‘Here, there is plenty of talking, shouting and intrigues, but actually everything is very calm,’ the French prime minister Richelieu wrote to a friend in June 1821. ‘Confidence is growing … a multitude of bridges are being built, canals dug, insurance companies founded, savings banks established, along with other institutions which prove that the spirit of association has made rapid progress. Everywhere industry is in motion and commotion, factories are prospering as never before, the causes of which I admit I cannot explain.’ The report of the police commissioner for the notoriously unruly manufacturing centre of Lyon in March of the same year confirms Richelieu’s assessment. ‘All is quiet, all is peaceful,’ it read; ‘the only source of agitation is the imagination.’1
News of the death of Napoleon, on 5 May, caused surprisingly little stir. Many of his worshippers simply refused to believe it and went on dreaming of a third coming. Others transferred their political hopes to his son, who was with his grandfather in Vienna. But most active Bonapartists realised that their cause was dead, and transferred their support to the mainstream liberal opposition, which consisted of Benjamin Constant, the marquis de Lafayette, the liberal deputies Marc-René Voyer d’Argenson and Jacques-Antoine Manuel, the lawyer Joseph Merilhou, the banker and deputy Jacques Lafitte and a handful of generals. Many were members of a Masonic lodge, Les Amis de la Verité, which brought together many students of the grandes écoles.2
The director general of police, Claude Mounier, did not drop his guard. ‘Various symptoms lead us to believe that the revolutionary faction is preparing something,’ he noted on 22 January that year. ‘Perfect unity and extremely active communications exist among the liberals of Paris, Madrid, Naples, Lisbon, Turin, and London.’ General Donnadieu, who knew a thing or two about provocation and exaggeration, ridiculed this and publicly accused the police of fomenting disturbances through agents provocateurs. The contemporary historian and politician François Guizot was convinced that whatever conspiracies did exist arose from a symbiosis of a disordered society and incompetent government. ‘Plots become necessary to it, both in order to legitimise its fears, and to provide it, through punishment, with the strength which its incompetence has forfeited.’ According to him, whenever a conspiracy was needed, it could be provided ‘by the self-interested ardour of unworthy agents’. In this case, however, Mounier seems to have been on to something.
Following the failure of the Bazar Français plot of August 1820, those of its leaders who were able to fled the country, many seeking sanctuary in revolutionary Naples. In the spring of 1821 one of these, Pierre Dugied, returned to France and began setting up cells based on the Carbonarist model of vèndite he had seen in Naples, which he called ‘ventes’. The first, established in Paris in May 1821, brought together a large number of students and shopkeepers, along with Lafayette and a handful of deputies.3
The example was followed by disaffected groups all over the country; as Carbonarism had no principles and no specific programme, it could happily accommodate Bonapartists, Orléanists, liberals, revolutionaries, bored soldiers, and all those nursing a grudge, against wealth and privilege, a political faction, the clergy, the police or nothing in particular. In the army, where it made rapid inroads, particularly among non-commissioned officers, Carbonarism was little more than a club for men nostalgic for the days of Napoleonic glory. ‘To be honest, the revolutionary party was a confused assemblage of patriots of every hue and of malcontents,’ recalled Francisque de Corcelle, the lawyer son of a liberal deputy. People like him were more interested in orderly progress, but this was impeded by the repressive measures introduced under the second Richelieu government. ‘From then on, a large part of the thinkers and politicians, despairing of achieving anything through legal means, began playing at revolution.’ In the course of 1821 Carbonarist ventes fanned out all over France, with possibly as many as 50,000 members. Whether many of them were active is doubtful, and few had any specific aims. According to Alexandre Dumas père, who knew some of them, Lafayette and his son George, Voyer d’Argenson, Jacques Charles Dupont de l’Eure, Claude Tirguy de Corcelle, Jacques Koechlin, Merilhou and others made up a ‘comité directeur’, and this is confirmed by the socialist historian and politician Louis Blanc. Although he was only ten years old at the time, one must credit him with insight and access to extensive first-hand sources. But if they did constitute a committee, it signally failed to direct anything.4
