François-René de Chateaubriand: Memoirs from Beyond the Grave. Alex Andriesse translation. New York: New York Review Books, 2022.
Napoleon led a life parallel to Alexander the Great—the main difference being, as Chateaubriand has observed, that in modernity it is impossible to pass oneself off as a god. After his victory at Austerlitz over the allied forces of Austria and Russia, Napoleon engaged in badinage with the defeated Holy Roman Emperor, Francis II. “Were such sovereigns worth being slaughtered for?” No, but there was another Alexander, Czar Alexander I, who was worth fighting for. “After the Battle of Austerlitz, almost everything Bonaparte does is in error,” and the Russian Orthodox Christian Czar of Russia, neither a god nor a beast (no emulator of the lion or the fox) exposed those errors. “The designs of Providence were fulfilled no less surely than those of Napoleon: we can see both God and man together on the march,” the one unerring, the other not. If Hegel claimed that the arrival of Napoleon in Prussia in 1806 betokened the appearance of the Absolute Spirit, the Holy Spirit finally marched its rival right back again, a decade later. Although Napoleon reconstructed the burial vaults at the Church of Saint-Denis to house the bodies “the princes of his race,” not even he would be entombed there. “Man digs the grave, and God fills it.” To write memoirs from beyond the grave means, among other things, to write them from the vantage point of seeing how Providence worked things out. For himself, while Berlin, “this monument of philosophy, was crumbling on the banks of the Spree, I was in Jerusalem, visiting the imperishable monument of religion.”
More immediately, Austerlitz resulted in the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire, Francis II renouncing the imperial throne and becoming the founding emperor of Austria-Hungary as Francis I. With Napoleon the principal emperor of western Europe, having established the Confederation of the Rhine, Prussia would be free to unite the many German states, once Napoleon was disposed of, initiating the geopolitics of twentieth-century Europe. As early as the 1840s, Chateaubriand judged that although “Germany dreamed of political unity…it lacked the political education needed to attain liberty—just as Italy lacked the military education to attain it.” Chateaubriand considered the Confederation of the Rhine “a great unfinished work, which required a good deal of time and a special knowledge of the laws and interests of the nations” to realize, “but it fell quite suddenly to pieces in the mind of the man who had conceived it” because the triumph of Austerlitz turned Napoleon from the task of political founding toward the task of mere conquest. “All that remained of this profound scheme were a military and a fiscal machine,” as “once the genius of his early vision passed, Bonaparte thought of nothing but money and soldiers”: “the tax collector and recruiting officer took the place of the great man.” Even on that level, Providence had other ideas. By barring England from his continental system, Napoleon did help to spur the industrialization of France, Germany Switzerland, and Italy,” as intended, but it also “extended English trade to the rest of the globe,” extending the already formidable British Empire, still recovering from the loss of its North American possession.
One civil accomplishment Napoleon did undertake successfully was the integration of Jews in his new ‘confederal’ empire (not so confederal, since he selected the rulers of the several nations within it). He did this by calling for the convening of a “Grand Sanhedrin,” in imitation of the Sanhedrin of ancient Israel, consisting of prominent rabbinical and lay Jewish men, charged with establishing laws governing the legal status of Jews; these laws, promulgated in 1808, consisted of a ban on polygamy, permission to intermarry with Gentiles in civil, not religious, ceremonies, and acknowledgment of Jewish-Gentile brotherhood within the nations of the new empire (including the obligation to defend national territories alongside Gentiles). Chateaubriand is having none of this, falsely claiming that the agreement “let the finances of the world go to the stalls of the Jews, and thereby produced a fateful subversion in the social economy.” In fact, the new Sanhedrin banned usurious practices by Jews in their dealings with fellow Jews and Gentiles alike. While the actual intention of new set of laws was to promote Jewish assimilation (thus setting many German Jews against Orthodox Jews in eastern Europe), settling the so-called ‘Jewish problem’ along Napoleonic lines, Chateaubriand takes it to have been a (failed) attempted preliminary to the empire’s extension into the Holy Land.
Napoleon and Alexander I met at the Tilsit conference in 1807. They agreed to divide Europe between Turkey going to Russia, along with “whatever conquests the Muscovite armies could make in Asia,” while Bonaparte was free to consolidate Italy, take Spain, Portugal, and North Africa, thereby making the Mediterranean a French mare nostrum. In the event, Napoleon’s invasion of Spain diverted troops he would need against Russia in the war he soon would undertake against the czar, whom he believed to be “a fool.” But Alexander was only playing for time, “pretend[ing] to be a conquered prince.” “The politics of the West and the politics of the East did not depart from their usual character.”
