Monopolizing violence

During the Middle Ages, war, rather than being waged on behalf of nonexistent states, had been embedded in society, so to speak. Armies - let alone navies, which are extremely capital-intensive - qua separate organizations did not exist; war was the vocation of the upper classes whose members, representing little but their own interests and sense of

⁵⁷ See D.

⁵⁸ Mann, Sources of Social Power, vol. II, appendix, tables A6, A7, A8. justice, donned armor and fought each other as the occasion demanded. As had also been the case in tribes without rulers, chiefdoms, and city­states, the modern ‘‘trinity’’ consisting of a government whose job is to direct policy, armed forces that fight and die, and a civilian population that supposedly enjoys immunity provided it does not interfere with the proceedings did not exist in the same form. Given the knightly ethos, rulers of every rank felt themselves obliged to fight in the front ranks and, as we saw, were frequently killed or captured; so long as they did so, they could scarcely be said to govern. The people on their part were hardly considered part of society at all. Looking at war as one would regard a natural disaster, a plague, or a famine - hence the four horses of the apocalypse - they watched as their betters battled each other and, of course, often paid the price.

The story of the transition from feudal hosts to mercenary forces and thence to the regular, state-owned armies and navies that made their appearance after 1648 has been told many times.⁵⁹ A good starting point is provided by the introduction of gunpowder, which was invented in China and must have been brought to Europe either by the Mongols or by the Arabs via North Africa and Spain; in any case there are scattered references to it in sources dating to the second half of the thirteenth century.⁶⁰ The use of cannon, or some other noise-making device prob­ably based on gunpowder, is mentioned for the first time in connection with the Battle of Crecy which was fought between the English and the French in 1348.

In the long run, nevertheless, gunpowder did less to change the balance between offense and defense than is often supposed.⁶² Instead it forced

⁵⁹ The best short account is probably M. Howard, War in European History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), chs. 2-5.

⁶⁰ See J. R. Partington, A History of Greek Fire and Gunpowder (Cambridge: Heffer, 1960), ch. 3; and J. F. C. Fuller, Armaments and History (New York: Scribner’s, 1945), pp. 78-81.

⁶¹ Jean Froissart, Chronicles (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1968), pp. 88 (n. 2), 121.

⁶² G. Quester, Offense and Defense in the International System (New York: Wiley, 1977), pp. 45-55. the latter to look around for different methods by which to erect fortres­ses, a problem which during the second half of the fifteenth century gave employment to the very best minds from Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Albrecht DUrer down. By 1520 or so, after many false starts, an Italian engineer by the name of Michele San Michele had hit upon the solution. Essentially it consisted of replacing the tall, thin, medieval curtain-walls by extremely thick, squat walls that were sunken into the ground; at the same time, the place of towers was taken by the angular structures known as bastions which projected from the walls and provided cover both to the latter and to each other.^[162] The resulting fortifications were much larger than their medieval predecessors and, as time went on and the range of cannon grew, tended to become larger still.

Not only was the new type of fortress much larger than the previous one, but it was also much more expensive. Though the cost of construc­tion should not be underestimated, a medieval castle was within the reach of a comparatively large number of people. In France alone the remains of perhaps 10,000 are known, albeit the majority consist only of a simple bailey, or tower, and moat. Lords of every rank built castles for themsel­ves, the difference between the most powerful monarch and the lowliest baron or count consisting not so much in the nature of the fortifications they erected as in the number of the castles that they owned, often in widely scattered places. The invention, and subsequent spread, of the so-called trace italienne brought this situation to an end. Only the richest and most powerful rulers could afford the new structures, while their sheer size meant that, instead of being located on the spurs of hills as previously, they tended to be built in the plains and even, as in the Netherlands, in country that was completely flat.^[163]

As the nobility’s castles became defenseless in front of cannon, its military position was also weakened in other ways. Contrasting sharply with those of antiquity, medieval armies had been based mainly on cavalry. So long as the terrain was suitable the mounted man-at-arms enjoyed a tremendous advantage, even to the point where the chronicles often fail to mention the foot-soldiers who were also present and whose role on the battlefield consisted of being massacred by the heavier, taller, and faster knights. During the fourteenth century, though, the role of cavalry began to be undermined by the reintroduction of two ancient weapons, the pike and the longbow.

