his
functionaries.

IV. The Pope, Napoleon's employee.

Other services expected of the Pope.--Coronation of Napoleon
at Notre-Dame.--Napoleonic theory of the Empire and the Holy
See.--The Pope a feudatory and subject of the Emperor.
--The pope installed as a functionary at Paris, and
arch-chancellor on spiritual matters.--Effect of this for Italy.

Over and above this positive and real service obtained from the
sovereign pontiff, he awaits others yet more important and undefined,
and principally his future coronation in Notre Dame. Already, during the
negotiations for the Concordat, La Fayette had observed to him with a
smile:[5133] "You want the holy oil dropped on your head"; to which he
made no contradictory answer. On the contrary, he replied, and probably
too with a smile: "We shall see! We shall see!" Thus does he think
ahead, and his ideas extend beyond that which a man belonging to the
ancient regime could imagine or divine, even to the reconstruction of
the empire of the west as this existed in the year 800. "I am not Louis
XIV.'s successor," he soon declares,[5134] "but of Charlemagne.... I am
Charlemagne, because, like Charlemagne, I unite the French crown to
that of the Lombards, and my empire borders on the Orient." In this
conception, which a remote history furnishes to his boundless ambition,
the terrible antiquitarian finds the gigantic and suitable framework,
the potent, specious terms, and all the verbal reasons he requires.
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.[5135] 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,[5136] subject by his
residence to territorial laws, and hence to the government and the
gendarmerie, but again he must come within