In Italy, Rome attempted to dominate the papacy. “Perhaps it was the moral and religious power of the Holy See that Napoleon feared,” although by his bullying he only enhanced that power. “What drove Napoleon?” Chateaubriand asks, not for the first time. “It was “the evil side of his genius, his inability to remain at rest,” the same incapacity that caused him to botch the founding of the Confederation by making it a platform for new conquests. “An eternal gambler, when he wasn’t laying bets on new empires, he was chancing fantasies.” These, Chateaubriand suggests were fantasies spurred by libido dominandi. “All authority (even the authority of time and faith) not attached to him personally struck the emperor as usurpation.” He failed to “see that by persecuting Pius VII, and thus making himself guilty of pointless ingratitude”—the pope had participated in the ceremony crowning him Emperor—Napoleon “lost the advantage of passing, among Catholic populations, for the restorer of religion.” It is true, Chateaubriand concedes in proper Catholic fashion, that “Rome is always the world’s greatest prize.” Napoleon annexed the Papal States to the French Empire in 1809, a degradation of the papacy numbering among the “miserable outrages of sophomoric philosophy.” But “the lowering of the pontifical flag” and its replacement by the Tricolor “presaged glory and ruins” there, as it would do “in every corner of the world.” When the pope now excommunicated Napoleon, Napoleon had him arrested and imprisoned. “If the iniquitous invasion of Spain turned the political world against Bonaparte, the disagreeable occupation of Rome repulsed the moral world,” as Napoleon “alienated himself from both the nations and the churches, from both man and God.” Pius XII died in French custody. Chateaubriand reminds his readers that this was the pope he had met in the course of his ambassadorial duties in his brief diplomatic career under the Consulate. “May my remembrance of his torments pay the det of gratitude I owe him for the torments he blessed in Rome, in 1803,” when Chateaubriand was recovering from the loss of Madame de Beaumont.
In spring of 1809, yet another coalition, this consisting of England, Austria, and Spain, declared its opposition to Napoleon. The allies still did not fully understand the new kind of warfare Napoleon had invented, although they were learning. Chateaubriand calls it “large-scale war,” a notion “inspired by the conquests of the Republic, which had requisitioned the masses.” That is, Napoleon democratized warfare. Instead of small, aristocratic armies, anchored in castles, Napoleon, the man who could not rest, led his armies out into the enemy’s country, “uninterested in retreats” but instead concentrating his troops on a single point in the enemy’s line, breaking it. “This maneuver, which was peculiar to him, was well suited to French fury, but would never have worked with less agile and impetuous soldiers.” But the result of Napoleonic action was European reaction: “When France went to war, Europe, learned to march,” as “the masses have counterbalanced the masses.” Chateaubriand hopes that Europeans will return to “civilized warfare,” warfare “that leaves populations alone while a small number of soldiers do their duty” of defending their country instead of devastating others in “fields of carnage, which ultimately bring about no results commensurate with their calamities.” Looking ahead from the 1840s, Chateaubriand forecasts that “Europe, barring unforeseen events, will be fed up with fighting for a long time to come,” as “Napoleon killed war by blowing it out of proportion.” A long time to come turned out to be a century after Napoleon’s defeat, some seventy years after Chateaubriand wrote his memoirs. Even in the twenty-first century, such restraint seems to need relearning, once a generation that has learned it passes from the scene.
By marrying the Hapsburg Archduchess Marie Louise in 1810, Bonaparte “obtained the only thing he lacked”: a link to monarchic legitimacy. “He is now, in every sense, master of the ages—if only he had wished to settle at the summit,” from which he could survey a domain of more than 85 million persons, “half the population of Christendom.” His wrongly ordered soul prevented him from so wishing. “While he has the power to stop the world, he does not have the power to stop himself. He will go on until he has conquered the last crown, which gives meaning to all the others, the crown of misfortune.”
