A pornographer of power and the perils of being a politician

"He knows the supreme meaning of power: to enjoy it in secret, to use it sparingly," says Stefan Zweig, midway through these pages about a man behind the scenes, a paradigm of a black monk with colorful facets. He went from mud to court, from dry land to Mecca, rattling or flying, depending on the winds. A cat with seven lives who found resources in every abyss: Joseph Fouché , the unloved man par excellence, deserved the literary brilliance of an expert portraitist who, moreover, knew how to tune into him something universal.

The Austrian narrator's portraits are well-known and numerous; he explored Marie Antoinette, Amerigo Vespucci, Magellan, Calvin, Casanova; his colleagues Tolstoy, Balzac, Stendhal, Dostoevsky, Dickens; poets such as Hölderlin, Whitman, Rilke, Verlaine; unclassifiable figures such as Nietzsche and Cicero… This time, however, something novel about his writing hovers over the text: a kind of personal fascination. For example, the delicate cruelty in his description of his protagonist: "He is not pleasing in appearance, far from it: a dry body, almost spectrally emaciated; a face with fine bones and pointed lines; a sharp nose; a sharp and narrow mouth, always closed; cold, fish-like eyes."

One might say that the character was tailor-made for a novel: “One would have to make an effort,” the Viennese author estimates, “to imagine that the same man, with the same skin and hair, was a professor of priests in 1790, a church plunderer in 1792, a communist in 1793, and a millionaire five years later.”

Among the majority of historical classics in Zweig 's work, Fouché slips into the minority of the rare, the "alternative." And he has other charms: he's not backed by the rigidity of bronze; he's an unusual perfidious figure at center stage. A lackluster wretch, he revels in power but spartanly denies himself the joy of display. He's the shadowy, desk-bound conspirator with a monastic vocation. His usual weapons are the secrets and weaknesses of others; murky business he hones in corridors and corners.

In light of Zweig, we see in this Fouché a kind of pornographer of power: someone who desires it for its own sake, not imbued with causes, feelings, epic whims, belongings, or principles; not as an instrument or bridge to something, but as an end in itself. This may sound quite familiar to us in the politics of our century, but it wasn't so much so among the Jacobins of the group from which he emerged, whose participation was intended to be assembly-based, essentially collective.

In contrast to that revolutionary "teamwork," the arbitrary verticality that Fouché imposes on the forces of the State—every time he agrees to manage them, in the intermittent phase of his career—does not respond to the political sector he should or claims to be serving. His priority is always himself: in his strategy, it's him and the universe. He's not interested in the change of direction that surrounds him; he views it as very minor compared to his individual interests. This suspicion of so many—which this book exploits—particularly casts a shadow over his reputation. It makes him different, of lesser quality than a Robespierre or a Napoleon . Invariably, his management is functional to the winning side at every twist and turn of the French historical process; not in vain does he go from teacher to church-burner, from Jacobin to beggar, and then to duke.

Capable of feigning allegiance to exactly opposite objectives and operators on the sly, agile in public or private pole vaulting, the Machiavellian Frenchman would go unnoticed today with such shenanigans, but his contemporaries and peers considered him to have gone too far in his baseness. Robespierre, Talleyrand, and Napoleon himself dedicated highly contemptuous lines in their memoirs to the labile, conspicuous, and scheming Minister of Police: “Traitor, immoral, and versatile (…); if only I had hanged Fouché, he would still be on the throne today,” the Corsican lamented on Saint Helena.

Although not the only one (Jean Tulard and Emmanuel de Waresquiel followed in his footsteps), Zweig is the first to deal with this sinuous political animal, and sensing that he breaks the mold of his previous books, the biographer notes in the prologue: “our time wants and loves heroic biographies, because from its own poverty of politically creative leaders it seeks superior examples in the past.”

Finally, without constituting a treatise, this book could be defined as an applied version two centuries later of The Prince, although more entertaining, vulgar due to its specificity, and plebeian – the scope of the Medici, for whom that text was written, is incomparable to that of the fleeting Fouché – with respect to those Machiavellian pages.

Zweig, the great Jewish humanist who took refuge in Brazil after the rise of Hitler , the man who committed suicide with his wife in 1942 in Petrópolis, despairing at the imminence of a global fascist barbarism (he was convinced of a global triumph of Nazism), completes in these pages something even more important than a biography.

By scrutinizing this dark soul, he offers a perspective that—thanks to literature, despite the burned books—regains relevance with each reissue, and in this one in particular, with considerations that seem to speak to our times: “Politics is not, as one would like to believe, the leadership of public opinion, but the servile inclination of leaders to the very authority they have created and influenced. This is how wars always arise: from a game with dangerous words, from an overexcitement of national values.”

Joseph Fouché , Stefan Zweig. Translated Nicole Narbebury. Godot Editions, 256 pages.