Claude François de Malet

French aristocrat and soldier

Claude François de Malet (28 June 1754 – 31 October 1812) was born in Dole to an aristocratic family. He was executed by firing squad, six days after staging a failed republican coup d'état as Napoleon I returned from the disastrous Russian campaign in 1812.

Malet enlisted as a musketeer at age seventeen as was common for a young nobleman of the ancien régime, but King Louis XVI disbanded the musketeer regiments in 1776 for budgetary reasons. In 1790 Malet's family disinherited him for supporting the French Revolution, when he became commander of his home town's National Guard and celebrated the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille. Malet volunteered for the Revolutionary army when war broke out and was assigned to the 50th infantry regiment of the Army of the Rhine as a captain. He was discharged in 1795, but reenlisted again in March 1797, first as Chief of Staff of the 6th division, then in 1799 as Chief of Staff of the Army of the Alps under the command of general Jean Étienne Championnet. A detachment of the 10th Cohort, led by Lahorie, went to the residence of the Duke of Rovigo, Minister of the Police. The Duke was taken by surprise and conveyed to La Force prison, while another detachment arrested the prefect of the police force. A third column went to the town hall of Paris and, while the troops took positions in place de Grève, the commanders took the key of the Midsummer's Day alarm bell, called the prefect Frochot and prepared the room for a provisional government. The death of the Emperor was believed throughout Paris, and Malet settled into the offices of the district general of the Place Vendôme, which offered the facilities necessary to play his part of commander. When General Pierre Augustin Hulin, commander of the Paris Garrison, requested verification of the senatorial documents, Malet shot and injured him. Finally, Malet's actions were ended when a senior military police officer, Colonel Jean Doucet, recognized that the new general of the Senate in fact was the prisoner Malet. Doucet disarmed Malet, returned him to prison, and ordered the 10th Cohort back to its barracks.

Malet's plan was skillfully conceived. It focused on the weakness of Napoleon's imperial dictatorship government, and calculated the consequences of the French passive obedience. Although unsuccessful, Malet's attempted coup d'état can be seen as revealing a fatal weakness of the new dynasty. This coup d'état caused the anger of Napoleon I because it exposed the weakness of French allegiance to the Bonaparte family as a dynasty: nobody had had the idea to shout, "Napoleon died! Long Live Napoleon II!" On the other hand, the coup attempt was in fact thwarted. A total of 23 civilians and officers, including Malet, Guidal and Lahorie, were tried on October 29, 1812, before a council of war for treason and all were convicted. All but 2 were executed on the plain of Grenelle on October 31. The conspiracy also led to strained relations between the Ministry of War and the Ministry of Police.