ourselves almost in this apostolic condition, ought we to grumble? Nay, let us rather rejoice at this precious deprivation of the world's goods; let us thank the Lord, who has restored things to that old condition for which the most pious of His children have never ceased to long."
As the feeling of horror and shame produced by the Reign of Terror, when it was past, turned the thoughts of many Frenchmen once more in the direction of monarchy and the royal house, so the cruel persecution of religion awoke ardent sympathy for the church and its priests.
In Belgium (now incorporated with France), where there had been wholesale banishment of the clergy, insurrections had broken out all over the country. To quell them it had been necessary to burn numbers of villages and kill several thousand peasants. In France there was now not only one Vendée; every province had its own. In 1800 the royalist and church party had the upper hand almost everywhere in the country communes of the twelve western departments; they had 40,000 men under arms. Even the men whose interests bound them most closely to the new order of things, the men who had acquired the confiscated property of the church, were not happy in their new possessions. The land of the new owner had formerly belonged to the priest, the hospital, or the school. These had been plundered, and he had become rich through their impoverishment. The women of his household, his wife, his mother, were uneasy and often depressed, and when he himself was ill he felt the stings of an evil conscience; he trusted that the priest would grant him absolution at the last moment, but was tormented by the fear that he might not. (Taine, Le régime moderne, i. 134, &c.)
All this was a good preparation for the rehabilitation of religion. And we must not forget the intellectual force, the valuable ally, which the church gained by suddenly, as it were, finding itself able to appropriate the fundamental principle of the Revolution, and in its name win new supporters. The whole situation was altered from the day when the church, hostile to liberty up to the last possible moment, finally, vanquished by necessity, inscribed liberty on its banner. Oppressed, and feeling the need of liberty for itself, it now spoke in the name of liberty, and that so touchingly that all who heard the crocodile weep took it to be a defenceless creature. Liberal Catholicism—how the words jar!—came into being. The church wrested the best weapon of the Revolution out of its hands, and put it into those of her own adherents—only temporarily, of course, until she had reconquered her old power; then, alas for liberty! But in the meantime the Pope had suddenly become liberal—religious liberalism, they called it. When the order of the Jesuits was reconstructed, even the Jesuits declared that their desire was "good, true liberty."
How much honesty there was in this appeal to liberty was seen as soon as religion was in power again. When, in 1808, Napoleon demanded of the Pope that he should concede liberty of religion, the Pope replied: "Because such liberty is at variance with the law of the church, with the decrees of its councils, and with the Catholic religion, because, moreover, by reason of the terrible consequences it would entail, it is incompatible with the peace and happiness of nations, we have condemned it." Simple-minded Catholics, like Lamennais, who at a somewhat later period acted on the supposition that all this talk of liberty was intended to be taken literally, discovered how much it meant. But even after Lamennais had been disposed of by a papal bull in 1832, his disciple Montalembert, who renounced his master's theories and became the most vigorous champion of the church in the middle of this century, was permitted to go on preaching liberal Catholicism. It was not until 1873, when such Catholicism could no longer be turned to any possible use, that it was anathematised in one of the most virulent bulls on record. Only few of those who read the bull in the newspapers understood its full import.
The appeals in the name of liberty gained the church many supporters; and to the men of principle who, at the moment of the revulsion under the Consulate, were influenced by these appeals, and whose sympathy for the church was increased by the harsh treatment meted out to the Pope under the Empire, there were added on the restoration of the Bourbons the many whose religion is always that of their masters, all the approvers of Holberg's fox' moral: "Give no thought to religious matters; abide blindly by the prevailing belief!"
About the year 1800, however, though an occasional revolutionary excess was still not unheard of, France enjoyed complete religious liberty, guaranteed by law. To the persecution of priests under the Convention and the imperfect tolerance of the Directory had succeeded perfect legal security for all confessions; the priests had been relieved from the obnoxious oath, its place being taken by a simple promise to obey the law; and each priest was now supported by the voluntary contributions of his parishioners, the state abstaining from all interference. These contributions were naturally often small, and many a prelate looked back with longing to the flesh-pots of the old days, and to what Robespierre called the alliance between the sceptre and the censer. Bonaparte had the choice between fostering the germ of religious liberty and making a tool of religious tradition. He did not deliberate. The re-establishment of the church was an indispensable link in the chain of his policy.[2]
[1] Louis Blanc (in his Histoire de la Révolution, viii. 35) has misunderstood this article. He takes the unfaithful wife and illegitimate son to mean Marie Antoinette and the Dauphin. A note in the original text has escaped his observation; it is to the effect that the "founders of the three greatest religions were bastards."
[2] Laurent, Histoire du droit des gens, tome xiv.; Carlyle, History of the French Revolution, i.-iii.; Louis Blanc, Histoire de la révolution française, i.-xii.; Chateaubriand, Mémoires d'outre-tombe, i., ii.
II
THE CONCORDAT
One night in the month of October 1801 the gates of Paris were secretly opened to admit a closed carriage with a military escort. What was concealed in that carnage? Was it a criminal? Was it contraband ware? There sat in it an old priest, Caprara by name, the Pope's envoy to General Bonaparte; and the contraband article thus smuggled into Paris in the darkness was the Concordat, the compact with Rome which re-established the Christian religion in France. It was considered rash to allow a priest coming on such an errand to make his entrance in daylight; the First Consul, with his usual sagacity and forethought, had arranged that he should arrive at night. It was not violence that was feared, only laughter. "They dared not," says Thiers, "put such temptation in the way of the mirth-loving population of Paris."[1]
The same difficulty recurred in April 1802, when, after countless attempts to come to an agreement, during the course of which it often seemed as if the negotiations were on the point of being finally broken off, things were so far settled that Napoleon could accord an official reception to the Cardinal-Legate. Ecclesiastical etiquette prescribes that a gold crucifix shall be borne in front of a papal legate, and the Cardinal demanded that on his way to the reception at the Tuileries this should be done by a mounted officer in a red uniform. On this occasion also the Government, as Thiers tells us, was afraid of the effect of such a spectacle on the population of Paris. A compromise was come to; it was agreed to do with the crucifix what had been done with the Cardinal himself six months previously, namely, drive it in a closed carriage.
At last, a week later, on Easter Sunday, April 18, 1802 (28th Germinal of the year X.), a copy of the Concordat was posted up early in the morning in all the streets of Paris, and the First Consul, after signing the Peace of Amiens in honour of the day, proceeded to Notre Dame, to hear the great Te Deum sung in celebration of the reinstitution of Christian worship, or, to use the official expression, the reconciliation of the Republic with Heaven. Programmes of the ceremonies had been distributed. The First Consul was attended by a numerous and distinguished suite. He had himself intimated to the wives of all the high officials that they were expected to appear in full dress. They accompanied Madame Bonaparte; he himself was surrounded by his staff, all
