Around a hundred gendarmes have been organized since the end of the XVIIIe century. The diffusion of these polices with military status informs us about security policies and the relations between army, State and society. The international of gendarmes, vector of a new connected history?
If the “fear of the gendarme” refers to a well-known feeling at all times, the history of the gendarmerie has long been neglected by researchers. It is this gap that this work contributes to filling, both a new step and a starting point.
New step, because it is part of a series of publications, the main actors of which are the Paris-Sorbonne University, the former Historical Service of the Gendarmerie and the Historical Service of Defense. The founder of the Sorbonne project, Jean-Noël Luc, has just published, under his direction, a History of the gendarmes, from the constabulary to the present day which summarizes the work carried out over the past fifteen years. Supported by statistics, organization charts and chronology, this pocket book offers a renewed account of the destiny of the “soldiers of the law”, as well as a diachronic panorama of their missions and their images.
The work in question goes beyond the national perspective by adopting a comparative approach on a global scale. Ultimatelyhe sketches a real connected history of the gendarmerie. A successful bet, both on an epistemological level and from the angle of the diversity of the twenty case studies, which will inspire new research.
What is a policeman?
This ambition implied defining the “gendarmic model” and its developments – which the directors do in the first part, then at the end of the work. Delicate task: on the one hand, Anglo-American historiography has gotten into the habit of drowning the gendarmes in the unclear category of paramilitary forces ; on the other hand and above all, the hundred institutions identified do not allow themselves to be locked into a single and fixed model. The extreme diversity of Swiss gendarmes, although founded at the same time (from 1803), attests to this.
Who is a policeman, in fact? Pragmatically, the directors of the work define a basic model based on a few criteria. The first of these, the most incontestable, is the military status of personnel, which often goes hand in hand with recruitment into the troops. The duality of missions constitutes another essential marker. Supervision of conscription and mobilization, as well as the provost police, are “natural” tasks of the gendarmerie. To these are sometimes added operational combat missions contributing to their prestige.
These military functions are accompanied by multiple civil functions of great diversity: maintenance of order and protection of property and people, other administrative and judicial police missions, even, as in Douala in Cameroon, in the 1920s- 1930, management of civil status, garbage removal and repression of tax evasion. Simple military police on Japanese soil, the Kempeitai was responsible, in Korea in the years 1900-1910, for administrative policing and the repression of uprisings, but also for religious, educational, health and civil engineering issues.
Should we assimilate the gendarmes to simple hybridizations of the army and the police, from which they borrow, in varied proportions, elements in terms of equipment, weaponry, recruitment method, structural organization and hierarchical orethos ? No, because these particular military bodies are often distinguished from civilian police forces by their desire to constitute an elite force or, at least, one of recognized quality. This concern is perceptible from the XIXe century through the recruitment of soldiers who know how to read and write, the granting of attractive remuneration and the care given to the training of staff and officers. Thus the gendarmes stand out from the mass of the population in many respects, while the executives often come from the upper social strata.
Police officers in the four corners of the world
The map of gendarmes in 1939 and 2015 summarizes the extent of their diffusion, in time and space, mainly in the Latin worlds and their colonial empires. First confined to Europe under French, revolutionary and then Napoleonic influence, the gendarmerie experience reached the “Far West” that is Latin America, before experiencing its full geographical development with colonization, from the middle of XIXe century, then during decolonization.
The terms of this expansion contain several surprises. If the gendarmerie is often imposed on societies dominated within an imperial framework, it is frequently maintained once the empire has disappeared. Despite a strong desire to eradicate all traces of French supervision, the authorities perpetuated it, as in Piedmont or the Swiss cantons after 1815.
Likewise, the leaders of postcolonial states resulting from independence movements commonly call on the gendarmes of the former metropolis to organize a national gendarmerie. In Algeria, for example, despite the cost of the “dirty war”, the government accepted, in 1963, the creation of a technical assistance detachment for the Algerian gendarmerie. In seven years, and despite recurring tensions, the French gendarmes trained 5,500 men and officers and 140 Algerian gendarmerie officers, thus playing a fundamental role in the organization of the police system of the new state.
The treatment of international police cooperation – bilateral or multilateral – represents one of the essential contributions of the work. These cooperations often respond to the desire of young or non-European States to “modernize” the administration of the country and the maintenance of order or to lay the foundations of a new political regime by benefiting from the experience of foreign gendarmes. The French army, crucible of the model, was among the most requested, until the beginning of the XXIe century, as shown by his interventions in the training of the Qatari Internal Security Force or the Jordanian gendarmerie. The authors, however, underline the implication in this swarming, from the XIXe century, from the Civil Guard Spanish and Carabinieri Italians.
How can we explain the diffusion, anchoring and persistence of a “gendarmic model” which can be expressed in various ways? The main hypothesis refers to this versatility of the body and its adequacy with the radical transformation, in contemporary times, of the relationship between the State and society. Generally present throughout a national or imperial territory, through a network of versatile or specialized posts, the gendarmerie makes it possible to respond to a growing concern for political control of populations and oppositions – Russia and Austria in XIXe century, Hungary within the framework of the dual monarchy, Cameroon under mandate after 1945, People’s China today – as well as surveillance of the masses, particularly rural – Cuba in the second half of the XIXe century, Ottoman Empire and State of Sao Paulo of the 1900s, Portugal in the following decade. But the installation of gendarmes can also satisfy the population’s desire for security: the oppressor becomes a protector, whose presence is desired by the elites and the villagers.
In search of gendarme cultures
This functional versatility of the gendarmes leads us to question the diversity of their perceptions by the populations. The work constitutes a starting point here, because cultural history, despite some intuitions, remains largely absent from case studies. The directors of the work also call for new developments in this area and in others, by providing several suitable tools – analysis grid, synoptic table of 122 institutions, 72 notices – for comparative approaches. We will suggest two avenues here.
The gendarmes often constitute, within imperial frameworks, multicultural social groups. This dimension is verified within the Napoleonic empire, but also the colonial empires, through the recruitment of “native” auxiliaries. This means that “gendarmic identities” constitute a promising field of research, at the crossroads of connected history, colonial and postcolonial history and cultural history.
Furthermore, the functional versatility of the gendarme generates variable and contradictory feelings among their constituents. A character hated when he embodies conscription, the arbitrary violence of a State or the injustice of the colonial order, this particular soldier becomes a reassuring figure when he helps to eradicate rural banditry. We can hope for the writing of a simultaneous history of fear and the contribution of the gendarmes, which would shed light on their place in the national or regional imagination on the basis of the major achievements of a gendarme historiography which has now reached maturity.