by Alan Schom
It was certainly true, however, that as France’s foreign minister, Talleyrand did obtain the most outrageous sums as bribes. The list of these perversely colorful achievements was known to the whole of Europe to gape and wonder at, and the subsequent ire and outrage simply made Talleyrand smile all the more mischievously. Great princes can commit great crimes — it is expected of them. But it was not always “enemies” of the French state who bribed him: Frenchmen played the same game. Marshal Murat, for example, paid Talleyrand substantial amounts for helping him secure his Italian claims, including one impressive payment of eight hundred thousand francs in (looted) gold. The margrave of Baden reputedly gave the French foreign minister 1 million francs, and King Ferdinand IV of Naples 3.7 million, for the right to retain title to lands they wanted. The king of Saxony upped the ante by giving Talleyrand a cool 6 million francs in exchange for a Berlin prison cell.[407] The negotiators at Lunéville later reputedly gave him 7 million.[408] Gold was flowing in almost as regularly as the tide. The hapless Prince van Weilbourg was to present Talleyrand with another five million francs in exchange for the presidency of the Batavian Republic. Although Talleyrand received his coffer of gold, Weilbourg failed to receive his quid pro quo. The French foreign minister never guaranteed results, of course, and never returned a sou. Nor were the German princes and princelings of the various Rhineland states — shortly to be assigned new frontiers and titles in what was to become the Confederation of the Rhine — any less worried about their future condition and largesse. Even more generous in an attempt to assure their claims, they sent convoys of gold under heavy guard directly to Talleyrand’s palace in broad daylight. The amount? Ten million francs. One German diplomat who did not appreciate being given this princely squeeze, and who did not fare well in Talleyrand’s hands, a certain Baron Gagerneda, complained that the French foreign minister was demanding payment in “hard cash” for his influence and “considered his high diplomatic position a gold mine.” He was, and it was. In the case of the realignment of the Rhineland states, after receiving the usual pot of gold from, in this case, Prince von Reuss, the elegant Talleyrand wrote in the margin of the treaty sent him: “The French Republic is delighted to have made the acquaintance of Prince von Reuss.” The inimitable Talleyrand had struck again.
Yet there was a mutual respect between Talleyrand and Napoleon. Talleyrand rarely emitted any semblance of personal feeling or emotion, especially in the political world, but when he did so, it was invariably disparaging. Was he being facetious a few years later, in 1805, when taking leave of Napoleon (who was departing for the battlefield), when he said he “felt an emotion that is impossible to describe”? With Talleyrand one never knew. Napoleon, too — despite later negative remarks — admitted he found it “most painful to leave the two persons [Josephine and Talleyrand] I love most.” The love-hate relationship between these two geniuses amused many and baffled most.
In the field of diplomacy, Napoleon and Talleyrand agreed on the tactics required to subdue their unfortunate opponent of the moment, and they applied the crudest, harshest measures in achieving this goal. Holland was virtually ravaged — militarily, financially, socially, and politically — by the brutal measures applied by Talleyrand and Bonaparte. But ultimately the foreign affairs objectives of the two men were to diverge dramatically. Both men hated Great Britain, but only Talleyrand was wise enough to wish to compromise and end the decades-long mutually destructive struggle between the two nations. Napoleon remained an uncompromising warlord, while Talleyrand, a despiser of the military profession, sought a full, enduring European peace. Sooner or later the two men were bound to break and go their separate ways.
