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

In 1814 the defeated Napoleon could call on not much more than the loyalty of his soldiers, and even many of those were weary. The rest of the population had come to see him as a tyrant and to associate him with oppression, taxation, conscription and deteriorating living standards. As far as they were concerned, there was little to choose between Napoleon and Louis XVIII, and the latter would at least bring peace and a relaxation of conscription.

Unlike the Bourbons, Napoleon had learned his lesson, and the man who landed at Golfe Juan on 1 March was no longer the imperious ruler of 1814. At Lyon, where he paused briefly before advancing on Paris, he issued edicts and hostile declarations concerning priests and aristocrats, threatening to string them up from lamp-posts. When he reached Paris he set out to galvanise the masses by holding a great ceremony of national federation, in emulation of the coming together of the Fête de la Fédération of 14 July 1790, the first anniversary of the fall of the Bastille. He did everything he could to revive the spirit of 1792, when to the strains of the ‘Marseillaise’ the nation had flocked to repel the invading allied armies. The very ease with which he had toppled the Bourbon regime gave radicals of every hue new hope, and all the political issues of the past decades resurfaced.

He succeeded in rousing old revolutionaries and rallied them in defence of what he made out was a common cause. In Toulouse, Marc-Guillaume Vadier, a former Jacobin and friend of Marat and Robespierre, an enthusiastic regicide who had retired from political life in disgust in the mid-1790s, now came forward to lead his community in welcoming Napoleon’s return. At Avignon, Agricole Morea, another rabid Jacobin and henchman of Robespierre, also sprang into action, seeing in the return of Napoleon the only hope of saving at least some of the legacy of the Revolution. Napoleon engaged the respected liberal Benjamin Constant to frame a new constitution, which appeased many enemies and critics. He abolished censorship. In an attempt to appeal to English public opinion he outlawed the slave trade. But the English were not impressed, and nor were the other powers to which he made conciliatory overtures, and whose delegates were still in congress at Vienna, finalising the new arrangement of Europe.5 (#litres_trial_promo)

News of Napoleon’s landing in France put the French delegate at the congress, Talleyrand, in an unenviable position. If Napoleon were to reach Paris, recover his throne and accept all the treaties binding France and the allies, they would have no legitimate grounds to make war on him. That would leave Louis XVIII, and Talleyrand himself, out in the cold. In order to pre-empt such a situation, he persuaded the delegates of all the powers at Vienna to issue a proclamation he had drafted, which declared Napoleon to have placed himself ‘outside the law’ and indeed ‘outside the human race’ by returning to France; he was to be treated as a dangerous criminal, an enemy of mankind. It followed that those who supported him were also outlaws. ‘The declaration is certainly the harshest measure ever taken against an individual,’ Talleyrand commented with satisfaction.6 (#litres_trial_promo)

It was much more than that. It was an entirely new departure in the history of European diplomacy and politics: a political excommunication by a group of powers of not just an individual, but of all he stood for and all those who supported it. It set the scene for a struggle between the self-appointed forces of good against the implied forces of evil, a struggle that would, in time, draw in the whole of Europe, as governments stood by the Vienna settlement as though it had been Holy Scripture and peoples tried to pursue the course of human progress. In the first instance, it drew a battle line across French society which made France very difficult to govern. The Hundred Days had profoundly altered the political landscape in other ways too.

The abdication of Napoleon in the previous year had ingloriously concluded a narrative of which the majority of the people of France had grown tired. Contemporary sources overwhelmingly report an indifference to his fall born of war-weariness and despondency, and even much hostility to his person. His spectacular reconquest of France, followed by the monumental battle and the shattering defeat of Waterloo, was, on the other hand, the stuff of legend. Waterloo instantly became a symbol – of heroism, grandeur, tragedy, and much more besides, a focus for pride as well as sorrow, a sacred memory which the Bourbon king and his regime insulted and defiled by their very existence.

