Absolute Monarchs (52 page)

In May Siena was shaken by a series of earthquakes, and the miserable pope was transferred to a Carthusian monastery outside Florence. By this time he was so weak that the doctors feared for his life and positively refused when the Directory ordered that he be sent to Sardinia. But he was still not allowed to rest. The following March, when French troops occupied Florence and abolished the grand duchy, he was moved again, this time to France. As he was now virtually paralyzed, they carried him in a litter over the freezing Alpine passes to Briançon and finally to Valence, where, on August 29, 1799, his long martyrdom came to an end.

For Pius VI was indeed a martyr. Few popes in history had been made to suffer so much and so unnecessarily. And the courage and fortitude with which he bore his tribulations do much to redeem his reputation—because he had, after all, much to answer for. It is unlikely that he could have saved the Catholic Church in France from the insensate fury of the Revolution. The fact remains, however, that when called upon to give a lead, he failed to do so; he dithered—and French Christianity very nearly died.

1.
See
chapter 22
.

2.
Voltaire had gone so far as to dedicate his tragedy
Mahomet
to Pope Benedict.

3.
He continued the work of Paul V, ordering the covering or painting over of the Papacy’s more provocative works of art, including more of the frescoes in the Sistine Chapel.

4.
“He was not, in fact, a Christian. Like many other fashionable clergy, he shared Voltaire’s sardonic rejection of revealed religion, and when it had been proposed to promote him to Paris, Louis XVI had refused, on the ground that the Archbishop of Paris ‘must at least believe in God.’ ” For this quotation and much of the paragraph I am indebted to Eamon Duffy,
Saints and Sinners
, pp. 199–200.

CHAPTER XXIV

Progress and Reaction

T
he French did not stay in Italy long. Napoleon had set off on his expedition to Egypt, from which he had stealthily slipped back to Paris in August 1799, just a week before the death of Pius VI. Joseph Bonaparte had proved incapable of holding Rome, anti-French and propapal risings by the Sanfedisti—“those of the Holy Faith”—had broken out all over the peninsula, and the French army had beaten a hasty retreat. It had, however, immediately been replaced by another army of occupation, Neapolitan this time, and there was a general feeling among the cardinals that the forthcoming conclave should be held in some city other than Rome, safer and generally more tranquil. They chose Venice.

The Most Serene Republic was dead. Napoleon had put an end to it in May 1797. A “Tree of Liberty” had been erected in St. Mark’s Square, surmounted by the symbolic scarlet Phrygian cap, which bore more than a passing resemblance to the doge’s
corno.
The
corno
itself, together with other symbols of the ducal dignity and a copy of the Golden Book in which the names of all the noble families of the republic were inscribed, had been publicly burned beneath it. But Napoleon had held Venice for only five months; in October, by the Treaty of Campo Formio, he had handed it over to Austria. It was therefore under Austrian auspices that the conclave was held, the Emperor Francis even offering to pay its expenses.

The selected meeting place was the island Monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore, and it was there, in November 1799, that the conclave assembled. From the outset it was clear that its task was not going to be easy. Austria wanted above all a pope who would uphold the monarchist counterrevolution and who would not interfere with her increasingly ambitious plans for North Italy; she was anxious in particular to assert her permanent possession of the Legations—Ravenna, Bologna, and Ferrara—which Pius VI had been obliged to cede to Napoleon at Tolentino. The Sacred College held no brief for the Revolution, but most of the cardinals felt a good deal more strongly about the Legations, which they held to be an integral part of the territory of the Papal State. Only after fourteen weeks of argument was the stalemate eventually broken, with the election of Cardinal Barnaba Chiaramonti, Bishop of Imola, as Pope Pius VII.

The Emperor Francis was, to say the least, displeased. The new pope, though gentle, mild-mannered, and deeply pious, was known to have preached in 1797 a Christmas sermon which welcomed democracy (in the revolutionary sense) as a Christian virtue; moreover, being himself a native of the Papal State, he could hardly be expected to look kindly on an Austrian annexation of the Legations. With reluctance the emperor invited him to Vienna for talks; the pope declined, and Francis somewhat pettishly refused him the use of St. Mark’s for his coronation. This consequently had to be staged in San Giorgio, a tiny island where conditions were cramped and where no ceremonial procession was possible. But now there came a still more ominous sign of imperial displeasure: fearful of propapal demonstrations in the Legations, Francis ordered that Pius return to Rome by sea. The vessel put at his disposal proved to be barely seaworthy and totally without cooking facilities; the journey took twelve nightmare days.

