ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to chart the development of detective police agents in nineteenth-century Paris, and explores both their literary image and their self-image. There was a long tradition of police in early nineteenth-century Paris. On occasions police detectives from Paris could be loaned to a provincial town or district faced with a particular problem. The detective, both the private detective and the police detective, has become a central figure in modern escapist, popular culture. Initially, the French word police had been virtually synonymous with civil government, but during the seventeenth century it became more associated with the government of a city. The traditional Whig perspective of the French police, that still informs much of the Anglo-Saxon perspective, assumes that there was a system centrally controlled and directed. There were commissaries appointed by central government in the larger towns dating back to the Revolution.
