Short answers, pulled from the story.
Claude François de Malet was a French aristocrat and Brigadier General born on the 28th of June 1754 in Dole. He is remembered for staging a failed republican coup d'état in October 1812 during Napoleon's Russian campaign, using forged documents to announce the Emperor's death and briefly seizing control of key Paris institutions.
On the night of the 23rd of October 1812, Malet escaped house arrest, dressed in a general's uniform, and used forged senatorial documents to free two imprisoned generals, seize the Minister of Police, and establish a provisional government at the Paris town hall. The coup collapsed when Colonel Jean Doucet recognized Malet as a known prisoner and disarmed him.
The conspiracy revealed that no one in Paris, when told Napoleon had died, thought to declare loyalty to a successor or shout long live Napoleon II. Obedience had been personal and institutional, not dynastic, a gap Malet deliberately exploited in his plan.
Malet opposed Bonaparte consistently from the start of the Consulate. He voted against the referendum confirming Napoleon as First Consul, resigned rather than serve under a self-crowned emperor, and was imprisoned twice, including on suspicion of membership in the Philadelphes, a republican anti-Bonapartist Masonic society.
Malet was disarmed by Colonel Jean Doucet on the 23rd of October 1812. Twenty-three conspirators were tried on the 29th of October before a council of war and all convicted; all but two were executed on the plain of Grenelle on the 31st of October. The Gendarmerie forces of Paris that had followed Malet's forged orders were dissolved and reconstituted as the 134th Line Infantry Regiment.
Malet prepared forged copies of a senatus consultum and official proclamations, along with forged orders used to release generals from La Force prison and direct troop movements across Paris. Each dispatch was sealed, numbered, and held in trust by a Spanish priest living on Saint-Gilles street near the barracks of the 10th National Guard Cohort.