If the trailer is to be believed, Napoleon, the upcoming movie from Ridley Scott and starring Joaquin Phoenix, will be the story of a bad boy and his bad girl. Rather than the leader of a motorcycle pack, Napoleon will be the alpha male of all Europe. Josephine will be the purring muse of his destructive creativity.
Fine. Whatever. I just want to see what Scott is able to do with the story of modernity’s most gigantic personality. Scott is one of those directors able to bring scale to the screen, and if Napoleon had one thing in spades, it was scale.
As a Catholic, it is easy to dismiss Napoleon Bonaparte as no more than one more in a long series of Antichrists. He was not Hitler, of course, but he did take his turn as Antichrist, most especially in his power-drunk rage at the Catholic Church between 1808 and 1814.
In the end, Napoleon lost his fight with the Church—or won it in an entirely unexpected way, depending on how you look at it.
Napoleon did not start out to fight the Catholic Church, and the story of his move from moderation to malice in his treatment of the Church is somewhat long and involved. But its source is easy to describe: Napoleon’s limitless ambition.
After the cruel years of the French Revolution, in which the Church was brutally attacked and suppressed, Napoleon became First Consul in 1799. Cardinal Chiaramonti, who had given a well known speech about how the Church could accommodate itself to new forms of government, was elected Pope Pius VII a few months later. Both saw the advantages in turning down the church/state heat in France. By 1801, the two of them had negotiated a concordat, or treaty, that returned much of Catholic life in France to normalcy.
But Napoleon’s dashing string of military victories over the next few years inflamed his ambition. Wildly popular, he had himself declared emperor in 1804, and, rather than submit to the usual “consecration” of the French ruler at Riems Cathedral, he arranged an opulent coronation for himself and his wife Josephine at Notre Dame.
He negotiated for Pope Pius to attend the coronation, and then redesigned the ceremony so that he would be sitting, rather than kneeling, when receiving the papal blessings. Most famously, he crowned himself rather than receive the crown from the pope, a move meant not so much to embarrass the pope as to underline the fact that he did not “receive” his earthly rule from the Church.
Pius seems to have returned to Rome with growing alarm at the emperor’s vanity.
Over the next few years, Napoleon made it clear that he thought of the pope as his vassal, especially demanding that the pope should declare war on Napoleon’s enemies. In this, a delusional grandiosity seems to have overtaken the emperor, in which he saw himself as a new Charlemagne, to whom the pope owed allegiance.
By 1807, the relationship with Pius VII was in tatters because even in spiritual matters, such as the appointment of bishops, Napoleon insisted that the pope be subject to him. Always he pushed for more from the pope, and Pius’s patient but persistent refusals enraged him. The two exchanged increasingly urgent letters, the pope remaining conciliatory, the emperor ever more demanding.
In the end, Pius became resigned to conflict, writing to Napoleon, “If our words fail to touch Your Majesty’s heart, we will suffer with a resignation conformable to the Gospel. We will accept every kind of calamity as coming from God.”
Calamity came.
A little more than a year later, Napoleon wrote a letter he intended for the pope to read. In it, he suggested he would entirely restructure the Catholic Church: “I will not fear to gather the Gallican, Italian, German, and Polish Churches in a council to transact my business without any pope and protect my peoples against the priests of Rome. This is the last time that I will enter into any discussion with the Roman priest rabble.”
By the middle of 1809, Napoleon had annexed the papal states, Pius had excommunicated him, and Napoleon had imprisoned the pope. Pius then refused to appoint new bishops in France.
A power struggle was now underway that included everything from Napoleon’s desire for an annulment to the future form of the papacy. In all of this, Pius VII, a prisoner, suffered quietly, never buckling even when his imprisonment included seemingly endless miseries.
In total, the pope remained Napoleon’s prisoner for almost five years. The conditions of his captivity varied from relative luxury to austerity. Isolation and sickness were his primary sufferings, and, at one point in 1812—taken from his bed at night and subjected to days of harsh travel as the French snuck him out of Italy—the pope became so sick that he was given the last sacraments.
