Читать книгу Phantom Terror: The Threat of Revolution and the Repression of Liberty 1789-1848 - Adam Zamoyski - Страница 17

‘The multitude will always remain calm if one honestly takes care of its interests, if one avoids everything that might undermine its confidence, unnecessarily wound its prejudices, corrupt its habits of thought and action, or manipulate its ignorance and credulity,’ Napoleon’s former police chief Fouché explained in a memorandum written for the Duke of Wellington shortly after Waterloo. ‘Everything has changed in our civilisation; it has made much fortunate progress, but it has also left us some new vices,’ he went on, pointing out that the ‘old deference’ had gone. ‘It is no longer possible to govern men in the same manner,’ he concluded.1

Wellington had taken advantage of his paramount position in the weeks following the victory to pressure the returning Louis XVIII to appoint Fouché as his minister of police, arguing that only he had the ability to stabilise the situation. Louis acquiesced with the utmost revulsion: Fouché embodied everything that was most objectionable about the Revolution, and had been one of those most determined to send his brother to the guillotine. And his revulsion was reinforced by a fundamental divergence of views on how to restore order and stability. The king and his entourage could not admit that the ease with which Napoleon had recovered his throne might have had something to do with their own mistakes. They were, as Fouché explained, ‘obsessed with the idea that the throne had been toppled as a result of a vast conspiracy’. This was, he believed, a ‘fatal misconception’, but conspiracy was in the air, and the publication of a book on the subject by Charles Nodier revived all the old fears of people working in the shadows for nefarious ends of one kind or another.2

As soon as he felt it was safe to do so, Louis XVIII dismissed Fouché and replaced him with a man of far less ability, Élie Decazes, a thirty-five-year-old lawyer who had been a minor official under Napoleon. Handsome and personable, he managed to charm Louis, whom he entertained with salacious gossip during their daily meetings. Their relationship quickly grew into a real friendship, and the childless king began to treat him as a surrogate son, addressing him in letters as ‘mon enfant’ or ‘mon fils’, and signing off as ‘Ton père’. Although he was only minister of police, Decazes gradually took over the direction of all internal affairs, leaving Richelieu to deal with foreign policy.3

Decazes did not have the benefit of Fouché’s experience, and he had certainly not read his memorandum, in which he warned against the indiscriminate use of informers and advised treating all intelligence with a pinch of salt. ‘Every day, the agent of the police has to furnish a report in order to earn his pay and prove his zeal,’ Fouché wrote. ‘If he knows nothing, he invents. If, by chance, he discovers something, he thinks he must enhance his own importance by inflating his discovery.’ On the other hand, the manufacture of conspiracies did, he admitted, have its uses, as the government could ‘seize the opportunity of a danger which it has conjured up, either to strengthen or to extend its power’, adding that ‘it is enough for it to survive a conspiracy to acquire greater strength and power’. But in the less than capable hands of Decazes, the opposite was to prove the case for the Bourbon regime.4

Decazes set to the task of tracking down subversives, making generous use of mouchards and paid informants such as chambermaids, hairdressers and dressmakers, as well as ‘spies of bon ton who frequented the most distinguished salons of the capital, dined at the best tables, were only seen at the Opera in a box’, in the words of one contemporary. The majority of them were women. ‘At their head figured a lady of consummate ability,’ he goes on. She was apparently ‘neither pretty nor ugly’, and could easily pass unnoticed, while being invited everywhere. By way of contrast, the same observer cites the example of another lady. ‘She is without contradiction the most charming creature my eyes have ever seen; nature has never formed a more perfect work of art,’ he writes. ‘Her figure is ravishing, her movements graceful, her voice gentle and ingratiating … She was in the full bloom of her beauty, being only about twenty-six years of age. Her life had been, so it was said, very adventurous. Nothing was known of her family or of the place of her birth. She had left for Russia three years before, with a gentleman said to be her father, from there she went to England, whence she returned with another gentleman said to be her husband.’ The couple gave sumptuous dinners and dances, probably paid for by the police, which the most distinguished and influential members of Paris society would attend. The hostess ‘moved around the rooms, mixed in every circle, spoke to all the men, listened to this one, asked questions of that one, and thus she fulfilled her role of observer’.5

