Under the Directory the office of a Minister of Police was revived, not without stormy protest, and the newly organised police soon became a power in the Republic as tyrannical and inquisitorial as that of Venice. It had its work cut out for it. Paris, the whole country, was in a state of anarchy, morals were at their lowest point, corruption and crime everywhere rampant. The streets of the city, all the high roads, were infested with bands of robbers with such wide ramifications that a general guerilla warfare terrorised the provinces. We shall see more of this on a later page, when describing the terrible bandits named _Chauffeurs_, from their practice of torturing people by toasting their feet before the fire until they gave up their hidden treasure. FOUCHÉ. Nine police Ministers quickly followed each other between 1796 and 1799, men of no particular note; but at last Barras fixed [Illustration: ATTACK UPON THE BASTILLE, DURING THE FRENCH REVOLUTION.] upon Fouché as a person he imagined to be well qualified for the important post. He thus gave a first opening to one whose name is almost synonymous with policeman--the strong, adroit, unscrupulous manipulator of the tremendous underground forces he created and controlled, the man who for many years practically divided with Napoleon the empire of France. The emperor had the ostensible supremacy, but his many absences on foreign wars left much of the real power in his Minister's hands. Fouché's aptitudes for police work must have been instinctive, for he had no special training or experience when summoned to the post of Police Minister. He had begun life as a professor, and was known as _le Père Fouché_, a member of the Oratory, although he did not actually take religious orders. Born in the seaport town of Nantes, he was at first designed for his father's calling--the sea; but at school his favourite study was theology and polemics, so that his masters strongly advised that he should be made a priest. Something of the suppleness, the quiet, passionless self-restraint, the patient, observant craftiness of the ecclesiastic remained with him through life.