Paris as It Was and as It Is / A Sketch Of The French Capital, Illustrative Of The Effects Of The Revolution

by Francis William Blagdon

This establishment is necessary and useful for maintaining order and tranquillity in a city like Paris, where the very extremes of luxury and wretchedness are continually in collision. I mean useful, when no abuse is made of its power; and it is to be hoped that the present government of France is too wise and too just to convert an institution of public utility into an instrument of private oppression.

Since the machinery of the police was first put in order by M. D'ARGENSON, in 1697, its wheels and springs have been continually multiplied by the thirteen ministers who succeeded him in that department. The last of these was the celebrated M. LENOIR.

The present Minister of the Police, M. FOUCHÉ, has, it seems, adopted, in a great measure, the means put in practice before the revolution. His administration, according to general report, bears most resemblance to that of M. LENOIR: he is said, however, to have improved on that vigilant magistrate: but he surpasses him, I am told, more in augmentation of expenses and agents, than in real changes.[[1]]

In selecting from the before-mentioned work the following widely scattered passages, and assembling them as a piece of Mosaic, it has been my endeavour to enable you to form an impartial judgment of the police of Paris, by exhibiting it with all its perfections and imperfections. Borrowing the language of MERCIER, I shall trace the institution through all its ramifications, and, in pointing out its effects, I shall "nothing extenuate, nor set down aught in malice."

If we take it for granted, that the police of Paris is now exercised on the same plan as that pursued towards the close of the old régime, this sketch will be the more interesting, as its resemblance to the original will exempt me from adding a single stroke from my own pencil.

"D'ARGENSON was severe," says MERCIER, "perhaps because he felt, in first setting the machine in motion, a resistance which his successors have less experienced. For a long time it was imagined that a Minister of Police ought to be harsh; he ought to be firm only. Several of these magistrates have laid on too heavy a hand, because they were not acquainted with the people of Paris; a people of quick feeling, but not ferocious,[a]2]] whose motions are to be divined, and consequently easy to be led. Whoever should be void of pity in that post, would be a monster."

MERCIER then gives the fragment by FONTENELLE, on the police of Paris and on M. D'ARGENSON, of which I shall select only what may be necessary for elucidating the main subject.

"The inhabitants of a well-governed city," says FONTENELLE, "enjoy the good order which is there established, without considering what trouble it costs those who establish or preserve it, much in the same manner as all mankind enjoy the regularity of the motions of celestial bodies, without having any knowledge of them, and even the more the good order of a police resembles by its uniformity that of the celestial bodies, the more is it imperceptible, and, consequently, the more it is unknown, the greater is its perfection. But he who would wish to know it and fathom it, would be terrified. To keep up perpetually in a city, like Paris, an immense consumption, some sources of which may always be dried up by a variety of accidents; to repress the tyranny of shop-keepers in regard to the public, and at the same time animate their commerce; to prevent the mutual usurpations of the one over the other, often difficult to discriminate; to distinguish in a vast crowd all those who may easily conceal there a hurtful industry; to purge society of them, or tolerate them only as far as they can be useful to it by employments which no others but themselves would undertake, or discharge so well; to keep necessary abuses within the precise limits of necessity which they are always ready to over-leap; to envelop them in the obscurity to which they ought to be condemned, and not even draw them from it by chastisement too notorious; to be ignorant of what it is better to be ignorant of than to punish, and to punish but seldom and usefully; to penetrate by subterraneous avenues into the bosom of families, and keep for them the secrets which they have not confided, as long as it is not necessary to make use of them; to be present every where without being seen; in short, to move or stop at pleasure an immense multitude, and be the soul ever-acting, and almost unknown, of this great body: these are, in general, the functions of the chief magistrate of the police. It should seem that one man alone could not be equal to them, either on account of the quantity of things of which he must be informed, or of that of the views which he must follow, or of the application which he must exert, or of the variety of conduct which he most observe, and of the characters which he must assume: but the public voice will answer whether M. D'ARGENSON has been equal to them.

"Under him, cleanliness, tranquillity, plenty, and safety were brought to the highest degree of perfection in this city. And, indeed, the late king (Lewis XIV) relied entirely on his care respecting Paris. He could have given an account of a person unknown who should have stolen into it in the dark; this person, whatever ingenuity he exerted in concealing himself, was always under his eye; and if, at last, any one escaped him, at least what produced almost the same effect, no one would have dared to think himself well-concealed.

"Surrounded and overwhelmed in his audiences by a crowd of people chiefly of the lower class, little informed themselves of what brought them, warmly agitated by interests very trifling, and frequently very ill understood, accustomed to supply the place of discourse by senseless clamour, he neither betrayed the inattention nor the disdain which such persons or such subjects might have occasioned."