Book Sneak Peak: Napoleon Bonaparte at the Origins of the War of Science and Religion
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| Napoleon, in a totally candid shot |
Enjoy! I would love any and all (constructive) feedback. Leave it in the comments below if you are so inclined!
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At the beginning of the 19th century, northbound caravans, shrouded by storms, moved with purpose as they dared to pick the teeth of the Alps through the Mont-Cenis pass between Italy and France. Menacing the air, these great Alpine jaws of the world ground rime from the stars above against rock from the great mouth of the earth below. And between, shadows of men passed between this chew of air and earth and ice with ancient manuscripts in tow, precious works of art, and artifacts from times long past. Above, a knowing gaze spilled down over this procession. Upon his stallion covered in heavy wool and armor, leering out from underneath one of the shadows cast by these great toothy palls of earthwork and stone, the frost-shorn silhouette of a young Napoleon Bonaparte considered his spoils of war. They moved steadily along the road he himself had ordered built through the passes. Far behind him, Rome trembled, growling prayers heavenward after this spoliation, led by “the ogre of the Tiber” Pope Pius VI (in office AD 1775-1799). All of Christendom was now felt to be moving.
Forty-hour prayer vigils were the order of the day, and in the Vatican they rattled and buckled beneath the winds of change. The only answer received was further mortification, however, as the Pope was forced to sue for a peace that culminated in the Treaty of Tolentino (February 19th, 1797). Adding insult to injury, the treaty forced Rome to renounce its claims to Avignon along with all of its lucrative holdings in northern Italy. Further, as the historian Thomas Albert Howard writes, Rome had to pay “30 million livres … and [among many other conditions] to hand over numerous works of art and pay for their transport to Paris.”[1]Ironically, the livrewas a unit of currency implemented originally by Charlemagne to help unite the territories of Christendom under his command in the Carolingian empire. Now, Napoleon’s victorious procession was being financed by livres to dismember Christendom (both literally and figuratively). Apart from the obvious value of the currency involved, the symbolism was perhaps not lost on Bonaparte. Nor was this limited to the Vatican. Across central and northern Italy the church’s belongings were systematically stripped, artwork was taken, shrines robbed, and statues of Mary moved under Napoleon’s droll observation that “we are [now the] masters of our Lady of Loreto.”
Then in 1810 the order came: the whole archive of the Pope—the largest in all of Europe—was to be sent to France. A giant train of wagons moved again through the Alps from Rome to Paris. Costing 600,000 francs, the operation in the end brought 3,239 chests full of 102,435 “registers, volumes … bundles”[2]moving their secrets both banal and supernal to where a new world was to be founded. While this operation was overall a success, Owen Chadwick notes several chests full of documents were lost, including two carts worth when flood waters at Borgo San Donnino took them.[3]
This had not been the first time the papal library in the Vatican had been raided. Originally commissioned by Sixtus IV in 1475 because the printing press had exponentially increased the number of papers associated with the business of the Pope managing the great machine that was the Church, it instantly became the best stocked library in Italy. Enough of an object of fascination even to the uneducated, when the Emperor’s army sacked Rome in 1527 soldiers looted the archives mainly in an attempt to turn the parchment into bedding for their horses, and transform the many seals into material for making bullets.[4]
At the beginning of the 19th century, northbound caravans, shrouded by storms, moved with purpose as they dared to pick the teeth of the Alps through the Mont-Cenis pass between Italy and France. Menacing the air, these great Alpine jaws of the world ground rime from the stars above against rock from the great mouth of the earth below. And between, shadows of men passed between this chew of air and earth and ice with ancient manuscripts in tow, precious works of art, and artifacts from times long past. Above, a knowing gaze spilled down over this procession. Upon his stallion covered in heavy wool and armor, leering out from underneath one of the shadows cast by these great toothy palls of earthwork and stone, the frost-shorn silhouette of a young Napoleon Bonaparte considered his spoils of war. They moved steadily along the road he himself had ordered built through the passes. Far behind him, Rome trembled, growling prayers heavenward after this spoliation, led by “the ogre of the Tiber” Pope Pius VI (in office AD 1775-1799). All of Christendom was now felt to be moving.
