Abstract
Tsardom’s political émigrés and the political police who pursued them inhabited a European world deep in political and social turmoil. This world endured growing, although at times exaggerated, social, economic and political tensions as the established orders believed themselves threatened by new and often only vaguely identifiable forces. One thing is certain: these forces appeared in common to demand alterations in the status quo. Arno Mayer argues that the elites overreacted to the threats against their preeminent positions in the order of things. They feared the pace of change, the radicalism of the new mass politics, the weaknesses of their own state apparatus and grossly exaggerated the renegade nature of the industrial worker and the professional bourgeoisie. But it is the perception of disorder, not necessarily the reality, that motivates governments to turn to their forces of order.
All is changed in civilization. It has made fortunate progress but has brought new vices. There is no longer the same stability any more. A new sort of trouble has arisen through the previously unknown pressure of public opinion. While the security of the state and public repose are exposed to more dangers, repression has lost its speed and even strength as a result of the guarantee of individual liberty … The most a government may achieve is to influence its people, and now its means are completely changed. Religion and morality are now only weak supports for the law.
Joseph Fouché to the Duke of Wellington, 1816
We are moving to a general revolution. If the transformation under way follows its course and meets no obstacle, if popular understanding [raison populaire] continues to develop progressively, if the education of the lower classes [classes intermédiares] suffers no interruption, nations will be levelled to an equality in liberty. If that transformation is halted, nations will be levelled to equality in despotism.
Excerpt from a pamphlet written by François-René de Chateaubriand, after the July Days, 18301
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Notes
Both of these quotations are cited in: D. E. Emerson, Metternich and the Political Police: Security and Subversion in the Hapsburg Monarchy (1815–1830) (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1968), 137, 182.
For thorough and fascinating discussions offering different perspectives on the evolution of European society from the second half of the nineteenth century to the outbreak of the First World War see: A. J. Mayer, The Persistence of the Old Regime: Europe to the Great War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981)
N. Stone, Europe Transformed 1878–1919 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984).
C. Tilly, et al, The Rebellious Century, 1830–1930 (London: Dent, 1975), 55. Tilley’s time frames are slightly different from mine, because he has not included the waves of Russian strikes which struck periodically beginning in the mid-1890s.
F. S. Zuckerman, The Tsarist Secret Police in Russian Society, 1880–1917 (Basingstoke: Macmillan — now Palgrave Macmillan, 1996), 84–5, 120, 190–1.
M. A. Miller, Kropotkin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 173–4
R. B. Jensen, ‘The International Anti-Anarchist Conference of 1898 and the Origins of Interpol’, JCH, 16, 2, (April 1981): 324–5.
B. L. Ingraham, Political Crime in Europe: A Comparative Study of France, Germany and England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 168
H. Liang, The Rise of Modern Police and the European State System from Metternich to the Second World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 157–8, 168
R. W. Lougee, ‘The Anti-Revolution Bill of 1894 in Wilhelmine Germany’, CEH, 15, 3, (September 1982); 225; Jensen, ‘The International Anti-Anarchist Conference’, 324–5.
R. Pipes, Russia Under the Old Regime (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1974; Penguin Books, 1977), 293–5.
R. Fosdick, European Police Systems (New York: The Century Co., 1915), 167
D. Bayley, Patterns of Policing: A Comparative International Analysis (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1985), 211.
R. B. Jensen, Liberty and Order: The Theory and Practice of Italian Public Security Policy, 1848 to the Crisis of the 1890s (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1991), 165–6.
J. Galtier-Boissière, Mysteries of the French Secret Police, trans. Ronald Leslie-Melville (London: Stanley Paul & Co. Ltd., 1938), 216–17, 228–9.
H. C. Payne, The Police State of Napoleon Bonaparte 1851–1860 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1966), 64–5.
Ibid., 282; H. C. Payne and Henry Grosshaus, ‘The Exiled Revolutionaries and the French Political Police in the 1850s’, AHR, 68 (1963): 956–7.
J. Berli, ‘A Republican Political Police? Policing under the Third Republic’, in The Policing of Politics in the Twentieth Century: Historical Perspectives, ed. Mark Mazower (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1997), 2.
