Memoirs of Monsieur Claude : chief of police under the Second Empire

Front matter

MEMOIRS MONSIEUR

MEMOIRS

OF

Contents

I. My Youth and my Vocation i

II. Secret Societies and the Police under

Louis-Philippe io

Chapter I My Youth And My Vocation

I WAS born at Toul (Meurthe), on the 17th of October, 1807, of an honourable family, though limited in means. I am proud of my town, which resisted the Prussian invasion. I am glad to belong to a population which carried its respect for duty up to heroism, and its contempt of danger to the very limit of courage. I may add that I take pleasure in attributing those gifts, if I have shown them in my long and difficult career, to my brave co-citizens, whose glorious history is written on their ramparts.

The limited means of my family obliged me to leave my province early in life, to make for myself an independent existence. Anxious to remain as short a time as possible at the cost of my parents, who had given me a good and careful education, I left Toul when nineteen years of age and went to Paris.

In this I was less guided by ambition than by the wish to make myself a lucrative career ; which, in those days, the provinces could not offer to a young man like me, whose education had been above his situation. I brought with me a recommendation to a friend of my family, M. de L , a man of independent means and social position in Paris. By him I was at once placed in the office of an attorney.

I was not precisely on the road to fortune ; sitting from morning till night at a desk, copying deeds, verifying records, unless I were carrying files of papers to and fro between the attorney's office in the Palais de Justice and its clients — a gutter-jumping employment which was not to my taste. With an inquiring mind, very fond of the exciting and the unexpected, under an external appearance of easy good-nature, I hated this life of a squirrel's whirligig, which stretched my legs and paralysed my imagination.

Nevertheless, I remained three years a lawyer's clerk. From gutter-jumper I rose to the rank of second clerk ; and there I might have remained indefinitely if certain aptitudes of mine had not shown themselves in time to assign me another mission. Chance put me in the way to find my true vocation, and to prove to my comrades that nature had endowed me with a faculty of observation which would make me, in time, a skilful policeman.

This chance, which decided my vocation, I owe to a man afterwards very celebrated in the annals of crime. It happened in 1829, of a Saturday. I had been invited, with a score of other clerks from the offices of notaries and attorneys, to a Pantagruelian dinner, given by a future neophyte. This young man, I was told, was the son of a rich merchant in the provinces. After spending in Paris all the money he could get from his father, he was now obliged to employ his brilliant faculties in some profession. Being very intimate with certain lawyer's clerks, he was enabled by them to enter their patron's office, as he had already given some time in the provinces to the study of law. By way of gratitude, he was now to spend his last francs in a farewell feast to his turbulent youth, given to his friends in the notary's office which he was about to enter. A few attorney's clerks were added to the number of his guests, among whom I had the honour of admission.

I had not, hitherto, known my host, whom his friends, out of respect, they said, for his family during the period of his dissipated life, called George. I was all the more curious to know him because my friends had represented him to me as a hero.

" If he does not, as yet," they added, " make known his family name, it is less because he dreads paternal anger at his peccadilloes — very excusable at his age — than because he fears the police. They have had their eyes on him ever since he killed his adversary, a traitor to France, in a duel, and thus proclaimed, in a threatening way for the government, his opinions as a Carbonaro."

France was just then on the eve of Charles X's ordonnances, and the Opposition were making demigods of the Carbonari. The French Bar was not backward in exhibiting its preferences for the Opposition, which promised to young lawyers a far more brilliant career than that of mere defenders of the widow and orphan.

In 1829 politics were everywhere; even the snuffboxes and the hats were adorned with portraits of Lafitte, Benjamin Constant, Dupont de l'Eure, and

Lafayette. In every cafe and every restaurant the customers were assorted according to their ways of thinking ; and each was on its guard against its adversaries. It goes without saying that the clerks of notaries and attorneys, the least well paid and well treated of the judicial hierarchy, were all, to a man, in the ranks of the Opposition.