The idea that any information was better than none led the police’s informers down increasingly frivolous avenues of investigation. Those spying on supposed Bonapartists in London turned their attention to the duc d’Orléans. He had left Paris at Napoleon’s approach in 1815 and gone to England, settling with his family at Twickenham. His house was placed under surveillance. The fact that the Neapolitan ambassador called regularly was deemed suspicious, even though the King of Naples was the duchess’s father. So were his visits to members of the British cabinet and royal family. One report concerned Orléans’ frequent contacts with the Duke of Kent, pointing out that most of the duke’s servants were French, including three former Polish lancers of Napoleon’s Guard, and that, when engaged in conversation by the spies, they expressed negative views about the Bourbons.6

The daughter of France’s ambassador in London could barely believe the nonsense the spies passed on to the embassy as information of the highest importance. In one instance, they reported that Orléans had a secret printing press producing anti-Bourbon pamphlets. When she drove down to Twickenham with her father one Sunday evening, they found the family sitting around a large table, with the children printing out a fable composed by one of them on a toy press.7

Orléans was not the only member of the French royal family under surveillance. Throughout 1816 and 1817 the police kept a close watch on the sexagenarian duc de Bourbon. Being the father of the duc d’Enghien, who had been judicially murdered by Napoleon, he was unlikely to harbour Bonapartist or revolutionary views even if he had shown any interest in politics. As it was, his attention was focused exclusively on his new teenage mistress.8

In the absence of real subversion, Decaze’s police conducted an obsessive pursuit of the trivial. People were arrested for shouting ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ or ‘À bas les Bourbons!’, even though these were more likely to be incoherent outbursts of anger at losing a job or a mistress, indignation at the rate of taxation or the price of bread, or just frustration and dissatisfaction, than indications of intent to overthrow the regime. They were arrested for making statements insulting to the royal family in a public place (usually a wine shop), for calling royalists ‘scoundrels’, for making ‘de mauvais propos’ (which can only be translated as ‘saying bad things’), for being a ‘mauvais sujet’, a ‘rotten fellow’ ‘signalé comme un homme dangereux sous tous les rapports’ (said to be a dangerous man all round), for frequenting a tavern where ‘suspect individuals’ gathered, for having just arrived from Berlin, from London, from New York, for failing to doff their hat to the king’s carriage, for not displaying a white cockade on it, for wearing a hat too red or multicoloured ribbons and trimmings which happened to include the colours of the tricolour (one jeweller’s apprentice was arrested for wearing a mixture of pink, white and violet), for using old military buttons with the imperial eagle on them, and so on.9

The Paris fire brigade fell under suspicion because they did not present arms when the king’s Gardes du Corps marched past. In Besançon, a mouchard launched an investigation into ‘a vast organisation of agitators’ by reporting that he had noticed people apparently communicating with each other surreptitiously in the street by tugging at their moustaches in various ways. At Saint-Romain-de-Popey in the Rhône on 21 July 1816, during a votive holiday for which ancient custom dictated that the men wear white-braided tricorn hats with red and green feathers, the gendarmes presumed these to be an allusion to the republican tricolour and began tearing the plumes from the hats, precipitating a riot which only ended after serious casualties had been inflicted on both sides.10

According to the drivers of the diligences, or mail coaches, part of whose job it was to render a detailed report of the public mood in the towns they had come from and passed through, people around the country were far more preoccupied with bread-and-butter issues than with politics. Of 704 outbreaks of violence against the authorities recorded between January 1818 and June 1830, only forty-three (6 per cent) had any political undertone, and even then it was usually no more than general disaffection. The riots of 1816–17 were almost exclusively about the food shortages following the Tambora eruption, and those in Lyon in 1819 were Luddite protests against the introduction of the Jacquard loom. Yet almost all were reported as having a political motive.11