Naturally, therefore, Talleyrand was to oppose most of Napoleon’s continental expansion, particularly in areas well beyond the historical frontiers of France. “My humble brain has much trouble in convincing itself that what we are doing beyond the Rhine will outlive the great man who is creating it,” Talleyrand said to Metternich following Austerlitz and subsequent central European conquests. They were, he insisted, “most foolish steps,” all the result of “ambition, pride, anger on his part, and of some imbeciles he listens to, thereby blinding his vision...You will see how he will finally compromise himself one of these days.”[409] When later Talleyrand secretly corresponded with the English, and with Czar Alexander I, opposing Napoleon’s formidable expansion throughout Europe, the foreign minister justified himself by quoting Corneille’s famous lines: “‘Treachery is a noble thing when enacted against tyranny.’...The only time in my life I ever plotted,” Talleyrand quipped, “was when I had most Frenchmen as my accomplices, and when the well-being of the country required it.”[410] But that of course was many years later. Still, Talleyrand’s sly, secretive ways and rather questionable foreign connections, as well as his own history, led Napoleon to entertain suspicions against him. “When M. de Talleyrand is not plotting,” Chateaubriand remarked, “he is selling bribes.” And everyone knew it.
Much later on, there were to be some rather disagreeable scenes between Talleyrand and Napoleon — or, one should say, by Napoleon against Talleyrand — accusing him of all sorts of things, especially when, after a series of battles, Napoleon refused to establish a lasting European peace. Talleyrand was gradually to come to the conclusion that the only way for France to achieve peace was “to banish the doctrines of [Bonaparte] usurpation and to revive the principle of legitimacy, which is the sole remedy for all the woes afflicting us.”[411] This led to a furious scene, when Talleyrand, summoned peremptorily to the Tuileries, found Napoleon surrounded by Fouché, Cambacérès, Lebrun, and Decrès. Napoleon, who always stage-managed everything, obviously had something special in mind. He lashed out at Talleyrand, calling him
a thief...a coward, a faithless wretch...All your life you have failed to fulfill your duties, you have deceived and betrayed everyone...Nothing is sacred to you! You would not think twice about selling out your own father! I could break you like a glass!...I really don’t know why I haven’t had you hanged from the gates of the Carrousel!”[412]
Even the tough Admiral Decrès, himself an old aristocrat, winced. “A pity, don’t you think, that such a great man was so badly brought up,” Talleyrand quipped later, as he reached those very gates outside the Tuileries. In reality, however, he was shaken and had never been so humiliated in his life. Yet he knew he was right. France needed peace at last, and Napoleon of course throve only on war.
“It is not that I fail to recognize his talents,” Talleyrand remarked, “for he is superior to everyone else, mais c’est l’or à côté de la merde [but he’s a blend of gold and shit].”[413] “My affairs went well all the time that Talleyrand was in charge of them,” Napoleon one day acknowledged, “and in the final analysis, he is the one man who best knows and understands France and Europe.”[414] But that lay many, many years in the future. In 1800 Napoleon and France were just beginning their adventurous saga.
Chapter Sixteen – Fouché’s Police
‘He is the sort of man we need in an affair like this.’
On Fouché
On May 21, 1759, Joseph Fouché, one of the most sadistic and versatile political actors and opportunists in French history, was born at Pellerin, on the Loire River just a few miles west of Nantes. The scion of well-to-do sea captains and merchants, young Fouché was too frail to follow in his father’s more robust footsteps to sea. Instead he received a good scientific and classical education at the Oratory of Jesus at Nantes, where he found himself in his element and throve. He considered but then abandoned the idea of a career in the church,[415] though he retained his strong attachment to the Oratory and its unique fraternity. Indeed, he decided to remain within the Oratory system but in a lay capacity, teaching science.
Beginning his teaching career at the Oratory College of Niort in 1782, within five years he had been transferred to the elite Oratory College at Juilly, where the aristocracy and the influential sent their favored sons. Among the students an
d colleagues, some were to be prominent in Fouché’s own political career within a few years, including Eugène de Beauharnais, Jérôme Bonaparte, Etienne-Denis Pasquier, Mathieu Molé, and Antoine Arnaud, all of whom were later closely associated with Napoleon’s regime, especially Minister Mole and Chancellor Pasquier. Despite his brief stay there, Fouché made a few lifelong friends and left an indelible impression on many as well, if for no other reason than his celebrated hot-air-balloon ascent with his upper classmen. (Joseph and Etienne Montgolfier had launched their first “mongolfière” in 1783 from the very field just outside Lyons, where, less than a decade later, Fouché was to inaugurate a mass execution of the notables of that same city.) But no sooner had he arrived at Juilly, which he found an academic paradise, than he was transferred yet again in the new year, this time to the Oratory College at Arras.
