Pope Pius VI (1717-1799)

The Last Great Pope of the Ancien Régime

Pius VI was elected in 1775, in a world where throne and altar still seemed united. Fourteen years later, the storming of the Bastille opened an era in which the Catholic monarchies collapsed one after another. Pius VI is thus the hinge pope between two epochs: he began his pontificate as a late-Renaissance prince, patron and builder, and ended it as a political prisoner led from fortress to fortress.^[12][13]

His figure sums up the fragility of the 18th-century established Church. Even before the Revolution, the pope's spiritual power was being nibbled away by "enlightened" sovereigns who claimed to govern their national Churches without Rome. Pius VI spent the first half of his reign defending, against emperors and grand dukes, the principle that the Church is not a public service of the monarchy.^[14]

A Pontificate of Nearly a Quarter Century

Pius VI reigned twenty-four years, six months, and fourteen days — one of the longest pontificates in history, and by far the longest of the 18th century.^[15] This exceptional length gave him time to leave his mark on Rome: he created seventy-three cardinals in twenty-three consistories^[16], beatified many servants of God without performing any canonization^[17], and in 1789 erected the first episcopal see of the United States, the Diocese of Baltimore.^[18]

But this longevity also weighed against him. An octogenarian by the time of the Revolution, the pope faced the storm with a worn-out body, in a Rome he could no longer defend militarily. The very duration that had made his glory became, at the end, his vulnerability.

The Pope Swept Away by the Revolution

The posterity of Pius VI is inseparable from his agony. No pope since the Middle Ages had been torn from Rome and led captive beyond the Alps. His death at Valence, on August 29, 1799, makes him the most recent pope to have died outside Italy.^[19]

This pathetic end long crushed judgment of his reign. He was seen as an overwhelmed pope, slow to react, a prisoner of outdated pomp and old-style nepotism. The judgment deserves nuance. On doctrinal ground — the condemnation of the Synod of Pistoia, the refusal of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy — Pius VI held a firm line that would be fully confirmed by the later magisterium. His weakness was political and military, not doctrinal.^[20][21]

Ecclesial and Biographical Notices

The Holy See's official list ranks Pius VI among the sovereign pontiffs, under his secular name of Giovanni Angelo Braschi, with a pontificate running from February 15, 1775 to August 29, 1799.^[22] The modern English-language reference synthesis remains Michael Ott's article in the 1911 Catholic Encyclopedia, which traces his curial career, election, conflicts with the princes, and final captivity.^[23]

The Encyclopædia Britannica confirms the chronology and calls the pontificate as a whole "tragic," dominated by defensive struggles against monarchs imbued with the Enlightenment and then against the Revolution.^[24] Treccani's Enciclopedia dei Papi provides the most detailed Italian notice, grounded in the pontifical acts and diplomatic correspondence of the period.^[25]

Sources for the Revolutionary Period

For the doctrinal acts, the documents are preserved and accessible: the briefs Quod aliquantum (March 10, 1791) and Charitas (April 13, 1791) against the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, and above all the constitution Auctorem fidei of August 28, 1794, whose condemnations appear in the magisterium's reference collection, the Denzinger-Hünermann.^[26][27][28]

For the captivity, the French archives themselves bear witness: the death certificate drawn up at Valence names the deceased "Jean Ange Braschy Pie VI pontife de Rome," and the itinerary of the deportation is documented step by step, from Siena to the citadel of Valence.^[29] Contemporary chronicles, such as the memoirs of the portraitist Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, add first-rate details about the pope as a person.^[30]

A Birth in Cesena

Giovanni Angelo Braschi was born in Cesena, in the march of Romagna, on December 25, 1717 — Christmas Day, which Roman tradition would not fail to note. He was the eldest of the eight children of Count Marco Aurelio Tommaso Braschi and Anna Teresa Bandi, a noble but impoverished family.^[31][32] Some uncertainty remains about the exact date: the Catholic Encyclopedia gives December 27, but Italian sources and recent historiography mostly retain December 25.^[33][34]

A pupil of the Jesuits of Cesena, young Braschi earned a doctorate in utroque iure — in civil and canon law — in 1734, and continued his studies at the University of Ferrara.^[35] His formation was that of a jurist and administrator, not a theologian: a trait that would mark his entire government.