J. Mayeur and Madeleine Reberioux, The Third Republic from its Origins to the Great War, trans. J. R. Foster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 21, 37–40, 46, 50, 54, 71, 74. Much of the discussion about French society that follows is derived from this work.
P. Kropotkin, Memoirs of a Revolutionist (London, 1899), 2: 258.
J. Berlière, Le Préfet Lépine: Vers La Naissance de la Police Moderne, (Paris: Editions de Noël, 1993) 8, 108.
J. Berliére, Le Monde de polices en France XIXe-XXe siècles (Paris, 1996), 149.
Ibid., 21; Brian Chapman, Police State (London: Pall Mall Ltd., 1970), 87–8; Richard Bach Jensen, Liberty and Order: The Theory and Practice of Italian Public Security Policy, 215–16, citation 17.
Ibid., 114–16, 158; Berlière, ‘The Professionalisation of the Police Under the Third Republic, 1875–1914’, in Policing Western Europe: Politics, Professionalism and Public Order, 1850–1940, eds C. Emsely and B. Weinberger (Westport Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1991), 36, 42–5, P. J. Stead, The Police of France (New York: Macmillan Inc., 1983), 60.
J. A. Davis, Conflict and Control: Law and Order in Nineteenth Century Italy (Basing— stoke: Macmillan — now Palgrave Macmillan, 1988), 314–16, 336.
For a succinct discussion of the Carbonari see: C. Emsley, Gendarmes and the State in Nineteenth Century Europe (Oxford University Press, 1999), Chapter 13.
R. B. Jensen, ‘Police Reform and Social Reform: Italy from the Crisis of the 1890s to the Giolittian Era’, CJH, 10 (1989): 194–5
D. Snyder and W. Kelly, ‘Industrial Violence in Italy, 1878–1903’, AJS, 82 (July 1976): 139.
For a through and elegant discussion of this subject see: M. Raeff, The Well-Ordered Police State: Social and Institutional Change through Law in the Germanies and Russia 1600–1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983).
A. Lüdtke, Police and State in Prussia, 1815–1850, trans. Peter Burgess (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 70.
E. G. Spencer, Police and the Social Order in German Cities: The Düsseldorf District, 1848–1914 (DeKalb Illinois: Northern Illinois University Press, 1992), 38–9.
Tilley et al., The Rebellious Century, 204; Spencer, Police and the Social Order, 53, 66, 80; K. S. Pinson, Modern Germany: Its History and Civilization, 2nd edn (London: Collier-Macmillan, 1966), 210–11.
Quoted in: P. T. Smith, Policing Victorian London: Political Policing Public Order and the London Metropolitan Police (Westport Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985), 55.
C. Andrew, Her Majesty’s Secret Service: the Making of the British Intelligence Community (New York: Viking, 1986), 15.
B. Porter, The Origins of the Vigilant State: The London Metropolitan Police Special Branch before the First World War (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1987), 13.
B. Porter, Plots and Paranoia: A History of Political Espionage in Britain, 1790–1988, (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 99; Andrew, Her Majesty’s Secret Service, 16–17.
Bernard Porter, ‘The British Government and Political Refugees, c. 1880–1914’, in From the Other Shore: Political Emigrants in Britain, ed. John Slatter (London: Frank Cass, 1984), 24.
A. Lansdowne, A Life’s Reminiscences of Scotland Yard (London: Leadenhall Press, 1890) (reprinted, Garland Publishing, New York, 1984, passim); Smith, Policing Victorian London, 77; Fosdick, European Police Systems, 227.
Lüdtke, Police and State in Prussia, xvii; Ingraham, Political Crime in Europe, 164–5, 169; Kirchheimer, Political Justice: The Use of Legal Procedures for Political Ends (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), 36.
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© 2003 Fredric S. Zuckerman
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Zuckerman, F.S. (2003). Europe in Turmoil: Protest, Violence and Maintaining Order in a Changing World. In: The Tsarist Secret Police Abroad. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230514935_1
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