The only conspiracy which has been tangibly linked with this group took place late in 1821. Its aim was to raise the garrison of the fortress of Belfort in eastern France, to coincide with revolts by that of Marseille and the cavalry school at Saumur. The risings were to take place on the night of 29–30 December, but the Saumur conspiracy was betrayed a few days before, and the rising at Belfort was put back to 1 January 1822. The conspirators there were slow to act, inadvertently raised the alarm, and displayed remarkable incompetence. They were rounded up without much trouble within a couple of hours. Their associates in Marseille did not even get that far, and their supposed directors in Paris washed their hands of them. A repeat attempt at Saumur in February 1822 lasted longer and even achieved some success, but its head, General Berton, wasted time on parleys and lunch, letting the initiative slip from his hands, and was eventually caught by an agent provocateur and executed. The captured conspirators of Belfort were used as bait in a provocation which netted another officer, Lieutenant Colonel Caron. In September, four sergeants of the 45th Infantry Regiment stationed at La Rochelle staged another ill-starred mutiny, and paid for it with their lives.5
None of these conspiracies managed to raise a whole regiment, and none of the estimated tens of thousands of Carbonari came out in support. Nor did they evoke an echo in the people. While always ready to shout ‘Vive l’Empereur! or ‘À bas les Bourbons!’, the population remained politically supine, as even the socialist historians of the period were forced to admit. But this in no way affected the authorities’ perceived need for stricter and more pervasive police.6
In December 1821, Richelieu’s second ministry was brought down by the Ultras, who accused it of being too liberal, and replaced by that of Jean-Baptiste de Villèle, one of their most active deputies in the Chamber. Within a week of taking power Villèle had appointed a new prefect of police for Paris, Guy Delaveau. This choice was dictated less by Delaveau’s questionable talents as a lawyer than by his devotion to the Bourbon dynasty and the Church, and particularly his connections with the Congrégation. This had originated as a movement founded by Jesuits with the aim of promoting a more devout lifestyle among aristocratic Catholics, and had spawned other bodies such as the Société des Bonnes Études, which encouraged the reading of ‘good’ books and denounced subversive ideas. As many of its members had also become active in the Chevaliers de la Foi and other militant Ultra associations, the Congrégation had grown increasingly political in nature. Delaveau was given a new director general of police, Franchet d’Esperey, installed in January 1822, a man of limited intelligence and little competence who was close to the Chevaliers de la Foi. Over the next seven years these two would do everything in their power to carry out a counter-revolution.
Delaveau forced strict religious observance on his employees, demanding that they show him certificates from a priest confirming that they had been to confession. The ‘certificat de confession’ was the equivalent of the English Test Act, which excluded anyone from holding public office unless they took communion in the established Church. Given the extent to which France had become secularised over the past half-century, this was a shocking innovation. At the same time, Delaveau turned a blind eye to his subordinates’ actual conduct, with the result, according to one of them, that the Préfecture de Police ‘presented the most upsetting spectacle, the most odious mixture of asceticism and debauchery’. ‘Never,’ he claimed, ‘have hypocrisy, false zeal, the love of gain under the mask of a grand show of royalism and devotion to the family of Louis XVIII, presented a more repellent, more detestable, more hideous spectacle.’7
Delaveau trusted nobody, and he set up a network of spies within the secret police to watch them too. He placed his own agents in the offices of all the commissaires and chiefs of department, with orders to report directly to him. ‘It is not difficult to understand how, with such wheels within wheels, the prefecture rapidly turned into a hub of intrigues, cabals, hatreds and passions, where the provocations and the vengeance of the congregation against the supposed enemies of altar and throne were hatched,’ wrote Paul Louis Canler, chief of the Sûreté. ‘As the attention of the administration was concentrated on political matters, the result was that the police as such were relegated to second place and totally neglected.’ Funds destined for them were diverted to pay political agents, and criminality flourished in consequence.8