As for me, an ardent apostle of liberty, I considered it a great privilege to be invited to meet this hero, this martyr to his opinions. The duel raised him to a pinnacle in my young imagination. I was prepared to follow him with enthusiasm even before I saw him.

The dinner was given at the Veau qui fete [Sucking Calf], a restaurant then in vogue. The giver of the feast was a young man about twenty-five years of age ; fair, graceful, elegant, with a smiling face set off by a silky moustache, without which he might have passed for a woman in disguise, or a schoolboy. He was excessively thin, but the frail body, so delicate in appearance, covered a robust constitution, judging by the suppleness of his limbs, and the strong play of his muscles. A man who sat beside him, and appeared to be his chosen comrade, was, on the contrary, a stout fellow, whose burly figure made the slender proportions of his friend the more noticeable ; nevertheless, this stoutness showed more weakness than strength, a constitution ravaged by excesses, and threatened with plethora. He seemed the type of an army officer degraded to the ranks. His name was Begand, and, like his friend George, he came from Lyons.

As the dinner went on, passing through the various discordant phases of jollity, I watched with more and more curiosity the two chief leaders of the feast. Lawyers' clerks are, as a rule, very easily excited by the blood of the vine. I noticed that George, from the moment when his guests began to sway, kept perfect possession of himself, in spite of the bottles before him. Yet he drank, and drank steadily. It is true, however, that he scarcely touched the dishes as they were passed to him. His comrade, on the contrary, ate enormously, and drank all the more to stimulate his gluttony.

Towards the end of the dinner, I observed that the more the face of Begand flushed, the more that of George turned livid. I then perceived that his gentle, almond-shaped eyes, the pupils of which had hitherto been bathed in a sort of magnetic fluid, were now shining with the brilliancy of steel. His brows were knit and lowered in a threatening manner. His lips had a savage grin; and the young man who, at the beginning of the meal, wore the head of an angel, at its close had the face of a hyena.

A strange thing now happened to me. As the man became transformed, or rather, as the mask fell from him, I became conscious that I myself was no longer the same. An evil influence acted upon me. This man, who had been depicted to me as a hero, I now saw for what he was — a criminal. The odour of blood that exhaled from all his pores intoxicated me far more than the wine that I had drunk. I felt myself stirred by an instinct against that malefic nature, as a shepherd's dog smells the wolf that is roaming round the flock. These magnetic impressions, these luminous perceptions, have, since then, often come to me at the sight or the contact of an evildoer; in fact, without depending upon them, they have been a great help to me in my delicate and difficult investigations. I admit that on this occasion these impressions, which I felt for the first time, bewildered me ; and, not understanding the instinctive horror I felt for this George, whom my friends thought a demigod, I was angry with myself for my assumptions.

In order to get rid of this mirage in my mind, which might be, after all, a veil of intoxication, I listened attentively to what he was saying. Without being, according to the consecrated word of that day, as emu as his guests, he was certainly excited by the champagne, and I soon saw that he was taking delight in gaining, by his cynical remarks, the admiration of those around him. I also saw that the fat Begand, who sat beside him, was claqueur to this orator, who posed as a wit.

At that period everything was discussed and argued — religion, social matters, the family. Young men, who personally had no knowledge of the past miseries of the country, were amazed that France should have reverted to her monarchical traditions. A toast was drunk to the " Return of Liberty," to which George responded as follows :

" Gentlemen, I drink to my former companions in pleasure ; to my new associates in work ; all of them victims, like myself, of the inequality of social conditions. Entering, as I now do, the pale of the bourgeois magistracy, — as narrow-minded and as stupid as all the other castes, — I drink to the future that will avenge us — us, the pariahs of civilization ! As for me, I have struggled, I am vanquished ! One consolation is mine. I have not surrendered without having fought valiantly ! "

"True! true!" cried the fat Begand. "We know you, George! You are stalwart! You have proved your metal! We all remember your duel with the nephew of Benjamin Constant!"