For “in the depths of his heart, Napoleon had retained a secret enmity for Alexander” of Russia. Russia remained formidable, a possible rival for control of Europe. The peace he had established with the czar was “a peace that Bonaparte’s character could not endure.” “By expanding the boundaries of France, Bonaparte had collided with the Russians, as Trajan, crossing the Danube, had collided with the Goths.” He formed an alliance with Austria and Prussia, while Turkey and Sweden aligned with Russia. In his new empire, “the French no longer recognized each other in the vastness of a country delimited by no natural border.” He had deranged the spirit of the city in his own country, “blinded by his hatred for the liberty of the nations”—his “hatred of constitutional governments [being] invincible.” And he failed to learn the geopolitical lesson of the Great European Plain: “that warlike people who inhabit the plains are condemned to be conquered,” as “all the various invaders of Europe have swooped down on the plains.” If Moses and Mohammad were armed prophets, Napoleon was an “armed poet.” Nero-like, “He wanted to ascend the Kremlin to sing and sign a decree on the theaters”—an allusion, Mr. Andriesse helpfully informs us, not only to Nero’s tyrannical antics but to Napoleon’s contemporaneous reorganization of the Comédie Française.
In May 1812, Napoleon headed the Conference of Dresden, whose attendees included the nominal rulers of the states composing his empire (“they are fighting over vassalage”). There, the Emperor gathered his polyglot armies for the invasion of Russia—680,000 infantry, 176,850 cavalry. Napoleon, Chateaubriand writes, “addressed himself to Destiny,” his counterpart, Alexander, addressed himself “to Providence.”
The Russians refused to engage in the kind of war Napoleon wanted to fight. They retreated, lengthening the French supply lines. Characteristically, “Bonaparte could not restrain himself” pushing forward. At times, he caught up with the Russians; after the Battle of Koldrina, “a murderous clash,” “French corpses were buried in haste, so that Napoleon could not measure the enormity of his losses.” September 1812 saw the Battle of Borodino, where Napoleon won a Pyrrhic victory in the bloodiest day of the Napoleonic Wars, seeing some 30,000 French imperial troops killed, wounded, or captured and more than 40,000 Russians taken in defense of their homeland.
Russian Field Marshall Mikhail Kutuzov, surrounded himself with Orthodox priests and religious icons. His soldiers prayed before battle, impressing a French officer who witnessed them by their piety, which “reminded me that the greatest of our kings, Charlemagne, also prepared for the most perilous of his undertakings with religious Christians.” Many among the French troops, sons of the Revolution, mocked the Russians for doing so, but one officer recalled, “our utter annihilation,” months later, “whose glory they cannot claim, since it was the manifest work of Providence, went to prove…that they had received what they had asked for.” In the battle at hand, however, “the French troops covered themselves with glory and demonstrated their great superiority over the Russian troops,” but “cursed be victories not won in defense of the homeland, which merely serve a conqueror’s vanity!” One of Napoleon’s generals “admitted that, on that important day, he no longer saw any signs of Napoleon’s genius.” As his difficulties mounted (the Russians continued to retreat, evading any decisive battle), Napoleon struggled. “We can find no other explanation for this other than in the very nature of the man. Adversity arrived, and its first touch froze him.” Unlike a Christian, ready to sacrifice, to suffer humiliation and injury, “prosperity alone left him with his faculties intact.”
“The Russians were withdrawing in good order to Moscow.” When Bonaparte’s army entered, the city’s governor-general, Fyodor Rostopchin, ordered the evacuated capital to be burned, “a decision [that] will go down in history as a heroic decision that saved one nation’s independence and contributed to the liberation of several others.” Chateaubriand concurs with the judgment of Madame de Staël: “This religious city has perished like a martyr whose spilled blood reinvigorates the brethren who survive.” Had Bonaparte seized Moscow, he would have “wrapped the world in his despotism like a mortuary sheet.” In destroying the city before he could do that, the Russians showed that “the rights of humanity come first.” “Speaking for myself, if the earth were an explosive globe, I wouldn’t hesitate to set it on fire were it a question of delivering my country from an oppressor. However, nothing less than the supreme interests of human liberty are needed to induce a Frenchman—his head covered in mourning and his eyes full of tears—to speak of a decision that would prove fatal to so many of his countrymen,” beginning with those who choked on the smoke or were crushed by collapsing arches and buildings. Bonaparte himself could only escape ingloriously “over the coals of a neighborhood that had already been reduced to ash.”
