FOURTEEN
On the death of Pope Clement XII in 1740, Charles de Brosses went to the pontifical palace where he saw ‘a sad image of human grandeur. All the rooms were open and deserted.’ He passed through them ‘without seeing a cat’ until he came to the chamber of the Pope ‘whose corpse lay on a bed, watched by four Jesuits, who were reciting, or pretending to recite, prayers' The Cardinal Camerlengo, the official who held supreme authority in Rome between the death of a pope and the election of his successor, came
at nine o'clock to do his duty which consisted of tapping with a small hammer several blows on the brow of the defunct and calling him by his name, Lorenzo Corsini. Finding that he gave no answer, he said, ‘This is why you are mute,’ and taking off the fisherman's ring, he broke it, according to custom… As the Pope's corpse has to remain a long time exposed in public, the face was shaved and the cheeks rouged to hide the pallor of death. He certainly looked better than when he was alive.
The Pope, who came from a princely Florentine family, had been blind for the last few years of his life, and had struggled in vain to halt the decline in the political role of the papacy which had been shrinking ever since the Peace of Westphalia had ended the Thirty Years' War in 1648. Neither he nor his immediate predecessors had been men well chosen to exert with force and conviction the authority of the Holy See. Clement XI had had to face a scandal in the early years of his pontificate when, in 1703, young girls and widows had been offered shelter in the palaces of prelates after an earthquake, and disease had added to the damage and suffering caused by a catastrophic flood that had brought the waters of the Tiber cascading through the streets of the city. It was rumoured that many of the women rendered homeless had received offers of more than shelter, and the Pope had had to order that they be removed to other homes and cared for at the expense of the Roman authorities. The Pope, a good and charitable man, had had thereafter to face a succession of further troubles and difficulties which were said to have reduced him to a state of perpetual tears.
Benedict XIII, Pope from 1724 to 1730, had been equally ill qualified to reassert the authority of the papacy. A Dominican of the most simple tastes, he had left affairs largely in the hands of the grasping Cardinal Niccolò Coscia who had made the most of the opportunities for self-aggrandizement which had been offered him. After the death of Benedict and of his successor Clement XII, it had been
64. A view of the Janiculum from the rooftops of Rome. The Villa Corsini is on the skyline on the far right.
hoped for a time that Benedict XIV would provide the Church with the firm leadership his predecessors had failed to give. Benedict XIV was an intelligent, witty, sociable man, noted for his moderation, restraint and engaging manners. Rome was fortunate to have so able an administrator, so sympathetic a pontiff and so liberal a patron. He turned the financial deficit which he found on his accession into a credit balance; he wandered about the streets of the city visiting his parishioners, sometimes incognito, wearing a wig and a tricorne hat; he provided paintings for St Peter's, mosaics for S. Maria Maggiore and manuscripts for the Vatican Library. During his pontificate, for the first time, signs and tablets were fixed to indicate the names of streets. But while the Romans had good cause to be grateful to him, the enemies of the Church had good cause also to be grateful for the elevation of so indulgent an adversary. And just as Benedict XIV found it impossible to counter firmly the argument of the philosophes, so Clement XIII and Clement XIV were unable to protect the Jesuits from the attacks made upon them by the Jansenists and the Roman Catholic powers alike. Clement XIII died suddenly in 1769 – the result of poison, it was inevitably alleged – after having witnessed the expulsion of the Jesuits from France and being faced with international demands, for their total destruction. His successor, Clement XIV, felt obliged to concede the demands and suppress the Society; and, having reluctantly signed the decree of suppression, an act which failed to secure an improvement in the papacy's relations with the European powers, the Pope fell into a decline and died in misery the next year. It was now left to Giannangelo Braschi, who in 1775 became Pope Pius VI, to face the challenge presented to the papacy, now bereft of power and influence, by the coming revolution in France.
In appearance the new Pope seemed ideally suited to his task. Tall, healthy and extremely good-looking, he had a dignified bearing, a commanding presence and an exceptional fluency of speech. Although his hair was white, his fresh complexion and very dark eyes made him appear much younger than he was. One contemporary said of him that he ‘seemed to be a born ruler’. Another, Prince Heinrich of Reuss, wrote, ‘I know of no sovereign with more noble a bearing than Pius VI. He has an impressive manner and in all his gestures there is something noble… His manners captivate everyone.’