Anyone of note who did not fit Delaveau’s and Franchet’s idea of a faithful subject was placed under surveillance, and a huge amount of police time was spent simply watching people, often for no very good reason. Groups of friends who met for dinner more than once in private rooms of restaurants were eavesdropped on. People might be placed under surveillance because they were, as in one man’s case, ‘well known for a long time as one of the most exalted supporters of the revolutionary system, and no less ill-famed for his morals’. A Swiss national running a studio for artists was watched because he corrupted young men with ‘obscene and seditious’ talk and the reading of ‘detestable works’. A former clerk fell under suspicion because he had abandoned his family in Nantes and brought a young girl to Paris ‘to give himself over to idleness and a shameful life’ – and because he had been heard talking of ‘the Glory of Bonaparte’. The duc de Broglie had to dismiss two servants after discovering that they were copying his correspondence and diary for the police. The cabinet noir was hyperactive, and, to add insult to injury, some of its employees not only opened and copied letters, but also stole any enclosed money. Venality was common: George Ticknor, an American studying in Paris, was visited one day by a commissaire and a judge, who announced that they must search his lodgings, which they proceeded to do at very great length, pausing to talk to him several times. A complaint through the American minister in Paris yielded only a denial that any such search had taken place – the two men had evidently only visited him in the hope of eliciting a bribe to make them go away.9
A request for a passport to travel in France exposed the applicant to ‘being an agent of the liberal faction charged with carrying into the provinces orders from the comité directeur, which never existed except in the heads of those congregationists with their extended ears’, in the words of one contemporary. ‘If one requested a passport for abroad, it was something else, one was considered a conspirator who wanted to overthrow everything.’ When one of Fouché’s erstwhile chiefs of department, Pierre-Marie Desmarest, now long retired, went off to spend two weeks of the summer with an old friend, the mayor of a little country town, he gave rise to a mountain of paperwork and a hilarious correspondence involving his own former deputy, two ministers, two prefects, a mayor and several police officials on the subject of his movements, when and by whom he had been issued with a passport, where it had been stamped, who he was staying with and with whom he dined every day.10
One day the poet Pierre-Jean de Béranger requested a passport in order to go to Breteuil, and since the liberal deputy Manuel had also requested one for the same place, the police concluded there was something brewing, and both had to be watched. As far as they could ascertain, the two never met at Breteuil, but the police nevertheless decided to probe Béranger on his return to Paris, without success. ‘It is impossible to speak to him if one is not well known to him,’ complained one agent. ‘The defiance in his house is such that neither we nor our inspectors can obtain admittance, as we are suspected, if not actually known, to be from the police. Latterly, one of our agents who was sent there only saved himself by prompt flight, having been set upon by the porter.’11
The agents were a mixed bag, drawn from both sexes, usually abandoned women with no other source of income or men with a gambling or drug habit to feed, but sometimes fantasists or political zealots. But they all shared the characteristics of amateurishness and incompetence. Police agents often recruited their own stables of informers and pools of petty criminals with various skills, usually by means of blackmail. They would post themselves in brothels, gambling dens or other establishments of disrepute to catch out people who could then be manipulated to provide information and even sent out on missions to spy or to purloin documents. Petty criminals and unlicensed prostitutes could be let off a charge for the price of favours, and each fresh crime they were put up to would implicate them further and make them more malleable tools of the agent, who could then order them to entrap, break in, steal, set up, or otherwise help in the extraction of intelligence.12
As Canler explains, since there was only one way for an agent to gain the approval of his or her superiors, ‘by uncovering some conspiracy, or, if after lengthy searches he could find nothing, to adroitly invent some foul machination, incriminate in a supposed plot some honest husband and father who in his life had never thought of conspiring, invent a few accomplices, choosing for these roles other innocents, and, finally, to deliver the whole lot to the police’.13
