ABSTRACT
A more general source of conflict to absorb the time and energies of eighteenth-century police officers was the question of their judicial competence. England or any other European state boasted a nationwide rural police force, France had a body of armed men whose duty it was to carry law and order to the countryside. Police boundaries would coincide with the most meaningful unit of local government—for the ancien regime an impressive rationalization which was bound to strengthen the hand of the intendant in so crucial an area of public affairs. Underlying every aspect of the functioning of the eighteenth-century police force was its numerical weakness. While the General Farm employed a force of 23,000 to defend its private interests, the marechaussee operated for most of the century with no more than three to three and a half thousand men, including eighty officers and men in the Auvergne, and a hundred in the Guyenne.