The eldest of the eight children of Count Marcantonio Braschi, he was born in the Romagna and had been educated by the Jesuits. Intent upon a legal career, he had studied at the University of Ferrara, and had afterwards advanced rapidly in his profession. Offered a canonry of St Peter's when he was thirty-six, he had at first declined it, as he was engaged to be married. But with the consent of his fiancée who became a nun, he entered the Church in which he received as rapid a preferment as he had done in his lay career. Very conscious of his own qualities, he was also extremely vain of his personal appearance, and ‘in order to heighten its effect’ so Ludwig von Pastor wrote, ‘he paid particular attention to the snow-white hair that framed his countenance. Some went so far as to suggest that he elegantly raised his long robe to one side so as to show his shapely foot. This betokened a serious flaw in his character which fitted ill with his desire for fame. These weaknesses were severely criticized and exaggerated by the satiric Romans.’
The Romans also criticized him for his evident desire to enrich his family in the manner of his predecessors. For one of his nephews he built the vast Palazzo Braschi1 which still dominates the Piazza S. Pantaleo, the last palace to be built in Rome for the family of a pope. Pius VI was, however, intent not only upon promoting the fortunes of his family and restoring the Holy See to its former reputation, but also upon enhancing the appearance of Rome. From Carlo Marchionni, designer of the Villa Albani, he commissioned a sacristy for St Peter's,2 which Alexander VII, Clement XI and Clement XII had all intended and failed to do, laying the foundation stone himself in September 1776 and thereafter frequently visiting the site, where numerous antiquities were unearthed. He presented St Peter's with a huge bell, the Campanone, weighing 28,000 lbs., as well as the two clocks at the ends of the attico of the vestibule. He provided mosaics for twenty-five altars in the basilica, and had the ceiling of the nave regilded, ordering that the arms of Paul V should be replaced by his own. The restoration of the ceiling of the Lateran Basilica was commemorated in the same way.
Pope Pius also built an orphanage and workshops on the Janiculum, and a school for poor boys in the Piazza S. Salvatore in Lauro. He extended the Hospital of S. Spirito; laid out the Giardino della Pigna in the Vatican; enlarged the Vatican Museums and added to their collections;3 decorated the Hall of the Muses in the Museo Pio-Clementino where he built a fine staircase as well as the Gabinetto delle Maschere.4 He erected obelisks near Trinità dei Monti,5 in the Piazza di Montecitorio6 and in the Piazza del Quirinale7beside the colossal statues of the horse-tamers.8 And he inaugurated a massive programme of public works in the Pontine marshes where 1,500 acres of land were reclaimed, and the Via Appia, unearthed in the process, was repaired and repaved.
Yet, while a patron and public benefactor of vigour and discernment, Pope Pius was far from being a statesman, and was to show himself quite incapable of dealing effectively with the problems presented to the Roman Church by the Revolution in France. When the French Assembly issued a document known as the Civil Constitution of the Clergy which required the popular election of both bishops and priests and the severance of those ties that had traditionally bound them to Rome, the French Clergy appealed to the Pope to authorize them to accept the Constitution and thus avoid the schism its rejection would entail. The Pope hesitated before replying to their request. So the Assembly demanded an oath of loyalty to the Constitution by them all. Some complied with the Assembly's demand, others did not; and the French Church was consequently split between constitutionnel priests who were prepared to obey the Assembly and recalcitrant priests who refused to do so. The Pope's eventual condemnation of the Civil Constitution led to violent disturbances in Paris where anti-clericalism was fostered both by political clubs and by the theatres which presented plays about the horrors of the Inquisition, the tribulations and hypocrisy of monastic and convent life, and the alleged greed and dissipation of the leaders of the Roman Catholic Church. Effigies of the Pope were set alight on bonfires, revolutionary slogans were plastered on church doors, convents were invaded and nuns assaulted, and a severed head was hurled through the windows of the Papal Nuncio's carriage. After the King had himself been beheaded, the Pope decided that protests were useless. ‘I see terrible misfortunes coming,’ he said, ‘but I shall have nothing to say. To speak in such times of trouble and disturbance can only make bad worse.’
