“I Promise Never to Speak to Anyone”: Police Practices and the Bastille

Bauer, Nicole

doi:10.1007/978-3-031-12236-1_5

Nicole Bauer ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-6857-4447²

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Abstract

The Jansenists may have deliberately set out to change attitudes towards secrecy in politics, but the police, the arm of the state often most visible and yet seemingly most opaque to ordinary people, contributed to this change as well. The police, like the royal court, came to be an object of criticism due to perceived extremes of secrecy and abuses of power. The Paris police had indeed maintained an intense regimen of secrecy, but through these practices, meant to deter resistance and the spread of rumors, the police only fanned the flames of rumor further, especially rumors of horrors and abuses in state prisons.

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Notes

1.
Bibliothèque historique de la ville de Paris Pierre-François Palloy, Discours à Messieurs les membres du Directoire des Districts, Cantons et des Municipalités du Departement (1790) CP 5252.
2.
For more on the imagination and rumors in pre-revolutionary France, see Jan Goldstein, The Post-revolutionary Self: Politics and Psyche in France, 1750–1850 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005).
3.
See James Van Horn Melton, The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Arlette Farge, Dire et mal dire: l’opinion publique au XVIIIème siècle (Paris: Seuil, 1992); Lisa Jane Graham, If the King Only Knew: Seditious Speech in the Reign of Louis XV (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000); Sarah Maza, Private Lives and Public Affairs: The Causes Célèbres of Prerevolutionary France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Keith Michael Baker, Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); David A. Bell, Lawyers and Citizens: The Making of a Political Elite in Old Regime France (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991); Roger Chartier, Les origins culturelles de la Révolution française (Paris: Seuil, 2000); Keith M. Baker, “Defining the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century France: Variations on a Theme by Habermas,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), 181–211; Dena Goodman, “Public Sphere and Private Life: Toward a Synthesis of Current Historiographical Approaches to the Old Regime,” History and Theory 31: 1 (1992): 1–20; Mona Ozouf, “L’Opinion Publique,” in The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture, Vol. I, ed. Keith M. Baker (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1987); and Press and Politics in Pre-revolutionary France, eds. Jack R. Censer and Jeremy Popkin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).
4.
See Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991).
5.
See Dana R. Villa, “Postmodernism and the Public Sphere,” The American Political Science Review 86: 3 (1992): 712–721; Michel Foucault, “On Politics and Ethics,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984); Ashley Woodward, Lyotard and the Inhuman Condition: Reflections on Nihilism, Information, and Art (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018); Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969); and Benjamin Nathans, “Habermas’s ‘Public Sphere’ in the Era of the French Revolution,” French Historical Studies 16: 3 (1990): 620–644; and Harvey Chisick, “Public Opinion and Political Culture in France during the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century,” English Historical Review CXVII 470 (2002): 48–77.
6.
Lyotard famously defined postmodernism as “incredulity towards metanarratives.” See Jean-François Lyotard, La Condition postmoderne: rapport sur le savoir (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1979).
7.
Robert Darnton, Poetry and the Police: Communication Networks in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2010), 131.
8.