Besides the military-technological developments that initiated it, the shift away from medieval warfare also had its financial aspects. As early as the thirteenth century the revival of an urban-based, commercial econ­omy began to put money into people's hands. As a result, rulers some­times released their vassals from the obligation of fighting for them, demanding shield-money or scutagium instead. The sums that were raised in this way could be used to engage mercenaries;^[164] and by the second half of the fifteenth century mercenaries had, except perhaps at the highest levels of command, largely taken over from their feudal predecessors. The way to form an army now consisted of commissioning - the term is still in use - an entrepreneur to raise troops, clothe them, equip them, and train them. Having done so, he was also expected to lead them in war, all in return for good money which the entrepreneur received from his em­ployers and which he shared with those under his command while trying to shave off as much as possible.^[165]

During the sixteenth century, inspired first by the Swiss and then by the Spaniards, armies came to consist mainly of massive blocks (known as Haufen or tercios) of infantrymen armed with a mixture of pikes and arquebuses and organized for mutual protection.

Given that states in our sense of the term still did not exist, the objectives for which war was waged had not changed much from medieval times. Rulers such as Charles V, Francis I, and their contemporaries fought each other to determine who would rule this province or that. The personal nature of their quarrels is indicated by the fact that the Emperor repeatedly offered to fight his rival in a duel; in addition, the peace treaties signed after each war often included some clause that provided for a marriage between the protagonists, their sons, sisters, daughters, and other family members in such a way as to produce an heir who, as the offspring of both sides, would - it was hoped - solve the problem that had given rise to the war. At a lower level, the fact that armies were made up of independent or semi-independent entrepreneurs helps explain the wave of civil wars that swept over countries such as England, France, and Germany.

The climax of these developments was reached during the Thirty Years War, which marks both the end of the old system and the begin­ning of the new. It started, as we saw, as an attempt by the Habsburg Emperor to reassert his authority over Germany and, possibly, the Em­pire in the wider sense of that term. However, it soon degenerated into a free-for-all in which Emperor, kings, territorial rulers of various ranks,

⁶⁷ The military revolts mounted by mercenary forces are well described in G. Parker, The Army of Flanders and the Spanish Road (London: Cambridge University Press, 1972), ch. 8. religious leagues, free cities, and commissioned and noncommissioned military entrepreneurs (many of them scarcely distinguishable from rob­bers and, unless willing to change sides, often treated as such) fought each other with every means at their disposal. All, needless to say, did so at the expense of the peasantry whose fields, orchards, and domestic animals enabled armies to march on their stomachs, to say nothing of meeting the remaining natural requirements of heroes such as looting, burning, and raping. Where the peasants did not allow themselves to be victimized but tried to put up a defense, they merely added to the confusion, so that for three decades much of Central Europe was literally engulfed in war.

In the long run, nevertheless, the outcome of chaos was order. Once the Treaties of Westphalia were signed, many of the mercenary forces that had fought the war - those who were not were absorbed into the standing armies or militia perpetua, as they were known - were sent home. Officers did not at once cease to be businessmen; in France it was only around the middle of the century that units ceased to be known after their comman­ders and the purchase of military rank was abolished, whereas in Britain the latter reform had to wait until the Cardwell Reforms of 1874. Still, throughout the period their role as independent entrepreneurs was grad­ually narrowed down. Such tasks as recruiting the troops, enrolling them, paying them, clothing them, equipping them, and promoting them were centralized in the hands of the newly emerging war ministries. The replacement of entrepreneurs by officers - who, increasingly, had to attend a military academy before being commissioned - turned the latter into loyal servants of the state, while the switch from temporary mer­cenaries to long-serving regular troops made it possible to improve the discipline of the rank and file. The crowds of unruly scarecrows that had infested Europe during much of the century before 1648 largely disap­peared. The name of General Martinet of France, who acquired fame by the bastinadoes that he inflicted for every missing button and every ill-fitting garter, has even entered the language.

By this time the entire structure of war, which hitherto had been waged for personal reasons, was beginning to change in the direction of the impersonal state. In England Queen Elizabeth I had often entered into commercial contracts with her subjects, the most prominent of whom were Francis Drake and Walter Raleigh, with the objective of despoiling the Spanish overseas possessions.⁶⁸ A hundred years after her death such a system had become unthinkable; and indeed already during the first half of the eighteenth century there grew the conviction that, to the extent that

68

K. R. Andrews, Trade, Plunder and Settlement: Maritime Enterprise and the Genesis of the BritishEmpire, 1480-1630 (Cambridge:CambridgeUniversityPress, 1984),pp. 14-15. rulers still went to war for their personal profit, they were little better than criminals.^[166] The state's growing monopoly over war also made itself felt overseas. Throughout the seventeenth century there had been many occasions when two countries fought each other in Europe but not in the colonies, or the other way around, as, for example, during the twelve-year truce between Spain and the Netherlands, which lasted from 1609 to 1621 and which was limited to Europe. After 1714 this situation came to an end. More and more the various West and East India Companies came to be regarded simply as an extension of their governments' power, and more and more this was actually the case.