The Roman people had at first been inclined to regard the French Revolution with either indifference or derision. But as the months went by and the émigrés who remained in the city were less and less hopeful of an early return home, the mood of the Romans became increasingly antagonistic towards the ‘assassins of Paris’. The nationalization of Church property in France, the confiscation of papal territories, the dwindling of contributions and the paucity of tourists and pilgrims all contributed to an exacerbation of this antagonism. When the French Convention, determined to gain international recognition for the Republic, dispatched envoys to Rome, the people turned upon them in fury.
Even those in sympathy with the Revolution, such as the Jacobin students at the French Academy, had to admit that the envoys behaved with excessive provocation. They strode about with tricolour cockades in their hats, supervised the removal of the portraits of popes and cardinals from the walls of the Academy and replaced them with pictures of Republicans; and, on the afternoon of 13 January 1793, having taken down the fleurs-de-lis from the façade of the French Embassy to make room for the Convention's emblems, they appeared in their carriage on the Corso, the very epitome of revolutionary fervour, tricolour badges in their hats, a tricolour flag flying above their heads. Imprecations and insults, then stones and rocks were hurled at the carriage whose driver, in evident fear for his life, whipped his horses into the Piazza Colonna and made at breakneck speed along the Vicolo dello Sdrucciolo for the courtyard of the Palazzo Palombara, the mansion of a French banker. The carriage hurtled through the gates; but, before they could be closed, the mob chased after it. One of the envoys managed to escape but the other received a fatal wound in the stomach from a razor. As he was carried away, the stones still raining down upon his body, a large part of the mob dashed off to smash the windows of houses of people supposed to be Francophiles – including those of Torlonia, the banker – to sack the Palazzo Palombara and the French post office, and to attack the French Academy whose door was set on fire. Throughout the night the streets rang with shouts of ‘Long live the Pope!’, ‘Long live the Catholic religion!’ while carriages were stopped and their occupants invited to join in the cheering. ‘The revolution which was to have started in Rome has misfired,’ the Venetian ambassador reported. ‘There were no supporters of it anywhere.’
And so, for the moment, papal Rome was spared. The French Convention, beset by other problems on every side, contented itself with the threats of vengeance and acclaimed its murdered envoy as a martyr of the Republic. But in 1796 Napoleon Bonaparte was appointed commander-in-chief of the army in Italy with the unanimous support of the Directory, all of whose members recognized in him a man who would not scruple to replenish the country's empty coffers with treasure looted from his defeated enemies. And, after his brilliant victories over the forces of the King of Sardinia and the Emperor of Austria in Italy, Bonaparte certainly did not hesitate to impose extortionate terms of surrender in obedience to the Directory's orders to carry everything out of the country that could be transported and was of use. From the papacy he took Ferrara, Bologna and the port of Ancona; and when the Austrians showed signs of recovery in northern Italy and the Pope misguidedly refused the peace terms of the Directory, Napoleon received orders to march towards Rome.
‘We are the friends of every nation,’ Bonaparte declared, ‘especially the descendants of Brutus and the Scipios. Our intention is to restore the Capitol, to set up there in honour the statues of the men who won renown, and to free the Roman people from their long slavery.’ In fact, it did not suit him to depose the Pope, as the Directory wanted him to do. For, if Pius were to be deposed, Naples might well then seize central Italy; and Naples, whose neurotic Queen was a sister of Marie Antoinette, would then be a greater threat to France than Rome. So Bonaparte decided to leave the Pope where he was and to impose upon him the terms of the Treaty of Tolentino. ‘My opinion,’ Bonaparte reported to Paris, ‘is that Rome once stripped of Bologna, Ferrara, Romagna and thirty millions can no longer exist. The old machine will fall to pieces by itself.’
As it happened, Rome lost far more than thirty millions. Palaces, galleries and churches were stripped; antique sculptures, Renaissance paintings, tapestries, and precious stones and metals were packed up and loaded on to wagons. The Laocoön, the Belvedere Apollo, and countless other masterpieces were piled up with the works of Raphael, Caravaggio and Bernini. On one day gold and silver bars worth 15,000,000 scudi were carried off; on another 386 diamonds, 333 emeralds, 692 rubies, 208 sapphires and numerous other precious stones and pearls, many of them prized off papal tiaras, were sent to Paris. A few weeks later over 400 valuable manuscripts followed them. A procession of 500 horse-drawn wagons under a strong guard of soldiers took further bundles and cases of plunder along the Via Flaminia. Soon afterwards 1,600 horses were seen being led away to the headquarters of the French army.