Curial Career: Treasurer, Then Cardinal

Braschi made his fortune in the service of the Curia. Secretary and conclavist to Cardinal Tommaso Ruffo from the conclave of 1740, he became one of Benedict XIV's secretaries in 1753, then a canon of St. Peter's.^[36] Long engaged to be married, he renounced marriage and received priestly ordination on December 21, 1758.^[37]

In 1766, Clement XIII appointed him Treasurer of the Apostolic Chamber — one of the most powerful financial posts in the Papal States. The office earned him as many enemies as influence: his financial reforms caused offense, and it was partly to sideline him that Clement XIV created him cardinal-priest of Sant'Onofrio al Gianicolo on April 26, 1773, inviting him to retire as commendatory abbot at Subiaco.^[38][39]

The Conclave of 1774-1775

On the death of Clement XIV — the pope who had suppressed the Society of Jesus in 1773 — a long and tense conclave opened. The central issue was the Jesuit question: should the new pope favor or oppose the suppressed Society? The Bourbon crowns (Spain, Portugal, France), which had extracted the suppression, feared a reversal.^[40]

Braschi, reputed a moderate, was elected on February 15, 1775. He took the name Pius VI and received episcopal consecration and coronation on February 22, 1775, at the hands of the Albani cardinals.^[41][42] On the Jesuit question he adopted a balanced position: he did not revoke the suppression — politically, he hardly could — but ordered the release of the former General Lorenzo Ricci, imprisoned in Castel Sant'Angelo. The old Jesuit died before the decree reached him. Pius VI then tolerated the survival of the Society in White Russia and Prussia, where non-Catholic sovereigns refused to apply the suppression.^[43][44]

Draining the Pontine Marshes

The temporal work that most impressed contemporaries was the draining of the Pontine Marshes, an immense unhealthy expanse south of Rome, haunted by malaria since antiquity. Pius VI engaged Dutch engineers and considerable sums there, had canals dug, the Via Appia restored, and the ports of Terracina and Anzio deepened.^[45][46] The enterprise, partly successful, earned him a mocking nickname as an obsessive builder.

This building zeal extended to other marshlands — near Città della Pieve, Perugia, and Spoleto — which were effectively drained.^[47][48] Pius VI wanted to be a reforming prince, concerned with the common good of his subjects as much as with the prestige of Rome.

The Pio-Clementino Museum and Patronage

Pius VI is one of the great patrons of neoclassical Rome. He completed and enlarged the Pio-Clementino Museum at the Vatican, begun under his predecessor, to house the ancient masterpieces unearthed by Roman excavations; its inventory appeared in 1792.^[49] He had antique obelisks erected, added a monumental new sacristy to St. Peter's Basilica, raised a monument before the Quirinal Palace, and restored the cathedral of St. Scholastica at Subiaco.^[50][51]

This splendor had its downside. The scale of expenditure, combined with territorial losses and revolutionary exactions, would leave pontifical finances drained at the end of the reign — even though Pius VI had first distinguished himself through financial reforms.^[52]

The Braschi-Onesti Nepotism

Pius VI revived a practice the 18th-century papacy believed extinct: nepotism. He showered favors on his nephews, especially Luigi Braschi-Onesti, made a duke and richly endowed, and Romualdo Braschi-Onesti, raised to the cardinalate.^[53] The latter is often described as the penultimate true "cardinal-nephew" in history: with Pius VI, the very institution of pontifical nepotism died out.^[54]

Pius VI's nepotism fed the hostility of the Enlightenment and the revolutionaries, who saw in it proof of the corruption of pontifical government. It also weakened the pope morally at the moment he had to face the accusations of the new spirit.

Erecting the See of Baltimore (1789)

Far from the Pontine Marshes, Pius VI performed an act of lasting significance: he organized the young Church of the United States of America, until then attached to the Apostolic Vicar of London. In 1789, he erected the Diocese of Baltimore, the country's first episcopal see, and had John Carroll appointed there.^[55][56] As the Church was losing Enlightenment Europe, it was gaining a foothold in the New World — a shift of gravity Pius VI could not measure, but one he made possible.