François Vidocq, the petty criminal turned police official, describes how mouchards would set up ‘a sort of political mousetrap’ in a wine shop: ‘drinking with the labourers, they worked them, in order to enmesh them in faked conspiracies’ before arresting them. They would teach the workers songs full of the crudest insults to the royal family, ‘composed by the same authors as the hymns for the holidays of St Louis and St Charles’, for, as Vidocq adds, the police had ‘its laureates, its minstrels, and its troubadours’.12

The police agent Pierre Blanc was actually prosecuted for ‘working to create a nucleus of malcontents in order to then denounce them to the authorities who employed him’. But his was an isolated case, and on the whole provocateurs were free to practise their art unmolested. The Ultra mayor of Toulouse, Joseph de Villèle, discovered that the police in the town were orchestrating grain-price rises and printing inflammatory pamphlets denouncing the Bourbons.13

The obsession with acquiring intelligence was not limited to the organs of the state. The ambassadors of the four allied powers had their own intelligence service, based at 15, rue de l’Université, organised by the erstwhile Prussian police chief Justus Grüner. Shortly after appointing Fouché, Louis XVIII had instructed one of his former agents, Brivazac-Beaumont, to create a network of spies to keep an eye on the minister. Fouché himself had set up under the chevalier de Bordes a parallel force to his own official police in the rue de Jérusalem, operating from offices in the rue du Dragon. Given the climate of suspicion and distrust at every level, various ministers had their own intelligence-gathering networks. According to Jacques Peuchet, archivist of the Préfecture de Police, there were four discrete networks operating within the Tuileries itself. One, headed by the duc d’Aumont, first gentleman of the bedchamber, was confined to the palace and the king’s person, and was made up of old émigrés and devoted noblemen, along with two duchesses, a marquise and six countesses. Monsieur had his own, run from the pavillon de Marsan and directed by Antoine de Terrier de Monciel, whose main purpose seems to have been to gather evidence to fuel Monsieur’s conviction that the country was ‘in a state of general conflagration’. Monsieur’s elder son the duc d’Angoulême had his own network, covering the army. ‘In every regiment there were three accredited spies,’ explains Peuchet, ‘one with the rank of captain, a second among the lieutenants, and the third, also a volunteer, kept an eye on the under-officers and the soldiers. There were aides-de-camp, generals and even a marshal of France in this odious militia.’ The duke’s wife, the dauphine, had her own ‘police mignonne’ which kept her informed of all the amorous goings-on, something it was well qualified to do as it consisted of young ladies of the court and clerics who thought nothing of betraying the secrets of the confessional. The police of Monsieur’s younger son the duc de Berry were less efficient. On one occasion he asked them to investigate his mistress in the hope of finding something in her behaviour that might provide him with an excuse to jilt her, as he wished to be free to conduct another affair with an actress he had just taken up with. But they confused the two names and investigated the actress instead: he was presented with evidence of her infidelities to him.14

Each of these networks employed its own stable of spies, both male and female, all acting on the assumption that any snippet of information was of value, however and wherever obtained, and that facts which did not add up to a narrative of some sort were unlikely to arouse interest; disparate and sometimes untrue gobbets were therefore mixed together to produce one. ‘It was a curious spectacle to observe all these police networks going about their work on the same stage, trying to remain concealed from each other and to penetrate the actions of the others,’ Peuchet concludes. ‘There were occasionally highly amusing conflicts and some very bizarre encounters.’15

The motives behind them could be recondite. One evening in 1819, a man called on Decazes and informed him that he had learned that a lady in the entourage of the duchesse de Berry was to meet an agent of Napoleon at a certain address at nine o’clock the following night. He expressed the hope that his services would not go unrewarded, and Decazes duly gave him two thousand-franc notes. To head the operation of catching the agent, Decazes picked a general keen to show his royalist credentials and aspiring to the rank of marshal of France. The general duly gathered together a strong body of police and staked out the house in question by four the following afternoon.

At eight, a carriage drove into the courtyard and a lady alighted, followed by a maid. The general, who had set up his headquarters nearby, was duly informed. The two women went up to the second floor, and instantly the windows were lit up by a multitude of candles. Then a chef from a nearby restaurant arrived accompanied by a swarm of turnspits, and the policemen watched as ‘a refined dinner, a sumptuous dessert, ices, wine’ were carried up to the apartment. Nine o’clock came and went, and by half-past the general was growing anxious, but then a cabriolet appeared, preceded by a liveried outrider. A man got down and bounded upstairs, attended by the outrider.

