On the contrary, he replied, and probably too with a smile: "We shall see! We shall see!" Thus does he think ahead, and his ideas extend beyond that which a man belonging to the ancient regime could imagine or divine, even to the reconstruction of the empire of the west as this existed in the year 800.

"I am not Louis XIV.'s successor," he soon declares,[5134] "but of Charlemagne....

I am Charlemagne, because, like Charlemagne, I unite the French crown to that of the Lombards, and my empire borders on the Orient." In this conception, which a remote history furnishes to his boundless ambition, the terrible antiquitarian finds the gigantic and suitable framework, the potent, specious terms, and all the verbal reasons he requires.
Under Napoleon, the successor of Charlemagne, the Pope can be only a vassal: "Your Holiness is the sovereign of Rome, but I am its emperor," the legitimate suzerain.

"Provided with "fiefs and counties" by this suzerain, the Pope owes him political fealty and military aid; failing in this, the endowment, which is conditional, lapses and his confiscated estates return to the imperial domain to which they have never ceased to belong.[5135] Through this reasoning and this threat, through the rudest and most adroit moral and physical pressure, the most insidious and most persevering, through spoliation, begun, continued and completed by the abduction, captivity and sequestration of the Holy Father himself, he undertakes the subjection of the spiritual power: not only must the Pope be like any other individual in the empire,[5136] subject by his residence to territorial laws, and hence to the government and the gendarmerie, but again he must come within the administrative lines; he will no longer enjoy the right of refusing canonical investiture to bishops appointed by the emperor,[5137] "he will, on his coronation, swear not to take any measures against the four propositions of the Gallican Church,"[5138] he will become a grand functionary, a sort of arch-chancellor like Cambaceres and Lebrun, the arch chancellor of the Catholic cult .-- Undoubtedly, he resists and is obstinate, but he is not immortal, and if he does not yield, his successor will: it suffices to choose one that is manageable, and to this end things work in the next conclave.
"With my influence and our forces in Italy," Napoleon says afterwards,[5139] "I did not despair, sooner or later, by one means or another, of obtaining for myself the control of the Pope, and, thenceforward, what an influence, what a lever on the opinion of the rest of the world!" "Had I returned victorious from Moscow, I intended to exalt the Pope beyond measure, to surround him with pomp and deference.

I would have brought him to no longer regretting his temporality; I would have made him an idol.