The other day, a bicentennial went quietly by: December 26 was the 200th anniversary of the death of Joseph Fouché, one of the most enigmatic and sinister figures of the French Revolution.
Fouché is not a big name of the same caliber as Robespierre, Danton or Lafayette, but he was a man with a remarkable life story: Seminary student; science professor; radical revolutionary and Terror enforcer; anti-Robespierre conspirator; chief of police and hardline persecutor of radicals under the Directory; ally of Napoleon Bonaparte in the 18th Brumaire coup; minister of police under the Consulate and the Empire; serial turncoat during the Restoration and the 100-day return of Napoleon. He was, at various times, a Christian and a militant atheist; a quasi-communist zealot for “sainte egalité” and a millionaire aristocrat. He was also a man of more familiar complexities: the mass murderer who was also a devoted husband and loving father; the ruthlessly efficient and cunning secret police chief who also enjoyed friendships with intellectual aristocratic women such as Delphine de Custine and Victorine de Chastenay; an opportunist who betrayed every side but may have retained a commitment to some fundamental principles.
In one way, Fouché’s story has a particular relevance to the modern era. He was a man whose career was built on reinventing himself, rewriting history and spinning facts—until it was finally undone because (1) his self-reinvention collided with a stone-cold fact he couldn’t rewrite or spin and (2) he tried to double-deal one time too many.
It is somehow fitting that Fouché’s personal background was rooted in a practice that we now regard as the ultimate sin of his era: slavery. His father, Julien Joseph Fouché, was a captain of a merchant ship that trafficked in slaves, a trade in which he grew rich enough to buy a slave plantation in San Domingo. Young Joseph, born in 1759, was expected to follow in his father’s footsteps; that was reportedly precluded by his frail health. Instead, he enrolled in a Jesuit seminary, took minor orders (a clerical rank below priesthood), and studied philosophy, theology and science. In 1782, he became a professor of physical sciences, teaching first in Arras (where he befriended a young lawyer and intellectual named Maximilien de Robespierre and even courted his sister Charlotte for a while), then in Nantes, where he was a prefect at the Oratory College when the Revolution broke out.
Fouché enthusiastically threw himself into political activity, joining one of the revolutionary clubs in Nantes. In a 2014 biography (colorfully titled “Fouché: The Silence of the Octopus”), French historian Emmanuel de Waresquiel argues that he already embraced radical views by 1791: his writings at the time not only attacked the monarchy and denounced priests who did not pledge loyalty to the Constitution but railed against inequalities of wealth. There was, however, one curious exception to his revolutionary spirit: he defended the slave trade as conducive to “the general interest.” (Later on, in 1794, he would enthusiastically celebrate the abolition of slavery in the French colonies.)
In September 1792, after the monarchy’s fall, Fouché was elected to the National Convention. Initially close to the moderate Girondins, he split with them on the fate of the deposed king Louis XVI, now “Citizen Capet.” Fouché’s 19th and 20th Century biographers, including Austrian writer Stefan Zweig in the celebrated 1930 book, Joseph Fouché: The Portrait of a Politician, reported that he initially planned to vote to spare Louis’s life and wrote a speech laying out his argument—but changed his mind when he realized that those voting for mercy would face the wrath of the Paris mobs and that the Revolution’s momentum was on the side of violent radicalism. To Zweig, Fouché’s decision to condemn the ex-monarch and betray his Girondin allies, to whom he had promised a vote for clemency, was his “first desertion”—the birth of Fouché the turncoat. However, more recent historians such as de Waresquiel question this version of the story, believing that the notion of Fouché’s last-minute reversal is itself part of his spin—a myth created when his 1793 vote to kill the King became a major inconvenience. Zweig claims that Fouché’s pamphlet, “Reflections of J. Fouché (of Nantes) on the Judgment of Louis Capet,” forcefully arguing for the former King’s execution, was printed “on the very day after the vote” (held on January 15-16). But de Waresquiel writes that a copy found in parliamentary archives is dated January 7, and the library copy available on Google Books is marked “15 janv. 1793” in pencil. That Fouché could have dashed off the eight-page pamphlet in a few hours seems unlikely. If he did tell some Girondin deputies that he was planning to vote to spare Louis, chances are that he was lying, not that he changed his mind.
