Joseph Fouché, 1st Duc d'Otrante, 1st Comte Fouché (French: [ʒozɛf fuʃe]; 21 May 1759 – 26 December 1820) was a French statesman, revolutionary, and Minister of Police under First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte. Fouché later became a subordinate of Emperor Napoleon. He was particularly known for the ferocity with which he suppressed the Lyon insurrection during the Revolution in 1793. But he also was a highly competent minister of police under the Directory, the Consulate, and the Empire. In 1815, he served as President of the Executive Commission, which was the provisional government of France installed after the abdication of Napoleon. In English texts, his title is often translated as Duke of Otranto.

Fouché was born in Le Pellerin, a small village near Nantes. His mother was Marie Françoise Croizet (1720–1793), and his father was Julien Joseph Fouché (1719–1771). He was educated at the college of the Oratorians at Nantes, and showed aptitude for literary and scientific studies. Wanting to become a teacher, he was sent to an institution kept by brethren of the same order in Paris. There he made rapid progress, and was soon appointed to tutorial duties at the colleges of Niort, Saumur, Vendôme, Juilly and Arras. There he was initiated into Freemasonry at "Sophie Madeleine" lodge in 1788. At Arras he had had some encounters with Maximilien Robespierre (and his sister Charlotte) both before the revolution and in the early days of the French Revolution (1789).

In October 1790, he was transferred by the Oratorians to their college at Nantes, in an attempt to control his advocacy of revolutionary principles – however, Fouché became even more of a democrat. His talents and anti-clericalism brought him into favour with the population of Nantes, especially after he became a leading member of the local Jacobin Club. When the college of the Oratorians was dissolved in May 1792, Fouché left the Oratorians, having never taken any major vows.

After the downfall of the monarchy on 10 August 1792 (following the storming of the royal Tuileries Palace), he was elected as deputy for the département of the Loire-Inférieure to the National Convention, which proclaimed the French Republic on 22 September.

Fouché's interests brought him into contact with the Marquis de Condorcet and the Girondists, and he became a Girondist himself. However, their lack of support for the trial and execution of King Louis XVI (December 1792 – 21 January 1793) led him to join the Jacobins, the more decided partisans of revolutionary doctrine. Fouché was strongly in favor of the king's immediate execution, and denounced those who "wavered before the shadow of a king".

The crisis that resulted from the declaration of war by the French National Convention against Great Britain and the Dutch Republic (1 February 1793, see French Revolutionary Wars), and a little later against Spain, made Fouché famous as one of the Jacobin radicals holding power in Paris. While the armies of the First Coalition threatened the north-east of France, a revolt of the Royalist peasants in Brittany and La Vendée menaced the Convention on the west. That body sent Fouché with a colleague, Villers, as representatives on mission invested with almost dictatorial powers for the crushing of the revolt of "the whites" (the royalist colour). The ruthlessness with which he carried out these duties earned him a reputation, and he soon held the post of commissioner of the republic in the département of the Nièvre.

Together with Pierre Gaspard Chaumette, he helped to initiate the dechristianization movement in the autumn of 1793. In the Nièvre department, Fouché ransacked churches, sent their valuables to the treasury, and helped establish the Cult of Reason. He ordered the words "Death is an eternal sleep" to be inscribed over the gates to cemeteries. He also fought luxury and wealth, wanting to abolish the use of currency. The new cult was inaugurated at Notre Dame de Paris by "The Festival of Reason". It was here that Fouché gave "the most famous example of its [dechristianization] early phase". Ironically enough, it was only a year previous that Fouché had been "an advocate of the role of the clergy in education," yet he was now "abandoning the role of religion in society altogether in favour of 'the revolutionary and clearly philosophical spirit' he had first wanted for education." Overall, the dechristianization movement "reflected the wholesale transformation that Jacobin and radical leaders were beginning to see as necessary for the survival of the Republic, and the creation of a republican citizenry."

Fouché went on to Lyon in November with Jean-Marie Collot d'Herbois to execute the reprisals of the Convention. Lyon had revolted against the Convention. Lyon, on 23 November, was declared to be in a "state of revolutionary war" by Collot and Fouché. The two men then formed the Temporary Commission for Republican Supervision. He inaugurated his mission with a festival notable for its obscene parody of religious rites. Fouché and Collot then brought in "a contingent of almost two thousand of the Parisian Revolutionary Army" to begin their terrorizing. "On 4 December, 60 men, chained together, were blasted with grapeshot on the plain de Brotteaux outside the city, and 211 more the following day. Grotesquely ineffective, these mitraillades resulted in heaps of mutilated, screaming, half-dead victims, who were finished off with sabres and musket fire by soldiers physically sickened at the task." Events like this made Fouché infamous as "The Executioner of Lyons." The Commission was not happy with the methods used for killing the rebels so, soon after, "more normal firing squads supplemented the guillotine." These methods led to the carrying out of "over 1800 executions in the coming months." Fouché, claiming that "Terror, salutary terror, is now the order of the day here ... We are causing much impure blood to flow, but it is our duty to do so, it is for humanity's sake," called for the execution of 1,905 citizens. As Napoleon's biographer Alan Schom has written: