On taking power, Napoleon adopted a form of administrative terror. He began by sending out military commissions backed by troops to dispense summary justice as they roved around the country, collecting unpaid taxes and recalcitrant conscripts. Once a semblance of order had been established these were replaced by special tribunals, which fulfilled the same purpose, but with due legal process and without the use of troops. They were nevertheless backed by force, in the shape of the Gendarmerie, the new name of the royal Maréchaussée.
The gendarme was the visible symbol of the state, and people took every opportunity to jeer at him, to jostle and impede him in his duties, and would often assist in the escape of those he had apprehended. Women, who resented their menfolk being taken away, were in the forefront of confrontations with gendarmes escorting conscripts and deserters, even if they were not from their own communities, and regularly caused affrays in which these were able to make their escape. But the efficiency of the Gendarmerie discouraged actual riots. The number of confrontations with the Maréchaussée thought worthy of being brought to the attention of higher authorities between 1771 and 1790 was 338, an average of about 1.4 per month. This dropped to virtually nothing under the Consulate and the Empire, but would begin to rise again when imperial authority started to disintegrate (the monthly average for 1813–17 would be 5.3, and it would remain at similar levels until 1850, a clear indication of the impact of the ruthlessness with which state security was enforced under Napoleon).6
Napoleon was the target of over thirty assassination attempts, but he knew better than to let this be known. ‘I do not like to have conspirators judged,’ he said to Pierre-François Réal, one of his senior police officials. ‘In such situations governments always lose out: it is so easy for a man to become a hero!’ He preferred would-be assassins to be thrown into gaol for a few months to cool off and then released. It was only when the conspirators could be successfully demonised that he would allow a public trial to go ahead. Assassination attempts were ‘mere diseases of the skin’, he said after one failed attempt on his life, while ‘terrorism’ was ‘an illness of the gut’. By ‘terrorism’ he meant those forces bent on undermining the state, and in this respect he saw the Jacobins as an altogether greater threat than the royalists conspiring against him, even if they did have the support and funding of the British government. The man who kept these terrorists at bay, his police chief Joseph Fouché, was as ruthless as himself, a cold, calculating individual whose instinct for survival was epic.7
Born in 1759 to humble parents in a small village outside the port city of Nantes in Brittany, Fouché was educated by the Oratorian Fathers and later taught in their colleges around the country. In 1792 he was elected to the National Convention in Paris, where he established a formidable reputation and was among those who called most insistently for the death of Louis XVI. He was then sent to root out counter-revolution in the Vendée, where, as well as purging large numbers of people, he stripped churches and eradicated every vestige of Christianity, which he identified as the Revolution’s prime enemy: back in Paris he busied himself with establishing the new Cult of Reason which was to replace it. In October 1793 he was despatched to crush opposition in Lyon, where he staged mass executions in which hundreds of people were chained together, blasted with grapeshot and allowed to die in bloody heaps. He was expelled from the Jacobin Club by Robespierre two weeks before the latter’s fall in July 1794, in which he played a part, thus saving his own neck. Over the next five years he sided alternately with royalists and Jacobins, and, by virtue of deft positioning, managed to get himself appointed minister of police on 20 July 1799. One of the first things he did on setting up shop at his headquarters on the quai Voltaire was to clamp down ruthlessly on his former Jacobin colleagues and silence protest by imposing strict censorship on theatres, publishing houses and the press. To show he meant business, transgressors were shot.
Fouché delegated criminal investigation to the Sûreté, headed by Commissaire Henry. The latter took into his employ a petty thief, François Vidocq, whom he set up in a small, dark old house on the rue Sainte-Anne, between the quai des Orfèvres and the Sainte-Chapelle. From there Vidocq ran a network of agents, all of them criminals, who shamelessly preyed on their own kin. That took care of the basics of law and order.
Fouché himself concentrated on what he called la haute police – state security. He created a new information-gathering network, which he financed ‘by making vice, inherent in any great city, contribute to the security of the state’, that is to say by imposing heavy taxes on gaming houses and brothels. He used these funds to employ as informers people of every class and milieu, so as to have eyes and ears in every rank in the army, in every salon and every household of note. He paid well, according to status and value of services rendered, and soon built up a remarkable matrix – it is believed that even Napoleon’s wife Josephine was in his employ.8
Additional information was provided through the scrutiny of mail, which had long been carried out under the ancien régime for the purpose of spying on foreign embassies (and providing the king with salacious gossip about the amorous doings of his subjects). The practice was deemed offensive to the dignity of man by the idealistic revolutionaries, and on 26 August 1790 the National Assembly decreed that every postal official must swear not to violate the privacy of personal correspondence. But on 9 May 1793 the letters of émigrés were excluded from this on grounds of national security. Comités de Surveillance de Lettres were established in provincial towns, and by the time Napoleon came to power all correspondence was regularly pried into.9
The work was carried out by the ‘cabinet noir’, in a nondescript house in the rue du Coq-Héron which backed on to the postal sorting office. Most of its personnel had followed their fathers and sometimes grandfathers into the job, and they were carefully prepared to take on the task. They not only received a thorough education with a heavy stress on mathematics; they were sent abroad, attached to a diplomat, financier or merchant, so that they might pick up not merely foreign languages, which they had been taught in Paris, but also dialects, popular expressions, slang and the most commonly used abbreviations, and to familiarise themselves with the handwriting styles of different countries. Once they took up their work this was camouflaged by another, official, post with an equivalent salary and standing.
They would hover in the sorting office, pick out anything that aroused their interest and take it through a small door into a laboratory situated in the adjacent house. To unseal the packet, scan its contents, copy relevant passages and reseal it was the work of a moment, and it would be back in the sorting office before any delay could occur. ‘It was in vain that the arts of envelopes, seals and ciphers struggled to escape such intrusion,’ wrote Agathon Fain, a lifelong civil servant and director of Napoleon’s private secretariat. ‘The school of the rue du Coq-Héron knew how to circumvent every ruse. It was familiar with all the chemical possibilities; the science of mathematical probabilities and grammatical analysis provided it with proven methods of decryption; it was as skilled in taking impressions, softening wax and hardening it again under the replicated seal as it was in penetrating, with time and study, the most inaccessible ciphers.’10
‘I admit that there never has been a police as absolute as the one which I commanded,’ Fouché later wrote, but he justified it with the argument that intelligent policing protected people from what in its absence would be random state terror. He believed surveillance to be more effective than imprisonment, as, knowing or even suspecting that they were being watched, people behaved themselves. It was terror in kid gloves. ‘Surveillance was a policing method which was very light, and I had devised it precisely in order to protect the numerous victims of [Napoleon’s suspicion] from arbitrary detention,’ he insisted.11
Between them, Napoleon and Fouché succeeded in restoring a degree of order in France, and in making people fear if not respect the organs of the state. Their