It was in that grim northern industrial city that Fouché’s political education began and where he met Carnot, still a frustrated army engineering officer, and, more important, an equally frustrated local lawyer by the name of Maximilien Robespierre, into whose family Fouché was welcomed. Although Robespierre’s sister declined Fouché’s offer of marriage, nevertheless a timely loan by the affluent schoolmaster enabled Robespierre to reach Paris in 1789 and to launch his bloody career. In October 1790 Fouché was transferred a final time, back to the Oratory College at Nantes, and soon was promoted to headmaster.
By now, however, his mind tended to be more on revolutionary politics than on education, especially in the watershed year (for him) of 1792, when the government closed his school, along with thousands of others. Running for the seat as deputy for Nantes and elected to the Convention, he proclaimed himself a “constitutional royalist,” a position he was quickly to abandon. That same year Fouché’s father died, in theory leaving him comfortably off, and before departing for Paris he married the daughter of the most influential politician of revolutionary Nantes, Bonne-Jeanne Coiquaud. It was to prove a fruitful and happy union, of which Fouché himself was proud and protective. At the age of thirty-three, Fouché was beginning a new career and a new life. Entering the assembly as a moderate from the Gironde, promising “to maintain freedom and equality or to die defending them,” he soon passed over not merely to the Left but to the extreme Left, to the Montagne of Jacobin politics. Voting now for the execution of his king, Louis XVI, he denounced both the nobility and the very church that had nurtured him.
But no sooner had he joined Robespierre’s faction than he was dispatched as special envoy of the Convention to enforce another execution, this time of the revolutionary principles still defied by some sections of the country. The French people were not yet sufficiently appreciative of what the Revolution had to offer, and his job was to encourage them to change their mind. Religion and the Roman Catholic church had to disappear — “de-Christianization,” they called it — to be replaced by the “Cult of Reason,” as did the nation’s aristocracy and most of the manufacturers, merchants, magistrature, and the wealthy in general. While some 600,000 French citizens were ultimately killed in France during the Revolution as a result of military and nonmilitary action, another 145,000, mostly aristocrats and the educated classes, managed to flee the country. For those less fortunate, imprisonment, torture, or some form of brutal summary execution remained the usual alternative.
Fouché, the man of his hour, who had hitherto passed himself off as a middle-class “gentilhomme” and teacher, now changed personality, ordering the desecration of the churches and cathedrals of Nevers and Moulins, where he humiliated and literally publicly defrocked Bishop François Laurent and thirty of his priests who, stripped of their vestments, were paraded before the shouting citizens as if they were circus clowns. Burning the priests’ vestments and missals while smashing religious statuary — though keeping the more precious objects — Fouché played up to the crowd, denouncing “these impostors who persist in continuing to perform their religious comedy,”[416] as he put it. “It is they who have been enslaving us more and more over the past 1,300 years,”[417] he exclaimed later in Lyons, when he personally ordered the invasion of Bishop Lamourette’s residence and had him placed ignominiously on a donkey, his miter strapped to the beast’s head, and the bishop’s Bible and crucifix tied to its tail, as the wretched clergyman was led through a howling mob that kicked, beat, and spit on him. All religious objects in Lyons were also destroyed, again on Fouché’s personal orders. A few weeks later he could proudly report to Paris that Christianity had “been struck down once and for all.”
