To Kidnap a Pope: Napoleon and Pius VII

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Munro Priceis Professor of Modern European History at the University of Bradford, UK, and specializes in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century French political and diplomatic history. Among his books are Louis XVI and the Comte de Vergennes: Correspondence, 1774-1787 (with John Hardman; Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1998), The Fall of the French Monarchy: Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette and the Baron de Breteuil (London, Macmillan, 2002) and Napoleon: The End of Glory (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2014 A harrowing tale of two rivals, whose battle of wills drove a wedge through French society, and Europe as a whole. Desperately, Radet took an axe to the front door, somewhat compromising any vestigial element of surprise in his attempt to take the Sovereign Pontiff into Imperial custody. By the time he arrived in the pope’s study, he was looking decidedly sweaty and dishevelled. Radet succeeded, none the less, in initiating an extended papal captivity with profound implications for the Holy See and European politics. The pen proving mightier than the sword is the theme of the book. However, the same could be said for Napoleon’s most controversial religious view — that of religious equality. Napoleon’s argument for religious freedom would outlast his empire and become a norm across Europe.

To Kidnap a Pope: Napoleon and Pius VII. By Ambrogio A. Caiani

Ambrogio receivedhis doctorate from Sidney Sussex College, University of Cambridge in 2009. Since then he has taught at the universities of Greenwich and York and at Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford. He became Lecturer in Modern European History at Kent in 2013. Research interests A riveting and compelling account of how the soft power of the Pope proved more durable than the military might of Napoleon.’—Tim Blanning, author of The Pursuit of Glory The commission lamented the fact that modern legal codes made no provision for the old legal instrument of the appel comme d'abus. Footnote 91 Under this procedure, during the ancien régime, appeals against ecclesiastical decisions could be brought to secular courts of appeal, like the old parlements. Here, clerical rulings or actions could be overturned. This instrument was used against clergy who exceeded the boundaries of their jurisdiction and intruded into the realms of the secular. The commission proposed its reintegration into imperial law and thus gave judges a potent weapon against rogue archbishops. Their suggestion that parlementaire Gallicanism be resurrected was decidedly unexpected. Régnier argued that articles six and seven of the organic laws of the Concordat (which the papacy had never accepted) had allowed for allegations of clerical abuse of power to be judged by the council of state. Footnote 92 They advised that the emperor could transfer the council's jurisdiction over the clergy to the imperial courts of justice. Thus, metropolitans refusing to invest candidates could be tried through an appel comme d'abus as criminally negligent in the exercise of their duties and indicted accordingly. Footnote 93 Imperial prosecutors anywhere in the empire could thus pursue any metropolitan who did not invest nominees. It was a safe assumption that Savary's police force would vigorously enforce this anti-clerical legislation. Indeed, the episode sketched in the book is important for any interested in understanding the roots of church-state conflict in Europe and elsewhere around the globe.Throughout this crisis the papacy responded in time-honoured fashion by refusing to collaborate with hostile forces. Its ultimate displeasure was made manifest when the emperor and his administration were excommunicated. Footnote 16 Thus the road was opened for mass civil disobedience. Footnote 17 The Concordat of 1801, like that of Bologna in 1516, had recognised the monarch's right to appoint bishops to vacant dioceses. Footnote 18 Throughout the years from 1808 to 1814 no papal bulls were issued to confirm imperial nominees. A new investiture crisis, reminiscent of the struggle that had pitted Henry iv against Gregory vii in the eleventh century, was building. Footnote 19 By 1811 the Church faced one of its worst crises since the great medieval schism which had straddled the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Footnote 20 On 17 June 1811 the concile national began with a solemn procession and mass at Notre Dame. The sermon preached by Étienne-Marie de Boulogne, bishop of Troyes, offered a reassuringly Gallican preamble, but also reaffirmed absolute loyalty to the papacy. Equally, Cardinal Fesch's decision to have a roll call in the course of which each bishop swore allegiance to the pope, as prescribed by the canons of the Council of Trent, was seen as inappropriate by the emperor. Footnote 72 The most vexed question surrounded the status of those bishops who had been nominated to sees but had not received papal confirmation. When taking his oath, the bishop of Troyes dismissed these nominees as ‘those, whose very presence is already a scandal in their dioceses’. Footnote 73 Despite such opposition, they could attend the concile with a consultative voice but no voting rights.

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My greatest complaint with the book is honestly that it isn't long enough! As the first major English work on this subject, I can tell it was incredibly we'll-researched, but the gripping drama between these two titans had me finishing the book in a matter of days. Caiani points out that the operation that netted the pope used swarm tactics that Napoleon himself would have approved of, yet while Napoleon was a master of battlefields, the pope proved to be an evenly matched political opponent. The two tussled over a fundamental question, one that still haunts European politics — should the state or the church exercise supreme authority? Prior to the French Revolution, the Papal States included territory in both France and much of Northern Italy. The whole episode’s history likely influenced another French emperor, Napoleon III, who helped shepherd the unification of Italy that destroyed the Papal States in 1870, when Italy was unified. It would be almost half a century before the Vatican would again gain some form of sovereignty, which would include only a small sliver of modern Rome, a far cry from those who wanted the Vatican to have at least a tiny portion of coastal territory as well. In this enthralling study, Ambrogio Caiani gives a vivid account of the struggle between the two men, which would continue virtually unabated until Napoleon’s death on St Helena in 1821. He is commendably even-handed in his analysis, presenting it both as a personal tussle between two dogged opponents and as a clash between contrasting visions of the world: a Catholicism ever more drawn to counter-revolutionary reaction, and an emperor consciously pursuing his own brand of modernity."—Alan Forrest, BBC History Magazine

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Despite the obvious mutual advantages of this arrangement, relations between Pius and Napoleon soured rapidly. Napoleon’s importunate demands for the annulment of his marriage to Josephine echoed Henry VIII’s two centuries earlier. Increasingly, it became evident that Imperial territorial ambitions in Italy were a threat not only to external papal dependencies, but the Papal States and even the Eternal City itself. In Napoleonic Europe, there would be no room for the temporal autonomy that the papacy saw as the precondition for spiritual independence. Ambrogio has published his research in several journals including The Historical Journal, English Historical Review, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, French History, European History Quarterly and International History Review. Teaching Ambrogio A. Caiani tells the story of Napoleon’s second papal hostage-taking: an audacious 1809 plot to whisk Pius VII (1742–1823) from Rome in the dead of night and to break his stubborn resolve through physical isolation and intrusive surveillance...Caiani’s unique contribution in this work is to have set aside traditional, partisan tellings of this tale as good versus evil, secular versus religious, or state versus church. Instead, this version, even-handed and detailed in its contextualisation, is about two charismatic leaders going mano a mano."—Miles Pattenden, Australian Book Review The pope’s carefully controlled captivity, first in Italy and later in France, would last five years. Incredibly, it was the second time in less than a decade that a pope had been kidnapped. His immediate predecessor, Pope Pius VI, had died in captivity at the hands of the French Revolutionary state. Yet, this affront to the Catholic Church had not involved Napoleon. The general of the age was transiting the Mediterranean on his return to France after his campaigns in Egypt and Palestine when Pope Pius VI died.