Napoleon Bonaparte

by Alan Schom

  His policies as police minister sometimes seemed contradictory, as he tried to reestablish national order according to his own lights. For instance, while asking for powers to impose sweeping newspaper censorship, he freed some well-known journalists from prison. At about the same time he persuaded the Directory to allow the first aristocratic émigrés to return to France from their long exile. He also succeeded in removing from the government’s banned list the names of some nonjuring priests (those who had not sworn allegiance to the revolutionary constitution), the very priests he had attacked at Lyons. As a result Fouché, the proconsul who had so terrorized and persecuted Lyons’ aristocrats and priests, became a regular guest at a few of their remaining chic salons in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, including those of the marquise de Custine and the marquise d’Esparbes, hobnobbing with distinguished names and leading churchmen. Who could begin to understand the twisted mind of this political opportunist, as he now mingled with the oldest French families while carrying in his pockets warrants for their arrest?

  And while actively attempting to stanch the tide of royalist-extremist groups hoping to overthrow the Directory, the inveterate conspirator Fouché was seeking out “a strong soldier” to carry out his own little coup d’état against those same directors who had just appointed him to office. If all went well he would soon be appointing himself head of state! For this coup, however, he needed a flexible soldier without strong personal interests in politics, someone who would not vie with him afterward for control of the government.

  His ultimate choice for this unique position was finally decided on as Fouché began visiting that individual’s beautiful aristocratic wife in the Rue de la Victoire, none other than Josephine Bonaparte. Curiously enough the general’s wife found the police minister a delightful if “correct” companion. Fouché, apparently always faithful to his wife, was paying only political court to Josephine. Her lifelong weakness being money, of which there never seemed to be enough, Fouché had been able to help her out on several occasions in exchange for information about Bonaparte’s headquarters, personal actions, and intentions. Josephine became a police informer against her own husband. Thus it was that Fouché soon realized that General Bonaparte was already preparing his own little surprise for the Directory, seeing himself in the role Fouché had reserved for himself. Fouché was reluctantly obliged to modify his plans, while Josephine filled him in on what she knew, handing over documents and even her husband’s personal letters to her. With the tide against him, as usual Fouché decided to swim with it, now attempting to ingratiate himself with Lucien and Joseph Bonaparte — whose attentions were not reciprocated, however. His aim now was to be accepted by the accomplices involved as “one of the leaders of the conspiracy,” as Director Gohier attested.[427]

  After Napoleon abandoned his army in Egypt and returned to Paris, Fouché had requested an interview with the general, who kept the influential minister of police waiting a full hour in his anteroom with everyone else before receiving him. Fouché was outraged but remained outwardly calm, though he would not forget this slight — sitting there, hat in hand, like a fourth-former before his headmaster. He passed muster, however. “He is the sort of man we need in an affair like this,” Napoleon afterward confided to a colleague, and admitted Fouché “into the secret,” as he put it.[428]

  Talking with Fouché at some length and quizzing him in depth, chiefly on the current political situation in the country, General Bonaparte had realized that the infamous police minister about whom he had heard so much over the years was in fact the only man for the disagreeable job of being his police minister. What is more, Fouché proceeded to steal nine hundred thousand francs from police funds for Bonaparte and his preparations for the 18-19 Brumaire, and then helped secure the streets of the French capital for him as well, preventing any possibility of revolt. Unlike Talleyrand, whom he respected in spite of their differences, Napoleon often felt disgusted by Fouché’s very presence. Few men had ever affected Bonaparte so strongly. These feelings were reciprocated,[429] but Fouché needed him and there were no better offers in sight. Fouché for his part had a comprehensive understanding of the political situation, its undercurrents and its leaders (all of whom he knew personally), not to mention the national situation, and a useful, detailed knowledge of administrative procedure. He already had hundreds of trusted men in place, while his ideas for reorganizing and reinvogorating the police were without parallel. For better or worse there was only one Fouché.

  Now, at the beginning of consular rule, Fouché set out reorganizing the entire Police Ministry. Determined to erase his reputation as the Proconsul of Terror at Nevers, Moulins, and Lyons, Fouché first secretly destroyed most of the documentary evidence concerning his earlier participation, including his official correspondence, speeches, and reports submitted to Paris. Meanwhile, to the public he stressed the moderating aspects of his new police policy, describing it as “gentler and firmer” than that of the past — as usual a contradiction in terms. To publicize his new image he had the names of some proscribed and outlawed citizens of prominence removed from the official government lists, including those of Maurice Barthélémy and Lazare Carnot. At the same time he attempted to mollify the very groups he had previously attacked with such pathological ferocity — aristocrats, priests, and Jacobins — by arranging for the return of some aristocrats, including Lafayette from a dreary Austrian prison.[430] Fouché was naturally only too pleased to act the great man, the obliging patron, as more aristocrats with ancient titles threw their doors open to him or discreetly sought his help in some matter. This did not, however, prevent the police minister from fully supporting and executing First Consul Bonaparte’s vigorous policy of crushing the Chouans, or the monarchist rebellion in the West. Fouché would accept aristocrats as long as they were willing to abide by his rules, which included reporting regularly to the police and being kept under close observation. Power was a wonderful thing.

