Napoleon’s imperial vision included in its first vague outline the restoration of the Church in France and the establishment of good relations with Rome. The sharpness of his earlier antagonism to religion was worn down by his experience and his political requirements. Let the old clergy overrun the provinces of France again, and they would soon exorcise them of their superficial Jacobinism. He had seen in the East how despotism throve where it had the support of religion. The new Pope, Pius VII, should be disposed to make a bargain with the new Charlemagne. Not only did France seem still to drift away from Catholicism, but the spirit of Gallicanism had passed over the Rhine and the Pyrenees. Alarming rumours of the founding of “national” churches came to the Vatican from Spain and South Germany; while Catholic Austria held aloof with an open cupidity for the Pope’s temporal dominions. So the Corsican free-thinker converted himself into “Charlemagne.” The Pope might be reminded of the spiritual desolation that cried for his spiritual intervention in France; ultramontanism could be made innocuous by the simple expedient of abolishing the mountains, and making a Catholic Constantinople of Paris; the police would be seconded by the subtler gendarmery of the clergy, the heads of which would be ingeniously fitted into the political machinery of the country. Before Napoleon left Italy (after Marengo) he sent the Bishop of Vercelli to the Pope with a message of peace. Talleyrand had already written to the Vatican in the same feeling, at the direction of the First Consul. Mr. Holland Rose and many other writers entirely misunderstand Talleyrand’s share in the work of religious pacification, because they have a quite false idea of his attitude towards the Church. I interpret the negative evidence to mean that Talleyrand was agnostic rather than deistic, in spite of his admiration for Voltaire and his dislike of Diderot and d’Holbach. But he was an agnostic Liberal statesman of a type familiar in France (and many other countries) down to our own time. He never attacked or ridiculed religion. He believed the Church to be a useful agency among the mass of the people, provided it was earnest and spiritual, and did not meddle with politics beyond promising eternal torment to the more violent radicals. Of this we have evidence enough even in his speeches of 1790-1792. He would not at all resent Napoleon’s proposals, if Napoleon would firmly maintain the rights of the constitutional clergy. There is not a particle of evidence that raises any difficulty as to Talleyrand’s attitude.[35] He is nowhere found with the angry soldiers and politicians who thought the revolution had made a French Church an anachronism, and who filled Paris with fresh murmurs at the idea of a Concordat.