ABSTRACT
In the autumn of 1810, after a walk in the hills, the new Prefect of Rome, Tournon, wrote to his mother that ‘I sat on the ruins of the temple of Jupiter Latinus, now a convent that will soon, itself, be a ruin’.1 This was no flight of fancy, nor an idle threat, but a clear statement of policy, for the Papal states, as the last territories to be annexed in the Italian peninsula, would now feel the full force of the terms of the Concordat in a line that stretched back to Piedmont in 1801. The French enforced its terms as rigorously as they did those of the Civil Code or the laws on conscription, for it was just as important to them. Turning convents into ruins was exactly what Tournon had been sent to Rome to do, unless they were fit for offices, barracks or schools, for this is what had happened everywhere else. It would be no different now that the French had assumed responsibility for the very heart of the Roman Catholic world.