It’s also notable that, while many of Fouché’s arguments in the pamphlet had to do specifically with the monarchy—he insisted that if the revolutionaries who overthrew the King balk at physically destroying him, they would show a failure of nerve—he also appealed to “law and order” principles that foreshadow the future Minister of Police:
The tyrant’s crimes have shocked all eyes and filled all hearts with indignation. Unless his head falls promptly under the blade of the law, bandits and assassins will be able to walk without fear, and the most atrocious disorder will threaten society.
Having cast his lot with the radicals, Fouché continued on that path. In the spring of 1793, sent as a représentant en mission (“representative on a mission”) to Nantes, where tensions ran high and the rebellious Vendée was not far away, he introduced measures that arguably anticipated the Reign of Terror by several months. On April 27, he issued an edict that defined broad categories of “suspects” subject to arrest—including relatives of emigrés, nuns who continued to lead a monastic lifestyle, and former servants of priests deported for refusing to take the constitutional pledge. (There were, however, few if any actual executions.)
In Nantes and later in Nevers, Fouché also pursued an aggressive de-christianization program, intended to all but root out Christianity and replace it with a civic religion of the Republic. Priests were barred from performing their functions unless they either married or adopted a child. Churches were shut down, vandalized and pillaged, precious medieval artifacts destroyed, bells taken down. Fouché presided over civic marriage ceremonies and civic baptisms—including that of his daughter Nièvre, born to his wife Bonne-Jeanne (who accompanied him) on August 10. (Little Nièvre, named after the department in which she was born, died about a year after “quite involuntarily fulfilling her function as a little republican princess,” as de Waresquiel puts it.)
As with birth, so with death: Decrees issued by Fouché in the cities of Moulins and Nevers on September 29 and October 10 respectively ordered the establishment of entirely secular cemeteries with no crosses; tombstones would bear the image of a laurel wreath for especially deserving patriots and the inscription “Death is an eternal sleep.” (Statues symbolizing sleep would further reinforce the message.)
The next step in Fouché’s revolutionary career engaged death far more directly. On October 30, he was directed to take charge (along with fellow radical Jean-Baptiste Collot d’Herbois) of reprisals in Lyons, where the government had just put down a rebellion led by moderate pro-Girondin republicans. After the city’s surrender on October 9, the Convention passed a demented decree ordering its destruction: all buildings except for the dwellings of patriots and the poor, industrial structures, and monuments of civic importance were to be razed, with the remnants renamed Ville-Affranchie (“Liberated City”) and a column erected on the ruins with the inscription, “Lyons waged war on liberty; Lyons is no more.” Georges Couthon, who had led the recapture of Lyons, apparently had little appetite for wholesale destruction (despite being one the “triumvirs” at the head of the terror regime in the months that followed) and asked to be relieved for health reasons after symbolically condemning a few buildings.
Fouché arrived in Lyons on November 8, a few days after Collot. There followed one of Terror’s most infamous atrocities. On December 4, 1793, about sixty condemned men were taken to an open ground near a granary, tied together with ropes and shot with grapeshot from three cannons. The wounded were finished off with sabers. Another mitraillade (“grapeshot shooting”) followed the next day, with more than 200 victims. It’s unclear how many perished in this grisly manner, but between the cannon, more conventional firing squads, and the guillotine, the reprisals in Lyons took about 2,000 lives—nearly 2 percent of the city’s population—by the end of April 1794. About 600 buildings were razed to the ground.
Despite the engraving above, there is no evidence that Fouché personally presided over any massacres. But he was certainly an enthusiast. On December 20, after French revolutionary armies recaptured Toulon from royalist rebels, he wrote to Collot (who had by then returned to Paris): “We have only one way to celebrate victory: tonight, we are sending two hundred thirteen rebels to be incinerated by lightning.”
