From France's Cromwell to Consummate Brigand: North Atlantic Catholics and Napoleon, 1789-1815

Our examination of the correspondence of the members of the North Atlantic Catholic community shows that their attitude towards the Napoleonic regime in the years from 1789 to 1815 was not exceptional when placed against the substial uniformity of their attitude with regard of teh longer period from 1760 to 1829. Their main objective was the preservation of the Church through compromise and adaptation to the new political regimes. The North Atlantic clergy was as uniform in their attitude towards the Napoleonic regime as they had been towards the French Revolution. This does not mean that the clergy did not show a variety of opinions. At the beginning, Bonaparte was recognized as the man sent by Providence to restore the pre-revolutionary order and to return the Church to the institutional role it enjoyed during the Old Regime. After the Concordat of 1801, mainly on account of the treatment he inflicted on the pope, Napoleon started to be regarded as a tyrant whose objective was not to annihilate the Church, as the revolutionaries had tried to do before him, but rather to replace the pope in order to use the Church as a means to achieve full control over the world. Within this general framework, differences in emphasis can be detected. On the one side, the French émigré priests, whose fate was intimately linked to Napoleon's politics, were more inclined to pass from the early enthusiasm to the post-1801 hate. For their part, the North American bishops, such as Carroll and Plessis, less attentive to rumours and certainly less influenced by European vicissitudes, were not as seduced or vexed by the Emperor's personality and projects. All of them, at any rate, were equally relieved to receive the news of Napoleon' final defeat.