For Napoleon was personally undergoing a great transformation. Gradually his mind had filled with dreams of empire. The cannon of Marengo had hardly ceased to echo before he began to speak of “My beautiful France.” Between himself and those about him he steadily increased the distance. His tone was that of Master. Tuscany having been taken from Austria, he made a kingdom out of it, put a feeble Bourbon upon its throne, dubbed the puppet King of Etruria, and brought him to Paris where the people of France could behold a king playing courtier to a French consul. At the Tuileries the ceremony and royalty encroached constantly upon republican forms, and the lip service of flatterers began to displace military frankness and democratic independence. Looking forward to supreme power, Napoleon was too astute a politician to neglect the priest. As Alexander had bent his head in seeming reverence at altars, and listened with apparent faith to Grecian oracles; as Cæsar had posed as Roman chief priest, and leagued himself to paganism; so Napoleon, who had been a Mussulman at Cairo, would now become a Catholic in Paris. It was a matter of policy, nothing more. “Ah, General,” said Lafayette to him, “what you want is that the little vial should be broken over your head.” It all led up to that. Monarchy was to be restore, and its natural supports--the aristocrat and the priest--were needed to give it strength. By coming to terms with the Pope, Napoleon would win, and the Bourbons lose, the disciplined hosts of the Catholic Church. Therefore the Concordat was negotiated, and the French Church, which even under the Bourbons had enjoyed a certain amount of independence, was put under the feet of the Italian priest, under the tyranny of Rome. By this compact the Pope held to himself the right to approve the clerical nominees of the State, while the tax-payers were annually to furnish $10,000,000 to pay clerical salaries. By this compact was brought back into France the subtle, resistless power of a corporation which, identifying itself with God, demands supreme control. Napoleon himself soon felt the strength of this released giant, and the France of to-day is in a death grapple with it. The time may come when the Concordat will be considered Napoleon’s greatest blunder, his unpardonable political sin. It was not faith, it was not even philanthropy which governed his conduct. It was cold calculation. It was merely a move in the game of ambition. At the very moment that he claimed the gratitude of Christians for the restoration of religion, he sought to soothe the non-believers by telling them that under his system religion would disappear from France within fifty years. It is not true that a majority of the French clamored for a return of the old forms of worship. On the contrary, the vast majority were indifferent, if not hostile. In the army it caused a dangerous conspiracy among the officers, against Napoleon’s life.