The Pope Who Came to Crown Napoleon and Watched Him Crown Himself

On Sunday 2 December 1804, in the choir of Notre-Dame Cathedral, Pope Pius VII stood before an altar covered with the imperial regalia of the new First French Empire and prepared to do something no pope had done in a thousand years: travel north of the Alps to crown a non-German monarch in his own cathedral. The candidate was Napoleon Bonaparte, 35 years old, recently First Consul of the French Republic and now elevated to Emperor of the French by a referendum carrying 99.9% approval. The pope was 62.

Pius had traveled to Paris under significant political duress. The new emperor wanted the imperial sanctity of Charlemagne’s 800 coronation — the original Christmas Day investiture that founded the Holy Roman Empire — and would not get it without a pope physically present. Pius had accepted the invitation in exchange for limited concessions on Catholic worship in France and a vague Napoleonic promise to address the question of the Papal States. The Papal States had been overrun by French armies in 1798 and 1799; substantial portions remained under French administration in 1804. The pope was, in a real political sense, Napoleon’s hostage.

The choreography

The ceremony had been rehearsed by Napoleon and the master of ceremonies, the unfrocked Bishop Talleyrand, over the preceding ten days. The traditional medieval coronation had three liturgical moments: the anointing (which the pope would perform), the investiture with the imperial regalia (which the pope would perform), and the crowning (which the pope would perform). Napoleon agreed to the first; he negotiated the second; he refused the third.

What happened in the cathedral on the morning of 2 December has been preserved by approximately a dozen first-person accounts. Pius VII anointed Napoleon. He blessed the regalia. He brought the crown forward. At the appropriate moment in the liturgy, Napoleon stood up, took the imperial crown out of the pope’s hands, and placed it on his own head. He then took the empress’s crown and placed it on his wife Josephine. The pope blessed both and chanted the Vivat imperator in aeternum. The political signal was unmistakable. Napoleon had been crowned not by the Church but by his own self-conferred authority.

Jacques-Louis David’s enormous painting The Coronation of Napoleon (1807, now in the Louvre) records the moment with one substantial historical falsification: David depicts Napoleon crowning Josephine while the pope sits with hands folded in his lap. This was Napoleon’s instruction to the painter. The original sketches had shown the pope with his hand raised in blessing; Napoleon ordered the gesture removed. The political-iconographic point of the painting — that the emperor crowned both himself and his consort, with the pope reduced to a passive ceremonial spectator — was the version of the event Napoleon wanted preserved.

The break

The political-religious relationship that had been managed by the Concordat of 1801 — the agreement between Napoleon and Pius VII that had normalized Catholic worship in France in exchange for substantial subordination of the French Catholic Church to state direction — collapsed through the next five years. Napoleon’s territorial ambitions in Italy were incompatible with the survival of the Papal States. His unilateral demand that the pope close his ports to British shipping was incompatible with the pope’s position as a neutral spiritual sovereign.

By 1808 French troops had occupied Rome. On 17 May 1809 Napoleon issued a decree formally annexing the Papal States to the French Empire and dissolving the temporal sovereignty of the papacy. Pius VII’s response on 10 June 1809 was the bull Quum memoranda — formally excommunicating “the violators of Saint Peter’s patrimony” without naming Napoleon personally but in language no informed Catholic could misread. The excommunication was the most consequential papal act against a Catholic monarch since Pope Pius V had excommunicated Elizabeth I of England in 1570.

The kidnapping

Napoleon’s response was illegal under every reading of canon law and most readings of contemporary European political-legal convention. On the night of 5–6 July 1809, French troops under General Étienne Radet broke into the pope’s private apartments in the Quirinal Palace in Rome. They smashed three locked doors with axes, found Pius VII in his bedroom in the company of two cardinals, and demanded his abdication of temporal authority. The pope refused. He was placed under arrest, allowed to take only his breviary, and bundled into a carriage at dawn.

Pius VII was held in close confinement for the next four years and ten months. He was moved from Rome to Florence, from Florence to Grenoble, from Grenoble to Savona on the Ligurian coast. In June 1812 — as Napoleon prepared to invade Russia — he was moved across the Alps to Fontainebleau, the imperial palace south of Paris. He arrived in critical health.

The conditions of his captivity were not physically severe by 19th-century imperial standards. They were spiritually severe. Pius was prevented from communicating with the College of Cardinals, from issuing pastoral documents, from appointing bishops, from exercising any meaningful papal function. The Catholic Church without a pope conducting routine business for nearly five years was a canonical and political problem.

The reversal

Napoleon’s military position collapsed through 1813. The Russian campaign had destroyed the Grande Armée. The Sixth Coalition was pushing the depleted French armies westward across Germany. By December 1813 Napoleon needed peace with the Church to stabilize his domestic political position.

He negotiated personally with the pope at Fontainebleau in late December 1813. Pius — chronically ill, isolated, badly advised — initially signed a draft document recognising Napoleonic claims over the Papal States. Within weeks he had been reached by his loyal cardinals, recognized that he had been manipulated, and formally repudiated the Fontainebleau Concordat. The document never took legal effect.

Napoleon abdicated on 6 April 1814. Pius VII was released from Fontainebleau on 23 January 1814 and traveled south through the Italian states he had not seen in five years. He re-entered Rome on 24 May 1814 to spectacular public reception. He was 71.

The afterlife

Pius VII spent the last nine years of his life — until his death on 20 August 1823 — reconstructing the papal administration, the Papal States, and the Catholic religious orders that Napoleonic occupation had dismantled. He restored the Jesuit Order in 1814 (suppressed in 1773). He sheltered the deposed Bonaparte family — most prominently Napoleon’s mother Letizia and several of Napoleon’s siblings — at Rome after Napoleon’s final defeat. When Napoleon died at Saint Helena in 1821, Pius offered to send a chaplain. The offer was declined.

The pope who had been kidnapped and held for five years by the emperor whose forehead his oil had blessed at Notre-Dame survived to see Napoleon’s empire collapse, Napoleon’s family stripped of its titles, and Napoleon’s body interred on a remote British island in the South Atlantic. He showed no public satisfaction at any of these events. His personal motto, struck into the medallion of his pontificate, was Pax et Justitia — Peace and Justice. He had spent twenty-three years as pope and had been physically present at the founding of the Napoleonic order and at its collapse.