleon had a nasty surprise when he learned otherwise. The sudden presence of Blucher’s 30,000-plus troops solidified Wellington’s position and turned the tide of victory.

The cost was grievous to both sides—23,000 for the Allies versus 25,000 killed and wounded (plus 9,000 captured) for the French. But when it was all over, Napoleon’s dreams of reconquest lay in ruins. The British quickly made sure he would not escape to America, instead hustling him down to the far-away island of St. Helena, where he died six years later.

Flashback, July 1809 (Excommunicated Napoleon Takes Pius VII Prisoner)

A dictator who rose from the ashes of his country’s last military conflict succeeded in encircling and isolating a pope named Pius.

The pope-dictator couple, however, were not Pius XII and Adolf Hitler, but Pius VII and Napoleon Bonaparte.

The similarities in names and situations notwithstanding, the struggle between Europe’s first would-be dictator and the Papacy differed markedly from that between Hitler and the later Pius. In other ways, it also represented a critical departure from the archetypal church-state conflict, between Pope Gregory VII and Emperor Henry IV.

The most obvious difference between these other figures was that Pius was more of a meek servant of the Lord. Napoleon was not facing Julius, the Renaissance pontiff and arts patron who was probably more at home leading armies than congregations in prayer. Pius VII left Vatican functionaries slack-jawed by making his own bed and mending his own cassock.

None other than Hitler’s junior partner among the Axis powers, Benito Mussolini, urged the Vatican to excommunicate the German leader. What would have been the consequences of this? As the example of Pius VII demonstrates, extreme peril for the pontiff.

Hitler, though baptized a Catholic, had not practiced the faith since childhood. He believed that Christianity would gradually fall away, though he was prepared to move that process along. After becoming dictator, he launched a campaign of intimidation against German Catholic seminaries, for instance.

Napoleon was not what you might call the most devout Catholic, but he knew that a substantial number of the French were and, at least partly for that reason, had made life difficult for the revolutionary regime when it passed anti-clerical measures. To some extent, then, he thought it wise to have ecclesiastical cover for his claim to power.

Nobody expected, at the start of the reign of Pius VII, that difficulties with France would be problematic. The former Barnaba Chiaramonti, according to Nicholas Cheetham’s history of the papacy, Keepers of the Keys, had been selected by the 1799 papal conclave as a compromise candidate who would stand up to the Emperor of Austria, Francis II, over the latter’s encroachments in northern Italy.

As I hinted above, Pius was temperamentally disinclined to disagree with anybody. But what we have here, in his multi-year confrontation with Napoleon, is the case of the proverbial 98-pound weakling who, cornered by a bully, decides to stand his ground and give as good as he gets.

Some of the problems between Napoleon and Pius began when the little Corsican general decided he wanted a promotion from First Consul of France to Emperor. Pius, upon being told tearfully by the Emperor’s beloved, Josephine, that the two had not been formally married, refused to go along with her coronation as empress until that matter had been rectified post haste. Napoleon was so ticked off that he made Pius watch as he crowned himself and Josephine.

Thereafter, difficulties multiplied between the two:

* The wedding gift from Pius to Napoleon and Josephine turned out to be a subtle insult—the jeweled tiara consisted of stones from former papal tiaras that had been robbed during the capture of Rome by French forces under Napoleon in 1799.

* Pius’ four-month stay in Pius after the coronation increased his popularity among French Catholics, and mightily displeased the emperor, who wanted no competing center of attention among his subjects.

* Pius refused to take part in the ceremony when Napoleon took the Iron Crown of Lombardy. (Question: Where did these titles come from? And why would anyone want to fight over a crown of Lombardy?)

* Pius refused to annul the marriage of Napoleon’s love-besotted, 19-year-old brother Jerome to an American, Elizabeth Patterson of Bonaparte. (Note: A descendant of that marriage eventually, Charles Bonaparte, eventually became a member of Theodore Roosevelt's Cabinet.)

* The pope protested against Napoleon's occupation of the papal city of Ancona, a port that Napoleon claimed as protection against British and Austrian forces.

* In a single threatening letter, Napoleon demanded that the pope dismiss from Rome ambassadors from Sardinia and Russia; pouted that he was going to send a Protestant as his representative to Rome; and speculated that the Pope might have to be reduced to Bishop of Rome rather than the supreme head of the Church.

* In front of his entire court, Napoleon threatened to dismember the Papal States—unless Pius, “without ambiguity or reservation,” publicly declare an alliance with the emperor.

* Napoleon demanded that one-third of the French cardinals should belong to the empire—i.e., him.

* Napoleon invaded Rome with 10,000 troops under the command of General Miollis in February 1808.

* Napoleon, chafing over his cooling relations with the Vatican, declared that he’d annex the Pontifical States and had the flag of those states lowered.

* Deciding that he’d had enough, Pius excommunicated Napoleon.

* Declaring that the pope had shown he was a “lunatic,” Napoleon had Miollis demand Pius’ resignation as head of the Papal States. Upon his refusal, Miollis ordered the pope and his secretary of state seized. At 4 in the morning, they were hustled out of the residence with only their ceremonial robes and 20 sous between them—not enough for a single meal.

Napoleon determined that he’d shut Pius off from advisors and break his will. The ploy almost worked. For the next four years, the pontiff would be engaged in a war of nerves with Napoleon, especially over the emperor’s proposal for filling vacant bishoprics without papal authorization.

Pius was ready to yield on this last point, except for one condition: he wanted to retain the power to fill bishoprics in the Papal States. Napoleon regarded this as defiance, and got his back up. Pius rallied and refused to yield.

In 1812, Napoleon had his troops haul Pius overland for a confrontation about yielding papal powers. Pius developed a chronic urinary infection during the trip across the Alps, at one point needing to have his carriage stopped every 10 minutes to relieve himself. The last rites were even administered to him at one point.

A year later, it looked as if Napoleon had broken Pius’ will at last—allegedly by smashing crockery and grabbing him by the buttons of his cassock. The pope signed a paper ceding his temporal power in Rome and allowing Napoleon to move the papacy to Paris. Two aides, upon hearing the news, rushed to the pope’s side and urged him not to give up. Pius recovered his nerve, repudiating the agreement he had signed under duress.

In 1814, Napoleon lost power (his escape from Elba and return to power was soon crushed at Waterloo), and the pope returned in triumph to Rome.

Pius had survived, and he would have been the first to say that it had only been through the intervention of the God to whom he prayed. But his plight became an object lesson to all his 19th-century successors. The way they interpreted Pius’ close call, the loss of his temporal powers in the Papal States had also nearly resulted in the irreparable loss of his spiritual authority.

Did Pius XII have the fate of Pius VII in mind as he puzzled out how to deal with Hitler? Very probably. While a century might appear enormous to Americans, it would seem like only 20 minutes in the context of the ancient institution known as the Vatican.

In the tense period when the Axis powers held sway across whole swatches of Europe, the Vatican would have been best advised to stop worrying and recall one particular incident from the Napoleonic era. At one point, the dictator launched into another tirade, telling Pius’ adept, seen-it-all Secretary of State, Ercole Cardinal Consalvi, that he would “crush” the Roman Catholic Church.

The cardinal sighed and shook his head over the emperor’s naivete. "If in 1,800 years we clergy have failed to destroy the Church, do you really think that you'll be able to do it?" he answered.