does he think ahead, and his ideas extend beyond that which a man
belonging to the ancient régime could imagine or divine, even to the
reconstruction of the empire of the west as this existed in the year
800. "I am not Louis XIV.'s successor," he soon declares,[34] "but of
Charlemagne. . . . I am Charlemagne, because, like Charlemagne, I
unite the French crown to that of the Lombards, and my empire borders
on the Orient." In this conception, which a remote history furnishes
to his boundless ambition, the terrible antiquitarian finds the
gigantic and suitable framework, the potent, specious terms, and all
the verbal reasons he requires. Under Napoleon, the successor of
Charlemagne, the Pope can be only a vassal: "Your Holiness is the
sovereign of Rome, but I am its emperor," the legitimate suzerain.
"Provided with "fiefs and counties" by this suzerain, the Pope owes
him political fealty and military aid; failing in this, the endowment,
which is conditional, lapses and his confiscated estates return to the
imperial domain to which they have never ceased to belong.[35] Through
this reasoning and this threat, through the rudest and most adroit
moral and physical pressure, the most insidious and most persevering,
through spoliation, begun, continued and completed by the abduction,
captivity and sequestration of the Holy Father himself, he undertakes
the subjection of the spiritual power: not only must the Pope be like
any other individual in the empire,[36] subject by his residence to
territorial laws, and hence to the government and the gendarmerie, but
again he must come within the administrative lines; he will no longer
enjoy the right of refusing canonical investiture to bishops appointed
by the emperor,[37] "he will, on his coronation, swear not to take any
measures against the four propositions of the Gallican Church,"[38] he
will become a grand functionary, a sort of arch-chancellor like
Cambacérès and Lebrun, the arch chancellor of the Catholic cult. -
Undoubtedly, he resists and is obstinate, but he is not immortal, and