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,