Policing and urban society in eighteenth-century Paris: 2024

In the eighteenth century, as the forms, practices and spaces of urban sociability emerged and took shape (such as salons, clubs, theatres, public places and promenades), police forces and policing practices were undergoing far-reaching changes. Though this took place at different rates, in different ways, and with varying intensity. Prompted by recent works examining the dynamics of communal living and social regulations at the time of the Enlightenment, this volume explores the transformations of urban sociability through the prism of police reform; not through direct convergences, but in the articulation of communal issues and the possible convergence or tensions between the processes that are more closely linked than previously thought.

Policing and Urban Society in Eighteenth-Century Paris connects several different expressions of sociability with the practices of police administration to investigate the stakes, innovations, and relationships that disrupted and moulded the institutional and social frameworks of Enlightenment Paris.