Fesch, Joseph

Fesch, Joseph, Cardinal and Archbishop of Lyons, was born 3d January 1763, at Ajaccio. Of Swiss parentage, he was the half-brother of Letizia Ramolino, the mother of Napoleon Bonaparte. During the French Revolution he became commissary to the Army of the Alps under his nephew in Italy. The First Consul having resolved on the restoration of the Catholic worship, Fesch resumed the clerical habit—for he had originally taken holy orders—and was active in bringing about the concordat with Pope Pius VII. in 1801. He was now (1802) raised to be Archbishop of Lyons, and in the following year to be cardinal. In 1804 he was sent as French ambassador to Rome, where he ingratiated himself with the pope by his adroit management and ultramontane sentiments. Two years later he was appointed associate and successor of Dalberg, Prince Primate of the Confederation of the Rhine. At a national conference of clergy assembled at Paris in 1810 he gave utterance to views which lost him the favour of Napoleon, who was still further exasperated against him on account of a letter which Fesch wrote to the pope, then (1812) in captivity at Fontainebleau, and which was intercepted. After this he lived in a sort of banishment at Lyons. At the approach of the Austrians in 1814 he fled to Rome, where he spent nearly the whole of the rest of his life. His resistance to the will of his nephew, and indeed his whole conduct, seems to have been actuated by sincere zeal for what he considered to be the interests of the church. He died at Rome, 13th May 1839. Of his large collection of paintings he bequeathed a part to the city of Lyons; the rest were sold at Rome after his death.