Bonaparte railed at what he took to be the madness of Rostopchin. “He who fails to understand greatness in another will not understand what it would mean for himself, when the time for sacrifices comes.” As for the czar, “Alexander betrayed no despondency when he learned of his adversities,” instead blessing “the hand that has chosen us to be first among nations in the cause of virtue and liberty.” As always, Chateaubriand understands the way men use words. To speak of God, virtue, and liberty pleases, reassures, and consoles a people. “How superior it is to those affected phrases, sadly scrounged from pagan locutions and defined by fatalism: it was to be they had to be, destiny drags them on!—empty phraseology, which is always barren, even when it refers to the most significant acts.” A century later, Russian rulers would take up exactly such language, and Russia has systematically ruined itself, ever since.
Having conquered an empty place, Bonaparte turned to the thought of attacking St. Petersburg. “Such were the new chimeras that filled Napoleon’s head”—chimeras, since “it is not possible to subjugate a nation whose last stronghold is the North Pole.” “The man was on the brink of madness, yet his dreams were still those of a great mind.” As he drew up his new plans, he lingered at Moscow, despite the threat of the Russian winter. “By delaying these few days”—thirty-five, to be precise—he “was sentencing the 100,000 men left to him to death.”
As he finally retreated from Moscow, the Russians counterattacked, cutting off his escape route. Passing back over one battlefield, the French saw that “the birds of the sky had not finished eating what we had sown when we passed that way again.” Kutuzov pursued, leisurely. “Just wait until the snow comes.” At Borodino, “a vast scene of butchery lay before them, with forty thousand corpses in various stages of decay.” Would they “soon be like the companions whose remains they had seen”? But Napoleon, “indifferent to the miseries of his soldiers, cared for nothing but his own interests.” One of his officers asked, “Is this the civilization we’re bringing to Russia?” Chateaubriand remarks, “When you have committed a reproachable act, Heaven imposes on you the sanction of witnesses.” With Napoleon, Chateaubriand himself is the most eloquent among them. “The Russian expedition was aa true extravagance, which all the civil and military authorities of the Empire had condemned.”
And what of the Russian dead? Who remembers them? “Who thinks of the peasants left behind in Russia? Are those rustics glad to have been at ‘the great battle beneath the walls of Moscow’? Perhaps I am the only one who, on autumn evenings, watching the birds of the north wheel high in the sky remembers that they have seen our countrymen’s graves.” Now that industrial companies have taken over that land, “with their furnaces and boilers,” the bones of the French “have been converted to animal black. That is what we are doing with the dead nowadays! These are the sacred rights of the new religion!”
Concurrent with this long retreat, a coup attempt failed in Paris, a sign of Napoleon’s waning authority. “The rights that Napoleon had founded on force were being destroyed, along with his forces, by Russia, while in the capital all it took was one man to cast them into doubt. Outside of religion, justice, and freedom, there are no rights at all”—none, that is, that can be secured. As for Napoleon himself, he took care to leave his troops behind, just after declaiming that he would never do so. After all, “Can I remain at the head of a rout?” Not if I am Napoleon. His great cavalry commander, Joachim Murat, lamented, “It is no longer possible to serve a madman. We are no longer safe with him. Not a prince in Europe believes his words or his treaties.”
The French Senate nonetheless ‘doubled down,’ providing another quarter of a million men under Napoleon’s command. But Napoleon could no longer overawe the Legitimists. Louis XVIII issued a proclamation “that would later be set down in a constitutional charter—the first hopes of liberty, which came to us from our ancient kings.” Czar Alexander addressed his own proclamation not the French but to all of Europe: “May there soon be nothing left of the bloodthirsty colossus who has threatened the continent with his endless criminality but a long-abiding memory of horror and pity!” And the pope repudiated the so-called Concordat of 1813, whereby Napoleon would have increased his power over the Church, thus “giving the signal to depose the oppressor of nations.” For his part, “Bonaparte declared that he had always wanted peace and that the world was in need of it. But this world no longer had any wish to serve him.” More, it wished to overthrow him, as England’s Duke of Wellington, “the fatal man,” opened a new front in the west of France and the “Young Germany” movement, spurred by the philosophy professor Johann Gottlieb Fichte, brought Prussian forces to bear on the side of Russia, marching to patriotic verses “full of religious feeling and sincere human nature that sang of God, loyalty, and Germany.” “The man whose life was a dithyramb in action fell only when the poets of Young Germany had sung and taken up the sword against their rival, Napoleon, the poet of arms,” who had claimed that he made his battle plans out of the dreams of his sleeping soldiers. Czar Alexander “shared their lofty sentiments, and he was in a position powerful enough to make their dreams a reality,” but eventually would allow himself “to be scared by the fearful monarchs around him,” who, unlike French Legitimists, did not want liberty, that is, constitutional monarchy. The absolutists of the Holy Alliance would deny political liberty to post-Napoleonic Europe, eventually bringing on the revolutions of 1848 in the years immediately after Chateaubriand wrote these words.
