Both during the war and after it, Pope Benedict spent much of his time in diplomatic negotiations with the European powers. Conciliatory by nature, he was not afraid to make substantial concessions in return for good relations and the smooth running of the Church machine. With Spain he even went so far as to negotiate the transfer of some twelve thousand ecclesiastical appointments to the king, retaining only fifty-two. The Curia was horrified; Benedict merely pointed out that King Ferdinand would almost certainly have appropriated them anyway and that by negotiating he had secured 1.3 million scudi in compensation.
Turning his attention to Portugal, which had broken off diplomatic relations in the time of Benedict XIII,1 the pope willingly granted all King John’s demands and even awarded him the title Fidelissimus, “Most Faithful.” But the country began to cause him serious anxiety after John’s death in 1750, and the rise to power in that same year of Sebastião de Carvalho e Melo, better known as the Marquis of Pombal. Since the new king, Joseph I, was a pleasure-loving nonentity, Pombal soon became the most powerful man in the kingdom—and the most feared, to the point where in 1759 the papal nuncio in Lisbon wrote that he was the most despotic minister there had ever been, not only in Portugal but in the whole of Europe. Pombal believed—as it happened, nearly always mistakenly—that he knew what was best for his country, and he brooked no opposition: those who expressed contrary opinions or stood in his way were imprisoned or executed. Not surprisingly, he hated the Church, which he made every effort to bring under his control, and had a particular detestation for the most active group within it, the Society of Jesus.
For some years already the Jesuits had been growing increasingly unpopular. Founded in 1534 as a humble order of missionaries, they were now seen as a vast, intellectually arrogant, power-hungry, and hugely ambitious organization, enmeshed in international intrigue and totally unscrupulous in their operations. For years they had been pilloried by Jansenist pamphleteers; Blaise Pascal in his Lettres provinciales had attacked them as shameless hypocrites. They were blamed for every atrocity, every outrage. Who else, people asked, had been responsible for the assassinations of Henry III and Henry IV of France and the attempts on the lives of Queen Elizabeth and James I of England? Had not the English Civil War been the fruit of a Jesuit conspiracy?
In Portugal the Society had five confessors at court and a near monopoly on colleges and schools. Its power had to be broken, and Pombal was determined to break it. In 1755, the year of the great Lisbon earthquake, a Jesuit was expelled for having preached a disloyal sermon, despite the fact that none of those who heard it had noticed anything to which the king might have objected. Two years later, the Jesuit confessor to the royal family was forcibly evicted, and the next day all Jesuits were forbidden the court and struck off the list of preachers in the cathedral. Pombal told the nuncio that the principal reason was the conduct of the Society in its missionary colonies in Spanish Paraguay and Portuguese Brazil, where Jesuit missionaries were alleged to have incited the Indians to rebellion. At much the same time the Portuguese envoy in Rome strongly hinted to Pope Benedict that if he did not take firm measures against the Society, King Joseph would expel it altogether from his realm.
It was always the pope’s instinct to temporize. He had no wish to offend the king, but he resented Pombal’s attitude, which demanded his unquestioning acceptance of the truth of his accusations. He politely replied that he would appoint one of his cardinals to investigate the charges and on consideration of his report would take whatever measures appeared appropriate. On April 1, 1758, just a month before his death, he duly named the Portuguese Cardinal Francesco Saldanha as reformer and visitor of the Jesuits of Portugal.
In his dealings with Prussia, Benedict smoothed his path by recognizing the Protestant Frederick II, whose conquest of Silesia had greatly increased the number of his Catholic subjects, as king, a title previously denied him by the Holy See; on the other hand, he refused absolutely to allow him to transfer to Berlin the seat of the Cardinal Bishop of Breslau, vicar general of all the Catholics in his realm, even when the king promised to upgrade the Catholic chapel there to the status of a cathedral. The result, the pope realized, would have been tantamount to the establishment of a Prussian state church, effectively independent of Rome—and he would have none of it.
Another serious problem was the heavy burden of debt which he had inherited. He instituted drastic economies in every department of the administration, but they did little more than counterbalance the depredations of the foreign armies; the burden remained crushing. In his canonical and liturgical reforms he had rather more success. Mixed marriages were regularized; Christians of the Eastern rite in communion with Rome—the Maronites of Lebanon, for example, and other uniate churches of the Middle East—were formally assured that they might continue in all their traditional forms of worship. The Congregation of the Index—effectively the papal board of censorship—was instructed to avoid excessive zeal, interpreting its instructions as liberally as possible. (Freemasonry, however, and the works of the pope’s openly confessed admirer Voltaire2 remained proscribed.)