To others, Napoleon’s return had been clear proof that the forces of revolution were still rampant, and that those who had supported him must be extirpated. As soon as news of the allied victory reached Marseille, a mob massacred retired Mamelouks of the Imperial Guard along with their wives and children. Marshal Brune was savagely murdered and mutilated at Avignon, General Ramel in Toulouse. A White Terror swept through the country, with random arrests, house searches, looting of property, beatings and occasionally murder. Owners of biens nationaux were molested and made to pay blood money to get royalist zealots off their backs. In Nîmes, it was the local Protestants, whose disabilities had been lifted by the Revolution and their rights safeguarded by Napoleon, who were the principal targets. All over France senior officers and functionaries were arrested and charged, and some condemned to death in legally dubious manner.7 (#litres_trial_promo)

In Paris, events took a less bloody course, but those who had fled in panic returned in a spirit of vengeance, clamouring for the execution of Napoleon and of dozens of his marshals and officials. Society ladies joined in the clamour for blood and, in the words of Marshal Marmont, ‘It was the height of fashion to be without mercy.’ Marmont was himself told he should be shot, despite his having remained loyal to the king.8 (#litres_trial_promo)

The more conciliatory Louis XVIII reportedly hoped that Ney would make his escape abroad, and was dismayed when he was apprehended. The marshal was to be tried by a tribunal of the Chamber of Peers, but its most distinguished members refused to sit in judgement over a man widely regarded as a national hero. Those who stepped in turned the trial into a mockery of justice, which only deepened the fault lines running through French society. While members of the highest aristocracy insisted on replacing the prison guards and donning their uniforms in order to stand guard over Ney between his condemnation and his execution, many others began to see him as a martyr.9 (#litres_trial_promo)

Napoleon’s postmaster Lavalette was also condemned to death. While he awaited the guillotine, the king’s entourage did everything they could to prevent his wife addressing a plea for mercy to him. When Marshal Marmont did manage to smuggle her into his presence he dismissed her petition, saying there was nothing he could do. ‘Vive le Roi!’ his entourage roared; Marmont records that the ferocious sound ‘reeked of cannibalism’. With remarkable devotion (considering that Lavalette was by no means young and had a mistress far fresher than her) she devised a plot to spring her husband from gaol dressed in her clothes, while she remained in his cell. With the help of friends, and the British general Sir Robert Wilson, he was then whisked off to England.10 (#litres_trial_promo)

An amnesty was declared, but it did not put a stop to the witch-hunts, and many were either banished or obliged to take shelter abroad. The army was further reduced and combed through for unreliable elements, resulting in the dismissal, disgrace, banishment or imprisonment of thousands. Anyone who had taken a seat in a legislative chamber under Napoleon was automatically disqualified from holding public office.

All the political passions of the past quarter-century had been stirred up. The humiliated army dreamed of revenge, Bonapartists of bringing back Napoleon or his son, revolutionaries of 1789 pined for a limited monarchy, others for the Republic of 1792, Jacobins for more extreme measures, and returned émigrés wanted the restoration of the ancien régime. Some monarchists felt that the lacklustre Louis XVIII, who had, as the saying went, forgotten nothing and learned nothing, should have been passed over in favour of the duc d’Orléans, head of a junior line, an intelligent man who had fought under the revolutionary tricolour in 1792, been a Jacobin and learned a great deal since. More reactionary elements favoured replacing him with a prince from the Spanish line of Bourbons, whose medieval mindset was more to their taste. Another candidate was the Prince of Orange, son of the newly created King of Holland, backed by deluded revolutionary French émigrés in Belgium who apparently believed that they would thereby succeed in adding the territory of Belgium to France.11 (#litres_trial_promo)

If Waterloo had convincingly demonstrated the strength of the forces of repression and the pointlessness of challenging them, Napoleon’s sensationally successful seizure of power suggested that with a will anything was possible. Sensible people took note of the former and resigned themselves to reality; hotheads were inspired by the latter, and were inclined to believe that any ‘coup de main’ might succeed. This meant that no serious group of would-be revolutionaries even considered the feasibility of action, while dreamers and adventurers were prepared to try their hand. If the probability of a well-organised conspiracy was negligible, that of sporadic isolated rebellion was not, particularly in Paris.

