Antoine Renglet vient de publier chez Palgrave Macmilan un ouvrage intitulé : « Policing Cities in Napoleonic Europe », dans la collection "War, Culture and Society, 1750 - 1850".
This book shows how the police functioned in the cities of the Napoleonic Empire. Shifting the attention away from the political repression, it focuses on the men who embodied this institution and made it working day-to-day. Based on extensive archival research, the book shows how the Napoleonic police were indeed an instrument of power, but also a profession and a service to the public. Traditionally associated with the image of Joseph Fouché and with political surveillance, the Napoleonic police, apprehended from the local level, thus reveals itself to be much more complex and oriented simultaneously towards the preservation of the regime and the maintaining good urban order. In a wider sense, the premise of this study is that studying policing from an urban perspective can provide new interpretations of the Napoleonic experience in Europe.
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