Forty-hour prayer vigils were the order of the day, and in the Vatican they rattled and buckled beneath the winds of change. The only answer received was further mortification, however, as the Pope was forced to sue for a peace that culminated in the Treaty of Tolentino (February 19th, 1797). Adding insult to injury, the treaty forced Rome to renounce its claims to Avignon along with all of its lucrative holdings in northern Italy. Further, as the historian Thomas Albert Howard writes, Rome had to pay “30 million livres … and [among many other conditions] to hand over numerous works of art and pay for their transport to Paris.”[1]Ironically, the livrewas a unit of currency implemented originally by Charlemagne to help unite the territories of Christendom under his command in the Carolingian empire. Now, Napoleon’s victorious procession was being financed by livres to dismember Christendom (both literally and figuratively). Apart from the obvious value of the currency involved, the symbolism was perhaps not lost on Bonaparte. Nor was this limited to the Vatican. Across central and northern Italy the church’s belongings were systematically stripped, artwork was taken, shrines robbed, and statues of Mary moved under Napoleon’s droll observation that “we are [now the] masters of our Lady of Loreto.”
Then in 1810 the order came: the whole archive of the Pope—the largest in all of Europe—was to be sent to France. A giant train of wagons moved again through the Alps from Rome to Paris. Costing 600,000 francs, the operation in the end brought 3,239 chests full of 102,435 “registers, volumes … bundles”[2]moving their secrets both banal and supernal to where a new world was to be founded. While this operation was overall a success, Owen Chadwick notes several chests full of documents were lost, including two carts worth when flood waters at Borgo San Donnino took them.[3]
This had not been the first time the papal library in the Vatican had been raided. Originally commissioned by Sixtus IV in 1475 because the printing press had exponentially increased the number of papers associated with the business of the Pope managing the great machine that was the Church, it instantly became the best stocked library in Italy. Enough of an object of fascination even to the uneducated, when the Emperor’s army sacked Rome in 1527 soldiers looted the archives mainly in an attempt to turn the parchment into bedding for their horses, and transform the many seals into material for making bullets.[4]
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| Harry Potter's hall of prophe--err, the Vatican secret archives |
In this earlier raid “the soldiery had no idea of the value of what they tore or burnt.”[5] Recollections still exist of great masses of manuscripts simply littering the streets of the Vatican, having been abandoned as the soldiers moved on. This latest raid, however, was different and the value of things hidden in the depths of the Vatican archives were precisely the reason for the incursion by Napoleon. Humiliated, the ramshackle papal forces were routed, and now the memories of the See of Rome moved from their homestead in boxes battling snows under the glacial roof of God’s world. Many of these artifacts were later to be placed at the Biblioteque Nationaleat Paris as symbols not just of Napoleon’s victory, but as one French general put it these items represented the coming of the modern age: “[art] which the French have taken from the degenerate Roman Catholic [is] to adorn the museum of Paris, and to distinguish by the most notable trophies, the triumph of liberty over tyranny, and of philosophy over superstition.”[6]On the horizon, then, rumbled the coming rise of the modern state, a great mess of Catholic anxiety due to trauma, and indeed a forgotten but major catalyst for what would eventually be known as the warfare of science and religion, which we will have opportunity to investigate in chapter three.
The traumatized Roman Catholics saw things differently than the French revolutionists, of course. Soon these “doctrinaire [French] cannibals were running around, catalogues at the ready, in museums and galleries and libraries,” recalls one in the Papal court. But this was only the latest in a recent series of humiliations. With France on the brink of bankruptcy, in the fall of 1789 the newly gathered National Assembly made the decision to confiscate church lands by force for resale. As Howard notes the “sale of lands started the next month and continued years thereafter, saving the treasury of France and financing an increasingly anticlerical Revolution.”[7]Then, almost overnight in February of 1790 monasteries and convents were closed—with the exception of a few who were doing work others cared not to, such as attending to the poor and maintaining certain hospitals. Monks who forsook their vows were promised a monetary reward in the form of a pension. On July 12th, 1790 the Civil Constitution of the Clergy was invoked, abolishing fifty ecclesiastical sees, and pressing the rest into service of eighty-three newly created political offices. Four thousand priests were instantly dismissed, while other Bishops and priests were forced to become civil servants (or, as they might prefer to call it under their breath, puppets of the state) if they were to continue their religious duties. An oath of loyalty to the state above all and an acceptance of the new Constitution was likewise mandatory. Depending upon one’s perspective, in either a staggering act of stubbornness in the face of progress or an instance of great courage against tyranny, only seven bishops and roughly half the clergy agreed to the oath. The others declined and faced the consequences of their decision, often with imprisonment.