The city contained a vast number of manual labourers living on the breadline or beneath it as a result of the early stages of industrialisation, a drift from the countryside and the disbandment of the army. Between 1800 and 1817 the density of the population went up by 30.8 per cent. A volatile new element was the jeunesse des écoles, students of the grandes écoles established by Napoleon, who were filled with the spirit of individualism, philanthropy and rebellion against all authority fostered by the culture of the Romantic movement. The city also attracted restless spirits, including a group of English liberals, the most prominent of whom were Byron’s friend Kinnaird and General Sir Robert Wilson, a flamboyant cavalryman who had fought his way to fame in the colonies, the Peninsula, Russia and Germany, and whose sense of chivalry was outraged at what was going on. Referred to by the Russian ambassador as ‘the English Jacobins’ and ‘the English revolutionaries’, they were, according to him, on a ‘mission’ to ‘excite everywhere civil war’. The French prime minister referred to them as ‘a turbulent sect which is seeking to stir up revolutionary ferment wherever it can find the means’.12 (#litres_trial_promo)

The ambassador was Charles André Pozzo di Borgo, a Corsican by birth and a one-time friend of Napoleon who had participated in the early stages of the Revolution, but then helped the British capture his native island in 1794. He was rescued from it by Nelson when the French reoccupied it two years later, and after spending some time in England had taken service in Russia. Alexander gave him the rank of general and employed him on various missions before posting him to Paris. There, Pozzo di Borgo played a leading role in the permanent conference of the ambassadors of Russia, Prussia, Austria, Britain and the Duke of Wellington, commander-in-chief of their joint army of occupation. This conference had been put in place by the allies to monitor the situation and coordinate their policy on France. It also edited the king’s speeches, new legislation and other important documents, which were submitted to it beforehand by the French cabinet for approval. Pozzo di Borgo was a brilliant conversationalist, with a wit likened to a fireworks display. With his strong Corsican accent, his agility, his flexibility alternating with outbursts of feeling, he was very much a man of the south, and was described by one French statesman as ‘a political Figaro’.13 (#litres_trial_promo)

The prime minister was Armand-Émmanuel du Plessis, duc de Richelieu. At the age of forty-nine, Richelieu had had an eventful life. Born into the highest aristocracy, he had been a gentleman of the bedchamber to Louis XVI. At sixteen he was married by his genealogically minded family to a hunchback dwarf of impeccable lineage and such ugliness that he fainted when he first saw her. He never did again: he left France in the early stages of the Revolution and took service in Russia, distinguishing himself at the capture of Ismail. He was befriended by Alexander, who in 1803 appointed him governor of Odessa, a city he developed and beautified over the next decade. In the autumn of 1815 Alexander persuaded Louis XVIII to appoint him prime minister, hoping that this would ensure that France would be governed in accordance with his views. Richelieu was a capable administrator, with frugal tastes and great integrity. ‘No man had a finer face, a more elegant figure, more seductive manners,’ noted a contemporary. ‘In the midst of the most polite and elegant circles he stood out by his elegance and his politeness, like a grand seigneur among bourgeois.’ He was not temperamentally suited to politics, but took up the challenge gamely.14 (#litres_trial_promo)

‘The interior of the country is perfectly tranquil,’ Richelieu wrote to Alexander in January 1816, ‘taxes are being paid on time, the public funds are rising, and outside the provinces occupied by the allied armies, and particularly the Prussians, which are still suffering greatly, the rest of France is getting back on its feet, recovering some confidence, and looking forward to a happier future …’ His principal cause for anxiety was what he called the ‘counter-revolution’, which obstructed him at every step and threatened to upset the fragile political balance he was trying to maintain. He was referring to the ultra-royalists, known as les Ultras. They coalesced around Louis XVIII’s sibling Charles Philippe, comte d’Artois, also known as Monsieur, the traditional style of the king’s younger brother.15 (#litres_trial_promo)

Endowed with wit and charm, he had been the darling of the court prior to 1789, a constant companion to Marie-Antoinette in her frivolous diversions, noted for his amorous adventures. Foreseeing the worst, he had left France two days after the fall of the Bastille, and in 1791, after the failure of Louis XVI’s attempt to escape, gathered a number of émigré nobles at Koblenz in Germany who hoped to march back into France to reinstate him. Nothing came of this plan and he moved to England, whence he launched an expedition to support the Vendée rebellion in 1795. He failed to bring his force and a shipment of supplies ashore to the aid of the royalists gathered there to support him, and sailed back to England, leaving them to be massacred by revolutionary forces. This does not seem to have damaged his reputation with the Ultras. They rallied around him because of his intransigent condemnation of the Enlightenment and its legacy, and his determination not to yield, as he felt his brother had done, to the temper of the times. As Louis had no progeny, Monsieur was heir to the throne. And as the obese and far from healthy king was not expected to live long, he was also a conduit to future preferment.

