12 - Napoleon and the Church

Summary

The Napoleonic Wars marked one of the deepest crises in the history of the Roman Church throughout Europe. For Catholicism, the experiences of the 1790s were cataclysmic. In France, Gallicanism was riven by a schism between those clerics who supported the Revolution of 1789 and those who had remained loyal to Rome. In the west of France, such tensions precipitated civil war. Across the Rhine, the destruction of the ecclesiastical principalities, which had been a staple of the Holy Roman Empire’s complex system of governance, had thrown the Germanic Church into chaos. Beyond the Alps, the invasion of Italy had led to the arrest of Pius VI, who died in Valence in 1799 a French captive. This list of disasters made the future of the Roman Church precarious.

Ecclesiastical historiography has been polarised when it comes to the French imperium’s impact on Catholicism. Napoleon is reincarnated as an Attila the Hun who ushered a new Babylonian captivity for Christendom.