Another field in which the shift from personal war waged by the ruler to impersonal warfare conducted on behalf of the state made itself felt was the different treatment meted out to prisoners of war. Previously they had been regarded as their captors' private property and had to ransom themselves; until they did so, they could be swapped, sold, and otherwise put to profit by private individuals who, accordingly, often quarreled among themselves as to who had made which catch. However, the establishment of standing armies and the centralization of military power in the hands of rulers brought this system to an end. After the War of the Spanish Succession, prisoners were taken out of their captors' hands. Ransom, instead of being settled by the individuals in question, was now a question for the belligerent state which negotiated with its opposite numbers on the basis of a fixed scale of payment - so much for a private, captain, or, at the very top, a marechal de France.^[167] Next, following the Seven Years War, the requirement for ransom was dropped altogether. From commodities to be traded, prisoners became guests of the opposing governments, though unless they were officers and able to look after their own accommodation (captive enemy commanders were routinely put on parole) they seldom found their quarters too comfortable.

The switch from personal to impersonal warfare also led to the inven­tion of a new legal category, the wounded. Although war had always resulted in injuries, previously those who suffered them did not enjoy any special rights; instead they merely made their way off the battlefield as best they could. As late as Hugo Grotius during the first decades of the seventeenth century, whether or not quarter would be offered depended solely on the goodwill of the victor. However, the move toward regular forces during the last years of the seventeenth century gave rise to the idea that the troops on both sides were not criminals fighting for some nef­arious ends but simply men doing their duty to their respective sover­eigns, or states. Once such men had become incapacitated, there was no sense in punishing them further, and indeed eighteenth-century interna­tional lawyers considered the idea preposterous. Consequently it became comparatively easy to make agreements - first bilateral, then multina­tional - which promised the wounded, provided only they did not con­tinue fighting, immunity from further military action as well as medical treatment and even special places of asylum which were not to be at­tacked: in short, protection as good as circumstances permitted.^[168]

From 1660 or so the tendency to look at combatants as servants of the state also began to have a clear effect on the way wars were commemor­ated and monuments to them built.^[169] From the time of the ancient Egyptian pharaohs all the way to the time of the Counter-Reformation, gloating had been one of the rewards of victory - e.g., Tiglat Pileser III, whom we have already met, boasted of having ‘‘impaled’’ his enemies ‘‘alive’’ and ‘‘cut off their hands.’’^[170] Likewise, the plastic arts often showed enemy dead in profusion and prisoners being maltreated, as, for example, in the reliefs commissioned by the same king, his ancestors, and his successors, depicting their capture of cities all over the Middle East and used by them to decorate their palaces at Nineveh and elsewhere. Nor were such practices confined to the ‘‘barbaric’’ East. Looking up the column erected by Trajan, supposedly one of the more civilized Roman emperors, in the forum that bears his name, those with keen eyesight can see Dacian prisoners being decapitated.

However, during the second half of the seventeenth century, such presentations of joy on one’s own side and suffering on the other ceased to be regarded as bon ton. Though monuments continued to be built for victories and commanders - witness Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate or Lon­don’s Trafalgar Square, overlooked by a statue ofNelson-from now on it was only very seldom that they showed the enemy in the act of being defeated, let alone tortured, mutilated, or executed. Not that such things ceased to take place either in European or, especially, colonial warfare; during World War II, American troops in the Pacific sometimes took Japanese ears as trophies.^[171] Even in Nazi Germany, care was taken to hide the atrocities from the gaze of the public; or, failing that, blame them either on military necessity or on the enemy who had been the first to violate the rules.

