old monarchy returned of its own accord at the moment when religion again became a power in the state. The revivification of the idea of authority which the Revolution misunderstood and scorned has been described as Napoleon's greatest and most arduous achievement.[4] It has been said with truth that no one ever developed the instinct and the gift of ruling as naturally and as boldly as he. But from the moment when, no longer content with being a power in virtue of his genius and of the new social order, he attempted to restore autocratic monarchy, what he relied on was not that idea of authority which amalgamates with the idea of right, and is an expression of the reasonableness of things, but the idea of authority which influences by dazzling and which is accepted blindly. And from that moment the alliance with the church was a necessity. When, in 1808, Wieland asked the Emperor why he had not adapted the religion he had reintroduced somewhat more to the spirit of the times, Napoleon laughed and replied: "Yes, my dear Wieland! It is certainly not a religion intended for philosophers. The philosophers believe neither in me nor my religion; and for the people who do believe one cannot do miracles enough or allow them to retain too many." It would hardly be possible to assert more plainly that authority is a dazzling, deluding power. On other occasions Napoleon employed the word which became the intellectual catchword of the following period—he described religion as order. Johannes Müller writes to his brother in 1806: "The Emperor spoke of what lay at the foundation of all religions, and of their necessity, and said that men required to be kept in order."
In this conception of religion as order we seem to trace some resemblance between Napoleon and the Jacobins, just as there is certainly a similarity between his attempts to rehabilitate the church and Robespierre's endeavours to reanimate religious feeling. As a politician Robespierre believed in the ordering, regulating power of religion, and as a politician at a period when the great majority of educated men were deists, he feared atheism as an idea altogether foreign to his age.
Bonaparte perceived what an invaluable instrument in the hand of a ruler a traditional religion and form of public worship was, and, if for no other reason than this, was determined on an alliance with the clergy, whom he, when a victor in Italy, had flattered and favoured with a view to eventualities. He was well aware that in France as in other countries the ignorant majority were still attached to the traditional religion, and that the teachings of the eighteenth-century philosophers could not possibly as yet have penetrated to the lowest and widest layer of the population. At an earlier period he had openly avowed his aims. At a meeting of his Council of State in the year 1800 he exclaimed: "With my government functionaries, my armed police, and my priests I am in a position to do whatever I please." To him the priest was a police official like the others, simply with a different uniform. In the notes which he dictated to Montholon he plainly intimates that the Concordat originated in his wish to attach the clergy to the new order of things, and to break the last tie which bound them, and the country with them, to the old royal house. He had carefully weighed in his own mind the choice which lay open to him between Catholicism and Protestantism. He conceded to his advisers that the inclination of the moment was probably more in the direction of Protestantism. "But," he sagaciously queried, "is Protestantism the old religion of France? Is it possible to create in a people habits, tastes, memories? The principal charm of a religion lies in its memories. When I am at Malmaison I never hear the church bell of the neighbouring village ring without feeling moved. And in France who could feel moved in a Protestant church, which evokes no memories of childhood, and the cold, severe appearance of which is so little in harmony with the ideas of the people?" "Besides," said he to Las Casas, "all my great aims were to be attained much more certainly with the aid of Catholicism. It kept the Pope on my side, and with my influence in Italy and my military strength there I did not doubt that sooner or later, by one means or another, I should get this same Pope into my power. And from that moment what influence! what a lever with which to move public opinion throughout the world! … Had I returned from Moscow as a conqueror I should easily have induced the Pope to forget the loss of his temporal power. I should have made him an idol; he would have stayed with me. Paris would then have become the metropolis of the Christian world, and I should have ruled the religious as well as the political world. … My church councils would then have represented Christianity; the Popes would simply have been their presidents."
Note, too, the arguments employed by Portalis, the official vindicator and champion of the Concordat. Attempting to prove the impossibility of introducing a new religion and the necessity of restoring the old one, he writes: "In ancient times, in the days of ignorance and barbarism, it was possible for very great men to proclaim themselves inspired by God, and, following the example of Prometheus, to bring down fire from heaven to animate a new world. But what is possible among a people still in the process of development is not possible in an old, time-worn nation, whose habits and thoughts it is so difficult to change." He begins, we see, by appealing to the authority of custom. And he continues: "Men believe in a religion only because they take it to be the work of a God. All is lost as soon as the hand of man is allowed to appear." It is unnecessary to argue that this language is not the language of faith. What Portalis refers to are the unsuccessful attempts to supersede the so-called revealed religion by a revolutionary religion, a "religion of reason," like Rousseau's and Robespierre's. These attempts had failed although the new religion did not need to be invented, but in reality already lived in the minds of the educated classes—had failed because it was impossible, directly after the overthrow of all outward authority, to give to the conviction shared by the majority of the educated an outward authority of the nature of that which had been overthrown. They bore no fruit, because their originators failed to grasp the fact that the human mind is perpetually remoulding its religious and moral conceptions, because they did not understand that the emancipated mind must inevitably feel itself moving onward even faster than before its emancipation towards a more perfect apprehension, and must consequently feel itself compelled ever and anew to reject every limiting, dogmatic principle. But to return, because the spontaneously evolved and chosen form of belief had proved untenable, to the much more untenable, old, petrified form, was certainly better politics than logic. There was no argument possible except an appeal to the direct utility of the proceeding. Therefore Portalis returns again and yet again to the position, not that religion is true, but that it is useful, that it is necessary, that it is impossible to rule without it, that morality without religious dogmas would be "like justice without courts for its administration." It is plain that the doctrine of hell-fire, as long as it is believed in, is a powerful instrument in the hand of a ruler. Portalis is actually honest enough to say in plain words: "The question of the truth or falsehood of this or that positive religion is a purely theological question, which does not concern us. Even if they are false, religions have this advantage, that they are a hindrance to the spread of arbitrary, independent teaching. They form a faith-focus for individuals. Governments are at ease with regard to ascertained dogmas which do not change. Superstition is, so to speak, regulated, circumscribed, confined within bounds which it either cannot or dare not overstep."
With subtle duplicity Bonaparte endeavoured to represent the restoration of the church in a different light to the different parties. To the Catholics it was represented as a service to Christianity only paralleled by the deeds of Constantine and Charlemagne, to the philosophers as an act by which the church was completely subjected to the state and the secular authorities. "It is an inoculation against religion," said Napoleon to the philosopher Cabanis; "in fifty years there will be no religion left in France." So much is certain, that he had no doubt whatever that by bringing about this reconciliation between church and state he was ensuring himself an obedient and devoted ally. To what extent he was mistaken is matter of history. He had soon cause to repent bitterly of having allied himself with the most undeveloped and ignorant, instead of the ablest and best, part of the nation. De Pradt tells that he heard Napoleon say again and again "that the Concordat was the greatest mistake of his reign." It can hardly be called a political mistake. But it certainly was the first and decisive departure from the spirit of the Revolution. It ensured certain of the secular results of that Revolution, but ensured them at the expense of the progress of French civilisation.[5]
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