Joseph Fouché

• 1. Introduction

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  Joseph Fouché ordered the words "Death is an eternal sleep" inscribed over the gates of every cemetery in the Nièvre department. That command tells you something essential about the man: theatrical, ideologically ruthless, and perfectly willing to reduce life's deepest mystery to a slogan. Born on the 21st of May 1759 in Le Pellerin, a small village near Nantes, Fouché would go on to serve every government France produced for nearly three decades. He served Jacobin radicals and Bourbon kings. He served the Directory, the Consulate, and the Empire. He helped send one French king to the guillotine, then became a minister of the king's own brother. The question the rest of this story tries to answer is not what Fouché did. It is how a man despised by virtually everyone in power kept getting called back to serve them.

• 2. The Schoolmaster's Radicalization

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  Fouché's father, Julien Joseph Fouché, died in 1771, leaving a family in Le Pellerin. The son was educated at the college of the Oratorians in Nantes, where he showed aptitude for literary and scientific study. That ability won him a place in Paris and then a series of teaching posts at Oratorian colleges across France, at Niort, Saumur, Vendôme, Juilly, and Arras. At Arras he was initiated into Freemasonry at the "Sophie Madeleine" lodge in 1788, and he met Maximilien Robespierre, a contact that would later turn lethal. When the Oratorians transferred Fouché back to Nantes in October 1790, the intention was to contain his growing radicalism. The plan failed. His anti-clerical views and democratic advocacy made him enormously popular in Nantes. He joined the local Jacobin Club and became one of its leading voices. When the Oratorian college was dissolved in May 1792, Fouché walked away from the order, having never taken any major vows. His first marriage, to Bonne Jeanne Coiquaud in September 1792, came just as the monarchy was collapsing around him.

• 3. The Executioner of Lyons

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  "Terror, salutary terror, is now the order of the day here... We are causing much impure blood to flow, but it is our duty to do so, it is for humanity's sake." Fouché wrote those words from Lyon in late 1793, and they were not empty rhetoric. He arrived in Lyon in November with Jean-Marie Collot d'Herbois after the city had revolted against the Convention. On the 23rd of November, they declared Lyon in a "state of revolutionary war" and established the Temporary Commission for Republican Supervision. What followed was catastrophic. On the 4th of December, sixty men chained together were blasted with grapeshot on the plain de Brotteaux outside the city; another two hundred and eleven were executed the following day. When blood from mass executions in the center of Lyon flooded the gutters of the Rue Lafont, local residents complained to Fouché and demanded payment for damages. He responded by moving the killings to the Brotteaux field along the Rhône. In total, Fouché called for the execution of 1,905 citizens, and over eighteen hundred executions were carried out in the coming months. As Napoleon's biographer Alan Schom recorded, the victims included bankers, scholars, aristocrats, priests, nuns, and wealthy merchants along with their wives, mistresses, and children. The label that followed Fouché back to Paris was "The Executioner of Lyons." On returning to the capital in early April 1794, he characterized his own policy without hesitation: "The blood of criminals fertilises the soil of liberty and establishes power on sure foundations."

• 4. Overthrowing Robespierre

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  Robespierre was appalled by the Lyon atrocities, but the break between the two men had a second edge. In early June 1794, during the "Festival of the Supreme Being," Fouché openly mocked Robespierre's theistic revival. Robespierre tried to expel him from the Jacobin Club on the 14th of July 1794. Fouché's response was characteristic: he went underground in Paris and plotted constantly. He later described his method in his memoirs, writing that he told threatened colleagues directly, "You are on the list, you are on the list as well as myself; I am certain of it!" He ran from deputy to deputy, warning each one that Robespierre would destroy them by morning. He did this under the protection of Paul Barras, who shielded him from Robespierre's final purge. The effort paid off on the 28th of July 1794, when the Coup of the 9th Thermidor brought Robespierre down. That single act of political engineering saved Fouché's life and established his reputation as a man who could move the levers of government from the shadows. The Thermidorian moderates who followed were uncomfortable with their own allies. Fouché was denounced by François Antoine de Boissy d'Anglas on the 9th of August 1795 and briefly arrested, but a Royalist rebellion freed him in the amnesty that followed the Constitution of 5 Fructidor.

• 5. The Art of Indispensability

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  By 1797, Fouché had leveraged an appointment dealing with military supplies into a source of personal wealth. He offered his services to the Royalists, then changed course and aligned again with the Jacobins. He served as French ambassador to the Cisalpine Republic in Milan in 1798, was judged too high-handed, and was removed. He found his way to Paris again, then briefly to The Hague, and became Minister of Police on the 20th of July 1799. Within months he closed the Jacobin Club in a daring move, hunting down pamphleteeers and editors on both the Jacobin and Royalist sides. By October 1799, when Napoleon Bonaparte returned from Egypt, Fouché was one of the most powerful men in France. He joined the conspiracy to overthrow the Directory and helped engineer the 18 Brumaire coup on the 9th and the 10th of November 1799. Bonaparte kept him in office. When Napoleon moved against the leading Jacobins after the Plot of the Rue Saint-Nicaise in December 1800, a bomb attack near the First Consul's carriage, Fouché correctly identified the perpetrators as Royalists. Napoleon preferred to blame the Jacobins, and Fouché told him flatly that he would prove otherwise. He could not stop the subsequent repression, but the willingness to contradict Napoleon in matters of evidence was a defining trait. Napoleon was, according to the source, so intimidated by his minister that when he removed Fouché from office on the 1st of August 1802, he did not do it in person. He sent a servant to deliver the news. The severance package was extraordinary: 35,000 francs yearly as a senator, land worth 30,000 francs a year, and over a million francs from the police reserve fund.

