FESCH, JOSEPH, Cardinal and archbishop of Lyons, was b. 3d Jan., 1763, at Ajaccio. His father, a Swiss officer in the service of Genoa, had married a widow, whose daugh ter by a former husband, Letizia or Letitia Ramolino, became the mother of Napoleon Bonaparte. F. was thus the half-brother of Letizia, and the uncle of the future emperor. He had entered the clerical profession, but left it at the outbreak of the French revolu tion, and, in 1795. 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, F. resumed the clerical habit, 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 fol lowing year to be cardinal. In 1804, he was sent as. French. authassailor to Rome, where he ingratiated himself with the pope by his adroit management and ultramon tane sentiments, and contributed to induce the pope to undertake his mission to Paris to consecrate Napoleon as emperor. F. accompanied the pope, and assisted at the coro nation; and for his services at Rome, he was rewarded by the office of grand almoner and a seat in the senate. In 1806, the archbishop of Regensburg, arch-chancellor and first prince elector of the just expiring German empire, and about to become the prince primate of the nascent confederation of the Rhine, chose F. to be his coadjutor and suc cessor; and, along with all these dignities, he received a stipend of 150,000 florins a year. In 1809, :Napoleon wished to invest him with the archbishopric of Paris, but F. declined it, as he had long been dissatisfied with the emperor's policy in regard to the papal chair. In 1810, he presided at a national conference of clergy assembled at Paris, and the views which he maintained there, with even more than usual keenness, brought him into disgrace with the emperor, who was still further exasperated against him on account of a letter which F. wrote to the pope, then(1812) in captivity at Fontainebleau,
and which was intercepted. He lost his imperial dignities and pension, and the pros pects of the primacy of the Rhine confederation were also taken away by the appoint ment of prince Eugene to be grand duke of Frankfort. After this, F. lived in a sort of banishment at his bishopric of Lyons. At the approach a the Austrians in 1814, he fled to Rome with his stster Letizia, the mother of the emperor, where he was received with open arms by the pope. The return of Napoleon brought him back of France, and dur ing the hundred days, he was nominated a member of the chamber of peers, though he never took his seat; but, after the battle of Waterloo, he had again to take refuge in Italy. The royalist clergy now persecuted him with accusations and lampoons which he in no way deserved. His resistance to the will of his nephew, and indeed his whole conduct, seem to have been actuated by sincere zeal for what he considered to be the interests of the church. When called upon by the Bourbons to resign his episcopal office, he obstinately refused; and it was not till 1825, after receiving a papal brief inter dicting the exercise of his clerical functions, that he resigned the charge, but not the title. In 1837, an attempt was made to reinstate him, to which, however, the French government refused assent. He lived in the greatest friendship with his sister, Madame Mere, as she was styled, till his death. He died 13th May, 1839. Of his famous and very large collection of paintings, he bequeathed a part to the city of Lyons, and the rest was disposed of in a series of auctions at Rome after his death.