Letters from Napoleon

[igenlode]

Letters from Napoleon to the Chief of his secret police:

"These five persons will be arrested at the same time, and sent with courier horses to the Temple that very day. Whether they are guilty or not of the act they are now accused of, I have been displeased with them for a long time."
"Give orders to have Mr. Kuhn, the American consul at Genoa, put under arrest, for wearing a Cross of Malta given him by the English, and as being an English agent. His papers will be seized, and an abstract of them made, and he will be kept in secret confinement until you have made your report to me. This man, having received a foreign decoration, ceases to be an American. I am sorry, by the way, you should have communicated with the ambassador of the United States. My police knows no ambassadors. I am master in my own house."
"I see in your report, one from the police commissary at Bordeaux, to the effect that the nobility did not attend the ball given by Senator Lamartinière. I wish for details on the subject, and desire to be informed, family by family, as to the persons referred to in this document"
"Order the goods of the Abbé Ratel to be sequestered. I am informed he still has something left under other people’s names."

https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/spies/letters-law

The Emperor pays close personal attention to those individuals who displease him, and very little to the law...

Comments

[watervole]

Good Lord! 'Ruthless' would be an understatement.

[igenlode]

It looks as if Broster was accurate when she writes in her author's note that she has not 'over-blackened' the character of Napoleon Bonaparte in the (off-screen) role he plays in her story, even if the precise action he takes against a fictional character is not, obviously, a matter of history...

Presumably that is the mindset it takes to successfully make oneself supreme ruler from humble immigrant origins!