But their obvious incapacity for civil affairs enabled them
to venture on nothing more than a few coarse jests and clumsy
demonstrations. At the Easter celebration at Notre Dame in honour of
the ratification of the Concordat, one of them, Delmas by name,
ventured on the only protest barbed with telling satire: "Yes, a fine
piece of monkery this, indeed. It only lacked the million men who got
killed to destroy what you are striving to bring back." But to all
protests Bonaparte opposed a calm behaviour that veiled a rigid
determination, before which priests and soldiers were alike helpless.

In subsequent articles styled "organic," Bonaparte, without consulting
the Pope, made several laws that galled the orthodox clergy. Under the
plea of legislating for the police of public worship, he reaffirmed
some of the principles which he had been unable to incorporate in the
Concordat itself. The organic articles asserted the old claims of the
Gallican Church, which forbade the application of Papal Bulls, or of
the decrees of "foreign" synods, to France: they further forbade the
French bishops to assemble in council or synod without the permission
of the Government; and this was also required for a bishop to leave
his diocese, even if he were summoned to Rome. Such were the chief of
the organic articles. Passed under the plea of securing public
tranquillity, they proved a fruitful source of discord, which during
the Empire became so acute as to weaken Napoleon's authority. In
matters religious as well as political, he early revealed his chief
moral and mental defect, a determination to carry his point by
whatever means and to require the utmost in every bargain. While
refusing fully to establish Roman Catholicism as the religion of the
State, he compelled the Church to surrender its temporalities, to
accept the regulations of the State, and to protect its interests.
Truly if, in Chateaubriand's famous phrase, he was the "restorer of
the altars," he exacted the uttermost farthing for that restoration.

In one matter his clear intelligence stands forth in marked contrast
to the narrow pedantry of the Roman Cardinals. At a time of
reconciliation between orthodox and "constitutionals," they required
from the latter a complete and public retractation of their recent
errors. At once Bonaparte intervened with telling effect. So condign a
humiliation, he argued, would altogether mar the harmony newly
re-established. "The past is past: a