The policy of revenge and proscription against persons who aided and abetted Napoleon in the early part of 1815, which had been announced in the proclamations issued by Louis at Cambrai before he entered Paris (June 25th and 28th), was not to remain a dead letter; and we have now to mention some of the saddest incidents which took place at this crisis in French history, and which were witnessed by the British army. Fouché had become Minister of Police. He justified his acceptance of that post by declaring that he wished to save the men who were threatened with vengeance.[66] Upon him it devolved to carry out this policy, and though he did so with outward reluctance, and told the King that there had been no conspiracy to dethrone him in favour of Napoleon—which appears to have been quite true, for all acted on the wild impulse of the moment,—yet still he was not ashamed to come forward in the odious light of an accuser against his former friends. On the 24th of July, two ordinances, countersigned by himself, were published, by which thirty-two Peers who had joined Napoleon’s Upper House, established since the 20th of March, were declared to have forfeited their rights to the French Peerage; twenty Officers and other Officials were at the same time ordered to be arrested, and brought to trial before a court-martial; and thirty-nine more were desired to quit Paris in three days, to places pointed out by the Minister of Police, and to remain there under his supervision, until the new Chambers should decide whether they were to be banished, or delivered over for trial to the tribunals.[67] ----- Footnote 66: Thiers, _Histoire du Consulat et l'Empire_, xx. 516 (Paris, 1862). Footnote 67: