clergy, through the suppression of the officialite; through the
reduction of chapters to the state of vague shadows, through the rupture
or laxity of the local and moral tie which once attached every member of
the clergy to a piece of land, to an organized body, to a territory, to
a flock, and through the lack of ecclesiastical endowment, through the
reduction of every ecclesiastic, even a dignitary, to the humble and
precarious condition of a salaried dependent.[5344]

A regime of this kind institutes in the body subject to it an almost
universal dependence, and hence entire submission, passive obedience,
and the stooping, prostrate attitude of the individual no longer able to
stand upright on his own feet.[5345] The clergy to which it is applied
cannot fail to be managed from above, which is the case with this
one, through its bishops, the Pope's lieutenant-generals, who give the
countersign to all of them. Once instituted by the Pope, each bishop
is the governor for life of a French province and all-powerful in
his circumscription we have seen to what height his moral and social
authority has risen, how he has exercised his command, how he has kept
his clergy under discipline and available, in what class of society he
has found his recruits, through what drill and what enthusiasm every
priest, including himself, is now a practiced soldier and kept in check;
how this army of occupation, distributed in 90 regiments and composed
of 50,000 resident priests, is completed by special bodies of troops
subject to still stricter discipline, by monastic corporations, by four
or five thousand religious institutions, nearly all of them given to
labor and benevolence; how, to the subordination and correct deportment
of the secular clergy is added the enthusiasm and zeal of the regular
clergy, the entire devotion, the wonderful self-denial of 30,000 monks
and of 120,000 nuns; how this vast body, animated by one spirit,
marches steadily along with all its lay supporters towards one end. This
purpose, forever the same, is the maintenance of its dominion over all
the souls that it has won over, and the conquest of all the souls over
which it has not yet established its domination.

Nothing could be more antipathetic to the French State. Built up like
the Church, after the Roman model, it is likewise authoritative and
absorbent. In the eyes of Napoleon, all these priests appointed or
sanctioned by him, who have sworn allegiance to him,