Absolute Monarchs

by John Julius Norwich

  It was not until July 2, 1871, that Victor Emmanuel made his official entry into his new capital. The streets were already being decorated for the occasion when he sent a telegram to the mayor forbidding all signs of festivity. As a pious Catholic, he had been not only saddened but terrified when sentence of excommunication had been passed upon him. Ferdinand Gregorovius, the Prussian historian of medieval Rome, wrote in his diary that the procession was “without pomp, vivacity, grandeur or majesty; and that was as it should have been, for this day signals the end of the millenary rule of the Popes over Rome.” In the afternoon the king was urged to cross the river to Trastevere, where some small ceremony had been prepared by the largely working-class population. He flatly refused, adding, in the Piedmontese dialect of which few of those about him would have understood a word, “The Pope is only two steps away and would feel hurt. I have done enough already to that poor old man.”

  POPE PIUS MADE his last journey through Rome on September 19, 1870. It was to St. John Lateran, where he left his carriage and slowly and painfully made the long ascent of the scala santa on his knees. When he reached the top, he prayed and then, rising to his feet, blessed the papal troops who had escorted him. Then he returned to the Vatican, which he never left again until his death seven and a half years later, outliving Napoleon III by five years and King Victor Emmanuel by a month. One of his last acts was to remove the excommunication by which the king would have been barred from receiving the last sacraments. In the weeks immediately before his death his most regular visitor was the Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Henry Manning, an Ultramontanist through and through. Just before his death he gave Manning a remarkably bad photograph of himself, scribbling on the bottom the words of Christ as he walked on the waters: “Fear not, it is I.” One somehow doubts whether Manning appreciated the joke.

  Pius died on the morning of February 8. According to custom, Cardinal Pecci, the camerlengo—soon to succeed him as Leo XIII—tapped his forehead three times with a little silver hammer, calling him by his baptismal name, Giovanni Maria. When there was no reply, he turned to the other cardinals present with the traditional words “The Pope is truly dead.” The body lay in state in the Chapel of the Blessed Sacrament, behind a grille which the feet touched so that they could be kissed by the faithful. A vast crowd filed by to do so, day and night, for three days.

  It had been the longest pontificate—thirty-one years—in papal history. Politically it had been, from Pius’s point of view, a disaster; but Pius did not spend all his life trying to maintain his temporal power. His first concern was always for the health and well-being of the Church itself, and for this no pope had ever worked harder or with greater effect. He founded more than two hundred new dioceses, particularly in the United States and the British Empire; he reestablished the Catholic hierarchies in Britain and the Netherlands; and he concluded concordats with an impressive number of states, Catholic and otherwise.

  There were other achievements, too, still more lasting though not perhaps in every case universally acclaimed. Already in 1854 the pope had proclaimed the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, according to which the Blessed Virgin—not, as many people assume, Jesus Christ—was born without original sin. The manner of the proclamation was as significant, if not more so, as the doctrine itself; though Pius had consulted several bishops in advance, he dared, as no pope had ever dared before, to put forward the dogma on his own sole authority. In doing so he gave an enormous boost to the burgeoning cult of Mary, which continued to gather momentum as the century advanced. (Only four years later came the stamp of divine approval: in Lourdes, the Virgin appeared to young Bernadette Soubirous and introduced herself with the words “I am the Immaculate Conception.”) Another cult to which the pope gave great encouragement was that of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Eighteenth-century Jansenists had dismissed it as “cardiolatry,” but Pius placed its feast day firmly on the Church calendar. It is no coincidence that the Basilica of the Sacré-Coeur in Paris was built during his pontificate on the Butte Montmartre—the highest point of Paris.

  All his life he had been alternately loved and hated, respected and despised; and in 1881, three years after his death, the pendulum swung again. It had been decided that his body should find its final resting place in the patriarchal Basilica of San Lorenzo fuori le Mura, but since Italy was by now in the grip of a furious wave of anticlericalism inspired by her prime minister, Agostino Depretis, it was thought safer for it to be transported by night. Unfortunately, word of the intended operation had somehow reached the Roman mob, which almost succeeded in hurling the coffin into the river. By the time it was carried into San Lorenzo, it had been dented by stones and was heavily spattered with mud. Pio Nono, it seemed, was as controversial a figure as ever he had been. He still is.

  1. “God doesn’t grant amnesties,” growled Metternich. “God pardons.”

  2. Antonelli was largely responsible for enabling the Papacy to cling to temporal power for as long as it did. He was a brilliant politician with immense charm and, as his countless bastards attested, an extremely mouvementé sex life. “When he stops in a salon near a pretty woman, when he stands close to speak to her, stroking her shoulders and looking deeply into her corsage, you recognize the man of the woods, and you tremble as you think of post chaises overturned at the roadside” (Edmond About, La question romaine).

  3. Radetzky had taken part in the very first Austrian campaigns against Napoleon more than half a century before and had been chief of staff at the Battle of Leipzig in 1813. He had fought in seventeen campaigns, had been wounded seven times, and had had nine horses shot from under him.

