The relationship between the police, law enforcement agencies more generally and the riots, insurrections and revolutions of the nineteenth century has traditionally been relegated to an event-based history that attributed political upheaval to police ‘responsibility’ and other ‘conspiracies’. However, in recent years, a series of pioneering works and those they inspired in the fields of social and cultural history have slowly revealed the untapped potential of this area of research.Footnote 1 In particular, they have demonstrated the value of studying the police and revolution together. Drawing on this work, I suggest that the police and its larger relationship to urban political crises may be characterized in part as a problem of overlapping temporalities. From this perspective, the police is characterized by its development over the medium to long term, with responsibility for controlling or monitoring populations as well as ensuring the smooth operation of the urban space affected and traversed by the constant and contradictory movements of city life. On the other hand, moments of revolt and revolution are presented as moments of rupture characterized by the collapse of the usual schemas of intelligibility, the suspension of power relations and a determination to transform radically a previous situation suddenly deemed intolerable.Footnote 2 What follows builds on this argument, we are, therefore, not so much concerned with how the police actually behaved during times of crisis – an area that has received more attention – than with what crisis did to the police, the city and the relationship between them. Out of this approach a series of new questions may be posed. What happens to the institutions of law and order during these rare moments? How does the new group in power handle the police and law enforcement? What does the crisis reveal about the principles that underpin the legitimacy of these forces and, more broadly, the implicit foundations of power in the city? What immediate changes do these crises bring about? What are their effects in the short, medium and long term? In addressing these questions, the aim is to contribute to an analysis of institutions in situations of crisis as well as a reflection on the multiple temporalities of urban change.
Paris proves to be a privileged vantage point for such a line of inquiry. The ‘capital of the nineteenth century’, both an industrial metropolis and political capital, was at that time undergoing intense demographic, social, cultural and political transformations. Partly for these reasons, it acted as a ‘laboratory’ of modern policing on both a French and European scale.Footnote 3 At the same time, it was the capital of revolutions, whether we consider the revolution of 1789, 1830, 1848 or, in a slightly different way, 1871 – the Commune is sometimes even presented as an anomalous expression of the broader period of upheaval between 1848 and 1865.Footnote 4 The Parisian experience was at once unique and a reflection of more general phenomena. In particular, it raises a last question, namely the role of the various responses of the police in the decline of insurrectionary practices over the course of the century. In what follows, I suggest that in order to answer this question, we must expand the initial definition of urban ‘crisis’ and connect the revolutionary experiences to a more complex interplay of undirected social processes.
1848: a ‘democratic and social’ police?
The nineteenth-century system of police may in fact be better understood as a ‘police system’ whose components were governed by different dynamics but which still formed a coherent and identifiable whole.Footnote 5 Given the large number of actors responsible for law and order, making analytical inroads into this ‘system’ requires that one focus on one type of police officer as a guiding thread. As a result, in this article we will focus on the sergents de ville, the uniformed police officers who became emblematic of the Parisian police force during this period.
The law and order landscape of Paris at the time of the July Monarchy (1830–48) was the result of a long accumulation of policies that can be traced back to the seventeenth century. In 1847, it was made up of several actors distributed over different sites (barracks, police stations and other buildings). The first was the army,Footnote 6 numbering 26,000 men divided into infantry and cavalry corps. It came under the authority of a general Commandant de la place de Paris, himself under the orders of the minister of war. The primary function of the army was to provide military protection for Paris against potential foreign aggressors or internal riots. However, soldiers also played a part in everyday law and order, operating from military posts scattered throughout the city. The second actor was the garde nationale (national guard). Established in 1791, it represented a citizen-based model of law and order and was for a long time the preferred instrument of everyday law enforcement in Paris. It was split into ‘divisions’ and organized on a military model. Armed and uniformed, these guards were more responsible for maintaining general law and order. The symbolic status of the national guard explains why it experienced mixed fortunes in the course of political events and transformations.Footnote 7 The garde républicaine (republican guard), formerly the garde municipale (municipal guard), was probably the most effective body in everyday urban law enforcement.Footnote 8 It consisted of 2,500 men in 1850. It was the most professionalized body at that time and, while used as a backup in the event of a riot, it was above all involved in ordinary tasks of law and order.
