and Miollis fo r the arrest of the Pope. The obvious retort for Fouche to
make was to ask why, in that case, the Emperor did not simply order Pius
returned to Rome. In fact Napoleon ordered the pontiff removed to
Florence, on the ground that tensions between French and papal troops
had reached fever pitch; if it came to armed conflict, he said, he did not
want to run the risk that the Holy Father might be snuffe d out by a stray
bullet. The true reason appears elsewhere in his correspondence: 'It was
impossible to send the Pope back to Rome without incurring the risk of
consequences still more vexatious than those that had already taken place.
The Battle of Wagram was impending.'
The Pope was taken first to Florence, then to Grenoble, A vignon and
Nice and finally back to Savona while Napoleon dithered about what to
do with him. A senatus consultum of 17 February 1810 ratified the 1809
decree by which the Emperor, as the heir of Charlemagne, original donor
of temporal power to the Papacy, abolished Vatican sovereignty over the
Papal states and declared them annexed to the French Empire. Under
house arrest in Savona until June 18u, Pius dug in for a long battle with
the Emperor. He began by refusing to consecrate bishops nominated by
Napoleon to the vacant sees, stating that he could no longer carry out any
papal fu nctions as he was a prisoner. This hobbled whatever was left of
the Concordat, fo r it was a central plank of that agreement that the Pope
should preside over canonical 'institution' of bishops nominated by the
Emperor.
At first Napoleon tried to conciliate Pius. He proposed a compromise
whereby his heir would be named King of Rome and would hold his
court there; in return the Pope would spend part of the year in Paris with
Napoleon, all expenses being met from the imperial treasury. But he
abandoned belief in an amicable settlement of the dispute in 1810 when
his police intercepted letters smuggled out of Savona telling Catholic
canons not to cooperate with Napoleon. This destroyed Napoleon's
second line of defence, which was to legitimate his nominations for the
vacant dioceses by the back door of the Catholic vicariate. The idea was to
get the chapters of the various French sees to legitimate his nominations
to the bishoprics without reference to Rome - precisely the manoeuvre
Pius expressly forbade.
Napoleon responded by handing out indefinite prison sentences to any
canons who would not cooperate and intensifying the hardship of Pius's
internment at Savona. It was now apparent that schism was imminent, as
also the formation of a national church along the lines of Henry VIII's
Church of England. To prevent this a delegation of French bishops
travelled to Savona, with the Emperor's permission, to try to get a
marcin
(Marcin)
#1