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Pope Pius IX and France

The chief ally of the papacy from 1849 to 1870 was France. The policy which made Louis Napoleon dictator forced him into mortal conflict with the republican parties; and the price of the parliamentary support of the Catholic majority was high. Even before Napoleon's election as president, Falloux, the Catholic leader, had promised to secure intervention in favor of the dispossessed pope. Napoleon, however, could, not forget that as a young man he himself had vainly fought to obtain from Gregory XVI those liberties which Pius IX. still refused to grant; he therefore essayed diplomacy, not arms. Nevertheless, to forestall the rescue of the pope by Austrian troops, he sent, in August 1849, an army corps under Qudinot to Civita Vecchia. By heading off reactionary Austria, Napoleon hoped to conciliate the French Liberals; by helping the pope, to satisfy the Catholics; by concessions to be wrung both from Pius and from the Roman triumvirs, to achieve a bloodless victory. As neither party yielded, Oudinot listened to his Catholic advisers, attacked Rome, with which the French Republic was technically at peace - and was roundly repulsed by Garibaldi.

To relieve their inglorious predicament the ministry hurried the Liberal diplomatist, Ferdinand de Lesseps, to Rome to prevent further conflict. At the moment when Lesseps had secured the signing of a treaty with the Roman Republic permitting peaceful occupation of the city by the French army, he was peremptorily recalled and Oudinot was as unexpectedly ordered to take the city by storm. This amazing reversal of policy was procured by the intrigues of Catholic diplomatists and German Jesuits, conveyed to Paris by Prince de la Tour d'Auvergnc. For the honor of the army and the Church, republican France thereupon destroyed the Roman republic. Napoleon lost 1200 in dead and wounded, actually secured not a single reform on which he had insisted, and drew upon himself the fateful obligation to mount perpetual guard over the Vatican.

As the catspaw of clerical reaction he had also to acquiesce in that "Roman campaign at home" that resulted in the Falloux Act of 1850, which in the name of liberty of education put the university in bondage to the archbishops, militated against lay teachers in secondary and primary schools, and set them under clerical control, made it ominously easy for members of religious congregations to become instructors of youth, and cut the nerve of the communal school system. That education was delivered up to the Church was partly the result of the terror inspired in the middle classes by the socialistic upheavals of 1848. The bourgeoisie sought the support of the clergy, and irreligion became as unfashionable among them as it had been among the nobility after 1793. Religion was thought to be part of a fashionable education, and the training of girls came almost exclusively into the hands of the religious orders and congregations.

So long as the alliance of the autocratic empire and the clergy lasted (1852-1860), intellectual reaction reigned; the university professorships of history and philosophy were suppressed. This alliance of the empire with the clergy was shaken by the Italian War of 1859, which resulted in the loss by the pope of two-thirds of his territories. Napoleon was evidently returning to the traditions of his youth, and in the September Convention of 1864 it looked as if he would abandon Rome to its manifest destiny. This solution was spoiled by the impatience of Garibaldi and the supineness of the Romans themselves. In 1867 Napoleon made himself once more guardian of the Holy See; but the wonders wrought by theFrench at the battle of Mentana cost the friendship of Italy.

Thereafter Napoleon was blindly staggering to his fall. He aimed at honor in upholding the pope, in driving the Austrian tyrant from Italy; in attacking Prussia. The Austrian support on which he relied confidently in 1870 proved delusive, for he could obtain nothing from Austria unless he had Italy with him, and nothing from Italy without the evacuation of Rome. Even after the war with Prussia had actually broken out, he refused Italian aid at the price of the abandonment of the city, a step which he nevertheless reversed hurriedly twenty days too late. With Napoleon fell the temporal power; but the French hierarchy still kept his gifts in the shape of the congregations, the pro-Catholic colonial policy, and a certain control of education. Of these privileges the Church was to be deprived a generation later. The Third Republic can never forget that it was to the support of the temporal sovereignty of the pope that Napoleon III owed his empire and France her deepest humiliation.