Claude François de Malet

• 1. Introduction

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  Claude François de Malet walked out of house arrest on the night of the 23rd of October 1812, dressed in a general's uniform, carrying forged documents, and announced to the garrison of Paris that the Emperor was dead. He had not killed Napoleon. He had invented the news. And for several hours, the city of Paris believed him. What does it reveal about an empire when its soldiers follow orders without once asking who would inherit the throne? That question haunted Napoleon himself. Malet was born on the 28th of June 1754 in Dole, to a family of the French aristocracy. He died by firing squad less than sixty years later, having staged one of the most audacious political frauds in the history of the Napoleonic era. The story of how he got from the musketeer barracks of the ancien régime to the plain of Grenelle passes through revolution, imprisonment, forged senatorial decrees, and a single moment when a colonel named Jean Doucet recognized a face he should not have seen in a general's coat.

• 2. Soldier Without a Regiment

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  Malet enlisted as a Musketeer at age seventeen, a path ordinary enough for a young nobleman of his time. King Louis XVI shut down the musketeer regiments in 1776 for budgetary reasons, cutting short a career before it had properly begun. When the Revolution arrived, Malet found in it a cause his family did not share. In 1790 they disinherited him after he took command of his home town's National Guard and publicly marked the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille. He volunteered for the Revolutionary army when war broke out, joining the 50th infantry regiment of the Army of the Rhine as a captain. Discharge came in 1795, but he returned in March 1797, first as Chief of Staff of the 6th division, then in 1799 as Chief of Staff of the Army of the Alps under General Jean Etienne Championnet. Both Championnet and General Andre Massena cited him for his defense of the Little St. Bernard Pass in August 1799. On the 19th of October 1799, he was promoted to Brigadier General. He spent 1801 fighting in the Helvetian Republic, until the peace arrangements of the treaties of Luneville and Amiens brought the Second Coalition to a close in 1802.

• 3. An Enemy of the New Order

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  After the coups of the 30 Prairial and 18 Brumaire of year VIII replaced the Directory with the Consulate, Malet voted against the referendum that confirmed Napoleon Bonaparte as First Consul. The punishment was administrative exile, first to Bordeaux, then to Les Sables d'Olonne. His opposition only sharpened in those years, even as he was made a Commander of the Legion of Honour. By 1805 he had been discharged from active duty and resigned rather than serve under a self-crowned emperor. He was appointed Governor of Pavia in the Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy, but Viceroy Eugene de Beauharnais expelled him on allegations of black market activities and propaganda. La Force Prison held him from the 1st of July 1807 to the 30th of May 1808. Released without trial, he was imprisoned again the following year on suspicion of membership in the Philadelphes, a republican and anti-Bonapartist Masonic society. From July 1810 he remained under house arrest in Paris, with a plan forming in his mind for which the house arrest itself had become the workshop.

• 4. The Architecture of a Forgery

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  During his detention, Malet designed a coup around a single plausible lie: Napoleon was dead. The Emperor's absence on the Russian front in October 1812 gave the fiction its opening. Malet's provisional government, as he planned it, would include names that lent the scheme republican legitimacy: Mathieu de Montmorency, Alexis de Noailles, General Moreau as vice president, Lazare Carnot as president, Marshal Augereau, Count Frochot as Prefect of the Seine, Destutt de Tracy, Vice-Admiral Truguet, and Senators Volney and Garrat. The preparations were intricate. Each accomplice received specific instructions, a role, and forged copies of a senatus consultum alongside proclamations. Every completed dispatch was sealed, numbered, and entrusted to a Spanish priest living on Saint-Gilles street near the barracks of the 10th National Guard Cohort. The forces Malet calculated would support the action were the Gendarmerie forces of Paris and that same 10th Cohort. The work of constructing this parallel legal reality took the months of his confinement.

• 5. Six Hours of False Empire

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  On the night of October 23, Malet escaped his captivity. Dressed in a general's uniform, he presented himself at La Force prison and used forged orders to secure the release of Generals Victor Lahorie and Emmanuel Maximilien-Joseph Guidal. He informed them Napoleon had died on October 7 near Moscow. He showed them documents suggesting the Senate had already responded to the Emperor's death. In the pre-dawn hours, Malet and his accomplices went to the Gendarmerie barracks. He announced the Emperor's death to commanders and soldiers, presented his forged papers, and sent detachments of the 10th Cohort fanning out across the city to make arrests. A detachment under Lahorie went to the residence of the Duke of Rovigo, Minister of the Police, who was seized and taken to La Force. Another detachment arrested the prefect of the police. A third column reached the town hall of Paris; while troops took positions in the place de Greve, commanders took the key of the Midsummer's Day alarm bell and prepared a room for the provisional government. The death of the Emperor was believed throughout Paris. Malet settled into the offices of the district general at the Place Vendome. When General Pierre-Augustin Hulin, commander of the Paris Garrison, demanded verification of the senatorial documents, Malet shot and injured him. The coup ended when Colonel Jean Doucet recognized the face beneath the general's uniform as that of the prisoner Malet. Doucet disarmed him, returned him to prison, and ordered the 10th Cohort back to its barracks.

• 6. What the Coup Exposed

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  Napoleon's fury when he learned of the conspiracy was not simply anger at the disruption. The coup had exposed something he could not dismiss: not one person in Paris had thought to shout that Napoleon was dead and the succession should pass to Napoleon II. The loyalty of French institutions extended to the Emperor personally, but not to any dynasty he had tried to plant. Malet's plan, the sources note, calculated the consequences of French passive obedience and targeted the structural weakness of an imperial dictatorship. Twenty-three civilians and officers, including Malet, Guidal, and Lahorie, were tried on the 29th of October 1812 before a council of war for treason. All were convicted. All but two were executed on the plain of Grenelle on the 31st of October. The conspiracy further strained relations between the Ministry of War and the Ministry of Police. The Gendarmerie forces of Paris that had followed Malet's forged orders were dissolved and reformed as the 134th Line Infantry Regiment, a reorganization that left no unit behind to carry the memory of having been deceived.