Absolute Monarchs (53 page)

The second problem was Pius’s continued refusal to confirm any bishops nominated by Napoleon. By 1810 there were twenty-seven sees without prelates in France alone and countless more in French-occupied Europe. Napoleon had hoped to persuade the council of existing bishops to override the pope, but the council—even though led by Cardinal Fesch, his own uncle—would not hear of it. Pius himself knew nothing of all this until, on June 9, 1812, he was snatched away from Savona and taken forcibly to France. The journey, most of which, for reasons of speed and secrecy, was effected in the hours of darkness, proved a further nightmare, every bit as bad as that endured by his predecessor: by this time, too, he was suffering from a serious urinary infection which obliged him to stop the coach every ten minutes. The poor man was on the point of death when, after twelve hideous days, he arrived at Fontainebleau—only to be informed that the emperor had just departed on his Russian campaign.

Napoleon remained in Russia only about six months. In December, learning of an attempted coup d’état in Paris, he abandoned his army—just as he had in Egypt—and took a sleigh back to the West. He arrived back at Fontainebleau in mid-January 1813. By this time the pope had made a partial recovery, but, remaining as he did in poor health and entirely alone, without a single cardinal to support him against the furious bullying by the emperor that now began, it was hardly surprising that he finally capitulated, signing on a scrap of paper a draft of a formal concordat whereby he would be shorn of all his temporal power. No longer would he rule in Rome; the seat of the Papacy was now to be transferred to France. New bishops would be invested by their metropolitans if the pope failed to approve their appointments within six months.

It was still only a scribbled draft, but Pius was forced to sign it, and Napoleon instantly proclaimed the concordat a fait accompli. Now at last the cardinals Pacca and Consalvi, both horrified by the news, were allowed to join their master. They found him a broken man, his head buried in his hands, appalled by what he had done and by the way the emperor had first tormented, then tricked him. Slowly the two cardinals managed to breathe new life and hope into him, until eventually he wrote to Napoleon in his own hand, repudiating the concordat on the grounds that he had signed only a draft and that under severe duress. Napoleon predictably suppressed the letter, but by now he had other, more important things to think about. After his defeat at Leipzig in October his empire had begun to crumble; by January 1814 he was writing to the pope withdrawing the concordat unconditionally. His Holiness was free to return to Rome at his convenience. Pius left first for Savona, then in March traveled on to the Holy City. Arriving on the twenty-fourth, he was given a rapturous welcome; his carriage horses were unharnessed from the shafts, and he was drawn in triumph to St. Peter’s by thirty young scions of the greatest families in Rome.

ON NOVEMBER 1, 1814
, with Napoleon exiled to Elba, the Congress of Vienna met to redraw the map of Europe. The papal representative was Cardinal Consalvi, whose superb diplomatic skills succeeded in recovering almost all the former papal territories with the exception of Avignon and the Venaissin—for which by now there was little real justification anyway. The Legations and the Marches of Ancona, however, which in 1798–1799 had formed part of the Cisalpine and Roman Republics and in 1808–1809 of Napoleon’s Kingdom of Italy—were returned once more to the Holy See.

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 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. As a first step in what would clearly prove a Herculean task, on August 7, 1814, Pius VII revived the Society of Jesus.

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 megalomaniac 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. This consequently put him in a substantially stronger position as a negotiator; and during the nine years remaining of his pontificate he was able to conclude more than twenty different concordats with foreign states, including Orthodox Russia in 1818 and Protestant Prussia in 1821, setting out the terms and conditions under which the work of the Church could be done in each. In most countries he lost the right to appoint bishops—one of the great points at issue between Church and state throughout history—but monasteries and seminaries reopened, and schools were once more subjected to religious authority. Not all the changes were for the best: there were cases where democracy was suppressed or the censorship of books reimposed. In Spain the hopelessly reactionary Ferdinand VII even reintroduced the Inquisition. But Pius himself did his utmost to adapt the Papacy to the modern world, and when he died on August 20, 1823—of the aftereffects of a broken femur—he left it in a state far better than that in which he had found it.

CARDINAL CONSALVI, THE
pope’s devoted secretary of state and the guiding spirit behind many of his reforms, died six months after his master, and the way was now clear for the
zelanti
, the more reactionary cardinals, who hated those reforms and looked for a conservative regime dictated by spirituality rather than pragmatism, to select one of their own. Their choice fell on the sixty-three-year-old Cardinal Annibale della Genga, who had spent much of his career in the papal diplomatic service until he was dismissed by Consalvi after disastrously bungling the negotiations for the return of Avignon. He took the 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
.

During the first months after his accession, there were fears both in Rome and abroad that Leo would reverse all the conciliatory policies of Pius VII. Fortunately, they were unfounded. Bigoted the pope might be, but he well understood the advantages of good relations with the European powers. Indeed, it was thanks to his intervention with the Ottoman Sultan Mahmud II that the Armenian Catholics were at last emancipated in 1830. But by then Leo was dead. His five-and-a-half-year pontificate had been a near disaster. He had undoubtedly meant well, but his lack of any understanding of the modern world made him a detested figure in Rome and undid much of the splendid work of his predecessor.

