Of all modern spies, Karl Schulmeister, Napoleon's chief secret-service agent, appears to have possessed mental and temperamental qualities of so high an order as to justify one's belief that in the business of haute politique he might have played a prominent rÔle, had his destiny lain that way. As it was, he played in the Napoleonic drama a part which, although practically unknown even to well-informed students of history, may be said to have contributed an important quota not only to the Corsican's achievement of his lofty position in the world, but also in some measure to its retention. And although Napoleon made his chief spy a rich man and allowed him to hold in his time many positions of consideration if not of honour, such as the organisation of the corps d'espions and the headship of the imperial secret police, it is a matter of definite record that he consistently and to the end refused to bestow on Schulmeister any decoration of honour. In what degree and to what extent the work of the spy was less dignified or honourable than that of FouchÉ, the high-placed minister of police, is not easily apparent and it seems hard to find any real justification for Napoleon's refusal to Schulmeister of a pectoral certificate of worth when we reflect on the personal and public character of the heavily bedizened Duc d'Otranto who, apart from his long career of duplicity and intrigue, was eventually to prove the agent of the Emperor's final undoing and betrayal. In view of our expressed opinion that megalomania largely underlies the psychology of the spy, it is interesting to note that Schulmeister also laid claim to the honour of lofty birth. His grandfather, he told the world of his time, had been a Hungarian refugee noble of the family of Biersky, who settled in Baden, about 1730, where he adopted the profession of schoolmaster, taking at the same time a name descriptive of his occupation—hence Schulmeister.
What we know for a certainty is that the spy's father was a kind of unattached or nonconforming Lutheran minister at Neu-Freistett in 1760, and that Karl Schulmeister was born here on 5th August 1770, when Napoleon was about one year old. The meagre accounts which remain extant give us the picture of a village boy of respectable position whose character bore a striking resemblance to that which Robert Clive earned among the townspeople of Market Drayton in his early years. Schulmeister, at the age of twelve, was the acknowledged leader of the local band of youthful marauders and scapegraces—hooligans we would call them in these days. At the age of seventeen he had already become known as one of the most accomplished smugglers on the Franco-German frontier, a business, it is noteworthy, in which he engaged, either personally or by proxy, to the closing years of his life. At the age of twenty-two he married an Alsatian maid called Unger, and established himself in two distinct trades which his considerable smuggling operations were likely to render lucrative at the time. In after years, however, when he had become the lord of a chÂteau and large pleasance, and preferred to be known as Monsieur de Meinau, the spy was prone to overlook the fact that he had at one time kept a provision shop and an ironmongery at Neu-Freistett. Smuggling he was always willing to admit, and for the reason that in Revolutionary times, when life was accounted cheap, it required much courage and resource, he said, to become a successful smuggler. Undoubtedly the experience he acquired in this dangerous trade had called for many of the mental qualities which were to serve him so well in his after-career.
About 1799 he was introduced to Colonel Savary, afterwards to become the Duc de Rovigo, who was then engaged on a minor commissarial mission for the Directory in Alsatian countries. Savary was evidently one of those fortunate individuals on whom the gift of sensing great events to come appears to be bestowed, and, like all of his kind, he had both the eye for useful men and the talent for attaching them. An acuminous judge of character, he was first attracted to Schulmeister by the latter's cool audacity and splendid resource in the conduct of perilous smuggling enterprises, though whether, as it is said, Savary was himself anxious to share in the very liberal profits of the smuggler's trade, is not so clear. It is certain, however, that the rising soldier and the prosperous contrabandist continued to meet and to correspond, so that in 1804, being commissioned to allure a princely emigrÉ across the French frontier, in accordance with Napoleon's resolve to put a term to conspiracies against his power by sacrificing the blood of a Bourbon, Savary at once remembered his friend Karl Schulmeister. The man who had so long and successfully eluded the excise officials at the frontier would in all probability, he argued, prove easily equal to the task of trapping a royalist on the wrong side of the international boundary-line.