As might have been expected, Benedict XIV was an enthusiastic patron of the arts and sciences. Unlike his predecessor, he had never been a rich man; no magnificent buildings stand to his memory. He managed nonetheless to found chairs of mathematics, chemistry, and physics at the Sapienza University, and a chair of surgery (with an institute of anatomy) at the University of Bologna; and he greatly enriched both the Vatican Library and the Capitoline Museum. It was thanks largely to him that, during the mercifully peaceful last ten years of his pontificate, Rome became not only the religious but also the intellectual capital of Catholic Europe—the Rome in which Johann Joachim Winckelmann invented art history, the Rome that was also a few years later to inspire Edward Gibbon. Gibbon’s contemporary Horace Walpole summed up Benedict accurately enough: “A priest without insolence or interest, a prince without favourites, a pope without nephews.” His Roman flock adored him, and when he died on May 3, 1758, the whole city went into mourning.
“WHO WOULD HAVE thought it?” wrote Cardinal Carlo della Torre Rezzonico to his brother on hearing that he had been elected pope. “I am completely bewildered before God and man.… You know my failings; if others had known them, they would never have acted as they have.” When his mother was informed, she died of shock.
Rezzonico, who took the name of Clement XIII after the pope who had raised him to the purple, came from a rich Venetian family which had bought itself into the nobility some seventy years before. The Jesuit historian Giulio Cesare Cordara, who knew him well, wrote:
He had all the virtues which could grace a prince and a pope. He was naturally kind-hearted, generous, candid, and truthful, abhorring any kind of dissembling or exaggeration. He had a lively mind, great powers of endurance, and an indefatigable capacity for work. It was easy to gain admittance to him; his conversation was kind but not unmeasured; pride and contempt for others were utterly foreign to his nature. Although destiny allotted him the highest dignity, he succeeded in preserving a notable humility and meekness.
The one thing he lacked was self-confidence. Shy and timid to a fault, he was incapable of making his own decisions. In consequence he became increasingly dependent on his secretary of state, Cardinal Luigi Torrigiani, whose deep admiration of the Society of Jesus did much to shape the pope’s own attitude in the crisis that was to come.
The problem of the Jesuits was to overshadow Clement’s entire pontificate. At the time of his accession the principal battlefield remained Portugal, where the Marquis of Pombal was stepping up his persecutions. Benedict XIV’s choice of Cardinal Saldanha as investigator had been a disastrous mistake. Saldanha was a distant relation of Pombal, to whom he owed his successful career and whom he obeyed in every particular. On June 5, 1758, barely a month after his appointment, he issued an edict announcing that he had certain knowledge that scandalous commercial transactions had been in operation in every Jesuit college, residence, novitiate, and all houses of other kinds owned by the order and under the protection of Portugal, in Europe, Asia, Africa, and America. All further trade was now forbidden under penalty of excommunication; all account books were to be surrendered. Two days later the Jesuits were formally suspended from preaching and the hearing of confessions.
The reaction in Portugal, among both the nobility and the people, was one of horror. In Rome, where the conclave was still in progress, it was much the same. The apostolic nuncio in Lisbon was instructed to inform Saldanha that his edict was excellent but for one slight omission: evidence. Without that, it was simple calumny. It was further remarked that although the cardinal’s inquiry had officially been opened on May 31, the decree had been printed four days earlier, on the twenty-seventh. Regarding the Jesuits’ suspension, the nuncio was to point out that this was entirely uncanonical: individual members of an order might be suspended, but not the order as a whole. The Patriarch of Lisbon was subsequently found to have signed the edict only under duress. On its publication he retired to his country retreat; a month later he was dead.
All this was only the beginning. On the night of September 3, shots were fired at King Joseph. Responsibility can almost certainly be laid at the door of a group of dissatisfied noblemen, twelve of whom were publicly executed, but soon the rumor was spreading that the attempted assassination had been instigated by the Jesuits—and Pombal had the perfect pretext for which he had been waiting. The seven Jesuit establishments in Lisbon were surrounded and searched, and on February 5, 1759, everything within them was sequestrated. This included all foodstuffs; had not pious benefactors taken pity on them, the fathers would have been reduced to beggary. On April 20, the king, by now recovered, wrote to Pope Clement reiterating the familiar charges against the Society and informing him that he had consequently expelled it from Portugal. The pope protested in vain. Soon afterward his nuncio suffered a similar expulsion, and, for the second time in thirty years, diplomatic relations were broken off.
