To Kidnap a Pope: Napoleon and Pius VII

Product Information

Desperately, Radet took an axe to the front door, somewhat compromising any vestigial element of surprise in his attempt to take the Sovereign Pontiff into Imperial custody. By the time he arrived in the pope’s study, he was looking decidedly sweaty and dishevelled. Radet succeeded, none the less, in initiating an extended papal captivity with profound implications for the Holy See and European politics.

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

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 The commission lamented the fact that modern legal codes made no provision for the old legal instrument of the appel comme d'abus. Footnote 91 Under this procedure, during the ancien régime, appeals against ecclesiastical decisions could be brought to secular courts of appeal, like the old parlements. Here, clerical rulings or actions could be overturned. This instrument was used against clergy who exceeded the boundaries of their jurisdiction and intruded into the realms of the secular. The commission proposed its reintegration into imperial law and thus gave judges a potent weapon against rogue archbishops. Their suggestion that parlementaire Gallicanism be resurrected was decidedly unexpected. Régnier argued that articles six and seven of the organic laws of the Concordat (which the papacy had never accepted) had allowed for allegations of clerical abuse of power to be judged by the council of state. Footnote 92 They advised that the emperor could transfer the council's jurisdiction over the clergy to the imperial courts of justice. Thus, metropolitans refusing to invest candidates could be tried through an appel comme d'abus as criminally negligent in the exercise of their duties and indicted accordingly. Footnote 93 Imperial prosecutors anywhere in the empire could thus pursue any metropolitan who did not invest nominees. It was a safe assumption that Savary's police force would vigorously enforce this anti-clerical legislation. This was especially the case in the Napoleonic Empire and its struggle with the papacy over episcopal appointments within those territories that fell under its control. The concile national of 1811 was one of the key flashpoints in this struggle for supremacy. This episode reveals much about the nature of Napoleonic imperialism and the Church's distrust of the growing power of the bureaucratic state. French Catholic historiography lavished attention on the concile during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but its assessments were deeply entangled in the context in which they were written. The growing conflict over the occupation of Rome in 1870 and the separation of Church from State in 1905 created a siege mentality among church historians. Catholic aristocrats and scholarly clergymen drew clear parallels between their anti-clerical present and the Napoleonic past. They charted an impressive genealogy of anti-Catholic persecution that cast a long shadow into their republican present. Studies by the comte d'Haussonville, the comte Mayol de Lupé and the abbé Ricard are admirable in their erudition. Footnote 2 These antiquarians had access to minutes, journals and notes whose location today is uncertain. 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 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. 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

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

Ambrogio's teaching focuses on 18th- and 19th-century Europe, his main area of expertise being the French Revolution, Napoleonic Empire, European Restorations and Catholicism. SupervisionThe 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” The most forgotten aspect of 1811 was the brief re-emergence of parlementaire Gallicanism. The council of state appointed a special commission of experts to explore legal remedies and apply pressure on the episcopate to solve the investiture crisis. It was presided over by Régnier, as minister of justice, and included some of the most famous jurists of the empire: Jean-Jacques-Régis de Cambacérès, Bigot, Michel Regnaud de Saint-Jean d'Angély and Achille Libéral Treilhard. Footnote 87 Many of these men had been close to the Jansenist avocats of the parlement of Paris who had resisted the papal bull Unigenitus with great vigour throughout the eighteenth century. Footnote 88 From this older generation of lawyers they had inherited a disdain for any intrusion by Rome into French affairs. They were eager to protect Gallicanism from papal interference. In this goal they had a keen ally in the Voltairian, and anti-clerical minister of police, Anne Jean Savary duc de Rovigo. Footnote 89 He had been a key figure in the repression of secret networks of Ultramontane clergy, and had overseen the interrogation and arrests of the three bishops who had challenged the emperor's intentions during the concile. In many ways these men were the ideologues of Napoleon's ‘War against God’. 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.

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

A groundbreaking account of Napoleon Bonaparte, Pope Pius VII, and the kidnapping that would forever divide church and state 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. However, it is Caiani’s argument that Napoleon’s wish to give the ceremony a religious character was largely sincere. Napoleon would take as a personal slight the various cardinals and other figures who refused to attend.

Professional

Ambrogio has published his research in several journals including The Historical Journal, English Historical Review, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, French History, European History Quarterly and International History Review. Teaching Caiani relates this dramatic story in telling detail but never loses sight of the broader picture, and uses his archival discoveries to excellent effect. The result is both an exciting narrative and a fine work of scholarship, shedding new light on Napoleonic history and that of the modern Catholic Church.”—Munro Price, Literary Review The pen proving mightier than the sword is the theme of the book. However, the same could be said for Napoleon’s most controversial religious view — that of religious equality. Napoleon’s argument for religious freedom would outlast his empire and become a norm across Europe. If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. We can now see clearly that industrialisation, secularism and the emergent nation-state spelt not the end of religious faith, but rather its transformation into a political force in its own right...But it was the Catholic church and its response to the French Revolution that paved the way. To Kidnap a Pope tells the story of this epic struggle.”—Mark Mazower, Financial Times

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

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. THE entry of Brigadier Etienne Radet, supported by 700 soldiers of the occupying French garrison, into Rome’s Quirinale Palace in the small hours of 5/6 July 1809 was ill-starred. An attempt at surreptitious ingress via the gardens and an upstairs window descended into noisy farce, gendarmes first entangling themselves in ornamental foliage and then crashing to the ground on an overloaded ladder.

Article contents

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.