which at least appears practicable, on a matter more rounded with practical difficulties than perhaps any other of the time. But we confidently cherish the hope, that on maturer reflection he will himself see how serious is the peril, to which he would expose the highest Catholic interests. His proposal is to agitate for the admission of non-resident candidates to Oxford and Cambridge degree examinations, with the view of Catholic students thither resorting.

To discuss this proposal point by point and in its practical details, is a task which we must reserve for our future article ; but it will not be entirely out of place here, to exhibit what we consider the fundamental fallacy of its principle. The writer seems to forget, that on all the most critical and important matters which fall under the province of higher education, Catholics and non-Catholics are irreconcileably hostile; are waging against each other internecine war. It does seem an extraordinary thought, to suggest that we constitute our enemies judges of our proficiency in the use of those arms, which we are learning to handle for the avowed purpose of mortally wounding the proposed judges themselves. They will be certainly very unwilling to confess, even in their own thoughts, that their deadly foe is equally skilled in the use of his weapon with their trusted defender.

Let us give an imaginary instance, as illustrating what we mean; an instance which we consider entirely parallel. In those days when the war between Catholicity and Calvinism was at its highest, and in some country most preponderatingly Calvinistic, a Catholic suggests that Catholic theological students shall compete in theology with Calvinists before Calvinistic examiners. He assures his co-religionists that the examination turns entirely on the question of theological ability and information, not at all on that of theological truth. He dwells on the paucity of Catholics in the kingdom, and their consequent deficiency in means for adequate competition; and entreats them to supply that defect by the method which he suggests. It is very certain that ecclesiastical authorities would turn a deaf ear on such a proposal: nor do we think it probable that they will be at all more favourably disposed to the present.

This is the objection of principle which occurs at the very first blush. As to details and particulars, we are confident that the more this plan is examined the more open it will be found to most serious exception; we are confident that it can have no effect except that of inflicting most deadly injury on the very cause which its originator desires to promote. But on this we are to insist in our future article.

ART. V.-THE CHURCH AND NAPOLEON I.

L'Eglise Romaine et le Premier Empire 1800-1814.

THE

Par M. LE COMTE D'HAUSSONVILLE. 3 vols., 8vo. Paris. Lévy. 1868.

HE three volumes before us are a reprint of the part which has already appeared of a series of articles in the Revue des deux Mondes. We have still to expect the continuation, which will fill at least one, if not more additional volumes, and the three now published leave us (as is so often the case with the second volume of a novel) exactly in the most exciting crisis of the narrative. Still, although we feel an eagerness for the remainder of the work, which could hardly be much greater if the conclusion of the struggle it relates were not already known to all the world, we are not disposed to wait for it before introducing our readers to the portion which has already appeared. The fact is, that a very large part of the details of the narrative are new, not only to English but even to French readers. We must confess that we were quite unprepared to suspect the existence of so many hitherto unpublished sources of information as the diligence of M. D'Haussonville has discovered. Looking at the volumes of M. Thiers, as multitudinous and massive as they are eloquent and lively, and still more at the one and twenty vast tomes of the Napoleon correspondence, published by order of the present emperor, which contain the portion of his uncle's letters written before 1811, we supposed that diligence, fairness, skill, and judgment in working quarries in these great mountains of facts, was all that could be required of him who should give, in a separate form, the history of Napoleon's dealings with the Church. Such, however, was not the case. M. Thiers, although, as a matter of course, he relates what may be called the public and external events, apparently does not understand, and certainly does not state or explain, the principles and motives which, on the side of the Pope, were the real causes of these events. The Napoleon correspondence, if it were complete, would of course give all that could be desired on the side of the emperor. Unfortunately, it is not complete. What other documents are omitted intentionally or not, we cannot say. That those which throw most light upon the conduct of Napoleon towards the Pope have been omitted, not

because their importance was not appreciated, but expressly because they revealed facts which the authorities of the second Empire think it most prudent to conceal-M. D'Haussonville proves to demonstration. It appears that the charge of publishing the invaluable documents preserved in the different official registers of Paris and elsewhere, was committed, by Napoleon III., to a commission, at the head of which was placed his cousin, Prince Jerome Napoleon. This commission were to publish the documents entire, and M. D'Haussonville bears testimony to the fidelity with which they performed their task. But, after fifteen volumes had appeared, the old commission was cancelled and a new one issued. What change was made in the members of the commission we are not told. Prince Napoleon was still President. But a more important change was made. In the Preface to the sixteenth volume of the correspondence they declare that, in future, it will be their object to publish only those documents which present such a picture of Napoleon as the commissioners believe that he himself would have wished to have presented to posterity, if he could have survived to see the publication. Perhaps no man ever lived who would have wished that such a disclosure of his conduct and motives should be wholly complete and fair. However that may be, it is most certain that Napoleon I. was not that man. All the world knew before, what certainly no reader of the volumes before us could fail to learn if he had not already known it, that at every period of his life, whether in war or peace, falsehood of the grossest and most outrageous character, was the instrument which he used most freely, naturally, and spontaneously. In war, we have been told, all stratagems are allowed. This military maxim, it seems, had so completely occupied the whole soul of Napoleon I. that he applied it not merely to military affairs, but to all in which he took any part. It is truly surprising that although his vast genius enabled him to perceive, by a happy instinct, almost every other propriety of the exalted rank to which he had raised himself, yet never at any period of his greatness, not even when he was, and loved to call himself, Emperor, not of France, but of the West; when Kings and Queens, the representatives of the proudest dynasties, accounted themselves honoured by being allowed to follow him at the most deferential distance; never, even then, did he consider it beneath his dignity to practise, in his own person, the most humiliating frauds, and solemnly to utter in his own person falsehoods which, if he wished them to be told, he might at least have left to some subordinate agent. The sovereign who had the absolute command of such a tool as Fouché was clearly

