Adam Zamoyski - Phantom Terror - The Threat of Revolution and the Repression of Liberty 1789-1848

In the interests of controlling the spread of undesirable attitudes, the Paris police confiscated unauthorised literature. Books which undermined the orthodox view on religion, the law, the monarchy, history, philosophy, science and morality might be banned, and were liable to seizure and burning. Their authors and publishers might be gaoled, but few were, most of those under threat preferring to spend a few months abroad, and enforcement of this legislation being among the police’s least favourite tasks.3

The Paris police prided themselves on keeping abreast of what was going on in the capital. The routine inspection of inns, wine shops, eating houses and brothels yielded information on what was said and done within these establishments, while a network of spies, called mouches (flies) and later mouchards , provided additional information. One eighteenth-century lieutenant general of police allegedly boasted that when three people came together for a conversation, one of them was sure to be one of his agents. These showed a pronounced appetite for catching amorous priests or prominent noblemen in flagrante , and describing in graphic detail exactly what they did with their partners. Antoine de Sartine, lieutenant general of police during the reign of Louis XV, was particularly active in this respect, ‘spying on the shameful secrets’ of his subjects ‘to amuse a king even more libertine than himself, with all the nudities of vice’, in the words of a later commissioner of police who had immersed himself (with evident relish) in the reports.4

Both the lieutenant general of the police of Paris, who by the end of the century commanded some 1,200 men armed like soldiers, and the four inspecteurs , who marshalled the mouches , bought their posts from the crown, and their principal concern was to recoup that investment and make a fortune by accepting bribes. In the words of the historian Richard Cobb, whose knowledge of the subject was unmatched, the inspecteur ‘was out for a quiet life, and asked only to be left alone with his pregnant girls, his drunks, his dead horses and run-over errand boys, his filles de joie , his runaway children, and his everlasting plaques ’. The police were an administrative corporate concern rather than an instrument of state control. And if the capital was being more and more regulated and invigilated, this was not true of other towns, and rural areas never saw more than the occasional troop of Maréchaussée trotting down the road.5

The only other major state to have a police force was Austria, or rather the Habsburg monarchy. Following her defeat at the hands of Prussia in the mid-eighteenth century, the Empress Maria Theresa had felt an urgent need to modernise the administration of her dominions, which involved an extension of state control. She too felt a need to know what was being thought and said. While her police relied on spies, known as ‘bluebottles’, she had issued a direct appeal to her subjects to assist them by sending in anonymous information on anything they believed might be of interest, and the response was enthusiastic. Her successor Joseph II carried on in this vein, and created a police force unlike any other in Europe.6

It owed its structure to Johann Anton, Count von Pergen, who believed that the state could not function properly unless the government controlled every aspect of the lives of the emperor’s subjects. They were therefore required to register by place of residence, and householders were made responsible for their lodgers and guests. Pergen wished to know everything they were doing, and his spies lurked in shops, coffee houses, gardens, theatres and any other place where people might meet. They were recruited from every class of society, and included members of the nobility as well as priests, doctors, shopkeepers, prostitutes and servants of all kinds. In addition, ordinary citizens were encouraged to report on their peers, and this practice became a vital element in the police’s information-gathering work.7

The Emperor Joseph believed in shielding his subjects from what he saw as the false philosophy and ‘fanaticism’ of the Enlightenment. He circumscribed the educational system and in 1782 abolished the University of Graz. He strengthened an already strict censorship, which came naturally to him in view of his loathing for ‘scribblers’. As well as covering the usual subjects such as religion and the monarchy, it was focused on promoting ‘the right way of thinking’. He was wary of ‘sects’, as he referred to almost any association, from Masonic lodges to reading clubs, in the conviction that they spread ‘errors’. Foreigners were the subject of intense suspicion, and they were watched assiduously, as were the clergy.8

Elsewhere in Europe, what police supervision there was tended to be restricted to towns and was in the hands of guilds and magistrates. In Italy, the only force fighting crime were sbirri employed by the senate of a city or regional potentates. They were variously described as ‘infamous’, ‘profligate’ and ‘corrupt’; and their behaviour differed little from that of the brigands they were supposed to combat. Any need to impose order by force was met with troops, usually the ruler’s guards stationed in the capital, or by some kind of more or less volunteer parish or corporate watch.9

In England, nothing much had changed in this field since the Middle Ages. According to the principle set down in the Statute of Winchester of 1285, every parish and city was responsible for policing itself. Magistrates, or Justices of the Peace, drawn from the propertied classes and often clergymen, appointed constables who were ordinary citizens serving yearly terms of office in rotation. The magistrates had the power to enrol additional constables and to issue warrants for the arrest of individuals. They could also order the dispersal of mobs by reading the Riot Act of 1714, and call on the country yeomanry, the militia or regular troops if they did not do so within the hour. The other regional authority was the lord lieutenant, a Tudor creation. Usually the foremost landowner in the county, he represented the crown and presided over the meetings of the county’s magistrates.

The administration of law and order in towns was on a similarly archaic basis, and only in London, the most populous city in Europe, had it been modernised, by Sir John Fielding, half-brother of the novelist Henry, a Justice of the Peace who in 1748 took over as chief magistrate, sitting at Bow Street. He persuaded retiring constables to stay on, and built up a force of some 150 experienced and salaried ‘runners’, as they were known, supplemented by over eight hundred volunteers. The inadequacy of these forces was exposed by the Gordon Riots of 1780, when a mob went on the rampage. It was only after several days and the intervention of troops that order was restored: 210 rioters were killed and 245 wounded, of whom seventy-five subsequently died. The physical damage caused to the capital was, according to a recent study, not surpassed until the Blitz in the 1940s. In 1785 the government introduced a Bill to establish a regular police force, but this was thrown out by Parliament: there was a deep-seated feeling that such a body would be an affront to English liberties.10

The ease with which the Revolution had taken place in France demonstrated that for all the boasting about knowing everything that went on in Paris, the authorities had been taken entirely unawares. (This was grist to the mill of those who believed in the Illuminati conspiracy, who argued that the Revolution could only have been carried out without the police knowing what was brewing by an efficient and ramified secret organisation.) Those who had seized power were made uncomfortably aware of their own vulnerability. Two days after the Bastille was stormed, the lieutenant general of police resigned, and the task of keeping order was entrusted to the armed civilians of the newly formed National Guard.