Entrusting the conduct of his business operations to his wife, Schulmeister visited Savary at BesanÇon early in March 1804. Here he was definitely instructed by the French General—Savary had been promoted to this rank in 1803—in the details of the intrigue which was to bring about the capture of the young Duc d'Enghien, whose murder had been resolved upon by the authority in Paris, its object being to strike terror into the royalist camp and clear the way towards a larger rÔle for Bonaparte. Enghien was at that time a young man of thirty-two resident in the territory of the Grand Duke of Baden close to the French frontier. Proscribed like all the members of his House, he was admittedly a man in whom a taste for political intrigue counted for little, too far removed from possible succession to the throne of France to be seriously suspected of ambitious designs and, from what his contemporaries assure us, one who represented the best type of his royal race. That harshness of lot which was common to the emigrÉ of every rank in those times did not spare the young Duc, who lived in very unpretending fashion at Ettenheim, a harmless dependent on the bounty of England. Historical inquiry into details connected with the residence of the young Bourbon in Baden has entirely removed from him all suspicion of having been in any way privy to a conspiracy against the First Consul. It was the Duc's custom often to visit Strassburg, where lived a lady friend who was to prove a cruelly unconscious agent in the intrigue which brought about her lover's destruction.
In accordance with the plans which Schulmeister laid down for the trapping of Enghien, this lady, to whom the Bourbon was passionately attached, was taken one morning by emissaries of the spy, conveyed to Belfort across the French border and interned at a country house near the frontier, the reasons given for her detention being that she had become an object of suspicion to the omnipotent French authority. In the lady's name, a letter was then forged by Schulmeister, purporting to come from her to Enghien at Ettenheim, retailing the misadventure and asking her lover to use whatever means he could to procure her release from the country house. This implicit appeal to his chivalry was sufficient for the Duc, who, on 14th March, decided to see if by bribery he could not himself effect the release of his mistress. Acting just as the astute Schulmeister had foreseen, Enghien left Ettenheim with two attendants before midnight of the 14th, and it was at a hamlet in Baden territory close to the frontier and near Lorrach, that the spy's emissaries, all on the alert and noting the opportunity of an easy capture, seized upon his person. Thence the prince was conveyed to Strassburg, from which city he was taken to Vincennes, where, having undergone a mock-trial, he was executed on 20th March at dawn, his gaolers forcing him to hold a lantern so that the bullets might find their mark. It may be remembered that one of Enghien's last requests was for permission to send a letter to his lady friend, who, as soon as she had ceased to serve any further purpose, was quickly released by Schulmeister. This letter, it may be presumed, would have conveyed the Duc's explanation for the reasons which had prevented him from coming to his mistress's aid as she had requested. It is said that Savary, for whom the capture of Enghien meant the certain continuance of Napoleon's favour, paid the spy blood-money equal to £6000 for his successful entrapping of the Bourbon prince.
Schulmeister was presented to the notice of Napoleon by his patron Savary in 1805. "Here is a man who is all brain and no heart, Sire," said the General. Our spy has left a short description of Napoleon of those days, which contains, as far as the writer knows, the only record of the quality of the great soldier's voice, a more important index of personality than is generally supposed. According to Schulmeister, Napoleon's voice was high-pitched, but crisp and with a certain stridency, while his habit of speaking through the teeth seemed also to give his utterances a peculiarly hissing sound. For the rest, the spy does not appear to have carried away a marked impression of the conqueror's personal appearance. The great soldier seems to have treated the spy with a playful interest and kindliness, and by the spring of 1805 we find that Schulmeister had received a commission from him to report upon the coastal towns of the south of England. It is also said that the spy visited Ireland, where he made it his business to become acquainted with the remnants of the rebels of 1798, who still placed a somewhat simple trust in Napoleon's vague promise, expressed, if at all, through third parties, that he would some day consider the question of attacking England through Ireland, granting her independence to the latter. Whether or not the English and Irish visits were ever paid, it is certain that Napoleon, in thinking out the campaign of 1805, especially remembered the existence of Karl Schulmeister—in itself a rare tribute to the spy's ability from a master-judge of clever and useful agents. Napoleon, as we gather from historical writers like Paul Muller, did not place an absolute confidence in the reliability of non-military spies. "The spy is a natural traitor" was his expressed view of the species. As a rule the Emperor trusted to his military intelligence department to supply him with all that information upon which he based his complex strategic and tactical calculations. The Austerlitz campaign in view, not so much of the momentous political contingencies inherent in the whole event, differed from others, however, as to the character of some of the most prominent actors engaged. It was on this account that an apparently insignificant person like Schulmeister came to play, in the stirring political drama of 1805, a rÔle which in its way was almost as helpful to Napoleon as his own genius in elaborating that memorable episode.
