Absolute Monarchs

by John Julius Norwich

  With the publication of Maria Theresa’s letter, the pope had no more cards left to play. The bull authorizing the suppression, Dominus ac Redemptor Noster, was accordingly prepared in the offices of the Curia, and was published on August 16, 1773. On the following day the general of the order, Lorenzo Ricci, was taken to the English College in Rome, from which, a month later, he was transferred to Castel Sant’Angelo. Meanwhile, the contents of his wine cellar were shared out among the cardinals. The same was true of much of the Jesuits’ art collection, though many of the most important items found their way to the Vatican Museums.

  Ricci was joined in the castle by his secretary, his five assistants—Italian, Polish, Spanish, Portuguese, and German—and seven others. On the orders of their jailer, the odious Monsignor Alfani, and of the Spanish ambassador to Rome, José Moñino, they were prevented from speaking to each other and their windows were boarded up to ensure that they made no effort to communicate with the outside world. In October they were forbidden to say Mass, and the sum set aside for their food was reduced by half. A prolonged and exhaustive investigation failed to prove anything against them, but their confinement continued. Despite repeated appeals to Clement and to his successor, the seventy-two-year-old Ricci died in November 1775, still in the Castel Sant’Angelo—though he was to be buried in the Jesuit Church of the Gesù. After his death, however, the proceedings against his colleagues were suspended. Two had predeceased him; the last were released in February 1776.

  The inhuman treatment of these men, all priests, against whom no evidence was ever found of any wrongdoing, leaves a further permanent stain on the record of Clement XIV—which, it must be said, was stained enough already. He himself had nothing against the Jesuits; why, otherwise, would he have delayed his action against them for three years? He had always been aware, however, that their suppression was the price he would have to pay for the Papacy, and he was fully prepared to sacrifice them. He might have argued that by then he had no choice, that the Holy See could never hope to regain the respect of Catholic Europe while the order survived; alas, after it had gone the Papacy was, if anything, even less respected than before, its international prestige lower than at any time since the Middle Ages.

  The last year of the pope’s life was miserable. The painful skin disease from which he had suffered for years suddenly worsened; at the same time he became deeply depressed and paranoid, being in constant fear of attempts on his life, to the point where he stopped kissing the feet of his favorite crucifix because he was afraid that the Jesuits had put poison on them. In a matter of months he deteriorated dramatically, until by August, according to the Neapolitan agent in Rome Centomani, “he was emaciated and utterly bereft of all color, his eye distracted, his mouth open and slobbering.” It was a relief to everyone around him, and surely to himself, when he died on the morning of September 22, 1774. Even then, his body decomposed so quickly that there were many who thought that the Jesuits had succeeded after all.

  CARDINAL GIOVANNI ANGELO Braschi, who was elected in February 1775 after a four-month conclave and took the name of Pius VI, was a genial aristocrat who had been engaged to be married before making a last-minute decision to enter the priesthood instead. His pontificate was to last nearly twenty-five years, at that time the longest in papal history; it was unfortunate indeed that for so fateful a quarter century the Church should have fallen into such feckless hands.

  Pius was neither particularly intelligent nor deeply spiritual. He was, however, tall and handsome—and he was in love with being pope. The English Grand Tour was now at its height, and he took enormous pleasure in appearing, superbly robed, at all the great ceremonies in St. Peter’s, giving audiences to the young milords who were flocking to Rome and dispensing his blessings with a graceful hand. In other ways, too, he seemed a throwback to the Renaissance. Nepotism returned with a vengeance: he built Palazzo Braschi on Piazza San Pantaleo for his nephew Luigi—the last palace to be commissioned by a pope for his own family—and hugely enriched several other relatives at the Church’s expense. He spent lavishly on the arts, raised three more Egyptian obelisks in Rome, and vastly extended the Museo Pio-Clementino in the Vatican. He even tried, unsuccessfully, to drain the Pontine marshes—characteristically passing the freehold of much of the reclaimed land to his nephews.

