AWAY FROM ROME!
pomp and splendour to the *Te Deum, regardless of what our atheists in Paris may say." During this same summer negotiations with Rome were concluded. On both sides the situation was desperately difficult. The Constitutional Assembly had broken with the Pope, had torn France adrift from the Church, and had divided the clergy into parties. But Bonaparte needed religious unity for reasons of state, and he needed the Pope to sanction his claim to the throne. Those immediately surrounding him urged the most contradictory requests on him: he should free the state from all the superstitions of religion, he should follow the example of Henry VIII and declare himself supreme head of the French National Church instead of leav- ing supremacy in religious matters to a foreigner, and he should make France a Protestant country. The reasons why he repudiated all these suggestions are well known. Napoleon, the statesman, wanted the Catholic religion and no other; and he wanted it because he desired a visible centre of responsibility. "If there were no Pope," he said, "we should have to make one." The man who spoke thus was not a deist but a politician. The future Emperor hoped that he would subordinate to his leadership the representative of the most ancient spiritual power of Europe, who was also the symbol of its historical unity. LaFayette did not understand all that Napoleon's ecclesiasti- cal policy implied, but he summarized its most intimate motives when he wrote: "Why not admit it, the little vial of coronation oil is to be broken over your head. This is what you want."
Ambassadors and outlines of a treaty were sent hither and thither. Napoleon demanded a Church constitution based upon the revolu- tionary status quo the sale of Church property in favour of the state, confiscation of real estate owned by the clergy, appointment and payment of the clergy by the state, and a new division of France into sixty dioceses, the bishops of which were to be chosen from those who had taken the oath as well as from those who had not taken it. When the Papacy replied in the negative, he sent a threat that he would declare war on Rome and the Papal States. If the Paris pro- posals were not signed within two weeks without modification, the French ambassador Cacault was to leave Rome at once and to join Murat, Commander of the Franco-Italian army.
Cacault himself pleaded with Consalvi to go to Paris personally,
THE