Steven L. Kaplan, “Note sur les commissaires de police de Paris au XVIIIème siècle,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 28: 4 (October 1981): 669–686. See also Catherine Denys, “The Development of Police Forces in Urban Europe in the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of Urban History 36: 3 (May 2010): 332–344.
9.
Alan Williams, The Police of Paris, 1718–1789 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979), xvi–xvii.
10.
Williams, xvii.
11.
Sir William Mildmay, The Police of France (London: T. Harrison, 1766), v.
12.
Louis Mercier, Tableau de Paris, Vol. I (Amsterdam: [s.n.], 1783–1788), 184, Vol. III, 264–266.
13.
Mercier, Tableau de Paris, Vol. III, 287.
14.
Ibid., 288–289.
15.
Ibid., 289.
16.
Révolutions de Paris (18–25 July 1789), 11.
17.
Révolutions de Paris (2–8 August 1789), 31.
18.
See Arlette Farge, Dire et mal dire: l’opinion publique au XVIIIème siècle (Paris: Seuil, 1992).
19.
BA MS 12435.
20.
BA MS 12602.
21.
Dossiers des prisonniers (1773) BA MS 12,435.
22.
Ibid.
23.
Ibid.
24.
BA MS 12509.
25.
Ibid.
26.
Ibid.
27.
Ibid. Service des porteclefs.
28.
Reglements et consignes: Consigne du service pour les porteclefs BA MS 12602.
29.
Ibid.
30.
Ibid. Reglements et consignes.
31.
Ibid.
32.
Ibid.
33.
Ibid.
34.
Ibid.
35.
See Lisa Silverman, Tortured Subjects: Pain, Truth and the Body in Early Modern France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), passim.
36.
Reglements et Consignes BA MS 12602.
37.
Ibid. Consigne devant les cazernes.
38.
Ibid.
39.
Ibid.
40.
Ibid. Consigne du chateau.
41.
Ibid.
42.
Ibid. Mémoire pour le chirugeon major de la Bastille, 1750.
43.
Arlette Farge and Jacques Revel explore the growing suspicion and antipathy towards the police after 1750 in their study on missing children in eighteenth-century Paris. See Farge and Revel, The Vanishing Children of Paris: Rumor and Politics Before the French Revolution, trans. Claudia Miéville (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991).
44.
Sortie des Prisonniers BA MS 12581.
45.
Ibid.
46.
Mercier, Tableau de Paris, Vol. III, 290.
47.
Simon Nicolas Henri Linguet, Memoirs of the Bastille. Containing a Full Exposition of the Mysterious Policy and Despotic Oppression of the French Government, in the Interior Administration of that State-Prison. Interspersed with a Variety of Curious Anecdotes. Translated from the French of the Celebrated Mr. Linguet, Who Was Imprisoned There from September 1780, to May 1782 (London: G. Kearsly, 1783), 8–9.
48.
Ibid., 64.
49.
Ibid., 23–24.
50.
A register of deaths from 1720 in the Bastille, reads “le nommé de Lian( ?) est décédé le 3 décembre 1720: il a été enterré au jardin le lendemain n’ayant donné aucune marque de la religion catholique.” Sortie des Prisonniers BA MS 12581.
51.
La Bastille, ou, L’enfer des vivants: à travers les archives de la Bastille, ed. Elise Dutray-Lecoin and Danielle Muzerelle (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale de France, 2010), 165.
52.
Dossier des prisonniers BA MS 12507.
53.
Ibid.
54.
Ibid.
55.
Ibid.
56.
BA MS 12507.
57.
Dossier des Prisonniers BA MS 10895.
58.
Dossier des Prisonniers BA MS 12432.
59.
Ibid.
60.
Dossier des Prisonniers BA MS 12,351.
61.
Ibid.
62.
Ibid.
63.
Ibid.
64.
Jean-Paul Marat, Les chaînes de l’Esclavage, ed. Michel Vovelle (Paris: Editions Complexe, 1988), 144.
65.
Ibid., xlviii.
66.
See The Press in the French Revolution, 17.
67.
Ibid., 9.
68.
Marat, 23, 236.
69.
Pierre Manuel, La Police de Paris dévoilée (Paris: Chez J. B. Garnery, 1793), frontispiece.
70.
Manuel, v, 1.
71.
Ibid., 2, 10, 13.
72.
Révolutions de Paris (3 August–28 October 1793), 89.
73.
BA MS 12,351.
74.
BA MS 12,852.
75.
Ibid.
76.
Ibid.
77.
Ibid.

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Nicole Bauer

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Bauer, N. (2023). “I Promise Never to Speak to Anyone”: Police Practices and the Bastille. In: Tracing the Shadow of Secrecy and Government Transparency in Eighteenth-Century France. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12236-1_5

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12236-1_5
Published: 01 December 2022
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-12235-4
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