Since rulers for the most part had already ceased to command in person, the modern distinction between a government that wages or ‘‘conducts” a war at the highest politico-military level and the armed forces that fight and die came into being. By the middle of the eighteenth century, rulers' personal property could be clearly distinguished from that of their states. Consequently it became sacrosanct; when, during the Seven Years War, Frederick II went into a pique and tried to demolish a castle belonging to one of his Austrian opponents, he encountered opposition on the part of his own generals.^[172] By way of another indication that war was ceasing to be regarded as a personal affair, even as they fought one another rulers now addressed each other as monsieur mon frere and exchanged elaborate compliments. This was a far cry from the days when, for example, as Francis I and Henry VIII prepared to meet at the Field of the Cloth of Gold, each side presented himself with an agreed-upon number of armed retainers for fear of being kidnapped or assassinated.

While government and armed forces were being separated in this way, the third leg of the ‘‘trinity,'' population, was also being created - or rather, shut out of the conduct of war - by the introduction of uniforms. Originating in the liveries which had long been worn by the servants of monarchs and lesser aristocrats, the purpose of the first uniforms was not to distinguish the two sides from each other; instead, following the demise of armor and the concentration of war in the hands of the state, it was to distinguish those who were licensed to fight on its behalf from those who were not. From 1660 on, uniforms, contrasting sharply with the ex­travagant dress of the higher classes but also with the more sober gar­ments worn by the townspeople, became the norm. Their purpose had never been strictly utilitarian; over time, though, they became more and more elaborate as rulers competed with each other to see who could dress his troops in the most impressive manner. The peak of military sartorial splendor was reached between about 1790 and 1830. Thereafter, owing to the rise of quick-firing weapons, it declined, but without giving up the essential distinction between the military and civilians which, as one of the cornerstones of the modern state, had to be maintained at all cost.

Dress, though, was but one of the marks which set the military apart. Previously, armed forces - apart from those responsible for the rulers' person who, logically enough, had been housed in or around his castle or palace - had existed only during wartime; now that they had become permanent, it was necessary to find housing for them, which in one country after another led to the construction of barracks. Once they were cooped up inside their barracks, the troops and their commanders, often serving for periods that could be measured in decades, developed a culture of their own. Gone were the days when they themselves con­stituted society, as during the Middle Ages. Gone, too, were the times when they were considered social outcasts, as during much of the six­teenth and early seventeenth centuries. Instead, eighteenth-century pro­fessional armies - and, to a considerable extent, their successors up to the present day - formed autonomous groupings which in many ways stood outside ‘‘civilian” society and, needless to say, regarded themselves as superior to the latter.⁷⁶ This was the period when a separate code of military justice, separate customs as the salute and (for officers) the duel, and even separate ways of bearing oneself develop; with the result that, in our own day, American officers as representatives of the state are pro­hibited from such effeminate forms of behavior as carrying an umbrella or pushing a pram. Soon the feeling of solidarity, which first arose within countries, spread across them, so that soldiering (from the German soldat, somebody who received Sold, or pay) became a profession with numerous international links.

Throughout the eighteenth (and nineteenth) centuries, the growing separation between armed forces and society manifested itself by two opposing trends. On the one hand, armies increasingly took upon them­selves tasks which had previously been contracted out to civilians; such as engineering, supply, administration, medical, and even spiritual services, all of which were increasingly provided by men who themselves wore uniforms and were subject to military discipline. On the other, the devel­oping body of international law - the law of nations, as it was called - tended to prohibit people who did not wear uniforms from taking part in their rulers' quarrels. The original idea was to prevent the troops on each side from robbing civilians, or, strictly speaking, to do so on their own without any benefits accruing to the armies of which they were members; to this end bilateral treaties were concluded between the rulers of such countries as France, the Holy Roman Empire, and Prussia. By mid­century this had been turned into a system, even a philosophy, whereby civilians, as long as they behaved themselves and paid up, were supposed to be immune from the horrors of war. As the greatest eighteenth-century lawyer, Emmeric Vattel, put it, war ought to be waged exclusively by sovereign rulers on behalf of their respective states. For anyone else to intervene in it was itself an offense, and as such they deserved to be both condemned and punished.⁷⁷

⁷⁶ See A. Vagts, A History of Militarism ( New York: Free Press, 1959), pp. 52ff.

⁷⁷ E. Vattel, The Law of Nations (Philadelphia: Johnson, 1857 edn. [1758]), pp. 317-18.

