was required to overcome its opposition. To only three classes of men did the Concordat immediately give entire satisfaction. These were (1) the clergy, with the exception of those who had sworn allegiance to the Republican constitution and who were now dismissed; (2) the numerous possessors of church property, who had hitherto felt themselves insecure, but were now confirmed in their ownership; (3) the great, ignorant peasant class, who could neither read nor write, and who longed for their Sunday and their church pageantry.
Even in the circle of the First Consul's most intimate associates one attempt after another had been made to shake his resolve. The spirit of the eighteenth century was strong in the men whose great or rare gifts made them the most eminent of the day, and it was these men whom Bonaparte chose for his companions. They all belonged to the class of "moderate Revolutionists," and were all disciples of Voltaire. Men like the famous astronomer Laplace, like the mathematicians Lagrange and Monge, told Bonaparte every day that he was on the point of bringing disgrace on his reign and his century. His old companions-in-arms, says Thiers, though they knew how the nation honoured them, dreaded the ridicule which awaited them if they knelt before the altar. Even his own brothers, who associated with the most talented writers of the day, importuned him not to stake his enormous power on a step so utterly at variance with the spirit of the times.
These strong expressions, like the previously quoted words of Madame Roland, show how certain men were that Christianity was to be regarded as dead.
It was not religious conviction which induced a man with a mind like Bonaparte's to act, regardless of all considerations and representations, in opposition to the whole of thinking France. Many of his utterances prove that he himself shared the opinions of the men he was opposing, that he did homage to the so-called enlightened deism of the eighteenth century. Certain assertions made by Bonaparte to Monge have been quoted to prove that he was an orthodox believer. "My religion is a very simple one," he said. "I see this great, complex, magnificent universe, and say to myself that it cannot have been produced by chance, but must be the work of an unknown, almighty being, who is as superior to man as the universe is to our cleverest machines." But would not Voltaire have expressed himself exactly thus? Bonaparte continued: "But this truth is too concise, too brief, for man; he wants to know many secrets about himself and his future which the universe does not tell him. Here religion steps in, and tells each individual what he longs to know. The one religion undoubtedly denies what the other asserts. But I do not, like Volney, conclude from this that all religions are worthless, but rather that they are all good." This is the language of Lessing's Nathan. And quite in keeping with it is another assertion made to Monge: "In Egypt I was a Mahometan; I must be a Catholic in France. I do not believe in religions, but in the idea of a God."
Some years earlier, in a speech made before the Directory and all the public officials (December 1797), he had reckoned attachment to religion, along with attachment to monarchy and feudalism, among "the prejudices which the French people must overcome." When in Egypt, he had not scrupled to proclaim himself a Mussulman. His proclamation to the Arabian population contains this clause: "We, too, are good Mussulmans. Is it not we that have destroyed the power of the Pope, who commanded war upon Mussulmans?" Now he certainly (officially) called the same Pope "the holy Father" and (privately) "the good lamb"; nevertheless, when negotiations were being hindered by Romish intrigues, he wrote of him in his letters as "the old fox," and called the priests, or, to use his own word, la prêtraille "imbecile bunglers."
His behaviour during these same negotiations with Rome witnesses equally strongly to his political wiliness and his unorthodoxy. Cardinal Consalvi, before setting out on his journey to Paris in 1801, had been imprudent enough to write to a friend of the anxiety he felt in thus venturing into the very jaws of the lion, into the hot-bed of that Revolution which had very recently shown itself so terribly hostile to religion and its priests. Bonaparte owned a sort of Odin's raven, which repeated all such private confessions to him. This raven was at the post office where the Cardinal's letter was opened, and its master consequently prepared just such a reception as was likely to make an impression on the man to whose character the letter gave a clue. It was evening when Consalvi arrived in Paris, but his audience was already appointed for the next morning, so that he had neither time to recover from the fatigues of the journey nor to take counsel with the Pope's representatives. Early in the morning he was driven to the Tuileries and ushered into a small bare room which he took to be the anteroom of the First Consul's audience chamber. After he had waited here for some time, a small door was opened, and through it he passed, to his surprise, into a long suite of splendid apartments, where all the principal government officials, the Senate, the Legislative Assembly, the generals, and the staff were assembled. In the courtyard he could see several regiments drawn up for inspection. It was, as he himself wrote, the sudden transition from a hut to a palace. All the dazzling splendour and formidable signs of authority by which the consular dignity could be enhanced were here exhibited, and when, in the farthest room of the suite, the Cardinal at last entered the presence of the three Consuls, who sat surrounded by a splendid retinue, Bonaparte advanced to meet him and said curtly, in an imperious voice: "I know why you have come. You have five days for negotiation. If the treaty is not signed by that time, everything is at an end." Consalvi was undoubtedly perturbed for the moment, but he succeeded in gaining time, and with the subtlety and skill of Romish statecraft placed so many difficulties in Napoleon's way that the latter, in one of the stormy audiences which followed, shouted angrily and arrogantly: "If Henry VIII., who had not the twentieth part of my power, could change the religion of his country, how much easier is it for me to do it! I will change it, not in France alone, but throughout Europe. Rome will weep blood when it is too late."
In this contemptuous manner did the restorer of religion speak of the power he intended to restore.
It is, therefore, not altogether surprising that, as in the case of a similar attempt made by Julian the Apostate 1500 years before, laughter, sometimes only dreaded, sometimes actual, was the inseparable adjunct of each step taken towards the reinstitution of the old religion. When Bonaparte read Pius VII.'s first brief at a Council of State, the brief in which the Pope intimates that he takes "his dear son Talleyrand" into favour again, sounds of half-stifled laughter were heard among the audience. Even Bonaparte himself was not always able to preserve his gravity. On the day when Cardinal Consalvi, apparelled in Roman purple, publicly presented him with a copy of the Concordat, the First Consul was suddenly seized with a convulsive fit of laughter which struck the whole assembly with consternation. And some years later than this he was still so little edified by religious rites, and so unable to control his countenance during their performance—he who as a rule showed himself a master in the art—that when the Pope was anointing him Emperor in 1804 he scandalised the spectators by yawning incessantly during the whole ceremony. Charles X., true Bourbon as he was, showed the proper seriousness when his turn came in 1825. With unmoved countenance, without the shadow of a smile, he allowed himself to be stripped to the waist and anointed, first on the head, then on breast, back, and arms.
Everything connected with the restoration of priestly authority and the reinstitution of Catholic worship was so utterly at variance with the customs and ideas which had prevailed in France since the Revolution that the witnesses of such rites could hardly believe their own eyes; they could not persuade themselves to take them seriously. In proof of this let me quote the words of such an eye-witness, De Pradt, Archbishop of Malines. He says: "If one single individual, by laughing, had given the signal, there would have been a perfectly inextinguishable Homeric outburst. This was the reef on which it was possible that everything might be wrecked. Fortunately Fouché, the Chief of Police, had taken the proper precautions, and, thanks to him, Paris kept a serious face."[3]
The occasion to which this utterance more particularly refers was that of the Pope's visit to Paris. A Pope in Paris! This was a risky experiment after all that had happened there during the last fifteen years, and with "a population so light-hearted and still so strongly influenced by philosophy." In hopes of inducing the Pope to give up the journey, his advisers at the last moment laid the above quoted Egyptian proclamation upon his table. But it