It was here at Lyons, in his role as proconsul for the Convention, that the darkest side of Fouché’s bizarre nature fully emerged. He and Collot d’Horbois, his fellow coordinator of Lyons, signed orders for the destruction of sixteen hundred of the city’s finest residences and for the execution of 1,905 citizens — all in the name of the newly proclaimed First Republic. “A bayonet piercing a human heart,” executioner Fouché remarked, “makes me tremble. However, this bayonet is guiltless, and only a child would wish to break it,”[418] he insisted in one of the most contorted sentences ever created. “Terror,” he continued, “salutary terror, is now the order of the day here...We are causing much impure blood to flow,” he concluded, “but it is our duty to do so, it is for humanity’s sake”[419] — which is precisely what the Spanish Inquisition had declared in the sixteenth century. Clearly he had found the formula for achieving the revolutionary objectives of liberty, equality, and fraternity, and under him the French Republic triumphed and rejoiced.
Alas, Fouché’s enthusiasm had proved a little too effective, for when the blood from the mass executions in the center of Lyons gushed from severed heads and bodies into the streets, drenching the gutters of the Rue Lafont, the vile-smelling red flow nauseated the local residents, who irately complained to Fouché and demanded payment for damages. Fouché, sensitive to their outcry, obliged them by ordering the executions moved out of the city to the Brotteaux field, along the Rhône. Beginning late in 1793 and continuing into the early spring of 1794, batch after batch of bankers, scholars, aristocrats, priests, nuns, and wealthy merchants and their wives, mistresses, and children were transferred here from the city’s jails, tied to wooden stakes, where firing squads and mobs were permitted to dispatch them. Day after day these murders went on, and ex-headmaster Fouché, whose personal library was filled with hundreds of leather-bound volumes in Greek and Latin, looked on. And every night this same Fouché, the model husband and father, smilingly, modestly returned to his wife and children at home, where a warm hearth and clean bed awaited the Executioner of Lyons, as he was known thereafter, both locally and to history.
Things were not always accomplished as neatly as he had planned or might have hoped, however. On one afternoon the execution of a twenty-six-year-old nun did not go according to schedule, when the good wives of Lyons’ working classes slashed at her bloodied head with their meat cleavers several times before succeeding in beheading the young woman, whose only crime had been refusing to stop praying to God when ordered to do so by “the people.”[420] Clearly democracy and freedom were on the march. “We must be fierce in order to fear becoming weak and cruel,” Fouché commented. “Let us strike like lightning and let the very ashes of our enemies disappear with the approach of freedom.”[421] His famous “terror, salutary terror” was now indeed “the order of the day” here in Lyons,[422] Fouché dutifully reported to Paris. In any other country he would either have been committed to an insane asylum or executed as a homicidal maniac, but in revolutionary France he was a hero.
Indeed, Paris appreciated his patriotic acts. “Citizen Fouché has brought about miracles...The infirm have been succored, the poor given fresh respect, [religious] fanaticism has been destroyed...suspicious persons have been arrested, great crimes punished...such is the summary of the achievements of the representative of the people, Fouché.”[423] And as Legendre confirmed in a special report to the Committee of Public Safety, “Public spirit is evident ever
ywhere...the vigor of the measures taken [by Fouché] will cause republicanism to triumph in such a manner as to make the enemies of freedom and equality despair.”[424] The tenets of the Revolution were the new gospel of the land, and Fouché was their apostle.
Following the change in tide, however, by the summer of 1799 the slippery political chameleon par excellence had put considerable distance between his recent unsavory past and the Jacobin officials and policies he had so warmly espoused and even personified. The Council of Five Hundred with its pro-Jacobin leanings, supported by its president, General Jourdan, and War Minister Bernadotte, was, in the eyes of the Directory, a danger to the Republic and a direct threat to their own existence and national stability. Having dismissed the previous nine unsatisfactory police ministers over the past three years, the Directory desperately sought a strong new minister willing to accept full responsibility for ruthlessly crushing all opponents. The reviled Executioner of Lyons was the only one capable of filling their requirements. Fouché convinced the five-man Directory that he could indeed restore order and firm government control of the country. If it took an ex-Jacobin to quell the Jacobins, so be it. What the Directory did not realize, of course, was that Fouché could not only squelch their opponents but help drive the final nail into their own directorial coffin as well.