Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes; Fourth Edition (44 page)

By now the Revolution had turned on Christianity itself. As the guillotines of the Terror dealt with the enemies of the Revolution throughout the autumn and winter of 1793, an attack on Christianity was launched in the name of the republican religion of mankind. Busts of the tyrannicide ‘saint’ Brutus were solemnly dedicated in parish churches, sacred vessels and crucifixes tied to the tails of donkeys and dragged through the streets. In the Dechristianisation which followed, 22,000 clergy are thought to have renounced or simply abandoned their priesthood. The remaining 5,000 were increasingly subjected to the same persecution which the Refractories had endured. State funding of the Constitutional Church had been withdrawn in 1794. Now Christianity was abandoned altogether in favour of ersatz religions of Humanity and the Supreme Being. Pagan rituals of fertility and the fatherland were devised, the Christian calendar abandoned for a ten-day week and new months dedicated to a cycle of growth and renewal. ‘Apostles of Reason’, many of them ex-priests, were sent round the country to preach paganism.

The destruction of the church of France was watched in helpless horror at Rome. As revolutionary France went to war with Europe of the
ancien régime
, there was no doubt where the sympathies of Pius VI lay. In June 1792, while the royal family were still alive, the Pope sent Cardinal Maury as his special legate to the Diet of Frankfurt, to stir the new Emperor Francis II to the defence of the Church. Maury was a disastrous choice. A courageous non-juring French priest who had staged a dogged resistance to the Civil Constitution in the Assembly, he was a single-minded partisan against the Revolution, utterly lacking the political skills essential in a legate. At Frankfurt he threw caution to the winds in summoning the governments of Europe to war against France. The Pope, he declared, ‘has need of their swords to sharpen his pen’. From now on, the Pope could only be seen in France as the implacable enemy of the Revolution, in league with European reaction against it.

During the next three years, despite his utter rejection of the Revolution, Pius VI held aloof from the European Coalition against France, anxious both to avoid giving the French an excuse to invade the Papal States and to preserve the tradition of papal neutrality in wars between Catholic nations. In May 1796, however, the young revolutionary General Napoleon Bonaparte advanced into Lombardy, establishing a republic at Milan and announcing his intention to ‘free the Roman people from their long slavery’. Napoleon did not in fact advance on Rome, but he did annex the most prosperous part of the Papal States, the so-called ‘Legations’ (because ruled by papal legates) of Ravenna and Bologna. To secure Rome from invasion the Pope had to agree to a humiliating armistice which gave the French access to all papal ports, an immense ransom of 21,000,000 scudi, and the choice of any hundred works of art and 500 manuscripts from the papal collections. The Pope was also to urge French Catholics to obey their government. After further papal attempts at armed resistance failed, in February 1797 these humiliating conditions were confirmed and extended by the Peace of Tolentino. The Pope accepted the permanent loss of Avignon and the Legations, and the ransom was more than doubled. There followed an uneasy period of French occupation of Italy, and the establishment under French patronage of a series of Italian republics beginning in the Legations and Lombardy, and ultimately extending to Naples in 1799. Civil marriage and divorce were legalised, monasteries closed, Church property confiscated to fill the empty coffers of the new republics. This assault on Catholic values and institutions confirmed papal dread of the French.

But Napoleon was Corsican, not French, and though not a Christian he had a healthy sense of the power of religion. In Egypt he would toy with Islam, and he was to declare that if he ruled a nation of Jews he would restore the Temple of Solomon. He set about wooing the Italian clergy, emphasising his own respect for the Catholic religion. He prevented looting of the churches, protected clergy from Jacobin mobs, and told Cardinal Mattei, Papal Legate in Ferrara, that ‘my special care will be to prevent anyone altering the religion of our fathers’. He tried to harness the bishops as allies in keeping law and order, and encouraged them to preach the compatibility of democracy and Christianity.

Some clergy thought that an accommodation was indeed possible. The future Pope Pius VII, Cardinal Chiaramonte, Bishop of Imola in the Legations (now the Cisalpine Republic), preached a long sermon on Christmas Day 1797 saying that God favoured no particular form of government. Democracy was not contrary to the Gospel. On the contrary, it required of citizens human virtues only possible with the help of divine grace. Liberty and equality were ideals only realisable in Christ. Good Catholics will also be good democrats. This careful utterance delighted Napoleon: ‘The Citizen Cardinal of Imola preaches like a Jacobin.’ The Cardinal used headed notepaper with the inscription ‘Liberty, equality, and peace in our Lord Jesus Christ’.

