<figure><img src="image_1.png" /></figure>

Article
scientifique

Compte rendu de
livre

2023

Accepted
version

Open
Access

This is an author manuscript post-peer-reviewing (accepted version) of the original publication. The layout of the published version may differ.

Nicolas Delamare théoricien de la police

Cicchini, Marco

How to cite

CICCHINI, Marco. Nicolas Delamare théoricien de la police. In: The Journal of modern history, 2023, vol. 95, n° 4, p. 963-965. doi: 10.1086/727422

This publication URL: https://archive-ouverte.unige.ch/unige:173791

Publication DOI: 10.1086/727422
**Nicolas Delamare théoricien de la police.** By Nicole Dyonet. Histoire du droit, volume 3. Edited by Pierre Bonin and Jean-Louis Halpérin.

Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2017. Pp. 504. €97.00 (cloth); €58.00 (paper).

A modern historian and specialist in rural crime and the *maréchaussée* of France, Nicole Dyonet has produced a reference monograph on the career of the Parisian police commissioner Nicolas Delamare (1639–1723) and his *Traité de la police* (1705–38). Although Delamare’s work is a classic for police historians, whether of Paris or of other *ancien régime* cities, his actual intentions and the conditions under which he produced it are often neglected. Despite some puzzling analytical choices, Dyonet’s work has the great merit of dusting off a historical dossier that is at the center of several fields of research.

As we know it today, the *Traité* is comprised of four volumes in folio, three of which appeared during the author’s lifetime (1705, 1710, 1719); a fourth posthumous volume was edited by his successor, Lecler du Brillet, and published in 1738. The work as Delamare envisioned it was never completed, as the published volumes cover just five of the eleven topics he announced in 1705: religion, morality, health, food supply, and roads. For each of these subjects, divided into subtopics, the commissioner published and provided commentary on the original police regulations, thus creating a sort of legislative corpus of reference. Because publication of the *Traité* spanned three decades, Delamare’s project was subject to various editorial vicissitudes, including reprintings and counterfeit editions, complicating any assessment.

Dyonet, an expert with detailed knowledge of Delamare’s voluminous archives (preserved at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France) and a close and careful reader of the three volumes that appeared during the author’s lifetime, sets out to demonstrate that the commissioner founded a theory of police and policing. Her thesis comprises three parts. First, she presents Delamare’s life and career as the context for his writing the *Traité de la police*, as the entire project seems to have been tightly linked to the social and professional advancement of its author. In the second part she offers a close reading of the theoretical portions of the *Traité*, analyzing Delamare’s “historical method” and his use of public law to demonstrate that the police are governed by general laws and customs. Finally, in the third part, she focuses on how the maps and engravings that illustrate the work contribute to the overall theorization of the police and its consolidation as an institution.

Dyonet’s meticulous work reconstructs Delamare’s professional development, adhering closely to original sources. Born in 1639 in provincial France, Delamare was the product of a social milieu that hardly predestined him for a career in the Paris judiciary. Thanks to his mastery of the written language and especially to an advantageous marriage, in 1673 he was able to purchase the office of commissioner-examiner at the Châtelet, the seat of police jurisdiction in the French capital. Once he had assumed this office, he was in charge of defending the rights of its commissioners, who had been established at the Châtelet beginning in the fourteenth century. He benefited from privileged access to the institution’s archives and styled himself an adroit “document hunter” (50). His talents as an archivist, which he cultivated throughout his long career, served more than just the commissioner: although not a trained graduate, Delamare quickly advanced to become “a sort of juridical consultant in police affairs” (56), a faithful servant to the lieutenant general of the

*The Journal of Modern History*, volume 95, number 4, December 2023.
For permission to reuse, please contact journalpermissions@press.uchicago.edu.
Paris police, whose office, with quasi-ministerial status, had been created in 1667 to ensure
royal authority over the capital.

Conceived and outlined beginning in the 1680s, the *Traité de la Police* served two purposes that constituted its real objective: on the one hand, to “ensure the defense” (284) and the prerogatives of the commissioner-examiners at the Châtelet, and, on the other hand, to establish their operation under a “principle of sovereignty” (420), to the detriment of local police powers that had long been anchored in the urban space, both in Paris and elsewhere in France. In order to win his readers’ support, Delamare buttressed the text with well-chosen images. Thus, the eight maps of Paris provided by Antoine Coquart and Nicolas de Fer at once illustrate and leverage the royal police’s territorial control of the capital. The maps of Paris from different epochs of urban development lent historical legitimacy to the Châtelet’s claims of authority. As for the vignettes that were employed as headpiece illustrations in the several volumes of the *Traité*, these announced in original fashion the iconographic program depicting the police as a royal jurisdiction. For, unlike the judiciary, the police did not have a tradition of visual representation at the time: the new images were intended to help associate the police with sovereign power. Although Dyonet insists that the *Traité* was the commissioner’s personal project, Delamare nonetheless seems to be nothing less than a paladin of the administrative and centralizing monarchy.

Dyonet's study abounds in highly useful information, including a chronological chart
covering the various editions of the *Traité* (95). It is nevertheless regrettable that her anal-
ysis often describes Delamare's thought and his theory of the police without establishing a
critical distance. Works of social history concerning the Parisian police forces (notably by
Vincent Milliot and Justine Berlière), clearly known to Dyonet, could have helped coun-
terbalance her perspective on Delamare as a “theoretician.” The once-dominant notion that
the Paris police might have served as a model throughout the realm has long come under
attack, notably by Catherine Denys and Vincent Denis. Delamare, who also served as a
field commissioner, operated within a context of tension between police forces about
which Dyonet says little. When the Parisian commissioner proclaimed a uniform law of
policing, he was contradicted by none other than his superior, d'Argenson, according to
whom “these sorts of affairs are not subject to general, invariable, and everlasting rules
but to conduct, prudence, and direction, each of which vary according to circumstances”
(91).

The *Traité de la police* was a bestseller for its time and circulated throughout Europe during the first half of the eighteenth century. How was it read by those promoting the German cameral sciences, that other tradition informing police knowledge that Dyonet leaves out of her analysis? Did the diffusion of the *Traité* signal the triumph of Delamare’s theory of police and policing? If so, how should we explain Montesquieu’s view, in *l’Esprit des lois* (1748), that police regulations were only a product of circumstance? Ultimately, Delamare’s work may have been appreciated by his contemporaries less for its theoretical qualities than for its formidable compilation of regulations that provided readers with a genuine compendium, to use Michel Foucault’s term.

These observations should take nothing away from Nicole Dyonet's main accomplishment. In focusing on the *Traité de la police* and its archives, she provides valuable tools that can help us better understand a source too often cited without adequate historical context.

MARCO CICCHINI*

Université de Genève

<footnote>* Translated for *The Journal of Modern History* by John Galbraith Simmons and Jocelyne Geneviève Barque.</footnote>