under no necessity to take this portion at least of his dirty work into his own hands. Yet, immediately after the peace of Tilsit, when every European power, except England, was at his feet; and when he had attained a greatness quite without example since the reign of Charlemagne, we find Napoleon condescending to write a letter to his adopted son, Eugene Beauharnais, his viceroy in Italy, in which he attempted, by the most violent threats, to shake the resolution of Pius VII. This letter to the viceroy he was to copy; and to enclose it in another addressed in his own name to the Pope. But Napoleon would not trust him to compose it. He wrote every word of the letter from Eugene to the Pope, with his own hand. Eugene was only to copy and sign it. It began, "I inclose to your Holiness an extract from a long letter which I have received from my most honoured father and Sovereign at Dresden. Your Holiness will permit me to say, that the disputes raised at Rome are calculated to provoke a great Monarch, who is deeply penetrated with religious sentiments, and who feels the immense services which he has rendered to religion in France, in Italy, in Germany, in Poland, and in Saxony. He is well aware that the world regards him as the column of the Christian faith, and the enemies of religion as a Prince who has restored to the Catholic religion in Europe the supremacy she had lost." After some more language of this sort was to come the Emperor's letter to the Prince, and then Eugene, once more in his own name, was to write; "Holy Father, this letter was not intended to be sent to the eyes of your Holiness!" Napoleon ended the whole in his own name to his adopted son, "You will send this letter to the Pope, and write to me at Paris."

It is plain enough that Napoleon was the last man to scruple about giving a false impression of his conduct and motives, and that no rule could less conduce to historical truth than that of publishing only what he would wish to have been published had he still survived. But this applies specially to his correspondence with Pius VII. and his ministers. Upon this point we are not left to conjecture, for we find that*"Napoleon thought fit to cause a great number of papers relating to his dealings with the Holy See to be burned; no doubt because he considered them injurious to his reputation. This was executed at Rome by General Miollis, at Paris by the chief of the archives of the late office of Secretary of State. But authentic copies of these curious documents have escaped destruction." Of these copies large use is made in the

* Vol. ii, p. 298.

volumes before us, and page after page there are letters painting most graphically the scenes going on at Rome, and in particular the orders and wishes of Napoleon himself. But to almost every one of these extracts is a footnote: "Not included in the Napoleon correspondence."

Hence it is that to almost every one of the most curious events of which he gives us the details, M. D'Haussonville adds that it has been hitherto quite unknown in France. In many instances the facts most clearly proved by these documents are among those most exactly contrary to the positive statements of Napoleon in the reminiscences which he dictated to his companions in exile in St. Helena. As a striking example, we may mention his statement that "at no time were more than fifty-three priests under restraint (retenus), in consequence of the dispute with Rome, and in their case the restraint was exceedingly slight." Upon this assertion our author says:—

Following my constant custom, I undertake to make Napoleon refute himself, and that by his own letters, the authentic copies of which lie before me. True, they are not included in the official correspondence of Napoleon ; but I am sure that the persons who have not thought it expedient to publish them (no doubt because they exhibit the Emperor in a different light from that in which he would have wished to be represented to posterity) will feel it even less expedient to contradict them. When the Emperor put down this exact number of fifty-three priests, who were the only ecclesiastics "put under restraint" (retenus), in consequence of the dispute with Rome, he had no doubt forgotten (such things are easily forgotten) that, without counting any of those who may have been "put under restraint," in virtue of his general orders, he had, with his own hand, given orders to put under restraint, in Italy alone, a number infinitely greater. I suppose it was a similar failure of memory, less easily explained in that case, which induced the editors of the official correspondence to omit these orders, so numerous and so ruthless.

He then shows that in a single year Napoleon himself gave express orders by which, in the Roman States only, thirteen cardinals, nineteen bishops, and "a multitude of canons and grand vicars, the number of which it is difficult to ascertain," were sent from Rome to France, and placed under restraint, under the surveillance of the imperial police in different provincial towns, and, moreover, above two hundred priests were transported to Corsica. (Napoleon by no means considered the island where he was born a paradise.) The number arbitrarily arrested in France itself, and thrown without trial into different prisons, no one can now estimate. Of this last