  Whereas his two predecessors had to cope primarily with the Bourbon princes, Pius found his chief enemy in the Emperor Joseph II. While his mother, Maria Theresa, was alive Joseph had given little trouble, but from the moment of her death in 1780 he was a changed man. The Church in Austria was, he decided, in urgent need of reform, and in matters pertaining to it he was no longer prepared to be dictated to, either by popes or by their nuncios. There were, for a start, too many monasteries—over 2,000 of them; 1,300 were promptly dissolved. As for the priesthood, it was far too blinkered in its outlook; in the future all seminaries would be put under state supervision and required to give their students a proper liberal education as well as a religious one. In October 1781 the emperor struck yet another series of blows against the Papacy: an Edict of Toleration effectively subjected Church to state, allowed freedom of worship and equal opportunities to his Protestant and Orthodox subjects, suppressed the contemplative religious orders altogether, and transferred the surviving monasteries from the jurisdiction of the pope to that of the local bishops.

  For Pius, there was only one thing to be done: travel personally to Vienna. He left in the early spring of 1782, arriving shortly before Easter. It was a courageous step—no pope had left Italy since the Reformation—but there seemed just a chance that with his strong personality and undoubted charm he might be able to win the emperor around. Alas, he was disappointed. Joseph gave him an enthusiastic welcome, provided him with a palatial lodging in the Hofburg, and staged several magnificent ceremonies at which the pope’s good looks and proud bearing impressed all those present; but in their long discussions he conceded nothing. (The Austrian chancellor, Prince Kaunitz, later remarked that he had given the pope a black eye.) Pius returned to Rome via Bavaria, at the invitation of its ruler, the Elector Charles-Theodore. There too he enjoyed a rousing reception, cheered to the echo wherever he went; no one present could have guessed that only four years later a congress held at Ems would very nearly succeed in creating a German Catholic Church virtually independent of Rome. That same year, 1786, in Italy itself, something very similar was being planned at Pistoia with the support of the emperor’s brother, the Grand Duke Leopold of Tuscany; this time, however, Pius was able to exert his authority. He forced the resignation of the synod’s moving spirit, Bishop Scipione Ricci—a nephew, as it happened, of the unfortunate general of the Jesuits—and condemned all the resolutions passed at Pistoia in a bull, Auctorem Fidei.

  The correct balance between the spiritual and the temporal power in the nations of Catholic Europe might long have continued as a major issue, to be discussed—and quite possibly fought over—for many years to come. But already in France the storm clouds were gathering, and such questions were to be altogether forgotten in the cataclysm that was on its way. On May 5, 1789, the States-General of France were summoned to a meeting at Versailles.

  FRANCE WAS BANKRUPT: bankrupt because of the exorbitant tax demands of her monarchy and the unbridled power of her aristocracy. In the early days of the Revolution, the Church was not blamed; neither Louis XIV nor Louis XV had been easy friends of the Papacy, but France had remained fundamentally Roman Catholic. The last Protestant pastor to be martyred had died in prison in 1771, the last Protestant galley slaves freed as recently as 1775. The chief minister was the Cardinal Archbishop of Toulouse, Étienne Loménie de Brienne.4 But the yawning gulf that existed between aristocracy and Third Estate was reflected in that between the noble bishops and the poverty-stricken majority of the parish clergy, who struggled to keep body and soul together; and as the great wave of the Revolution gathered force the Church was inevitably engulfed. It was another agnostic prelate, Charles-Maurice d
e Talleyrand-Périgord, Bishop of Autun, who proposed, on November 2, 1789, that Church property should be put “at the disposal of the nation.” Three months later, all religious orders were suppressed.

  At this stage the pastoral structure of the Church remained untouched, but the following July saw the passing by the Assembly of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, which was revolutionary indeed. Fifty-two episcopal sees were abolished; henceforth each département would have its own bishop, designated a “public official” and subject to the authority of an elected diocesan council. The clergy were henceforth to be elected by the laity, Catholic or not, and known as citizen-priests, curés-citoyens. All of this was proposed, it need hardly be said, without any reference to the pope—who, it was plain, would be expected to accept the Civil Constitution in its entirety. If he did not, there was a strong possibility that France would once again annex Avignon—where the revolutionary party had already declared the annexation a fait accompli—and the Comtat Venaissin.