At that name I shuddered. My singular impressions were confirmed. Until then, my friends, when lauding their future neophyte, had not named his adversary. But all the particulars of the duel with Benjamin Constant's nephew were known to me. He, being the insulted party, fired first, and fired wide of his adversary. The latter took his time, aimed deliberately, and shot young Constant dead, through the right breast. This duel, considered by the moderate liberals a murder, was called by the ultra-radicals a just vengeance. When I saw my comrades acclaiming a man who was nothing less than a murderer, I looked about me to escape an orgy that filled me with disgust. At this moment the man himself broke up the feast. Ordering their glasses filled for the last time, he rose and said :

" My friends, now that I quit the world of idlers and enter with you the class of earners, I shall no longer have the silly vanity to conceal my patronymic. My name is Lacenaire."

That name, which was not yet blasted, but which was destined to inspire the coming generation with legitimate horror, sounded in my ears like a funeral knell. On leaving the restaurant of the Veau qui fete, I felt as if some enormous weight were lifted off me. My companions reproached me for not showing sufficient enthusiasm at the manner with which this charming fellow had buried, with such perfect grace, his life of a man of pleasure.

" Friends," I said, carried away by my physiological impressions, " this Lacenaire, in spite of his smiling face and his loquacity, — more cynical than witty, — shows nothing good to me. Behind the mask of a gentle, affectionate man he has the face of a wild beast. My eyes have seen him such as he is — an enemy to society. His features are handsome, I admit ; their expression is horrible. If his head is deceptive, his hand, which I have closely examined, is not. That hand, with its thin, flat fingers, enlarged at their extremities like the heads of young reptiles, exhibits to me the creeping cruelty of the individual. I tell you that that man will not enter your notary's office next Monday. And I '11 tell you more — before long you will hear much about him. He has killed, and he will kill."

At these words, which I regretted as soon as I had said them, my comrades declared I was crazy ; they laughed at me. But one, the head clerk in the notary's office, was very angry, and called me a calumniator.

Two days later they laughed no longer. Lacenaire did not enter the notary's office ; and on Tuesday morning the safe was found to have been partly broken open during the night. The thieves, alarmed probably by some unexpected noise, had left the office without securing the very considerable property contained in the safe. Suspicion naturally fell on the young man who had so won the confidence of the head clerk that the latter recommended him for a position in the office, which he had frequently visited while the matter was being negotiated.

A few months later, Lacenaire, before becoming the odious assassin of the rue Montorgueil, was arrested for theft at the Cafe de la Bourse. The news of this robbery, committed by the brilliant amphitryon of the Veau qui fete, caused a certain excitement in the legal world. The head clerk who had called me a calumniator never ceased to extol my perspicacity, which he declared was witchcraft. He told the story on all sides until it reached the ears of the head clerk of the Criminal Court of the Tribunal of the Seine. That official, perceiving that I might become a very precious employe in his department, made me proposals which I accepted. Little did I think that my instinctive perceptions at the Veau qui t'ete were to open to me the doors of the Prefecture. I now entered them as a humble clerk ; I was on my true ground ; and I owed it to Lacenaire, thief, forger, and murderer !

Chapter II Secret Societies And The Police

UNDER THE REIGN OF

LOUIS-PHILIPPE

AFTER the revolution of 1830, 1 rose from the position of recording clerk to that of deputy clerk of the Court of the Seine. There I performed the functions, without having the title, of clerk of the criminal and detective police courts \_greffier cf instruction criminelle\ . I owed this rise partly to my zeal and my natural fitness for the work, and partly to political events.

