This chapter focuses on the period of the French Revolution, which saw a greater emphasis on the creation of police institutions and particularly fostered developments in political policing designed to check any one or any group that appeared to threaten the state. The revolution, the wars, and the politics of the period helped to shape the police institutions of Europe for the generations that spanned the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries. They also contributed to the extension of what the French term haute police and which, in 1841, had its essence defined by a prefect as ‘everything related to the security of the king and of the state and also related to public spirit, opinions manifested, news that circulates as it arrives, and the men known to be opposed to the government’. Successive regimes in France—revolutionary, Napoleonic, Restoration—developed political police to investigate internal and external threats; opponents of the French acted similarly. Political police were developed to cope with threats to what increasingly resembled the modern state, and so too were ideas and practices regarding police who could prevent crime in the streets and countryside. At the same time, popular policing and the victim’s or community’s investigations and pursuits still continued, as did victim and community discretion about how to treat a suspect.
Hoe een verlichtingsideaal een taal wist uit te roeien : Over de verdwijning van het Jiddisch in Nederland