  And yet there are further contradictions, for while Bonaparte favored negotiations to gain international recognition of his fledgling triumvirate and a rapprochement with the exiled Bourbons and Louis XVIII himself, Fouché worked behind the scenes to undo all that. (Later he would do just the opposite, negotiating with the Bourbons for peace against Napoleon.) Although maintaining a firm hand on the controls, so far as the more violent Jacobins were concerned, the police minister resumed reasonably friendly relations with their backers, including — of all people — Generals Bernadotte, Jourdan, and Moreau. Ever the political opportunist, he believed in keeping his options open.

  He likewise modified his policy regarding the church. In addition to attempting a reconciliation with the more moderate churchmen, he was to favor Napoleon’s Concordat and the normalizing of relations with Rome, whose very church he had ridiculed and vandalized. What had been condemned yesterday was today supported by the government, and by none more strongly than Fouché himself. Nonetheless, harsh repressive measures were also being taken by that very government. On Bonaparte’s orders, for instance, Fouché began cracking down on the capital’s newspapers, eventually reducing them through state censorship and police action from a thriving sixty to thirteen. No one really knew what to expect in “this country...so strangely troubled by a thousand different passions,” as Louis Madelin so aptly put it.

  Fouché’s ideas for reorganizing the police fitted in reasonably well with those of First Consul Bonaparte. To enable the surveillance and control of the entire country, he had to have sweeping powers, and for that purpose Fouché asked for the creation of prefects of police for every department — that is, alongside the first consul’s new political prefects. Napoleon found this proposition rather alarming, no doubt rightly seeing in such a move the creation of a powerful adversary, should the police minister himself turn against the first consul. What is more, Interior Minister Lucien Bonaparte — traditionally in charge of the nation’s police in the provinces through the gendarmerie — protested at the transfer of
those powers from his own ministry. But Fouché persisted and through a change of title managed to effect roughly the same thing. In the major ports and cities of the country, Fouché was now permitted to create prefects of police in everything but name, designating them “general commissioners of police,” while those at a lower level, for certain ports and regions, were labeled “special commissioners.”[431] Thus all the Channel ports, for instance — from Boulogne down to Bordeaux and along the Mediterranean coast as well — were now controlled directly by Fouché’s own men, while all major cities and regional capitals, such as Strasbourg, Toulouse, and Lyons, were equally covered, as were non-French territories as they were conquered, including Geneva, Turin, Mainz, Cologne, Ostend, and Antwerp.[432] As part of the compromise made by Fouché, the general commissioners were technically, administratively, under the prefect of each department (or state), but in reality they were detached from Lucien Bonaparte’s Interior Ministry and made directly responsible to Fouché. Fouché’s police now legally controlled the entire country.

  The overall daily administration of the entire Police Ministry was handled by Fouché’s friend and close collaborator Secretary-General Lombard Tardeau. After him Fouché relied heavily on three senior officials: Pierre François Real, a former Paris police commissioner and friend of Danton, who was in charge of nearly half the country’s provincial police, including those of the northern and western departments; State Counselor Pelet de La Lozère, who in turned administered the remainder of the country, with the exception of Paris. All general commissioners thus reported directly to these two men alone. And finally there was Charles Desmarests, a vicious defrocked priest, who headed France’s Secret Police, his grasping tentacles reaching out in every direction.[433] All these department heads, along with the prefect of police of Paris, usually met in Fouché’s office every Wednesday.

  Unlike the rest of the country, Paris was allotted its own separate police prefecture, created on February 17, 1800. The prefect was far more powerful and influential than any of the general commissioners in the provinces, and in theory was at the same administrative level as Réal and Pelet de La Lozère. But in reality he gradually became a rival of and challenge to the police minister himself, Paris being the seat of government and the hub of all national political and commercial activity. Fouché soon found that Prefect Louis Dubois, with whom he had at first worked so closely, gradually began to vie openly with him. Indeed, in some cases Dubois clearly outshone Fouché in results, such as when he uncovered the most complex and murderous assassination plot ever concocted against Napoleon — a plot that Fouché had dismissed as unimportant until an explosion proved how terribly wrong he had been.

  Every now and then one comes across the names of individuals, prominent or distinguished for some reason, who are known among the upper echelon of government or society but unknown to the public. Little is written about their private lives, then or later. Even high-ranking government officials acquainted in their official capacity with such individuals afterward found in fact that they knew very little indeed about their past or personal existence. When the individual in question also deliberately conceals his tracks and fails to oblige us with memoirs — in an age when nearly everyone wrote them — we are left at a loss. Such is the case of the early years of Napoleon’s first prefect of the Paris Police, Louis Nicolas Pierre Joseph Dubois.

