Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 10.djvu/769

 NAPOLEON

699

NAPOLEON

your Majesty does not believe one word of what you have just been saying". "You are right", said the emperor. "At any rate it helps to pass an hour."

Napoleon was not an unbeliever; but he would not admit that anyone was above himself, not even the pope. "Alexander the Great", he once said to Fontanes, "declared himself the son of Jupiter. And in my time I find a priest who is more powerful than I am ". This transcendent pride dictated his religious policy and utterly vitiated it. By the Concordat, as Talleyrand said, he had "done not only an act of jus- tice, but also a very clever act, for by this one deed he had rallied to himself the sympathies of the whole Catholic world." But the same Talleyrand declares, in his "Memoires", that his struggle with Rome was produced by "the most insensate ambition", and that when he wished to deprive the pope of the institution of bishops, "he was all the more culpable because he had had before him the errors of the Constituent As- sembly". This double judgment of the former Con- stitutional bishop, later the emperor's minister of foreign affairs, will be accepted by posterity. By a strange destiny, this emperor who travelled all over Europe, and whose attitude towards the Catholic reli- gion was in a measure inherited from the old Roman emperors, never set foot in Rome; through him Rome was for many years deprived of the presence of the remotest successor of St. Sylve.ster and of Leo III; but the successor of Constantine and of Charlemagne did not see Rome, and Rome did not see him.

Chief Sources. — Correspondance de Napoleon premier (1858- sqq.) : Lecestre. Lettres inedites de Napoleon I (Paris, 1897) ; (Euvres de Napoleon Bonaparte (Paris. 1822); Memoires dictes a Sainte-Hilene, ed. Lacroix (Paris, 1904); L.tB Casas, Memorial de Sainte-Heline (London, 1853); Memoirs of Chateaubriand and Talleyrand.

General Works. — Thiers, The Consulate and the Empire under Napoleon (tr. London, 1893); Allison, History of Europe from the commencement of the French Revolution to the restoration of the Bourbons (Edinburgh, 1.849-185S) : Rose, The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Era (Cambridge, 1907); HAZLlTr, Life of Napoleon Bonaparte (London, 1894); Watson, Napoleon, a Sketch of his Life (New York, 1902) ; Sloane, Life of Napoleon Bonaparte (New- York, 1896) ; Taine, Modern Regime, tr. Durand (London, 1904); Levy, Napoleon intime (Paris, 1893; reprinted, Edin- burgh, 1910); Masson, NapoUon dans sajeunesse (Paris. 1907); Idem, NapoUon el sa famille (Paris, 1897-1907); Idem, Napoleon et son fits (Paris, 1904); Idem, NapoUon inconnu (Paris, 1895); Idem, Josephine empress and queen, tr. Hoey (London, 1899). In France Fr6d6ric Masson is now the foremost student of Napo- leonic history. His numerous works are indispensable for a knowledge of the Empire.

Special Studies: — His Religious Sentiments. — Bouegine, Pre- miere communion et fin chretienne de NapoUon (Tours, 1897) ; Fischer, NapoUon I, dessen Lebens und Charaktersbild mil beson- derer RUcksicht auf seine Sidling zur christlichen Religion (Leipzig, 1904). //{.'' Youth. — Chuquet, La jeunesse de Napoleon (Paris, 1897-98); BROWSlsr,. Boyhood and Yo^Uh of Napoleon, 1780-1793 (London, 1906). The Coming of Napoleon. — Vandal, Av^nement de Bonaparte (Paris, 1902-1907). Relations with England. — Co- QUELLE. Napoleon and England (1808-1813), tr. Knox (London, 1904); Levy, Napoleon et la paiz (Paris, 1902); Wheeler and Broadley, Napoleon and the Invasion of England, the story of the Great Terror (London, 1908); Alqer, Napoleons British visitors and captives (Westminster, 1904) ; Grand Carteret, Napoleon en images, estampes anglaises (Paris. 1895) ; Ashton. English Caricature and Satire on Napoleon I (London, 1884). Relations with Spain. — de Grandmaison, L'Espagne sous NapoUon (Paris, 1908). The Divorce. — Welschinger, Le divorce de NapoUon (Paris, 1889); Rineri, Napoleone e Pio VII (.1804-1813) (Turin. 1906). Relations with Russia. — Vandal, NapoUon et .Alexandre I (Paris, 1891-1894); De .SiouR, Histoire de NapoUon et de la Grande-.irmie pendant I'annie 1812 in the Nelson collection (Edin- burgh. 1910). The End. — Wolseley, Decline and Fall of Napo- leon (London, 1895) ; Rosebehy, Napoleon, the Last Phase (London, 1900); Browning, Fall of Napoleon (tondon. 1907); HoussAYE, 18H (Paris, 1888); Idem, 1815 (Paris, 1893-99); Idem, Waterloo, tr. Mann (London, 1900); Seaton, Napoleon's captivity in relation to ISir Hudson Lowe (London, 1903).