The general waited a while and then went into action, at the head of forty policemen. ‘The house was attacked, they mounted the stairs with precipitation, they entered an antechamber, the lackey on duty there cried out and ordered them to leave, and, seeing that they would not, threw a large cream cheese at the general leading the assault force,’ in the words of Peuchet. ‘But worse followed! Hardly had they managed to open the door to the salon when they saw … Guess who? First, Countess M …, wife of the aspiring marshal of France, lying on a divan, faint with fear. As to her cavalier, the emissary of Buonaparte, it was none other than H.R.H. the duc de Berry himself.’ Incandescent with rage, the duke seized some fire irons and went for the general, threw him and his escort out of the apartment and sent them scuttling down the stairs. Since neither he nor his lady had recognised her husband, who had dressed in plain clothes for the operation and whose face was masked by the cream cheese, they sat down once again, did justice to the dinner and ‘made love with added zest’. Decazes was furious, particularly as the whole of Paris was talking about nothing else by the next morning, and two days later he received a note from the Grand Almoner of France, thanking him for the gift of 2,000 francs to the fund for indigent priests.16

Gullible he might well have shown himself to be in this instance, but it was unwise to ignore even the most far-fetched intelligence, as people at both extremes of the political spectrum were prepared to embark on ventures of barely believable rashness; almost anything could sound plausible in the prevailing climate, with the phantom of Napoleon hovering in the popular imagination and the fear of ‘Jacobinism’ gripping people’s minds.

Marooned as he was in the middle of the Atlantic on the island of St Helena, Napoleon continued to haunt the nightmares of his conquerors. Their fears combined with the vague longings of others to generate an extraordinary incidence of rumour. In the prevailing climate, official announcements were greeted with suspicion, which encouraged second-guessing and speculation, and this developed a life of its own, giving rise to new conjectures that turned into certainties with surprising rapidity. News also travelled at very irregular speeds. Reports of a riot in one place might take ten days to reach a neighbouring town but only three to reach Paris, from which it might come back to the second town first, giving rise to the impression that there was a revolution in Paris rather than nearby.

Many rumours were the consequence of discontent over the price of bread or of deep-rooted if inchoate anxieties, foremost among which were that the government might be planning to raise taxes, impose conscription, bring back the servitudes of the ancien régime, return the biens nationaux, and abolish the freedoms won during the Revolution. Whenever such anxieties were aroused, the poor would long for a guardian angel, a protective deity, and would fix on the one figure whose power they believed in – Napoleon. Wishful thinking would do the rest, and give rise to rumours that he was about to return, or had done so.

In the summer of 1814, shortly after he had reached Elba, rumours began to circulate that Napoleon had landed in France at the head of a Turkish army. At the end of 1815, before he had set foot on St Helena, talk of his imminent return alternated with reports that he had already landed, and even sightings of him. Rumours of this sort reached a peak in 1816 and 1817, when the effects of the Tambora eruption raised the price of bread to new heights. They continued over the next years, and would not cease with Napoleon’s death in 1821, news of which would be widely disbelieved.17

The rumours had occurred most frequently in March 1815, the month he escaped from Elba. That miraculous return and the birth of his son the King of Rome, on 20 March 1811, were the two events on which his followers based their hopes for the future, and violets, which flower in March, became associated with those hopes. The cities of Lyon and Grenoble also featured as the focus for many rumours, as they had welcomed him enthusiastically in 1815. Each March between 1816 and 1825 there were reports of his return, some of them specific as to where he had landed, where he had been sighted and the number of troops he had with him. These troops were variously Turkish, Moorish, Polish, German, Persian, Chinese, ‘barbarians’ or ‘two million Indians marching across the Ganges’. In one instance, Napoleon had landed first in the United States and recruited an army of Americans; in another, he was rescued from St Helena by ‘the Emperor of Morocco’. The more sensational the image, the more easily it captured the imagination.18