As one might suspect this left a series of increasingly traumatic memories among Roman Catholics, “bitter and enduring memories that shaped Rome’s attitude toward what we today generally call ‘modernity.’”[8]Many in support of the French revolution saw these “refractory” priests and bishops who declined the oath as seditious elements in need of purging, especially in the light of increasing counterrevolutionary forces in France. In addition, the Pope had released a vicious denunciation of the oath to all Catholics in his encyclical Quod aliquantum. Calling the oaths an explicit attempt “to annihilate the Catholic religion, and, with her, the obedience owed to kings” this spurred a bitter anti-state sentiment among Catholics that would result in the 19thcentury’s rabid ultramontanism (ultramontanism being a position that emphasizes the power of the Pope that cuts across all secular politics and borders). Ironically, while these measures of the French revolution were meant to either stamp out or cow the church, the trauma caused by these very measures would fuel Catholic revivalism the next century.
The traumatized Roman Catholics saw things differently than the French revolutionists, of course. Soon these “doctrinaire [French] cannibals were running around, catalogues at the ready, in museums and galleries and libraries,” recalls one in the Papal court. But this was only the latest in a recent series of humiliations. With France on the brink of bankruptcy, in the fall of 1789 the newly gathered National Assembly made the decision to confiscate church lands by force for resale. As Howard notes the “sale of lands started the next month and continued years thereafter, saving the treasury of France and financing an increasingly anticlerical Revolution.”[7]Then, almost overnight in February of 1790 monasteries and convents were closed—with the exception of a few who were doing work others cared not to, such as attending to the poor and maintaining certain hospitals. Monks who forsook their vows were promised a monetary reward in the form of a pension. On July 12th, 1790 the Civil Constitution of the Clergy was invoked, abolishing fifty ecclesiastical sees, and pressing the rest into service of eighty-three newly created political offices. Four thousand priests were instantly dismissed, while other Bishops and priests were forced to become civil servants (or, as they might prefer to call it under their breath, puppets of the state) if they were to continue their religious duties. An oath of loyalty to the state above all and an acceptance of the new Constitution was likewise mandatory. Depending upon one’s perspective, in either a staggering act of stubbornness in the face of progress or an instance of great courage against tyranny, only seven bishops and roughly half the clergy agreed to the oath. The others declined and faced the consequences of their decision, often with imprisonment.
As one might suspect this left a series of increasingly traumatic memories among Roman Catholics, “bitter and enduring memories that shaped Rome’s attitude toward what we today generally call ‘modernity.’”[8]Many in support of the French revolution saw these “refractory” priests and bishops who declined the oath as seditious elements in need of purging, especially in the light of increasing counterrevolutionary forces in France. In addition, the Pope had released a vicious denunciation of the oath to all Catholics in his encyclical Quod aliquantum. Calling the oaths an explicit attempt “to annihilate the Catholic religion, and, with her, the obedience owed to kings” this spurred a bitter anti-state sentiment among Catholics that would result in the 19thcentury’s rabid ultramontanism (ultramontanism being a position that emphasizes the power of the Pope that cuts across all secular politics and borders). Ironically, while these measures of the French revolution were meant to either stamp out or cow the church, the trauma caused by these very measures would fuel Catholic revivalism the next century.
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| Pius IX being all infallible and such |
The real irony, however, was that this legacy of Napoleon and the French Revolution would also simultaneously fuel the idea of the warfare of science and religion. Driving forward philosophe and Enlightenmentnarratives of Catholics hellbent to retard the growth of progress, while simultaneously retrenching Catholic reactions and reactions against Catholic reactions, thunderheads of a quite different war were gathering. Riding the storm with the collective pent-up fury of the Catholic Church, and supercharged by his own bullish agenda, was Pope Pius IX. _________________________________-
[1]Howard, The Pope and the Professor, 16.
[2]Chadwick, Catholicism and History, 15.
[3] Chadwick, Catholicism and History, 15.
[4]Chadwick, Catholicism and History, 5.
[5]Chadwick, Catholicism and History, 5.
[6]Howard, The Pope and the Professor, 18.
[7]Howard, The Pope and the Professor, 20.
[8]Howard, The Pope and the Professor, 18.
[1]Howard, The Pope and the Professor, 16.
[2]Chadwick, Catholicism and History, 15.
[3] Chadwick, Catholicism and History, 15.
[4]Chadwick, Catholicism and History, 5.
[5]Chadwick, Catholicism and History, 5.
[6]Howard, The Pope and the Professor, 18.
[7]Howard, The Pope and the Professor, 20.
[8]Howard, The Pope and the Professor, 18.
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