Italian and Religious Policy. — De Barral, Fragments relatifs d Vhistoire ecclesiaslique du 19' siicle (Paris, 1814); De Pradt, Les qualre concordats (Paris, 1818); Ricard, Correspondance diplo- matique et papiers inedits du cardinal Maury (Paris, IS^l). Works of Erudition. — Bouvieh, Bonaparte en Italic: 1796 (Paris, 1899); Drlaclt, NapoUon en Italic (Paris. 1906); D'Haussonville. L'egliseromaine et le premier empire (P&ri9, 1868): Welschinger, Le pape et Vempereur ISOi-lSlS (Paris. 190.5); RiNIEHl, Napo- leone e Pio VII, 1804-1813 (Turin, 1906) ; Madelin, La Rome de NapoUon: la domination fran^aise d Rome de 1809 d 1814 (Paris, 1906); Chotard. Le pape Pie VII d Savone (Paris, 1887); Destram. La deportation des prUres sous NapoUon I in Rev. Hist., XI (1879); De Lanzac de Laboric, Paris sous NapoUon:

la religion (Paris, 1907); Lyonnet, Histoire de Mgr d' Avian (Paris, 1847) ; Meric, Histoire de M. Emery (Paris, 1895) : db Grandmaison, NapoUon et les Cardinaux noirs (1895) ; Caussette, Vie du Card, d' Astros (Paris, 1853) ; Guillaume, Vie ipiscopale de Mgr d'Osmond (Paris, 1862) ; Marmottan, ^institution cano- nique et NapoUon I: I'archevSque d'Osmond d Florence in Revue Historique,LXXX\l (1904); see also bibliographies to (Concordat OF 1801; Articles, The Organic; Pius VI; Pius VII. For a fuller bibliography of the subject, consult Kirchheisen, Biblio- graphie de V^poque de Napoleon I (Paris, 1908) ; Davois, Biblio- graphie NapoUonienne fran^aise jusqu'en 1908, I (Paris, 1909); Rivista Napoleonica (1901 sqq.).

Georges Gotau.

Napoleon III (Charles-Louis-Napol^on), orig- inally known as Louis-Napoleon-Bonaparte, Em- peror of the French; b. at Paris, 20 April, 1808; d. at Chiselhurst, England, 6 January, 1873; third son of Louis Bonaparte, King of Holland and Hortense de Beauharnais, daughter of the Empress Josephine. After the fall of the First Empire, Hortense, who had been separated from her husband, took her two sons to Geneva, Aix in Savoy, Augsburg, and then (1824) to the castle of Arenenberg in .Switzerland. Louis Napoleon had for tutor the scholar Le Bas, son of a member of the Convention. The ' ' principle of nation- alities " attracted him in youth, and with his brother, he took part in an attempted insurrection in the States of the Church, in 1831. He was on the point of setting out for Poland when he heard that the Russians had entered Warsaw. On the death of the Duke of Reich- stadt (1832) he regarded himself as the heir of the Napoleonic Empire. The Republican press, engaged in a struggle with Louis Philippe's government, mani- fested a certain sympathy for Louis Napoleon. Though Casimir P(?rier had expelled him from France in 1831, he and a few officers from Strasburg at- tempted, but failed in, a coup de main (1836). In his book, "Idees Napoleoniennes", published in 1838, he appears as the testamentary executor of Napoleon I and a bold social reformer. His attempted descent on Boulogne, in August, 1840, resulted in a sentence of life imprisonment, notwithstanding his defence by Berryer. While in prison at Ham, he wrote, among other brochures, one on the "Extinction of Pauper- ism". He escaped from Ham in 1846. After the Revolution of 1848 he returned to Paris, became a member of the Constituent Assembly, and finally was elected President of the Republic by 5,,562,834 votes, on 10 December, 1848.

Presidenaj of Louis Napoleon. — Before his election Louis Napoleon had entered into certain engagements with Montalembert in regard to freedom of teaching and the restoration of Pius IX, who had been driven to Gaeta by the Roman Revolution. When General Oudinot's expedition made its direct attack on the Roman Republic, April, 1849, and the Constituent Assembly passed a resolution of protest (7 May, 1849), a letter from Louis Napoleon to Oudinot requested him to persist in his enterprise and assured him of reinforcements (8 May, 1849) ; at the same time, how- ever, Louis Napoleon sent Ferdinand de Lesseps to Rome to negotiate with Mazzini, an agreement soon after disavowed. In this way the difficulties of the future emperor reveal themselves from the beginning; he wished to spare the religious susceptibilities of French Catholics and to avoid offending the national susceptibilities of the Italian revolutionists — a double aim which explains many an inconsistency and many a failure in the religious policy of the empire. "The more we study his character, the more nonplussed we are", writes his historian, de la Gorce. Oudinot's vic- tory (29 June, 1849) having crushed the Roman RepubHc, Napoleon, ignoring the decided Catholic majority in the Legislative Assembly elected on 18 May, addressed to Colonel Ney, on 18 August, 1849, a sort of manifesto in which he asked of Pius IX a general amnesty, the secularization of his administra- tion, the establishment of the Code Napoleon, and a Liberal Government. The Legislative Assembly, on