Realists like Chiaramonte might look for an accommodation with democracy and republicanism, but to Pius VI matters seemed not so simple. Republicanism spelt the end of monarchy, and the Pope was a monarch. The Peace of Tollentino was a bitter pill to swallow, and many saw in it the beginning of the end for the temporal power of the popes, for the Legations which it had surrendered were in fact the only economically viable parts of the Papal States. The Pope was now an old and sick man. There were some even in Rome itself who hoped that he would have no successor.

In this fraught and expectant atmosphere a party of Roman republicans decided to plant a series of Liberty Trees round Rome. Tempers flared, rioting broke out, and in a skirmish on the morning of 28 December the young French General Duphot was killed. Joseph Bonaparte, the French Ambassador, at once left Rome, the papal Ambassador in Paris was arrested, and the order was given for the declaration of a Roman republic. French troops entered Rome on 15 February, the twenty-third anniversary of the Pope’s coronation. The cardinals were arrested, the Pope ordered to prepare himself to leave Rome within three days. When he asked to be allowed to die in Rome the French commander, General Berthier, replied contemptuously, ‘A man can die anywhere.’ On 20 February the terminally ill ‘Citizen Pope’ was bundled into a carriage and taken north to Tuscany.

Lodged first in a convent in Siena, and then in a Carthusian monastery outside Florence, he rallied a little, but the French feared his presence in Italy as a focus for counter-revolution, and would not leave him be. Plans were made to take him to Sardinia, but he was too ill for the journey. In March 1799, despite his almost total paralysis
he was once more pushed into a carriage and dragged through snow and ice across the Alps to France. He died in the citadel of Valence on 29 August 1799. The local Constitutional clergy refused his body Christian burial, and the town prefect registered the death of ‘Citizen Braschi, exercising the profession of Pontiff’.

Pius VI had not been a good pope. He was weak, vain, worldly While he built sculpture galleries and raised obelisks and fountains, the monarchies of Europe had hijacked the Church, and pressed religion into the service of the absolute state. For this Pius was not to blame. He had no more control over that process than his predecessors. Against the mounting demands of the monarchies neither the courage of an Innocent XI nor the skill of a Benedict XIV had availed.

At the crisis of religion in France, however, Pius had hesitated when decisive action was needed. Certain of his own divinely ordained leadership in the Church, he had failed to rise to the challenge of leadership, had allowed the situation to drift. At the last, however, he had endured, and the ignominies and wretchedness of his final months did more for the papacy than the whole previous twenty-four years of his pontificate, the longest and one of the most disastrous since the papal office had begun. Martyrdom wipes all scores clean, and in the eyes of the world Pius VI died a martyr. It remained to be seen what his successor – if he were to have a successor – would make of that inheritance.

II F
ROM
R
ECOVERY TO
R
EACTION

In the late summer of 1799, Italy was uneasily free of the French. The Roman Republic had collapsed and Neapolitan troops occupied Rome. All over the peninsula improvised armies of ‘Sanfedisti’ (from ‘holy faith’) had arisen in defence of religion and against Jacobinism. Venice, the Legations and virtually the whole of the papal territories north of Rome were in the hands of the Austrians. Pius VI had favoured Venice as the most suitable location for a conclave, and many cardinals were already gathered there when he died. The Emperor Francis II, confident that the cause of the papacy and the interests of Austria were bound to be the same, offered to pay the Conclave expenses. The cardinals duly assembled in the Benedictine island monastery of San Giorgio there on 30 November 1799, the first Sunday in Advent. The newly appointed secretary of the Conclave, Ercole Consalvi, had announced the death of Pius VI to the
monarchs of Europe in terms which underlined the links between throne and altar: ‘Too many crowned heads, alas, in our times have seen that the princely power falls when the dignity of the Church decays. Restore the Church of God to her ancient splendour: then the enemies of the Crown will shake in terror.’
²
That assumed convergence of interests would dominate the election.

The Emperor, paying the bills, was clear in his requirements. The new Pope need not be a man of talent or ability – a pope, after all, was never short of advisers. But Austria needed a pope who would throw the moral weight of the papacy behind the forces of European counter-revolution, against revolutionary France. Though he did not say so, Austria in particular needed a pope who would surrender the Legations and the rest of Austrian-occupied papal territory, as Pius VI had surrendered them to France at the Peace of Tollentino. By contrast, Naples demanded a pope committed to the restoration of the Papal States, who for that reason would be willing to co-operate in driving Austria out of the peninsula.

