Yet as his behaviour softened his demands stiffened; and at the close of the audience he pressed Consalvi to sign a somewhat unfavourable version of the compact within five days, otherwise the negotiations would be at an end and a national religion would be adopted—­an enterprise for which the auguries promised complete success.  At a later interview he expressed the same resolution in homely phrase:  when Consalvi pressed him to take a firm stand against the “constitutional” intruders, he laughingly remarked that he could do no more until he knew how he stood with Rome; for “you know that when one cannot arrange matters with God, one comes to terms with the devil."[156]

This dalliance with the “constitutionals” might have been more than an astute ruse, and Consalvi knew it.  In framing a national Church the First Consul would have appealed not only to the old Gallican feeling, still strong among the clerics and laity, but also to the potent force of French nationality.  The experiment might have been managed so as to offend none but the strictest Catholics, who were less to be feared than the free-thinkers.  Consalvi was not far wrong when, writing of the official world at Paris, he said that only Bonaparte really desired a Concordat.

The First Consul’s motives in seeking the alliance of Rome have, very naturally, been subjected to searching criticism; and in forcing the Concordat on France, and also on Rome, he was certainly undertaking the most difficult negotiation of his life.[157] But his preference for the Roman connection was an act of far-reaching statecraft.  He saw that a national Church, unrecognized by Rome, was a mere half-way house between Romanism and Protestantism; and he disliked the latter creed because of its tendency to beget sects and to impair the validity of the general will.  He still retained enough of Rousseau’s doctrine to desire that the general will should be uniform, provided that it could be controlled by his own will.  Such uniformity in the sphere of religion was impossible unless he had the support of the Papacy.  Only by a bargain with Rome could he gain the support of a solid ecclesiastical phalanx.  Finally, by erecting a French national Church, he would not only have perpetuated schism at home, but would have disqualified himself for acting the part of Charlemagne over central and southern Europe.  To re-fashion Europe in a cosmopolitan mould he needed a clerical police that was more than merely French.  To achieve those grander designs the successor of Caesar would need the aid of the successor of Peter; and this aid would be granted only to the restorer of Roman Catholicism in France, never to the perpetuator of schism.