As the treasures left Rome, representatives of the French government moved in. Bonaparte's brother, Joseph, arrived as ambassador with a salary of 60,000 francs a year and established himself with a large French household in Palazzo Corsini. French officers came on leave, and French agents, accompanied by Italians from the north sympathetic towards the Revolution, came to encourage the Republican groups that existed in Rome. On the night of 27 December 1797, after a sharp rise in food prices, these groups combined to stage a demonstration on the Pincio in protest against papal rule. On this occasion the demonstrators were dispersed by papal troops who shot and killed two men; but the next day a crowd of Jacobins appeared before Palazzo Corsini, shouting, ‘Long live the Republic! Long live Liberty!’ Joseph Bonaparte received their leaders whom he reproved for causing such a commotion. He was about to go out to address the crowd gathered at the palace gate when there was a discharge of guns from a papal cavalry picket which had entered the embassy precincts. The frightened crowd now swarmed into the courtyard and up the palace stairs, while Bonaparte ordered the cavalry picket to withdraw from French territory. As the papal troops retreated, the mob inside the palace took courage, and ran out towards them. The troops turned to open fire again, wounding several of the demonstrators. In the ensuing mêlée a young French general named Duphot, who had been having lunch with the ambassador and had rushed out upon the papal soldiers with drawn sword, was shot through the neck.
His death afforded the Directory the excuse they needed for sending in their army to occupy Rome. And so on 11 February 1798 General Berthier, who had succeeded Bonaparte as commander-in-chief, marched into Castel Sant' Angelo, billeting his officers in Roman palaces and his soldiers in Roman convents. The Pope's troops were disarmed, and several of his cardinals arrested. Others were expelled or deposed, while the Pope himself was abruptly informed on 17 February that he would have to leave Rome within three days. He was then eighty years old, very frail and mortally ill. He asked if he might be allowed to spend the few remaining days of his life in the city of St Peter, but the officer to whom the request was made, a Swiss Protestant, replied, ‘People die anywhere.’
Pius, soon to be referred to by French officials as ‘Citizen Pope’, entered the travelling carriage that awaited him in the Cortile di San Damaso with two priests and a doctor. The Blessed Sacrament was enclosed in a small case hanging round his neck. His eyes filled with tears as he peered into the darkness through the
65. The end of the race of the riderless Arab barbs in the Roman Carnival.
carriage window towards St Peter's basilica. A detachment of dragoons escorted him to the Ponte Molle where people knelt in the snow to receive his blessing as he left. Five days later he arrived in Siena where he was given a room in the convent of the Hermits of St Augustine. At daybreak on 29 August the following year, the crucifix slipped from his hand as he lay dying on his bed in the French fortress of Valence. He had reigned for twenty-four years, six months and two weeks, the longest pontificate since the twenty-five years ascribed to that of St Peter.
In Rome, so it was reported in France, the establishment of a Roman Republic had been greeted with enthusiasm. Trees of Liberty were planted in the Forum and beside the statue of Marcus Aurelius on the Capitol, and citizens danced around them with tricolour cockades in their hats. But French observers actually living in Rome noticed no such signs of popular rejoicing. General Berthier, after his ceremonial entry into the city, had gone to the Capitol where the Tree of Liberty had been hoisted. He had made a speech invoking the shades of the ancient heroes of the first Roman Republic, but declared that he had ‘seen nothing but the most profound dismay’. There was ‘no trace of the spirit of liberty at all’.
There were those, of course, who welcomed the change of government or were at least prepared to give the impression of doing so for the sake of peace or profit. The Sforza, Santa Croce and Borghese families entertained the French in their palaces; women of other families were seen with French officers walking in gardens and riding in carriages; certain bankers and merchants increased their wealth by collaborating with the occupying forces; certain cardinals gave up their caps and one even signed himself ‘Citizen Somaglia’.
