The Concordat's terms were narrower than a full restoration. Catholicism was recognised as the religion of the great majority of French citizens, not as the state religion, a distinction that mattered because it preserved the Revolution's principle of religious freedom for Protestants and Jews alongside the practical dominance of the Catholic Church. Confiscated Church property was not returned; in exchange the state agreed to pay clergy salaries, converting the priesthood into salaried civil functionaries in a way that gave the state permanent leverage over appointments and, in practice, over content preached from the pulpit.
The Organic Articles that Napoleon attached without the Pope's agreement went further still, requiring government permission for the publication of any papal document in France and for episcopal correspondence with Rome, provisions the Vatican never formally accepted but that French governments enforced for decades regardless. The result was a durable but uneasy compromise: the Church had public worship, an intact hierarchy and a paid clergy back, and the state had a Church it could supervise rather than an underground one it could not.
The Concordat of 1801 remained the legal basis for church-state relations in France until the Law of 1905 formally separated them, and a modified version of the same regime persists today in the three departments of Alsace-Moselle, which were under German administration in 1905 and never came under the separation law, so a French Concordat negotiated by Napoleon and a Pope still governs clergy salaries in a corner of the French Republic more than two centuries later.