After 1812, thousands of soldiers of the Grande Armée were taken prisoner by the Russians. Whether they are French, Swiss, German, Italian, or Belgian, they have sometimes experienced difficult episodes. Most returned home from 1814 or 1815. However, some remained beyond the Niemen for a few more years. Some even made roots in Russia and still have descendants in this country (1). Among these prisoners, one of them had an original journey…
Nicolas-Auguste Tournal was born around 1776 in Paris or Burgundy, the facts are hardly precise. Contrary to what one might imagine, this Frenchman did not participate in the campaigns of 1812, 1813, or 1814. And in any case neither in Russia nor in Saxony since he was then in the Illyrian Provinces and Italy. So how did he end up a prisoner in Russia for ten long years? Far from being an ordinary soldier, Tournal would have been a spy for Napoleon. The lawyer then commissioner of the secret police of Eugène de Beauharnais Son of a Parisian lawyer, Nicolas Tournal, and Marie-Madeleine Le Clerc de Sablière, Nicolas-Auguste studied law. We find him as a lawyer in 1798. He lives at 16 rue Notre-Dame des Victoires in Paris. He is then a witness at a friend's wedding. He married a certain Marie-Magdeleine Martin on 21 Floréal Year II (May 10, 1794) in Paris, and would have had at least two children of whom we know nothing (2).
After a first career probably as a lawyer in France under the Consulate, he then joined the police services. A police officer at least since 1809, he found Napoleon in Vienna and joined his staff. At the end of 1809, Tournal was sent to the Illyrian Provinces (3).
On January 21, 1810, he arrived in Trieste where he was to be appointed police commissioner. There, he learned that Marshal Marmont, governor-general of Illyria, had already given this function to someone else. He was then sent as police commissioner to Gorizia while being head of the town's administration. In 1811, he published a small brochure entitled The Portrait of the English. At the end of 1812, the former lawyer was appointed commissioner of the Carinthian High Police. The decree of April 15, 1811, had created the “highest political police”, endowed with extraordinary powers. She was responsible for monitoring not only the citizens but also the administration and the courts, and the general situation in the country while being subject to the usual police. In 1812, Tournal published a Collection of rules of law and moral precepts for the use of the youth of the Illyrian Provinces. The work is published at the Joseph Sassenberg printing house in Laybach (4). As such, he was certainly in contact with the writer and future academician Charles Nodier (1780-1844), municipal librarian in Laybach and director of the Official Telegraph, newspaper of the Illyrian provinces in 1812-1813. Moreover, the famous novelist wrote a reading note relating to Tournal's book in the Official Telegraph of May 21, 1813. Charles Nodier expressed his “surprise and regret. He did not find a single phrase from the gospel in the rich collection of sayings of moralists and philosophers, which was compiled by the ex-police commissioner. » (5)
In 1813, the war spread to Illyria. Commissioner Tournal is active there. He provided daily reports to Viceroy Eugène de Beauharnais. In December 1813, Eugène named him commissioner of his army. He remained there until April 28, 1814. In reality, he headed the Italian secret police. He then constituted a vast network of agents throughout the peninsula.
At the fall of the Empire, he initially remained in Milan occupied by the Austrians. He is probably in contact with the Austrian general staff and serves as an intermediary between Eugène and Baron Velden who tries in vain to get Josephine's son to betray Napoleon. Eugene also reportedly asked him to provide him with information on the troop movements and positions of the Austrian armies. Moreover, the former lawyer also has agents in Vienna, notably at the Russian embassy.
With Napoleon on the Island of Elba
From August 1814, Tournal was with Napoleon on the island of Elba. He subsequently announced that he had gone to Porto-Ferrajo to claim his salary as commissioner. The hypothesis holds little validity. We can estimate that a former head of the secret police of the Kingdom of Italy had his place with Napoleon to inform him about public opinion and, better, to help him prepare a return to the continent, for example. Livorno for example.
During his interrogations in Saint Petersburg, Tournal denied having met the ex-emperor but revealed that General Drouot, governor of the island of Elba, had paid him “great attention”. Finally, he said he had difficulty meeting Grand Marshal Bertrand. This seems quite unrealistic to us when we know that Henri-Gatien Bertrand succeeded Marmont as governor-general of the Illyrian Provinces until 1812. The two men could only have known each other. Were his liaison officers in Italy put into action during the riots of 1815? Did he play a role in the Bonapartist plots? Still, Nicolas Tournal was questioned twice before an Austrian government commission in Milan in 1814 or the first months of 1815.
