A hand-written letter from Napoleon denying his role in the kidnapping of Pope Pius VII in 1809 is to go under the hammer this weekend, in a reminder of France’s complicated past relationship with the Vatican.
The letter, signed “Napole”, will go on sale at auction on Sunday, the day after the funeral of Pope Francis who died this week.
Pope Pius VII was kidnapped by French forces in his private apartments in the Quirinal Palace in Rome and remained a prisoner of Napoleon for five years.
The head of the Catholic church had sought to maintain the Vatican’s sway over the French church and resisted Napoleon’s desire to exert control over the clergy.
In the letter addressed to French nobleman and ally Jean-Jacques-Regis Cambaceres, Napoleon feigns ignorance of Pius VII’s detention.
“It was without my orders and against my will that the Pope was taken out of Rome; it is again without my orders and against my will that he is being brought into France,” he wrote.
“But I was only informed of this ten or twelve days after it had already been carried out. From the moment I learn that the Pope is staying in a fixed location, and that my intentions can be made known in time and carried out, I will consider what measures I must take…,” he added.
The missive has been estimated at 12,000-15,000 euros ($14,000-17,000) by auction house Osenat and will go on sale in Fontainebleau, south of Paris, where Pope Pius VII was imprisoned after being initially held in Savona in Italy.
“This arrest is one of the events that will define Napoleon’s reign, at a political and religious level,” Jean-Christophe Chataignier, an expert in the Napoleonic era at Osenat, told AFP.
“Napoleon knows this letter will be made public and that it’s intended for authorities everywhere,” he added.
– ‘Miscalculation’ –
In his 2021 book “To Kidnap a Pope”, historian Ambrogio Caiani called the arrest “one of the greatest miscalculations of (Napoleon’s) career” which stoked domestic and foreign opposition to his rule.
Pius VII’s predecessor, Pius VI, fared even worse than him.
After opposing France’s anti-clerical government following the 1789 revolution, Pius VI was seized by French forces in March 1799 after their occupation of Rome and died in captivity the following August.
Napoleon memorabilia regularly comes up for sale at auction.
Two pistols that he once intended to use to kill himself were sold in France last July for 1.7 million euros, while one of his trademark “bicorne” hats set a record price for his possessions when it was acquired for 1.9 million euros in November 2023.
