Soldier Emperor:
The Pope’s Divisions, Part Three
By Mike Bennighof, PhD
March 2025

Our story began in Part One and continued inPart Two.

That arrangement lasted less than a year. The new French ambassador to the Papal States, Napoleon’s elder brother Joseph, sought to provoke a republican rising that would overturn the pope’s secular power and usher in a French-allied satellite regime. In January 1798, Joseph held a celebration for the engagement of his sister-in-law, Desirée Clary, to his friend, Brig. Gen. Léonard Duphot. Duphot, an ardent republican, had organized a demonstration in front of the embassy, which attracted a crowd of counter-demonstrators.

When papal troops arrived to break up the demonstration, Joseph, Duphot, and several aides intervened to separate the republicans and soldiers, urging everyone to leave peacefully. The soldiers refused, shouting insults, and Duphot drew his sword to threaten them. A papal corporal named Marinelli reacted by shooting him with an arquebus. Duphot died soon afterwards (one of the last people ever killed by an arquebus), leaving Desirée bereft and her own former fiancé, Napoleon Bonaparte, deeply angered.

The Directory dispatched Gen. Alexandre Berthier with an army to overthrow the pope’s regime and establish a Roman Republic. Borosini’s legion holding the road to Rome promptly surrendered; Ancanjani’s holding the city gates ran away.

Berthier enters Rome, 15 February 1798.

Pius VI cancelled Carnival and called for mass processions, led by himself and his cardinals and assorted holy relics. These proved no more effective than the pope’s soldiers. Berthier arrived on 9 February, and four days later presented a list of demands including a formal apology for Duphot’s death, three thousand horses and still more cash and artwork, and the reduction of the papal army to 500 men. Pius VI yielded, but on the 15th, while the pope was busy celebrating the 23rd anniversary of his election, across town at the Forum a small group of French agitators and local republicans were planting a Tree of Liberty and declaring the republic. When the pope refused to lay down his temporal authority, Berthier - despite the papal gift of a sturgeon and 40 bottles of wine - arrested Pius VI on the 20th; Pius ordered his Swiss guards to offer no resistance. The last 500 papal soldiers were dismissed or incorporated into the Cisalpine army; the French impressed the two new Papal corvettes into their fleet along with several transports; 70 formerly Papal sailors would be killed in action at the Battle of the Nile in August 1798.

Borosini, apparently gifted at failing upward, joined the Cisalpine general staff.

The French proceeded to thoroughly loot the Vatican and the rest of the city, seizing treasures including art, books, and precious metals. Sacred vestments were piled in bonfires to extract their gold and silver. The Directory dispatched a Swiss banker, Rudolf Emanuel von Haller, to oversee the pillage (some works call him a “French general,” but this is not true). Haller had been twice prosecuted for embezzlement, and most recently served as treasurer of Napoleon’s Army of Italy.

Haller, supported by French troops, entered the Vatican Palace and informed the pope that he was leaving for Tuscany. Pius, now 80 years old, appealed to Haller to allow him to remain in Rome until his death.

“One can die anywhere,” Haller replied, and the pope was bundled into a carriage that took him to Siena in Tuscany. His captors shuffled him to several more locations in Italy and France until he died in August 1799 at Valence in France; his 24-year reign the longest such since St. Peter. In the years that followed, Haller passed his loyalty effortlessly from regime to regime, but the bank he founded in 1816 went bankrupt four years later and in 1833, aged 86, he suffered the worst end possible for a Swiss banker: he died destitute.

Haller gives Pius VI the Directory’s order to vacate Rome.

With Rome under French occupation, the new papal election took place at Venice’s San Giorgio monastery. Venice at the time lay under Austrian rule, and the Austrian emperor, Francis II, applied his influence with a heavy hand. The conclave opened on the last day of November 1799, and in March 1800 finally settled on Cardinal Luigi Barnaba Chiaramonte, the Bishop of Imola. Chiaramonte, a late entry as a compromise candidate, had called on his flock to accept their French overlords and claimed no contradiction between the ideals of the French Revolution and Catholicism. “Equality,” he preached in his 1797 Christmas homily, “is not an idea of philosophers but of Christ.”

As Pius VII, he was crowned in the monastery chapel, wearing a papier-maché tiara since the French had stolen the traditional papal finery. He sailed from Venice in a decrepit Austrian frigate, arriving on the Adriatic coast and traveling overland to his new see. Rome had been occupied by a Neapolitan army in September 1799; the French drove them out but did not restore the Roman Republic, and in June 1800 Pius VII declared the Papal States re-established, now reduced to Latium and Umbria.

