Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature - 3. The Reaction in France. Georg Brandes
tells each individual what he longs to know. The one religion undoubtedly denies what the other asserts. But I do not, like Volney, conclude from this that all religions are worthless, but rather that they are all good." This is the language of Lessing's Nathan. And quite in keeping with it is another assertion made to Monge: "In Egypt I was a Mahometan; I must be a Catholic in France. I do not believe in religions, but in the idea of a God."
Some years earlier, in a speech made before the Directory and all the public officials (December 1797), he had reckoned attachment to religion, along with attachment to monarchy and feudalism, among "the prejudices which the French people must overcome." When in Egypt, he had not scrupled to proclaim himself a Mussulman. His proclamation to the Arabian population contains this clause: "We, too, are good Mussulmans. Is it not we that have destroyed the power of the Pope, who commanded war upon Mussulmans?" Now he certainly (officially) called the same Pope "the holy Father" and (privately) "the good lamb"; nevertheless, when negotiations were being hindered by Romish intrigues, he wrote of him in his letters as "the old fox," and called the priests, or, to use his own word, la prêtraille "imbecile bunglers."
His behaviour during these same negotiations with Rome witnesses equally strongly to his political wiliness and his unorthodoxy. Cardinal Consalvi, before setting out on his journey to Paris in 1801, had been imprudent enough to write to a friend of the anxiety he felt in thus venturing into the very jaws of the lion, into the hot-bed of that Revolution which had very recently shown itself so terribly hostile to religion and its priests. Bonaparte owned a sort of Odin's raven, which repeated all such private confessions to him. This raven was at the post office where the Cardinal's letter was opened, and its master consequently prepared just such a reception as was likely to make an impression on the man to whose character the letter gave a clue. It was evening when Consalvi arrived in Paris, but his audience was already appointed for the next morning, so that he had neither time to recover from the fatigues of the journey nor to take counsel with the Pope's representatives. Early in the morning he was driven to the Tuileries and ushered into a small bare room which he took to be the anteroom of the First Consul's audience chamber. After he had waited here for some time, a small door was opened, and through it he passed, to his surprise, into a long suite of splendid apartments, where all the principal government officials, the Senate, the Legislative Assembly, the generals, and the staff were assembled. In the courtyard he could see several regiments drawn up for inspection. It was, as he himself wrote, the sudden transition from a hut to a palace. All the dazzling splendour and formidable signs of authority by which the consular dignity could be enhanced were here exhibited, and when, in the farthest room of the suite, the Cardinal at last entered the presence of the three Consuls, who sat surrounded by a splendid retinue, Bonaparte advanced to meet him and said curtly, in an imperious voice: "I know why you have come. You have five days for negotiation. If the treaty is not signed by that time, everything is at an end." Consalvi was undoubtedly perturbed for the moment, but he succeeded in gaining time, and with the subtlety and skill of Romish statecraft placed so many difficulties in Napoleon's way that the latter, in one of the stormy audiences which followed, shouted angrily and arrogantly: "If Henry VIII., who had not the twentieth part of my power, could change the religion of his country, how much easier is it for me to do it! I will change it, not in France alone, but throughout Europe. Rome will weep blood when it is too late."
In this contemptuous manner did the restorer of religion speak of the power he intended to restore.
It is, therefore, not altogether surprising that, as in the case of a similar attempt made by Julian the Apostate 1500 years before, laughter, sometimes only dreaded, sometimes actual, was the inseparable adjunct of each step taken towards the reinstitution of the old religion. When Bonaparte read Pius VII.'s first brief at a Council of State, the brief in which the Pope intimates that he takes "his dear son Talleyrand" into favour again, sounds of half-stifled laughter were heard among the audience. Even Bonaparte himself was not always able to preserve his gravity. On the day when Cardinal Consalvi, apparelled in Roman purple, publicly presented him with a copy of the Concordat, the First Consul was suddenly seized with a convulsive fit of laughter which struck the whole assembly with consternation. And some years later than this he was still so little edified by religious rites, and so unable to control his countenance during their performance—he who as a rule showed himself a master in the art—that when the Pope was anointing him Emperor in 1804 he scandalised the spectators by yawning incessantly during the whole ceremony. Charles X., true Bourbon as he was, showed the proper seriousness when his turn came in 1825. With unmoved countenance, without the shadow of a smile, he allowed himself to be stripped to the waist and anointed, first on the head, then on breast, back, and arms.
Everything connected with the restoration of priestly authority and the reinstitution of Catholic worship was so utterly at variance with the customs and ideas which had prevailed in France since the Revolution that the witnesses of such rites could hardly believe their own eyes; they could not persuade themselves to take them seriously. In proof of this let me quote the words of such an eye-witness, De Pradt, Archbishop of Malines. He says: "If one single individual, by laughing, had given the signal, there would have been a perfectly inextinguishable Homeric outburst. This was the reef on which it was possible that everything might be wrecked. Fortunately Fouché, the Chief of Police, had taken the proper precautions, and, thanks to him, Paris kept a serious face."[3]
The occasion to which this utterance more particularly refers was that of the Pope's visit to Paris. A Pope in Paris! This was a risky experiment after all that had happened there during the last fifteen years, and with "a population so light-hearted and still so strongly influenced by philosophy." In hopes of inducing the Pope to give up the journey, his advisers at the last moment laid the above quoted Egyptian proclamation upon his table. But it was too late to shake his resolve. The meeting of the two potentates took place at Fontainebleau. After the first exchange of compliments and cordialities, they drove to the Palace in the same carriage. Napoleon's face beamed with satisfaction, and as he handed the Pope up the steps, each of his unusually lively glances seemed to say: "Do you see my prize? I have him." By a comical inadvertency, the great procession to Paris was led by a troop of mounted Mamelukes. The sight of the bronze-hued visages of these Mahometan horsemen transported the spectator in fancy to Mecca. They made the entrance seem more like that of a Mahometan than of a Christian high priest. The Pope's own face betrayed the embarrassment he felt on finding himself in such an entirely new world. It was easily seen that his foot, though it was kissed by multitudes, did not tread this soil with perfect confidence. His priestly retinue, resplendent in gorgeous episcopal vestments, and the military court which came to meet it, shining in burnished mail, presented a strange contrast. One might, says Archbishop de Pradt, have imagined one's self suddenly transported to Japan at the moment of a visit from its spiritual to its temporal emperor.
In order thoroughly to understand the First Consul's reasons for determinedly adhering to and carrying out a project which at the first glance seems unpatriotic and impolitic, we must consider the matter in the first place from the purely economic point of view.
The Revolution had plunged France into economic distress. Prosperity was at an end; the population was threatened by famine; in the middle of the nineties more than half of the country lay uncultivated. The lands of the émigrés and the church had been paid for by their purchasers in paper-money, but this paper-money was valueless. The economic salvation of the country could only be accomplished by turning to account the resources which had been made available by the new distribution of the state property.
The land which had been taken from the nobility and the church had long been left entirely uncultivated because, since the fruits of the earth require time to blossom and mature, no one was willing to plough and sow without the certainty that the ground would remain in his possession long enough to reward him for his labour. But such certainty was impossible as long as the old owners of the land were in the country and had not renounced their right to it. Nothing but their extermination could make the cultivation of the new national property a reasonable proceeding. It was because the Reign of Terror exterminated them that it was demanded and endured. When it had fulfilled its double task of saving the Republic and ensuring the security of the new distribution of property, it was overthrown. What the owners of property demanded after