ENDING OF THE 1260 YEARS.
Pius VI felt great alarm at the agitation which was manifesting in France, and foresaw that the moment was not far distant, when the eldest son of the church would be forced from his mother’s tutorship. Nevertheless, the court ceased not to maintain the best relations with the pontiff; and the feeble Louis XVI offered considerable sums to the Roman chancery for the canonization of the daughter of Louis XI, Jeanne Bossue, whom Louis XII had so scandalously divorced for Anne of Brittany. But before that ridiculous affair was decided, their harmony was broken by the suit respecting the necklace of pearls, in which the honor of the French queen and of an ecclesiastical prince was gravely impeached. The arrest of the chief criminal, Cardinal Rohan, caused a great sensation in the Roman conclave. The pope instantly addressed the ambassador of France, and signified to him that he should call for the observance of the canonical rules in favor of the accused, if the process was continued. Louis would hear nothing, and declared that judgment should be passed on the prince of Rohan, in spite of the pope, the cardinals, and all foreign courts, to avenge the queen’s honor. Rohan then resolved to defy the danger; and demand of the parliament the investigation of the cause. The crafty prelate had foreseen that Marie Antoinette would recede from the scandal of the public debates, and would procure their silence, by which he should be acquitted. But the conclave who knew not Rohan’s motives for that determination, approved not of his step, and protested against his voluntary abandonment of his rights, by declaring that the Roman court alone could judge a prince of hierarchy. All Europe were interested in the suit. The king of Spain sent letters to France to persuade Louis XVI to hush up the affair. The German emperor recalled Cardinal Rohan as a prince of the empire. The elector of Mentz also pretended that he was entitled to investigate the accusation, because the accused was prelate of Strasbourg, and his suffragan. The diet of Ratisbon also claimed jurisdiction of the cause as belonging to a state of the empire. In this emergency, Pius VI perceiving the impossibility of changing the temper of Louis XVI, who appeared to take it as a serious concern for his honor as a husband, wished to save, at least, the dignity of the body of cardinals. Therefore, to evade the result that a prince of the popedom should be declared, by a secular tribunal, a calumniator, swindler, thief, and forger, he pronounced the suspension of Cardinal Rohan, grand almoner of France, and granted him a delay of six months to appear and justify himself before his peers, concerning the accusations against him. The parliament of Paris alleged that the pope’s brief was against the liberties of the Gallican hierarchy, and refusing any respect to it, prolonged their inquest. Happily for the grand almoner, Marie Antoinette secretly interposed in the affair, gained over the most influential councillors, and excluded him from the process. Rohan was instantly reinstated in his titles and dignities; which fact made the Parisians declare in allusion to the pretended jest attributed to Francisco I, that the cardinal had lost nothing except his honor. Concord was then re-established between the two courts, their relations subsisted as before the affair, and Louis XVI trusted in Pius VI, that he would arrest the progress of civilization in France, and restore to the country the former ages of vassalage. But it was not in the king’s power to accomplish that sacrilegious work. Men and things, laws and constitutions, all were carried away by a resistless force during the revolutionary tornado; and as if events did not sufficiently expedite their abasement, the nobles and the priests affected additional pride and arrogance. The queen, in a species of delirium, abandoned herself to her pleasures and dissoluteness, without any dread of the scandal, without any regard for her own conduct, sacrificing, for the young nobles of her court, the objects of her criminal attachment, the millions of France, at the period when the public finances were in the most frightful disorder. Louis XVI then resolved to convoke the “notables,” thereby to obtain new taxes, and to supply the deficiencies in the treasury. From the opening of that assembly, the extent of the progress which the clamor for reform had made was obvious. The notables, although belonging to the privileged classes, refused the subsidies which were demanded, denounced the dissipation of the court, and demanded the suppression of annates, through which millions were drawn from the kingdom into the Roman treasury. In those circumstances, the nuncio of Pius VI interposed to defend the interests of the Roman court, and engaged Louis XVI to transfer the reins of government to the hands of an energetic priest, who, after the example of Richelieu, might save the altar and the throne from impending ruin. The imbecile monarch obeyed, and named for his principal minister, Charles Lomenie de Brienne, archbishop of Toulouse, to whom he gave the direction of the finances. The prelate immediately formed the edicts for the new imposts, and carried them to the parliament to be registered. The councillors refused to obey his command, and declared that the “states general” alone were competent to enact the public expenditures. That word, the “states general,” soon spread throughout France. The priests, the nobles, the parliament, the peasantry, all nerved by hope, or various interests, proclaimed the principle that “a nation represented by their delegates, alone possessed the imprescriptible right to reform abuses and to impose taxes.” The king resisted that opinion, and held many sessions, “lits de justice,” at which the new