Police agents regularly disguised themselves as workers, went to bars and plied men with drink before prompting them to complain about conditions, about the government and the monarchy, or to sing Napoleonic songs, before arresting them. Many an innocent labourer who had gone to have a drink after work woke up in gaol. Posing as merchants, police agents entrapped craftsmen, printers and traders into manufacturing, printing or supplying forbidden goods, banned literature, tricolour cockades or busts of Napoleon. One agent befriended a group of workmen, one of whom was a joiner, whom he commissioned to make a box with steel pipes according to a drawing he supplied, and when this was ready, reported them all as members of a secret society, producing as evidence the box, which he affirmed was an ‘infernal machine’ designed to wipe out the royal family. The joiner hanged himself in his cell on the night of his arrest, ostensibly confirming his guilt.14
The prime motive for all the investigation was the search for the elusive comité directeur, and former officers were under relentless surveillance, as they were thought to be its most likely messengers. The prefects of every department received regular circulars and special admonishments reminding them to check that everyone passing through their area must have their passports checked, and specifying where they should be stamped and by whom. They were enjoined to check that postmasters did not give fresh horses to anyone without a correctly endorsed passport. They were upbraided for allegedly letting people slip through their department without having their passport checked, yet retailed travellers’ complaints to them about being disturbed by over-zealous gendarmes barging into their hotel bedrooms in the middle of the night to check their papers. From the extant archives it is clear that the ministry in Paris received alarmist letters from busybodies in the country about travellers, accusing the local authorities of being dilatory. And for all the passports, visas, hotel and inn registers, feuilles de route of the stagecoaches and other red tape, it seems the police were continually losing track of people supposedly under close surveillance.15
In the autumn of 1822 the police were keen to find out how many former Napoleonic officers and revolutionaries of one kind or another were crossing into Spain to join the liberals, so a police agent assumed the identity of a former officer, and presented himself at the Spanish embassy in Paris to offer his services to the constitutional government. He was well received, assured that he would obtain a rank commensurate with his status, and encouraged to call again. More interviews followed, to discuss practical matters such as how and by which route he should travel, what papers he should carry, where and when he would be given money, a cipher and other necessary means. The agent’s frustration mounted as the matter dragged on, assuming an almost surreal aspect, and it was only after several weeks that he realised that the Spanish ambassador, the Duke of San Lorenzo, was in fact playing him along, trying to find out what the French police knew about the means by which he was despatching genuine volunteers across the border. Another agent, who had made contact with and apparently been befriended by a former Napoleonic officer in touch with the Spanish revolutionaries, was fed fantastic information about how all French liberals would at a given signal from the comité directeur congregate at Bayonne on the French border, where they would meet up with a Spanish force and march on Paris, while he himself was going to assassinate Louis XVIII with a poisoned arrow, assisted by the supposedly subverted Gardes du Corps.16
The system was not merely inefficient and pointless, it also often ended in farce. One evening in Paris two agents, one working for the director general of police, the other employed by the military police, and both looking to uncover some plot, met up in a tavern and began standing each other drinks, pretending to be former Napoleonic officers nostalgic for the old days. They agreed to meet the next day in the Tuileries gardens to discuss means of bringing them back. More meetings followed, in various cafés and eventually private rooms, to which each introduced colleagues who also assumed the guises of disaffected Bonapartists. The discussions, vague at first, became more specific as to ways of overthrowing the Bourbons in favour of Napoleon’s son, until one day the police raided one of their meetings and arrested the agent working for the military police and his colleagues. They were thrown into the prison of La Force, and it was a full month before they could get a message out to their chief at the military police headquarters to secure their release.17
