Pius VI., dethroned and borne off by the Directory, died in prison at Valence; Pius VII., dethroned and carried off by Napoleon, is confined, sequestered and outraged for four years in France, while all generous hearts take sides with the oppressed against his oppressors.

Moreover, his dispossession adds to his prestige: it can no longer be claimed that territorial interests prevail with him over Catholic interests; therefore, according as his temporal power diminishes his spiritual power expands, to such an extent that, in the end, after three-quarters of a century, just at the moment when the former is to fall to the ground the latter is to rise above the clouds; through the effacement of his human character his superhuman character becomes declared; the more the sovereign prince disappears, the more does the sovereign pontiff assert himself.

The clergy, despoiled like him of its hereditary patrimony and confined like him to its sacerdotal office, exposed to the same dangers, menaced by the same enemies, rallies around him the same as an army around its general; inferiors and superiors, they are all priests alike and are nothing else, with a clearer and clearer conscience of the solidarity which binds them together and subordinates the inferiors to the superiors.

From one ecclesiastical generation to another,[5212] the number of the refractory, of the intractable and of independents, rigorists or the lax, goes on decreasing, some, conscientious Jansenists, hardened and sectarians of the "Little Church," others, semi-philosophers, tolerant and liberal, both inheriting too narrow convictions or too broad opinions for maintaining themselves and spreading in the newly founded society (milieu).[5213] They die out, one by one, while their doctrines fall into discredit and then into oblivion.

A new spirit animates the new clergy, and, after 1808, Napoleon remarks of it, "It does not complain of the old one, and is even satisfied with it; but, he says, they are bringing up new priests in a sombre fanatical doctrine: there is nothing Gallican in the youthful clergy,"[5214] no sympathy for the civil power.