A Short History of Freethought Ancient and Modern, Volume 2 of 2 by J. M. Robertson

notice of the attitude held towards religion by Napoleon, who at once crowned and in large measure undid the work of the Revolution. He has his place in its religious legend in the current datum that he wrought for the faith by restoring a suppressed public worship and enabling the people of France once more to hear church-bells. In point of fact, as was pointed out by Bishop Grégoire in 1826, "it is materially proved that in 1796, before he was Consul, and four years before the Concordat, according to a statement drawn up at the office of the Domaines Nationaux, there were in France 32,214 parishes where the culte was carried on." [1197] Other commonplaces concerning Napoleon are not much better founded. On the strength of a number of oral utterances, many of them imperfectly vouched for, and none of them marked by much deliberation, he has been claimed by Carlyle [1198] as a theist who philosophically disdained the "clatter of materialism," and believed in a Personal Creator of an infinite universe; while by others he is put forward as a kind of expert in character study who vouched for the divinity of Jesus. [1199] In effect, his verdict that "this was not a man" would tell, if anything, in favour of the view that Jesus is a mythical construction. He was, indeed, by temperament quasi-religious, liking the sound of church bells and the atmosphere of devotion; and in his boyhood he had been a rather fervent Catholic. As he grew up he read, like his contemporaries, the French deists of his time, and became a deist like his fellows, recognizing that religions were human productions. Declaring that he was "loin d'être athée," he propounded to O'Meara all the conventional views--that religion should be made a support to morals and law; that men need to believe in marvels; that religion is a great consolation to those who believe in it; and that "no one can tell what he will do in his last moments." [1200] The opinion to which he seems to have adhered most steadily was that every man should die in the religion in which he had been brought up. And he himself officially did so, though he put off almost to the last the formality of a deathbed profession. His language on the subject is irreconcilable with any real belief in the Christian religion: he was "a deist à la Voltaire who recalled with tenderness his Catholic childhood, and who at death reverted to his first beliefs." [1201] For the rest, he certainly believed in religion as a part of the machinery of the State, and repeated the usual platitudes about its value as a moral restraint. He was candid enough, however, not to pretend that it had ever restrained him; and no freethinker condemned more sweepingly than he the paralysing effect of the Catholic system on Spain. [1202] To the Church his attitude was purely political; and his personal liking for the Pope never moved him to yield, where he could avoid it, to the temporal pretensions of the papacy. The Concordat of 1802, that "brilliant triumph over the genius of the Revolution," [1203] was purely and simply a political measure. If he had had his way, he would have set up a system of religious councils in France, to be utilized against all disturbing tendencies in politics. [1204] Had he succeeded, he was capable of suppressing all manifestations of freethought in the interests of "order." [1205] He had, in fact, no disinterested love of truth; and we have his express declaration, at St. Helena, on the subject of Molière's Tartufe: "I do not hesitate to say that if the piece had been written in my time, I would not have permitted its representation." [1206] Freethought can make no warm claim to the allegiance of such a ruler; and if the Church of Rome is concerned to claim him as a son on the score of his deathbed adherence, after a reign which led the Catholic clergy of Spain to hold him up to the faithful as an incarnation of the devil, [1207] she will hardly gain by the association. Napoleon's ideas on religious questions were in fact no more noteworthy than his views on economics, which were thoroughly conventional.