And now the anti-Jesuit fever spread to France. For the past half century the France of Voltaire and Rousseau, of Diderot and his Encyclopédie, had been the European focus of antireligious thought. “So long as there are rogues and fools in the world,” wrote Voltaire to Frederick the Great, “there will always be religion. There can be no question but that ours is the most ridiculous, absurd, and bloodthirsty that ever infected the earth.” The Papacy was detested, and the Jesuits were its most vocal champions. They also had a virtual monopoly on education and stood, in the minds of the philosophes (freethinkers), as the principal bastion of reaction and obscurantism. No wonder, then, that Pombal’s activities against them had been viewed by many Frenchmen with approval. In short, France was a tinderbox and its fuse was lit, ironically enough, by a Jesuit, Father Antoine Lavalette.
Father Lavalette was the procurator of a mission run by his order on the island of Martinique who in 1753 became apostolic prefect of all the Jesuit settlements in the West Indies. He was, however, a man of business as well as a priest, and he also ran a large plantation on the neighboring island of Dominica where he employed some five hundred slaves, sending the produce of their labors back to France. All might have been well had it not been for the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), in which Britain and France fought on opposite sides. Two of Lavalette’s valuable shiploads were seized by the British outside Bordeaux, and the business was left a total of 1.5 million livres in debt. The Paris parlement pronounced the Society of Jesus responsible, further declaring its assets subject to confiscation and forbidding it to give instruction or to accept novices pending a thorough review of its constitution. A suggestion by the French government that the order should be administered by a special vicar general independent of Rome was instantly vetoed by the pope. “Let them be as they are or let them cease to be,” he said—a command rendered somewhat more pithily in Latin as “Sint ut sunt aut non sint.” The government chose the latter alternative, and on December 1, 1764, a royal decree declared the Society abolished and expelled from France.
NOW IT WAS the turn of Spain, to which King Charles had returned from Naples in 1759 on the death of his mentally unhinged half brother King Ferdinand. Though far more Catholic than its French neighbor, the country had been by no means unaffected by the Age of Enlightenment, and there were many who attributed its general backwardness to the influence of the Church. The Jesuits in particular were blamed, as they had been in Portugal, for the disturbances in Paraguay, while continuing to disclaim all responsibility. They were equally innocent of the charge that led to their third expulsion.
On March 10, 1766, a decree was published in Madrid forbidding the wearing of the traditional flowing cloak and broad-brimmed sombrero in all royal residential towns, university towns, and provincial capitals in Spain. Instead, men were enjoined to wear the short French wig and tricorne. The forbidden costume, it was claimed, was un-Spanish and served only to enable criminals to conceal their faces and so to pass unrecognized. A fortnight later, on Palm Sunday, serious riots—they were known as the “hat and cloak riots”—broke out; the Jesuits played no part but were once again held responsible. On February 27, 1767, Charles III banished them from Spain and all its overseas territories. In November of the same year they were similarly expelled from Naples and Sicily and in 1768 from the island of Malta—still in the hands of the Knights of St. John—as also from the Duchy of Parma and Piacenza, whose Duke Ferdinand was the nephew of Charles III.
Although the duchy had been created as a fief for a bastard son of Pope Paul III, it had long since ceased to acknowledge the historic suzerainty of the Holy See. Successive popes, on the other hand, had continued to assert their claims. Most recently, Clement XIII had reaffirmed the papal case when in 1765 Philip was succeeded by his fourteen-year-old son, Ferdinand. But Parma—or, more accurately, the duchy’s chief minister, Guillaume du Tillot, Marquis of Felino—was spoiling for a fight. Within months of Ferdinand’s accession he had issued a law imposing crippling dues on ecclesiastical property, and in January 1768 he promulgated another, forbidding the reference of disputes to Rome and the publication of any ecclesiastical decree without ducal permission. This was too much for Pope Clement, who immediately convened a congregation of cardinals and bishops to consider a suitable response. The result was a papal brief which reiterated the feudal rights of the Holy See over the duchy and declared all Parma’s anticlerical laws null and void. For good measure Clement included all those responsible for the two laws in the bull In Coena Domini, which contained a list of those excommunicated for reasons of faith or morals and according to an age-old tradition was read out on Maundy Thursday every year.
