540 Chapter XXII
In the next year, 1796, in response to approaches by the Directory, Pius VI pre-
pared a conciliatory letter, Pastoralis sollicitudo, recommending to French Catholics
the acceptance of the republican order.^16 It was never published, largely because
the French constitutional clergy, issuing from the Revolution, feared that reconcili-
ation would work to their disadvantage. Pius VI was also the first Pope to grant
full diplomatic honors to an envoy from a power not Catholic in principle, when
he received Joseph Bonaparte as representative of the French Republic after the
Treaty of Tolentino; and the modern period of papal affairs, in which no distinc-
tion is made diplomatically between Christian and non- Christian states, is dated
precisely from this year 1797.^17 In that year the man who soon became Pius VII
(and was to sign the Concordat of 1801), Barnaba Chiaramonti, then bishop of
Imola, near Bologna, declared his sympathies with the Italian revolution, con-
sented to work with the French, and accepted the Cisalpine Republic.^18
The French clergy made notable efforts to dissociate religion from politics. The
constitutional clergy in France, after 1795, were no longer paid by the state nor
considered established by it, and while generally remaining committed to the Rev-
olution were absorbed in religious reconstruction in the ruins that followed the
Dechristianization. Clergy both in France and in the emigration resisted the over-
tures of Louis XVIII. The Abbé Emery, head of the seminary of Saint- Sulpice in
Paris, evaded the approaches of royalists. Even the émigré bishops, all of whom
were monarchists by personal preference and belief, refused on various occasions to
set up committees at the request of Louis XVIII, or take other joint action in
which it should seem to be taught, as official Catholic doctrine, that Christianity
had any intrinsic attachment to monarchy. In short, political Catholicism of the
kind taught by some clerics and by such laymen as Joseph de Maistre—the doc-
trine of the “throne and the altar”—seems to have drawn little support from the
most qualified spokesman for Catholicism at this time. This too, in later times, was
easily forgotten.^19
Indeed, less was heard from the Protestant clergy than from the Catholic in the
way of tolerance for the new order. The various established churches of the Protes-
tant world remained very conservative, or inclined to moralizing outbursts against
the French Directory and the Batavian revolution. One has the impression (more
ity, but see J. Gendry, Pie VI, sa vie, son pontificat, 2 vols. (Paris, 1907), II, 243, n. 4. The Pope also
intimated that Louis XVIlI might accept a “heroic sacrifice which is worthy to be made by a soul like
yours in favor of the repose of human kind.” It is understandable that later royalists and ultramontanes
might not wish to publicize such a letter.
16 E. E. Y. Hales, Revolution and Papacy: 1769–1846 (New York, 1960), 89; L. von Pastor, History
of the Popes from the Close of the Middle Ages (Eng. trans. London, 40 vols., 1890–1953), XL, 303–5; A.
Latreille, L’ église catholique et la Révolution française, 2 vols. (Paris, 1946), I, 231–33; J. Leflon, Histoire
de l ’ église, vol. 20, La Crise révolutionnaire 1789–1846 (Paris, 1949), 142–44; M. Reinhard, Religion,
Révolution et Contre- révolution (Paris, Centre de documentation universitaire, photo- duplicated,
1950’s), 242–43. Hales is a British, Pastor a German, and the others French Roman Catholic histori-
ans. Their views may be contrasted with the more common belief of recent American Catholic writers
in an essential incompatibility between the principles of the Church and the Revolution.
17 R. A. Graham, Vatican Diplomacy (Princeton, 1959), 41.
18 J. Leflon, Pie VII, des abbayes bénedictines à la papauté (Paris, 1958).
19 P. de la Gorce, Histoire religteuse de la Révolution française (5 vols., Paris, 1912–1931), V, 270–79,
and works cited in preceding notes.