In this society of the days of the Consulate a sort of 'aesthetic and sentimental' religiosity came into flower at the time of the publication of Atala, followed by The Spirit of Christianity, a sort of lyrical mysticism of which Chateaubriand was to be the prophet. But most people were not yet looking so far ahead. The spectacles offered by the Church were among the attractions of Paris in which it was considered good taste to take part. This is how a young blood lists his day's pleasures to come. 'Oh, there's no denying it, no day will ever have been better spent! Listening to a Passion that will make me cry, while everyone is bound to notice me; after that, dining well at Rose's; then taking my charmer Sophie to Longchamp in an elegant phaeton, and eating an ice with her at Garci's on the way back; going to hear Garat sing Pergolesfs Stabat; then spending a few hours at the masked ball, thoroughly roasting Mme X..., who is to be disguised as a lay sister, then ... Upon my sacred wordl It's delightful!'
If Bonaparte was feeling his way to the Concordat, it was doubtless not for the sake of assisting the development of such a peculiar form of devotion, any more than to please his colleagues of the Institute, nearly all of them enemies of the Church, nor the generals of his army, all ferocious anti-clericals. The reasons for this great step, one of the most daring of his whole career, were exclusively political. He knew that in governing a people the spiritual power was the most valuable auxiliary of the temporal. One would think he had read this saying of RivaroFs: 'Philosophy divides men, religion unites them in the same principles Every State, if we may say so, is a mysterious vessel whose anchors are in Heaven/
Up to then the Catholic world had mostly worked against the Consulate, born of the Revolution, and part of the country was still in a state of armed insurrection of moral opposition. The object of the manoeuvre, therefore, was to set men's consciences at rest the better to enslave them. Bonaparte's idea could not be more accurately defined than by the — more or less apochryphal - confession that Julie Talma ascribes to him: c ls it not true that the non-juring priests have the greatest influence in such and such departments? Is it not true that these priests belong to Louis XVIII? That he is therefore more powerful than myself in those regions? By treating with the Pope, therefore, I am robbing Louis XVIII of this army of priests; they are mine instead of his/
The original idea of the Concordat can be entirely reduced to this consideration. There were still the innumerable difficulties to be solved which the negotiations with Rome would present at every moment-persuading the Pope to consent to the division of Church property among the purchasers of national property; obtaining the substitution of the bishops of the old regime by prelates chosen and paid by the Government; introducing among the regular clergy a part of the Constitutional clergy and marrying two elements that had always fought against each other — so many thorny problems destined at last to be solved, thanks to the goodwill of the Holy Father and the persistence of the First Consul.
But all this is wide of our subject. We are only concerned to know how the country was going to accept this spiritual coup d'etat, and what effect it was to have on everyday life.
On Easter Day 1802 a grand ceremony took place in Notre-Dame. With the tenor bell of the cathedral ringing again after ten years* silence, a Te Deum celebrated the alliance concluded between France and the Holy See.
A considerable number of soldiers and mounted police were drawn up round the church, and the wits insinuated that this was to prevent God the Father from being burgled. At eleven o'clock, preceded by four regiments of cavalry, a succession of coaches drove up, with grooms in full livery for the first time, bringing the three Consuls, the Ambassadors and the Ministers. Received on entering by the recently appointed Archbishop - the old Monsignor de Belloy —with holy water and incense, Bonaparte, Cambaceres and Lebrun took their seats in the choir, under a dais, while Mme Bonaparte throned it in one of the two ambos.
The Cardinal-Legate said mass. At the moment of the elevation the onlookers were surprised by a spectacular innovation: the troops presented arms and the drums beat a general salute. During the sermon several of the generals laughed
derisively, especially Lannes and Augereau, who had just lunched too well, and had been almost forcibly dragged there by Berthier. Another, General Delmas, asked that evening by the First Consul what he thought of the ceremony, replied without hesitation, 'A fine piece of Church flummery! The only thing missing was the million men who gave their lives in order to destroy what you have just re-established!'
That phrase summed up the feeling of a large number of military men, for the army of the Revolution found it hard to understand the sudden right-about turn it had been ordered to execute. Feeling was no less acute in certain intellectual circles, especially in the Institute, where the spirit of the Encyclopaedia still held sway. We need only recall the motion proposed by Cabanis during a session I demand that the name of God shall never be pronounced within these precincts T And the still more singular declaration made by another member C I swear that God does not exist!'
But these belated disciples of the philosophers, who included Guinguenet and Parny, Garat and Marie-Joseph Chenier, were after all only a small group; their protestations were hardly taken seriously, any more than the fantasies of Lalande the astronomer, who had such fine things to say of the heavens, and such bad ones of their principal occupant. There was certainly little religious belief among the people of that day, but the mere fact that religion had now been given legal existence soon helped it to gain ground, because the general concern was for correct behaviour in such matters.
This explains the rebirth of fashionable piety on the morrow of the Concordat. It soon became the custom for certain very important persons to go to Mass, like Cambaceres, or to be appointed honorary churchwardens, like Murat; for certain leaders of fashion to take round the plate at Saint-Koch in full evening dress, like the wife of the banker Delarue — with a Russian Count leading her by the hand and two lacqueys carrying her train, followed by a negro-or to tender the bread for consecration at Saint-Ambroise, like Mile Duchesnois, or even to set up a temporary altar on the day of Corpus Christi, like Mile Contat at her country house at Ivry. The Paris populace was not a little astounded by these unaccustomed sights, but more surprises were in store for it. The priests were about to reappear in the streets in ecclesiastical garments, first in short cassocks, like the abbes of the old regime, then in the long soutanes formally recommended by Bonaparte. 1 On feast days the service would be performed outside the church; the Holy Sacrament would be carried along the Boulevard Saint-Antoine, or the procession would go to worship the Calvary at the Hermitage of Mont-Valerien.
Since the clergy were now officially recognized, they must obviously be free henceforth to pursue their calling in a variety of ways, such as blessing the cadets of the Military School of Saint-Cyr (who greeted the Bishop of Versailles with somewhat comical verses 2 ), confirming the young ladies of Saint-Lazare, and assisting condemned prisoners on the Place de Greve, an innovation witnessed by the populace, according to the Journal des Debats, 'with as much pleasure as respect'.
And all would have been well if it had not been for the persistent intolerance of some old-fashioned priests, which gave rise to a number of unnecessary disturbances.
Why deny the Constitutional abbes the right to say mass, now that they had been recognized by the Pope? Why should the Abbe Bossu turn an honest man out of Saint-Eustache, with insults, for having committed the crime of dressing his two little boys as mamelukes, rather as we might dress ours as sailors or Scotsmen? Why, above all, should the Cure Mardruel forbid the funeral procession of poor Chameroy to enter Saint-Eustache, thus incurring the anger of the theatrical world and the indignation of the public at large? So many blunders that might easily have been avoided in the interest of the Sacred Union!