Policing the Forests of Pre-Industrial France: Round Up the Usual Suspects

Abstract

Historians of crime and criminal justice have long debated the extent to which certain offences arose out of social antagonisms. Records of crimes such as poaching and wood-stealing seemed to encapsulate many of the tensions and inequalities of the pre-industrial (and proto-industrial) countryside. The theft of timber in particular is often assumed to be a product of the stark and pervasive poverty of Europe in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Yet other scholars have preferred to emphasize the self-interested nature of much rural criminality. Drawing on some of the procedural handbooks that offered advice to French forest guards, this study argues that those who policed the woodlands differentiated among various types of offences, whose likely perpetrators were presumed to form parallel hierarchies (of social status, occupation, etc.).