It is well known that the Emperor, more than all other generals, and true to the maxims of PolyÆnus, made it invariably his business to learn all he could about the personality and character of any commander with whom he was about to measure himself. With Alvinzy, Wurmser, Beaulieu, the Archduke Charles and MÉlas, Napoleon had fought different types of battles based to a large extent on the personal qualities and disposition of the general whom he happened to be opposing. In the early months of 1805, Napoleon, always well served by his regular diplomatic agents, may be trusted to have known the names and characters of most of the commanders to whom Austria and Russia were about to entrust the command of their armies in the campaign which all Europe knew to be inevitable. As to the attributes of Field-Marshal Mack, then a man of fifty-three, he can have had but few illusions and well knew that family influence, rather than the possession of real ability, had given the Austrian his high position in the military councils of his country. In Mack was a dull simplicity of mind, unusual to a man of his class, added to the fatal quality of allowing himself easily to be influenced by others. Conditions in the Austrian army, which had within recent years suffered a series of reverses at the hands of both Bonaparte and Moreau, lent themselves easily to irregular influences, a fact which had not escaped the penetration of Napoleon. Mack, again, was anxious to atone for his defeat by the French in 1797 and was prepared to take advantage of any opportunity which should give him in the conflict a superiority over the conqueror of Italy and Austria.
In the summer of 1805 that opportunity presented itself in the form of a letter which was addressed to him from one Karl Schulmeister, who, like many well-educated Alsatians, spoke and wrote French and German equally well. The writer in the course of a lengthy communication informed the Field-Marshal that he had been removed across the French frontier by Napoleon's orders, on the ground that he was an Austrian spy. Schulmeister admitted the facts. He had been moved, he wrote, out of pure love of his country and hatred of Napoleon, to act the spy through the imperial armies of France, as to the equipment, plans, intentions and organisation of which he was perfectly well acquainted. All this information he was willing to give up on the condition of being allowed to serve on the staff of the Austrian army. Then followed an account of his Hungarian ancestry and many other details which need not be particularised here. It is sufficient to say that Mack eagerly seized the opportunity of possessing himself of the services of a man who knew all about the French army, and engaged him as secret-service agent on his own particular account. The spy, who had visited Vienna in order to meet the Field-Marshal, was furthermore given military rank, and Mack procured him—on the ground of his noble Hungarian descent, with forged attestations as to which Napoleon's agents had supplied him at his own request—membership of some of the most exclusive military clubs in the Austrian capital. As his supply of money, coming as it did from Napoleon's long purse, was practically unlimited, Schulmeister, the ex-smuggler and actual spy, became an easy favourite in some of the most exclusive circles in the proudest society in Europe.
