To Kidnap a Pope: Napoleon and Pius VII

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The papacy's refusal to negotiate, let alone invest new bishops, left only one solution open to the imperial administration: namely a recourse to neo-conciliarist measures. Simply put, the French Empire resurrected the late medieval notion that church councils could circumvent papal supremacy. Many historians have seen this process as a cynical exercise by Napoleon to force his will on the Catholic Church. While there is some truth in this assessment, it can rather be argued that the appeal to conciliarism was not entirely misguided. Through this expedient, the Empire sought to appeal to older members of the Catholic hierarchy in France who had lived through the twilight years of Gallicanism and Jansenist controversies over ecclesiology during the second half of the eighteenth century. Footnote 21 Historians of conciliarism have focused on Jansenism and Febronianism and have disregarded its swansong during the early nineteenth century. For example, Francis Oakley's brilliant The conciliarist tradition passes over the events of 1811 in complete silence. Footnote 22 This article contends that neo-conciliarist thinking, even if clumsily articulated, was central to the concile. From the vantage point of the ostensible diplomatic triumph of 1801, this unfolding of events looks incomprehensible. That year, Pius and Napoleon as First Consul rather than Emperor accomplished the seemingly impossible: dissolving the antipathy between the secular republic and the papacy, the enduring scar of the 1789 revolution. They did so by means of a novel legal instrument on the status of the Roman Catholic Church in France, the Concordat. This 5 May will mark the bicentenary of Napoleon’s death on St Helena. The occasion will no doubt be marked, as was the bicentenary of the Battle of Waterloo six years ago, by a flood of new books about the emperor, adding yet more to the estimated 200,000 already written. Given this saturation, one wonders if there is anything left to say. This fascinating book proves that there is. It does so by focusing on a crucial yet neglected aspect of Napoleon’s rule: his bitter, decade-long confrontation with Pope Pius VII. This marked an important step both in the emperor’s decline and fall, and in the evolution of the Catholic Church. Despite the obvious mutual advantages of this arrangement, relations between Pius and Napoleon soured rapidly. Napoleon’s importunate demands for the annulment of his marriage to Josephine echoed Henry VIII’s two centuries earlier. Increasingly, it became evident that Imperial territorial ambitions in Italy were a threat not only to external papal dependencies, but the Papal States and even the Eternal City itself. In Napoleonic Europe, there would be no room for the temporal autonomy that the papacy saw as the precondition for spiritual independence.

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Funder reveals how O’Shaughnessy Blair self-effacingly supported Orwell intellectually, emotionally, medically and financially ... why didn’t Orwell do the same for his wife in her equally serious time of need?’ Gallicanism, as André Latreille reminds us, had always been a multifaceted phenomenon, Footnote 31 divided, for convenience, into three different strands: monarchical, parlementaire and ecclesiastical. Napoleon was interested in the monarchical branch of this tradition, but the parlementaire strand did re-emerge unexpectedly in 1811. The emperor's attachment to the traditions of the Church of Gaul were to an extent opportunistic. For example, the concordat of 1801 can hardly be held up as a shining example of French ecclesiological tradition. Footnote 32 Indeed, the pope's power as supreme head of the Church was used to force the resignation of the surviving bishops of the ancien régime Gallican establishment. A more Ultramontane measure is hard to imagine. Footnote 33 It was viewed as a crime by the petite église which never forgave Pius vii for his betrayal. Footnote 34 Furthermore, those constitutional bishops who had sworn loyalty to the French Revolution and its civil constitution had remained wary of the Roman dimension of the Concordat. Footnote 35 However the really unknown quantity was the new generation of bishops created after 1800 who had little or no experience of the ancien régime or of a constitutional episcopate. The emperor, as he admitted himself later on St Helena, had badly misjudged the French clergy's attachment to the traditions of Gallicanism. Footnote 36 The experience of revolution during the 1790s had created younger curés and bishops who placed their highest hopes and loyalties in Rome. An imperial state, that had inherited the revolution's non-denominational nature and lukewarm appreciation of religion, remained suspect to them.The pope’s carefully controlled captivity, first in Italy and later in France, would last five years. Incredibly, it was the second time in less than a decade that a pope had been kidnapped. His immediate predecessor, Pope Pius VI, had died in captivity at the hands of the French Revolutionary state. Yet, this affront to the Catholic Church had not involved Napoleon. The general of the age was transiting the Mediterranean on his return to France after his campaigns in Egypt and Palestine when Pope Pius VI died. To save this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you used this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your Dropbox account.

