The informers, whether they were regular police employees or mouchards, were on the whole neither intelligent nor educated. Their brief was to be on the lookout for anything out of the ordinary, and since both their experience and their understanding were limited, a great deal of what they saw and heard did strike them as such. When they eavesdropped on a conversation between two educated people they were likely to understand nothing, or to misunderstand, and in either case it would appear to them potentially seditious. The volume of information thus generated grew massively, as did the appetite for more, and as the British historian Richard Cobb, who trawled through the relevant archives in depth, explains, a brief report was ‘clear proof of utter incompetence or of deliberate covering-up’, and if there was nothing to report, something had to be invented.1
The more theatrically such information was presented, the better it was likely to be received. Cobb illustrates this with a case from 1793, when two agents eavesdropped on the same conversation on the terrace of a Paris café. One of them, who knew what he was about, began with a detailed description of the suspect’s appearance and how he was dressed. He went on to say that the individual in question had uttered obscene propositions unworthy of a republican, that he had vilified the national representative body, berated the Convention, insulted national sovereignty, mocked the champions of the people, undermined the revolutionary government, mouthed overtly counter-revolutionary sentiments, expressed the desire to bring down the republican regime, revealed himself to be an agent of Pitécobourg (prime minister William Pitt and the commander of the Imperial Army operating against France, Prince Frederick of Saxe-Coburg), and so on. The other, either a novice or a man of singular candour, merely reported that the man in question had said: ‘Merde à la Convention.’ He would not have been congratulated on his brevity.2
All of this tended to the production of reams of intelligence which was virtually fictitious and therefore valueless. Although his desk groaned with voluminous reports, the prefect of police in Paris had, at the very best, a highly distorted idea of what was going on in the capital, only a hazy one of what was happening in other cities, and none at all on the state of affairs in vast areas of the country. And he had as little control.
While all but the most privileged had welcomed the overthrow of the old regime and the abolition of feudalism, few appreciated the imposition of the new revolutionary order. States are as greedy as feudal lords when it comes to taxes, and the officials of the new regime rapidly overtook the former masters in unpopularity. In rural areas, their attempts to impose the authority of the state were met with mulish cunning. Such resistance was made all the easier as the revolutionary climate allowed the private and the public, the criminal and the political spheres to become gradually confused, and more inextricably with every new development in the political process.
The Revolution had been unpopular from the very beginning in the Midi, for a variety of regional, religious and other idiosyncratic reasons, and throughout the 1790s the government in Paris had great difficulty in affirming the authority of the state and collecting taxes there. Much the same was true of the west and north-west of France, where dumb resistance gradually flared up into full-scale civil war with the royalist rising of the Vendée. Despite ruthless military action, bordering on genocide, by the revolutionary government, the region was never entirely subdued, and the authority of the state remained frail. In addition, many coastal areas and port cities retained their own ways of doing things, and flouted the government’s attempts to control their activities. They evaded tax through smuggling, and traded with the enemy on a regular basis. Many inland cities also displayed an independent spirit, which, in the case of Lyon, proved indomitable.
A major manufacturing centre at the confluence of the Saône and the Rhône, a vital centre of communication linking Switzerland, Piedmont and the valley of the Rhône, and between areas chronically resistant to control such as Burgundy, the Massif Central and the Midi, Lyon had a long tradition of rivalry with and opposition to Paris. The topography and architecture of the city itself defied control. The density of many-storeyed houses along narrow, winding alleyways leading up the Grande Côte provided ideal conditions in which political or criminal fugitives could go to ground (it would be an important centre of resistance activity between 1940 and 1945). The rivers provided ideal means of disposing of evidence, as bodies would only be plucked from the swirling waters as far away as Avignon, if at all. In addition, Lyon was uncharacteristic of French cities in that its houses did not have concierges, the prime sources of information for the police. Nor, because of its steep, narrow streets, did it have many horse-drawn cabs, and therefore no cochers de fiacre, cab drivers. The cocher de fiacre was by the nature of things a party to criminals getting away from the scene of a crime, transporting stolen property, smuggling people in or out of town, abducting girls, and many other forms of illegal activity. As he had to be licensed by the police he was, even if he tried to play for the other side, an essential source of intelligence.3
There were swathes of rural France where bands of brigands roamed unchecked. In the Ardèche no road was safe, even for heavily escorted army pay convoys. The Revolution had led to an increase in the numbers of people living outside the law, and the wars swelled these through a steady flow of deserters. The introduction of conscription in 1798 only compounded the problem. Conscription was conceived both as a duty and a right, with the citizen not only serving the state but also participating in its workings, a notion based on Rousseau’s ideal of the citizen-soldier. It was a useful tool for the imposition of the new order, inculcating in the conscript deference to military hierarchy and the state it served. But it also taught the docile how to fight and emboldened the timorous, and it forced those who did not wish to serve to go into hiding, where they could only survive through banditry.
The government’s attempts to impose its will encountered formidable obstacles. These began with the near impossibility in remote rural areas and the overpopulated slums of larger cities of establishing a person’s identity. Political fugitives, criminals, deserters or people on the run for any number of reasons changed names, of which they might have a variety, or were known only by sobriquets or nicknames, often derived from their region of origin, physical attributes or alleged intellectual, physical or sexual prowess. In May 1792 the Convention had introduced passports, which had to be carried by anyone travelling outside their commune. Many people had more than one passport, sometimes a pocketful, stolen or forged. It was not unknown for men to dress up as women in order to go through with a marriage to another man which would provide them with a new legal identity.4
The police strove to pin people down by filling their passports with descriptions of their physical appearance, listing colour of hair and eyes, height, weight and distinguishing marks such as missing limbs, fingers, toes, ears, noses and eyes, traces of smallpox and other diseases. Deformities were noted, along with possible causes – a broken leg badly set might connect with an escape from prison. Every blemish and scar was scrupulously noted, along with their supposed origin (pistol, gun or knife wound, sabre cut, agricultural accident, maiming by a wild beast, fire, scalding, etc.). Tattoos and brandings were deemed helpful, often denoting a spell in the army or navy, or past criminal conviction. Tics, accents, deportment, way of walking, even the expression of the eyes or face – suspicious, frank, shifty, timid, soft, provocative, and so on – were all meticulously listed.
This approach proved counter-productive in the long run. Those picked up by the police were predominantly vagabonds, beggars, pickpockets, harlots, fences and other petty criminals. Such people tended to be malnourished, crippled, maimed and diseased, their bodies covered with the testimony of a lifetime