Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 29, 2025
I have read in a work remarkable on many accounts that it was on the occasion of the Concordat of the 15th July 1801 that the First Consul abolished the republican calendar and reestablished the Gregorian. This is an error. He did not make the calendar a religious affair.
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: "You want the holy oil dropped on your head"; to which he made no contradictory answer.
The annexed is the Concordat of the revolutionary provinces:
This statement was made on the 13th, Doctor Crolly's letter is dated on the 11th, Mr. O'Connell's on the 14th, and Lord Heytesbury's denial of the Concordat on the 15th of January.
We must therefore conclude that he allowed the antagonists of the Concordat to make this treacherous onset, with the intention of extorting every possible demand from the dazed and bewildered Cardinal. After further delays the Concordat was ratified at Eastertide, 1802.
It is impossible briefly to describe the various conflicts between Pius VII. and Napoleon. Though now kept in captivity by Napoleon, the Pope refused to ratify these and other ukases of his captor; and the credit which Napoleon had won by his wordly-wise Concordat was now lost by his infraction of many of its clauses and by his harsh treatment of a defenceless old man.
The negotiations which led to this Concordat had lasted several years. It was abundantly liberal in the true acceptation of this term. How can they be called truly liberal, who have no liberality for any but themselves, who know no other liberty than that which enables them to tyrannize over the church, and trample under foot her most sacred and beneficial institutions?
On the 18th of August, the privateer Monsieur, which was not bound by the concordat, took a prize, which the captain of the Monsieur rifled, and then ordered into port. Jones, however, opposed the captain's order, and sent the prize to L'Orient, whereupon the Monsieur parted company with the squadron.
I affirm then, and I think with good reason, that the affair was conducted in a most honorable manner, and that the Concordat was signed freely and without compulsion by his Holiness, in presence of the cardinals assembled at Fontainebleau.
Napoleon reintroduced the cult of the God of authority, by establishing the Concordat with Rome, because as he bluntly put it, "men require to be kept in order." A number of socially minded thinkers, of whom the best known is George Eliot, deified humanity and gave themselves to worship and serve it. "Whatever thy heart clings to and relies on," wrote Luther, "that is properly thy God."
Word Of The Day
Others Looking