Finally, there was the Prefecture of Police, the core of the system and the institution that was really responsible for maintaining law and order in the city. Created in 1800 by Napoléon Bonaparte, its multifarious activities were divided between different departments whose organization varied over time. Of primary interest to us here are the commissaires de police (police commissaries), who embodied a very old institution straight out of the eighteenth century. Deeply embedded in the social spaces of the capital,Footnote 9 they administered a portion of the urban environment called either the section or the quartier. There was also the police municipale (municipal police), made up of central brigades located in the Prefecture of Police on the Île de la Cité, a backup unit in case of unrest; the special services (vehicles, garnis, etc.) and finally the sergents de ville proper. There were 900 of these city police officers, often ex-army personnel and divided up by arrondissement. Their specific task was to look after everyday law and order in the city by way of regular patrols.
The whole system formed a tangle of groups with different definitions and functions, producing many tensions and gaps. But this did not prevent there being a certain central coherence: together they formed a network operating on several different levels (ordinary/exceptional) and despite the multiple authorities, decisions were ultimately made by the Prefect of Police. These policing authorities were subject to numerous criticisms in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. They were suspected of continuing the practices of the First Empire and the ancien régime. These were described as focusing on political activities over municipal duties, fraternizing with criminals and, in the case of the uniformed police, using violent tactics.Footnote 10 These criticisms formed a backdrop, however, to other more diverse and sometimes more positive assessments. The same uniformed police were seen under the July Monarchy as a reassuring presence, i.e. visible (‘ostensible’) in the positive sense this term had at the time.Footnote 11 In any case, these officers were responsible for law and order in a city that was undergoing intense transformations. The population increased from half a million to one million inhabitants between 1800 and 1850; the city became industrialized and started to show the influence of hygienist ideas. The first boulevards were opened up, the ‘legend of Paris’ started to take shape and the arrival of new populations raised fresh concerns, as evidenced by the emergence of the ‘social question’ – a renewed fear of crime and the increasingly common association between ‘labouring classes and dangerous classes’.Footnote 12 These concerns, difficulties and impasses, whether those of the elites, the poor or the urban administration itself, did not of themselves constitute a ‘crisis’, rather they were experienced as a complex whole undergoing moments of flux and change. We have to distance ourselves from our knowledge of what happened next to appreciate the situation as it was then.
It is generally acknowledged that both the outbreak of the Revolution of 1848 and the scale on which it took place were completely unexpected. The prohibition of the campagne des banquets on 21 February effectively led, in four days, to the abdication of the king, the proclamation of the Republic and literally the promise of a new era for humanity, inspired by the intellectual ferment of the 1830s and intensified by the heat of the moment.
The ‘élan of 48’ is well known. Less attention has been paid to the issue of the police and law and order at such moments.Footnote 13 The agencies outlined above took part in the first repressive phase of events and were strongly condemned. The criticisms mentioned above coalesced into a coherent whole whose tone was even more urgent than before. The police forces, and especially the sergents de ville, were routinely described in newspapers and political discourse as untrustworthy, violent and politically motivated. They embodied what appeared after the fact to be the intolerable despotism of Louis-Philippe. For these reasons, the sergents de ville unit was disbanded for a second time (the first being in July 1830).
The Republicans who came to power nevertheless faced the major problem of how to establish a police force or agency of law enforcement that satisfied the new conceptions of legitimacy that prevailed at that time. The difficulty was further complicated by the fact that the members of the provisional government were not themselves in agreement on the subject and were overwhelmed by the proliferation of extra-institutional practices among the people. The question of urban ‘law and order’ took on a very complex dimension in revolutionary Paris. On the ground, it was mainly maintained by the national guard, who revived the ‘citizen-soldier’ model inherited from or inspired by the French Revolution. Alongside them, guard units with a variety of names – les lyonnais, la compagnie de Saint-Just, les enfants de Paris – multiplied and claimed responsibility for a ‘revolutionary’, ‘citizen-based’ or ‘Republican’ form of law and order. The underlying idea was that power now lay directly in the hands of the citizens and that the activity of government could not be delegated. Some original policies were developed in this context by the new people in power. Marc Caussidière, the very Republican Prefect of Police who was appointed by the provisional government, devoted himself, in his words, to ‘creating order out of disorder’. He formed a new police corps for this purpose, the gardiens de Paris. Hastily organized in late March, this corps would never amount to the 2,000 officers initially planned. It displayed, however, some symbolic markers that were evidence of the fledgling authority's process of justification. The name lost its military connotation and took on a more benevolent tone. More broadly, the uniforms had to look as little as possible like an army uniform and the officers were clean-shaven, in accordance with a symbolic association between public power, masculinity and hirsuteness that was confirmed here in a very concrete matter.Footnote 14 The officers were not armed, as their mission was supposed to be a mediating one, based on dialogue.Footnote 15 Finally, they were not recruited from the ranks of former military officers, but from among workers undergoing hardships from the economic crisis of 1846–48. The distinction between the social and political dimensions fell down here. We can see an attempt to create a police force that suited a ‘social and democratic’ Republic, typical of 1848, based on the principle that economic relations were inseparable from political ones.Footnote 16
Other police forces were involved in this change. The municipal guard, which became the ‘Republican’ guard in March, underwent similar transformations, as Fabien Cardoni has shown.Footnote 17 The senior officers were elected, the uniform more closely resembled workers’ clothes, the officers were recruited from the working classes and their mission was a conciliatory one. The same was true of the famous garde mobile (mobile guard) studied by Mark Traugott, which also aimed to provide jobs for young workers and build a people's army.Footnote 18 Thus, between February and April 1848, all of the forces and ‘quasi-institutions’ responsible for maintaining law and order were ‘republicanized’– according to the specific meaning that republicanized took on at the time.