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 (#litres_trial_promo)

9

Intelligence (#u577e727a-5ab6-5497-adf2-fadb1808a1dc)

‘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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo)

Orléans was not the only member of the French royal family under surveillance. Throughout 1816 and 1817 the police kept a close watch on the sexagenarian duc de Bourbon. Being the father of the duc d’Enghien, who had been judicially murdered by Napoleon, he was unlikely to harbour Bonapartist or revolutionary views even if he had shown any interest in politics. As it was, his attention was focused exclusively on his new teenage mistress.8 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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, they entered an antechamber, the lackey on duty there cried out and ordered them to leave, and, seeing that they would not, threw a large cream cheese at the general leading the assault force,’ in the words of Peuchet. ‘But worse followed! Hardly had they managed to open the door to the salon when they saw … Guess who? First, Countess M …, wife of the aspiring marshal of France, lying on a divan, faint with fear. As to her cavalier, the emissary of Buonaparte, it was none other than H.R.H. the duc de Berry himself.’ Incandescent with rage, the duke seized some fire irons and went for the general, threw him and his escort out of the apartment and sent them scuttling down the stairs. Since neither he nor his lady had recognised her husband, who had dressed in plain clothes for the operation and whose face was masked by the cream cheese, they sat down once again, did justice to the dinner and ‘made love with added zest’. Decazes was furious, particularly as the whole of Paris was talking about nothing else by the next morning, and two days later he received a note from the Grand Almoner of France, thanking him for the gift of 2,000 francs to the fund for indigent priests.16 (#litres_trial_promo)

Gullible he might well have shown himself to be in this instance, but it was unwise to ignore even the most far-fetched intelligence, as people at both extremes of the political spectrum were prepared to embark on ventures of barely believable rashness; almost anything could sound plausible in the prevailing climate, with the phantom of Napoleon hovering in the popular imagination and the fear of ‘Jacobinism’ gripping people’s minds.

Marooned as he was in the middle of the Atlantic on the island of St Helena, Napoleon continued to haunt the nightmares of his conquerors. Their fears combined with the vague longings of others to generate an extraordinary incidence of rumour. In the prevailing climate, official announcements were greeted with suspicion, which encouraged second-guessing and speculation, and this developed a life of its own, giving rise to new conjectures that turned into certainties with surprising rapidity. News also travelled at very irregular speeds. Reports of a riot in one place might take ten days to reach a neighbouring town but only three to reach Paris, from which it might come back to the second town first, giving rise to the impression that there was a revolution in Paris rather than nearby.

Many rumours were the consequence of discontent over the price of bread or of deep-rooted if inchoate anxieties, foremost among which were that the government might be planning to raise taxes, impose conscription, bring back the servitudes of the ancien régime, return the biens nationaux, and abolish the freedoms won during the Revolution. Whenever such anxieties were aroused, the poor would long for a guardian angel, a protective deity, and would fix on the one figure whose power they believed in – Napoleon. Wishful thinking would do the rest, and give rise to rumours that he was about to return, or had done so.

In the summer of 1814, shortly after he had reached Elba, rumours began to circulate that Napoleon had landed in France at the head of a Turkish army. At the end of 1815, before he had set foot on St Helena, talk of his imminent return alternated with reports that he had already landed, and even sightings of him. Rumours of this sort reached a peak in 1816 and 1817, when the effects of the Tambora eruption raised the price of bread to new heights. They continued over the next years, and would not cease with Napoleon’s death in 1821, news of which would be widely disbelieved.17 (#litres_trial_promo)

The rumours had occurred most frequently in March 1815, the month he escaped from Elba. That miraculous return and the birth of his son the King of Rome, on 20 March 1811, were the two events on which his followers based their hopes for the future, and violets, which flower in March, became associated with those hopes. The cities of Lyon and Grenoble also featured as the focus for many rumours, as they had welcomed him enthusiastically in 1815. Each March between 1816 and 1825 there were reports of his return, some of them specific as to where he had landed, where he had been sighted and the number of troops he had with him. These troops were variously Turkish, Moorish, Polish, German, Persian, Chinese, ‘barbarians’ or ‘two million Indians marching across the Ganges’. In one instance, Napoleon had landed first in the United States and recruited an army of Americans; in another, he was rescued from St Helena by ‘the Emperor of Morocco’. The more sensational the image, the more easily it captured the imagination.18 (#litres_trial_promo)

