To Kidnap a Pope: Napoleon and Pius VII

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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 abbés Lamennais (Jean, brother to the more famous Hugues), Astros, Perreau, Dauchet and many others, linked to the anti-imperial chevaliers de la foi conspiracy, were distinctly un-nostalgic. Footnote 39 They were radicals, who wanted a much more powerful and reformed Church to be built on the ruins of Gallicanism. In this they were natural allies of the papacy, and during the Restoration made some important contributions to political thought. Footnote 40 That said, Gallicanism did not die with the empire: the abbé Denis-Luc Frayssinous, who was the secretary to the concile national of 1811, and the later rector of the Restoration university, did his best, with a neo-Gallican clique, to rejuvenate French ecclesiastical traditions. Footnote 41 The battle between Gallican and Ultramontane ecclesiology would continue right up to the 1848 revolutions and beyond. Footnote 42 The empire's legislators were forced to seek other solutions. Two ecclesiastical conseils met in late 1809 and early 1810 charged with advising the council of state on the most effective means of resolving the episcopal stand-off. The most loyal bishops and theologians of the empire, headed by Cardinal Fesch, met to search for a solution. Three series of questionnaires on the governance of the Church during the present crisis were issued and provided the agenda for discussion. Footnote 47 Most preferred a negotiated settlement with the imprisoned pope. They proposed that a delegation be sent to Savona to discuss terms. Footnote 48 For Pius, the release of the college of cardinals and his return to Rome were the sine qua non for future negotiation. Footnote 49 Yet the government was concerned about what would happen if the pope continued to resist conciliation. 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.

Ambrogio A. Caiani : To Kidnap a Pope: Napoleon and Pius VII

A riveting and compelling account of how the soft power of the Pope proved more durable than the military might of Napoleon.’—Tim Blanning, author of The Pursuit of Glory The resulting document, the Concordant of 1801, saw many rights restored to the church. Priests were made employees of a state they swore allegiance to, and the Vatican’s oversight was enshrined, but the fate of priests who had married during the French Revolution would be a lingering concern of the Catholic Church for decades.

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On 5 July Fesch travelled to Saint Cloud to give the emperor news of this significant reverse. Footnote 80 The neo-conciliarist solution, instead of rallying and resurrecting the Gallican Church on the contrary emphasised the strength of Ultramontane feeling. The emperor expressed his dissatisfaction and threatened to arrest any metropolitan archbishop who would not bestow canonical investiture on an imperial candidate. Footnote 81 A last ditch attempt was made to save the situation and Napoleon dictated a draft set of decrees to be approved by the bishops.

Losing a Kingdom, Gaining the World: The Catholic Church in

For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial. A scholarly monograph that reads like a thriller; and is a work of narrative history which ably threads ideas into the heart of its presentation.”—Alexander Faludy, Church Times Indeed, the episode sketched in the book is important for any interested in understanding the roots of church-state conflict in Europe and elsewhere around the globe. Napoleon reached center stage following the Coup of 18 Brumaire in 1799. Once in power, Napoleon sought to ameliorate the effects of the French civil war. Those who supported the revolution pitted themselves against both royalist and Catholic forces in the Vendée wars, a series of farmer and peasant uprisings partly over the right to practice the Catholic faith. Napoleon sympathized with the peasants in the Vendée region and sought to reconcile the principles of the French Revolution with the Catholic Church. Above all, Napoleon believed that the church should be subordinate to the state. Thus, we should not be surprised that following the rapprochement, he declared that St. Neopolus — an obscure (and, Caiani suggests, possibly fictitious) early Christian martyr — would be celebrated each Aug. 15. For most Catholics, this was the date of the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary and also, by coincidence, Napoleon’s birthday.Continuing with a series of ecclesiastical biographies (and my obsession with Napoleon), 'To Kidnap a Pope' is the story of Pius VII, the Pope who stood up to Napoleon, and suffered greatly for it. A stark contrast to my previous book on the relatively ineffectual and silent Pius XII, Pius VII feels more like a 19th-century martyr given his (almost) unbroken resolve. The pope was made a prisoner of Napoleon and spent much of his imprisonment in Savona. Later, after Napoleon seized the Papal States, he brought the pope to Fontainebleau near Paris. That seizure in 1809 was meant to further break the pope’s spirit, the author argues. 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 Prior to the French Revolution, the Papal States included territory in both France and much of Northern Italy. The whole episode’s history likely influenced another French emperor, Napoleon III, who helped shepherd the unification of Italy that destroyed the Papal States in 1870, when Italy was unified. It would be almost half a century before the Vatican would again gain some form of sovereignty, which would include only a small sliver of modern Rome, a far cry from those who wanted the Vatican to have at least a tiny portion of coastal territory as well.