Here was just the pretext Tillot needed. Not only Parma but the three great Bourbon monarchies of France, Spain, and Naples reacted in fury. The pope’s ban, they maintained, applied as much to themselves as it did to the duchy; Clement had effectively released all their subjects from their duty to their sovereigns. Bernardo Tanucci, the chief minister in Naples, went so far as to suggest depriving him of all his worldly possessions. The French foreign minister, the Duc de Choiseul, abandoned diplomatic language altogether:
The Pope is a complete ninny, and his minister is a first-class fool. The insult is aimed not only at the Duke of Parma: it applies to the whole House of Bourbon. It is an act of revenge, a reprisal against those monarchs who have driven out the Jesuits. If this first detestable step is tolerated, the Roman Court, led by a man that knows no bounds, will stop at nothing. The dignity of the monarchs and the Family Compact demand that we allow no prince of this House to be insulted with impunity.
The best way to resolve the crisis, he believed, was for the House of Bourbon—France, Spain, and Naples—to send a joint memorandum to the pope, expressing its astonishment that he should have addressed such a missive, as insulting as it was unjust, to the Duke of Parma. The Holy See must now formally countermand its brief. If the pope were to refuse, diplomatic relations with Rome would be broken off for the remainder of his pontificate. Predictably, he did refuse, and in June 1768 a French army reoccupied Avignon and the Venaissin, together with Neapolitan Benevento, which had been a papal fief since the eleventh century.
Meanwhile there was another problem that refused to go away: what was to be done with the luckless exiles? It had been vaguely assumed that they would all be accommodated in Rome, but a special congregation of cardinals decided, by a majority of six to two, to deny them admission. These exiles were numbered in their thousands; the Society’s houses had no spare capacity, nor any spare funds to pay for their lodging elsewhere. An attempt was made to land some three thousand Spanish Jesuits on the island of Corsica, but this proved disastrous. For nearly forty years the island had been in revolt against its Genoese overlords; there was fighting all over, and the inhabitants had barely enough food for themselves. The new arrivals were not permitted even to disembark for well over a month, and then they were obliged to forage for themselves among a resentful and often openly hostile peasantry. Within five months sixteen members of the Castilian Province were dead.
Then, on May 15, 1768, Corsica was purchased by France. Having expelled all Jesuits from his territory four years earlier, King Louis was certainly not going to allow them to overrun his new island. They were collected up again, embarked on French ships, and dropped off at Sestri Levante, between Genoa and La Spezia, from which it was hoped that they would gradually and secretly make their way, in small parties, into the Papal States. But from the moment of their arrival on Italian soil, the attitude toward them changed. The more compassionate Italians were horrified to see these hundreds of homeless and penniless men of God, tattered and emaciated, physically and emotionally exhausted, wandering without even a definite destination in view. Clement could no longer close his doors against them. At long last they were allowed entry into papal territory, though they were forbidden to come to Rome without special permission from the Society’s general.
No similar degree of pity, however, was shown by the Bourbon powers. Nothing would now satisfy them but the universal suppression of the Jesuit order; and on Monday, January 16, the Spanish envoy in Rome handed the pope a communication from his government. Clement took it and dismissed the envoy with his blessing; only then did he open it—and he canceled all his audiences for the next two days. The shock and humiliation were too much for him, and he never properly recovered. He summoned a special consistory for February 3, but the night before suffered a massive heart attack. He was dead by morning.
His had been a sad pontificate, poisoned by the implacable hatred of the House of Bourbon for the Society of Jesus, for which he could hardly be blamed. He was, however, unimaginative and—for a Venetian—surprisingly narrow-minded.3 Perhaps, had he been a greater pope than he was, more self-confident and more decisive, he might have been able to defend the Society rather more effectively—but even then he would have been unlikely to make much difference. The fault was in the age; the Enlightenment approved of the pope as little as the pope approved of the Enlightenment. The Papacy had lost its prestige, and with it much of its power. Christian Europe might pay it lip service but very little more.
CLEMENT XIII DIED fighting to save the Jesuit order; Clement XIV killed it. Lorenzo Ganganelli was a Franciscan of humble origins who, in 1743, had, ironically enough, dedicated a book to the founder of the Jesuits, St. Ignatius Loyola. The conclave which, after three and a half months, elected him pope was from the very beginning dominated by the Jesuit question. It also had the distinction of being visited by Joseph II of Austria. Joseph had been emperor since the death of his father, Francis I, but exerted little real power, his mother, Maria Theresa, being still alive and very much in control. In answer to polite questioning, he gave it as his opinion that she was too pious to do anything to bring about the suppression of the order; neither, however, would she do anything to oppose that suppression, and she would on the whole be happy if it occurred. He himself felt much the same way.
