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By Root 2486 0

as well as serving as French ambassador to Lisbon. Nicknamed ‘The Tempest’, Junot had his sights set on glory. He had never had an independent field command, had missed the dramatic campaigns of 1805-7, and had been denied the marshal’s baton that had fallen to so many of his colleagues. Apart from a few battalions composed of Swiss mercenaries or the scrapings of the old Hanoverian and Piedmontese armies, the 25,000 men that he commanded were all veteran units of the French line. Another European capital, then, seemed doomed to occupation at the hands of the French.

Nor was Lisbon alone in this, for in Italy the tempo of events had continued to speed up and thereby to reinforce the impression of a Napoleon in a state of perpetual motion, not to mention a Napoleon who could not resist the opportunity to engage in ostentatious displays of armed force. With the Kingdom of Etruria now once again in French hands, Italy’s last independent ruler was Pope Pius VII. Relations between emperor and pontiff had been deteriorating ever since the latter’s return from Napoleon’s coronation. Pius and his Secretary of State, Cardinal Consalvi, were outraged by the regalist measures which the emperor had imposed on the Church in France and his Italian dependencies. And likewise they could not accept his insinuations that the pope was a vassal of Napoleon. With the rift further deepened by the occupation of the Adriatic city of Ancona for strategic reasons by French troops in the autumn of 1805, Pius therefore defied the French ruler. A new catechism introduced in France to reinforce loyalty to Napoleon was not approved, for example, while doubts were cast upon the sudden discovery of a ‘St Napoleon’, whose feast day coincided not just with Napoleon’s birthday but the feast of the Assumption. Equally, obtaining a decree of nullity to get rid of Jerome Bonaparte’s American wife met with such difficulties that Napoleon was left with no option but to give up on Rome and bully the French hierarchy into exceeding their powers and doing as he wanted. As for Ancona, Napoleon was sharply informed that he could either surrender the city forthwith or face a breach in diplomatic relations. The emperor, however, did not back down and Pius was put under more and more pressure to accede to the Continental Blockade and turn the Papal States into a French ally. But this he would not do. The papacy, he argued, was neutral and, indeed, had no option but to remain so. At the same time, he would not hand to Napoleon or anyone else the role of the Church’s temporal protector, and this meant in turn that he must ipso facto continue as the ruler of a sovereign state. As a conciliatory measure, he did accede to French pressure to divest himself of the services of Cardinal Consalvi, who resigned in June 1806, but that was all. Indeed, by the summer of that year the French ruler was facing excommunication. This was no empty threat, and Napoleon knew it: as a human being he had no belief in redemption, nor still less care for his immortal soul, but to have incurred such a penalty would have inevitably been to undermine the sanction that he had received at his successive coronations as emperor of France and king of Italy. For a little while, then, the emperor held off - it helped in this respect that Pius made a number of minor concessions that suggested he could be swung over to Napoleon’s view - but in November 1807 time ran out for the papacy: French troops occupied the Adriatic provinces of the Papal States and four months later a large garrison installed itself in the fortress of Sant’ Angelo in the centre of Rome itself. The Pope was still on his throne, but he was now staring Napoleonic power full in the face.

Back in the Peninsula tension was increasing by the day. With the signature of the treaty of Fontainebleau, it appeared that salvation was at hand for Godoy, but in fact the appearance of the French armies coincided with a dramatic deterioration in his situation. In addition to blackening the favourite’s reputation and ensuring that the machinery of power