From November 1814, the police commissioner left the island of Elba and, via Livorno, went to Florence, Genoa, and Pisa. He meets his liaison agents, but also sympathizers of the Bonapartist cause. Above all, in Livorno, then a hub for espionage, he could ensure maritime communication points between Elba and the continent.
It is attested in Genoa on March 6 or 7, 1815 when Napoleon had just landed at Golfe-Juan.
On a mission in Crimea (1815)
While Napoleon returned to Paris, Nicolas-Auguste Tournal was secretly sent to Russia. The French consul general in Livorno officially issued him a passport. He then boarded the ship Saint Nicolas which was to take him to the Ottoman coasts.
Soon he arrives in Constantinople. There, he meets a local merchant, Carlos Papa Rigopulo, known as a French spy. He also apparently distributed several hundred portraits of Napoleon. He met the French charge d'affaires Pierre Jean-Marie Ruffin (1742-1824) who temporarily replaced the French ambassador in Constantinople and inhabitants of Odessa, French people, Greeks, and Russians. It is believed that Tournal then had entries into the Russian embassy in Constantinople.
On April 19, 1815, Nicolas Tournal arrived in Odessa with his royal passport. But the Russian authorities were alerted. The same day, he was arrested. A complete report is sent by General Kobla (who replaces the Duke of Richelieu, governor of Odessa, who left to participate in the Congress of Vienna) to the Minister of Police in Saint Petersburg. Kobla asks for instructions regarding Tournal. The Russian Minister of Police was undoubtedly already alerted by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs which had transmitted to him a dispatch from Constantinople indicating that Police Commissioner Tournal intended to go to Odessa. The document spoke of “the extreme suspicion of this man”.
Minister Balashov sends a “trusted police officer” with orders to bring the spy back to St. Petersburg.
During the search for his belongings, we found statistical data on the ports of the Black Sea, a draft paper "impregnated with the spirit of Bonapartism", entitled "Letters from a Parisian", information on the war of 1813-1814 in Italy, pamphlets borrowing the ideas of 1789, liberty, equality, fraternity, and tinged with attacks against religion, correspondence, unfinished drafts...
Above all, in the lid of his trunk, the police discovered a copper plate intended to print portraits of Napoleon. It is a medallion approximately 5 cm in diameter with a border on which is engraved in a circle a Latin inscription “Napoleon imperator. Semper magnus. Umiqumque felix. Et Totus illabitur orbis, impavidum ferient ruinae”. The last phrase is borrowed from Horace’s famous ode “To Caesar Augustus.”
So, what was Commissioner Tournal doing in Crimea? Observe, no doubt, but also spread Napoleonic propaganda in Russia. By distributing brochures and effigies of the Emperor, Nicolas Auguste Tournal would have had the mission of bringing together French people, numerous in Odessa, prisoners or exiles, to foment a revolt or bring them, by sea, to France. Odessa is not a destination chosen at random. The city created and led by the Duke of Richelieu is accessible by sea and many Westerners live there, doing business. There we find, for example, a certain Sicard, a merchant from Marseille with whom Nicolas-Auguste Tournal had “special recommendations”. Likewise, he had in his papers a letter of recommendation from Saint-Prix, one of the richest landowners of Gorizia (where Tournal had been commissioner) to his nephew, the first president of the commercial court of Odessa, one of the most important personalities. influential foreign bourgeoisie in the region. Regardless, his task must have been important. Indeed, how can we understand that the Emperor landing in France in March 1815 sent such an effective and useful spy (in France or Italy where he still had real networks) far from him? Was he an emissary of Napoleon to conclude an alliance with Alexander? This is quite possible. The idea was to renew a treaty similar to that of Tilsit in 1807. Napoleon wanted at all costs to separate the Russians from the other allies. Tournal probably had networks, and relays allowing him to send messages to the Tsar or to eminent personalities close to Alexander.
