National Council of Paris

Since the seizure of Pius VII in 1809 the conflict had been stuck on one precise point. The Concordat gave the Emperor the right to name bishops, but the pope the right to confer canonical institution on them, without which they could not exercise their office. A prisoner at Savona, Pius VII refused to institute anyone.

The paralysis spread: some thirty sees were vacant, and the number grew with every death. Napoleon sought a way round Rome that would not provoke an open schism, and summoned a national council.

About a hundred French and Italian bishops assembled at Notre-Dame on 17 June 1811, presided over by Cardinal Fesch, the Emperor's uncle. They were asked to decide that, after a fixed delay, a metropolitan might himself institute a bishop who had been named, should the pope not reply.

The assembly refused to decide: it held itself unqualified to rule against the sovereign pontiff. On 11 July Napoleon dissolved the council and had three bishops arrested and taken to the keep of Vincennes. A reconvened assembly ended by voting the desired decree — but subordinating it to the pope's approval, which he would grant under duress.

The episode settled nothing. In January 1813 Pius VII, moved to Fontainebleau and exhausted, signed preliminaries of a concordat; two months later he retracted in writing. The religious conflict thus ran on until the fall of the Empire.

It cost dear politically. By forcing the episcopate to choose between its sovereign and its pope, the regime lost the benefit of the Concordat of 1801: part of the clergy and the faithful, won over in 1802, fell away at the very moment when the Empire most needed them.