With the whole of Europe in flux, the Conclave sat deadlocked for three months. Eventually, however, a compromise candidate emerged, and the cardinals unanimously elected the ‘Citizen Cardinal of Imola’, the sweet-natured monk, Barnaba Chiaramonte. From Austria’s point of view this was a disaster. Chiaramonte, who took the name Pius VII (1800–23), was, like Pius VI, a native of Cesena in the Legations, and was bishop of the neighbouring see of Imola. He would never agree to Austrian sovereignty over this traditional papal territory. Moreover, everybody remembered his notorious ‘Jacobin’ Christmas sermon of 1797, in which he had baptised democracy. Here, in this mild-mannered man, who preferred to make his own bed and mend his own cassock, was a pope of decidedly unsound political views. To signal their displeasure, the Austrians refused the use of San Marco for the coronation, and Pius had to be crowned in the cramped monastery church, while the lagoon seethed with boatloads of spectators craning for a glimpse.

This was spiteful, but more than spite. The coronation of the Pope was a symbol of his temporal sovereignty. To co-operate in the coronation would be to recognise the integrity of the Papal States, including the Legations. The Emperor at once invited the Pope to come to Vienna. Pius, aware that once in Austria he would be pressured into conceding the Legations, politely but firmly declined, saying
that his first duty must be to return to Rome. He was not permitted to travel overland, however, since this would certainly have provoked demonstrations of loyalty from the population of the Legations. Instead, he was taken to the Adriatic port of Malamocco, and put aboard the ancient tub
La Bellone
. There were no cooking facilities, and the journey south to the Papal States, which should have taken one day, stretched out to a nightmare twelve. It was just as well that Pius had refused to go to Vienna, however, for by the time he entered Rome in July 1800 the political situation had been transformed once more. Napoleon Bonaparte, having made himself First Consul of France, had defeated the Austrians at the Battle of Marengo, and was once more master of northern Italy.

There would be no re-run of the Jacobin attack on the Church, however. Napoleon had drawn his own conclusions from the religious chaos of revolutionary France, and he recognised that the claim to act in defence of religion against infidel France was one of the strongest cards in the hands of Austria and her allies. In December 1799 one of his earliest decrees as First Consul ordered funeral honours for the body of Pius VI, still lying unburied in a sealed coffin at Valence. Pius, Napoleon declared, was ‘a man who had occupied one of the greatest offices in the world’. The Pope, to Napoleon, was ‘a lever of opinion’, his moral authority equivalent ‘to a corps of 200,000 men’.

On 5 June 1800 Napoleon made a startling speech to the clergy of Milan. ‘I am sure’, he declared, ‘that the Catholic religion is the only religion that can make a stable community happy, and establish the foundations of good government. I undertake to defend it always … I intend that the Roman Catholic religion shall be practised openly and in all its fullness … France has had her eyes opened through suffering, and has seen that the Catholic religion is the single anchor amid storm.’
³
All of this was intended for the Pope’s ears. ‘Tell the Pope’, Napoleon declared, ‘that I want to make him a present of 30,000,000 Frenchmen.’ Bonaparte needed to pacify France, and the parts of Europe occupied by France. He recognised that an accommodation with the Catholic Church was a precondition for any such peace. The counter-revolution in the west of France, in the Vendée, was a Catholic counter-revolution, its banners adorned with the emblem of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, its leader a peasant priest, the Abbé Bernier. Only a religious settlement could still such unrest, and only the Pope could deliver a religious settlement.

France had two competing hierarchies – the pre-revolutionary bishops appointed by the Bourbon kings, most of whom had fled abroad, and the bishops appointed under the Civil Constitution. Some of the Constitutional bishops had apostatised from the faith during the Terror and its aftermath, but the Constitutional Church itself had held together under the leadership of the courageous Bishop Henri Grégoire, and it too had its martyrs. Napoleon was accustomed to speak scathingly about the Constitutional bishops – ‘a bunch of brigands’, he called them, at least when talking to Rome. He could hardly abandon them altogether, however, without appearing to repudiate the Revolution itself. Yet there was no reconciling these two groups of bishops. The only way out of this dilemma was to wipe the slate clean, and to start again with a new set of bishops (to include former bishops from both camps) appointed by Napoleon himself. To have any chance of being accepted, such an arrangement needed the backing of the Pope. In return, Napoleon promised that the clergy of France would be paid by the state (though there would be no question of the return of confiscated Church property), and he would do all in his power to restore the Papal States.