  When, in 1789, the Assembly had unilaterally abolished the annual payment of St. Peter’s pence for the maintenance of the Holy See, Pope Pius had made no objection. In the absence, therefore, of any word from Rome, on July 22 Louis XVI gave his preliminary sanction—though with many misgivings—to the Civil Constitution. It was unfortunate that on the very next day he received a private letter from the pope, written on the tenth, to the effect that the Constitution “would lead the entire nation into error, the kingdom into schism, and perhaps be the cause of a cruel civil war.” The king suppressed the letter and entered into rather desperate negotiations with Pius in the hope that some compromise might be reached—although, given the present mood of the Assembly, there was no indication that it would be prepared to take any papal demands, or even opinions, into account.

  The French clergy, who knew nothing of the pope’s letter and most of whom hated the Constitution, longed for guidance in the shape of a public pronouncement from Rome; they were disappointed. Pius was prepared to write privately to King Louis, but he could never give the new legislation his blessing, and if he were to speak openly against it he risked driving the whole country into schism, as had happened in England two centuries before. So he remained silent, and the clergy were still without instructions when, on November 27, the Assembly directed that all men of the Church should swear an oath of obedience to the Constitution. About half the parish priests did so, but only seven bishops (including, of course, Talleyrand). Those who refused were removed from their posts but remained theoretically free to worship as they liked. As time went on, however, and the Revolution grew in force and intensity, they came to be considered traitors, and many were deported.

  It was the imposition of the oath that finally induced Pius to break his silence. In March 1791 and again in April he denounced the Constitution as schismatic, declared the ordinations of the new state bishops to be sacrilegious, and suspended all prelates and priests who had taken the oath. The Church in France was now split down the middle. Diplomatic relations were broken off, Avignon and the Venaissin annexed yet again. Finally, on August 10, 1792, the monarchy was abolished—and the bloodletting began. In Lyon a campaign of mass executions accounted for well over a hundred priests and nuns; further massacres took place in Paris, Orleans, and several other cities. No fewer than eight bishops were to die on the scaffold. Loménie de Brienne would almost certainly have been among them, had he not cheated the guillotine by poisoning himself in prison. On January 21, 1793, the King and Queen of France followed hundreds of their subjects to the scaffold.

  By now the persecutions were no longer confined to refractory priests; they were directed against Christianity itself. Some twenty thousand left holy orders altogether. Churches were locked, converted into “temples of reason,” or rededicated to any one of a number of bogus religions such as “Fertility” or Robespierre’s “Supreme Being.” The public practice of the Christian religion almost ceased; by the spring of 1794, only about 150 of the prerevolutionary parishes were celebrating Mass. The situation improved to some extent after the fall of Robespierre in July of that year, but three years later the violence was renewed and the persecutions became worse than ever.

  From Rome, Pope Pius followed the events with horror. The old Europe that he had known on his accession in 1775 had been transformed. The Bourbons were gone from France. They still ruled in Spain, but Charles IV, who had succeeded his father, Charles III, in 1788, was a virtual cipher who thought only of hunting. In Austria, Joseph II had died in 1790 and his brother the Emperor Leopold II two years later; the imperial throne was now occupied by Leopold’s son Francis II, and Joseph’s ideas of Church reform were long forgotten. Meanwhile, Austria was heading the great European coalition against France. Pius was reluctant to join it, first because of the old tradition of neutrality in wars between Catholic nations and second because he had no wish to give France an excuse to invade the Papal States; but it was only natural that, from the sidelines, the Holy See should give it all possible support.

  What neither the pope nor anyone else could have foreseen was that Europe was about to undergo yet another transformation, more radical and more dramatic than any since the days of the Roman Empire. Napoleon Bonaparte was on his way.