In September 1823 Delaveau urgently wanted to know the whereabouts of the sons of Marshal Ney, and instituted a search which involved the whole country and lasted for weeks, only to reveal that they were living quite openly in Paris. When the police heard that Hippolyte Carnot, son of the exiled regicide minister of war under the Directory, had come up to Paris but could find no trace of his trip in the passport office or on the feuilles de route of the stagecoaches, or of his residence in any of the capital’s hôtels garnis, they deemed this suspicious and put in hand an investigation. They eventually tracked him down to lodgings at 18, rue des Quatre-Fils, ‘in an apartment in which everything bespeaks opulence’, and where he was living with a ‘physically pleasing’ lady. Two agents called on him, claiming that they were the employees of a bank anxious to trace another Napoleonic notable in order to make a payment to him. They kept a close watch on his lodgings and his lady, and noted that he received a visit from Antoine Boulay de la Meurthe, a magistrate who had held high office under Napoleon. They then called on Boulay de la Meurthe, again posing as bankers (a favourite ploy), and asked him whether by any chance he knew the whereabouts of Carnot. He denied any knowledge, probably because he suspected them of being police agents, which placed him under suspicion, and therefore under surveillance. Further attempts to gain admittance to Carnot, under various guises, came to nothing, as ‘whoever asks for M. Carnot is immediately ejected by his servants, with the epithet “mouchard”’.18
The ploy of pretending to be bank employees seeking to contact someone in order to pass on a legacy or a significant sum of money fooled nobody, and the gauche manner in which the agents put their questions usually identified them as what they were, whereupon servants would amuse themselves by giving misleading answers. The phrase ‘we enquired in an appropriate manner’ is used, frequently, in agents’ reports to cover what was clearly a clumsy question, and the lack of a satisfactory answer would be attenuated by passages such as: ‘he responded negatively, but with a contraction of the face, gestures of surprise and anxiety which clearly proclaimed that he had strong reasons for betraying truth in this instance’. When there was no evidence to cite against a suspect, the report would throw in that he ‘combines the most profound immorality with the worst political principles’, as though a taste for loose women or young girls had any bearing on the case.19
The majority of the police archives relating to this period went up in flames at the time of the Paris Commune, but there is no reason to suppose that what perished was of a superior quality to what remains. Judging by the information to be found in the surviving files, the time expended on intelligence-gathering was mostly wasted. Those concerning subversive activity of one sort or another contain no firm evidence, only mountains of suggestive irrelevance and reams of documents relating to supposed secret societies, most of them transparently bogus.
They did, however, provide the chief archivist, Simon Duplay, with material for an authoritative-sounding memorandum on the subject of the great conspiracy, which he compiled in the autumn of 1822. Duplay had been Robespierre’s secretary and, narrowly surviving his fall, had subsequently been employed by Fouché in a department dedicated to ‘the search for all plots and projects against the constitution, the government and the person of the first magistrate, as well as the tracking down of the agitators, authors and accomplices of such enterprises …’20
Duplay’s memorandum bears all the marks of having been commissioned by a believer in the grand conspiracy. ‘It has been established that all the conspiracies which have taken place since 1816 have been the work of secret societies and resulted from the same impulse, and that the source of all these machinations was to be found in the Capital,’ it boldly asserted. ‘While the authorities have not been able to obtain judicial proofs with respect to the prime movers, that comité directeur which has revealed its existence by so many multiple acts on so many different occasions, they have at least gathered together enough facts to be able to designate with certainty its principal members.’ He went on to list Lafayette, Constant, Voyer d’Argenson, the deputies Jacques Koechlin and Auguste de Kératry, and General Foy. The only ‘fact’ Duplay adduces is that some of them gave financial assistance on their release from prison to various persons who had been implicated in conspiracies.21
According to him, the grand conspiracy originated in Germany where, following the defeat of Jena, the student societies turned their attention from mutual rivalry to the aim of assassinating Napoleon and subsequently toppling all the German monarchs. Their influence penetrated France in the ‘literary cortège’ of Madame de Staël, who was popular among French liberals. In 1815 there were, according to Duplay, two secret societies operating in France, one of them the Chevaliers de l’Épingle Noire, on whom he admits ‘there exists in the archives of the Police Générale no specific piece of information’. The other, the Société du Lion Dormant, a Masonic order founded by French captives in England with Napoleon as Grand Master, supposedly had lodges all over France. Yet the only information Duplay had on it derived from the testimony of one adept who had been inducted without really knowing what he was letting himself in for, but thought they meant to kidnap the royal family and threaten to murder them if the allies should invade.22
