Napoleon. After he had been thrown into captivity, however, he flatly
refused to continue, and the Emperor cut the knot by installing in the
bishoprics, as they fell vacant, men of his own choice, under the
style of "vicars of the chapters."

This was but the initial step to an entire destruction of the
administrative scheme devised and perfected by the Roman hierarchy.
The college of cardinals had first been brought to Paris, and its
members then banished in pairs to the great provincial towns; the
ecclesiastical courts, with all their archives, were likewise
transplanted from Rome to the French capital; the thirty episcopates
of the two new French departments were reduced to four; the army of
foreign prelates which had been supported by the papal system was
dispersed into the various lands from which its members had come. The
number of Roman parishes, too, was reduced, and all the convents were
secularized. Such of the discharged priests as were ready to swear
allegiance to the Emperor and the Gallican Church received a small
pension; the rest--and they appear to have been in a majority--saw
their personal as well as ecclesiastical goods confiscated and were
themselves exiled.

These or similar measures being applied likewise to Piedmont, Liguria,
Tuscany, Parma, and Placentia, the sums of money raised from
confiscated estates became enormous. A large proportion of these funds
flowed of course into the imperial coffers, and to this fact, as well
as to the restored public confidence, was largely due the rise in
prices on the stock exchange which occurred on the consummation of the
Austrian marriage. These sweeping changes were of great service to
true religion and to the lands in which they were made, breaking as
they did the chains of an ecclesiastical oppression under which the
populace had been reduced to poverty, ignorance, and apathy.
Unfortunately the new rule, while more economical than the old, was
not less arbitrary--military despotism being as little fitted for the
development of a people as the rule of a corporation. Men looked
aghast as the papacy and papal influence crumbled together, while the
seat of real ecclesiastical power was removed from the banks of the
Tiber to those of the Seine. Time seemed to be taking its revenge.
Seven centuries earlier Lothair had been the vassal of Innocent II;
Napoleon was now the suzerain of Pius VII. So contemptible had the
Pope become, even in the eyes of devout Catho