An “Unofficial Police Force”? The Role of Snitches in the Control of Napoleonic Paris

Between 1799 and 1814, the Napoleonic police force, which intended to exercise greater political surveillance over consular and imperial society, relied on the use of an auxiliary force of citizens providing occasional or regular assistance to the police, a force then described as the “unofficial police”. While these indicators have long been the subject of fantasies linked to the focus of historiography on famous snitch figures, as well as numerical overestimation, this study attempts to grasp “from below” the reality of police use of snitches in Paris under the Consulate and the First Empire, in order to reconsider the very nature of a State often referred to as “a police regime”. The analysis of the profile of these anonymous police actors as well as of their different uses by the police, while questioning the possible instrumentalization of police practices and expectations by the snitches themselves, makes it possible to put into perspective the effectiveness of the Napoleonic police system, which was based much less on an all-powerful professional police force than on the voluntary participation of a part of society.