edicts were registered. The parliaments protested against them as illegal, and declared the registry null. The principal minister in vain endeavored to intimidate them, although he imprisoned the most refractory members. Those rigorous acts only exasperated their minds, and forced the king to dismiss the minister of finance, and to select for his successor, the Genevan Neckar, and also to issue the decree for the opening of the assembly of the states general, May 1, 1789. An incredible excitement was manifested throughout France. Clubs and political unions were every where organized for the election of the national deputies. On May 4, 1789, the delegates of the three orders, the “Tiers-etat,” the nobility, and the priesthood, met at Versailles, where the assembly was appointed to be held. Louis XVI, followed by the princes and the great officers of the crown, attended mass with them; at the end of which, La Fare, the prelate of Nancy, delivered an oration, in which he combined declarations of love for religion, fidelity to the king, and sublime reflections on the advantages of freedom. On the morrow, the king opened the states general with a cautious address, in which he announced assurances of his respect for the laws, and affection for the people. The deputies of the “Tiers-etat” were no longer duped by a hypocritical language. Assembled to effect useful reforms in the nation, they commenced their labors, without permitting themselves to be discouraged by the multiplied obstacles which counteracted them. They began by attacking the ecclesiastical privileges, declared the wealth of the priesthood national property, abolished the tithes, sold the estates of the hierarchy, and transformed them into life-annuities; and then suppressed the annats. On May 17, 1790, the deputies, whose power had been recognized, having assumed the title of the national assembly, decreed the famous constitution concerning the priesthood, which overthrew all the degrees of the hierarchy, and enjoined on the prelates and priests to take the oath of fidelity to the nation. The large majority of the French priests refused to submit to the decisions of the assembly. Of one hundred and thirty prelates, four only adopted it. Nevertheless, the first consecration of the constitutional prelates, soon took place in the oratory. Talleyrand Perigord, prelate of Autun, assisted by the prelates Gobel, Lydda, and Mirourlot, conferred the prelatic dignity on the priests Rapilly and Maroles, newly promoted to the sees of Quimper and Laon. That event made a profound sensation at the court of Rome. Pius VI was contented before with addressing his protestations to the legislators of the constituent assembly, as he said, who devoured each other. He then judged that his remonstrances had been too mild. Therefore, he decided to appall the deputies by fulminating his terrible bulls against the ecclesiastics, who had taken the oath of fidelity to the constitution, and enjoined on them within forty days to retract, under the penalty of excommunication, as intruders, illegitimate schismatics, heretics and sacrilegious. The pope’s bulls only induced the legislative body to decree that all connection with the Roman court was dissolved, and that the nuncio should be expelled from France. The ambassador was recalled to Paris, and the refractory priests who refused to take the oath were prosecuted. Pius was thus at once attacked, both in his spiritual and temporal domination. The cry for liberty, impelled by the national assembly, was resounded at Avignon. The Comtadins rallied at the idea of independence proclaimed by France. They formed a national guard; adopted a religious constitution like that of the French government, and revolted against the vice-legate, who commanded the province in the name of the pope. Then, on the pontiff’s refusal to sanction those acts, they drove the vice-legate from their territory, with the archbishop and all the ecclesiastics attached to the cause of Rome; and having declared themselves independent of the pope, they proposed to unite with France. Pius VI, enraged to see one of his finest provinces detached from his secular domain, tried another effort to retain his sovereignty. He organized bands of assassins, who, under the name of “pontificals,” gave themselves up to frightful ravages in the Comtat Venaissin, and butchered a great number of the republicans of Avignon and the territory, in the name of the pope and for the greater glory of his religion. Happily, the cause of liberty triumphed. Public indignation wrought justice on the murderers, and Avignon was united to France. That event was celebrated at Paris with great rejoicings, amid which the Parisians burnt the effigy of the pope in the garden of the royal palace; a burlesque comedy, which became the pretext, on the part of Pius, for cruel reprisals. The pope seized the French who resided in his states, and who were regarded as advocates of the new notions. He massacred or poisoned the whole of them, and did the same to all the Italians and strangers who were suspected of holding the opinions of the constituent assembly. With respect to those who were neutral or indifferent, he merely incarcerated them in the dungeons of the castle of Angelo, with the harshest treatment. Nevertheless, of what avail was the wrath of a furious pope against that revolutionary movement? The cry of liberty resounded at Paris, passed the Alps, was heard at Rome, and was re-echoed by the Italians. Then the pope conceived the design to raise a civil war in France, and to use the priests and monks, who were devoted to his cause, as instruments to renew the terrible crusades. More than seventy thousand ecclesiastics had refused the constitutional oath. The constituent assembly had the weakness, however, to permit