Crimes of Opinion
Policing the Public in Eighteenth-Century Paris
Lisa Jane Graham
More than two decades ago, Richard Cobb drew attention to the fact that police archives provide abundant information on topics besides crime. Cobb suggested that the police offer the most reliable guide to the ordinary and routine elements of popular life in eighteenth-century France because "who more than a commissaire would have heard so much of the spoken thoughts and insults of the common people?"1 Several historians heeded Cobb's call and used police records to shed light on a stratum of beliefs and attitudes normally hidden from the historian's view.2 Perhaps no one has been so
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