Short answers, pulled from the story.
Joseph Fouché, 1st Duc d'Otrante, was a French statesman born on the 21st of May 1759 in Le Pellerin, near Nantes, who died on the 26th of December 1820. He served as Minister of Police under Napoleon Bonaparte and was notorious for the mass executions he oversaw in Lyon in 1793, earning the name "The Executioner of Lyons."
Fouché and Jean-Marie Collot d'Herbois arrived in Lyon in November 1793 after the city revolted against the Convention. On the 4th of December, sixty men chained together were blasted with grapeshot on the plain de Brotteaux; another two hundred and eleven were executed the following day. Over eighteen hundred executions were carried out in the coming months, and Fouché personally called for the execution of 1,905 citizens.
Fouché went underground in Paris after Robespierre tried to expel him from the Jacobin Club on the 14th of July 1794. He worked behind the scenes, running from deputy to deputy warning each that Robespierre would have them killed. His efforts culminated in the Coup of the 9th Thermidor on the 28th of July 1794, which brought Robespierre down.
Napoleon dismissed Fouché twice. In 1802, he removed him on the proclamation of the Consulate for life, partly because Fouché had accumulated too much independent power. In 1810, he dismissed him on the 3rd of June after Fouché made unauthorized secret peace overtures to the British cabinet of Spencer Perceval, and then refused to surrender certain ministry documents.
Fouché served as Napoleon's Minister of Police for a third time during the Hundred Days while simultaneously maintaining secret contact with the Austrian statesman Klemens Wenzel von Metternich. After Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo, Fouché headed the provisional government and tried to negotiate with the allied powers. The Bourbons then restored themselves to power in July 1815.
Stefan Zweig wrote a psychological biography of Fouché. The play Supping with the Devil by Jean-Claude Brisville depicted Fouché dining with Talleyrand, and was adapted into the 1992 film The Supper directed by Édouard Molinaro, starring Claude Rich and Claude Brasseur. Albert Finney portrayed Fouché in the 1977 film The Duellists, directed by Ridley Scott, based on a Joseph Conrad story. Gérard Depardieu played him in the mini-series Napoleon.