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.

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.