them to celebrate their superstitious rites in the edifices of the sworn priests. Those wretched fanatics, at the instigation of the Roman court, unworthily abused the toleration to conspire against the new order of things. They insinuated to their devotees that all the sacraments administered by the constitutional priests and prelates were essentially null. They re-exorcised the children, re-married the adults, and dared to announce from the confessional and the pulpit, that out of their communion, all was concubinage, illegitimacy, and damnation. A dangerous agitation, the effect of these insinuations, was manifested in all the departments of France, which counteracted the revolutionary movement. The legislative assembly, which had succeeded the national, took measures to arrest the progress of the evil. They23withdrew the connivance and the pensions which the state had granted to the refractory priests, decreed freedom of worship, the emancipation of the monastic orders, the marriage of the priests; and, upon the proposition of the Archbishop Torni, prohibited all the ecclesiastical costume. Louis XVI wished to defend the priests by his enfeebled authority, and made use of the right which the constitution conceded to him, to reject a law, according to his caprice, by his simple veto. The ecclesiastics then assumed a fatal haughtiness and insolence. They dared to announce publicly, that a vast confederacy was organizing by the machinations of the pope, and that soon all the papal powers united by the pontiff, would rush into France to extinguish the philosophical hydra in a sea of human blood. The audacity of the priests, and the imminence of the danger, at length coerced the legislative assembly to act with severity toward the rebellious ecclesiastics. Therefore, all the ecclesiastics, without exception, were enjoined to take the civic oath, or to leave the kingdom. Those who refused to obey the decree, and who persisted to live in France, were cast into the national prisons. Nevertheless, the majority of them joined the princes and princesses who fled into foreign countries, and who intrigued with the monarchs to excite them against the French nation. Among the emigrants was the Abbe Maury, one of the most powerful champions of despotism, who fled to the pope, obtained flattering distinctions, and was appointed papal nuncio to represent the Roman court at the diet of Frankfort, and to urge Germany to invade France. At length, a formidable coalition against France was organized. Civil war broke out in La Vendee, and the frontiers were menaced by the armies of Prussia, Sweden, Austria, and Sardinia. In the interior, secret machinations augmented the disorder, and threatened France with certain ruin. Thence the people, in the excitement of despair, dreading to fall again under the yoke of despotism, went to the prisons which contained the enemies of freedom, to avenge themselves on the guilty authors of their misery. However deplorable those excesses, they were the result entirely of the priestly doings; for even when in prison, they ceased not to conspire against the nation, and to enrage the people in avowing their hope of deliverance by the allied armies. Let not the advocates of despotism and the Roman priesthood cry out against the massacres in the French prisons, as long as they can be condemned for the crusades, by Pope Innocent VIII, against the Albigenses; the butchery ordered by Philip II of Spain; the atrocities of the Armagnacs and the Bourguignons directed by Charles VI; the massacre of Bartholomew by Charles IX; and the dragonnades in the Cevennes, commanded by Louis XIV. It is not difficult to decide which is the most sanguinary and criminal, the priesthood, or the republicans, or the royalty. But events changed their character. A new national assembly, the convention, succeeded the legislative. France was proclaimed a republic, and Louis XVI expiated the crimes of his race—if less his own—on the scaffold. Pius VI instantly fulminated his bull of excommunication against the French people, designated them as an impious, sacrilegious, and abominable nation, and hurled against them the thunderbolts of heaven and earth. In reply, the convention sent the pope the following letter: “The executive council of the French republic, to the prince prelate of Rome. Pontiff! you are required instantly to release the French prisoners detained in your dungeons. If this claim is without effect, you will learn that the republic is too high-minded to forget an outrage, and too powerful to permit it with impunity.” The pope, on receiving that message from the convention, could scarcely restrain his rage. Nevertheless, the cardinals having made him understand the danger of provoking the republican people, the simulated vicar of God, and the pretended successor of Peter, the would-be infallible pontiff of universal Christendom, humbled himself before the messenger, a citizen from the lowest rank, and promised to obey the will of the republic! But when he heard that the French had met with some adverse events, the pope resumed his audacity, collected his troops, and announced that he was about to put on the helmet and the cuirass to fight the republicans. After the example of their chief, the monks and the priests, filled with crusading enthusiasm, overran the cities and the country; on their route, recruited other fanatics, enrolled them under the pontifical banner, and organized them as bands of assassins. Then, when they supposed that they were in sufficient force to attack the republic, they cast off all shame, and the rights of nations, and massacred the secretary of the embassy, named Basseville, at the time when he was passing along in the street to the academy, accompanied by his wife and children. Then the cannibals