  Born in Lille in 1758, Dubois lived to be nearly ninety, his life ending in utter obscurity in the closing days of 1847, just before the collapse of Louis-Philippe’s July Monarchy. Under the Bourbons the policing of Paris had been left in the hands of the lieutenant-general of police. But with the arrival of the Consulate, Napoleon created the prefecture of police and named Dubois to that post on March 8, 1800, a job he held until the autumn of 1810.[434] Although the new prefect had served as a magistrate during the Revolution, he had apparently had no direct police experience before taking up his new post.

  Fortunately for Fouché and Dubois, General Bonaparte believed in a strong police authority and gave it his full support. Indeed, Napoleon was fascinated by its daily activity and always delighted in listening to Dubois — whom he highly esteemed — tell police stories, the more lurid the better.[435] In fact, as Napoleon’s associates, friends, and family soon learned, there was little happening in Paris, and in their own lives, that he did not know about.

  Dubois was the only police official apart from his superior, Fouché, who had direct access to Napoleon whenever he wished. If Dubois, like just about every other Bonaparte appointee, was vain and hardly scrupulous in financial dealings, nevertheless he was an effective administrator governing the most volatile capital in Europe. What is more, Prefect Dubois was held directly responsible for the safety and well-being of Bonaparte and his entire family, as well as of every other member of the government. It was a tall order, and if anything untoward happened to the first consul, for example, if any attempt was made on his life or to overthrow his government, it was Dubois — not Fouché — who was charged with uncovering such conspiracies — well in advance. The prefect’s powers and responsibilities were therefore not merely second to those of Fouché, but inevitably overlapped and duplicated some of them, leading to mutual jealousy and acrimony. Although it was Fouché who had hired Dubois in the first place, it was only natural that Fouché would become wary as the prefect began to steal some of his thunder, eventually resulting in Fouché’s plotting to remove Dubois. Ironically, when the prefect did ultimately fall from power many years later, he did so with Fouché at his side.

  Fouché, as police minister, bore the overall nationwide responsibility for everything from arresting murderers and administering prisons to guarding public baths and garbage collection. The reports and information arriving daily from the four corners of the “Republic” were submitted to Réal or Pelet de La Lozère, who in turn passed them on to Secretary-General Tardeau, who finally presented them to the police minister. Fouché and his staff next carefully studied, sifted, and edited their contents for a special creation of the Ministry of Police, the most select and secret newspaper in France, the Bulletin de la Police. Early each morning only two copies were printed, covering from between fifteen to twenty pages. One copy was kept under lock and key in Fouché’s office. The other was tied in a green — Napoleon’s favorite color — silk ribbon and dispatched to the secretary of state, Hugues Maret, at the Tuileries, who was responsible for deciding who and what should have access to the first consul. Maret then personally handed the daily Bulletin to Napoleon.[436]

  The Bulletin included every major and minor item of interest occurring in the whole of France during the previous twenty-four to forty-eight hours, and Napoleon spent a great deal of time studying it. When, during one campaign hundreds of miles from Paris, the Bulletin was late in reaching him, he raged: “That is incredible negligence!”[437] Indeed, he came to feel that he could not run the country without it, for every Frenchman of importance was spied upon with a thoroughness that would have shocked the world had it been known. Although he specifically forbade the interception of most mail at the outset of his regime, and denounced the Directory for having censored all mail, Napoleon soon permitted Post Office Director Lavalette to expand his efforts. Nor were the police without means of similar procedures. The French, accustomed to this sort of humiliating interference, shrugged their shoulders and accepted it. And as the vast majority of the citizens were illiterate, government intervention of the nation’s post affected only a small percentage of the population. In any event, it was better than the chaos, distortions, and rampant brutality of the Revolutionary regimes. There was always a price to pay.

  Napoleon frequently met with Fouché at eleven each morning to discuss a variety of subjects, including items in the Bulletin, as well as special proposals and subjects brought up by the police minister. In addition the police minister communicated with the Tuileries by letter on a frequent basis, totaling some eleven hundred items over the course of Napoleon’s fourteen
-year reign.

  At the beginning of the Consulate a still-optimistic Bonaparte had made it known that he considered Fouché’s role and that of his police to be of critical importance to the success of his new regime. “I wish to be informed about everything [concerning the police] in the greatest detail and to work with you personally at least once, even twice a day when necessary,” First Consul Bonaparte had instructed his new police minister.

  Nor was Fouché slow to act, issuing his own national proclamation informing the country of his philosophy of the national police and how he interpreted its execution:

  All the repressive measures required have been effectively taken [that is, against the individuals attempting to prevent Bonaparte’s initial coup of 18 Brumaire and of undermining his new regime]: the instigators of the troubles, the royalist provocateurs, in short everyone who could serve as a threat to public or individual safety will be seized and prosecuted. All good republicans should therefore remain calm, because all their wishes are being carried out.[438]