during a term of from one month to two years. Every communication from high to low and from low to high between the French Church and its Roman head, cut off at will, intervention by a veto or by approval of all acts of pontifical authority, to be the legal and recognized head of the national clergy,[5175] to become for this clergy an assistant, collateral, and lay Pope--such was the pretension of the old government, and such, in effect, is the sense, the juridical bearing, of the Gallican maxims.[5176] Napoleon pro-claims them anew, while the edict of 1682, by which Louis XIV. applied them with precision, rigor and minuteness, "is declared the general law of the empire."[5177] There are no opponents to this doctrine, or this use of it, in France. Napoleon counts on not encountering any, and especially among his prelates. Gallican before 1789, the whole clergy were more or less so through education and tradition, through interest and through pride; now, the survivors of this clergy are those who provide the new ecclesiastical staff, and, of the two distinct groups from which it is recruited, neither is predisposed by its antecedents to become ultramontane. Some among these, who have emigrated, partisans of the ancient régime, find no difficulty in thus returning to old habits and doctrines, the authoritative protectorate of the State over the Church, the interference of the Emperor substituted for that of the King, and Napoleon, in this as in other respects, the legitimate, or legitimated, successor of the Bourbons. The others, who have sworn to the civil constitution of the clergy, the schismatics, the impenitent and, in spite of the Pope, reintegrated by the First Consul in the Church,[5178] are ill-disposed towards the Pope, their principal adversary, and well-disposed towards the First Consul, their unique patron. Hence, "the heads[5179] of the Catholic clergy, that is to say, the bishops and grand-vicars,... are attached to the government;" they are "enlightened" people, and can be made to listen to reason. "But we have three or four thousand curés or vicars, the progeny of ignorance and dangerous through their fanaticism and their passions." If these and their superiors show any undisciplined tendencies, the curb must be tightly drawn. Fournier, a priest, having reflected on the government from his pulpit in Saint-Roch, is arrested by the police, put in Bicêtre as mad,[5180] and the First Consul replies to the Paris clergy who claim his release "in a well-drawn-up petition,": "I wanted[5181] to prove to you, when I put my cap on the wrong side out, that priests must obey the civil power." Now and then, a rude stroke of this sort sets an example and keeps the intractable on the right path who would otherwise be tempted to leave it. At Bayonne, concerning a clerical epistle in which an ill-sounding phrase occurs, "the grand-vicar who drew it up is sent to Pignerol for ten years, and I think that the bishop is exiled."[5182]