These rumours had a destabilising effect in rural communities and led to a reluctance to show loyalty or even pay taxes to a regime which might be swept away at any moment. In late 1816 a rumour spread that the former Empress Marie-Louise was forming an army in Austria to liberate France, as a result of which thirty soldiers deserted and set off to enlist. In March 1817 a reported sighting of Napoleon spread paranoia through Lyon, with some barricading their doors and windows, and others fleeing the city. Parish priests who assured their flocks that the ogre would never escape from St Helena only made people wonder whether perhaps he already had. There were also impersonators of Napoleon or his marshals, who travelled around the country swindling people of food and money as they dispensed more or less fantastic pieces of information. In the Lyon area, highway robbers attacked in the name of Napoleon, leading to news spreading that he was advancing on Paris. Just as damaging were rumours that he had been murdered by the allies, which caused explosions of anger and rioting.19

In their reports, police agents, landowners, prefects, mayors and other officials often inflated the degree of support for Napoleon in their localities, either voicing their own worst fears or because they did not wish to appear lacking in zeal, thus magnifying the threat and causing alarm in Paris. This could lead to overreaction, which merely had the effect of making people believe that Napoleon really had landed. Such was the case in March 1816, when 6,000 National Guards were deployed in Lyon on the strength of baseless gossip. In 1821, a rumour that Napoleon had disembarked travelled so fast that a couple of days later a hundred communes sent in reports which mentioned sightings in almost as many places. Instead of suggesting the evident fallacy of the original rumour, this threw the authorities in Paris into a panic, the police came out in force everywhere, and the declaration of a state of emergency added credence to it.20

After Waterloo, the Bourbon authorities had seized all pro-Napoleonic literature they could lay their hands on, and the Chamber passed a law criminalising any endorsement of the emperor and his doings. Another extended criminal law to include incitement, direct or indirect, to change the line of succession to the throne of France. Symbols of Napoleonic rule were removed and representations of events or subjects connected with the Empire were banned. In 1816 two artisans from Beauvais were arrested for announcing the intention of naming their sons Paul-Joseph-Bonaparte and Louis-Henri-Napoléon. A doctor in Albi was arrested for naming his daughter Marie-Louise-Néapoldine, another for naming his Marie-Louise-Napoléonide. People were not infrequently arrested for wearing a violet in their buttonhole.21

In spite of this, millions of prints, statuettes and busts of Napoleon, as well as images illustrating the glorious episodes of his life, were clandestinely produced and disseminated all over the country by travelling salesmen. After his death, coins appeared on the market bearing the inscription ‘Napoleon II’. The police were powerless to stop this illicit industry and trade, despite frequent arrests and severe penalties for possession.

A high priority for the French police was to keep a close watch on members of Napoleon’s family, most of which had wound up in Italy. His mother had settled in Rome, along with his uncle Cardinal Fesch, his brothers Lucien and Louis, and his sister Pauline, whose beautiful villa was suspected of being a hub for all manner of dangerous conspiracy. Decazes despatched an agent to coordinate surveillance over them, and persuaded the Austrian and other police forces operating in the peninsula to tail him, in order to lend him credibility with other subversives. The only fruits of this surveillance are thick files of reports of numbing futility in the archives of Paris.22

Napoleon’s brother Joseph had managed to escape to Switzerland after Waterloo, whence he made his way discreetly to an Atlantic port and sailed to the United States, which he reached in September 1815. Unaware of this, but finding that the trail they had picked up had gone cold, the French police began to suspect the worst – if he was not to be found, he must be in hiding, and if he was in hiding, he must be plotting. The prefect of the department of the Ain reported a sighting, and various houses were watched around the clock; on 20 October the minister of police received a report that he was in the Jura, conspiring with a group of Bonapartist sympathisers; the prefect of the Jura then reported that he had crossed Lake Geneva and was hiding in the village of Chablais. ‘We have identified ten houses he has stayed in, but we can never find the one he is in at the time,’ complained one agent. Other sightings, one of them of him disguised in women’s clothing, kept the agents on full alert for months after Joseph had reached America.23