A description of the chief spy is given by M. de Gassicourt, a member of the medical suite of Napoleon: "Schulmeister is a man of rare courage and imperturbable presence of mind. He is made for great activities, his shoulders being broad, his chest deep, his body not tall, but capable of sustained exertions. His face is like an impenetrable mask." A German writer—an anonymous journalist in the Courier du Bas-Rhin, who has written much about the spy's career—describes Schulmeister as "one who ever seemed to affect the air of a man on whom the safety of the State depended." While absolutely incapable of the commonest feelings of humanity where strict business was concerned, as in the murder of Enghien, the spy appears to have considered it an indispensable part of his social equipment to waltz like a gentleman of the old court of Versailles, and with this momentous object in view employed the services of the most eminent dancing masters. His manners were said to be excellent by men who were sufficiently good judges, and, in any case, he must have acquired considerable polish to have passed muster in Austrian society of that age. He had not been long in Vienna, at all events, before he had attached to his own service, and of course for cash considerations, two well-known military men, who, when Mack took command of his army in the autumn of 1805, accompanied him to the Front, Schulmeister also proceeding thither as head of the military intelligence department attached to Mack's forces. During all this time he successfully contrived to keep closely in touch with Napoleon, from whom he was now taking sums of money for necessary expenditure and salary which, according to documents in the National Archives of France, containing much of the spy's correspondence, amounted to a sum equal to at least £20,000 per annum of our own money. Like most of the spy species, Schulmeister was a high liver, although Napoleon, a hard enough critic of accounts of all kinds, never laid any complaint to his charge on the ground of unnecessary extravagance.
Mack, as we have seen, was one of those men who easily surrender their will-power to bolder spirits. Accordingly, Schulmeister, who possessed the Austrian's complete confidence and who was well assisted by his Austrian fellow-spies, Wend and Rulski, acting on the instructions transmitted to him by Napoleon's headquarters, kept the Field-Marshal, by means of forged communications purporting to come from traitors in the French camp, falsely informed as to the movements of the three advancing imperial armies. As an aristocrat and a convinced supporter of all feudalistic forms and ideals, Mack was easily led to believe that the newly established throne of the Corsican received but half-hearted adherence from the French people. Napoleon even had newspapers especially printed which were to be shown to Mack in order to strengthen this impression. According, also, to letters supplied by the spy, Napoleon, who had left Paris with Vienna as his objective, had been forced to return with the greater part of his armies in order to quell a revolution which had broken out against his throne on his departure from the French capital. Coincident reports, supplied by Schulmeister's paid collaborants, seemed to point to the truth of the Alsatian's startling intelligence, and acting upon it, the Austrian Field-Marshal, with an army of 30,000 men, issued from the city of Ulm in pursuit of what he thought to be the retreating French armies only to find himself surrounded by a ring of steel, or what Napoleon was wont to term his "necklace" manoeuvre, Soult, Marmont, Lannes, Ney, Dupont and Murat closing him in on all sides. The memorable capitulation of the city, a pivotal point in the set strategy of Austria's military plans for the campaign of 1805, followed at once, Mack paying the penalty of what was for long thought to be an act of treachery, by being deprived of his rank, with a further punishment of two years in a military fortress. As for Schulmeister himself, his audacity never showed itself more conspicuously than in the immediate sequel. Not content with having practically assured to Napoleon the success of what is known as the Austerlitz campaign, admittedly the most spectacular of all the Emperor's military exploits, the spy, after Mack's disgrace, repaired to Vienna, where in the chief military councils, which were attended by the Emperor Francis and the Emperor of Russia, he is said to have counselled plans which were sure, he said, to enable the Allies to offset the disaster of Ulm and redeem the situation. Strange though it appears, his views, supported as usual by forged letters of intelligence, were applauded by the military commanders present, and the result was the shattering of the Austro-Russian armies at Austerlitz on 2nd December 1805. On the morrow of that memorable conflict, the spy was arrested at the instance of highly placed persons in Vienna who had long suspected him. The timely arrival of the French saved him, however, from a felon's fate, and it is said that by January 1806 he was back in Paris, boasting to his friends of the large amounts of money he had accumulated out of payments made to him not only by the French but also by the—Austrians!