These changes were accompanied by shifts in the usual dichotomies and habits in the area of urban regulations. The chiffonniers (rag-and-bone men), for example, who would formerly have been targeted by the police, drew up petitions demanding ‘freedom of movement’ and challenging the use of mannequins by other rag-and-bone men.Footnote 19 More broadly, the Prefecture at that time received dozens of suggestions for reorganizing the police – veritable ‘dream’ polices that deserve further analysis.Footnote 20 A more detailed study of concrete law and order practices in the city during this revolutionary movement is needed, but it certainly seems that in some ways the usual social distances of former times were abolished. There was thus a profound disruption of the customary social divisions. Given the values inspired by the Revolution, this situation presented certain advantages and we see the ‘suspension of power relations’ described by Eric Hobsbawm,Footnote 21 leading to a more generalized exercise of public functions, in a diluted form, outside the usual institutions. It also presented disadvantages, however, especially for those in positions of power; because there was no uniform definition of law and order, the agents were untrained and the authorities were in competition with one another. Revealingly, the situation was constantly described as ‘provisional’: these moments are good indicators of what routines from previous times had been internalized and what administrative foundations they support or not. The whole question – this was Caussidière's project in particular – was how to stabilize this shift while respecting the new values being promoted.
This hope was not realized. Instead, there was a return to the former state of affairs, which is an indication of the resistance of police institutions. After 15 May (when protesters invaded the Assembly), the Commission exécutive instigated a return in stages to the former practices of the municipal guards (militarization, purging, strengthened supervision). After the bloody June Days Uprising of 1848, when, revealingly, members of different police forces could be found on either side of the barricade, the élan was broken. In Paris on Easter Day 1849 – a symbolic date for the ‘resurrection’ in progress – the conservative Republic arranged for the return of the sergents de ville. The impact of the ‘June Days’ was powerful. In the minds of many elites and non-Parisians, the ‘people’ of Paris were once again considered as the ‘plebs’, a class to be controlled and an indicator of former social dysfunctions, another reason why it was desirable (for the conservative elites, but also many provincial French) to return to ‘law and order’. A little over a year after the February Revolution, the ‘police system’ seemed to have weathered the crisis, even if its foundations were shaken for a period of time.
Four points can be drawn from this first experience. First, the political crisis represented a temporal break: it led to a discursive reconstruction that called the former agencies of law enforcement into question and justified their dissolution. It involved a specific memory – that of the French Revolution in the broad sense – which produced a different relationship to time, suggested a different definition of the res publica and proposed different points of reference in the area of law and order. It prompted a change in the very definition of the nature and mission of policing. The distance between police officers and the general Parisian community and the legitimacy of delegations of public authority were especially called into question.
The disruption was not total however, as Fabien Cardoni has pointed out. The Prefecture of Police was not really threatened. Many of its components, such as the commissaires de police and the service de sureté, remained in place. Several of its functions, such as pursuing criminals and maintaining public decency, were not called into question. And, as an example, the episode also revived the old struggle between the Prefecture of Police and the Hôtel de Ville (then led by Armand Marrast).