Arriving in Saint Petersburg, he was questioned by the Minister of Police in person. The latter reported all of the discussions to Tsar Alexander, describing the articles found on the Frenchman. The minister was said to have been particularly outraged by the draft letter, written: “with great difficulty”. This letter, says Balashov, testifies “to the spirit that the emissaries of a revolutionary monster must spread” (6). The “Letter from a Parisian” is said to have a very anti-British tone while professing ideas from 1789 and glorifying Napoleon. The violently opposed character to the English was not necessarily meant to displease the Russians who, since the abdication of Napoleon at Fontainebleau and the start of the Congress of Vienna, often clashed with England on several points including that of Poland.
On June 21, 1815, three days after Waterloo, the minister presented a new memorandum to the Tsar with copies of the two interrogations he subjected Tournal to.
Arrested, and interned, Napoleon’s spy is reduced to silence. Here too, we can question such isolation. This is not typical for a simple soldier or an ordinary observer. It was certainly necessary to prevent Tournal from being able to reveal Napoleon's plans towards Russia and the Tsar. He was condemned “without time limit” and sent to St. Petersburg to the Alekseyevsky Ravelin (St. Peter and St. Paul) fortress. He remains there for a year.
Prisoner in Solovki (1816-1820)
In 1816, the former head of the Italian secret police was sent closer to the Arctic Circle, to the Solovki Islands. The archipelago is famous for its monastery, which became a place of exile and then a harsh prison for opponents of the tsars. After 1923, it was the place chosen by the Bolsheviks to silence their political opponents. Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago refers directly to the Solovki. The place is located about 900 km northeast of Saint Petersburg. Tournal was taken to Kem where he remained for almost three months under the surveillance of soldiers. From the port of Kem, he takes the boat to the Solovki Islands. Ultimately, the former commissioner was detained there for four years, from May 17, 1816, to March 3, 1820.
The Solovki archipelago was not a usual area of detention for French prisoners after 1812, but the objective was once again to isolate Tournal, to prevent him from speaking and coming into contact, especially with possible fellow citizens.
The prisoner is entitled to 13 kopecks per day, or 0.13 rubles, while a “normal” prisoner may have one ruble daily. To estimate this amount, let us show that at that time, black bread cost 6 kopecks per kilogram and salted meat 15 kopecks per kilo. By order of Archimandrite Paisius, his clothes, sheets, pillow, mattress, and blanket were taken from him. Life is particularly harsh in his cell located in the monastery. It's cold there. The superior of the monastery even stole his items, including twenty-six gold rings, watches, and swords. He is forbidden from receiving clothes, linens, shoes, and other items handed over every year, even to killers. Who still takes care of him? Who also knows that a French spy is interned in Solovki? His wife and two children know he is gone, but have no news of him.
However, on several occasions, thanks to complicity, Nicolas-Auguste Tournal managed to clandestinely transmit letters (which are said to be full of humor) asking for help to the consul general of France in Saint Petersburg, Baron Pierre by Galz de Malvirad (7). On August 19, 1819, he wrote to the Minister of Religious Affairs (or “Chief Prosecutor of the Synod”), Prince Alexander Nikolaevich Golitsyn (8). He complains of the illegality of the reprisals applied to him and asks that his petition be transmitted to Tsar Alexander.
For this, the prisoner had tried to convince a soldier to send a letter to a French doctor named Blum or Baum as well as to his compatriot Durant living in Saint Petersburg, under the pretext that he was ill. After many setbacks, Tournal finally managed to get some papers through, perhaps through Father Savvati, an assistant abbot considered a “decent and compassionate man. »
In 1817, 1818, and then on August 25, 1819, he wrote to the French ambassador in Saint Petersburg. Unfortunately, Louis XVIII's minister plenipotentiary, Pierre Louis Auguste Comte de la Feronney, was known as such an extreme and ruthless royalist that he was difficult to tolerate in Paris. During the Hundred Days, he was the first aide-de-camp to the Duke of Berry. Naturally, this ambassador is completely convinced that Napoleon's agent must remain a prisoner in Russia and silenced in the Arctic ice.
However, Baron de Galz de Malvirad filed a request with the Russian government.