Fouché the “mitrailleur of Lyons” was not only a killer but an ideologue. He is generally believed to be the principal author of an “Instruction” to departmental authorities issued on 26 Brumaire, Year II (November 16, 1793) by the Temporary Commission of Republican surveillance in “Liberated City.” This text, titled “The Goal of the Revolution is the People’s Happiness,” is one of the clearest expressions of the French Revolution’s totalitarian turn. After a preamble which states that “all is permitted to those who act in the spirit of the Revolution,” it goes to declare:
Do not be mistaken: in order to be a republican, each citizen must carry out within himself a revolution equal to the one that has changed the face of France. There is nothing, absolutely nothing in common between the slave of a tyrant and the inhabitant of a free state. The latter’s habits, principles, sentiments, actions—all must be new. You have been oppressed, now you must crush your oppressors.
The Republic no longer wants anyone but free men in her bosom; she is determined to exterminate all the rest and to recognize as her children only those who are willing to live, fight, and die only for her.
Zweig thought the “Instruction,” which includes vehement fulminations against the rich, was the first Communist text—55 years before The Communist Manifesto. One may debate whether that’s an accurate description. But it does contain this extraordinary statement (emphasis in the original):
Any wealth in excess of what is sufficient for a man’s needs cannot be used, it can only be abused. While he must keep what is strictly necessary, all the rest belongs to the Republic and to its less fortunate members.
Fouché’s tenure as representative-on-mission in Lyons had another notable and deeply ironic episode: On March 10, 1794, he presided over a festival celebrating the abolition of slavery in the French colonies. At this event, he marched at the head of a group of “chained Negroes of both sexes”—obviously not actual slaves but free black men and women who had been chained for the occasion to symbolically represent slaves—before removing their chains and embracing them to the sound of cannon shots (for once celebratory, not homicidal). The slave trader’s son and recent defender of slavery literally playing white savior in a grandiose ceremony: what a quintessential Fouché moment.
On March 27, Fouché was recalled by the Convention. There’s a legend (mostly perpetuated years later by Charlotte Robespierre, anxious to rehabilitate her brother as a maligned humanitarian) according to which Robespierre was disgusted by the carnage in Lyons. Fouché himself, in his posthumously published self-exculpatory memoirs, claimed the opposite: that Robespierre accused him of being too soft, e.g. failing to execute the wives of men condemned as counter-revolutionaries. In fact, it appears that neither version is true. The cannon-shot executions in Lyons did cause a minor outcry about “butchery” among the Jacobins in Paris in December, but Collot successfully squelched all objections at the time. Fouché’s recall nearly four months later was due to conflicts with Jacobins in Lyons, who accused him of persecuting patriotic sans-culottes (particularly after he dissolved the local popular society).
Fouché’s radical egalitarianism and militant atheism also placed him too close to the Hébertists, who had been sent to the guillotine in late March and early April. (Among the casualties of this purge was Fouché’s friend Pierre-Gaspard Chaumette, executed on April 13.) On May 7 (18 Florèal), Robespierre addressed the Convention in a lengthy speech on “religious and moral ideas” in which he declared war on atheists, assailing them as purveyors of cynicism and immorality—and possibly foreign agents. “Who charged you with the mission of announcing to the people that the Divinity does not exist?” he inquired, addressing a “wretched sophist” who sounded a lot like Fouché. (A few weeks later—on 8 Thermidor/July 26—he would openly name Fouché and the dead Chaumette as his atheist bogeymen.) “What advantage do you find in persuading man that a blind force presides over his destiny … and that his soul is only a light breeze extinguished at the entrance to the tomb?” To deny the existence of a deity and the immortality of the soul, Robespierre asserted, was to empower iniquity, “distress virtue” and “degrade humanity.” The Convention readily agreed, establishing the Cult of the Supreme Being as a new state religion.
Two weeks later, a delegation of “patriots” from Lyons, led by a man Fouché had removed as editor of a local pro-Jacobin newspaper, was invited to speak at the Convention. They vociferously denounced Fouché and accused him of unjust persecution and “charlatanism.” The clouds over his head were thickening.
At first, Fouché fought back in the open; somehow, he worked the Jacobins in Paris well enough to get elected president of the Jacobin Club on June 6, 1794. Unamused, Robespierre denounced him and got him not only removed from that post but expelled from the Club a few days later. There was now little doubt that Fouché’s contest with Robespierre had reached a “kill or be killed” stage.