Finally, the effects of this political crisis seem to have been limited in the medium term. Even though adjustments had to be made, the earlier police system, full of discrepancies and itself the product of earlier crises, seemed more or less to survive and even, in a way, become stronger. It is a case of what we can call institutional and urban ‘resilience’.
The 1850s: resolving the ‘urban crisis’
The events of 1848 had another effect: June 1848 appeared in retrospect to be the Parisian symptom of a serious urban problem. More precisely, it crystallized a number of issues from the 1840s that had the effect of producing even more insistent claims of an unprecedented ‘urban crisis’ in the 1850s. This claim had some basis in fact, since the rise in the number of inhabitants dramatically exacerbated old problems: overcrowding, inadequate housing, traffic, fear of epidemics and so on. But the claim also had to do with the very categories used to think about the city, building on the conceptual problems that had emerged in the previous decade. Approaches to the city became more focused on urban planning, centralization and technical concerns.Footnote 22
The response of the new regime, the Second Empire, took different forms. The first and best known was the process called Haussmannization. Though this process was not as coherent in theory as has sometimes been claimed, in practice the project clearly expressed certain principles: circulation, rationalization and attention to the city's mise-en-scène. We will not go into all of its features hereFootnote 23 – the opening up of wide boulevards, the creation of parks, the transformation of the water supply and transport systems, the shifting of the poorest populations to the margins of the city, the reorganization of access to the barracks and so on. The transformation was such that it became a benchmark for both France and Europe.
The stakes of this policy in the area of law and order are also well known – the wide avenues being supposed to hamper the erection of barricades and facilitate the displacement of troops. Less well known is that these responses also concerned the police force itself.Footnote 24 The most striking example was the 1854 reform, expedited on the authority of the emperor, which reproduced London's Metropolitan Police in Paris.Footnote 25 There were various motivations behind this reform beyond just social control. While it was partly to do with the concerns arising out of 1848 and a more global conception of the city, it also involved expectations and perspectives of a different kind. The reform aimed to prevent further uprisings, address concerns about crime and match the standard of the English capital, whose ‘bobbies’ impressed at the Great Exhibition of 1851. But it also sought to create public acceptance of the police force, and in this way integrate the government more fully into the Parisian social space. There is a combination of surveillance and seduction here that is typical of this regime.
This does not mean that these projects of reform were developed in conjunction with each other. Haussmann distrusted the police force, which he thought was too ‘soft’, and preferred to rely on the support of the troops or the municipal guards. Nevertheless, there is a clear connection between the operating principles of this police force and those supposed to govern the new ‘urban era’ (circulation, rationalization, mise-en-scène). The change was certainly a remarkable one: the number of sergents de ville was trebled, rising from 900 to 2,800, and there was a change in how law and order was practised. Instead of being organized around regular patrols by the various police units from their bases, or forays into crowds by non-uniformed detectives to pick up criminals and other offenders, the new system was based on the perpetual circulation of a sergent de ville through the Parisian streets. In a way, there was a shift in the spatial logic of law and order, from one based on the ‘point’ to one based on the ‘plane’. The Prefecture of Police also endeavoured to provide greater supervision, control and regulation of officer activities, and even though there was no training or real selection process, we can see a form of professionalization taking place. The change inevitably affected the whole of the ‘police system’. The national guard underwent a sharp period of decline after June 1848, which marked the end of the ‘citizen-soldier’.Footnote 26 Army theorists developed new military tactics for the garde de Paris and military troops: they were now to avoid having small stations scattered throughout the city, representing easily taken weapons reserves. Many stations were thus abandoned and left to the new sergents de ville. At the same time, though this was more obvious in the case of the soldiers, both groups were increasingly used to quell riots or street disturbances and were concentrated in larger, more detached barracks buildings.Footnote 27 The Caserne Napoleon for example, built in 1853 for a large number of military personnel and guards, was detached from its immediate built surrounds and located behind the Hôtel de Ville along the new arterial thoroughfares. Although they were the product of different initiatives, the various changes in the forces of law and order fitted together and are best appreciated as part of one vast reconfiguration. The changes worked hand in hand: one part of the forces of law and order was concentrated in specific sites so it could intervene in cases of unrest, while the other took care of everyday law and order in the city in a new way. The development can be seen as a form of functional specialization.