This does not allow the release of Tournal, but on the contrary greater surveillance over him. The instructions are clear: “Have strict control over him. Don't give ink or paper. » These letters being in his file, they did not reach their recipients. But some have probably managed to overcome the obstacles.
At the beginning of 1820, the conditions of internment of the commissioner were finally relaxed. His assets, including numerous gold objects, “in numbers that would be enough for an entire jeweler’s shop” writes the Russian historian Kirill Serebrenitsky, were returned to him.
Remote in the Russian steppes
Finally, in April 1820, he was taken further from the border to Arkhangelsk, a port city at the mouth of the Northern Dvina, located a thousand kilometers north of Moscow. Another rapid trip since he was sent very quickly to Orenburg, a city located on the border of Asia and Europe on the Ural River, 1,200 km south of Moscow. The former secret police commissioner remained there for three more years under police surveillance. In 1824 only, he obtained a certain freedom with an obligation of residence. At the time, a return to France was not considered.
In Orenburg in fact, he seems to have been under house arrest and not imprisoned, Nicolas Auguste Tournal gave French lessons and established contacts with liberal networks, free thinkers, and followers of the French Revolution. He is said to have taught French in the family of Major General Zhemchzhnikov. Police reports say Tournal “behaves modestly.”
Perhaps it was just a coincidence, but it was precisely in 1820, when the Frenchman arrived in Orenburg, that the local Masonic lodge bearing the name “Friends of Humanity” was awakened. Three or four years later in this city, the garrison is in turmoil. Soldiers belonging to the lodge formed an organization called “Talleyrand and Alexandre”, violently Jacobin and anti-Christian, led by Major Alexandre Lukic Kuchevsky and Pierre Kudrytashov and in which young ensigns named Taptikov, Starks, and Kolesnikov act. These officers allegedly tried to provoke a rebellion and raise the peasants from the Urals to the Volga, to go to Kazan and then to Moscow. The plot was denounced and the leaders were severely punished.
Tournal meets officers including a certain Melgounov. This lieutenant Melgounov, aged fifty-two, is the son of a rich landowner. He was considered a “bad subject,” an opponent of the tsarist regime. He participated in the War of 1812 and resigned from the army several times, notably after insulting his superiors. He was accused of fighting duels at least seven times. He is undoubtedly a Freemason, free-thinker, liberal, and follower of revolutionary ideals. Once again the former head of the secret police of King Eugène de Beauharnais is considered dangerous and likely to politically influence opponents of the Tsar. Some of his new friends are arrested. This is the case of Melgounov who will be interned at the Saint-Pierre and Saint-Paul fortress in Saint Petersburg.
A report dated 1825 specifies that Melgounov is in communication with Tournal and that he “despises the government, religion, morals, and everything that should be sacred for people. It often allows the abuse of churches and sacred icons. […] It is politically dangerous because it addresses peasants, servants, and other “black” people and preaches their equality and disobedience” (9). The officer appears to have been monitored and denounced, being considered linked with Nicolas Auguste Tournal “like a close and exceptional friendship. They are together every day. Melgunov for him sings and translates everything that was composed by the lowest level against the government. »
Sometimes they would have gone together to Gatchina, “where there are cavalry garrisons.” In this remark, we see a real concern emerging. Wouldn't the French spy and his liberal friends be preparing a revolt, a plot, an uprising...? The actions of the Decabristas are not far away (10). On August 18, 1825, by direct order of the Tsar, Melgunov was expelled from the service. On August 23, he was handed over to headquarters and was then sent to the province of Yaroslav under the control of the tsarist police without being able to leave the area assigned to him.
Strangely, a small fifteen-page brochure appeared in 1825 in Saint Petersburg entitled “Advice on writing or reading precepts in the French language”. Written by N-A Tournal, benefiting from printing permission dated June 4, 1825, it was printed on the printing press of the public education department. The text promotes French reading and poetry. There is nothing political or tendentious. Nevertheless, we may be surprised by the distribution of this pamphlet written by a French prisoner who is still more or less incommunicado.
On August 25, 1825, two days after Melgunov's exile in Yaroslav, General Potapov handed over to General Miloradovich of Saint Petersburg the sealed Tournal papers as well as an envelope containing a five-ruble note belonging to the Frenchman. Finally, he informs him that Tournal has been authorized to leave Russia.
