ABSTRACT
Napoleon's France was a police state. Of course, it cannot compare for ruthlessness and horror with twentieth-century police states, like Stalin's Soviet Union, Hitler's Germany or even Pinochet's Chile. No jack-booted policemen broke down doors in the middle of the night to haul people off to concentration camps; the army did not 'disappear' political opponents by kidnapping, torturing and killing diem in secret; in short, terror was never a tool of Napoleonic government. Napoleon's police nevertheless did exercise tight control over all public expressions of opinion, did pay a network of secret agents to keep the nation under surveillance, and did detain the regime's enemies in special state prisons without charge or trial. In short, they regularly ignored proper judicial procedures and systematically violated the civil rights that the French Revolution had proclaimed with such high hopes in 1789 to end centuries of so-called 'monarchical despotism'.
