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

Our story began in Part One and continued inPart Two and Part Three.

When Napoleon declared himself Emperor of the French in 1804, he summoned Pius to crown him. The pope had no wish to participate, but Napoleon’s ambassador to Rome, his uncle Joseph Fesch, eventually talked Pius into attending. Fesch had cajoled his nephew into signing the Concordat and now turned his charm on the pope.

Pius agreed to do so, but at the penultimate moment, Napoleon took the crown from the pope and placed it on his own head. The symbolic relegation of pope from benefactor to servant was not missed by many. Six months later, Pius blessed Napoleon as he crowned himself King of Italy in Milan, this time placing the Iron Crown of Lombardy on his own head.

Pius VII (center left, seated) enthusiastucally blesses the coronation of Empress Josephine by Napoleon, in this painting by Jacques Louis David.

That act grated on the pope, as the new Kingdom included territories that had formerly belonged to the Papal States. Thereafter, Pius VII’s opposition to Napoleon steadily grew. Napoleon demanded that the Papal States adhere to his Continental System, refusing admission to British goods:

“Your Holiness is sovereign of Rome,” he wrote in February 1806, “but I am Emperor. All my enemies ought to be your enemies. As the head of our religion, I shall always have a filial deference for Your Holiness, but I am accountable to God, who made use of my arms to re-establish religion. And how can I see it compromised by the dilatoriness of Rome without groaning?”’

Pius remained unmoved:

“The Holy Father,” he replied, “does not recognize, and has never recognized, in his states, any power superior to his own.”

While Napoleon expected Pius to act as his subordinate, the pope remained determined to exercise his independence. The pontiff refused to annul the marriage of Napoleon to Josephine as well as that of his brother Jérôme to an American shipowner’s daughter. In October 1806, Napoleon declared Jérôme’s marriage annulled without the pope’s blessing.

If Pius would not enforce the Continental System, then Napoleon would do so for him, sending troops to occupy Ancona and Civitavecchia, the two major ports of the Papal States. In November 1807 the French occupied most of the pope’s territory outside Latium, and in February 1808, French troops occupied Rome itself.

Napoleon visits the pope at the Chateau Fontainebleu.

By this point, Pius knew not to expect his army to resist the French or anyone else for that matter. Instead, he hatched a plot to have all of his soldiers desert (something at which they had proven themselves quite capable) before they could be incorporated into the French army. Predictably, one of his senior officers betrayed the plan to the French, who rounded up the papal troops and forced them into French service. The two Papal infantry regiments were amalgamated into the Royal Italian 7th Line Regiment, which came to be considered the worst outfit in the Royal Italian Army, more inept than even the penal regiment of re-captured deserters. Three of the new battalions refused to accept French-language commands or to renounce their loyalty to the Pope.

That left Pius with just under 200 ceremonial guards, and though nominally still the ruler of Rome and its environs, his practical; temporal authority went no further than the outer walls of his Quirinal Palace. In February 1809, he displayed his continued hold over his subjects by asking them to forgo celebrating Carnival. Despite French efforts to organize parades and parties, the city remained quiet - until the anniversary of Pius’s election, when it suddenly brightened with lights and cheer.

In May 1809, Napoleon formally annexed the Papal States to France; French troops read out the order in Rome on the morning of 10 June 1809. That afternoon, Pius excommunicated the emperor and all French troops within Papal territory along with anyone else who supported the French takeover. Though the French revolutionaries had enthusiastically adopted atheism, Catholicism remained, as the Concordat had it, “the majority religion of Frenchmen.” Excommunication deeply undermined imperial authority, and Napoleon demanded that it be rescinded. Pius refused.

The French next attempted to raise a militia force, ordering parish priests to provide lists of names of all men between 18 and 60. Pius told them to refuse, and the French received no names. On the night of 5 July 1809, a mixed force of French gendarmes and local collaborators led by Brig. Gen. Etienne Radet broke into the Quirinal Palace and dragged the pope off to France. Radet, commander of the French police in Rome, enjoyed discussing theology and composed hymns to the Virgin Mary in his leisure hours, but he apparently nabbed the pope on his own initiative. Presented with a fait accompli, a supposedly infuriated Napoleon kept Pius under guard; the emperor then rewarded Radet with a barony and promotion.

After shuffling the pope between various locations in northern Italy and southern France, Pius’s jailers settled on the bishop’s residence in Savona near Genoa, where he remained under house arrest until June 1812. Then Napoleon had him moved to the Chateau Fontainebleu, a former royal hunting lodge south-east of Paris. There, the pope refused the luxuries pressed on him, remaining in his apartments reading histories from the chateau’s extensive library. Pius VII signed the humiliating Concordat of Fontainebleu in February 1813, while under the influence of fever and insomnia. In it, Pius renounced his claim to the Papal States and granted Napoleon the right to name French bishops. Consalvi, released from French imprisonment when Pius signed, convinced the pope to repudiate the agreement. Fearing that French rebels would free the pope and use him as a figurehead, in January 1814 Napoleon ordered him released and returned to Rome.

Napoleon abdicated in April 1814, a month before Pius made his triumphal re-entry into Rome. Now a steadfast reactionary, the pope re-instituted the Index of Condemned Books and the Inquisition. Among the many reforms instituted with the return of papal temporal power, the Papal Army (outside of the pope’s ceremonial bodyguard) only slowly revived.

Roman street life, 1809.

The new army, as overseen by Consalvi, initially would have 1,500 men in a single small infantry regiment. Recruiting only brought in a little over 700 men, but improved as the end of the Napoleonic wars left tens of thousands of career soldiers unemployed. The Papal Army recruited Italian veterans of the French Army and the Royal Italian Army, and by 1819 had over 9,000 men on its rolls.

The Papal Army and Navy of Pius VI and Pius VII had never been intended as the armed wing of the Roman Catholic Church. Rather, these were the temporal armed forces of the Papal States’ temporal government, and served the pope in his role as ruler of central Italy. They were supported by the weak tax revenues of the Papal States, a weak revenue stream thanks to incompetence and endemic corruption; the financial might of the Church itself was not applied to the pope’s military.

Given the size of the Papal States, if the pope was to rule them, he needed at least a minimal armed force to suppress banditry. The Papal Army succeeded in this task, and in backing up papal tax collectors. They appear to have conducted their ceremonial roles admirably. But as a conventional army, they have to be ranked as the very worst of the Napoleonic era.

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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.

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