Leo XII

Annibale della Genga, a nobleman from the Marche who had served as nuncio in Germany, was elected on 28 September 1823 as the candidate of the zelanti, the hard-line cardinals who thought Pius VII and Consalvi had made too many bargains with the modern world. Tall, gaunt, and so ill that he warned the conclave it was electing a corpse, he reigned for nearly six years and used every one of them to turn the clock back. Consalvi was dismissed within days. The Jews of Rome, allowed out of the ghetto under the French, were confined to it again and forbidden to own property; education passed wholly under clerical control by the bull Quod divina sapientia of 1824; the reformed administration of the Papal States gave way to the old privileges of the nobles and the police methods of Cardinal Rivarola, whose tribunal in the Legations handed down more than five hundred sentences against suspected Carbonari in a single decree in 1825.

He was not merely a reactionary. He held the Jubilee of 1825 against the advice of nearly everyone, and it drew hundreds of thousands of pilgrims to a Rome that had not seen one in half a century. His encyclicals Ubi primum (1824) and Quo graviora (1826) condemned Bible societies, religious indifference, and Freemasonry, setting the tone for the papacy's quarrel with liberalism for the rest of the century. Abroad he was shrewder than at home, quietly appointing bishops for the new Latin American republics while Spain still claimed them.

He died on 10 February 1829, unmourned in the city he had disciplined, and remembered mostly as the pope who proved that the restoration could not simply restore.