Joseph II and the State Church

The great adversary of the first half of the reign was Emperor Joseph II, son of Maria Theresa, archetype of the enlightened despot. His religious policy — Josephinism — claimed to subject the Church to the State: Edict of Tolerance of October 1781, suppression of hundreds of monasteries deemed "useless," seminaries placed under public control, bishops forbidden to communicate freely with Rome.^[57][58]

For Pius VI, the issue was not civil tolerance in itself, but the State's claim to regulate the internal life of the Church, to close convents, train the clergy, and sever ties with the successor of Peter. It was the spiritual autonomy of the Church that was at stake.

The Journey to Vienna (1782)

Pius VI then made a spectacular decision: to travel in person to Vienna to bend the emperor. No pope had left Italy on such an errand for centuries. He left Rome on February 27, 1782, and arrived in Vienna on March 22, 1782.^[59] The welcome from the crowds was triumphant — but the emperor remained unmoved.

Pius VI departed again on April 22, 1782, having obtained nothing but vague promises; according to a persistent tradition, Joseph II had a monastery suppressed barely hours after the pope's departure.^[60] The journey, a resounding diplomatic failure, showed the limits of pontifical diplomacy against a determined sovereign. The emperor would push audacity so far as to visit Rome in 1783 and extract in 1784 a concordat recognizing his right to appoint the bishops of Milan and Mantua.^[61]

Febronianism and the Congress of Ems (1786)

The same challenge rumbled in Germany under the name of Febronianism, after the pseudonym "Justinus Febronius" behind which hid the auxiliary bishop of Trier, Johann Nikolaus von Hontheim. The Febronian thesis reduced the pope's primacy to an honorary presidency and exalted the authority of bishops and national Churches.^[62]

Hontheim had retracted, but his ideas had won over the ecclesiastical prince-electors. In 1786, the archbishops of Mainz, Trier, Cologne, and the Archbishop of Salzburg met at the Congress of Ems and adopted a "Punctuation" demanding broad autonomy from Rome.^[63] Pius VI nevertheless managed to contain the movement, which dissolved for lack of unity among the German prelates themselves and for lack of support from the lower bishoprics, which were anxious to keep their Roman guarantees.

Scipione de' Ricci and Tuscan Jansenism

The gravest doctrinal assault came from Tuscany. Grand Duke Peter Leopold — the future Emperor Leopold II — was pursuing there, with the Bishop of Pistoia and Prato Scipione de' Ricci, a "reform" program of Jansenist, Febronian, and Gallican inspiration.^[64] A grand-ducal circular letter of January 26, 1786, set its framework; Ricci then convened a diocesan synod at Pistoia, held from September 18, 1786.^[65]

The synod adopted a bold program: limitation of pontifical primacy in favor of episcopal authority, liturgy in the vernacular, reduction of popular devotions — indulgences, processions, and notably the cult of the Sacred Heart targeted by Jansenist sensibility — suppression of most religious orders, and a ban on vows before age forty.^[66]

The 85 Condemned Propositions

The Synod of Pistoia provoked a cautious but firm reaction in Rome. After eight years of examination, Pius VI published on August 28, 1794, the apostolic constitution Auctorem fidei, which condemned eighty-five propositions drawn from the synod's acts, qualified as erroneous, rash, scandalous, or heretical as the case might be.^[67]

Among the censured theses was the idea that the Church would be infallible only "insofar as it conforms to Scripture and true tradition" — a formula which, under cover of fidelity, in reality subjected the living magisterium to private judgment. Also condemned were the conception of episcopal authority as independent of the pope, the claim to reform liturgy and devotions unilaterally, and the attack on the cult of the Sacred Heart.^[68][69] Scipione de' Ricci had resigned his see as early as 1791; he would submit to pontifical authority in 1805.^[70]

The Doctrinal Significance of Auctorem fidei

Auctorem fidei is the major magisterial act of the pontificate. It reaches far beyond the Tuscan quarrel: it fixed for a long time the Catholic answer to Gallicanism, Febronianism, and late Jansenism, reaffirming the pope's primacy of jurisdiction, the unity of the magisterium, and the legitimacy of authentic popular devotions.^[71] Its condemnations would enter Denzinger's collection as a stable reference of doctrine on the Church, the episcopate, and the liturgy.^[72]

The contrast is striking: while Pius VI was losing ground politically, he won doctrinally a victory that would be fully ratified by the later magisterium, up to the First Vatican Council of 1870. The statesman's frailty did not impair the teacher's firmness.