  4. “Wherever we are, there shall be Rome.”

  5. Louis-Napoleon had revived his uncle’s empire—and himself assumed the title of emperor—on December 2, 1852.

  6. “Pio Nono had been doubtful about the Irish volunteers at first, because he feared the effects on Irishmen of the ready availability of cheap Italian wine” (Duffy, Saints and Sinners, p. 224).

  7. “Italy is made; now we have to make the Italians.”

  8. “La France,” the pope is said to have remarked to a remaining French representative, “a perdu ses dents” (Sedan)—“France has lost her teeth.” Pius IX was famous for the awfulness of his puns, but even for him this must have been one of the worst.

  CHAPTER XXVI

  Leo XIII and the First World War

  The conclave that, on its third ballot, elected Cardinal Vincenzo Gioacchino Pecci Pope Leo XIII on February 20, 1878, was the first to be held by the Holy See since its loss of temporal power. The cardinal was ten days short of his sixty-eighth birthday and known to be in poor health, but those who saw him as little more than a stopgap pope soon had cause to revise their opinions. He was to run the Church with remarkable efficiency for over a quarter of a century.

  His early career had been unpromising. A nunciature to Belgium in 1843 had ended in disaster, with his ignominious departure at the request of King Leopold I. His next thirty-two years were spent as the not particularly important Bishop of Perugia. In 1853 Pius IX had made him a cardinal, but the all-powerful Antonelli had disliked and distrusted him, and it was only after Antonelli’s death in 1876 that Pecci had been recalled to Rome. He was then appointed camerlengo, the cardinal who administers the Church between the death of a pope and the election of his successor; but even this was less significant than might have been supposed, since there was a long-standing tradition that camerlenghi did not become popes.

  The problems that Leo inherited were formidable indeed. Throughout the 1870s and ’80s, and especially under the ministries of Agostino Depretis and Francesco Crispi, the attitude of the Kingdom of Italy to the Papacy was frankly hostile; the Law of Guarantees was infringed again and again. Leo was not even allowed to bless the crowd from the loggia of St. Peter’s in the traditional manner after his coronation; instead, the ceremony had to take place in the seclusion of the Sistine Chapel. Over the next few years the situat
ion grew steadily worse. Processions and outdoor services were banned; the bishops suffered from unremitting government interference; tithes were withheld; priests were conscripted into the army, while fewer and fewer of them were allowed to involve themselves in education. The Catholic faithful, alarmed by what was beginning to look suspiciously like persecution, implored the pope to form his own parliamentary party in order to tackle the government on its own ground; but Leo remained firm. If Catholics wished to express their feelings by voting in the local or municipal elections, they might do so; anything more would mean recognition of the Italian state—and that remained out of the question.

  As Supreme Pontiff, on the other hand, he could speak out for the Church, which he regularly and vigorously did. The views he expressed were essentially those of his predecessor, of the Vatican Council, and even of the “Syllabus”; but the tone was markedly different. Gone was the shrillness which had informed so many of Pius IX’s later pronouncements; Leo spoke with a voice of calm, of reason and regret. Why was the Kingdom of Italy so hostile? Surely the Church should be a friend, not an enemy. Had it not led humanity out of barbarism and into enlightenment? Why, then, was its teaching rejected? As anyone could see, that rejection was causing nothing but lawlessness and strife. If Italy would only return to the Catholic fold, all her present troubles would vanish.

  With other nations, Leo adopted an even gentler approach. The Franco-Prussian War had changed the religious face of Europe. The dominant power was no longer Catholic Austria but fiercely Protestant Prussia, and this new dispensation had left the Catholic areas of Germany, particularly Bavaria, gravely concerned. German Protestants had been outraged by Pius IX’s “Syllabus” and by the definition of infallibility, while the Catholics had organized themselves into a powerful political party, which made a considerable nuisance of itself in the Berlin Parliament; Bismarck had consequently come to look upon them as a potentially dangerous enemy. With the help of the odious Dr. Adalbert Falk, whom in 1872 he made his minister of education, he had instituted what was known as the Kulturkampf—the Culture Struggle—and this in turn had given rise to the so-called Falk Laws, which expelled the Jesuits and several other religious orders, subjected all Catholic educational establishments to rigid state control, and made any discussion of politics from the pulpit punishable by imprisonment.

  Once enthroned, Leo lost no time in seeking a reconciliation. Fortunately for him, Bismarck was already losing confidence in his anticlerical policy, which was proving singularly unsuccessful; it had aroused furious protestations, one or two serious riots, and even some occasional bloodshed. He was now only too pleased to find an excuse to abandon it, and the overtures made by the pope provided a perfect face-saving opportunity to do so. The chancellor could not, of course, be seen to give in too quickly, but by the end of 1880 the worst of the anticlerical laws had been rescinded, and by 1886 the Kulturkampf was a thing of the past. The only important exception was the ban on the Jesuits, which was to remain in force till 1917.

