How can we account for the ignorance that prevails with regard to this man, whom his contemporaries believed to be so powerful? Nothing is known of the Baron de Batz: his history occupies a few lines in the biographical dictionaries: his dossier in the Archives tells us no more. Would he be so entirely forgotten if he had really held the fate of France in his hands throughout the Terror, and had moulded events at his will? With whom does the mistake lie? With his contemporaries, who regarded him as the pivot of the whole Revolution, or with posterity, who hitherto have been unaware that he ever lived?