Another of Napoleon’s brothers, Jérôme, was also a source of worry. His father-in-law the King of Württemberg had done everything to persuade his daughter to divorce him, and when she refused he locked them both in the gilded cage of the castle of Ellwangen. Jérôme was treated as a prisoner of state, with a commandant of the castle, a police commissioner and an agent of the postal service keeping watch over his every move. All the entrances to the castle were heavily guarded, he had to ask permission to go out of doors, and could only do so under cavalry escort. In spite of this, the French police sent agents into the area to observe and obtain information on his activities.24

The former wife of Louis Bonaparte and erstwhile Queen of Holland, Hortense, had been banished from France after Waterloo and, at the insistence of the French government, denied permission to settle in Switzerland (too full of plotters), so she went to Austria, where a close watch was kept on her. Surveillance was extended to people corresponding with members of the Bonaparte family, and to former servants, even cooks and footmen.25

What underlay Richelieu’s anxiety was the fear that Napoleon might escape from St Helena. He believed that while the former emperor would find few supporters in France his very existence as a free man in any part of the world would be ‘an interminable cause of disturbances’ there. ‘It is certain that the agitators and the malcontents of every country look to St Helena, certainly not out of love for the man who is incarcerated there, but because they would regard his appearance on the scene as a means of disturbing and destroying the present state of affairs,’ he wrote to his ambassador in London, the marquis d’Osmond. ‘The island of St Helena is a point on which our telescopes must be unceasingly trained,’ he warned.26

He saw a potential threat in every ship fitting out in an American port if former Napoleonic officers had been spotted there. Although he did not credit all the reports he received warning of some plan to free him, he admitted that ‘it is difficult to believe that there is not a project prepared for the overthrow of the established order in France and to bring back Bonaparte’. When he heard that a ship from America had docked at Civita Vecchia, he assumed it was connected with Joseph Bonaparte, whom he still believed to be in Europe, and with a sighting in Italy of Napoleon’s faithful Marshal Poniatowski (who had been killed at Leipzig in 1813). Every rumour fed his anxieties, and at one point he believed that the former emperor might be liberated by slavers, who regularly crossed the Atlantic. When four ships sailed from England with volunteers intending to fight under Simón Bolívar for the liberty of Spain’s American colonies, he feared that they might liberate Napoleon along the way.27

In the spring of 1818, General Gourgaud, who had accompanied Napoleon to St Helena, decided he could stand the exile no longer and returned. In London, on his way back, he had a long conversation with the French ambassador, who sent a record of it to Richelieu, who was appalled. Inflating his own importance, Gourgaud implied that Napoleon had had ten opportunities to escape to America, and could do so at any moment.28

Richelieu was worried that the British authorities were not taking the threat seriously enough, and not checking on his presence every day, or that Napoleon might somehow manage to seduce his guardians. He was also afraid that a change of ministry in Britain might bring into government liberal sympathisers of the fallen emperor who would set him free, and he was not above suspecting the British of considering allowing Napoleon to escape, in order to destabilise France.

Accounts by British and French witnesses of Napoleon’s incarceration on St Helena, whether they were sympathisers or denigrators, casual observers or those dedicated to his captivity, confirm that he never showed the slightest interest in escaping. If anything, he appeared to relish what he saw as his martyrdom. Even if they had been able to dodge the Royal Navy ships circling the island, any would-be rescuers would have had difficulty in approaching Napoleon, let alone freeing him. He was guarded by six hundred men of the 53rd Regiment of Foot and four companies of artillery. There were pickets posted all over the island day and night, severe restrictions on his and his party’s movements, and a curfew after the evening gun. No unauthorised ship was allowed into the anchorage, and any vessel that stopped to take water had a guard posted on it. Napoleon’s British gaoler, Sir Hudson Lowe, was as strict as he could be, and certainly nourished no feelings of sympathy towards his charge.29

