[3] After the downfall of the monarchy on 10 August 1792 (following the storming of the royal Tuileries Palace), he was elected as deputy for the département of the Loire-Inférieure to the National Convention, which proclaimed the French Republic on 22 September.

However, their lack of support for the trial and execution of King Louis XVI (December 1792 - 21 January 1793) led him to join the Jacobins, the more decided partisans of revolutionary doctrine.

While the armies of the First Coalition threatened the north-east of France, a revolt of the Royalist peasants in Brittany and La Vendée menaced the Convention on the west.

That body sent Fouché with a colleague, Villers, as representatives on mission invested with almost dictatorial powers for the crushing of the revolt of "the whites" (the royalist colour).

[10] Grotesquely ineffective, these mitraillades resulted in heaps of mutilated, screaming, half-dead victims, who were finished off with sabres and musket fire by soldiers physically sickened at the task.

[12] As Napoleon's biographer Alan Schom has written:[12] Alas, Fouché's enthusiasm had proved a little too effective, for when the blood from the mass executions in the center of Lyons gushed from severed heads and bodies into the streets, drenching the gutters of the Rue Lafont, the vile-smelling red flow nauseated the local residents, who irately complained to Fouché and demanded payment for damages.

Fouché, sensitive to their outcry, obliged them by ordering the executions moved out of the city to the Brotteaux field, along the Rhône.From late 1793 until spring 1794, every day "batch after batch of bankers, scholars, aristocrats, priests, nuns, and wealthy merchants and their wives, mistresses, and children" were taken from the city jails to Brotteaux field, tied to stakes, and dispatched by firing squads or mobs.

[12] Outwardly, Fouché's conduct was marked by the utmost savagery, and on his return to Paris early in April 1794, he thus characterised his policy: "The blood of criminals fertilises the soil of liberty and establishes power on sure foundations".

The remaining ultraleftists (Collot d'Herbois, Billaud-Varenne), and the moderates (Bourdon de l'Oise, Fréron) who had won the support of the nonaligned majority of the Convention (Marais), also opposed Robespierre.

Fouché is reported to have worked furiously on the overthrow: Rising at early morn he would run round till night calling on deputies of all shades of opinion, saying to each and every one, "You perish tomorrow if he [Robespierre] does not".

'[11]Fouché, as both a ruthless suppressor of Federalist rebellion and one of the key architects of Robespierre's overthrow, embodied the merciless French politics of the republic era.

The ensuing movement in favour of more merciful methods of government threatened to sweep away the group of politicians who had been mainly instrumental in carrying through the coup d'état.

He was himself denounced by François Antoine de Boissy d'Anglas on 9 August 1795, which caused his arrest, but the Royalist rebellion of 13 Vendémiaire Year IV aborted his execution, and he was released in the amnesty which followed the proclamation of the Constitution of 5 Fructidor.

In the ensuing Directory government (1795–1799), Fouché remained at first in obscurity, but the relations he had with the far left, once headed by Chaumette and now by François-Noël Babeuf, helped him to rise once more.

In Pierre François Charles Augereau's anti-Royalist coup d'état of Fructidor 1797, Fouché offered his services to Barras, who in 1798 appointed him French ambassador to the Cisalpine Republic.

[5] Equally skilful was his action in the so-called Aréna-Ceracchi plot (Conspiration des poignards), in which agents provocateurs of the police were believed to have played a sinister part.

When Napoleon showed himself eager to blame the still powerful Jacobins, Fouché firmly declared that he would not only assert but would prove that the outrage was the work of Royalists.

[5] In other matters (especially in that known as the Plot of the Placards in the spring of 1802), Fouché was thought to have saved the Jacobins from the vengeance of the Consulate, and Bonaparte decided to rid himself of a man who had too much power to be desirable as a subordinate.

He continued, however, to intrigue through his spies, who tended to have more information than that of the new minister of police, and competed successfully for the favor of Napoleon at the time of the Georges Cadoudal-Charles Pichegru conspiracy (February–March 1804),[5] becoming instrumental in the arrest of the Duc d'Enghien.

Fouché would later say of Enghien's subsequent execution, "It was worse than a crime; it was a mistake" (a remark also frequently attributed to Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord).

[16] After the proclamation of the First French Empire, Fouché again became head of the re-constituted ministry of police (July 1804), and later of Internal Affairs, with activities as important as those carried out under the Consulate.

While engaged in the campaign of Spain, the emperor heard rumours that Fouché and Charles Maurice de Talleyrand, once bitter enemies, were having meetings in Paris during which Joachim Murat, King of Naples, had been approached.

In that year Fouché received the title of Duke of Otranto,[5] which Bonaparte created—under the French name Otrante—a duché grand-fief (a rare, hereditary, but nominal honor) in the satellite Kingdom of Naples.

[18] Compelled by the weather and intense sea-sickness to put back into port, he found a mediator in Elisa Bonaparte, Grand Duchess of Tuscany, thanks to whom he was allowed to settle in Aix-en-Provence.

In 1812 he attempted in vain to turn Napoleon from the projected invasion of Russia, and on the return of the emperor in haste from Smarhoń to Paris at the close of that year, the ex-minister of police was suspected of involvement in the conspiracy of Claude François de Malet, which had been unexpectedly successful.

Shortly before his arrival in Paris (19 March 1815), Louis XVIII sent Fouché an offer of the ministry of police, which he declined: "It is too late; the only plan to adopt is to retreat".

That, however, did not prevent him from entering into secret relations with the Austrian statesman Klemens Wenzel von Metternich in Vienna, his aim being to prepare for all eventualities.

Even Prime Minister Talleyrand disapproved of such practices, including the execution of Michel Ney and compiling proscription lists of other military men and former republican politicians.

Fouche settled first in Prague, then in Linz and finally in Trieste, his considerable wealth allowed him to live comfortably and he spent his time writing his memoirs and seeing to the upbringing and education of his children.