Reinforced, Napoleon careened on, losing the Battle of Leipzig in October 1813 and watching as Allied forces advanced across the Rhine in December. When the French legislature dared to tell him that he should restore political liberty to the country, he replied, while closing the legislature, “Do you wish to restore the sovereignty of the people? Very well, in that case, I declare myself the people, for I claim to be where sovereignty resides, now and forever.” Chateaubriand contents himself by remarking, “Never has a despot so emphatically explained his nature.”
Not Napoleonic ‘Destiny’ but divine Providence “had changed the fortunes of the world.” Napoleon departed for the eastern front while Pius VII, now liberated, made his triumphal return to the Vatican, “making his way amid hymns and tears, to the sound of bells and cries of ‘Long live the pope! Long live the head of the Church!'” Protestants turned out, saying, “Here is the greatest man of his age,” a living martyr. “Such is the greatness of true Christian society,” Chateaubriand writes, “where God ceaselessly mingles with men. Such is the superiority of the power of the weak, sustained by religion and adversity, over the power of the sword and the scepter.”
Chateaubriand himself had his own, literary, card to put down. He wanted the French to rise up against Napoleon before the foreign troops could defeat and overthrow him, to restore the Bourbon monarchy with institutions “modified to suit the times”—that is, institutions ensuring political liberty rather than the absolutism of Louis XIV, which Napoleon had attempted to revive. In the struggle of rival regimes that would wrack his country for a century and a half to come, Chateaubriand opposed radical, Jacobin republicanism, Napoleonic despotism, and socialism in defense of constitutional monarchy, a regime strong enough to defend France from foreign enemies (which would soon see a united Germany at the forefront) without engaging in wars of conquest, while maintaining domestic tranquility under the rule of law and of Christian, especially Catholic, moral authority. He made his argument in a pamphlet, Bonaparte et des Bourbons, but it was too late for any insurrection to stop the Allied armies.
“The war came and installed itself outside the gates of Paris”—the first time in centuries that “Paris had seen the smoke of enemy camps.” Defeated once again, Napoleon had returned to the capital, “leaving behind him the immense inferno of his pointless conquests.” Ever-scheming Talleyrand wanted to get rid of him and to replace him with the regency of Marie-Louise which of course he would head. It was too late for his schemes, as well. Paris surrendered on March 31, 1814, “within ten days of the anniversary of the Duc d’Enghien’s death.” Recalling Napoleon’s vicious injuries to Russia, Christian Czar Alexander refused vengefulness. “I am a just man, and I know that the French people are not to blame. The French are my friends, and I want to prove to them that I come to return good for evil. Napoleon is my only enemy.” He extended his protection over Paris, respecting “all its public institutions,” quartering only so many troops there as to guarantee civil order while the French “secure for yourself a government that will give peace to France and Europe both.” Not long after, having seen that “order, peace, and moderation reigned throughout” the city, “Alexander departed, leaving us our masterworks”—unlike Napoleon, he plundered no paintings or statues from the country he had conquered—and “our liberty, set down in the charter—a liberty we owed to his intelligence as well as to his influence.” “Chief of two supreme authorities, an autocrat of the sword and the church, Alexander alone, of all the sovereigns of Europe” (very much including the deposed Napoleon) “understood that France had reached an age of civilization at which she could only governed under a free constitution.” The Czar “considered himself merely an instrument of Providence and claimed nothing for himself.” When Louis XVIII entered Paris, Alexander kept out of sight. Most beautifully, when told by a Frenchman that his arrival “long been waited and wished for,” he replied, “I would have come sooner, had French valor not delayed me.” In all, “he appeared to be astonished by his triumph; his almost tender gaze wandered over a population he seemed to consider superior to himself,” “as if he felt he was a barbarian in our midst, as a Roman might have felt ashamed in Athens.”