By that time the point had long been reached where the uniformed, disciplined, state-owned armed forces with their heavy horsemen, can­non, and well-dressed volleys of musket-fire could be withstood only by other organizations similar to themselves. After 1700 the growing capac­ity of government to impose order as well as slowly improving economic conditions meant that it was seldom necessary any more to employ first-line troops for internal purposes. Doing so became the characteristic task of light cavalry - hence the term ‘‘to dragoon.” In 1795 it took a mere ‘‘whiff of grapeshot” to disperse the crowds that menaced the National Assembly in Paris. There was, however, a price to be paid. Units that were earmarked for fighting against others of their kind tended to be stationed on the frontiers rather than in the towns where riots were mostly likely to occur, and they did not possess the special skills necessary for internal disorder. Finally, the closer to the end of the century we come, the better able governments were to control the movement of their citizens and prevent them from going abroad if necessary. Hence there was a tendency to draw on citizens rather than foreigners as recruits; this in turn limited their usefulness against fellow citizens, since the danger always existed that they would use bayonets against the authorities rather than on the latter's behalf.^[173]

These developments both reflected and made necessary the separation between the armed forces and the police, the other uniformed arm of the modern state, and by no means the least important of the two. The first West European to use the term seems to have been Melchior von Osse who, around 1450, served as chancellor to the elector of Saxony. To him, as to Nicholas de la Mare who published his Traite de la police in 1750, it simply meant ‘‘public order''; as late as the 1770s itwas in this sense, and in this sense only, that it was used by Hector Crevecoeur in his Letters of an American Farmer. As an organization it reflected the growth of the towns. Since the Middle Ages, the latter had at their disposal an array of minor officials such as lantern-lighters, nightwatchmen, supervisors of markets and of slaughter-houses, companies of guards, and prison war­dens - in short personnel whose work covered every aspect of municipal government at the lower levels.^[174] Sharing the general preference for venal office, most of them were not municipal employees and did not receive a salary. Like today's companies that are licensed to tow away illegally parked cars, the normal practice was to have them contract with the town. This meant that they reimbursed themselves out of the proceeds of their work or, in the case of wardens, at the expense of the prisoners and their families. Others, such as the English thiefcatchers, set up private guilds and made their living by claiming a share out of stolen goods recovered, not seldom from themselves. A famous case was that of the London racketeer Jonathan Wild around 1725. Not only did he operate a network that specialized in stealing goods and selling them back to their owners, but he also caught ‘‘unauthorized’’ thieves (in other words, such as operated without his permission and did not share their proceeds with him) and handed them in to the authorities.

These urban officials apart, various forces existed to look after the security of the countryside. England had long had the sheriffs and the constables; the former were unpaid county officials, whereas the latter were elected personnel maintained out of the taxes paid by the parishes. In other countries provincial governors had their guards whose character was partly public, partly private. Commanded by a special official known in France as the prevot, they could be used to quell disorder, maintain public safety, look into criminal matters, and the like. All of these forces were semi-professional and tied to the districts in which they were raised. It was only in the 1760s that the first national police, the French marechaussee, was established; as its name indicates, originally it was a highway patrol whose mission was to prevent robberies. Compared with the forces that the king maintained for combating his external enemies, it was very small. In a country whose population probably stood at about 26 million, the former could reach 400,000 men and seldom fell below 200,000 even in peacetime; but the mareechausseee counted only some 3,000 men, divided into thirty companies of a hundred each. To make up for their numerical weakness, their uniforms were particularly splendid, a tactic later adopted by many of their foreign counterparts such as the Italian carabinieri.

By this time Paris already possessed a lieutenant general de police with twenty district commissioners and a total of 700 men - a third of them mounted - under his command. Originating in the second half of the seventeenth century, the system was soon imitated in other places; a medium-sized city such as Lyons or Bordeaux would probably have a guard consisting of several dozen men and even a small provincial town of some 50,000 inhabitants was likely to have four or five policemen to maintain law and order within its precincts and an additional area of, say, 250 square kilometers. The appointment of these chefs de police was in the hands of the mayors, who as we saw had themselves ceased to be elected but were appointed by the intendant on the king’s behalf. All these forces were responsible for a very large variety of duties, from public sanitation through looking after markets to controlling vagabonds, in addition to police work in the narrow sense of that term.

One of the first rulers who tried to establish a Directory of Police or Polizeidirektion was that centralizing monarch, Emperor Joseph II of Austria, after he took over from his mother in 1780.^[175] At first it had only two employees in addition to its head, one Franz von Beer; before long it expanded both in terms of personnel and the fields of activity that it covered until it had branch offices throughout the Empire. However, Beer's attempt to set up a single countrywide organization that would look after all types of police affairs was resisted by the Austrian Estates, which saw it as a threat to their liberties, and had to be abandoned. Foiled in this, he and his men found themselves limited to state security, in­cluding a cabinet noir that specialized in opening the letters of political suspects as well as foreign ambassadors. Routine police matters that were not considered to endanger the regime continued to be handled by a very great variety of provincial and municipal authorities, backed up by the armed forces when strictly necessary, a situation which began to change only after the failed Revolution of 1848.

