Lenoir, who succeeded de Sartines, carried espionage still farther, and employed a vast army of spies, paid and unpaid. Servants only got their places on the condition that they kept the police informed of all that went on in the houses where they served. The hawkers who paraded the streets were in his pay. He had suborned members of the many existing associations of thieves, and they enjoyed tolerance so long as they denounced their accomplices. The gambling-houses were taken under police protection; with the proviso that they paid over a percentage of profits and reported all that occurred. People of good society who had got into trouble were forgiven on condition that they watched their friends and gave information of anything worth knowing. One fashionable agent was a lady who entertained large parties and came secretly by a private staircase to the police office with her budget of news. This woman was only paid at the rate of £80 a year.
De Crosne.
Thiroux de Crosne was the last lieutenant-general of police, and the revolutionary upheaval was no doubt assisted by his ineptitude, his marked want of tact and intelligence. While the city was mined under his feet with the coming volcanic disturbances he gave all his energies to theatrical censorship, and kept his agents busy reporting how often this or that phrase was applauded. He was ready to imprison anyone who dared offend a great nobleman, and was very severe upon critics and pamphleteers. The absurd misuse of the censorship was no doubt one of the contributing causes of the Revolution. The police were so anxious to save the king, Louis XVI., from the pollution of reading the many libels published that they allowed no printed matter to come near him. In this way he was prevented from gauging the tendency of the times, or the trend of public opinion. At last, wishing to learn the exact truth of the vague rumours that reached him, he ordered a bookseller, Blaizot, to send him everything that appeared. He soon surprised his Ministers by the knowledge he displayed, and they set to work to find how it reached him. Blaizot was discovered and sent to the Bastille. When the king, wondering why he got no more pamphlets, inquired, he learnt that Blaizot had been imprisoned by his order!
The monarchical police was quickly swept away by the French Revolution. It was condemned as an instrument of tyranny; having only existed, according to the high-sounding phrases of the period, to “sow distrust, encourage perfidy, and substitute intrigue for public spirit.” The open official police thus disappeared, but it was replaced by another far more noxious; a vast political engine, recklessly handled by every bloodthirsty wretch who wielded power in those disastrous times. The French Republicans, from the Committee of Public Safety to the last revolutionary club, were all policemen—spying, denouncing, feeding the guillotine. Robespierre had his own private police, and after his fall numerous reports were found among his papers showing how close and active was the surveillance he maintained through his spies, not only in Paris alone, but all over France.
Under the Directory the office of a Minister of Police was revived, not without stormy protest, and the newly organised police soon became a power in the Republic as tyrannical and inquisitorial as that of Venice. It had its work cut out for it. Paris, the whole country, was in a state of anarchy, morals were at their lowest point, corruption and crime everywhere rampant. The streets of the city, all the high roads, were infested with bands of robbers with such wide ramifications that a general guerilla warfare terrorised the provinces. We shall see more of this on a later page, when describing the terrible bandits named Chauffeurs, from their practice of torturing people by toasting their feet before the fire until they gave up their hidden treasure.
Fouché.
Nine police Ministers quickly followed each other between 1796 and 1799, men of no particular note; but at last Barras fixed
