Phantom Terror: The Threat of Revolution and the Repression of Liberty 1789-1848

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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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