To Kidnap a Pope

Well over 200,000 books have been written about Napoleon, but this recent work actually manages to say something new by focusing on an aspect of his reign that has been oddly neglected – at least in the English-speaking world – his tense and turbulent relations with the Pope, Pius VII, which ended with the Pope’s kidnapping from Rome by French forces in 1809 and imprisonment in France. Though bullied, browbeaten, and even once physically manhandled by Napoleon, the elderly Pontiff steadfastly refused to make the concessions to the secular power that his captor demanded from him. Ambrogio Caiani not only… show more.

A book that can be read almost as a thriller. Caiani takes us through a tale of bullying, bungling, and petty spite by Napoleon, who meets more than his match in the mediated determination of Pius, a man so long dismissed even by his collaborators, as a second-rate leader. Caiani’s deft character analysis, born of meticulous research in a plethora of archives in Rome, Paris, Lyon, and beyond, yield the story of a tense, complex battle of wills between two men who, despite their own best efforts, came to symbolise one of the most profound, protracted culture wars of the… show more.