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French Archival Notes Police Spies and Labor Militants after the Commune

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2008

Bernard H. Moss
Bernard H. Moss
Affiliation:
University of Southern California
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Extract

Within recent years French historians have turned increasingly to police archives as a vast untapped source for the study of labor and socialist movements. However diligent the labor press was in reporting movement activities, it could never outdo the French political police in its saturation coverage of meetings, congresses and demonstrations. During the second half of the nineteenth century the hub of the political police was the Paris Prefecture of Police, which had literally hundreds of paid informants reporting on political and social circles, high and low, not only in Paris, but in the provinces and other countries as well. Fire destroyed nearly all of the valuable archives of the Prefecture prior to 1871. Beginning then with the post-Commune period, which is particularly rich in documentation, the archives are presently open to the public with some restrictions through 1940. A visit to the Archives of the Prefecture of Police of Paris, located in the Section Police Judiciaire, 36 quai des Orfèvres, has become de rigueur for students of French and international labor movements.

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Other
Information
International Labor and Working-Class History , Volume 5 , June 1974 , pp. 16 - 19
Copyright
Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 1974

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References

1. See. for example, Kriegel, Annie, Aux origines du communisme français 2 vols. (Paris, 1964)Google Scholar, Willard, Claude, Les Guesdistes: Le Mouvement socialiste en France (1893–1905) (Paris, 1965)Google Scholar, and Stafford, David, From Anarchism to Reformism: A Study of the Political Activities of Paul Brousse (Toronto, 1971).Google Scholar

2. See Bordas-Charon, Jeannine, Inventaire de la Série B/A des Archives de la Prefecture de Police,. Cartons B/A 1 à 80 (Paris, 1962).Google Scholar

3. On the basis of such reports Derfler, Leslie. “tReformism and Jules Guesde 1891–1904,” International Review of Social History, XII (1967), 66–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar, attributed the Guesdist revolt against socialist unity to his personal “drive for power.”

4. In addition to these newspapers see Virmaître, Ch., Paris-Police (Paris, 1886)Google Scholar, Guyot, Yves, La Police (Paris, 1884)Google Scholar, and Andrieux, Louis, Souvenirs d'un Préfet de Police, 2 vols. (Paris, 1885).Google Scholar

5. See the author's Origins of the French Labor Movement: The Socialism of Skilled Workers (Unpublished dissertation, Columbia University, 1972).Google Scholar

6. Dictionnaire biographique du mouvement ouvrier français, ed. Maitron, Jean (Paris, 1967) V.Google Scholar Also, the Revue socialiste, XLVIII (1908), 502.Google Scholar

7. Dictionnaire. IV. Gazette des tribunaux, 05 7–8, 1880.Google Scholar Also, Barberet, Joseph, Bataille des intérêts (Paris, 1879), pp. 327–30.Google Scholar

8. Del Bo, Giuseppe, “Lo spionaggio intorno alla I Internationale Oscar Testut, agente secreto ‘numero 47’.” Movimento operaio, no. 6 (1952), pp. 954–67.Google Scholar

9. B/A 1148.