Fouché spent the next month or so quietly plotting. Rarely sleeping at home to avoid arrest, he stayed in the shadows, going from deputy to deputy and telling them that he had personally seen Robespierre’s proscription list with their name on it. “Fouché’s genius—for he certainly did have genius—was to manipulate people’s fears,” writes de Waresquiel.
Was there really a proscription list? Nobody knows. (Though, just before his downfall, Robespierre dropped some heavy hints that he was preparing a purge.) Nor does anyone know how instrumental Fouché really was in Robespierre’s overthrow. But he was definitely a key figure behind the scenes, and some of the known coup leaders—Collot d’Herbois, Bertrand Barère, Marc-Guillaume Vadier—were his friends. Nobody even knows whether Fouché was at the Convention on 9 Thermidor. His name does not appear in the transcripts of the historic session. Maybe he went into hiding on the day his plot came to fruition. Maybe he was there, observing and keeping quiet while others railed against the “tyrant” and “dictator” Robespierre.
The downfall and execution of Robespierre and his allies removed the immediate danger to Fouché; but the drastic change in the political climate created new problems for him. Public opinion turned strongly against perpetrators of the Terror, even the ones who had brought down Robespierre. Another Thermidorian implicated in atrocities, Jean-Baptiste Carrier, who like Fouché had ordered mass executions—the infamous noyades or drownings of Nantes, in which barges full of condemned men and women were sunk in the Loire river—was tried and guillotined in December 1794.
Meanwhile, Fouché—still a deputy in the Convention—used his participation in the anti-Robespierre plot as a shield and worked hard to rewrite his past. He successfully memory-holed his role in the mitraillades of Lyons, shifting the blame to his old pal Collot d’Herbois—who wasn’t even in Lyons after the first two mass executions—and to the conveniently dead Couthon. (Collot was deported to French Guyana in 1796 and lasted two years before he was killed off by yellow fever; such deportations so often proved deadly that they were nicknamed “the dry guillotine.”) Denounced by citizens of Nantes and Nièvres over his activities as representative-on-mission, he tenaciously defended himself, published pamphlets refuting the “slanders” and cultivated friendly journalists. He persuaded some of his accusers that he had actually saved their lives. He managed to win back two then-influential politicians, Jean-Lambert Tallien and Louis Legendre, who openly denounced him at one point but later defended him as one of the heroes of 9 Thermidor. (“Fouché had no part in 9 Thermidor,” responded centrist deputy Boissy d’Anglas, one of the many people who utterly despised Fouché. “That day was too sublime to have been dishonored by his help.”)
Interestingly, during the same time, Fouché still maintained ties to the radical left. He reportedly financed proto-communist and proto-anarchist journalist François-Noël (“Gracchus”) Babeuf and may have been implicated in the far-left insurrection of April 1-2, 1795 (12-13 Germinal, Year III).
On August 9, 1795, Fouché’s luck (temporarily) ran out, and the Convention ordered his arrest. He went into hiding and stayed in hiding until the charges against him were vacated by a general political amnesty in October of the same year.
For the next four years, Fouché worked on clawing his way back up. He cultivated financiers and arms dealers. He also became a spy for Paul François Barras, the most powerful politician of the Directory. That job that eventually led him—after a brief stint as the Directory’s envoy to the Cisalpine Republic, a newly minted sister state in Northern Italy—to an appointment as Minister of Police in July 1799.
As it turned out, being top cop was Fouché’s true calling. In a precarious situation where both Jacobins and royalists were plotting against the government, Fouché cleverly manipulated them all, sowing subtle terror, unerringly finding people’s weak spots (and secrets), and recruiting agents. In the words of historian Albert Sorel, “He turned all of Paris into a giant mousetrap.” He could intimidate by means as simple as having someone brought in for questioning in the middle of the night, or forcing the person to wait and sweat in his office while he sat at his desk apparently busy with his papers. He easily took turns playing good cop/bad cop.
The 18th Brumaire coup that dissolved the Directory and installed Napoleon Bonaparte as First Consul happened less than four months after Fouché took his post. There is little doubt that Fouché was aware of the planned coup; if he wasn’t actively involved, he helped Napoleon by doing nothing about it.