It is impossible to trace Schulmeister in anything like recordful fashion between 1806 and 1809. His name is occasionally mentioned in connection with the missions of Savary, who always gave his confidence to the spy and entrusted him on occasion with rendering military and political reports in hostile territory, and experts agree in the opinion that these reports were drawn up with the skill and precision of an exceptionally well-endowed critic of strategic and diplomatic values. On Napoleon's second visit to Vienna, the spy was appointed censor over theatres, publishing houses, religious establishments and newspapers, and as indicating his possession of a large political sense, it may be pointed out that he had the works of Voltaire, Diderot, Helvetius, Montesquieu and Holbach translated and scattered broadcast among the various races of Austria-Hungary, in furtherance of the liberal ideas of the Revolution which Napoleon claimed to represent. All these productions had up till that time been included on the Index, political as well as religious. In 1809, for a short season, he occupied the important position of commissary-general of the imperial armies in the field. At Landshut he distinguished himself by leading a troop of hussars in person and capturing several important positions. In the same year he reappeared in Strassburg, still under Savary's orders, and in the course of a revolt which he was called upon to quell, distinguished himself by blowing out the brains of one of the most violent agitators, the trouble ceasing forthwith. At Strassburg he was always at home and to the very end held his popularity among all classes.
Some years previously he had purchased in the neighbourhood of his old home the important ChÂteau Le Meinau and in 1807 had become also the proprietor of an estate called De Piple, not far from Paris. In that year, too, he began to use the territorial distinction—Monsieur de Meinau. At both mansions people knew him for his lavish hospitalities, the magnificence of his receptions and routs, his unfailing generosity to the poor of his districts and, above all, for his love of little children—this last trait an easily comprehensible transition, it may be supposed, from the vicious intrigues of his complex trade, to the confiding simplicity of guileless minds. His property was said in those years to be worth the equivalent of £200,000, some said much more, and it is quite certain that Napoleon rewarded him generously for his undoubted services to the imperial throne.
His last important work in an official capacity was executed also in 1809 when, through the influence of the ever-obliging Savary, Schulmeister was appointed by Napoleon to act as chief of the secret police during that famous Congress of Erfurt to which the Corsican commanded the presence of nearly all the sovereign princes of Continental Europe. In the voluminous correspondence which the spy conducted—his particular Atticus being Savary—Schulmeister, whose pen was clearly as fluent as his wits were nimble, keeps his patron, who, it will be remembered, afterwards succeeded FouchÉ as head of the French ministry of police, in full touch with the intrigues of that historic gathering of European celebrities. None was too low or unweighty, nor any too highly placed to escape the often hypercritical and always interesting comments of the all-observing spy. The result is that apart from details bearing on the political significance of the Congress we are also regaled with tittle-tattle concerning the often far from dignified relations of the Tsar Alexander, as well as other august personages, with the subsidiary grand army of demi-mondaines who had taken advantage of the opportunity afforded them by the afflux of wealthy princes and nobles from every capital, to accumulate profit during the process of the congressional sun. The Corsican, with his omnivorous sense of intrigue, laid particular emphasis on the necessity of closely watching the movements of Russia's Emperor, whose taste in venal characters of the hetaira type was often in the inverse ratio of his exalted station. Napoleon, indeed, found himself more than once under the necessity of reproving the Imperial Muscovite whose attentions to a celebrated French actress with whom the Corsican himself had once been on the best of terms, very much perturbed him. "Visit that woman," he said, with the coarseness of the soldier, "and to-morrow all Europe will know what your physical proportions are from the ground up." Schulmeister had even explicit orders to note the movements of the fair Queen Louise of Prussia, her personal attractions for the Tsar also providing a source of much soul-burning to the French Emperor, who, whether he were well informed or not, allowed no opportunity to escape him of aspersing the much-humiliated Queen to Alexander. Goethe himself, despite all the admiration the Corsican professed for the Sage of Weimar, was not sacred from Napoleon's agent. The insistent "ce Monsieur de Goet'—qui voit-il?" was hardly less frequent on imperial lips than that other demand: "Et l'Empereur Alexandre—oÙ a-t-il passÉ la nuit derniÈre?" These were types of implicit instructions which were daily issued to his spy by the sometimes least dignified of sovereigns.