When the pope finally reached Rome in July 1800, he found the political situation once again transformed. Napoleon Bonaparte, now first consul and de facto ruler of France, had smashed the Austrians at Marengo and was once again master of North Italy. Would Pius follow the same path as his predecessor, to deposition and exile? It seemed more than likely. But Napoleon was a lot more intelligent than the members of the Directory had been—intelligent enough to see that the French people were sick and tired of the excesses and extremes of the Revolution: that the reaction had set in and that they wished to return to their old faith. One of his first actions on achieving supreme power had been to order full funeral honors for Pius VI, whose body was lying, still unburied, at Valence.
¹
On June 5, 1800, he had addressed the clergy of Milan:

I am convinced that the Catholic religion is the only one capable of making a stable community happy, and of establishing the foundations of good government. I undertake always to defend it.… I intend that [it] should be practiced publicly and in all its fullness.… France has had her eyes opened through suffering and has seen that the Catholic religion is her single anchor amid the storm.

The first communication from Napoleon to be received by Pius VII, therefore, was a good deal friendlier than the pope had expected. It informed him that the first consul would welcome proposals for a new concordat, even going so far as to suggest that if agreement could be reached the Papacy might recover at least some of its lost possessions. But the ensuing negotiations were long and hard. One of the thorniest problems was that of the appointment of bishops. At this moment in her history France had two competing hierarchies: the old prerevolutionary one and that which had been established by the Civil Constitution. Each had its own bishops, among whom no reconciliation was possible. Napoleon’s solution was to abolish the lot and to nominate a new set himself without consultation with the pope—a proposal that left the Sacred College horrified. Another headache was caused by the question of clerical celibacy. During the Revolution priests had been permitted—indeed encouraged—to marry, and many of them had done so. An additional complication here was Talleyrand, who was now foreign minister of France; a former Bishop of Autun, he had married a lady who was not only English but a Protestant to boot. He was understandably determined that no action be taken against married priests.

But it was not only the French who made the difficulties. For many of the cardinals Napoleon continued to represent the Revolution, that same Revolution that had persecuted the Church, stolen its property, massacred its priests, abducted its pope, and deprived it of its secular power, which included its schools, hospitals, and care for the poor. Let Napoleon throw his tantrums; let him threaten schism on the English pattern or even turn Calvinist and take Europe with him; were not even those things preferable to an accommodation with Antichrist? In May 1801 the talks were on the point of breaking down altogether, and the French troops in Florence were preparing to march on Rome. Only a frantic rush from Paris to Rome by the papal secretary of state, Cardinal Ercole Consalvi, saved the day—and the long-awaited concordat was finally signed on July 15. Even then the difficulties were not over: hardly was the ratification complete and the necessary legislation under way than Napoleon unilaterally published his seventy-seven Organic Articles, tightening the grip of the state and further restricting papal intervention. The Legations remained in French hands, as did Avignon and the Venaissin. There was no restoration of Church property. The two sides were still arguing when, in May 1804, Napoleon had himself proclaimed Emperor of the French. Shortly afterward the pope was invited to Paris for the imperial coronation.

This put Pius in a quandary. The monarchies of Europe had been shocked by the concordat, which they saw as an act of capitulation. If the pope were now to attend—let alone perform—the coronation of this Corsican adventurer, the reputation of the Papacy would sink lower still. As for the Emperor Francis, who had defended the Church throughout the Revolution, how would he react to the spectacle of a pope crowning an upstart rival, devoid alike of birth or breeding? At the same time, Pius knew that he could not refuse. Telling himself that the very act of laying the crown on Napoleon’s head must at least increase his prestige, he set off, escorted by six cardinals, across the Alps.

On his arrival in Paris he found an unexpected opportunity to assert his authority: Josephine confessed to him that she and Napoleon had never gone through a wedding ceremony in church, and the pope refused point-blank to attend the coronation until they had done so. A secret marriage service, without witnesses, was accordingly performed by Napoleon’s uncle Cardinal Joseph Fesch on the previous afternoon, much to the bridegroom’s irritation. But the emperor had his revenge. On the day of the coronation, December 2, 1804, in Notre Dame, he first kept the pope waiting for a full hour and then personally performed the actual crowning—first of himself and then of Josephine. Pius was allowed to bless the two crowns, but that was all: for the rest, he was relegated to the role of a simple spectator. In Jacques-Louis David’s great painting of the occasion his displeasure can be clearly seen on his face.