It was at this point that the Chateaubriand’s pamphlet did have some good effect. Napoleon still had “more than forty thousand of the best soldiers on earth surround[ing] him,” and for his part, ever-scheming Talleyrand hoped to place the French crown on the four-year-old Napoleon II (as a former revolutionary, “he dreaded the Bourbons”), a policy consistent with Bonaparte’s own stated desire at the time. With the publication of Bonaparte et les Bourbons, “I flung myself headlong into the fray” in “an effort to tip the scales” in favor of Legitimacy. Later, Louis XVIII said that “my pamphlet was more advantageous than an army of a hundred thousand men,” and even Bonaparte allowed that “I have no reason to reproach Chateaubriand; he resisted me when I was still in power.” Chateaubriand courteously returns, “My admiration for Bonaparte has always been great and sincere, even when I was attacking him with all my might,” although cautioning his readers that the uncritical admiration of the Emperor among those who no longer remember the sufferings he inflicted during his years of tyranny distort the past and threaten France’s future. Like Alexander, Chateaubriand wants a life of Christian humility without personal or national humiliation, for himself and for his countrymen, and for the men of every country.
Such a life had been impossible under the regime of Napoleon. Under it, we French “no longer mattered.” “Everything belonged to Bonaparte: I have ordered, I have won, I have spoken; my eagles, my crown, my blood, my family, my subjects.” Even under the pseudo-republican oligarchy of the Jacobins, “we did not have the shame of being the property of a man,” and no foreigner invaded us, thanks to the valor and sacrifice of our own men. “Despite his enormous acquisitions,” Napoleon “succumbed not because he was defeated, but because France no longer wanted him. An important lesson! Let it never be forgotten that there is a germ of death in everything that offends human dignity.”
The French would re-learn this lesson in the 1940s. To that generation, Chateaubriand still spoke: “God, in His patient eternity, sooner or later brings justice to bear. In those moments when Heaven appears to sleep, it is a fine thing that honest men look on with disapproval, for this disapproval remains as a rein on absolute power. May France never repudiate the noble souls who dried out against her servitude when all were prostrate, when there were so many advantages to remaining prostrate, so many graces to receive in exchange for flattery, so many persecutions to reap for sincerities sown.”
In the end, Talleyrand got what he really wanted: power for himself. He negotiated with Alexander for permission to form a provisional government with himself as its president, even as he adroitly switched to backing the Bourbon Restoration. “From that moment forward, M. de Talleyrand seemed to be the arbiter of the world; his parlors became centers of negotiation.” Chateaubriand issues his riposte. “The first acts of the Restoration were entrusted to the barren Bishop of Autun.” [1] Alluding to the likelihood that Talleyrand owed his physical condition to syphilis, Chateaubriand remarks, “He infected this Restoration with sterility and passed on to it a germ of dishonor and death.”
Napoleon abdicated in April 1814. Departing for what would be only his first exile, at the island of Elba, Napoleon continued to hold Louis XVIII less legitimate than himself, since Louis was elected by the “lowly Senate,” while Napoleon had been chosen by “the unanimous wish of the people.” That he now departed in accordance with the nearly unanimous wish of the people he preferred not to notice. Chateaubriand, it is scarcely necessary to say, does.
Chateaubriand concludes his assessment of Napoleon’s character. “Bonaparte cannot be judged according to the rules we apply to the great geniuses, for he lacked magnanimity.” Unlike the great-souled man of Aristotle’s Ethics, Bonaparte could expand or condense his soul as conditions warranted. “Like the rebel angel, he could shrink his immeasurable mass down and fit himself into a measurable space; his ductility permitted him both salvation and rebirth,” enabling him to live in exile on an island and then return to France in a final attempt to regain his empire. “Changing his manners and costume at will, flawless in comedy and tragedy alike, he was an actor who could look natural under the tunic of a slave or the mantle of a king.” As such, he “was, in one person, all things great and miserable in man”—a consummate Machiavellian prince, waging a futile war against God and nature alike.
Note
- Talleyrand, an ordained priest, had risen to the station of Bishop of Autun by the eve of the French Revolution. He quickly metamorphosed into an open scoffer at religion, earning excommunication. Reinstated as a member of the Church at the beginning of the century, he was laicized by Pius VII in 1802, an act very much in line with prudential reasoning on the Pope’s part.
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