"You will see," exclaimed Bonaparte, while negotiating the Concordat,
"how I will turn the priests to account, and, first of all, the
Pope!"[25]



III. Dealing with the Pope.

Services which he obliges the Pope to render. - Resignation or
dismissal of the old bishops. - End of the constitutional Church. -
Right of appointing bishops and of sanctioning curés given to the
First Consul.

"Had no Pope existed," he says again,[26] "it would have been
necessary to create him for the occasion, in the same way that the
Roman consuls appointed a dictator for difficult circumstances." Only
such a dictator could effect the coup d'état which the First Consul
needed, in order to constitute the head of the new government a patron
of the Catholic Church, to bring independent or refractory priests
under subjection, to sever the canonical cord which bound the French
clergy to its exiled superiors and to the old order of things, "to
break the last thread by which the Bourbons still communicated with
the country." "Fifty émigré[27] bishops in the pay of England now lead
the French clergy. Their influence must be got rid of, and to do this
the authority of the Pope is essential; he can dismiss or make them
resign." Should any of them prove obstinate and unwilling to descend
from their thrones, their refusal brings them into discredit, and they
are "designated[28] as rebels who prefer the things of this world,
their terrestrial interests to the interests of heaven and the cause