Napoleon raged against him, at one point moving the entire retinue of Roman cardinals to Paris with the intention of replacing Rome as the center of Church life. In 1813, Napoleon visited the pope, subjecting him to a week of psychological abuse. At the end of the week, Pius signed a document that relented to some of Napoleon’s demands. The pope seems to have thought it was a working document. Nonetheless, Napoleon published the agreement, and Pius was compelled to make a public retraction.
There is a quality of madness in the way the world’s greatest strategist seemed to abandon strategy in dealing with the Church. Napoleon could have lived with the Concordat of 1801, and to do so would have avoided a great deal of trouble for him. That he could not accommodate himself to a Church that still had a voice—even if it was the genuinely cooperative voice of Pius VII—suggests dimensions to this struggle that even the emperor did not comprehend.
Imprisoning the pope brought with it serious consequences. The prime example came in Spain, a sometime ally of France whom Napoleon turned on and tried to subjugate between 1808 and 1813. Because of Napoleon’s treatment of Pius, the Spanish—especially the lower classes, who had already been battling the anti-clerical trends of the upper classes—decided that Napoleon was not just a political rival to their king, but an enemy of their Church. They rose up against him, essentially inventing modern guerrilla warfare.
For years, the Spanish bogged down massive French armies in war unlike anything the French had ever seen. Napoleon himself went to Spain and won a series of battles, none of which managed to dent Spanish resistance. For Napoleon, Spain became the definition of a quagmire. In fact, Napoleon’s Grande Armée, a truly awesome fighting machine, was depleted in Russia by as many as half a million because of the ongoing war in Spain. (In the end, the French would suffer more than 400,000 dead and wounded there.)
Napoleon marched home in defeat from Moscow, never to regain the might he had wielded before the Russia campaign. He had to let go of many things after that, one of which, in 1814, was his prisoner, the pope.
Pius, who had endured so much without ever becoming the vassal Napoleon wanted, returned to Rome and was hailed a “living martyr.” He reigned over the restored Papal States until 1823.
For Napoleon, next came the exile on Elba, the brief return to power, defeat at Waterloo, and then the final, genuinely cruel exile at the hands of the British on St. Helena in 1815.
For most historians, that is the end. Europe had defeated the emperor; the pope had persevered and was restored.
For a Catholic, however, this is where the really good part of the story begins.
Napoleon wrote to Pius to complain of his treatment on St. Helena, and the pope took up his cause. Further, the pope sheltered members of the fallen Bonaparte family in Rome. The pope had never stopped referring to Napoleon as his “son,” although he once referred to him as his “stubborn son.”
Napoleon, growing ill and living in miserable conditions, told one of his attendants, “I was born in the Catholic religion. I wish to fulfill the duties it imposes and receive the succor it administers.” He asked the pope he had so long tormented to send him a chaplain, and Pius did, sending a Corsican priest, Father Vignali.
The two Corsicans spent hours together. Napoleon declared his belief in God and began regular reading of the Bible. He once barked away an atheist doctor who sniggered at his religion, telling him he could not bear dullness of heart.
He made his confession to Father Vignali and returned to the sacraments. Napoleon was denied all communication with his son, so he asked Father Vignali to bring his son the chalice and altar accessories from St. Helena when he died.
The emperor’s long struggle with the Church was over. He was at peace, it seems, with Christ and his vicar. He called Pius VII “an old man, full of kindness and light.”
In 1821, Napoleon Bonaparte died in a cold and moldy room with his door open to the exposed Eucharist in the simple Catholic chapel he’d had installed. In his will, Item 12 reads, “To the Abbé Vignali, one hundred thousand francs. It is my wish that he should build his house near the Ponte Novo di Rostino [in Corsica].” It is a declaration of his esteem for his fellow Corsican, the one who brought him, finally, home.
But it is the opening paragraph of Napoleon Bonaparte’s will that tells the full and surprising truth about the man who had once been the scourge of bishops and popes. “I die,” he wrote, “in the apostolical Roman religion, in the bosom of which I was born more than fifty years since.”
What a wonderful movie ending this would make . . . but I doubt I will ever see it. Such endings don’t fit the modern narrative, and so they are buried. But if you really want to enjoy the movie about the genius bad boy of Europe, remember this: in the end, even he found his way home.