At this epoch, constitutional monarchy, which, in the words of a celebrated personage, was the " best of republics," needed energetic and judicious men to restrain, in the interests of a power seeking peace, impatient minds from forcing the realization of the programme of the Charter. In spite of the easy, good-natured disposition of the Citizen-King, Louis-Philippe, he was exposed, from the moment he mounted the throne, to the rancours of all parties which did not even recoil before the horrors of civil war. To protect himself, His Majesty summoned around him the men who were most interested in maintaining the privileges which the revolution of July had sought to suppress. I, myself, was under a magistrate who continued to perform the same

MONSIEUR CLAUDE n

part he had formerly played under the " monarchy of divine right." The police service was strengthened, both at the Prefecture and at the Ministry of the Interior, by the vigilant care of Casimir Perier [President of the Council of Ministers]. The cabinet noir, suppressed for a time in 1830, was re-established by General Sebastiani, Minister of Foreign Affairs.

The revolutionary movements which broke out in all the countries of Europe, starting from Paris and its secret societies (in which Republicans, Bonapartists, and Legitimists were plotting in their several ways), necessitated the creation of a new staff for the cabinet noir, the functions of which did not cease until the overthrow of Louis-Philippe in 1848.

In this connection, I must tell of a celebrated man, Raspail — Francois Vincent Raspail — President of the Society of the Amis du Peuple [Friends of the People]. Citizen Raspail, chemist, vegetable physiologist, and artilleryman, had played a very important part among the adversaries of Charles X's "ordinances." After that he allowed himself to be forgotten by the camarilla in the Laffitte salons, only, however, to reappear with vigour as a journalist, notably in the Tribune, and in political letters which he fulminated against the new government. Everybody read, eagerly, his articles against his late friends and associates who, in one night, had wriggled into a "court-dress." The cabinet noir was crammed with his letters against the King, who, he said, "was none of his choosing."

The Citizen King, who sought for partisans, not for adversaries, became much alarmed by Raspail's letters, copies of which rained upon him daily from the cabinet noir, and he said to Montalivet, then Minister of the Interior:

" Good God ! what does the man want ? "

"Sire," replied the Minister, "probably, like all the other heroes of July, he wants the cross of the Legion of Honour."

" Then give it to him," cried the King, "and let me have peace ! "

Nothing further was said about Raspail between the King and his Minister, but the latter did not allow those august words to drop. On the morrow Raspail, Friend of the People, democratic artilleryman, proprietor of the Tribune, head of a secret society, received a huge official document. Supposing it to be a summons or an injunction, he threw it on his desk and began to think of preparing for incarceration. But when, after a time, he opened the missive, words could not express the amazement with which he read as follows :

Monsieur, — I have the honour to announce to you that, by ordinance under date March 13, 183 1, the King, at my suggestion, has appointed you Chevalier of the Legion of Honour. The Grand Chancellor of the Order will at once send you a duplicate of this announcement of your appointment.

(Signed) Montalivet.

Open-mouthed, his eyes bulging from their sockets, Raspail turned and re-turned this letter, to see if the date were not April 1 instead of March 13. The Republican, expecting fetters, received the cross of honour! He immediately wrote a reply to the Minister, which did not need to go through the cabinet noir, for he took care to send it simultaneously to all the newspapers of the Opposition. In it the President of the 11 Friends of the People " said, among other amiabilities, that the Government, "despairing of winning a citizen through his conscience, took him by the buttonhole."

But between the reception of the official letter and its answer a ministerial crisis had occured, and Casimir Perier succeeded Montalivet. When the public refusal of the Friend of the People appeared, Casimir Perier exclaimed, with his natural stiffness and obstinacy:

"Very good: let Raspail choose — the cross of the Legion of Honour or imprisonment in a dungeon."

Three days later the official announcement of his appointment appeared in the Moniteur, Furious, Raspail went to the office of the Moniteur to insist on the insertion of his refusal. The editor told him, suavely, that his paper could not thus insult the noble institution of the Legion of Honour.

He had scarcely returned to his own office before he received a courteous letter from the Prefect of the Seine, saying that he " would have the honour of receiving Monsieur Raspail as Chevalier of the Legion of Honour on the following Friday, at midday."

