ENGLISH EXTRACTS. THE PAPAL COURT AND THE FRENCH REPUBLIC. [From the "Times," August 2.]

New Zealander, Volume 7, Issue 593, 20 December 1851, Page 3

ENGLISH EXTRACTS. THE PAPAL COURT AND THE FRENCH REPUBLIC. [From the "Times," August 2.]

Wn had attached little credit to a leport, current in some fmits of Italy and propagated on the continent, tliat the Fiench army was likely to be recalled from Rome, and that on the evacuation of the Papal Stales by Geneial Gemwm and his troops, the present Government of Koine would fall back on the convenient protection of Austrian or Neapolitan auxiliaries. Accoidw«;ly our own Italian correspondent, who was induced to return to Home by this rumour, has already reported to us that lie found it wholly without foundation ; and that nothing is changed in the state of Rome, save that the French army is somewhat reinforced, and that the Papal authorities are more than ever despicablp, tyrannical and dependent on foreign support. But although it is not to be supposed that tho French Government can withdiaw from the consequences of the Roman expedition by tlnowing the Holy City, and with it the whole of central Italy, into the undisputed possession of Austiun garrisons, and so leversing the only defensible part of the Fiench policy, yet we have reason to believe that a serious change has taken place in the views of the French Cabinet on this subject, and that this change has produced a corresponding effect on the lelations of the Pope and the French authorities in Rome. When General Oudmot surrendered the entire administration of the reconquered city to the restored Government of Pius IX., it will he remembered that the priestly refugees of Gaeta and Portici had successfully evaded every sort of pledge for the reform of their policy. The points upon which Louis Napoleon had himself insisted in his letter to M. Edgar Key were tacitly surrendered; and, after having committed the flagrant inconsistency of crushing the Roman Republic by a French Republican army, France has seen her forces pressed into ibe serrice of a Government which causes even that of Gregory XVI. to be regretted. The acquiescence of the French Government in such a state of things as is notv to be witnessed in Rome must, we should hope, be a very reluctant acquiescence, For not only dops ibis Government of bigots and sbnri reflect considerable scandal on the Fiench authorities who are condemned to witness such enormities, but it menaces to defeat and destroy the very object the Catholic party had in view, by rendering the tempoial power of the Pope even moie odious and impossible than it ever was before. Fiance did too much in lending her army to assist a re-action against the revolutionary party, which must, ere long, have been ejected by the people of Rome, reduced as they were by foreign conspnatois and adventurers to the last straits of bankruptcy and tenor : but France ba9 done too little in allowing- her military interference to stop where it did, and in continuing to protect a Government whose acts of corruption, impolicy, and injustice she bad lost the power to oppose or to control. The case has entirely changed its aspect ftom what it was in November, 1848. At that time the Papal Government was altogether in the right. Pius IX. had made great, and, we believe, not insincere efforts to improve the temporal institutions of his dominions. He had summoned to his councils tho only statesmen to whom Italy had given birth in our tunes, who combined a sincere attachment to the principles of constitutional liberty with a practical and courageous use of the duties of authority. lie resisted an extravagant popular cry for war, winch could only end m annihilating- all hopes of the internal reform of the Italian States. At that moment the Papal Government was violently overthrown by an inroad of revolutionary fanatics fiom other paits of Italy and from the hiding places of Paris and London. The dastardly troops, who never faced an enemy, turned their guns against the Palace of their Sovereign ; and the Pope's Minister, dauntless in the performance of his public duties, was basely and barbarously murdeied on the steps of the Cancelleria by assassins whose subsequent impunity and whose popular triumph sufficiently indicated the real authors of that crime. The Pope fled in a ludicrous disguise, hut he carried with him an amount of respect and sympathy , inspired partly by his own good intentions, but much more by the detestable chaiacter of his enemies. His six months' residence in the Neapolitan dominions, and the triumph of the Fieiich army at the gate of San Pancraz o, sent him back an altered mail, lie returned to pproecute those whom his own weakness had first encouraged — to re-install a Cardinal in the place of a statesman, to raise an Antonelh where a Rossi had fallen — to oxhibit an amount of suintual anogance and bigotry only equalled by the timidity and incapacity of his temporal government — and to extinguish the last hopes of a salutary lefoini in the stale of Rome under Papal domination. In this second and disgraceful period of the reiga of Pius IX. France was unhappily implicated, for she had lent the Pope her material support, but had renounced all moral or political control over his administration. His own character was declared by the ci devant Liberals of the French National Assembly to be the surest pledge of bis good government. No other piecautions were taken, and the result is an amount of oppression and embarrassment in which the meanest agent of the French Republic would refuse to engage his responsibility. These things have, if we are correctly informed, roused Louis Napoleon and his Ministers from a state of passive acquiescence in what they must disapprove, first, because it is a breach of faith to themselves ; and, secondly, because these abuses hold out the strongest encouragement that can be given to the ultra-revolu-tionary paity. An intimation has, we are informed, been conveyed to the Pope expressing in distinct language that as the French army cannot he withdiawn from Rome without discredit and a total surrender of its position in Italy to Austria, so neither can it remain there without taking steps to secure to the people of Rome some of the advantages of a better government. The intercourse between the Papal Court and the French authorities had for some time past become cool and constrained. A difference had arisen with reference to the distribution of the military posts in tho city; and the dissatisfaction of each paity with the ether was increased by the consciousness that neither of them had anything to expect from the people. The Pope, warned by these signs that matters cannot go on much longer as they are, arranged a meeting with the King of Naples at his villeggiatura at Castel Gandolfo, to which place he repaired at an unusually early period of the summer ; and although the precise result of that interview has not transpired, it is asserted, on reasonable grounds of belief, that the Pope expressed his dc termination to quit his dominions, and retire once more to the Neapolitan territory, if the French Government ehould forcibly inteifere with the internal administration of Rome. The Pope is probably assured that such a threat will not be indifferent to the French Government, for in a country in which the supreme power of the State is shortly to be disposed of by popular election, the influence of the French clergy, who are ardently devoted and servilely submissive to Ihe Papal authority, is not to be defied. The army of Romish priests in France may have a far more direct action on the Government af that country through the suffrages of the peasantry, than the army of French soldiers who hold no more than the ground they stand upon in Rome ; and a Government which has courted that species of foreign support is liable to have such a power turned against its principles and its own inteiests. Such is tho singular situation, and such the excessive contradictions of the Papal power — incapable of retaining its own subjects in their natural allegiance but usurping an allegiance of superstition in foreign realms — impotent at home, aggiessive abroad — at once intolerant of all liberty for others and regardless of all law but ita own. Those will be the characteristics of the Papal power as long as it exists. But the violence of these contrasts and the incompatibility of these pretensions militate powerfully against the stability and the permanence ol a power placed in such anomalous conditions.