ABSTRACT
Reorganizing or renewing measures aimed at managing populations and their movements played an important part in a more general move to transform urban police forces. Wanting to better monitor population movement may have been an aim common to policy makers in urban police forces, but the latter were quite diverse. The transformations which began to affect certain parts of the urban police from this time onwards can be seen as so many experiments in putting principles defined by royal legislation into practice, particularly when they echoed the aims of urban elites. The scale and modalities varied in relation to the size of the urban bodies and authorities locally in charge of the police. Three points appear to characterize the movement. First, increased attention paid to written proceedings, and their greater formalization. Next, monitoring officers can be seen to become more specialized and professional. Last, territorialization of monitoring forces: the increasingly well-defined link between controlling space and monitoring populations.