• 6. Survival Under the Empire

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  After his 1802 dismissal, Fouché returned to Freemasonry, attending the "Les Citoyens réunis" lodge in Melun. Through the backing of Cambacérès, who was Deputy Grand Master of the Grand Orient de France, he became Conservator of the "Grande Loge symbolique Générale" attached to the Supreme Council of France, responsible for Masonic Justice. The Masonic network gave him a continent-wide intelligence advantage at a time when he held no official post. By 1804 he had made himself useful again, playing an instrumental role in the arrest of the Duc d'Enghien during the Georges Cadoudal-Charles Pichegru conspiracy. Of Enghien's subsequent execution, Fouché said: "It was worse than a crime; it was a mistake." The remark was also frequently attributed to Talleyrand. By July 1804 he was back as head of the reconstituted Ministry of Police. After the Battle of Austerlitz in December 1805, he told Napoleon: "Sire, Austerlitz has shattered the old aristocracy; the Faubourg Saint-Germain no longer conspires." In 1808, Napoleon received rumors that Fouché and Talleyrand, once bitter enemies, were meeting secretly and had approached Joachim Murat, the King of Naples. Napoleon rushed back from the Spain campaign and found nothing incriminating. That same year, Napoleon created for Fouché the title of Duke of Otranto as a hereditary but nominal honor. When the British Walcheren expedition threatened Antwerp during Napoleon's Austrian campaign of 1809, Fouché mobilized 60,000 National Guards on his own authority, adding the provocation: "Let us prove to Europe that although the genius of Napoleon can throw lustre on France, his presence is not necessary to enable us to repulse the enemy." Napoleon approved the military measure and rejected the words. Their final rupture came on the 3rd of June 1810. Fouché had made secret peace overtures to the British cabinet of Spencer Perceval without authorization. At the moment of his dismissal, he declined to surrender certain documents to Napoleon, falsely claiming some had been destroyed. Learning of his deception after arriving in Florence, Fouché prepared to sail for the United States. Severe sea-sickness turned him back, and Elisa Bonaparte, Grand Duchess of Tuscany, arranged for him to settle in Aix-en-Provence instead.

• 7. The Regicide Who Served the King

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  In 1812, Fouché tried in vain to dissuade Napoleon from invading Russia. After the catastrophic retreat, he was suspected of involvement in the conspiracy of Claude François de Malet, who had briefly and unexpectedly seized power. He cleared his name but was sent to govern the Illyrian provinces and then dispatched to watch Murat in Naples. He arrived in Paris on the 10th of April 1814 just as Napoleon's marshals were compelling the emperor to abdicate. Fouché's response to the collapse was to simultaneously advise the Senate to seek reconciliation with the Bourbon monarchy, write to Napoleon urging him to withdraw to the United States, and send an appeal for liberty to the incoming King Louis XVIII. None of these moves secured his position, so he began conspiring with those who sought to overturn the Bourbons entirely. Then Napoleon escaped from Elba. Louis XVIII offered Fouché the Ministry of Police before Napoleon even reached Paris on the 19th of March 1815. Fouché declined and joined Napoleon for the third time. He simultaneously opened secret relations with the Austrian statesman Klemens Wenzel von Metternich in Vienna. After the Battle of Waterloo, he headed the provisional government and tried to negotiate with the allies. The Bourbons returned in July 1815. Fouché, having voted for the death of Louis XVI in 1792, was now named Minister of Police under Louis XVI's own brother, Louis XVIII. Ultra-royalists in the cabinet could barely accept his presence. What followed was a campaign of White Terror, directed against those who had supported Napoleon's return. Even Prime Minister Talleyrand, himself no stranger to political flexibility, disapproved of practices including the execution of Michel Ney. Fouché's exchange with Lazare Carnot, the interior minister of the Hundred Days, captured the atmosphere: Carnot asked where he should go, calling Fouché a traitor. Fouché told him to go where he wanted, calling him an imbecile. By 1816, the royalist authorities found his services useless and proscribed him as a regicide. He settled first in Prague, then in Linz, and finally in Trieste, where he died in 1820. He is buried in Ferrières-en-Brie. The historian John Holland Rose put the verdict plainly: "Despised by all for his tergiversations, he nevertheless was sought by all on account of his cleverness."