The French had now the pretext against the Papal Government which they desired. Joseph Bonaparte instantly left the city, and orders were sent to Berthier, chief of the staff in northern Italy, to march upon Rome. Berthier advanced amid the acclamations of the towns and the curses of the peasantry, and entered Rome on the 10th of February, 1798. Events had produced in the capital a much stronger inclination towards change than existed on the approach of Bonaparte a year before. The treaty of Tolentino had shaken the prestige of Papal authority; the loss of so many well-known works of art, the imposition of new and unpopular taxes, had excited as much hatred against the defeated government as against the extortionate conquerors; even among the clergy and their retainers the sale of a portion of the Church-lands and the curtailment of the old Papal splendours had produced alienation and discontent. There existed too within the Italian Church itself a reforming party, lately headed by Ricci, bishop of Pistoia, which claimed a higher degree of independence for the clergy, and condemned the assumption of universal authority by the Roman See. The ill-judged exercise of the Pope's temporal power during the last six years had gained many converts to the opinion that the head of the Church would best perform his office if emancipated from a worldly sovereignty, and restored to his original position of the first among the bishops. Thus, on its approach to Rome, the Republican army found the city ripe for revolution. On the 15th of February an excited multitude assembled in the Forum, and, after planting the tree of liberty in front of the Capitol, renounced the authority of the Pope, and declared that the Roman people constituted itself a free Republic. The resolution was conveyed to Berthier, who recognised the Roman Commonwealth, and made a procession through the city with the solemnity of an ancient triumph. The Pope shut himself up in the Vatican. His Swiss guard was removed, and replaced by one composed of French soldiers, at whose hands the Pontiff, now in his eighty-first year, suffered unworthy insults. He was then required to renounce his temporal power, and, upon his refusal, was removed to Tuscany, and afterwards beyond the Alps to Valence, where in 1799 he died, attended by a solitary ecclesiastic.