achieved precisely the opposite - a reputation as a man you could not
reason or do business with. Once again we see the contrast between the
mathematician and the poet manque: it was as if all his logical faculties
were expended on means and all the mystical ones on ends.
As Napoleon saw it when he surveyed his Empire in r8o8, his first task
was to deal decisively with the Catholic Church. The Concordat quickly
broke down when Pius VII refused to implement the Continental
Blockade in the papal territories, on the ground that he must be above
temporal disputes between 'his children'. By this time Consalvi was no
longer at Pius's elbow, so that the Pope increasingly listened to the
reactionary Cardinal Pacca. As a countermeasure, in January r8o8
Napoleon ordered General Miollis to occupy the Papal states. A year
later, during the war with Austria, he ordered them annexed; Miollis was
instructed to incorporate the Vatican's troops into his command and take
over the administration of the Papal states, simply paying the Pope a
salary as a pensioner. Pius, believing that Austria would win the war,
issued a bull of excommunication against Napoleon. In response the
Emperor ordered his troops into the Qu irinal Palace, where Pius was
requested to renounce his temporal power. When the Pontiff refused, he
was arrested (6 July r8o9).
Napoleon always liked to play his old game of distancing himself from
the actions of his subordinates, consciously muddying the historical
record by pretending they had acted in certain key instances without his
authorization. On r8July r8o9, accordingly, he wrote to Fouche: 'I take it
ill that the Pope has been arrested; it is a very foolish act. They ought to
have arrested Cardinal Pacca, and have left the Pope quietly at Rome.'
That this was pure humbug can be seen from a letter he had written to
Murat a year earlier: 'I have already let you know that it is my intention
that affairs in Rome be conducted with firmness, and that no form of
resistance should be allowed to stand in the way. .. If the Pope, against
the spirit of his office and of his Gospels, preaches revolt and tries to
misuse the immunity of his domicile to have circulars printed, he is to be
arrested ... Philip the Fair had Boniface arrested, Charles V kept
Clement VII in prison for a long period, and those popes had done less to
deserve it.'
Yet Napoleon barefacedly insisted that the actual arrest of the Pope
had taken place without his orders, and made sure that all policy
documents bearing his signature were couched in vague and ambiguous
language. This was of a piece with his general trend towards obfuscating
the record in controversial areas; such 'mystification' enabled him to
blame Savary for the d'Enghien affair, Murat for the imbroglio in Spain
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