Still, at the present day all, except the bishops, are in this situation, having lost the ownership of their places and the independence of their lives, through the maintenance of the consular and imperial institutions, through removal, through the destruction of the canonical and civil guarantees which formerly protected the lower clergy, through the suppression of the officialite; through the reduction of chapters to the state of vague shadows, through the rupture or laxity of the local and moral tie which once attached every member of the clergy to a piece of land, to an organized body, to a territory, to a flock, and through the lack of ecclesiastical endowment, through the reduction of every ecclesiastic, even a dignitary, to the humble and precarious condition of a salaried dependent.[5344] A regime of this kind institutes in the body subject to it an almost universal dependence, and hence entire submission, passive obedience, and the stooping, prostrate attitude of the individual no longer able to stand upright on his own feet.[5345] The clergy to which it is applied cannot fail to be managed from above, which is the case with this one, through its bishops, the Pope's lieutenant-generals, who give the countersign to all of them.

Once instituted by the Pope, each bishop is the governor for life of a French province and all-powerful in his circumscription we have seen to what height his moral and social authority has risen, how he has exercised his command, how he has kept his clergy under discipline and available, in what class of society he has found his recruits, through what drill and what enthusiasm every priest, including himself, is now a practiced soldier and kept in check; how this army of occupation, distributed in 90 regiments and composed of 50,000 resident priests, is completed by special bodies of troops subject to still stricter discipline, by monastic corporations, by four or five thousand religious institutions, nearly all of them given to labor and benevolence; how, to the subordination and correct deportment of the secular clergy is added the enthusiasm and zeal of the regular clergy, the entire devotion, the wonderful self-denial of 30,000 monks and of 120,000 nuns; how this vast body, animated by one spirit, marches steadily along with all its lay supporters towards one end.

This purpose, forever the same, is the maintenance of its dominion over all the souls that it has won over, and the conquest of all the souls over which it has not yet established its domination.
Nothing could be more antipathetic to the French State.

Built up like the Church, after the Roman model, it is likewise authoritative and absorbent.

In the eyes of Napoleon, all these priests appointed or sanctioned by him, who have sworn allegiance to him, whom he pays annually or quarterly, belong to him in a double sense, first under the title of subjects, and next under the title of clerks.