The ‘new police’ represented by the sergents de ville became, in the words of Maxime Du Camp, ‘the one we all know, which catches our eye at every moment and is in permanent and direct contact with the public through its army of sergents de ville’.Footnote 28 They were mainly former military personnel, better supervised than before but still untrained, and lived in the neighbourhoods they operated in. They gradually became part of the daily interactions that made up the fabric of urban life, though not without friction along the way. These interactions and confrontations ultimately produced a form of law and order that was more shared than imposed, going beyond the original intentions of the reformers.Footnote 29 We find here, in a way, the phenomenon of ‘normalization’ described by Michel Foucault (in particular as developed in his last books).Footnote 30 Various factors explain this process, apart from 1848. On the one hand, this new police fitted in with older expectations that became more pressing at the turn of the century. At the same time, it worked with many of the transformations of the urban environment in the 1850s to the 1870s: the rationalization of space and time, industrialization, the increased presence of the state within social spaces, the development of the media and so on. Despite the many tensions and oppositions, by the end of the 1860s these officers had become part of the everyday urban landscape. The ‘police system’ outlined above was profoundly reshaped during this time.
These reforms remind us of the multiple meanings and forms a ‘crisis’ can have, a particularly ‘urban’ one in this case, although the political, social, cultural and urban dimensions are once again intertwined. The changes in the 1850s also remind us that crises can arrive one after the other, and should no doubt be taken as a group in order to perceive the more complex trajectories of change. Taking up the analyses of sociologist Andrew Abbott, it seems that ‘turning points’ can take time and that a crisis by itself, identified as such, may be just one element in a broader process of reorganization.Footnote 31 The reform process in this case was more traditional in one sense, or more familiar from the perspective of police historians.Footnote 32 The political transition and the recognition of an impasse accelerated the latent transformations and changed their form or meaning. Because the changes were made at an opportune time by more permanent authorities using co-ordinated administrative resources (compared to 1848), the changes were deep and lasting. This fact only makes the experience of the Commune more interesting.
The Commune: overturning the ‘old order’
The Parisian insurrection of 1871 occurred in a very different context to February–June 1848. Unlike the February Revolution, it was a case of a ‘slow slide’.Footnote 33 The fall of the Second Empire, the proclamation of the Republic at the Hôtel de Ville and the ongoing military defeats heightened tensions in the capital, at that time the most Republican city in the country alongside Lyon. Surrounded since 19 September, Paris endured a painful blockade, in a climate of ‘siege fever’ that intensified after the armistice and the election of a conservative Assembly in February.
The forces of law and order, however, were already under threat by 4 September: from that moment, the Republican discourse of the 1860s moved from being a minority viewpoint to the dominant one. While it now incorporated elements from the memory of the Second Empire, the ‘negative’ discourse from the beginning of the nineteenth century took hold once again. The police forces of the Second Empire, and the sergents de ville in particular this time, were again described as politically motivated, ambivalent in their loyalties, and violent. They seemed to exemplify a regime that was solely authoritarian and police-focused. As a result, the new Prefect of Police, the liberal de Kératry, once again dissolved the sergents de ville unit. They were rapidly restored again, however, on 19 September, making this the shortest interruption of the service in the nineteenth century.
There were many reasons for this: it was a matter of strengthening military defences and ensuring law and order in the besieged capital, which now seemed difficult to achieve without more professionalized forces. The government of national defence, whose members were also divided among themselves, distrusted the national guard (which had been reactivated during the summer) and its desire to take care of law and order themselves. The police once again underwent a symbolic transformation for this comeback: the same officers who had served the Second Empire were now called ‘guardians of the public peace’ (gardiens de la paix publique). They were once again disarmed, shaved and given a more discreet uniform that soon attracted gibes (people called them ‘monks’). These reiterations are fascinating subjects of analysis, but the police appear to have been more resistant this time to the political transition, no doubt due to the effects of the changes of previous years.
From this moment, however, the national guards reappropriated the police stations in the working-class neighbourhoods of the north-east, which the Prefecture, being unable to react, was forced to accept. The situation became clearer after the events of 18 March, and the ‘recapture of the city by its fringes’. At four o’clock that afternoon, Thiers ordered the whole national and municipal administration to leave for Versailles. The Commune thus presents a remarkable instance of an administrative tabula rasa, which makes it an ideal vantage point for studying modes of urban administration in times of crisis.
The various authorities that more or less ran the capital (the elected Commune, the central committee, the vigilance committees and so on) had varying conceptions of power, but they agreed on two points in the area of policing. The first shared platform was the still-hazy project from 1848 of a ‘democratic and social republic’, with its new understanding of ways of delegating public authority. Linked to this was the notion that the old police forces should be removed in favour of a law and order maintained by citizens.