rushed about the city, shouting, “Long live Pius VI! long live Saint Bartholomew! Kill all Frenchmen!” The palace of the academy was assailed, the pensioned pupils were pursued and forced to fly from the daggers of the priests, while other bands of assassins forced open the doors of the French dwellings, and there renewed the same scenes of violence. In France, affairs daily assumed a more mournful aspect. Within, all was disorder and anarchy. The peasants of Brittany and La Vendee, excited by the pretended prophecies of the fanatics, organized the insurrection of the Chouans, and transformed their rich country into a frightful field of battle. Without, the despots and their hordes of myrmidons roared, ready to rush upon the republic. Such was the critical position into which the nobles and priests had placed their country. Pius VI, the author of the dreadful crusade, the enterprise of kings against liberty, desisted not from the odious task which he assumed. He even united with Britain and the other northern courts, whom he ever cursed as heretics, and formed with those powers and the kings of Italy and Spain, a formidable coalition. It is true that tyrants have neither religion nor patriotism. Their religion is the immoderate love of power, the exercise of that supreme authority with which the ignorance or weakness of their fellow-citizens has invested them. Their country is the throne where they sit in the plenitude of their insolence. For those would-be demi-gods, men are but slaves, fit only to dig into the earth, thence to extract the wealth which they grasp, and to furnish it for their passions and luxury. The French republic organized fourteen armies, struggled against their enemies, made the despots tremble on their thrones, and finally announced that they would punish the old pope for his crimes and treachery. When the French were preparing to invade Italy, Pius appealed to the superstitious fanaticisms of the people, and disseminated this furious proclamation—“Italiani! as soon as the sound of the bell shall announce the entrance of the republicans into the territories of the church, fly to arms, burn the crops, poison the fountains and wells; kill by every method, by the dagger, sword, fire, or poison, an unbridled enemy, who cuts off, with the axe of the executioner, the heads of kings and priests. Exterminate the barbarous republicans, who have sworn to overturn the throne and the altar. Obey all of you, as your God, that which your pope ordains. We promise plenary indulgences and temporal recompense, to all who shall butcher the ferocious French. We grant an entire amnesty to thieves, assassins, and parricides, who shall cancel all their crimes in combating for our religion. We grant, in advance, our absolution to all courageous women, who, after the example of Judith, will prostitute themselves to those Philistines, and then chop off their heads! Let all men flock to the Roman standard! Let Italy entire rise up with its myriads of swords, at the voice of the vicar of Christ, and let all men and women plunge their hands in the blood of the French, and partake with delight, of that glorious holocaust! We dispense no persons from this crusade but the ecclesiastics; because it is the duty of pastors to lift up their hands on the top of the mountain, while the faithful slaughter on the plain.” During the dark ages, and the fury of the “League,” never did fanaticism howl more ferocious language. But the times were altered, and the pope’s proclamation had scarcely any influence on the people. Moreover, what could be achieved by wretches demoralized by anguish, crushed by exactions, and besotted in the grossest ignorance? The papal treasury also was empty, the Roman credit destroyed, and the resources from loans dried up: all had been devoured by the pope and his bastards, even to the silver plate of the mass-houses. The Italians made no movement, but rather awaited the arrival of the French, not as enemies, but as liberators. Moreover, the pope having been desirous to double the taxes, the people revolted against the fiscal agents, killed some of them at Rome, and even talked of burning down the palace of the duke of Braschi, whose wealth and audacious luxury were so odiously contrasted with the general distress. But a few policemen sufficed to stop those hostile manifestations, and to make the degenerate sons of ancient Rome tremble. The miserable people were so demoralized, that on one day of uproar, Braschi went out of his palace, with a whip in his hand, followed by some lacqueys carrying baskets full of pieces of small money, crying with a loud voice—“Come on! scatter the money among the rabble, that they may go and howl further off!” Then, clearing his way with blows of his whip, he passed through the midst of the crowd without any one of them even thinking to punish his arrogance. However, as the pope lost some of his guards in those collisions, he declared their persons inviolable, and published that an insult to a “sbirri” should be deemed high treason. In the interim, France had seen the convention revolutionized. A party composed of all the infamous men who had enriched themselves by betraying the popular cause, triumphed over the mountain, and the sway of power passed into the hands of the directory. With them the priests re-appeared, and after them followed bands of assassins, organized under the name of Jesuits, who made a terrible war on the republic. Those new crusaders, recruited among the nobles and the dissolved monks, scattered themselves in many of the departments, especially in Vaucluse and Bouches-des-Rhone, and perpetrated the most atrocious barbarities, in the name of the pope and Louis XVIII, whom Pius VI recognized by that title, after the death of the son of Louis XVI in the temple.