Since Cardinal Francesco Saverio Castiglione, who succeeded him in March 1829 as Pope Pius VIII, was to reign for only twenty months, he might have been seen as a stopgap. He was in fact a good deal more. A brave man of high principle, he had served an eight-year prison sentence for refusing to swear allegiance to Napoleon. Pius VII, whose name he had deliberately adopted, had greatly admired him and had hoped that he might be chosen as his successor; and the new pope’s declared aim was to continue in the great man’s footsteps. He could not altogether abolish Leo’s police state, but he drew its teeth and made life for the average Roman infinitely more bearable than it had been; and when, in August 1830, France deposed her morbidly pious and hugely unpopular Charles X, the pope was not slow in recognizing Louis-Philippe as King of the French and bestowing upon him the traditional title “Most Christian King.”

Four months later, however, Pius died in his turn. His successor, elected after sixty-four days and eighty-three ballots, was a former Camaldolese
³
monk from the Monastery of San Michele in Isola on the island of Murano in the Venetian lagoon. His name was Cardinal Bartolomeo Alberto Cappellari, and he took the name Pope Gregory XVI. Just as Pius VIII had continued the work of Pius VII, so—alas—was Gregory XVI to follow in the footsteps of Leo XII. Like Leo, he was a creature of the
zelanti;
he also had the backing of the Austrian chancellor, Prince Metternich, who had set his heart on an absolutist pope who would not surrender to what he described as “the political madness of the age.” The prince certainly got what he wanted.

Gregory succeeded to the Papacy in a moment of crisis. Since the fall of Napoleon, a wave of radical discontent had been steadily gathering force the length and breadth of the Italian Peninsula, deriving much of its strength from a vast semisecret society known as the Charcoal Burners, or Carbonari. Their principal ideals were, first, political liberty; second, the unification of Italy. And although few of them were yet aware of the fact, there was another group still in the process of formation for whom a united Italy was to be the only goal. This group was called La Giovane Italia—Young Italy—and was founded in 1831 by an exile in Marseille, a young man of twenty-six named Giuseppe Mazzini.

In 1830 rebellion broke out in the Papal States, several of the cities falling into rebel hands. Gregory had to move swiftly. Terrified that the unrest might spread, he appealed to the Austrian emperor to send troops to defend Rome. Francis did not need to be asked twice. His firm action quickly restored order in the Papal States, but it solved none of the fundamental problems which underlay the uprising; and with the immediate danger averted the pope settled down to a policy of grim repression. He openly condemned the very idea of freedom of conscience or of the press, or the separation of Church and state. On those who upheld these ideals he clamped down mercilessly, by means of a police regime even more severe than that of Leo before him. Before long the papal prisons were overflowing, the papal exchequer emptied by the cost of spies and informers.

Gregory’s mind was totally closed to progress, indeed to any innovation. It was typical of him, for example, that he banned the new railways—which he called
chemins d’enfer
—from all papal territories. Less than four months after his accession, the great powers came together to demand radical reforms in the Papal States. The pope refused; civil disorder broke out once again; the Austrian troops were recalled; and Louis-Philippe—in a remarkable display of ingratitude—seized Ancona. For the next seven years the Papal States lay under foreign military occupation.

BUT GREGORY’S WORST
failure was in Poland. By the terms of the Third Partition in 1795, Poland as a state had ceased to exist, its territory split among Russia, Prussia, and Austria, and ever since his accession in 1825 Tsar Nicholas I had been making life as difficult as he could for the Catholics—and the Poles were virtually all Catholics—under his rule. Upon the Uniates (those who, while accepting papal supremacy, followed the Eastern rite) he put heavy pressure to join the Russian Orthodox Church, while the bishops—the vast majority—who preferred the Latin rite found that communications with Rome had been made well nigh impossible. Resentment of the Russians steadily grew, until, in November 1830, the Poles rose against them. Everything that could go wrong did so; yet they somehow managed to establish a provisional government, and when, in February 1831, a force of 115,000 Russian troops marched on Warsaw, they fought back. A great wave of pro-Polish feeling now swept across Europe, and from all over the continent men hastened to join the Polish colors, including hundreds of officers from Napoleon’s Grande Armée. Other contingents came from Germany, Italy, Hungary, and Britain. In France, Louis-Philippe made sonorous speeches suggesting military support, and James Fenimore Cooper started a Polish-American Committee.

Alas, their efforts were in vain. On September 8 Warsaw was forced to capitulate. Tsar Nicholas took hideous vengeance. The leaders of the revolt were beheaded, 350 sentenced to hang, 10,000 officers sent off to hard labor. The estates of more than three thousand families were confiscated. In the countryside, whole villages were burned.

The accent was on humiliating the proud, degrading the noble, removing the vertebrae. Prince Roman Sanguszko, who was of Rurik’s blood and might have qualified for some respect in Russia, was sentenced to hard labour for life in Siberia and made to walk there chained to a gang of convicts. When his wife, a friend and former lady-in-waiting to the Empress, fell at the feet of Nicholas and begged for mercy, she was told she could go too. She did.
⁴

At some stage it might have been expected that Gregory XVI would utter a word or two of support for his Catholic flock; he did nothing of the kind. Instead, in June 1832, he published a brief in which he categorically condemned the insurrection and denounced “those who, under cover of religion, have set themselves against the legitimate power of princes.” Two months later, in his encyclical
Mirari Vos
, he went still further, referring to “that absurd and erroneous doctrine, or rather delirium, that freedom of conscience is to be claimed and defended for all men.” As to any ideas for the regeneration of the Church, “it has been instructed by Jesus Christ and his Apostles and taught by the Holy Spirit.… It would therefore be completely absurd and supremely insulting to suggest that the Church stands in need of restoration and regeneration … as though she could be exposed to exhaustion, degradation, or other defects of this kind.”