compromise. The Pope made a few concessions, which the bishops took
down in writing, then changed his mind once they were gone and issued a
letter of revocation. Things went from bad to worse at the ecclesiastical
council called in Paris by the bishops loyal to Napoleon. The aim was to
get a decree allowing French archbishops to do the 'instituting' if the
Pope refused, but the assembled clerics, stiffened in their resolution by
the Pope's disowning of the draft agreement of Savona, displayed
unwonted backbone and refused to oblige; the Council therefore declared
itself incompetent to resolve the issue of 'institution'.
The two sides now seemed to have settled in for a long war of attrition.
A final attempt to secure what Napoleon wanted was made by Cardinal
Fesch at a council in Savona in 181I, but this too was unsuccessful. In
fury the Emperor removed the Pope to Fontainebleau. Essentially,
th.ough, he had lost the war. At first French public opinion was
indifferent to the conflict, but the failure of the Savona council seemed to
many to portend ultimate civil war. Rampant anticlericalism was the new
ideological bearing of the regime, but the stark choice this posed between
Church and State worried that essential pillar of the Emperor's support,
the notables. They feared a new period of social instability, the
resurgence of the Jacobins and possible armed insurrection in the old
Vendee areas, but most of all they dreaded that the Pope would repudiate
the Concordat in its entirety, including the vital clause where he
recognized the legitimacy of the sale of Church property. The more
ultramontane factions of the clergy were already urging Pius to rescind
this, on the ground that the loss of Church property, benefices and livings
discouraged the sons of the elite classes fr om entering the priesthood.
His personal struggle with the Pope apart, Napoleon's attitude to
Catholicism was ambivalent. In his heart he hankered after a national
church, where priests in the pulpit would dilate on his military victories
as the work of God, and fr om some docile clergy he did indeed secure
this reaction. But, recognizing the power of the Catholic Church to allay
the fears and enhance the hopes of the uneducated and to provide a
cosmology that made sense of a fr ightening world for the peasantry, he
was largely content to leave it alone. His general policy was to encourage
his proconsuls not to offend the religious susceptibilities of devoutly
Catholic countries; the many instances of anticlericalism or sacrilegious
behaviour were largely the function of other-ranks Jacobinism.
A less finely judged ambivalence was in evidence in the Emperor's
attitude to the Jews. On the one hand, Jewish communities were officially
liberated from the prison-like ghettoes to which the ancien regime had
marcin
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