There was once again a proliferation of forces taking on the task of policing.Footnote 34 The various national guard units very quickly intervened on the local level in Paris. There was once again a resurrection of the revolutionary model from the beginning of the century, intensified by the situation of the national and civil wars, which facilitated symbolic associations with the sans-culottes and soldiers of year II. In addition, there were improvised administrative arrangements at the local level. The most visible sign of this was the takeover of official functions by the general public, a phenomenon with roots in earlier times – it had already been seen during the French Revolution – but which re-emerged in a particularly vigorous form.Footnote 35 Tailors, accountants, office workers and locksmiths became tax collectors and town clerks, but also commissaires de police and inspectors. Julien Léveillé, a 39-year-old cabinetmaker, thus became the commissaire de police of the Enfants-Rouges district at the beginning of April, by appointment of the elected council of the Hôtel de Ville.Footnote 36 There were in fact very diverse modes of access to these positions,Footnote 37 and once again there was a complete transformation of the principles underpinning these roles. This is clear from an examination of practices at ‘ground level’, made possible by the military court records.Footnote 38 We see a blurring of the distinction between judicial and sub-judicial matters, as well that between public and private. Arrests and punishments were carried out on behalf of the ‘Law’, without the burden of the more precise definitions of the former codes and regulations. The communal form of law and order attempting to establish itself was thus local, discontinuous and porous. Negotiations were constant, as were the discussions of the principles of justice in police stations and courts – somewhat on the model of labour tribunals. It looked a little like the ‘intermediate public spaces’ described by Alain Cottereau.Footnote 39 Ultimately, arrests were random and short-lived, except, notably, in the case of the designated ‘enemies’ of the Commune. This is the final interesting point.
It seems that the old institutions were once again preserved and taken over by leaders recognized by the Commune proper. This was the case with the Prefecture of Police, renamed with typical Communard irony as the ‘Ex-Prefecture of Police’, and controlled by the Blanquist Raoul Rigault. As the conflict with Versailles became more entrenched, the inspectors of the ‘Ex-Prefecture’, while continuing to police prostitution and theft, gradually took on the task of pursuing the officers of the previous order – the gendarmes, republican guards and sergents de ville. This pursuit took different forms (denunciations by neighbours, intervention of the national guard, searches by inspectors), but it was one of the distinctive features of the period. The hostage shootings on 24 and 26 May (whose casualties included members of the clergy and Paris guards) are well known, but the phenomenon was more widespread. There were arrests, depending on the local conditions, of the few officers remaining in Paris, their families or close friends. There were also invasions of the private homes of officers – who were based, as mentioned above, in their own neighbourhoods – and searches that often left the homes to the mercy of the crowd. We see signs in this of the desire to purge public space of the dross of the old order, which was also characteristic of the Commune.Footnote 40 All of these different aspects together represent ‘what the Commune did to the police’. In comparison with 1848, despite the different kinds of information source, it seems that the challenge to the old forces and their operations was taken further, but it also did not last as long. With the Bloody Week of May 1871, the experiment ended in bloodshed and normality was restored through an enormous judicial undertaking whose purpose was the ‘return to order’ of institutions, practices and conceptual frameworks.Footnote 41 The old police officers were back by summer. There were few purges, except in the upper levels of the hierarchy; even in Belleville, one of the main flashpoints of the uprising, many officers moved back into their former stations and lodgings.Footnote 42 There were some changes: the sergents de ville unit was increased by 1,000 men, and the memory of the Commune weighed for a while on relationships at ground level. But overall, continuity prevailed. The following decade above all consolidated the trends of the 1860s: the end of the national guard, the elimination of the Republican guards, the extension of the powers of the local police officers (gardiens de la paix) and so on. The face that emerged under the Second Empire became more defined.
This new political crisis again invites certain observations. Once more, we find the role played by the memory of the Revolution, in the same form, and its contribution to the redefinition of the old situation and finding new solutions in the area of policing.
The rejection of the old ‘police system’ seems to have been deeper and more radical, however, than in 1848 (the police commissaires were replaced this time, for example), even though this system had become more ‘professionalized’ and specialized in the intervening period. Perhaps these two movements actually went hand in hand, the rejection being all the stronger for the fact that the professionalization under way was already well advanced.
