Contenu du sommaire : Histoire des savoirs policiers en Europe (XVIIIe-XXe siècles)

Although it is still a little-known topic, the circulation of police knowledge is an important element in the creation of a modern police in the late Ottoman Empire. This paper deals with the modalities and stakes of the transfer of police knowledge between France – the chosen reference for police matters – and the Ottoman Empire. It points out two vectors for the transmission of knowledge: the French experts called by the sultan in order to reform the police in the capital and the translations of police texts (memoirs and scientific works), which allowed the Ottoman police to get acquainted with foreign sciences and practices. It also questions the reasons and limits of the French choice, pointing out what was at stake in the definition of a police model which fitted the political and social configuration of the Ottoman Empire.

Under Restoration and July monarchy, more and more administrative investigations on « public spirit », « public opinion », « moral and political situation » are led in France by the State. This article seeks to demonstrate that the construction of this political and administrative knowledge in the reports of the servants of the State, mainly the prefects, derives from three sources at least : the statistical tradition, characterizing State since Middle Age, the police surveillance, associated with the name of Fouché, and the social surveys that flourish at this time in particularly with the publications of Villermé. In all cases, the forming political surveys imitate these models, but also break deeply with them. They draw the limits of a new field of investigation for the State, typical of the parliamentary age : the political ideas and feelings of the French people.

Written between 1790 and 1806, the « papers » of senior police officer Lenoir constitute a comprehensive survey about Parisian police on the eve of the French Revolution. This unpublished document expresses what the police would have found acceptable to bring to the population's attention, what they could have revealed of their practical experiences, of their organization and of the way they collected information in order to act better. The Parisian police knowledge can be seen from three angles. It first takes part in the construction of a « State memory » that the police want to be easily usable thanks to the systematic production of lists and registers. The police knowledge then defines itself as having to be the most « complete » it can possibly be, therefore they wish to put both a registration of the population into general use and to be aided in the gathering of this information by numerous « auxiliaries ». Ultimately the police need to know what they are doing. Their « members » are professionals who acquire skills and experience and who adopt some procedures to avoid an arbitrary approach. This knowledge production is useful and necessary to the functioning of police structures and to their action on the body of the population and depends more and more on the « technical skills » control, the foundation of a new professional identity and of an increased legitimacy towards the population.

This paper focuses on the transfer of the London Metropolitan Police model from the English capital to Paris. Far from being reduced to a simple copy, this transfer is part of a long tradition of contacts between the police, of Franco-English relations and of Parisian reinterpretations. This type of police force is quickly reappropriated by the institutions as by the inhabitants, then, at the end of the century, turns itself in a new « police model » for the other Western cities. This process thus invites to think about the way foreign experiments as regards police force were known and perceived. We can consider also the historicity of the concept of « model » and observe, at a larger scale, how these successive crosses established a framework and element-type of a visible police urban force, which are associated in the Western thought with the idea of metropolitan civilization.

The knowledge and professional skills used by the police are essentially practical, especially during the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century. By studying the case of identification techniques used by the police at that time, we can understand how and by what agents this sort of knowledge and skills were developped. The police imported professional techniques from the administrative or scientific sphere. But soon they were able to improve their professional tools on their own way. This importation was facilitated by the intermediate position of some police officers between different the police and other social worlds, the variety of the careers police officers embraced before joining the police forces and the lack of any unifying training. Although practical training was still predominant, a growing number of written documents were composed to convey professional police knowledge.

In 1899, when journalism was not yet « professionalized » and sociology not yet institutionalized, Dick May, a woman writer who became converted to the social sciences, founded the first French school of journalism within the framework of a school devoted to « social teaching ». France was in crisis after the Boulangism, the political and financial scandals of Panama and the Dreyfus Affair. The progressive Parisian intellectual middle class believed that teaching social sciences was one way to regenerate French society. Science and reason would necessarily help the nation to unite once again : « in ten years, ours students will have covered our country with lay missions and transmitted our word of truth to all the provinces ». Initially part of the Popular University movement, the School of Journalism of Dick May will not reach its aim, when Durkheim and his friends introduce sociology at the University.

Considering the use Durkheim made of the organicist theory in his book about The Division of Labour, this article aims at questioning the epistemological grounds of Halbwachs' and Simiand's theories of social classes. One could read them as a continuity of Durkheim's former program of social morphology, where society is an organisation struggling for life. In this struggle, social classes are several social types, more or less important to impulse the vital movement of the society. In this way civilization is the evolution of the society trying to acclimate its groups to the natural and social environment.

The United States likes to introduce itself as an « opened society » which offers opportunities of unlimited upward mobility for everyone. During the thirty-year boom period after World War ii (During the « 30 Glorieuses »), the economic propserity has reactivated this typical creed of the American Dream. It is therefore no surprise that the American academic sociology should have made the examination of the question of social mobility one of its priorities. Far from naïvely sharing their fellows' beliefs, American sociologists have shed critical light on the issue: for example they drew a rather unflattering portrait of the self-made man or they belittled the assessment of the flow of upward mobility. However, at the time, French intellectuals who were often influenced by Marxism, blamed this sociology for being conformist instead of integrating its assets in order to enrich its thought on social classes and factors of concerted action; and in order to justify their protest against the existing social order. It has therefore seemed necessary to raise the question of such a refusal.

Examining first how religions were made objects of the « folk-psychology » of Heymann Steinthal and Moritz Lazarus (Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft, 1859-1890), then the role judaism played in this process as a motor of analysis and the normativity of one of the first figures of « Culturwissenschaft », this article studies the complex relations between science and religion which marked the emergence of cultural sciences in 19th century Germany.