These rumours had a destabilising effect in rural communities and led to a reluctance to show loyalty or even pay taxes to a regime which might be swept away at any moment. In late 1816 a rumour spread that the former Empress Marie-Louise was forming an army in Austria to liberate France, as a result of which thirty soldiers deserted and set off to enlist. In March 1817 a reported sighting of Napoleon spread paranoia through Lyon, with some barricading their doors and windows, and others fleeing the city. Parish priests who assured their flocks that the ogre would never escape from St Helena only made people wonder whether perhaps he already had. There were also impersonators of Napoleon or his marshals, who travelled around the country swindling people of food and money as they dispensed more or less fantastic pieces of information. In the Lyon area, highway robbers attacked in the name of Napoleon, leading to news spreading that he was advancing on Paris. Just as damaging were rumours that he had been murdered by the allies, which caused explosions of anger and rioting.19 (#litres_trial_promo)

In their reports, police agents, landowners, prefects, mayors and other officials often inflated the degree of support for Napoleon in their localities, either voicing their own worst fears or because they did not wish to appear lacking in zeal, thus magnifying the threat and causing alarm in Paris. This could lead to overreaction, which merely had the effect of making people believe that Napoleon really had landed. Such was the case in March 1816, when 6,000 National Guards were deployed in Lyon on the strength of baseless gossip. In 1821, a rumour that Napoleon had disembarked travelled so fast that a couple of days later a hundred communes sent in reports which mentioned sightings in almost as many places. Instead of suggesting the evident fallacy of the original rumour, this threw the authorities in Paris into a panic, the police came out in force everywhere, and the declaration of a state of emergency added credence to it.20 (#litres_trial_promo)

After Waterloo, the Bourbon authorities had seized all pro-Napoleonic literature they could lay their hands on, and the Chamber passed a law criminalising any endorsement of the emperor and his doings. Another extended criminal law to include incitement, direct or indirect, to change the line of succession to the throne of France. Symbols of Napoleonic rule were removed and representations of events or subjects connected with the Empire were banned. In 1816 two artisans from Beauvais were arrested for announcing the intention of naming their sons Paul-Joseph-Bonaparte and Louis-Henri-Napoléon. A doctor in Albi was arrested for naming his daughter Marie-Louise-Néapoldine, another for naming his Marie-Louise-Napoléonide. People were not infrequently arrested for wearing a violet in their buttonhole.21 (#litres_trial_promo)

In spite of this, millions of prints, statuettes and busts of Napoleon, as well as images illustrating the glorious episodes of his life, were clandestinely produced and disseminated all over the country by travelling salesmen. After his death, coins appeared on the market bearing the inscription ‘Napoleon II’. The police were powerless to stop this illicit industry and trade, despite frequent arrests and severe penalties for possession.

A high priority for the French police was to keep a close watch on members of Napoleon’s family, most of which had wound up in Italy. His mother had settled in Rome, along with his uncle Cardinal Fesch, his brothers Lucien and Louis, and his sister Pauline, whose beautiful villa was suspected of being a hub for all manner of dangerous conspiracy. Decazes despatched an agent to coordinate surveillance over them, and persuaded the Austrian and other police forces operating in the peninsula to tail him, in order to lend him credibility with other subversives. The only fruits of this surveillance are thick files of reports of numbing futility in the archives of Paris.22 (#litres_trial_promo)

Napoleon’s brother Joseph had managed to escape to Switzerland after Waterloo, whence he made his way discreetly to an Atlantic port and sailed to the United States, which he reached in September 1815. Unaware of this, but finding that the trail they had picked up had gone cold, the French police began to suspect the worst – if he was not to be found, he must be in hiding, and if he was in hiding, he must be plotting. The prefect of the department of the Ain reported a sighting, and various houses were watched around the clock; on 20 October the minister of police received a report that he was in the Jura, conspiring with a group of Bonapartist sympathisers; the prefect of the Jura then reported that he had crossed Lake Geneva and was hiding in the village of Chablais. ‘We have identified ten houses he has stayed in, but we can never find the one he is in at the time,’ complained one agent. Other sightings, one of them of him disguised in women’s clothing, kept the agents on full alert for months after Joseph had reached America.23 (#litres_trial_promo)