contained as much piety and religious indoctrination as under the ancien
regime.
The fiasco over the imperial university was part of a more general
power struggle with the Catholic Church. Napoleon suspected the hand
of the Pope behind the riots in Parma which were bloodily suppressed at
the beginning of r8o6. Pius VII irritated him by refusing to annul
Jerome's American marriage, by declining to recognize Joseph as King of
Naples, and by his political neutrality. During the struggle with the
Third Coalition the Pope refused to garrison Ancona, which could have
allowed the British to turn his flank in Italy. When Napoleon had
defeated the Third Coalition he turned to settle accounts with the
Papacy, complaining that Rome was a hotbed of British espionage and
insisting that the Pope set his face against England; there should be a
general treaty with Naples for the defence of Italy and the immediate
closure of all Papal ports to British trade.
When the Pope demurred, the issue became one of credibility.
Napoleon wrote angrily to Cardinal Fesch: 'For the Pope I am
Charlemagne ... I therefore expect to be treated from this point of view.
I shall change nothing in appearance if they behave well; otherwise I shall
reduce the Pope to be merely Bishop of Rome.' To Pius himself
Napoleon wrote with a litany of complaints and reprimands: 'Your
Holiness is sovereign of Rome, but I am its Emperor; all my enemies
must be those of your Holiness.' The Pope replied curtly: 'There is no
Emperor of Rome.' For the time being Napoleon had more pressing
concerns, but he vowed that when Europe was more settled he would
have a final reckoning of accounts with the Vicar of Christ.
To show his contempt for the Papacy, the Emperor had his tame
nuncio Cardinal Caprara approve the publication of a new French
Catechism, which ordained absolute loyalty to the Emperor on all French
Catholics. In return fo r the outright purchase in his own name of his
palace in Bologna, Caprara was happy to do Napoleon's bidding. The
new catechism seemed at first merely to stress the age-old duty of
Catholics to obey temporal rulers, but in the seventh lesson of the
document the Emperor was mentioned by name:
'We in particular owe to Napoleon I, our Emperor, love, respect,
obedience, loyalty, military service, the dues laid down for the
conservation and defence of the empire and of its throne; we also owe
him fervent prayers for his safety and for the temporal and spiritual
prosperity of the State.'
Why do we owe all these duties towards our Emperor?