Readers of the Imperial legend will remember well the young General Lasalle, Napoleon's most famous leader of light cavalry. This soldier was also the possessor of many of those characteristics which we are accustomed to associate with that harmless enough social type which is described by the term, "funny man." The General's peculiar aptitude for cutting strange and grotesque figures, his talent for distorting his features into the most singular of grimaces, his capacity for assimilating strong drinks, as well as his unfailing geniality with all sorts of men, were traits as well known to the Army as the theatrical dress-manias of Murat, or the boastfulness of General Rapp. It is not surprising to learn, therefore, that Schulmeister, between 1800 and 1809—Lasalle was killed at Wagram, in the latter year—was on terms of great intimacy with the young General. Well aware of the high favour with which Napoleon regarded his cavalry leader, Schulmeister confided to the latter the secret of his great ambition. He had riches, he said, far beyond his needs and everything, indeed, which was capable of satisfying the heart of ambitious man. He lacked, however, the one especial decoration on which his aspirations were set. That was—of all things—the Legion of Honour! The bestowal of that distinction would, he declared, cap his noblest and most honourable ambitions. Would Lasalle use his undoubted influence with the Emperor to procure him that supreme testimony of Imperial good will? The General, accordingly, informed Napoleon of his chief spy's aspiration only (a writer says) to draw from the great soldier what was probably the only horse-laugh in which the conqueror had ever indulged. "Schulmeister," said the Emperor, "may have all the money he wants, but the Legion of Honour—never!" With the Emperor himself the spy was, nevertheless, on terms which were cordial enough. It was Napoleon's custom to address him by his Christian name "Karl," and, in the presence of others particularly, to twit him, often in the most cruel terms, on the despicable nature of his trade. The Emperor's refusal to include him among the wearers of the famous Order which he founded is not to be explained on very logical grounds, seeing that the decoration was worn by soldiers like Radet, whose chief business in the Army seemed to be the execution of, frankly, dirty jobs, from the performance of which the far from squeamish officers of the Corsican shrank with wholesome aversion. Such, for example, was the invasion of the Vatican and the arrest of a harmless old Bishop like Pius VII., or the supervision of the incarcerated Black Cardinals who had refused in 1810, on religious grounds, to attend the church ceremony which gave Napoleon a second wife in the person of Marie Louise.
On the advent of this Austrian Archduchess to share the Imperial throne, Viennese influence at the Court of Napoleon began to count in Paris as an important enough factor. Sufficiently important, at any rate, to put a term to the activities of the man who had been to a great extent responsible for the debÂcle of Austria's military and political schemes in 1805. Schulmeister accordingly disappeared from Paris, selling his estate near Paris and retiring to his splendid property at Meinau, where his popularity with the Alsatians was so great as to justify the belief that the spy was generously endowed with many qualities other than those which had led him to adopt the trade of espionage. "He is a spy," his countrymen used to say, "but surely also a gallant man." In 1814, during the invasion of France, a regiment of Austrian artillery was especially detailed to demolish his mansion and to destroy as much of his personal property as possible. The spy returned to Paris during the Hundred Days, only to be arrested when Napoleon left for Belgium. He was released on paying over so large a ransom that his fortune was permanently crippled. On the return of the Bourbons, all his attempts to play a social rÔle were severely frowned down by the friends of his prosperous days, and with the small remnants of a fortune which unfortunate speculations had now reduced to the vanishing point, he returned to Alsace, there to live a life of lean days and pathetic obscurity. As late as 1840 he was the keeper of a bureau de tabac, one of those tobacco stalls which are given to Frenchmen as a solatium for public services in the lower grades. He was alive in 1850 when the Prince-President toured through Alsace, but refused to bring himself to the notice of the nephew of Napoleon. The President called on him, however, vouchsafing him an honour which he had never received from the great Captain—namely, a handshake. He died in 1853 and was buried near his wife and parents in the cemetery of Saint Urbain in Strassburg.
