Uses of Written-Records and Bureaucracy in the Paris Lieutenance générale de police, 1730-1760

Today kept in the Arsenal Library in Paris (Bibliothèque nationale de France), the archives of the Lieutenance générale de police reveal a truly qualitative jump in police bureaucracy in the 1740s and 1750s. At that time, the number of documents combine with a new tool for recording information, the registre, that leads us to reflect on the role of written-record in police activities. Before officer Guillauté’s well-known memoire in 1749, the registre became a must-have in policing the city. During the midcentury, office working endorse a new and growing proportion of police activities, up until then focused on street-level policing. At first perceived as necessary to track down thieves, written records spread widely in the Parisian police, under the reforming Berryer (1747-1757) and Sartine (1759-1774) lieutenances. Setting a new way of policing, based on targeted-surveillance and written-records, it encourages the rise of a common writing culture in the Ancien Régime police. Although born in pratice and marked by empirism and hesitation, such a development made the Paris police, alongside the Ministries of the Army and the Marine, one of the centres of an emerging administrative culture, in order to better police the capital of the kingdom.