Introduction

Abstract

In the middle of the eighteenth century, Europe’s absolutist rulers, seeking a model police force, looked to France. Paris appeared the best-policed city in Europe; one Lieutenant of the Paris police allegedly boasted that when three persons gathered for a conversation, one of them was sure to be his agent. Englishmen, with notions of liberty which they maintained set them apart from most people in continental Europe, regarded the French system with horror; the last thing they wanted were the ‘spies’ of the Paris Lieutenant, or the militarised, mounted policemen who patrolled provincial French roads. In 1829, however, the Metropolitan Police were established in London; ostentatiously this was a civilian force, unarmed, uniformed in top hat and tails, and with orders to prevent crime. Coincidentally a uniformed civilian police, the sergents de ville, also took to the streets of Paris in 1829. Twenty five years later, when Napoleon III sought to improve the Paris police, he looked to the Metropolitan Police of London. So too did other police reformers, whether in autocratic Berlin or democratic New York. By the middle of the nineteenth century the model police force was that of London. A neat reversal of roles appears to have taken place between England and France in the space of a century.