‘Thus, at the end of 1815 or the beginning of 1816, a comité directeur existed in the capital,’ writes Duplay in a total non-sequitur. He goes on to affirm that under the name L’Indépendance Nationale, this set up regional committees in every department of France. According to him, it orchestrated Didier’s rising of 1816 and had a hand in the Épingle Noire’s attempt to seize Vincennes (although Duplay had earlier confessed that he had no information on the existence of that organisation). The proof he adduces of a connection between some disturbance or alleged conspiracy and the Parisian comité directeur is in some cases no more than a deposition by some individual that he had seen someone receiving a letter from someone the police suspected of having contacts with one or other of the liberals in Paris. ‘The points of contact with the capital are no less evident, although there is no information which could reveal the comité directeur which was directing the conspirators of 1817 from Paris,’ Duplay writes with regard to the Lyon revolt. ‘It appears that the house of Madame de Lavalette provided the point of contact.’ The surviving police files containing the reports of the spies watching her house support no such likelihood.23
According to Duplay, following the failure of the Lyon revolt the comité directeur concentrated on parliamentary means, canvassing for petitions and organising election campaigns, and influencing deputies. It nevertheless kept in touch with all the secret societies around the country. These presented quite a challenge to Duplay. Informers reported the existence of groups with a baffling variety of names, such as L’Ordre de l’Amitié, Les Admirateurs de la Valeur Française, Trois Cents Laboureurs du Champ de la Veuve, L’Ordre du Soleil, La République, Marie-Louise et son Fils, and so on. Upon investigation it would sometimes turn out that some had already ceased to exist or had changed their name. Duplay was confused by the connections between societies such as Les Chevaliers de la Liberté and the Société des Réformateurs, which he thought might be another name for the comité directeur.
Surprisingly, Duplay does not dwell on the papers concerning the Grand Firmament that found their way into his archive. These include induction rites which involved abjuring the Christian faith and burning crowns and sceptres, several bloodcurdling decrees and oaths, some in dog Latin, and the statutes of the organisation. An informer had supposedly been admitted to a session of its ‘synod’ in Turin, and discovered that the Adelphi were in close contact with a comité directeur in Paris which included Benjamin Constant, Jacques-Antoine Manuel, Pierre Paul Royer Collard and Auguste de Kératry.24
Duplay was puzzled by the discovery of a seemingly Masonic society calling itself Misraïm, which appeared to have ramifications in the most unlikely places. Its existence was reported in towns such as Montpellier, Nîmes and Mâcon, in Switzerland and Italy, and as far afield as Russia. It also allegedly had branches in Scotland, headed by the Duke of Atholl, and in England, where the membership was reported to include the king’s brother the Duke of Sussex. The archives contain the society’s catechism (an unreadable skein of mumbo-jumbo), its hierarchy of seventy-nine grades, various papers issued ‘under the Equator’, impressions of Masonic-looking seals seized at Calais, and the information that members wore a black rosette with a black cross on it, with an inscription that could not be deciphered.
Duplay came to the conclusion that all these names were red herrings planted by the conspirators to put the police off the scent of the real one. In his view of things, everything was intricately linked, and above all orchestrated by the fabled comité directeur. In the case of Louvel’s assassination of the duc de Berry, ‘even if it has not been proved that the comité directeur itself directly ordered the assassination of 13 February, it is at least proved by the confessions of the assassin himself that his fanaticism had been fed and inflamed by the agitation reigning all around him’.
Ironically, Metternich, who had from the beginning taken a dim view of the French police, was now convinced that they had been thoroughly infiltrated by the comité directeur. Alexander was so concerned about their unreliability that he insisted they could only issue passports for travel to Russia to people who had produced a certificate of good morality.25