We cannot avoid noting once again, however, the resilience of the police institution, even though it was more deeply affected. Despite its change of name, the Prefecture of Police and a number of its functions and positions (such as commissaire and inspector) remained intact.
Finally, the medium-term effects do not seem to have been as wide-ranging as in 1848. The post-Commune period' gave rise to an enormous debate between the municipal council and the new heads of the Prefecture of Police, with on one side an attempt to municipalize and on the other an attempt to militarize the police, resulting in the maintenance of the status quo.
The political crisis and policing crisis in this case were thus both more profound and less effective in the medium term.
Conclusion
Comparing different historical moments, even two as close together as February–June 1848 and March–May 1871, is always a delicate process. The sources of information are not always the same and specific contexts affect the phenomena observed (an unexpected revolution on a European scale that still maintained basic political frameworks in one case, or a simmering crisis in the context of war and more cut off from the rest of the country in the other). Nevertheless, each of these crises provides specific insights into longer-term transformations and echoes each other in certain ways, allowing comparisons to be made.
In the first place, each political crisis seemed to reorganize the conceptual frame of reference. The old police force was immediately discredited, based on a collective imaginary that ran throughout the century, while the memory of the Revolution re-emerged and coloured the situation with its conceptual categories. The reference to the French Revolution of 1789–93 played an essential role, adapted to each different situation – the establishment of a national citizen's guard (garde nationale citoyenne), the idea of policing by and for the people and the election of police commissaires, especially under the Paris Commune of 1792.Footnote 43 The crises also seemed to involve a process of ‘disembedding’, that is, where police work began and ended was less clear-cut and tended to extend beyond the actors and institutions normally responsible for these tasks. Finally, on each occasion, those involved in the revolutionary movement insisted that the new powers and its police should have a municipal dimension. For these reasons, these crises of the second half of the nineteenth century do seem to have produced an alternative model of urban policing. It is worth noting that while this process was led by thinkers, activists and political leaders, they were not the only actors. It was more a matter of ideas and practices that were familiar to the general population if not shared by them, and that become part of a repertoire of insurgent practice in the nineteenth century.Footnote 44
At the same time, the police institutions were never completely undermined and we see in each case a form of institutional resistance and then resilience. This was because the new groups in power needed a force for maintaining law and order, but it was more broadly due to the nature of institutions themselves.Footnote 45 The reflection on the different relationship to time has to be continued here, between on the one hand institutions that were defined by their ability to produce stability, regularity and routine – especially when they were responsible for policing – and on the other periods that appeared as times of rupture, reversal and the multiplication of possibilities.Footnote 46 These cases could then be an avenue of further analysis on the growing presence of government administrations in the nineteenth century and their integration into social life, as well as the nature of the shifts experienced by urban societies during such crises.Footnote 47
It is also interesting to note that these revolutionary episodes, major events on a political and even cultural level, had a weaker impact on the organization of the police, less than the so-called ‘urban crisis’ in the middle of the century, which itself was part of longer-term processes on a transnational level. This does not mean that the effect of these crises was negligible, but that these different timeframes, their scopes and contradictions, need to be considered together. This allows us to contextualize these crises and their effects within the broader configurations they take place in, and make comparisons on that basis. Above all, it allows us to glimpse both a deeper and more discontinuous history of police organizations, and thus of the urban reality of which they were a thread.Footnote 48 This may be a way of moving away from the usual readings of the process of ‘modernization’, which often rely on linear and all-encompassing viewpoints.
It remains for us to reflect on the fact, in conclusion, that the crises discussed here were the last two revolutions of the French nineteenth century. The decline of the revolutionary phenomenon and its replacement by other kinds of socio-political movement and opposition was no doubt connected to changes in the urban fabric and changes in modes of policing (both its ordinary adjustments and the extraordinary policies arising out of the crises). But it was more broadly the product of a profound change in the power relations of which both sets of changes were a part. This process can be seen in other urban and rural contexts, in France and Europe. The Parisian case remains of special interest, due to its overall importance and these historical episodes. The uniformed policeman in any case ultimately became the symbol of ‘everyday’ urban law and order, an even more integral part of it after 1880. Significantly, the next police ‘crisis’ was the security crisis of 1907. This event revealed a shift from the labouring classes/dangerous classes association towards an opposition between ‘honest’ people and the ‘criminal class’, and showed that the new relationship between the police officer and the city was now a given. The situation was thus a different one, without thereby, of course, being a fixed one.