  WHEN THE FRENCH Directory was established in October 1795, Bonaparte had been appointed second in command of the Army of the Interior; and five months later, when it resolved to launch a new campaign against Austria through Italy, the slim, solemn young Corsican, bilingual in Italian, seemed the obvious choice to lead it. No one, except possibly himself, could have foreseen the measure and speed of his success. Toward the end of April Piedmont was annexed to France, King Charles Emmanuel IV abdicating and retiring to his other kingdom of Sardinia. On May 8 the French crossed the Po, and on the fifteenth Bonaparte made his formal entry into Milan, where he established a republic. His orders were to annihilate the Papacy, “the center of fanaticism,” but there was still an Austrian army in Lombardy and he was reluctant to press too far to the south. Instead he took over the Legations—so called because they were ruled by a papal legate—of Ravenna, Bologna, and Ferrara, and concluded an armistice with the pope on terms hugely favorable to himself. By these terms he would retain the Legations, place a garrison in Ancona, and enjoy free access to all papal ports. He also demanded an indemnity of 21 million scudi and the choice of five hundred ancient manuscripts and one hundred works of art from the papal collections. On his side the pope undertook to urge all French Catholics to accept and observe their country’s religious laws. In February 1797 these terms were confirmed by the Treaty of Tolentino, which also provided for the permanent surrender to France of Avignon and the Venaissin, an additional vast indemnity, and many more works of art.

  Meanwhile, Napoleon’s elder brother, Joseph, was sent to Rome as ambassador, together with his prospective brother-in-law, General Léonard Duphot. The two had instructions to make all the trouble they could and so to prepare the way for the overthrow of the Papacy and its replacement by a Roman republic. On December 22, 1797, they engineered an armed demonstration against the pope—in the course of which, however, Duphot was shot by a papal corporal. Joseph, deaf to the Curia’s explanations, reported to the Directory that one of his country’s most brilliant young generals had been murdered by the priests. As a result, General Louis Berthier was ordered to march on Rome. He met with no opposition and on February 10, 1798, occupied the city. Five days later the new republic was proclaimed in the Forum. Pius, who was now eighty, was abominably treated—the Fisherman’s Ring was forcibly torn from his finger—and carried off to Siena, crowds kneeling in the rain to watch him pass.

  In May Siena was shaken by a series of earthquakes, and the miserable pope was transferred to a Carthusian monastery outside Florence. By this time he was so weak that the doctors feared for his life and positively refused when the Directory ordered that he be sent to Sardinia. But he was still not allowed to rest. The following March, when French troops occupied
Florence and abolished the grand duchy, he was moved again, this time to France. As he was now virtually paralyzed, they carried him in a litter over the freezing Alpine passes to Briançon and finally to Valence, where, on August 29, 1799, his long martyrdom came to an end.

  For Pius VI was indeed a martyr. Few popes in history had been made to suffer so much and so unnecessarily. And the courage and fortitude with which he bore his tribulations do much to redeem his reputation—because he had, after all, much to answer for. It is unlikely that he could have saved the Catholic Church in France from the insensate fury of the Revolution. The fact remains, however, that when called upon to give a lead, he failed to do so; he dithered—and French Christianity very nearly died.

  1. See chapter 22.

  2. Voltaire had gone so far as to dedicate his tragedy Mahomet to Pope Benedict.

  3. He continued the work of Paul V, ordering the covering or painting over of the Papacy’s more provocative works of art, including more of the frescoes in the Sistine Chapel.

  4. “He was not, in fact, a Christian. Like many other fashionable clergy, he shared Voltaire’s sardonic rejection of revealed religion, and when it had been proposed to promote him to Paris, Louis XVI had refused, on the ground that the Archbishop of Paris ‘must at least believe in God.’ ” For this quotation and much of the paragraph I am indebted to Eamon Duffy, Saints and Sinners, pp. 199–200.

  CHAPTER XXIV

  Progress and Reaction

  The French did not stay in Italy long. Napoleon had set off on his expedition to Egypt, from which he had stealthily slipped back to Paris in August 1799, just a week before the death of Pius VI. Joseph Bonaparte had proved incapable of holding Rome, anti-French and propapal risings by the Sanfedisti—“those of the Holy Faith”—had broken out all over the peninsula, and the French army had beaten a hasty retreat. It had, however, immediately been replaced by another army of occupation, Neapolitan this time, and there was a general feeling among the cardinals that the forthcoming conclave should be held in some city other than Rome, safer and generally more tranquil. They chose Venice.