  Unfortunately, just as Prussia was giving up her anticlericalism, France was reviving hers. The recent war had been followed by the horrors of the Paris Commune, in the course of which the Archbishop of Paris and several other distinguished churchmen had been executed by firing squad; the atrocity had led, not surprisingly, to a right-wing reaction which had continued through most of the decade. By 1879, however, this in turn was spent, and the French political scene was dominated by Léon Gambetta, who two years before had defined his position with the words “Le cléricalisme, c’est l’ennemi.” On the last day of 1882 Gambetta died at the age of only forty-four, in the company of his mistress, from the accidental discharge of a revolver; but his policies lived on after him. Throughout the 1880s and ’90s in France, it was the Kulturkampf all over again. Under the famous Article VII of the educational code of the radically left-wing Jules Ferry, religious and lay schools could no longer compete on an equal footing. Just as they had been under Louis XV, the Jesuits were driven from their religious houses. They, the Marist Fathers, and the Dominicans were deprived of the right to teach in either state or private schools. Primary education was completely secularized. Seminarists were no longer excused from military service. The first state secondary schools for girls were established, a major—and to many a shocking—reform, since the education of young women had until now always been the preserve of the Church. Finally, divorce was permitted for the first time.

  With the Third Republic and the Church at daggers drawn, Pope Leo did his best. In encyclical after encyclical, he urged the French government to put an end to its hostility, damaging, surely, to the very soul of France: Church and state, he endlessly repeated, were not incompatible; they were complementary and should consequently be working together for the general good of the French people. But to the right-wing, monarchist, Catholic faction he was just as outspoken. There was, he declared, nothing illegal or immoral in the principle of republicanism as such; whatever their feelings, it was the duty of all good Catholics to support the established republic. The Church could fight hostile legislation; it must never oppose a legitimate constitution. But the pope’s words had little effect, and France’s narrow escape in 1888–1889 from a dictatorship under the consumingly ambitious but ultimately somewhat absurd General Georges Boulanger1 did still more to polarize the Catholic Right.

  From 1893 to 1898 France was governed by a set of rather more moderate ministers, and it seemed at first that the worst of the Church’s troubles might be over. Another of Pope Leo’s encyclicals assured French Catholics that a bishop might quite reasonably support a republican candidate so long as that candidate gave him guarantees of religious freedom. This led to the establishment of a Catholic Republican Party, which caused the parliamentary majority to shift toward the center. But then in November 1894 came the conviction on a charge of treason of the Jewish Colonel Alfred Dreyfus and his subsequent sentence to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island. On the question of his guilt or innocence, France was split in two, with the always anti-Semitic Catholic right predictably campaigning against Dreyfus. (Of all the publications involved, the most venomously malignant was the journal of the Assumptionist order, La Croix.)2 The affaire was to drag on until the summer of 1906, when Dreyfus was finally restored to his former rank, promoted, and decorated.

  By then, however, Catholicism in France had suffered its greatest blow of all. In June 1902 the government was taken over by Émile Combes, a provincial politician who had himself studied for the priesthood but had later developed a bitter hatred of the Church and everything it stood for. The wholesale expulsion of all “unauthorized” religious orders was now set in train; on April 19, 1903, the entire monastic community of the Grande Chartreuse was forcibly ejected by two squadrons of dragoons with fixed bayonets. By the end of 1904 more than ten thousand Catholic schools had been closed. Thousands of priests, monks, and nuns had fled France to escape persecution, and in December 1905 the Concordat of 1801 was formally abrogated, bringing about the complete separation of Church and state.

  It was a sad day for the pontificate; happily for him, Leo XIII did not live to see it.

  LEO’S MOST SIGNIFICANT work, however, was not political or diplomatic but sociological. He was the first pope to face up to the fact that the world had moved into an industrial age. It was not that the appearance of a teeming urban proletariat in Italy had somehow escaped the notice of his predecessor; Pius IX had been bitter indeed in his repeated attacks on socialism, nihilism, and what he saw as the other evils of the age. He had failed, on the other hand, to appreciate that this immense new working class was the responsibility of the Church, which was largely ignoring it. It was Leo who reopened the dialogue between them and introduced programs of social action. His Opera dei Congressi e dei Comitati Cattolici sponsored fourteen congresses during his pontificate alone; but he also supervised the formation of Catholic trade unions, which also had a considerable success until in 1927 Benito Mussolini made voluntary with
drawal of labor a punishable offense.

  His greatest monument is probably his encyclical Rerum Novarum, published in May 1891. It was in fact the Papacy’s shamefully belated response to Das Kapital and The Socialist Manifesto and was later to be described by Pope John XXIII as the Magna Carta of Catholic social doctrine. Already in the preamble, Leo nailed his colors to the mast. In the present industrial society, he wrote, “a small number of very rich men have been able to lay upon the teeming masses of the laboring poor a yoke which is very little better than slavery itself.… The conflict now raging derives from the vast expansion of industrial pursuits and the wondrous discoveries of science; from the changed relations between masters and workmen; from the enormous fortunes of some few individuals and the utter poverty of the masses; from the increased self-reliance and closer mutual combination of the working classes; and also, finally, from the prevailing moral degeneracy.”