The Civil Constitution of the Clergy

The decisive trial came from France. The Revolution nationalized clerical property (November 2, 1789), abolished perpetual monastic vows (February 1790), then voted the Civil Constitution of the Clergy (July 12, 1790), which reorganized the Church of France as a State administration: bishops and parish priests elected by the citizens — including non-Catholics — dioceses redrawn along departmental lines, severing the ordinary bond with Rome.^[73][74]

The Assembly soon imposed on clerics an oath of loyalty to the Constitution, splitting the French clergy between jurors ("constitutionals") and non-jurors. Pius VI, whose answer was slow in coming, is accused by historians of having left his clergy in embarrassment for long months — a silence that abandoned many consciences to disarray.^[75]

The Briefs Quod aliquantum and Charitas (1791)

The pope finally broke his silence. On March 10, 1791, the brief Quod aliquantum condemned the Civil Constitution of the Clergy as well as the principles of the Declaration of the Rights of Man regarding religious liberty and equality of religions.^[76] Pius VI recalled in it that he had long delayed before pronouncing sentence:

"We have not yet hurled the thunderbolts of the Church." — Pius VI, brief Quod aliquantum, March 10, 1791^[77]

On April 13, 1791, the brief Charitas declared the consecrations of constitutional bishops illegitimate, suspended the oath-taking priests, and summoned the clergy to return to unity.^[78] These two texts sealed the rupture between Rome and revolutionary France; the nuncio Antonio Dugnani was recalled, and diplomatic relations ceased.^[79]

The Loss of Avignon and the Comtat Venaissin

The French riposte was immediate. In 1791, the Assembly voted the annexation of Avignon and the Comtat Venaissin: Avignon, purchased in 1348 by Clement VI, had been a pontifical possession for more than four centuries, and the Comtat Venaissin, ceded to the Holy See in 1273/1274, for more than five centuries — two sovereignties that form the department of Vaucluse.^[80][81] Pius VI thus lost, overnight, part of his temporal patrimony — a foretaste of the far vaster amputations to follow.

The Bassville Murder (1793) and Louis XVI, "Martyr" According to Pius VI

Tension degenerated into violence. In January 1793, a Roman riot targeted the Mancini Palace, seat of the French Academy, and the Jewish ghetto; the legation secretary Nicolas-Jean Hugou de Bassville was murdered there.^[82] The Convention exploited the crime to build a new grievance against Rome; the Catholic Encyclopedia acknowledges that the Curia's responsibility for the disorder was not nil.^[83]

That same month, on January 21, 1793, Louis XVI mounted the scaffold. On June 17, 1793, before the cardinals assembled in secret consistory, Pius VI delivered the allocution Quare lacrymae: in it he hailed the fallen king, in his own words, as a martyr of the faith, struck down, in his view, for refusing to give lasting sanction to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy.^[84] The papacy and the Republic were now in open war over legitimacy.

The French Invasion and the Treaty of Tolentino (1797)

In 1796, the young General Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Italy and crushed the pontifical forces. A first armistice was concluded at Bologna on June 25, 1796, at the heavy price of millions of francs and the occupation of Romagna.^[85] The following year, Pius VI, without an army, had to sign the Treaty of Tolentino on February 19, 1797.

The terms were crushing: definitive cession of Avignon, the Comtat Venaissin, and the legations of Bologna, Ferrara, and Romagna; payment of fifteen million francs; delivery to France of hundreds of works of art and manuscripts torn from the Roman collections.^[86][87] The Papal States, mutilated and ruined, were but a survivor on borrowed time.

