Preliminary Programme

The National Guards in the French empire have never been researched. In Algeria, these bourgeois militias were created soon after the arrival of settlers and European inhabitants in colonial cities. In Oran, between 1840 and 1870, the National Guard was one of the units in charge of policing the main city of Western Algeria. In fact, most of the guards were reluctant to assume their weekly pro bono missions. Even if they were sometimes mobilized to support the army when French domination was threatened in the countryside, the National Guard doesn't appear as a main institution for order maintenance in colonial Algeria. But institutional reforms and debates, especially about whether Jews or Spaniards should be allowed to join the National Guard, open a way to analyzing social hierarchies and segregation in the colonial context. (Show less)

During the early modern period, cities were policed by diversified police forces. These police forces performed their duties in connection with each other and the urban authorities used to gather their heads frequently to harmonize their operations and improve public safety. Yet historical studies focus mostly on one single police institution and this often leads to minimize other existing police forces or even ignore how these police forces interact. This paper therefore aims to show the existence and operation of the “police system”, i.e. the arrangement which allows the various bodies with their specific functions and interactions in urban life to function together. “Police systems” in Paris and Brussels in the 18th century will then be explained and compared. Apparently, at that time, the two capitals’ polices were very different, the Lieutenance générale de Police in Paris having nothing in common with the municipal police organization in Brussels. However, when these two institutions are put into perspective with other police forces at work in the two cities, it can be shown that the two police systems have many common features. Finally, the notion of a police system for the pre-modern era may also challenge the truly innovative “modern polices” set in 19th century Europe. (Show less)

The idea of ‘English Policing’ was absolutely essential to police reform around Europe during much of the 19th century and well into the 20th century, as the London Metropolitan Police model was admired by foreign observers and police reformers as the beacon of a modern and effective, citizen-oriented and democratic approach to law enforcement and maintenance of public order.

Yet, as historians of English policing have amply demonstrated, there were always significant discrepancies between ‘the model’ and the actual functioning of English policing. Even if we restrict the ‘English police model’ to the London Metropolitan Police force, the rhetoric around the model never quite fitted the reality of policing. At the same time, the abstract model was of crucial importance both in shaping the concept of ‘modern’ policing and in inspiring policing in many parts of Europe.

As the Metropolitan police model was constructed in deliberate opposition to the existing watchmen and to the French gendarmerie model, the London Metropolitan model projected certain features which it did never quite fulfil: the force was never entirely free of military elements and influences; it was never entirely unarmed; it was never free from using plain clothes officers. Moreover, the extent to which the reality distinguished itself from the ideal varied considerably over time. Similar compromises were made in almost all other forces claiming to be inspired by the Metropolitan Police Model.

In this paper I will discuss the advantages of conceiving of different approaches to policing as Weberian arch-types, conceptually detached from any actually existing police or gendarmerie or watchman force. (ie. a ‘Peelite ideal type’ and a ‘gendarmerie ideal type’, as well as other types which could be constructed according to a series of core attributes).

The construction of abstract types would allow assessment of how closely or distantly any force matched a series of key characteristics of the ideal-type. It would also help structuring analysis of change over time, according to the extent of compromise with the ideal, as considerable fluctuations occurred depending on the needs during times of challenge from social and political unrest.



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The concomitant renewal of the Napoleonic history– henceforth examined at the european scale - and the history of the police - oriented towards a social study of its personnel, to their knowledge and practices -, renders urgent a complete rewrite of the history of the Napoleonic polices For a long time focused on the political affairs of the parisian scene, this traditional approach is now in complete discord with the conclusions of recent studies on brigandage, on the political, even cultural, severance provoked by the European growth of the gendarmerie. Our geographical scope is resolutely original seeing that it covers all the annexed territories during the Revolution and the Empire, studied on the whole, from Mont-Blanc to Hanseatic departments. This choice preserves a striking and instructive diversity since the range of situations is wide from Rome to Hamburg. Above all, this territorial strip represents an intermediate space between old France and Europe, and thus a model space of institutional and cultural confrontations.
This paper attempts to comprehend the implications of imperial experience at once through the modes of institutional transfers, to interactions at work and to shifts in the end, and through the introduction and action of new State agents, themselves considered in their social and familial dimension. Indeed, a database is dedicated to police personnel (concerning the 7,000 gendarmes employed in 1811). To be able to understand recruitment policy as well as the relationships between the population and agents of authority, implies that one knows the profile of the latter. In this manner we establish the geographical origin of the agents, the fraction of those French-born with respect natives, as well as the former careers of this personnel. It’s only once we reveal who these agents are, that we may, in a third section, interest ourselves in what they do so as to comprehend, beyond their legal remit, their actual practices, and, beyond these daily duties, their task of unifying officer in the service of a same normative space.
The use of the concept of policing (in the sense of exercising of police functions), brings out the irreducive specificity of the Napoleonic experience with respect to reference models. The Napoleonic police prefigures admittedly just as well a national police (as a centralized tool in charge of laying down the Nation-State’s laws), as a colonial police (tool of domination, by means of controled delegation of the coercive authority, recruited among natives but especially among martial races), but it is advisable to draw a new category : the Napoleonic police is an imperial police insofar as it is an institution integrated in an universal project, open to the natives in its recruitment - positions of responsibility included -, for the sole use of metropolitan France, but excluding a special use of violence in everyday duties.
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In the long-standing controversy about police reform prior to the establishment of the first organised police force in London in 1829, France was the 'other' against which English standards and ideals were commonly examined. Much has been written about the topic in this period. However, France continued to play the role of the 'other' up to the end of the nineteenth century, principally in periods of heated public debates about law enforcement in England. In these debates comparisons between English and French detectives were commonplace. This paper proposes to examine such comparisons as portrayed in the late Victorian press and in popular fiction of the time with the aim of shedding light not only on what leading participants in these debates thought about the French political culture but also about their own.
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