At the turn of the 19th century, Napoleon’s armies marched southward toward Egypt while his brother, Joseph Bonaparte, was left in command of Rome, but his leadership proved lacking. It was not long into French occupation that pro-papal uprisings broke out under the Sanfedisti (or “those of the Holy faith”) which continued until a new occupying army arrived from Naples. With such violence and instability, the tender Christian cardinals considered carefully their flight. After the death of Pope Pius VI, the cardinals sought out a tranquil location whereby a new conclave could form to elevate a pope. They ultimately chose Venice, where the “Most Serene Republic” had recently been conquered by Napoleon but then relinquished to Austria in the Treaty of Campo Formio in 1797. It was here, under Emperor Francis of Austria, that the new pope was to be selected on the island monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore. However, the politics of this conclave were fraught with trouble –Austria, which was financing the conclave, strongly desired a new pope who would uphold the monarchist counter-revolution and essentially hand over control of the Legates (Ravenna, Bologna, and Ferrarra) to Austria. Each of the Legates had previously been clumsily ceded to Napoleon by Pius VI.
Pius VII
After fourteen weeks of deliberations, the conclave selected Cardinal Barnaba Chiaramonti, Bishop of Imola, who took the papal name of Pope Pius VII. However, the new pope was known to have praised recent democratic reforms as a Christian virtue, and despite being a “gentle, mild-mannered, and deeply pious” person, Pius was met with pettiness and contempt by Emperor Francis of Austria. He forbade Pius from using St. Mark’s Square for his papal coronation, and he forced the new pope to return to Rome by sea using only a tiny vessel devoid of a kitchen facility. It was a snub that showed how low the papacy was regarded by this point in time. In keeping with tradition, the pope continued to serve as the court jester of Europe.
After twelve long days on the ocean, Pius finally arrived in Rome only to find that politics had worsened. Napoleon had smashed the Austrians and re-conquered much of North Italy, virtually surrounding Rome –would the pope follow in his predecessor’s footsteps, and proceed down the road of deposition and exile? In this moment, the astute leadership of Napoleon had sensed a sea-change of weariness among his fellow Frenchman who grew to despise the old revolutionary zeal. Now, Napoleon warmed up to the old Catholic faith. An uneasy concordat was signed in 1801, but negotiations continued to falter for years, particularly over the issue of appointing bishops and returning papal possessions confiscated during the Revolution (according to Napoleon’s seventy-seven Organic Articles). By 1804, Napoleon crowned himself Emperor of France and invited the pope to his coronation ceremony in Paris. This created a problem for Pius. The concordat was deeply unpopular among the European powers (it was seen as a lamentable capitulation) and Emperor Francis of Austria would surely react negatively to this news. When arrangements were finally made (i.e. when Napoleon finally married Josephine in a church) Pius was compelled to attend the coronation ceremony, but unbeknownst to the pope, during the proceedings Napoleon snubbed the pope, refusing to allow him the traditional performance of the coronation. Instead, Napoleon crowned himself, and Pius was merely granted permission to “bless” the crowns of Napoleon and Josephine. For the rest of the ceremony, the pope was relegated to the role of spectator. Notably, in Jacques Louis-David’s famous painting of Napoleon’s coronation, Pius’s displeasure can be clearly seen. With that being said, the pope remained in France for some four months where he was greeted by swelling crowds of adoring people each time he appeared in public.
One year to the day after Napoleon’s coronation, his contingent of 68,000 troops had decimated a combined force of 90,000 Russians and Austrians at Austerlitz in Moravia. This brought about the final end of the Holy Roman Empire as Austria was forced to return all Venetian territories to France and form the new Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy. Napoleon then quickly put the pope in his place, dictating himself as emperor over Rome and the Papal States. French forces easily captured Naples and Rome without opposition, and the pope was surrounded in his own city and immediately exiled to the Quirinal before he was suddenly kidnapped by French soldiers (again, without opposition). But despite the lack of permission from Napoleon over the abduction, the pope was still imprisoned and prohibited contact with the outside world. Meanwhile Rome became a dead city, the papal administration was effectively liquidated, and the pope began to suffer from a painful urinary infection which caused him to relieve himself every ten minutes or so. In pain and entirely cut-off from his remaining cardinals, Pius eventually relented to Napoleon. When the Emperor returned home from Russia to quell an attempted coup d’état, Pius signed an informal concordat which relinquished all of his temporal power, and handed over the seat of the Papacy to France. The pope was then immediately ashamed of his actions, but by 1814, the Napoleonic Empire was collapsing and the concordat was dissolved. Napoleon was exiled to Elba, the Congress of Vienna met to redraw the map of Europe, and Pius was at last allowed to return to Rome amidst rapturous celebrations in the streets. As one of his first acts, he sought to revive the Society of Jesus by means of reconstruction:
“But it was not only Europe that needed reconstruction; it was also the Church. The Holy Roman Empire, which had begun with Charlemagne just over a thousand years before, had been abolished in 1806; the great prince-bishoprics of Germany were gone. The religious orders had been largely suppressed. All over the continent episcopal sees were vacant, seminaries were closed down, Church property taken over; and in all the lands which had been subject to the revolutionary law of France, divorce, civil marriage, and freedom of religion were now deeply rooted and would be hard indeed to abolish” (388).
“The pope was now seventy-two, and respected in Europe more than he had ever been. The cruelties and excesses of the Revolution and the megalomaniacal ambitions of Napoleon had brought about a vigorous spirit of reaction of which the Church, which had endured persecution from the one and consistently harsh treatment from the other, had emerged as the leading symbol; and Pius, whose pontificate had been one of the most troubled in all history and whose own personal sufferings had been acute, was now seen as the personification of resistance which had ultimately led to the destruction of both. No longer was the pope looked upon –as he had been in the previous century—as a fairly insignificant anachronism; he was now once again back on the map of Europe, recognized by the Catholic princes as a temporal ruler as well as the supreme spiritual authority” (389).
In his remaining nine years as pope, Pius managed to conclude at least twenty different concordats with foreign states, from Orthodox Russia to Protestant Prussia, and while the pope lost the right to appoint many foreign bishops, he did set about to open new monasteries (even if his reforms often came with the Church’s obstruction of self-governance and the censorship of books). Unfortunately, the Inquisition was also once again reintroduced in Spain by the hopelessly reactionary Ferdinand VII. After years of recovering from health problems, Pius succumbed to a broken femur. He died on August 20, 1823 –at long last, here was a pope who had managed to claw back some of the papacy’s flagging reputation, even if it was short-lived.
Leo XII
Cardinal Consalvi, the pope’s devoted secretary of state and leading light behind many of his reforms, suddenly died six months after the pope, and this paved the way for the zelanti, a radical band of conservative cardinals who decided to select one of their own as the next pontiff. They chose sixty-three-year-old Cardinal Annibale della Genga, a flawed diplomat who once bungled negotiations over Avignon. He took the papal name of Leo XII:
“Pious but narrow-minded, in constant pain from chronic piles, he represented a throwback to the most blinkered days of the eighteenth century, condemning toleration, reinforcing censorship and the Index, once again restricting Jews to ghettos and in Rome obliging three hundred of them to attend a weekly Christian sermon. In the Papal States the old aristocracy was reestablished, the old ecclesiastical courts reintroduced. Education was strictly controlled, morality enforced by a thousand pettifogging regulations. The playing of games on Sundays and feast days was punishable by a prison sentence. The free sale of alcohol was forbidden. The enlightened modern state that Consalvi had been so carefully building up was replaced by a police regime of spies and informers of the kind all too accurately depicted in Puccini’s Tosca” (390).
Fears grew across Europe, however they were fortunately unfounded. “Bigoted the pope might be… he well understood the advantages of good relations with the European powers” (390). Still, the pope was once again regarded as a detested figure in Rome when he died in 1829.
Pius VIII & Gregory XVI
The next pope was Cardinal Saverio Castiglione who took the papal name of Pius VIII. “A brave man of high principle,” he was nevertheless to serve as pope for a mere twenty months before dying in 1830. This was a sad but common tradition in the history of the papacy –that the best were often deprived of the chance to rule. Pius was succeeded by a former Camaldolese monk from the Monastery of San Michele in the Venetian lagoon who took the name of Gregory XVI. Sadly, he was to follow in the footsteps of Leo XII, a “creature of the zelenti,” who was absolutist in his refusal to surrender to what he described as “the political madness of the age.”
At this time, there was a movement of radical discontent across the Italian Peninsula, deriving power from a secret society known as the Charcoal Burners, or Carbonari. Their ideals inclued unflinching support of political liberty and the unification of Italy. And they were joined by another group called La Giovane Italia (or “Young Italy”) which was founded by a Marseille exile in 1831 named Giuseppe Mazzini. And amidst the uprisings, Gregory partnered with the Emperor of Austria to quell the rebellion, and pack the papal prisons to the brim. He was a notorious defender of creating a papal police state, leaving the Papal States under foreign military occupation, and among his other stubbornly arrogant anti-modern policies, the pope also banned the introduction of new railways in his territories. However, his greatest failure was in Poland which had been split between Russia, Prussia, and Austria (and where Tsar Nicholas I had been making life miserable for the majority population of Catholics). The Poles soon rose up against Russia and established a provisional government, and as Russia sent an army of 115,000 troops into Warsaw, a broad feeling of sympathy for Poland swept across Europe, including many Napoleonic soldiers. Other mercenaries came from Germany, Italy, Hungary, and Britain. In America, James Fenimore Cooper started a Polish-American Committee. Alas, all the enthusiasm was in vain and Tsar Nicholas swiftly exacted utterly brutal vengeance –the rebel leaders were publicly beheaded, 350 were hanged, and 10,000 Polish soldiers were sent off to hard labor. Farms were burned and estates were confiscated. Perhaps predictably, instead of defending his Catholic flock, this backwards, spineless pope attacked the insurrection instead.
However, “Gregory’s record was not wholly disastrous. He reorganized all foreign missions, bringing them more firmly under papal control. He established some seventy new diocese across the world and nearly two hundred missionary bishops. He denounced slavery and the slave trade. He founded the Christian Museum in the Lateran and the Etruscan and Egyptian Museums in the Vatican. But he brought sad discredit on the Church; and when on June1, 1846, he died after a short illness, there were few indeed who mourned him” (393).
For this reading I used John Julius Norwich’s 2011 single volume history of the papacy Absolute Monarchs: A History of the Papacy.