Policing and the problem of privacy in Restoration-era France, 1815-30

Abstract

This article examines how the police state of the Bourbon Restoration reshaped elite social relations and notions of privacy. As the state invaded the private lives of its citizens in order to track elite opinion and oppositional activity, it was charged with spreading distrust throughout high society. In order to restore their privacy in the face of such surveillance, elites turned to strategies that erected sharp barriers between intimates and outsiders. As a result, anxieties about state surveillance both strained the social fabric and intensified bonds between close friends and family members. Elites thus found privacy to be both fragile and necessary as they confronted the increased strength of the post-revolutionary state. In tracing both police practices and the elite response to such practices, this article re-evaluates the sources of the desire for a separation between public and private in the early nineteenth century.