This was dreadful : surely this excess of official graciousness was degenerating into sarcasm.

He was on his way to the Hotel de Ville to inform the Prefect in person that he would not be thus received, when he was met by a congratulatory deputation of the dames de la halle [market-women], who flung themselves and a huge bouquet into the arms of the new Knight of Honour. But even this was not the worst ; he was destined to drink that dreadful cup to the dregs ! He, who saw Jesuits everywhere, and despised priests as much as he did the Legion of Honour, received a charming letter from Bishop Gringoire, Commander of the Order, claiming priority in the honourable appointment, on which he congratulated him. A bishop congratulating Raspail! Surely this was the acme of sarcasm — it was worse than imprisonment !

But Casimir Perier was not the man, any more than Raspail, to give way. " Cross or prison," said the Minister. If the chemist would not take the cross, the artilleryman should be punished. A week later Raspail was summoned before the examining judge at the Prefecture to explain why he had refused to serve in the artillery since General Loban had ordered him to patrol the faubourgs and prevent the assembling of mobs ; and why he had issued incendiary writings against the new social order.

It was now, at the beginning of my career as clerk of the court, that I first knew Raspail. When I saw him enter the courtroom to undergo examination, I was struck by the aspect of this vigorous southerner, in whom a crafty shrewdness vied with ferocious energy. A clerk of the court is not a mere scrivener, not a record-book, nor an automaton whose mechanism the judge sets going; he is, before all else, an observer. I soon saw in the accused and in the judge two athletes ; the former sitting as haughtily on his bench as the latter in his armchair.

Though they were placed at two ends of the social ladder, the first seemed to me very capable of tipping that ladder over and of changing abruptly the position of the other. It was a war of words between the two men, in which the wily frankness of the accused fought the apparent bonhomie of the judge. I admired the vigorous language, wholly without artifice, of Raspail, while the judge was doing his best to conceal his thoughts. Raspail avoided all traps by jumping over them. Instead of hiding his power and his actions, he exaggerated them ; and I, who watched the two men, thought there was as much shrewdness and calculation in the mind of the accused as in that of the judge.

Each started from an opposite point of view to reach a different end. The magistrate endeavoured not to exasperate a man who was dangerous to the Government; the other was bent on proving to the defender of law and order that he was more to be feared than they thought him. Both were before an altar that neither believed in — that of an hermaphrodite monarchy; which the judge would fain have seen legitimist; and Raspail regarded as a mere step to his republic.

That was the opinion I formed while performing my duty as clerk, turning my eyes from one to the other as they spoke, and writing down their words.

When the examination was over — in which Raspail declared his full responsibility for the articles in the Tribune, and scornfully blamed the artillery staff that appealed to the civil law against his actions — the judge asked if he would sign his declaration.

11 Willingly, monsieur," he replied, casting a glance over my papers, " very willingly, and with both hands."

Proud of the position in which he had placed the machine of administration, he was about to leave the office, when the judge stopped him as he reached the doorway, by saying, in the tone of a man who has forgotten some insignificant matter :

" Ah ! I forgot one circumstance — " The malicious judge made a pause. Raspail looked at him sideways^ while the judge looked at nothing at all as he continued :

" Is it not true that because you belong to a secret society — more secret than the one of which you are president — you have been obliged to refuse the cross of the Legion of Honour ? In doing so have you not obeyed an order of that secret society ? "

" Monsieur," replied Raspail proudly, " I am not here to answer personal questions, even from an examining judge. I have signed the declaration you have legally obliged me to make. I may have compromised myself ; I will not compromise others. I can be a martyr, but I will not be a traitor."

So saying he departed, but less proud of himself than he was a few moments earlier, for it is a fact that the heads of secret societies do not belong to themselves. In the name of independence they have less liberty than all other men. They are compelled to obey, outside of legal society, an inflexible command. They resemble those men who, having broken the bonds of marriage, become the slaves of jealous and imperious mistresses. The pressure that secret societies exert upon their leaders compelled to combat a now superannuated tyranny, almost excuses a return to reactionary measures.