Napoleon’s attitude toward Fouché seems to have been a mix of loathing, fear, and grudging appreciation. Interestingly, the future emperor hated Fouché both for his role in the Terror (he detested the Jacobins) and for his role in ousting of Robespierre, whom he saw as a moderate destroyed for trying to curb the Terror. (This unusual take was apparently a result of Napoleon’s friendship in 1793 with Robespierre’s younger brother Augustin, who went to the guillotine with Maximilien on 10 Thermidor.) Nonetheless, he felt it was far more useful to have Fouché as a friend than as an enemy. Later, in exile on St. Helena, he would express the view that his biggest mistake was not having Fouché shot.
Fouché stayed on as Minister of Police, racking up more points when he tracked down the people responsible for the December 24, 1800 bombing intended to kill Napoleon. (While Napoleon initially believed the culprits were Jacobins, Fouché insisted from the start—rightly, as it turned out—that it was a royalist plot.)
In August 1802, upon declaring himself First Consul for Life, Napoleon dissolved the Ministry of Police and folded its functions into the Ministry of Justice, thus depriving Fouché of a cabinet post; however, he clearly did not want to antagonize Fouché too much. The ex-minister received not only a lucrative post in the Senate and a piece of land but a bonus of over a million francs (about $3 million in today’s currency).
Despite his ostensible retirement from police work, Fouché still maintained ties to his spy network and played an important role in uncovering the royalist Pichegru Conspiracy in 1804; the same year, after the proclamation of the Empire, the Ministry of Police was back with Fouché at its head. Later on, he also became Minister of Internal Affairs and was granted the newly created title of Duke of Otranto.
His relationship with Napoleon remained tense. In 1810, he was dismissed from the government altogether, then recalled for missions abroad. In 1814, he returned to France three days before Napoleon’s forced abdication. He tried to act as power broker, negotiating with Louis XVIII and his brother the Count d’Artois (the future Charles X) while trying to persuade Napoleon to retire to the United States. By the time Louis XVIII offered him his old post as Minister of Police, it was too late: Napoleon was on his way back from Elba, and the King’s downfall was imminent. Days later, Fouché was once again installed in that post under Napoleon. (“Fouché the minister, who lived to be that and had no other life,” his friend Madame de Chastenay wrote in her memoirs.)
The “100 Days”—March 20 to July 8, 1815—were the peak of Fouché’s life as a political player. He played a highly dangerous game, serving Napoleon while also hedging his bets and negotiating with the Emperor’s enemies, mainly Metternich and the Duke of Wellington, behind his back. “He is not Napoleon’s minister; he is already the minister of whatever will come after Napoleon,” writes de Waresquiel. Napoleon openly accused him of betrayal on several occasions; in one episode recalled years later by Napoleon’s brother Lucien Bonaparte, the Emperor barked, “Monsieur Duke of Otranto, I ought to have you hanged!”, to which Fouché imperturbably replied, “Sire, I do not share Your Majesty’s opinion.”
With Napoleon’s power tottering and the future of France uncertain, Fouché’s power at this point was enormous. He briefly served as head of the provisional government after Napoleon’s second abdication. Louis XVIII promised him that his services would be rewarded. And in fact, after the second Bourbon Restoration, Fouché continued on for a while as Minister of Police. But the victors no longer needed him, and this is where his life enters a chapter that could be titled “The Betrayer Betrayed.”
In a new France dominated by an ultra-royalist elite determined to avenge the wrongs of the Revolution (in contrast to the first Restoration, which had more of a “forgive and forget” attitude), Fouché’s Jacobin past became increasingly problematic. A mere two months after Louis XVIII’s return to the throne, in September 1815, he was pushed out of the cabinet. Formally resigning on September 19, he accepted an ambassadorship to Saxony and moved to Dresden with his family. (His first wife Bonne-Jeanne had died of a stroke in 1812; in 1814, the 55-year-old Duke of Otranto had married a beautiful 27-year-old noblewoman, Ernestine de Castellane-Majastres.)
A far worse blow came four months later. In January 1816, the new French parliament, with an ultra-royalist majority, voted to create an exception to the general amnesty for people who had supported Napoleon during the “100 Days”: it applied to former National Convention members who had voted for Louis XVI’s execution. Among those was Fouché. The proscription meant lifelong banishment from France, the loss of French properties, and a total ban on holding any public office on behalf of the French state including diplomatic service.
