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MICHAEL BROERS explores a forgotten dimension of the clash between Napoleon and Pius VII
Popes, Emperors and `the way of the world'
There are two things most of us know about Napoleon's relationship to the Catholic Church: One is that he restored the Church to a prominent place in French life after the persecutions it had suffered during the French Revolution (17891799) when he negotiated his 'Concordat' with Pope Pius VII in 1801, less than two years after he assumed power in France. Then, there is also the fact that Pius refused to grant Napoleon a divorce from Josephine or recognize his son from his second marriage to Marie-Louise of Austria born in 1810 - as his heir, that Napoleon then invaded the Papal States, imprisoned Pius, and was promptly excommunicated. Not many people have really thought about how the Pope and the Emperor actually got from the first point to the second in less than ten years, however.
There are many subjective reasons for ignoring the years in between, and for simply regarding the collapse of relations between the Holy See and the Napoleonic Empire as something of a `high level spat' over dynastic marriages of convenience and international diplomacy, with no bearing on the cultural or religious history of Europe in the age of the French Revolution.
There is a way of seeing their quarrel as no more than this, a diplomatic row which began over Pius' fear of a permanent Franco-Austrian alliance, was compounded by Napoleon's displeasure that the Pope would not enforce his blockade against Britain, and which then came to a head over the divorce. This is convenient, particularly for those who see Napoleon as the founder of the modern Right in France, and who cannot believe that he might have harboured an innate dislike of Catholicism, thus linking him to the Jacobin `deChristianizers' of the Terror. To treat his row with Pius and, above all, his excommunication, as more than a piece of `tit-for-tat' diplomacy, would undermine the image of Napoleon as the bulwark of social conservatism. It muddles his image as the `man on horseback' who refounded the Church and then used it as a source of patriarchal authority to reinforce the authoritarian ethos of the Civil...