ABSTRACT
Victorious maker of peace and the Concordat of 1801, consul-for-life in 1802, emperor of the French in 1804, victor over the two rival emperors, Austrian and Russian, at Austerlitz the following year and then over the once dreaded Prussian army at Jena in 1806, Napoleon at Tilsit would unfold before the tsar his plan for a new European order. Napoleon, supreme war lord and ceremonial chief of state, was also, by virtue of his tireless scrutiny of governmental operations, the supreme bureaucrat. Napoleon's dealings with the Church of Rome followed a much tortuous course. His instinct for religious conciliation, which has seen at work in Italy and Egypt, led him to open his term as first consul with a series of gestures toward the 'recalcitrants', priests who had never accepted the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. One of the several features of Napoleon's rule which have continued to agitate, and often to confuse, observers was the so-called 're-aristocratization of France'.