Some of the measures introduced by the new government, as directed by the Directory's three civil commissioners, were welcomed by the people or at least regarded as just, such as the regulations providing for the lighting of streets at night, when formerly the only lamps to be seen were those small lampioncini that burned before representations of the Madonna. But many of the Republican government's other measures were far less well received: the Romans complained angrily of the renaming of their streets andrioni, of the adoption of the Republican calendar which abolished Sunday and provided for only one day's holiday in ten. They objected to the withdrawal from circulation of familiar coins and their replacement with foreign assignats, resulting in a further rise in the cost of living. At the same time the attempts of the French authorities to foster Republican enthusiasm by the introduction of the carmagnole, a dance popular in revolutionary France, in place of the traditional dances of the Carnival; by the insistence on voi, in imitation of the French vous, instead of lei; by the decoration of ancient statues with revolutionary favours; and by the replacement of religious feast days with such celebrations as the Fête of the Federation, and the Fête of the Perpetuity of the Republic, in which enthusiasts disguised as Roman senators honoured the memory of early martyrs in the cause of liberty, were all alike regarded with derision or contempt.
Other activities of the French were bitterly resented. There were outcries of protest when the bronze angel on the summit of Castel Sant’ Angelo was painted in the colours of the Revolution, provided with a cap of liberty and transformed into ‘the Liberating Genius of France’. The people were also outraged when the authorities refused to allow the revered statue of St Peter9 to be decorated with its traditional emblems on the Apostle's feast day. Far more widely resented, however, were the government's depredations: its forcible seizure of Church property, its monetary exactions from families who could afford to pay them, and its use of the money thus acquired not for the relief of the poor but for the extravagance of its own members and for the maintenance of the French army of occupation.
Despite these wholesale appropriations, the Roman Republic was soon close to bankruptcy; and while officials, profiteers and speculators, their wives and hangers-on flaunted their new-found riches in the streets, parading about in the latest Parisian fashions, the men with hair cut à la Titus, the women in those outré and revealing dresses which Madame Tallien wore at Frascati'ss, the poor of Rome went hungry. At first the protests were limited: men joined dogs in urinating against the Trees of Liberty and delighted in seeing them knocked over by donkeys, until guards were mounted over them. But in February 1798 there were riots in Trastevere; and the suppression of these, with the execution of twenty-two of the ringleaders in the Piazza del Popolo, was followed by demonstrations, outbreaks of violence and assassinations elsewhere.
At the end of November help came from an unwelcome deliverer. Taking advantage of the partial withdrawal of French troops for other Napoleonic enterprises, the soldiers of the King of Naples marched into Rome through the Porta S. Giovanni on the south side of the city, while the French, greatly outnumbered, withdrew through the Porta del Popolo on the north, leaving a garrison in Castel Sant' Angelo to fire their cannon on the Neapolitans as they encamped in St Peter's Square. The cannonade soon ceased, however; and during the course of the next few days the Romans grew accustomed to the sight of King Ferdinand riding around the city with an escort of resplendently uniformed dragoons. But the proud liberators did not remain long. Defeated by the French north of Rome, the Neapolitans withdrew from the city, taking with them as much plunder as they could conveniently carry and leaving more awaiting shipment in Roman warehouses. On 11 December King Ferdinand rode hastily after his retreating troops; four days later the French reoccupied Rome.
That winter was a hard one. Despite the severely repressive rule of the French Civil Commissioner, Bertolio, who assumed the powers of a dictator, there were riots in the city as food shortages became acute and the price of fuel rose week by week. Almost every day there was a rattle of gunfire in the Piazza del Popolo as criminals and troublemakers were executed; and gangs of brigands, in virtual control of the countryside around the city, entered the gates with impunity. Although the anniversary of the fall of the Bastille was celebrated with great pomp in the Forum in July 1799, and officials made promises of better times soon to come, there had been little alleviation of the crime and distress with the advent of
66. Pope Pius VII (1742–1823), Napoleon's adversary.
the warmer weather. In September the French garrison in Rome, bereft of the support of the rest of their army which had now been largely withdrawn from the peninsula, were obliged to discuss a capitulation. On the last day of the month, after their commander had issued a proclamation exhorting the Romans to maintain their tranquillity, they marched out of the city, while the Neapolitans entered it once more from the south.
But, as before, the Neapolitans were not to remain for long; and when Napoleon's victory over the Austrians at Marengo gave him mastery over Italy again, his troops were ready to return. He now, however, had a different adversary to face, in the person of Gregorio Barnaba Chiaramonti who had been elected Pope in March 1800 at a lengthy conclave held in Venice and who entered Rome as Pope Pius VII in July.