After the Bonaparte family, the police prioritised former Napoleonic officers, particularly the 15,000 or so demi-soldes, most of whom had been banished to provincial towns. They were poor conspiracy material. For one thing, they affected an easily identifiable form of dress: a Bolívar hat, long blue frock-coat buttoned up to the chin in military fashion, black necktie, riding boots and spurs. They usually sported a moustache and wore the red ribbon of the Légion d’honneur in their buttonhole, or, failing that, a violet. As if that were not enough, they met in the same cafés and were as easily traceable as they were identifiable. All recent research has shown that the overwhelming majority of demi-soldes may have entertained a jaundiced view of the Bourbon regime and remembered with fondness their glorious general, but remained politically passive.30

That did not stop the police. According to General Berton, the mouchards swarmed round the demi-soldes, and ‘if three people paused in a public place for a word and one of them was a military man, within the instant one or sometimes several of these minions of denunciation would creep up and place themselves at a small distance from the little group, staring in a distracted way at the stars or the tops of the trees, bending their ears to catch a few words which they half hear, but which, guessing the rest, they pass on in their fashion, according to the instructions they have received’. They would hang about the concierges and servants of former Napoleonic officers, asking questions, or call on them pretending to be officers who had fallen on hard times, offering to sell forbidden Napoleonic mementos.31

These tactics often led to ludicrous outcomes, as in the case of one former general turned police agent drawing into conversation an erstwhile member of the imperial administration who had been made a baron by the emperor. He made a number of provocative statements, with which the baron agreed, and then suggested they meet again in order to plan ways of staging a coup with the aim of bringing Napoleon back to power. The next morning a proud inspector handed his chief a lengthy report from the general incriminating the baron, only to have Decazes hand him the baron’s report incriminating the general. Both were agents provocateurs.32

Some informed observers and many policemen believed that most if not all of the ‘conspiracies’ the police uncovered during this period were of its own creation. A typical example is that of two police agents, named Chignard and Vauversin, who accosted a former Napoleonic soldier in the street and invited him to join them for a drink. As the wine flowed, they began to mutter about past glories and to make toasts to the good old days. When the veteran was suitably liquored up, they suggested forming a brotherhood, and all three signed an oath ‘to die for each other and for real liberty without monarchy’. He was then arrested, charged with plotting to overthrow the government and sentenced to a long term in gaol. Dozens of naïve ex-soldiers and demi-soldes were entrapped in this way.33

Richelieu himself dismissed as a fabrication the ‘evidence’ the police presented at the end of January 1816 of a conspiracy in Lyon. The same may have been true of the first actual insurrection against the Bourbons on the night of 4 May 1816, when some three or four hundred men led by a lawyer named Jean-Paul Didier attempted to take the city of Grenoble. It was put down within hours by the commander of the garrison, General Donnadieu, who had prior knowledge of Didier’s plans. Six conspirators lost their lives during a brief shoot-out, fourteen more were shot by the general out of hand, and a further eleven were later condemned and executed. Richelieu was one of many who believed that Donnadieu had probably masterminded the rising so that he could show his zeal and obtain promotion.34

In May of the same year, the police arrested a number of people whom they suspected of conspiring to put either the Prince of Orange or the Duke of Kent on the throne. Later the same month, they were on to a plot by a group calling themselves ‘Les Patriotes de 1816’, which seems to have involved little more than people distributing triangular pieces of paper printed with the words Union, Honneur, Patrie and an incoherent phrase about decapitation. They found some other texts to the effect that the sufferings of the people would soon be at an end. However, most of those arrested maintained under interrogation that they had never heard of Les Patriotes de 1816. They were equally ignorant of the other secret groups, such as the Vautours de Bonaparte, the Patriotes Européens and Régéneration Universelle, whose existence informers had reported to the police. The files on the case, which consist principally of the reports of agents and mouchards snooping and checking up on various suspects, tell us more about the eating and sleeping habits and sexual mores of Parisians of the day than about potential subversion.35

Later the same month, the police arrested an NCO by the name of Monnier, who had been making plans of the fortress of Vincennes; in his lodgings they found various papers, including an oath, a barely coherent diatribe calling on Frenchmen to free their motherland of the occupying foreign forces and overthrow the Bourbon monarchy in favour of Napoleon. He was tried and sentenced to death, but on the scaffold he implicated several others, the most senior of whom was a demi-solde