A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

looked on suspiciously. A police spy slipped away from the crowd to report that sedition was being
preached, and the man in charge of the police ordered his men to advance slowly, their truncheons
at the ready. The crowd booed and pelted them with stones; the police got angry and began hitting
out wildly, knocking down women and children as well as men. A man drew a knife as a policeman
tried to capture an anarchist banner, and stabbed him in the chest. Police Constable Robert Culley
staggered a few yards and fell dead.
A coroner’s jury, considering the death, was obviously unsympathetic to the police, feeling they
had no right to interfere with freedom of speech. When the coroner was told the jurors were unable
to agree on a verdict, he replied that they would have to stay there without food and drink until they
did agree. Whereupon the jury - which consisted of respectable tradesmen - produced a verdict of
justifiable homicide against the unknown person who had stabbed Constable Culley. The spectators
cheered, and the jury found themselves treated as heroes. The short-term result was to increase the
hostility between police and public; but the long term-result was to allow Englishmen to stand on a
soap box and say whatever they liked.
In France, the whole situation would have been regarded as preposterous. They had had their
official police force since the time of Louis XIV and the policeman took it for granted that he
represented the king’s authority and could say and do as he liked. One result of this attitude, of
course, was the French Revolution. But the infamous Chambre Ardente affair, with its revelation of
mass poisoning and child-sacrifice was evidence that the French needed a police force rather more
urgently than the English. (This was, of course, before the introduction of gin caused the English
crime wave.) The French chief of police was also the censor of the press, and could arrest
newspaper publishers and anyone who printed a ‘libellous book’. (Prohibited books were actually
tried, condemned, and sent to the Bastille in a sack with a label - specifying the offence - tied to it.)
The French concentrated on the spy system to keep crime in check - a vast network of informers.
M. de Sartines, the police minister under Louis XV, once had a bet with a friend that it would be
impossible to slip into Paris without knowledge of the police. The friend - a judge - left Lyons
secretly a month later, and found himself a room in a remote part of the city; within hours, he had
received a letter by special messenger, inviting him to dinner with M. de Sartines. On another
occasion, de Sartines was asked by the Vienna police to search for an Austrian robber in Paris; he
was able to reply that the robber was still in Vienna, and give his exact address - at which the
Vienna police found him.
The French underworld was also more organised than the British could ever hope to be. When
Louis XVI married Marie Antoinette in 1770, a gang stretched cords across the street under cover
of darkness, and crowds attending the celebrations stumbled over them in large numbers. Two
thousand five hundred people were trampled to death in the confusion, and the pickpockets moved
around rifling the corpses. But the next day, de Sartines’s men swooped on known criminals and
made hundreds of arrests. They did it so swiftly that they recovered enormous quantities of stolen
goods - watches, rings, bracelets, purses, jewellery - one robber had two thousand francs tied up in
his handkerchief. It was an inauspicious beginning for a marriage that ended on the guillotine.
After the Revolution of 1789, the police force was disbanded - only to be formed again by
Robespierre, who wanted to know what his enemies were doing. Napoleon appointed the sinister
Joseph Fouché his police minister, and Fouché’s spy network became even more efficient than that
of de Sartines.