CONCORDAT OF 1801

The two men responsible for the Concordat of 1801 were motivated by practical and religious considerations. Napoleon Bonaparte, first consul of France by the end of 1799, saw the need to mend the religious conflict with Catholicism unleashed by the Civil Constitution of the Clergy (1790), which attempted to place the French church under government control. As Napoleon consolidated his power in France, the bishop of Imola, Barnaba Gregorio Chiaramonti, was elected pope as Pius VII in mid-March 1800. Having preached that revolutionary ideas need not be in conflict with Catholicism, he extended an olive branch to the French. Napoleon, sensing that the French had wearied of the religious conflict, sought a settlement with Rome. Motivated by the prospect of restoring millions of souls to the church, Pius VII concurred.

Serious negotiations commenced in November 1800, on Napoleon's three basic conditions: the reinstitution of the church with a new episcopacy, the state assumption of the clergy's salaries, and the clerical renunciation of former church properties. The parties aimed to end the schism in France by reconciling the Roman religion and the Revolution, with both sides willing to ignore the thorny question of temporal power,

which the French had truncated. There were stumbling blocks, including Rom's desire to have Catholicism established as the religion of state and the French reluctance to make this concession. Napoleon dispatched emissaries to Rome in March 1801, instructing them to treat the pontiff as if he had two hundred thousand bayonets at his disposal. On 15 July 1801, an agreement consisting of two declarations and seventeen articles was approved.

In the first of the declarations that formed a crucial preamble, the republic recognized Catholicism as the faith of the great majority of the French. The second promised that this religion could expect the greatest good from the restoration of public worship and from its profession by the consuls of the republic—although Article 17 provided for the eventuality of a first consul who might not be of the faith. The articles arranged for the reorganization of the church, with 60 dioceses in place of the 135 under the ancien régime. Provision was made for the resignation of all the present archbishops and bishops; their replacements were to be named by the first consul, but their canonical institution was reserved to the pope. The bishops were to appoint parish priests from a list approved by the government. In turn, the papacy specified it would not dispute the church property confiscated by the republic, nor trouble the conscience of those who had purchased it. In exchange, the state promised to return the religious edifices it retained, while providing salaries for the clergy. The Roman faith was to enjoy full freedom of public worship, and its adherents were permitted to provide foundations in land or money on its behalf.

On 15 August 1801 Pius VII ratified the Concordat, issuing two encyclicals to the bishops of France. In the first, he related the rationale for the agreement, outlining its principal clauses. In the second, he required the resignation of the entire French hierarchy, so that new appointments might be made in accordance with Article 5 of the Concordat. This extraordinary exercise of papal power represented a deathblow to Gallicanism (the traditional resistance to papal authority within French Catholicism). Skirting the issue of the temporal dominions, the accord secured for the pope the right not only to invest bishops, which he had previously possessed, but also under certain conditions to depose them, which in France represented an innovation.

Neither Paris nor Rome appeared totally satisfied with the agreement, although both drew substantial benefits. Pius appreciated the reestablishment of the Catholic hierarchy in France, the restoration of Catholic worship, and the abandonment of the religious innovations of the revolutionaries. The centralization it sanctioned in the French church clearly reinforced the position of the papacy. Napoleon, for his part, inherited the prerogatives of the monarchy vis-à-vis the church and the clergy. Furthermore, he achieved the laicization of sovereign power while depriving the royalist opposition to his regime of the most potent weapon in its arsenal.

In April 1802 the French legislature approved the Concordat, along with the Organic Articles for its implementation. Most of the measures in this lengthy appendix dealt with the relationship of the state to the Catholic Church, seeking to establish control of the former over the latter, while restricting the rights of the Holy See in France. Papal bulls, briefs, decrees, and even legates could not be received in France without governmental approval. Under its terms bishops were forbidden to leave their dioceses while obliging them to submit to state authorities the rules of their seminaries. These rules had to include adherence to the four Gallican Articles of 1682, which curtailed the powers of the French church while limiting the power of the pope therein. Additional articles stressed the primacy of civil matrimony and determined the holy days to be publicly celebrated. In his allocution of 24 May 1802, announcing the implementation of the Concordat, Pius praised the efforts of Napoleon in achieving the religious rapprochement, but deplored the Organic Articles and called for their modification.

Napoleon, likewise, had reservations about the accord and unsuccessfully sought to replace it with the coerced "Concordat of Fontainebleau" of January 1813. The 1801 Concordat survived Napoleon's downfall in 1815 and was recognized by the restored monarchy. It guided church-state relations in France throughout the nineteenth century and was repudiated only in 1905, when the Third Republic introduced a complete separation of church and state.

See alsoCatholicism; French Revolution; Napoleonic Empire; Separation of Church and State (France, 1905).

bibliography

Primary Sources

Boulay de la Meurthe, Alfred, ed. Documents sur la négociation du Concordat et sur les autres rapports de la France avec le Saint-Siège en 1800 et 1801. 6 vols. Paris, 1891–1905.

"Convention between the French Government and His Holiness Pius VII." In Controversial Concordats: The Vatican's Relations with Napoleon, Mussolini, and Hitler, edited by Frank J. Coppa, 191–193. Washington, D.C., 1999.

Secondary Sources

O'Dwyer, Margaret M. The Papacy in the Age of Napoleon and the Restoration: Pius VII, 1800–1823. Lanham, Md., 1985.

Roberts, William. "Napoleon, the Concordat of 1801, and Its Consequences." In Controversial Concordats: The Vatican's Relations with Napoleon, Mussolini, and Hitler, edited by Frank J. Coppa, 34–80. Washington, D.C., 1999.

Walsh, Henry H. The Concordat of 1801: A Study of the Problem of Nationalism in the Relations of Church and State. New York, 1933. Reprint, New York, 1967.

Frank J. Coppa

Concordat. An agreement between a religious group and the government of a country on matters of mutual concern. Thus the Vatican entered into concordats with both Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. An important model is the Pactum Callixtinum, or Concordat of Worms (1122) whereby the contest between the Popes and the Holy Roman Emperors over the right to appoint bishops was resolved in favour of the Popes.

concordat Agreement between Church and State, regulating relations on matters of common concern. The term is usually applied to treaties between individual states and the Vatican City.