In Monsieur’s apartments in a wing of the Tuileries known as the pavillon de Marsan (after his erstwhile governess Madame de Marsan, who had resided there under the ancien régime), the Ultras formed a political lobby both at court and in the capital. Their agenda was entirely at odds with that of the king, and they undermined him at every step. They wanted draconian reprisals against people who had served the Revolution or Napoleon, the return of the biens nationaux, the re-establishment of the Catholic Church and a litany of other reactionary measures, some of which, such as the abolition of divorce, they managed to push through the Chambers. Believing that the ‘cursed race’ of Jacobins, now operating ‘under the title of liberals’, were the heirs of Hus, Wycliffe, Luther, and Louis XVI’s finance minister Jacques Necker, whom they held responsible for provoking the Revolution, they meant to carry out a ‘counter-revolution’ (a word coined at the time). This required an épuration, a cleansing, of the whole of French society. Anyone who was not with them was a declared enemy, and, as one contemporary observed, ‘even in the salons there was a kind of civil war in which the harshest words and the most violent altercations were by no means rare’. The king quipped to Pozzo di Borgo that they would end up cleansing him. They would certainly make it as difficult as possible for him to bring tranquillity to France.16
9
‘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