The « volcano of the Revolution » prompted the former lieutenant general of the police, Lenoir, to take up his pen. His aim was to stifle criticisms of the revolutionaries on his behalf, reflect on the causes of the Revolution itself, and defend the work accomplished since 1667 by themagistrats of police. To this end, Lenoir adopted the model of an « administrative mémoire » or a treatise on the police. Yet his personal traumas thwarted this initial project. The contradictions between his efforts to compose a politico-administrative text, and at the same time, a work of more literary inspiration constitute one of the major clues to Lenoir’s ultimate failure. Indeed, his text remained unfinished in 1807, a project suffused with remorse, a compilation of different versions. Far from being a secondary source, the « memoires » of Lenoir in their complexity dramatize rupture and chaos, proffering a vision of a world coming apart, seen through the eyes of an enlightened administrator, who remained a partisan of the structures of Old Regime society.