A cultured, sensitive and learned man with a pleasantly ironical sense of humour, Pope Pius was supposed by the more rigidly conservative cardinals to be in sympathy with many of the ideas of the Revolution. As Archbishop of Imola he had agreed to style himself ‘Citizen-Cardinal’ and to have the baldacchino over the throne in the cathedral removed; his writing-paper had borne the superscriptions ‘Liberty’ and ‘Equality’. Yet those closest to him knew that his desire to reconcile the Revolution with the Church had not prevented him from taking a stand against the authorities when he felt the Church to be threatened. He would prevaricate, feign forgetfulness, ignore an unwelcome order. He came to terms with Napoleon by negotiating, through Cardinal Consalvi, the Concordat of 1801 and he presided over Napoleon's coronation as Emperor in Nôtre Dame in 1804. But when Napoleon decided to destroy the temporal power of the papacy, and ordered General Miollis to occupy Rome once more, the Pope recognized that there could be no further reconciliation.
The French dragoons who rode into Rome through the Porta del Popolo at dawn on 2 February 1808 were supposed at first to be on their way to Naples; but as they took over Castel Sant' Angelo and, one after another, occupied the different rioni, having disarmed most of the papal troops, it was realized that they had come to stay. Indeed, Napoleon, whose favourite bedside books were Plutarch's Lives, dreamed of founding a second Roman Empire; and, determined not to repeat the mistakes that had been made during the previous French occupation of Rome, he saw to it that only the most efficient and scrupulous officials were employed in the administration of the city.
General Miollis himself was a cultivated man, courteous and placatory. At his headquarters in Palazzo Doria he gave superb dinner-parties at which the nobles and prelates of Rome were not only provided with exquisite meals but also persuaded to believe that, while the Emperor had no reason to question the religious authority of the Pope, his role as a secular prince was no longer acceptable in the new Europe. Many of the nobles acquiesced in this view and raised no objection when the rest of the papal troops were disarmed, the papal printing-presses closed down and papal officials brought increasingly under French control. But the clergy were less amenable; and when it became known that the Pope disapproved of the parties at Palazzo Doria, they began to refuse the General's invitations. The Romans in general shared the Pope's distrust of French motives. Angered by the abolition of the lottery, they were further provoked when the French authorities, ignoring the Pope's decision that the annual Carnival ought not to take place while a foreign garrison was in occupation of the city, seized the stage properties and decorations by force and decreed that the celebrations should take place as usual. The shopkeepers and tavern-owners consequently closed their doors and shutters, and the people turned their backs upon the Corso.
As the French hold upon the city tightened, the Pope's resolve hardened. ‘The Pope is not a man whom one may hope to persuade by persistent argument,’ the French chargé d'affaires reported. ‘He is firm and immovable in his attitude. Once he has made up his mind, anything you say will not persuade him to change it. He does not prevent you from speaking, but after you have finished talking yourself he just lowers his head on his breast and allows you to leave in silence.’
In the hope that the Pope might be more pliant if his advisers were removed, Miollis ordered the expulsion from Rome of the Dean of the Sacred College and the Pro-Governor of the city, and sent two officers to arrest Cardinal Bartolommeo Pacca, the uncompromising Pro-Secretary of State. Pacca, however, had been warned of their coming and arranged for the Pope to be with him when they arrived. The Pope upbraided them furiously, so angrily, in fact, that Pacca observed a phenomenon he had believed to be imaginary: a man's hair standing on end His Holiness ordered the officers to tell their General that there must be an immediate end to these outrages, that Cardinal Pacca was under his protection, and that if the French wanted him they would have to break into the innermost chambers of the Quirinal to find him. The Pope then stormed out of the room followed by Pacca; and, as he returned to his own private apartments, the keys were turned in the seventeen doors through which they passed.
Napoleon decided that the time had now come to issue a decree formally annexing the Papal States to the French Empire and creating Rome a ‘free imperial city.’ The decree was read by a mounted herald on the Capitol; then, as trumpets blared, the papal flag was lowered from the summit of Castel Sant’ Angelo and the French tricolour was hoisted in its place. The Pope, watching the scene from a heavily curtained window in the Quirinal, said to Cardinal Pacca, ‘Consummatum est!’ He then walked over to a table on which lay a document he had long threatened to issue, the bull of excommunication. After a prayer and words of encouragement from Pacca, he picked up a pen and signed it. Later that day, copies of the bull and of an order requiring the Romans not to give their support to the new régime were posted on the doors of St Peter's, St John Lateran and S. Maria Maggiore.
General Radet, the young and headstrong chief of the Roman police, now seized his opportunity to come to the attention of the Emperor as an officer of initiative and daring. He asked General Miollis for signed warrants authorizing him to arrest Cardinal Pacca and to abduct the Pope. Miollis readily granted him the warrant for
67. (opposite) Napoleon with his son, styled King of Rome. Born in 1811, the son of the Empress Marie-Louise, the king who was proclaimed Napoleon II after Waterloo, inherited his mother's tendency to consumption and died at the age of twenty-one.
Pacca's arrest, but considered that his instructions from the Emperor did not allow him to take any action against the Pope other than placing a guard upon the Quirinal. But with or without written authority, Radet was determined to act; and in the early hours of the morning of 6 July he led an assault on the Pope's apartments. His plan was to scale the wall of the Quirinal by rope-ladders and, with a party of forty men, to gain access to the papal apartments from the roof, while other parties crept through the gardens and forced windows at the back of the palace. This plan miscarried when a rope-ladder broke and the cries of the falling men alerted the palace guards. But Radet, undeterred by the lights now shining from the palace windows and the tolling of the palace bell, attacked the main door with a hatchet and was raining blows at the lock when it flew open, the bolts withdrawn by the soldiers who had gained access to the hall from the back. Radet rushed for the staircase followed by his men, axes and crowbars in their hands. They disarmed the Swiss Guards who had been ordered not to resist French soldiers, and battering their way through locked doors, at about half-past three they came upon the Pope in the Hall of Audience. He was sitting fully clothed in soutane, stole andmozzetta between two cardinals. At sight of him, Radet, a pious man who composed canticles to the Madonna, came to a sudden halt and ordered his men back. ‘On the roof and mounting the stairs, it all seemed splendid,’ he later confessed. ‘But when I saw the Pope, in that instant, I also saw myself at my first Communion.’
‘Why have you come?’ the Pope asked him.
‘Most Holy Father, to repeat to your Holiness, in the name of the French Government, the proposition that he should renounce his temporal power.’
We cannot yield what does not belong to us. The temporal power belongs to the Church.’
‘Then I am under orders to take you away.’
‘Those orders, my son, will assuredly not bring divine blessings upon you.’
The Pope felt obliged to obey the orders, though. Allowed half an hour to collect what he needed, he asked for his ciborium, breviary and rosary, and then, without money or even a change of clothes, he followed Radet down the staircase and stepped into the coach which was waiting for him in the courtyard. The door was locked behind him and the coach rattled away towards the Porta Salaria.
The Rome from which the Pope was exiled until the fall of his adversary was governed by the occupying power with efficiency rather than with understanding of the character of the Roman people. Among the aristocracy, the French had a number of supporters, several of whom dined regularly in the gilded salons of the Palazzo di Montecitorio with the amusing and scholarly Prefect of Rome Baron de Tournon. But even these Francophiles were disillusioned when their sons were conscripted into the Napoleonic armies. They, like other Roman parents, urged their children not to present themselves for enrolment or, if forced to enrol, to desert. Many did desert and found refuge with the brigands in the nearby mountains, so that the drive for conscripts did as much to strengthen the bands of outlaws around Rome as to increase the imperial levies.
68. Pius VII enters Rome on 24 May 1814, his carriage drawn by the sons of noble Roman families.
While the brigands outside the city grew in numbers, so did the poor within it. The dissolution of the religious orders by the Napoleonic régime and the sequestration of their property led thousands of monks and nuns, expelled from monasteries and convents, to join those mendicants to whose needs they had formerly ministered. The number of indigents in Rome rose from 12,000 in 1810 to 30,000 in 1812.
