Under Napoleon, the successor of
Charlemagne, the Pope can be only a vassal: "Your Holiness is the
sovereign of Rome, but I am its emperor," the legitimate suzerain.
"Provided with "fiefs and counties" by this suzerain, the Pope owes
him political fealty and military aid; failing in this, the endowment,
which is conditional, lapses and his confiscated estates return to the
imperial domain to which they have never ceased to belong.[35] Through
this reasoning and this threat, through the rudest and most adroit
moral and physical pressure, the most insidious and most persevering,
through spoliation, begun, continued and completed by the abduction,
captivity and sequestration of the Holy Father himself, he undertakes
the subjection of the spiritual power: not only must the Pope be like
any other individual in the empire,[36] subject by his residence to
territorial laws, and hence to the government and the gendarmerie, but
again he must come within the administrative lines; he will no longer
enjoy the right of refusing canonical investiture to bishops appointed
by the emperor,[37] "he will, on his coronation, swear not to take any
measures against the four propositions of the Gallican Church,"[38] he
will become a grand functionary, a sort of arch-chancellor like
Cambac?r?s and Lebrun, the arch chancellor of the Catholic cult.
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