Orages, Littérature et culture 1760-1830. Nº; 10: L'Œil de la police (review)

If the symbol of the eye has in the twentieth century been largely associated with the omnipresent State—think George Orwell's 1984—it was in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century closely associated with the Police. The image of the eye which graces the cover of Orages: l'Œil de la police does well to remind us that although they are closely associated, the Police and the State are two separate entities, particularly where politics are concerned. The institutional reforms that occurred in France around the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth century not only established the modern police system we recognize today, but also set in motion a way of conceptualizing the police within the popular imagination. The eight essays which compose the dossier paint an in-depth and complicated picture of an institution largely associated with surveillance and law enforcement. One quickly concludes, however, that this institution is foremost an urban organizational force whose relationship to the prevailing political system, as well as to the public, is often times uneasy. As Vincent Milliot notes in his contribution Catastrophe de la police et police de la catastrophe, "[L]a police doit savoir se mettre au service des citoyens pour renforcer sa légitimité; elle n'est pas qu'une force coercitive au service du souverain" (53). This careful balancing act between the state and the people is built into the very DNA of the police and is explored in various aspects throughout the collected work.

The collected essays are organized chronologically from approximately 1760 to 1830 and take a global approach to the basic questions that open up Flávio Borda d'Agua's introduction: Who/what are the police? Where do they come from and what do they do? And lastly, what do we know about the police as an institution? The responses are markedly historical, literary and judicial, and draw upon police reports, newspaper articles, memoirs, literary sources, and verbal trials of censorship. Appropriately, the first two essays treat the police of the Ancien Régime. Catherine Deny focuses on the ways that police preparation for urban fires in the city of Lille helped reinforce and structure the greater institution. She notes that police archives "di[sent] beaucoup de choses, moins sur son objet que sur elle-même, sur ses pratiques, son organisation, ses transformations" (18). Such preparations required the mobilization of an entire series of professions outside of the police, particularly those related to construction and transportation. In this way, the police are essentially an organizational force. Vincent Milliot, in his essay, uses the catastrophe of 1770, in which 132 people were crushed to death during a public celebration for the marriage of Marie Antoinette and the future Louis XVI at Place de la Concorde, to outline the process of reform that resulted. This event deeply humiliated the police and not only launched vociferous debates and accusations in the press, but led to a Parliamentary inquiry. The gross result was the enunciation of the principle that police authority needed to be exercised uniformly and centrally.

The next three articles address the philosophical questions and very real concerns of police surveillance. Christophe Cave, in his article "L"œil' observé: critique du contrôle et de la surveillance chez Louis Sébastien Mercier et dans les Mémoires secrets", explores the double-edged sword of police power in relation to public security. On the one hand, Cave notes that Mercier celebrates the global project of police surveillance which helps ensure public safety and order, arguing that the ends justify the means when it comes to public safety. On the other hand, the authors of Les Mémoires secrets underscore the very real possibility of despotism in which the authorities are "prêts à écraser leurs concitoyens dans des temps d'alarmes et de troubles" (64). Cave notes that although control is political and that...