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After the conclusion of the Concordat and the founding of the Empire, the date of the National Day was set on August 15, which marked both the anniversary of the birth of the emperor and the Feast of the Assumption. The papacy even invented a new saint at the request of the French authorities, which it included in its liturgical calendar and provided with a series of prayers that all the clergy, including the faithful, had to recite. The creation of this devotion, based on the very name of the reigning monarch, illustrates in a somewhat caricatured way the mobilization of religion in the service of the State, right up to what it holds as its most sacred observance: the prayer. The reason of this change is that, contrary to the place it held in the Ancien Regime, religion was no longer the principle of sovereignty that justified the intervention of the State: it only constituted one of its attributes. The devotion to Saint Napoleon failed to survive the Empire. This was less the result of the unwillingness of a part of the Church, anxious to theologically dissociate itself from the State, than the mutation of the traditional figure of the saint in political myth as a result of a dual process of secularization and politicization.