It was plain from the start of the conclave that any candidate who openly favored the Jesuits would be vetoed by one or all of the Catholic powers; on the other hand, to win the election on the strength of a previous promise to abolish them would smack of simony. Ganganelli was therefore careful to tread a middle path. He let it be known that he considered the complete suppression of the order to be a possibility, no more. He probably had no very strong views one way or the other; but he was an ambitious man and he was determined to play the Jesuit card quietly—but only very quietly—to his advantage. On May 19, 1769, at the age of sixty-three, he was elected pope.
Clement XIV possessed many admirable qualities. He was highly intelligent, friendly and unassuming, and totally incorruptible, with a fine sense of humor. When, on November 26, 1769, he was taking part in the possesso—the immense procession preceding the ceremonial to take possession of the Lateran—his horse, terrified by the cheering of the vast crowd, reared up and threw him. He remarked later that he hoped that when he was on his way up to the Capitol he looked like St. Peter, but hoped even more that when he fell he looked like St. Paul. He was handicapped by a sad lack of political experience: he had never been out of Italy and had never held a diplomatic post abroad. It was perhaps his consciousness of this disadvantage that sapped his confidence. In the words of an anonymous contemporary who knew him well:
he lacks courage and stability; he is unbelievably slow in taking any decision. He deceives people with fine words and promises, weaves his web around them and enchants them. He begins by promising them the world but then makes difficulties and in true Roman fashion withholds a decision.… Anyone who seeks a favor should endeavor to obtain it at his first audience.
Cardinal François de Bernis, the French ambassador to Rome, wrote:
Clement XIV is intelligent, but his knowledge is confined to theology, church history, and a few anecdotes of court life. He is a stranger to politics, and his love of secrecy is more than his mastery of it; he takes a delight in friendly intercourse, and in the process he lays bare his inmost thoughts. He has a pleasant manner. He wants to please and is in mortal fear of displeasing. In vain he arms himself with courage; timidity is the fundamental feature of his character. In his government he will show more kindness than firmness; to the church finances he will bring order and thrift. He is frugal and active, though not a quick worker. He is cheerful, and he wants to be at peace with everyone and to live long.
That love of secrecy would cause him serious difficulties with the Sacred College. His cardinals were never confided in, nor even asked for their opinions. They began to complain and when their complaints went unheeded took matters into their own hands, boycotting the great ceremonies of the Church and leaving the pope to officiate virtually unattended. Moreover, Clement’s habit of surrounding himself with men of low degree put a severe strain on his relations with the Roman nobility, to the point where, only four months after his accession, they refused to give the ceremonial attendance that was their traditional duty. A particular irritation to them was the pope’s private secretary and favorite, a fellow Franciscan named Bontempi, son of a cook in Pesaro. It was to Bontempi, far more than to the papal secretary of state, Cardinal Opizio Pallavicini, that he confided his innermost thoughts and secrets.
The pope’s instinctive wish to conciliate led him, immediately on his accession, to open up discussions with Portugal and the Bourbon powers. Portugal was easily dealt with. After ten years of severed relations, virtually every Portuguese from the king down wished heartily to end the quarrel. The only exception was Pombal; but after Clement had confirmed all his nominees in various bishoprics and offered a red hat to his brother, even the dread marquis was persuaded to relent. Then, in 1770, the pope took another major step. He discontinued the annual reading of the bull In Coena Domini, in which the inclusion of Parma two years before had precipitated the Bourbon ultimatum—thereby ending forever a tradition which had continued since at least the early thirteenth century.
These gestures and others like them did something to improve relations between the two sides, but Clement was still under constant pressure and was well aware that the breach could never be healed until the Society of Jesus was dissolved once and for all. He delayed action for as long as he could, but then, in 1773, came the news that the Bourbon states were preparing for a showdown, which would almost certainly result in a complete rupture: nothing less than the secession of the most powerful Catholic states of Europe from the authority of the Holy See. Some doubts remained over Habsburg Austria, since Maria Theresa had formerly favored the Jesuits, entrusting them with the education of her children, but in April the empress, who had high hopes of marrying off her daughter Marie Antoinette to the French dauphin, the future Louis XVI, wrote to Charles III of Spain confirming that, despite the high esteem in which she held the Society, she would put no obstacle in the way of its suppression if the pope considered it expedient in the interests of Catholic unity. We have the evidence of several of those closest to her that she regretted this letter for the rest of her life; her remorse would have been greater still had she known the ultimate fate of her daughter, for whose sake she had sacrificed the Jesuit order.
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 de 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.