To Kidnap a Pope: Napoleon and Pius VII. By Ambrogio A. Caiani

His next book project is a history of the politics of religion for the Catholic Church during the Age of Revolutions 1700-1903. On 17 June 1811 the concile national began with a solemn procession and mass at Notre Dame. The sermon preached by Étienne-Marie de Boulogne, bishop of Troyes, offered a reassuringly Gallican preamble, but also reaffirmed absolute loyalty to the papacy. Equally, Cardinal Fesch's decision to have a roll call in the course of which each bishop swore allegiance to the pope, as prescribed by the canons of the Council of Trent, was seen as inappropriate by the emperor. Footnote 72 The most vexed question surrounded the status of those bishops who had been nominated to sees but had not received papal confirmation. When taking his oath, the bishop of Troyes dismissed these nominees as ‘those, whose very presence is already a scandal in their dioceses’. Footnote 73 Despite such opposition, they could attend the concile with a consultative voice but no voting rights. In this enthralling study, Ambrogio Caiani gives a vivid account of the struggle between the two men, which would continue virtually unabated until Napoleon’s death on St Helena in 1821. He is commendably even-handed in his analysis, presenting it both as a personal tussle between two dogged opponents and as a clash between contrasting visions of the world: a Catholicism ever more drawn to counter-revolutionary reaction, and an emperor consciously pursuing his own brand of modernity."—Alan Forrest, BBC History Magazine While Bernier’s political views were flexible, Napoleon’s own religious views were pragmatic and at times Unitarian. Try Ambrogio A. Caiani’s To Kidnap a Pope: Napoleon and Pius VII...It is 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, Spectator‘Books of the Year’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. The imperial government had expected that the threat of a concile national meeting in Paris would induce the pope to make concessions. In April 1811 all the bishops of the French empire, of the kingdom of Italy and Karl Theodor von Dalberg, prince-primate of Regensburg, were summoned to Paris. Footnote 56 The intention was that an assembly of the bishops of the imperial Church could circumvent papal authority and sanction canonical investiture by metropolitan archbishops (or in their absence the senior bishop of the province). Although superficially simple, this plan rapidly ran into difficulties. The three deputy bishops returned from Savona with a note, dated 19 May, which they claimed had the pope's sanction. Footnote 57 It comprised four articles which accepted the metropolitans’ right to invest new bishops within six months of nomination. Within forty-eight hours, the pope's conscience caused him to disavow the note and retracted the last two articles. From a legal standpoint, the note was unsigned and thus valueless. This treaty, which established the basic form of many later agreements between the Vatican and secular rulers, guaranteed state financial support for the Church while entailing the papacy’s abandonment of the Legitimist Bourbon cause. In a situation that foreshadows today’s contentious Vatican-China deal, the Concordat also sought to heal the schism between a persecuted “loyalist” Church and tolerated “constitutional” one. My greatest complaint with the book is honestly that it isn't long enough! As the first major English work on this subject, I can tell it was incredibly we'll-researched, but the gripping drama between these two titans had me finishing the book in a matter of days. Such a conclusion would be hasty, however, as throughout 1812 and early 1813 negotiations between Napoleon and the pope continued. They would culminate in the Concordat of Fontainebleau, signed by Pius vii on 25 January 1813. Its provisions were profoundly inspired by the decrees of the concile national of 1811, and the influence of Jansenism was implicit throughout its articles. This new concordat (subsequently repudiated by Pius) would have created a Catholic Church that accepted the supremacy of the empire and would have given the clergy a new utilitarian mission. Footnote 107 The vicissitudes, and eventual retraction, of this concordat are beyond the scope of this article. For the moment it was the key point at which Napoleon's policy of neo-conciliarism had seemed to triumph over Ultramontane resistance.