The pope remained in France for the next four months. Despite repeated efforts, he failed to achieve any of his main objectives: the Organic Articles remained in force. On the other hand, he enjoyed huge personal success. Whenever he appeared in public, which he did as often as possible, he was greeted by cheering crowds, all surging forward to receive his blessing. The pendulum had swung a long way since the Revolution; France was on the threshold of a dramatic Catholic revival, and the presence of the pope was exactly what it needed. When the time at last came for him to return to Rome, more crowds lined his route; it was a very different journey from that which had followed his election in Venice only five years before.

ONE YEAR TO
the day after the emperor’s coronation, his army of 68,000 triumphed over a combined force of 90,000 Austrians and Russians at Austerlitz in Moravia. On the day after Christmas, by the terms of a treaty signed at Pressburg (now Bratislava), the Holy Roman Empire came to an end and Austria was obliged to return to France all the Venetian territories she had acquired in 1797 at Campo Formio—to constitute, together with the coasts of Istria and Dalmatia, the new Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy. For Napoleon, however, this was only the beginning: he was determined to take over the entire peninsula. He had already annexed, without warning and to the pope’s furious indignation, the papal port of Ancona; now a French army of 40,000 men under Marshal André Masséna marched through the Papal States into South Italy, with Joseph Bonaparte as the emperor’s personal representative. When Pius registered a somewhat nervous protest, Napoleon put him firmly in his place: “Your Holiness will show the same respect for me in the temporal sphere as I bear toward him in the spiritual.… Your Holiness is the Sovereign of Rome, but I am its emperor.”

On February 11, 1806, King Ferdinand and Queen Maria Carolina of Naples—she was the sister of Marie Antoinette—fled to face the winter miseries of Palermo; and on the fourteenth, in drenching rain, a French division entered Naples. There was virtually no resistance. The Neapolitans looked on in silence, when on the following day, Joseph staged his own procession and took up residence in the royal palace. Later that year, by imperial decree, he was proclaimed king. The Holy See was surrounded by French-controlled territory, and henceforth relations between France and the Papacy suffered a steady deterioration, leading in January 1808 to another French occupation of Rome itself, with the pope held prisoner in the Quirinal and under immense pressure to abdicate all his temporal power. He continued to refuse, and on June 10, 1809, Rome was declared a “free imperial city” while the tricolor replaced the papal flag on Castel Sant’Angelo. Three weeks later French patience gave out altogether: a body of French soldiers climbed the walls of the Quirinal with scaling ladders and burst into the papal study, where Pius was in conference with his secretary, Cardinal Bartolomeo Pacca. The two were seized and, still fully robed, bundled into a coach and driven north. Pacca was held in Florence, but the pope was rushed with all possible secrecy over the Alps to Grenoble.

When Napoleon was informed of the abduction, he flew into a rage. His men had acted irresponsibly and without orders; he would have infinitely preferred to leave Pius at the Quirinal, where he belonged. On the other hand, he would lose face by sending him straight back to Rome. Finally he decided to send the unfortunate pontiff to the bishop’s palace at Savona, on the Italian Riviera. Here, though treated with every consideration where his physical comfort was concerned, he remained a prisoner—totally cut off from the outside world, with paper and ink alike forbidden. Rome, meanwhile, had become a dead city, the entire papal establishment having been virtually liquidated; the cardinals, the heads of the religious orders, the archives and seals of authority had all been removed to Paris.

By now, however, the emperor had two new problems on his hands. Josephine had failed to provide him with a son and heir and was now, at forty-six, obviously too old to do so. His only hope lay in remarriage, but Pius, he knew, would never grant him a divorce. Fortunately, however, his marriage had been undertaken only under pressure and without witnesses; in the circumstances, the ecclesiastical courts in Paris saw no obstacle to annulment. In April 1810 Napoleon married Marie Louise, daughter of the Emperor Francis I of Austria
²
—though thirteen cardinals who remained loyal to the pope refused to attend the ceremony.