(2015)

FOUCHÉ by Stefan ZWEIG - Translated from German by Alzir Hela and Olivier Bournac - Grasset Editions The Pocket Book - 2015 - 279 pages - Soft cardboard cover. From a good distance from the academic perspective illustrated by Louis Madelin (1901), Zweig has focused on tracing the psychological genesis of a personality whose armor built through trials and humiliations obstructs any feeling of sympathy from the reader. Chronological, the narrative is divided into a series of nine chapters. Its specific trait is an exceptional dramatic intensity. The face-to-face encounters of Fouché with Robespierre up to Thermidor and then with a Napoleon drifting towards tyranny before being drawn into an inexorable fall, dramatize the key moments of a history with unexpected twists. These moments where opportunism, conquest, and the amoral will to preserve power inevitably intertwine, are, in Zweig's eyes, the despairing image of the present time. Fouché, published in 1929, by Stefan Zweig holds a unique place in the series of Lives. The work is set in the France of the Revolution and the Empire. The existence of the man who was associated with the Terror, the Napoleonic reign, and the Restoration as a "massacreur" and ruthless policeman is incomparable to any other.