“It’s worse than a crime; it’s a blunder.”
Perhaps no line better captures U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to fire FBI Director James Comey. Of course, it is now the task of special counsel Robert Mueller to decide whether Trump’s action constitutes a crime. As to whether it was a blunder, Joseph Fouche -- the man who coined the phrase -- would have no doubt. No individual better grasped than did Fouché the weaknesses, but also strengths, of working under a ruler as indifferent to political norms as he was to the wellbeing of his subjects.
How could he not? It was under Napoleon Bonaparte that Fouche served as head of the Ministry of Police, an institution that in certain respects anticipates our own Federal Bureau of Investigation. (Not coincidentally, the man who brought the FBI into being in 1908, Attorney General Charles Joseph Bonaparte, was the great grandnephew of Old Boney.) It may well be that the dynamic between the emperor and his minister, as well as their respective destinies, also anticipates that found between the president and former FBI director, and their own destinies.
Like Napoleon, Fouche was a child of the French Revolution, deeply marked by its ideals and energy. He first made his reputation during the Terror when Parisian authorities tasked him to quell counterrevolutionary forces. Fouche led a provincial campaign of “pacification” that earned him the title, long before Klaus Barbie, of the “Butcher of Lyon.” Following Robespierre’s fall, he navigated between the reefs of unbound revolution and reaction so expertly that Napoleon, upon coming to power in 1799, named him minister of police.
From the outset, Fouche wove a stunningly intricate counterespionage web that, while lacking the technology available to J. Edgar Hoover’s team in the 1960s, was far more effective. His boast “When three meet, one is always mine” was not empty. To the contrary, as Stefan Zweig wrote with much drama but little exaggeration, no one could “vie with this cold-blooded and keen-witted observer possessed of a registering apparatus which detects the most trifling oscillations of political life.”
Police agents and spies not only enabled Fouche to dismantle Jacobin as well as Bourbon plots against Napoleon, but also to collect great clods of dirt on Napoleon’s siblings. (Not unlike the Trump clan, they exploited Napoleon’s office to enrich themselves.) He also had the wit to ingratiate himself with Josephine, Napoleon’s first wife, as well as with the emperor’s many enablers, gathering enough information to make him impossible to keep, yet impossible to fire.
Most important, though, Fouche also had the spine to refuse to swear loyalty to Napoleon, and to maintain loyalty instead to France. Increasingly obsessed by this political Rubik’s cube -- how to remove Fouche from office without finding a knife lodged in his back -- Napoleon lit upon a nifty solution. In 1802, he eliminated not his police minister, but instead the ministry itself, shifting its staff and duties to the ministry of justice. Thanking Fouche for a job well done, Napoleon rewarded his nemesis royally. In fact he made Fouche, a sea captain’s son, royalty by bestowing upon him a chunk of territory in southern France. Tellingly, when he informed Fouche that his services were no longer needed, Napoleon -- famously brusque and brutal in personal encounters -- did so not in person, but through a letter delivered by a subordinate.
Tellingly, less than two years later, upon crowning himself emperor, Napoleon turned again to Fouche. No other man was better suited to safeguard the empire from within, and no other man could be trusted less if he remained outside of the emperor’s sight. Shocked by Napoleon’s decision to assassinate the Royalist Duc d’Enghien -- the act that spurred Fouche’s famous bon mot -- the minister of police nevertheless made himself indispensable to his employer. It was only in 1810 that Napoleon, blinded by sycophantic subordinates and self-absorption, again dismissed Fouche from his post. The reason? Fouche refused to surrender the hundreds of files and notes he had so carefully compiled on the intrigues and scandals involving Napoleon’s relations.
Faced with the threat of imprisonment, Fouche eventually coughed up the notes. Yet he proved more resilient than Napoleon. Come Waterloo and Napoleon’s exit from the European stage, Fouche remained. The former revolutionary and terrorist, the man who had served as police minister first under the Revolution and then under Napoleon, now became police minister under the restored Bourbons. Not unlike Comey, Fouche embodied two principles. First, regimes are short and institutions are long; despite the volcanic upheavals of a quarter century of revolutionary events, the ministry of police abided. Second, Fouche, like Comey, swore fidelity to his institution and to the nation it served, not his employer. As more than one biographer has argued, Fouche’s one loyalty apart from self-preservation was to save France from rulers who overstepped limits and threatened the nation’s revolutionary inheritance.
Since his victory last November, Trump has inspired countless comparisons to Napoleon, ranging from tactical cunning to his raging narcissism. (The most telling comparison, perhaps, will be how the first hundred days of the Trump presidency resemble the last hundred days of the Bonapartist regime.) But perhaps the most apt comparison is not between Trump and Napoleon, but between the ways in which they managed relations with their respective ministers of police. In the person of Fouche, Napoleon met a rare match and grasped the need to treat him with deference and diplomacy. In the person of Comey, Trump met more than his match. The president's inability to grasp the consequences of his ill-considered action turns Fouche's bon mot inside out: In the coming months, the work of special counsel Robert Mueller will judge whether or not Trump's actions constitute more than just a blunder.
