The successor of Pius VIII was Gregory XVI, who became pope in 1831. His election was not calculated to pacify the people or lessen the general excitement. On the contrary, he fully committed his pontificate to the policy of retrogression, and this was so well understood that he had to prepare at once to grapple with the revolution, so near the Vatican that he could witness the surgings of the enraged populations. The Italian people assumed the attitude of defiance; and if they had been hitherto disposed to submit passively to the oppressions of the papacy, it then became evident that they, too, after centuries of obedience to the pope as an absolute temporal monarch, were resolved to try the experiment of self-government under a written constitution. They had endured absolutism until they could do so no longer. The revolution broke out almost simultaneously at Bologna, Parma, and Modena, and very soon after at Rome. The pope was able to hold the insurgents in check in the latter city only by military force; but in the provinces the popular tumult increased. It is said, in behalf of Gregory XVI, that the insurrection was occasioned without any personal enmity to him; that "it arose against the _rule_, not against _the ruler_; against _the throne_, not against its actual possessor.... It aimed at the _final overthrow of the reigning power, ... the substitution of a republic for the existing and recognized rule_."[169] Accepting this as true--and there is no reason for doubting it--it establishes the proposition clearly that the Roman Catholic populations of the papal States entered upon the revolution for the purpose only of stripping the pope of his temporal power, leaving his spiritual power undisturbed. What followed is best interpreted in the light of this acknowledged fact. A modern author thus depicts the condition of affairs from which the people of Italy revolted: "Absolutism, administered by priests, was the system which prevailed in the States of the Church during the pontificate of Gregory XVI, and in no part of the Peninsula, not even at Naples, were the people so oppressed or so ill governed."[170] The same author further says: "In Sardinia, even more than in almost any other portion of the Peninsula, the Church enjoyed the exceptional privileges which she had acquired during the Middle Ages. _The civil power had, in fact, no legal jurisdiction over the clergy._ All offenses committed by ecclesiastics were tried by clerical tribunals, acting upon the Canon law, and _irresponsible to the State_. Moreover, these courts claimed, and to some extent exercised, jurisdiction over laymen accused of heresy, blasphemy, sacrilege, and other offenses against the Church."[171]