Thanks to weak finances, Pius VII moved slowly to rebuild his armed forces, starting with a reconstituted Swiss Guard and a mounted Noble Guard. The Swiss often complained of late and partial payments. Pius VII continued the slow expansion, not least to enroll the insurgents who had helped overthrow the Roman Republic, lest they turn to banditry. In 1801 the papal army set up two small infantry regiments totaling 2,000 men, expanding to 3,000 men with an additional two cavalry squadrons and one artillery battery in 1802. A new volunteer militia, officered by rich nobles who paid and equipped the troops, supposedly added 12,000 men.

Napoleon overthrew the Directory in November 1799, installing himself as First Consul, in effect France’s military dictator. Now he found himself needing legitimacy, and the pope could prove a useful tool in that regard. For his part, Pius VII could do without yet another French invasion. The Corsican and the Catholic began work on a Concordat that would define the church’s role in France.

This would not come easy. The Revolutionaries had taken away the Catholic Church’s legal privileges, seized property, murdered hundreds of priests and nuns, and turned the clergy into state employees. The talks, begun in Rome, did not go well. Another round in Paris made some progress, and Joseph presented a draft to his brother. Napoleon threw a temper tantrum, and hurled the document into a fireplace. His uncle Joseph Fesch, a Corsican priest, talked him down from his rage. Calming himself, Napoleon then had dinner with Cardinal Secretary of State Ercole Consalvi, who had been exiled from Rome by the French following the killing of Gen. Duphot and had overseen Pius VII’s election. Consalvi worked through the night with the Bonaparte brothers to hammer out an agreement acceptable to both sides.

Allégorie du Concordat de 1801, by Joseph François. It wasn’t quite this way.

Someone on the French side (obviously with Napoleon’s sanction), slipped a different draft in front of Consalvi when it came time to sign, and the Cardinal balked. A new round of discussion followed, and finally Consalvi accepted the ninth formal draft of the Concordat. He and Joseph signed the document on 15 July 1801.

Each sided needed the other. The world’s largest Catholic nation, at the time, had veered away from the Church toward atheism. A decade after the revolution, the closure of seminaries (and massacres of clergy) left the remnants of the French church badly under-staffed. Yet the vast majority of French people still followed the faith, and that created a gulf between them and their government. In western France, counter-revolutionaries led by their priests remained in the field.

The Concordat recognized Catholicism as the religion of most French people, but did not make it the state religion, implicitly maintaining freedom of religion. Napoleon would later unilaterally add Protestants and Jews to the Concordat, extending this freedom without the Pope’s consent.

All remaining bishops would give up their seats. Napoleon would nominate replacements; the Pope would approve them and could fire them, maintaining the arrangement between church and state that the old Bourbon kings had established in 1516. These bishops would appoint parish priests. The clergy all swore an oath of allegiance to the state (Napoleon held out stubbornly for the oath to be made to him personally, before relenting), and would be paid by the state. In exchange for ceding the personal oath of loyalty, the Concordat provided for each mass to end with a prayer: “Lord, save the Republic, save the First Consul.”

The Concordat, as Napoleon had hoped, had profound effects outside France. Even without agreements of their own, church-centered opposition to the French puppet regimes in Germany and Italy faded. Napoleon’s staunchly Catholic adversaries in Vienna lost a crucial propaganda point.

Within a year, Napoleon had begun to step on the papal slippers, issuing the Organic Acts that unilaterally altered the concordat. And in 1801 and 1802, Pius VII disputed the secular takeover of the ecclesiastical states of Germany (the independent bishoprics) by Napoleon’s German puppets. This came to a humiliating end in 1803 when the French ruled in favor of the temporal rulers. Napoleon tossed the pope a bone, outlawing the Revolutionary-era Cult of the Supreme Being and Cult of Reason, but no one had paid attention to those manufactured religions in years.

Click here to order Soldier Emperor right now.

Global Empires
      Soldier Emperor
      Soldier Emperor: Indian Empires
      Journal No. 40: Byzantium Eternal
Retail Price: $205.97
Package Price: $160
Gold Club Price: $128
You can experience the Global Empires Package right here.

Sign up for our newsletter right here. Your info will never be sold or transferred; we'll just use it to update you on new games and new offers.

Mike Bennighof is president of Avalanche Press and holds a doctorate in history from Emory University. A Fulbright Scholar and NASA Journalist in Space finalist, he has published a great many books, games and articles on historical subjects; people are saying that some of them are actually good. He lives in Birmingham, Alabama with his wife and three children. He misses his Iron Dog, Leopold.

Want to keep Daily Content free of third-party ads? You can send us some love (and cash) through this link right here.