Concordat of 1801

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 15th of July 1801, in Paris, Napoleon Bonaparte and Pope Pius VII put their names to a document that neither of them entirely wanted. The Concordat of 1801 was a bargain struck between two men who each needed something from the other. Napoleon needed the loyalty of French Catholics. Pius VII needed to restore some measure of papal authority over a church that the Revolution had nearly destroyed. What emerged from their negotiations was an agreement that would shape French religious life for more than a century. How did a revolutionary state come to terms with the institution it had tried to demolish? And what exactly did each side give up to get what it needed?

• 2. What the Revolution Broke

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  The National Assembly had moved against the Catholic Church with sweeping force. It seized Church properties, then passed the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, which effectively made the Church a department of the French state and stripped it of papal authority. The Gallican Church that remained was nominally Catholic but answered to Paris, not Rome. In the Vendee region, this rupture between the Church and the government bred deep hostility among devout Catholics. Subsequent laws went further still, abolishing the traditional Gregorian calendar and erasing Christian holidays from the public calendar. Priests who refused to swear loyalty to the new order faced exile or worse. Those who did swear allegiance under the Civil Constitution became a tiny minority, and when the Concordat was finally in place, very few parishes kept those priests in their posts.

• 3. The Negotiating Table

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  Napoleon's team at the negotiating table was a careful selection. He appointed his brother Joseph Bonaparte, a counselor of state named Emmanuel Cretet, and Etienne-Alexandre Bernier, a doctor in theology. Pope Pius VII countered with Cardinal Ercole Consalvi, Cardinal Giuseppe Spina who held the title of Archbishop of Corinth, and his theological adviser Father Carlo Francesco Maria Caselli. Six men in total, three from each side. Notably absent from the room were the French bishops themselves. Whether they were still living abroad in exile or had already returned to France, they had no seat at the table. The concordat as finally arranged, according to the historical record, practically ignored them. In April 1801, before the negotiations concluded, Napoleon told his brother Lucien his view of religion and power plainly: "Skillful conquerors have not got entangled with priests. They can both contain them and use them."

• 4. Terms of the Deal

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  The Concordat declared that Catholicism was "the religion of the great majority of the French," but stopped short of naming it the official state religion. That distinction preserved religious freedoms, especially for Protestants. The papacy won back the right to depose bishops, though the French government retained what it had held since the Concordat of Bologna in 1516: the power to nominate them. Clergy would receive their salaries from the state and in return swore an oath of allegiance. The Catholic Church, for its part, surrendered all claims to lands that had been confiscated after 1790. Those estates were gone for good, sold off during the Revolution and not to be returned. Sunday was formally restored as a festival day, effective Easter Sunday on the 18th of April 1802. The traditional Gregorian calendar itself, however, did not come back until the 1st of January 1806.

• 5. Who Really Won

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  Georges Goyau observed that the Organic Articles, promulgated in April 1802 as a companion to the Concordat, infringed in various ways on the spirit of the agreement. Napoleon had presented these additional laws as part of the package. They gave the state recognition to Protestants and Jews as well as Catholics, something the Church had not anticipated. Napoleon's approach to religion was frankly utilitarian. He could win the affections of French Catholics while simultaneously holding political leverage over Rome. The balance tilted firmly in his favor. He selected the bishops and supervised church finances. Catholic clergy returned from exile and from hiding, resuming their old places in their old churches, but the institution they returned to operated under a far more state-friendly arrangement than anything that had existed before the Revolution. The papacy had regained a foothold; Napoleon had gained a partner he could direct.

• 6. A Long Afterlife

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  The Concordat of 1801 stayed in force for over a hundred years. France finally abrogated it with the law of 1905, which formally separated church and state. But even that law did not reach everywhere. Alsace-Lorraine had been under German Empire control when the 1905 law passed, so the concordat's provisions never applied there in the same way. Under the local law of Alsace-Moselle, certain terms of the 1801 agreement remain in effect to this day. Napoleon had also extended similar arrangements to territories France controlled in Italy and Germany, spreading the concordat model beyond French borders.