The Roman Republic and the Abduction (1798)

The reprieve was brief. In December 1797, a riot in Rome caused the death of the French General Léonard Duphot, furnishing the awaited pretext.^[88] General Berthier entered Rome without resistance on February 10, 1798, and proclaimed the Roman Republic on February 15, 1798. Pius VI was ordered to renounce all temporal sovereignty.^[89]

The old pope refused. On February 20, 1798, he was torn from the Vatican and led out of Rome.^[90] According to an often-repeated anecdote with no established primary source, to the octogenarian asking to die in his city, his escort supposedly answered that one can die anywhere.^[91]

The Way of the Cross of Deportation

Then began a long ordeal. From Rome, Pius VI was led to Siena, then to the Charterhouse of Galluzzo, near Florence, where he stayed from June 1798 to spring 1799.^[92] The Franco-Tuscan war forced him back onto the road: Parma, Piacenza, Turin, then the crossing of the Alps — a pope of eighty-one, ill, carried on a stretcher over the snow-covered passes.^[93][94]

He passed through Briançon and Grenoble, finally reaching the citadel of Valence, in the Drôme, the prison of his last days. All along this way of the cross, crowds flocked, against the authorities' expectations, to receive the captive pope's blessing: the captivity, intended as a humiliation, became despite itself a spiritual triumph.^[95]

Death at Valence (August 29, 1799)

Pius VI died at Valence on August 29, 1799 — 12 Fructidor, Year VII, of the republican calendar — at eighty-one, after twenty-four years, six months, and fourteen days of pontificate.^[96] The death certificate drawn up by the French administration soberly names him "Jean Ange Braschy Pie VI pontife de Rome."^[97]

His embalmed body was not buried at once: only after Bonaparte's political reversal did it receive burial, first at Valence, before being repatriated to Rome at the end of 1801, thanks to the Concordat of 1801.^[98][99] Part of his entrails would remain in France: deposited in 1811 at Valence's Saint-Apollinaire Cathedral, where a memorial monument is said, according to secondary accounts alone, to record that his entrails were returned to the French while Rome kept his body — a reported wording whose exact text remains to be verified in the Valence archives.^[100]

The Fear of the "Last Pope"

The death of Pius VI, a prisoner of a Republic that claimed to be the enemy of all spiritual kingship, seemed to many to seal the very end of the papacy. Rome was occupied, the Papal States dismembered, the Sacred College dispersed. The Church's enemies announced that Pius VI would be the last pope; some Catholics themselves trembled.^[101]

Yet this fear was groundless. Pius VI had taken precautions: by his ordinance of November 13, 1798, he had provided that the conclave would be held, failing the ability to sit in Rome, in the city where the greatest number of cardinals would be found.^[102] The institution survived the man.

The Conclave of Venice and Pius VII

The cardinals gathered under Austrian protection at Venice, in the Benedictine monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore. The conclave opened on November 30, 1799, and after more than three months elected on March 14, 1800, Cardinal Barnaba Chiaramonti, Bishop of Imola, who took the name Pius VII — chosen out of filial devotion to his predecessor who had died in exile.^[103] It would be the last conclave held outside Rome.

Pius VII would confront Napoleon, would himself also be deported to France, but would return triumphantly to Rome in 1814 and witness the fall of the Empire. Far from having buried the papacy, Pius VI had opened for it the age of popes victimized by revolutions.

The Body's Return and Posterity

Repatriated to Rome, the body of Pius VI received solemn obsequies at St. Peter's, celebrated by Pius VII on February 19, 1802.^[104] The great sculptor Antonio Canova dedicated to him a famous kneeling statue, placed before the Confession of St. Peter's. In 1949, by decree of Pius XII, his remains were laid in an ancient sarcophagus in the Vatican grottoes, with an inscription recalling his unjust exile.^[105][106]

Posterity long oscillated between two images: the lavish, nepotistic prince of the dying Ancien Régime, and the old man swept away by the Revolution who died in exile. Both are true. But it is the second that fixed his place in the Church's memory: Pius VI, the first great pontifical victim of the age of revolutions, witness that the See of Peter does not die with kingdoms.

• Pope Clement XIV — predecessor of Pius VI, the pope who suppressed the Society of Jesus in 1773.
• Pope Pius VII — successor of Pius VI, elected at Venice in 1800, who likewise faced Napoleon and deportation.
• The First Vatican Council (1869-1870) — which would define pontifical primacy and infallibility, confirming the line of Auctorem fidei against Febronianism and Gallicanism.
• Pope Pius VIII — pope of the first half of the 19th century, heir of the Church that emerged from the revolutions.
• Pope Leo XIII — who would rethink the relations between the Church and the modern States born of the Revolution.