CAIANI | Senior Lecturer | Doctor of Philosophy Ambrogio CAIANI | Senior Lecturer | Doctor of Philosophy

Lesser men would have found reconciliation impossible, but Napoleon had a respectful, if unorthodox, view of religion. Napoleon boldly committed himself to reconciliation with the church — on his terms. Napoleon would tap Etienne-Alexandre Bernier, a former royalist rebel, as his chief negotiator with the papacy in historic negotiations. The French state would gain thereby the strength that came from social cohesion in the religious sphere and the right to nominate bishops for papal approval. Conversely, by being given a state-sponsored hand in the work of ecclesial reconstruction, the papacy saw an opening for undermining the traditionally problematic autonomy of the Gallican Church in relation to Rome.

Although there is no surviving evidence, it seems plausible that Savary and the ministry of police leaked these draft decrees to the prelates in Paris, thus heightening their fears of arrest. Whatever the case may be, episcopal resolve melted away during the second half of July 1811. The turning-point came when all bishops in Paris were invited to the ministry of religious affairs and presented with a draft decree containing five articles. Footnote 96 Essentially these returned to notions that the Church in France was autonomous and after six months metropolitans could invest their own bishops. The only concession was article five, that made provision for an enlarged deputation to be sent to Savona to seek papal sanction. Footnote 97 Bigot, as the French minister of religious affairs, and Giovanni Bovara as his Italian counterpart, spent many days trying to persuade the bishops in Paris to accept this draft decree in writing. The letter of adherence drafted by Cardinal Étienne Hubert Cambaceres, archbishop of Rouen, served as the template to which the vast majority of bishops signed their name. Footnote 98 In Partnership with St Martin-in-the-Fields. This series of nine lectures is inspired by the words of Martin Luther during the Reformation. Distinguished speakers investigate those things in which we believe deeply – and for which we would be prepared to make a costly stand.

Pope: Napoleon and Pius VII, 1800-1815 - Goodreads To Kidnap a Pope: Napoleon and Pius VII, 1800-1815 - Goodreads

If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. Napoleon was surprised about the pope’s intransigence, as both Protestants and Jews had agreed to abide by Napoleon’s vision, which placed the state at the center of things. Indeed, under Napoleon, many of the deprivations Jews had faced were abolished, and Jews across Italy were permitted to leave the ghettos. The Concordant agreement was to long outlast Napoleon. Until France’s laïcité law separating church and state would come into effect in 1905, the Concordant was effectively the last word on church-state relations. Napoleon arranged similar agreements with Protestant and Jewish groups in his empire. The story of the struggle, fought with cunning, not force, between the forgotten Roman nobleman Barnaba Chiaramonti, who became Pope Pius VII, and the all-too-well-remembered Napoleon.”—Jonathan Sumption, The Spectator , “Books of the Year”

Ambrogio A. Caiani tells the story of Napoleon’s second papal hostage-taking: an audacious 1809 plot to whisk Pius VII (1742–1823) from Rome in the dead of night and to break his stubborn resolve through physical isolation and intrusive surveillance...Caiani’s unique contribution in this work is to have set aside traditional, partisan tellings of this tale as good versus evil, secular versus religious, or state versus church. Instead, this version, even-handed and detailed in its contextualisation, is about two charismatic leaders going mano a mano."—Miles Pattenden, Australian Book Review