If there had not been so many uprisings instigated by those societies (of all parties) during the reign of Louis-Philippe there would have been no cabinet noir, of which Raspail and so many others were the daily prey, and the police under that tolerant reign would not have been reenforced by so many adversaries of liberty.

In 1848, when the Tuileries was pillaged, a part of the secrets of the cabinet noir were revealed by a mass of letters : some from Republicans like Raspail, Ledru- Rollin, and Blanqui ; others from Monarchists like Prince Talleyrand, who cheated and deceived Louis- Philippe whom he had made, just as he deceived all the other sovereigns with whom he dealt. The discovery of this correspondence proved that the government born of Liberty did not shrink from domiciliary visits, nor from corrupting men in various employs, in order to keep itself posted as to all the revolutionary manoeuvres. The cabinet was suppressed in 1848 ; but its suppression was a good deal like that of the Bastille. It existed no longer in name under the Empire ; but it existed in fact at the Tuileries, with numberless branches.

iS MEMOIRS OF

The discovery of Louis - Philippe's correspondences made the world cry out : " Corruption ! " But afterwards — what came ?

I was not yet twenty-five years old when I was intrusted, as I have said, with the functions of clerk of the court of the Seine. Later, in consequence of an overthrow of government, I was suddenly appointed to a place in a Ministry, which retarded, for a time, my legitimate advancement in my chosen career. I will presently relate the circumstances of that appointment, due to two statesmen who acted in my behalf, each with a different object, but both from self-interest.

Had it depended on me, at this period of my life, I should have been content to remain simply a clerk of the court \greffier\. I have had no other ambition than to follow the inclinations of my mind and faculties, using them for the good of my country, satisfying my tastes, and securing the safety of those who depended on me. A tenacious hunter of the most dangerous and crafty criminals of the city, my hounding instincts cease the moment my prey is in the hands of justice. I take as much pains to lessen the hardships of a scoundrel's captivity as I took to capture him.

When I began, as recording clerk in a criminal court, to collate, verify, and correct the reports of the secret police, that police had little in itself to recommend it. It still showed the hand of Vidocq ; and his moutons [spies] who tracked the thieves were scarcely more honest than the game they hunted. Monsieur Allard was the first to crush the odious theory that to know the ways and means of robbers the police must be half rascals themselves. Allard, a skilful administrator, re-formed the staff of the agents of public safety. He justly thought that to inspire respect and terror in the enemies of society it was necessary to oppose absolute honesty to their vices, and irreproachable conduct to their debauchery. It was Allard who laid the foundation for a decent, scrupulous, and vigilant police administration, by clearing out, once for all, a band of smirched men, set to hunt for reprobates whom they resembled.

The numerous plots and attempted outbreaks that never ceased to trouble the reign of Louis-Philippe necessitated the creation of a double police — that of the Prefecture and that of the Chateau [the Tuileries] ; the former becoming secondary to the latter. General Athalin, whose devotion to the family of the new King dated back for many years, was the supreme director of this upper police, which might, at that time, have been called the royal police. It was to him that the cabinet noir turned over the compromising letters and other revelations of the secret societies ; to him that the Prefecture sent the reports and denunciations concerning political plots.

But if General Athalin found in the Minister of the Interior, Casimir Perier, and in the Prefecture eager assistants in frustrating conspirators aiming at the life of the King, he found a most discouraging opposition to his faithful efforts in the King himself. Here is an example of it : A military plot was hatching by the Bonaparte family to proclaim, on the 5th of May, 1831, in the Place Vendome, the return of Napoleon II. Ample information had reached General Athalin that Prince Louis Bonaparte and his mother, the Duchesse de Saint-Leu, were coming from Italy to proclaim the son of the Emperor in presence of the glorious relics of the Grand Army.