Overnight, the ambassador became a nonentity. Fouché had hoped that his current post and past services to the monarchy would exempt him from the proscription; they did not. This time, there was no getting out of his predicament; his pleadings and attempts to use his network of friends and plant favorable articles in the press were fruitless. The French government proved not only inflexible but vindictive: in Prague, where Fouché stayed for a while with his family and initially found a welcome reception, the French embassy apparently signaled that he should not get invited to too many social events. The humiliation of his exile was exacerbated by rumors (never confirmed or disproved) that his wife was having an affair with a younger man.
In late 1819, Fouché moved to Trieste, Italy, where he focused on his family and the education of his four children (then between the ages of 17 and 23) and was on friendly terms with Napoleon’s brother Jêrome Bonaparte, who lived in the same city. A chill caught during the cold winter of 1820 turned to pleurisy. A short time later, Fouché died at the age of 61, receiving last rites like a good Catholic. Even some people who had despised him as a traitor—such as fellow exile Nicolas Planat, a former colonel in Napoleon’s army—found themselves moved by the demise of this man who had been so powerful and had fallen so low.
Most people who wrote about Fouché weren’t so charitable. François-René de Chateaubriand, the Christian conservative writer, called him “a hyena in clothes.” The British historian Lord Roseberry wrote that he could think of “no one more repugnant or more infamous”; the French writer and historian Lamartine’s judgment was that Fouché “lacked nothing in skill, little in intelligence, and everything in virtue.” Unlike the era’s other great turncoat, the equally duplicitous Talleyrand, Fouché wasn’t particularly charming or witty. (He had his moments, though: On one occasion when Napoleon caustically reminded him of his vote for Louis XVI’s execution, he reportedly replied without batting an eye, “And that is the first service I was able to render Your Majesty.”) And yet some, including the great novelist Honoré de Balzac, thought Fouché was an underrated man who embodied the fundamental amorality of power and politics. Fouché still has devoted fans, including some of his numerous descendants (among whom there are members of royal families). For the bicentennial of his death, the Society of Napoleonic Memory laid a wreath at his tomb in Ferrières-en-Brie; plans to install a plaque at the palazzo where he died in Trieste were thwarted by COVID-19.
De Waresquiel, who has said he reluctantly undertook the biography of Fouché, ended up being oddly sympathetic to his subject. He asserts that, despite his opportunism, Fouché did remain committed to the basic ideals of the Revolution. During the 100 Days, he persuaded Napoleon to permit virtually unlimited freedom of the press and tried to get him to recognize popular sovereignty as the basis of statehood; during his negotiations with the Bourbons and the allied powers, he worked hard to get them to guarantee constitutional liberties under the Restoration and to protect the principle of equality under the law. De Waresquiel also believes that Fouché deserves a fair amount of credit for preventing brutal military reprisals against France, and especially Paris, in 1815. And he points to Fouché’s record of surprising personal loyalty to former allies or their families: During the French Revolution, he protected former associates at the Oratory College in Nantes; under Napoleon, he gave pensions to Charlotte Robespierre and to Collot d’Herbois’s widow. (It’s a very Fouché kind of loyalty, of course: get your buddy to take the fall for a crime you committed together, then make sure his widow is provided for.) He may have also saved Vadier and Barère from deportation.
A lot of Fouché’s life and career remains shrouded in mystery—intentionally so, since he used his post as Minister of Police to destroy a lot of records that implicated him personally and left instructions to destroy most of his personal papers after his death. (It’s unknown, for instance, whether he had a romantic relationship with his lifelong friend Delphine de Custine.) Even now, new things about him are still coming to light: De Waresquiel actually ended up writing a second book in 2017, called Fouché: The Secret Files, based on newly discovered archives. Some of the new revelations in it have to do with Fouché’s freemasonry; others, far less sympathetically, with his lifelong defense of the interests of colonial slaveholders.
Not an admirable man by any means. (In fact, “repugnant and infamous” is probably about right.) But certainly a fascinating man, and a fascinating life.
The French Revolution Nerd 