Mediating authority: representations of the police in Paris circa 1900
Date
2023
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
This dissertation explores how police authority was constructed and mediated through visual, material, and literary representations in Paris in the decades around 1900. Although policing has had a long history in France, its manifestation in the latter two-thirds of the long nineteenth century catalyzed a larger project of urban regulation and modernization. Developing in tandem with Napoléon III and Baron Eugène Haussmann’s legal and spatial efforts to order the capital, and with the rise of mass cultural mediums, the Prefecture of Paris advanced an image of their police force as just, masculine, and controlled. ☐ Far from establishing a singular ideal, however, this dissertation argues that the resulting proliferation and plurality of images of the police disavowed any notion of a monolithic authority in Paris. Chapter one considers Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen’s illustrations of police discrimination in relation to his sympathies with the anarchist movement and marginalized populations of the capital. The second chapter analyzes how the radical modes of spatial and social control in Félix Vallotton’s prints visually articulate contemporary anxieties about police violence in Parisian streets. Chapter three situates Jules-Alexandre Grün’s commercial poster production within the context of the public’s fascination with the police and the contemporaneous “crisis of virility” that troubled the force, popularizing a typology that threatened the masculine image promoted by the State. As contradictions to the official vision of authority, Steinlen’s unjust, Vallotton’s violent, and Grün’s emasculated officers elucidate how the police image was reconfigured in relation to different urban sites, phenomena, and social types characteristic of modern Paris. This image was also reconfigured, as the epilogue shows, in its translation to film, where the time-based medium offered novel opportunities to exploit these artists’ strategies for picturing the police to heightened comedic and critical effect. ☐ By bringing issues of gender, class, and political affiliation as well as histories and theories of urbanization to bear on representations of the police, this dissertation demonstrates how artists refashioned the official image to expose the disturbing realities of policing in the modern French capital. More broadly, it complicates our understanding of and attitudes toward police authority and its construction, concerns that remain at the forefront of global debates about policing today.
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Keywords
Media, Order, Paris, Police, Prints, Reproductive innovations