Police Stories: Building the French State, 1815-1851 (review)

Police Stories offers a panoramic view of policing in France under three regimes of the first half of the nineteenth century—the Bourbon Restoration, the July Monarchy, and the Second Republic. The focus is on the commissaire de police (cp), the period's central figure of local policing, and on provincial France, with some comparative examples from the Paris region. This primarily social history of police and policing addresses two main topics. The first is a portrait of the cps and their conditions, especially in the Restoration and July Monarchy periods. In this context, the subtle interplay of patronage, political loyalty, and competence is evident in the constitution and evaluation of police personnel, and letters requesting appointment or appealing dismissal illuminate professional identity often with poignant autobiographical detail.

The second topic is a tour de France of police work that visits the important places, notably markets and urban toll gates (octrois), and witnesses ordinary conditions and situations, such as begging, prostitution, strikes and workers' associations, theater going, food prices, peddling and vagabondage, and café and cabaret life. Some valuable observations and insights emerge. For example, the rapid growth of urban peripheries (faubourgs)—a phenomenon well known thanks largely to the author's previous work—contributes to the progressive bureaucratization and centralization of local policing.¹ Communication between authorities in Paris and rural mayors, to regulate flows of migrants in response to changing economic conditions, reveals a de facto nationalization of policing before the advent of formalized control by the central state.

Faithful to its title, the panorama takes in a multitude of individual cases, stories or parts of stories gleaned from a treasure trove of such archival and published contemporary sources as police memoirs, manuals, and proposals for reform. The effect is a rich, complex and multihued tapestry of impressions and evidence that flesh out and enrich existing studies of police institutions. New empirical knowledge from the French provincial case, rather than any significant institutional analysis of its own, is the study's main contribution. One exception is the account of the conflict between the municipalities and the central state over control of the cp, which ended in favor of the state. Workers' insurrections, such as those of the early July Monarchy, also hastened centralization. The analysis of the contribution of these factors to the building of the French state is first-rate.

New knowledge supports certain generalizations of particular interdisciplinary interest: growing professionalism of cp appointment, function, and sense of career; the surprisingly routine nature of most police work, amid a constant obsession with political surveillance and fear of social disorder from outsiders and, increasingly, from militant workers; a peculiar type of administrative tension between the central state's control of police appointments and the municipalities' responsibility for paying police salaries; and a broad continuity with Old Regime (pre-revolutionary) patterns. These generalizations have relevance for comparative police studies, for study of the professions, and for administrative history. The ever-present archival research and the vivid presentation of its results are likely to attract historians and humanists inclined to savor the texture of the concrete instance and the well-told anecdote, of which Police Stories offers an abundance.