As the lands of the Church were expropriated, as taxes were vastly increased to the level of those levied in France, as more and more Romans were deported and confiscations of their property grew more widespread, the French administration of Rome became ever more detested. And, after Napoleon's defeat at the Battle of Leipzing in October 1813, it also became impracticable. With no hope of further help from France, with the British navy landing raiding-parties along the coast and brigands scouring the countryside beyond the city walls, it was now but a matter of time before the whole structure collapsed. The coup de grâce came, however, in an unexpected way.
Five years before, one of Napoleon's most brilliant marshals, Joachim Murat the innkeeper's son who became a dashing cavalry leader, husband of Napoleon's youngest sister, Caroline, and Grand Duke of Berg and Cleves – had been further rewarded with the Kingdom of Naples. A man of limitless ambition and vanity, he had conceived a plan of uniting southern and central Italy into one kingdom under his sway; and, after the disaster of Leipzig, he made up his mind to break with Napoleon and to make common cause with the Allies in order to further his ends. On the pretext of moving his army north for the defence of Italy against Austria, he filled Rome with troops who appeared to be in transit but of whom many had come to stay. By the end of January 1814 the Neapolitans were in virtual possession of the city. It was only on Castel Sant' Angelo that General Miollis, still loyal to Napoleon though his cause was now lost, continued to fly the French flag. It was to fly there for only a few weeks more. On 10 March 1814 the last French troops marched out of Rome, with drums beating and flags flying, past the silent Roman crowds whom they had governed for almost six years.
In April Pope Pius returned, his carriage, drawn by the sons of noble families, passing slowly down the Corso beneath triumphal arches. He re-entered the Quirinal whose rooms the French had filled with Empire furniture and ornaments, and on whose walls they had painted the figures of classical gods and goddesses. Most of the French ornaments were removed to make room for the crucifixes and religious statues which they had replaced, but not all the goddesses were painted over: the Pope observed that those whose dresses were not diaphanous might make very nice Madonnas. Indeed, the Pope decided not to do away with anything merely because it was French. He retained many of the reforms carried out by the Napoleonic administration and adopted the Napoleonic Civil Code. He offered a home to Napoleon's widowed mother, Letizia, who went to live at the Palazzo Falconieri10 with Cardinal Fesch, whose father had married her as his second wife. Napoleon's brother Lucien, who had been made Prince of Canino, a little town north of Rome, came to live in a palace there. Asylum was also granted to Napoleon's other brother, Joseph Bonaparte, to his sister, Elisa, formerly Grand Duchess of Tuscany, and even to Napoleon's Inspector-General of Gendarmerie, the Duc de Rovigo.
When the Duc died in 1833, the French occupation of Rome had been largely forgotten and little evidence of their rule remained. In their time the Vatican Library and Museums had been reorganized; further areas of the Pontine Marshes had been drained; the first expert excavations of the Trajan Forum had been carried out; and the charming gardens overlooking the Piazza del Popolo from the Pincian hill had been laid out by the Roman landscape architect, Valadier. But more grandiose conceptions, such as an immense imperial palace stretching from the Piazza Colonna to the Colosseum, were never realized, and Rome appeared to foreign visitors much as it had done when Charles de Brosses had arrived a hundred
69. The Piazza del Popolo from the Pincio Gardens, by the poetical landscape painter, Samuel Palmer, who spent part of his long honeymoon in Rome in 1838.
years before. The population still numbered only about 135,000; and Stendhal, writing in 1827, noted that the inhabited area remained bounded on the south by the Capitol, on the west by the Tiber, and on the east by the Pincian and Quirinal hills. Three quarters of the city inside the Aurelian Walls – the Viminal, the Esquiline, the Caelian and the Aventine hills – he described as being silent and solitary. ‘La fièvre y règne,’ he wrote, ‘et on les cultive en vigne.’ He saw an Englishman ride his horse through the Colosseum; and, though he considered the Corso the most beautiful street in the universe, he found, as others had done for centuries past, that it stank of cabbages.
As an English visitor observed, ‘One can walk from one end of the city to the other without seeing a single thing to suggest that you are not still in the eighteenth century or to remind you that the French were once masters here for several years.’ Most of the looted works of art had been returned; and the Papal States, which the Allies had denied to the faithless Murat, had been given back to the Pope. Rome, like the rest of Europe, as one of the diplomats who had attended the Congress of Vienna chose to put it, ‘was as it might have been had the tragedy of the Revolution never occurred’. The old world could not be restored, however: there were more upheavals soon to come.