Got seriously ill – but is it reality or a trick? –, he was repatriated to Saint Petersburg.
We therefore know that on August 25, 1825, he obtained his passport for France. Afterwards, the Russian archives lost track of him. He finally has permission to leave the country where he spent ten long years of internment. Strangely, Nicolas Auguste Tournal does not leave immediately. However, on August 11, he wrote in a letter: “I intended to work on correcting the heavy affairs of the merchants but I left it aside and I now want to go to France. » He therefore knew at that moment that the papers would be in order and that the Tsarist police would let him leave the territory. But it was still attested on site on September 14. A priori, he would not have left until early December 1825, just before the Decembrist attempt.
Finally back in France
This is because at the end of 1825 or the very beginning of 1826, Tournal finally returned to his homeland (11). Before leaving Russia, did he participate in setting up the Decabrist plot? Did he network with liberal networks? We don't know it, but for him, the long ten-year exile is finally coming to an end.
The royal police are watching. This is because a former spy of Napoleon may seem suspicious to him. Especially since he never stopped uttering revolutionary, Jacobin, anti-religious, Bonapartist ideas.
On March 16, 1826, the Paris police prefect invited Mr. Hinaux, head of the central police, to observe the arrival of “Sir Nicolas-Auguste Tournal, lawyer, born and domiciled in Paris, coming from Russia. This individual, who was attached, before the restoration, to Prince Eugene, and who was held prisoner in Russia for a long time, manifests, it is said, very bad political dispositions. I invite Mr. Hinaux to obtain information on the previous existence of Mr. Tournal, the time and reasons for his departure from France, the causes of his detention in Russia, and to give orders so that his steps and its relationships are subject to special surveillance. I would like to know, with the results of this surveillance, the imputations contained in an insulting writing to a member of the clergy of Strasbourg, which Mr. Tournal peddled during his visit to Metz, and which, without doubt, he will hasten to propagate in Paris. » (12)
The police response does not take long but we can detect many inaccuracies, even gross errors in view of the above elements. On April 24, 1826, the report requested by the prefect of police was written: “Sir Tournal left the capital in 1809 to, as a military employee, go and fulfill a mission entrusted to him in Russia by the government. In 1812, Mr. Tournal, who was then part, he said, of the French army in Russia, was taken prisoner of war, then made a state prisoner and relegated to Siberia, for having improperly integrated into business affairs. diplomatic. His captivity lasted until 1825 when Emperor Alexander freed him and permitted him to return to France. Mr. Tournal is around fifty years old, of a communicative character, but loquacious, incandescent, when above all, he recounts his captivity. He complains bitterly of the government of Bonaparte, who, he says, sacrificed him by sending him to Russia. This individual is in a state bordering on misery; since he returned to Paris, he has already sold some of his clothes to make a living; he does not talk about politics, is busy looking for his wife, who during seventeen years of absence, believed him to be dead, and is said to have married a second time. He also takes care of seeking public employment, and for this purpose frequently visits the offices of the Ministries of War and the Interior, even intending to request a special audience with His Exc. Mgr Count de Corbière (13). Mr. Tournal says he has found no other friends in Paris other than his cousin, bearing the same name, who lives in the Faubourg Montmartre, and Mr. Coulon, a postal worker, with whom he is very close (14). As for the fact of the writing that Mr. Tournal would have peddled during his visit to Metz, we have not found any traces of it, despite the use of the necessary means to achieve this. »
The police report did little to investigate the causes of the internment in Russia. It was simpler to consider Tournal as a soldier of the Grande Armée taken prisoner during the campaign of 1812. The investigator did not think that there could be other hypotheses, that far from being a simple soldier of the regular army, the former lawyer had been a police commissioner, head of the secret police of Viceroy Eugène de Beauharnais and that Napoleon had sent him on a secret mission to Crimea in 1815?
We will probably never know why he was sent to Russia: to spy, observe, carry out Bonapartist propaganda, rouse the French in favor of Napoleon on his return from the island of Elba, even meet the Tsar and propose to renew an alliance with France leading to a new division of Europe as at Tilsit in 1807? Still, knowing his personality, his police past, and his numerous networks, the emperor had entrusted a substantial mission to Nicolas-Auguste Tournal.
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