ABSTRACT
When Pius VII finally excommunicated Napoleon with the bull of June 1809, it was not as a shocked, spontaneous reaction to his arrest or the invasion of his country. Tensions of a profoundly religious nature had been building between the French and the Holy See since at least 1805. This was the culmination of a process, not the beginning of a new quarrel. Nor was its nature diplomatic or even narrowly ecclesiastical. It was not really about forcing Rome into the blockade, the seizure of the Papal states, the Pope’s arrest or even the installation of bishops, although this is how Napoleon sought to disguise it, both before and after the arrest of Pius in 1809.1
Rome had felt, with some justification, that it held a stronger hand in negotiating the Concordat for the Italian Republic than in negotiating that for France. Napoleon, too, knew he was dealing with a society where the Church still held a pre-eminent position, the Josephine reforms not withstanding. The Papacy engaged in protracted negotiations between 1802 and 1804, extracting several concessions it perceived as crucial at the time. With considerable reluctance, Napoleon accorded the bishops more control over the curriculum of their seminaries; the divorce laws were stricter than under the French Concordat; although the Oath of loyalty was imposed, Rome won in return the exemption of the clergy from military service. Above all, Napoleon backed down over the proposed abolition of ten sees in Lombardy, Modena and the Legations, and, paramount in the eyes of the Curia at this point, Catholicism was declared the official state religion. The Italian Republic, unlike the French empire, was not a secular state. Napoleon swallowed hard. Melzi, his Vice-President, tried to fight back with a decree issued just after the signature of the Concordat in January 1804, which asserted the supremacy of the state over the Church, thus destroying the notion of the Concordat as a compromise, because he demanded that the state set the fundamental boundaries between the secular and spiritual spheres. Melzi had been a close collaborator of Joseph II and saw the French Concordat as closer to the Josephine model. When Napoleon forced him to back down in June 1804, it almost led to Melzi’s resignation. Pius VII now felt that the tide was turning in favour of the Church and assumed that,
in an Italian context, the terms of neither Concordat would be enforced to the letter. These hopes were dashed by two decrees in 1805, which effectively renewed the principles set out by Melzi. The Civil Code was extended to the Italian Republic in full, thus negating the concessions won over divorce and civil marriage, while the regular orders were suppressed entirely, so dashing Pius’s assumption that the Concordat would not be enforced in full. Church-state relations were thus permanently poisoned in the new Kingdom of Italy, but in a wider context Rome now saw that its real enemy was the Civil Code and the ruthless, incalculable introduction of legislation outwith the terms of any Concordat Rome might negotiate with Napoleon. In 1801 Napoleon had imposed the ‘Organic Articles’ unilaterally in the face of Roman protests.2 Henceforth, it was clear he would behave no differently outside ‘old France’. Concessions like the recognition of Catholicism as the state religion, or even the conservation of threatened dioceses, were now seen as the empty window-dressing they were.3 In 1806 Napoleon replied to Pius’s protests against its extension beyond the limits agreed in 1802, that the Concordat and the Code were the embodiment ‘of the political system inspired by Providence itself.’4 Napoleon did not refer to ‘Divine Providence’. The battle lines were starkly drawn.
