Legislature pointedly elected an atheist as its president; and the Senate
coopted a leading 'constitutional' who had opposed the accord. Resent
ment in the Army was even more vociferous. Napoleon was able to ride
out these waves of dissent because the Concordat was hugely popular
with ordinary people, and especially the peasantry, who had now got its
old church back but shorn of its feudal privileges.
Radicals of all stripe thought the Concordat a mistake. Charles James
Fox, talking to Napoleon after the Treaty of Amiens, blamed him for not
insisting on a married clergy. Napoleon replied: 'I wanted, and still want,
to pacify; theological volcanoes are to be quenched with water, not with
oil; I should have found it less easy to introduce the confession of
Augsburg into my empire.' Jacobins, and later historians sympathetic to
them, saw the Concordat as the final betrayal of the Revolution. On this
view, what had made France unable to throw off the claims of absolutism,
despite the events of 1789-94, was the dead hand of Catholicism, and
here was Napoleon making common cause with it, in a treaty signed by
two separate despotisms. Some historians have even speculated that the
Concordat was fundamentally 'unFrench' and that by concluding it
Napoleon showed himself clearly a man of Italian sensibility, a true
Constantine in his attitude to religion.
Certainly the reopening of churches for general worship inflamed
Jacobins wedded to Voltaire's aim of 'wipe out the infamy!' (religion).
The solemn Te Deum in Notre Dame cathedral on Easter Day, 18 April
1802, held to celebrate the Concordat, degenerated into farce. Napoleon
ordered all his generals to be present to display unity, but the idea
backfired. The only ones in Napoleon's entourage who knew when to
genuflect were the two defrocked clergymen: ex-bishop Talleyrand and
ex-Oratorian priest Fouche. The others went up and down at will. At the
elevation of the host during the Consecration, senior officers responded
by presenting arms, and throughout the Mass the booming voices of
Lannes and Augereau could be heard chatting and laughing. After the
service Napoleon asked one general (reputedly Delmas) how he thought it
had gone. 'Pretty monkish mummery,' said the general. 'The only thing
missing were the million men who died to overthrow what you are now
setting up again.'
The Concordat allowed Napoleon to take a more relaxed view of the
royalist threat, and the first sign of his increased confidence was the law
to permit emigres to return. In 1802 amnesty was declared, allowing the
return of all refugees from the Revolution except those who had actually
borne arms against France; it was to be a point of understanding that
there would be no return of real estate already sold as 'national property'.
marcin
(Marcin)
#1