In this way the distinction of setting up the first nationwide police force responsible for all forms of internal security belongs to Napoleon. Begin­ning in 1799, he systematically merged the various forces already existing with each other and put them under a single minister, Joseph Fouche. A sinister genius - he was certainly not above plotting against the emperor to whom he reported daily - Fouche developed his command into a vast organization; the number of provincial commissaires de police alone rose from thirty at the beginning of the empire to four times that number ten years later. Even so, the uniformed police which now made its presence felt in every district and town only represented the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Not visible to the public eye was the Surete, established in 1810 and at first headed by a reformed criminal and daredevil jailbreaker, Francois Vidocq, to say nothing of a very large number of professional, semi-professional, and amateur informers known as mouchards. Often recruited from among the lowest classes - concierges, footmen, barbers, prostitutes, and the like - they infested every street corner, coffee house, and saloon. Here they collected vast amounts of information, most of it too trivial to use.^[176]

Hard on the heels of the police came another characteristic device of the modern state, prisons. If only because incarceration is expensive and requires a long-term commitment, pre-state political communities had seldom used it as a method of punishment. Either it was limited to important personages whom, for one reason or another, one did not want to execute, as in Roman times when Augustus confined his daughter and granddaughter.⁸² Alternatively it served to detain those who were await­ing trial. Like other offices, jails were often run on a contractual basis by operators who sought to make a profit out of their unfortunate charges. In the absence of a well-developed bureaucratic machine capable of enforc­ing long prison sentences, the penalties meted out by justice had to be swift and cheap. The ones most frequently used included fines, confisca­tion of property, humiliation (either pillorying or forcing the culprit to wear some kind of shameful garment), exile, floggings, mutilation, and of course executions. The latter in particular were regarded as an edifying spectacle that was put up by the authorities for the benefit of their subjects. By the middle of the eighteenth century they were being carried out by a variety of exciting methods. Witness the case of a would-be French regicide who first had his flesh torn from his body; then had several different boiling liquids poured into the wounds; then was drawn and quartered by horses (to help them do the job, he had to be cut into pieces first); and finally had his remains burnt and his ashes scattered so that nothing, but nothing, should remain of him.⁸³

Within fifty years, though, the state had grown so powerful that dis­plays of ferocity, instead of emphasizing its might, merely tended to arouse sympathy for the victim. Sustained by the Enlightenment belief in the essential goodness of men, and prodded by reformers such as Jeremy Bentham and his Italian fellowphilosophe Cesare Beccaria,⁸⁴ the state did not merely want to punish transgressors. Instead it tended to regard them as a blemish on its own record; hence it undertook the much more difficult task of reforming them at the hands of its own officials in the hands of special institutions designed for the purpose. Among the methods employed were isolation, enforced silence (both of which were supposedly good for the soul), the imposition of a strict daily routine, and, above all, work.⁸⁵ Historians have traced the origin of the modern prison

⁸² Suetonius, Lives, Augustus, 65.

⁸³ The proceedings are described in A. L. Zevaes, Damien le regicide (Paris: Riviere, 1937), pp. 201-14.

⁸⁴ Bentham’s most important work on the subject was Theorie des peines et recompenses (1811; English translation, The Rationale of Punishment, London: R. Heward, 1830). Beccaria wrote Dei delitti e delle penne (1764; English translation, Essay on Crime and Punishment, London: Bone, 1801).

⁸⁵ See J. Bentham, Panopticon: or the Inspection House (London: Payne, 1974); and, much more succinctly, J. Mill, ‘‘Prisons and Prison Discipline,” in Mill, Political Writings, T. Ball, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 195-224. system to certain seventeenth-century antecedents such as the orphan­ages and workhouses into which the magistrates of Protestant cities sometimes put foundlings and various types of minor offenders.^[177] Yet another model for incarceration was provided by armies and especially navies; every time a war broke out the result was likely to be a set of criminals released and put into uniform. Fleets of galleys, such as the one maintained by Louis XIV, had their rank and file formed almost entirely of convicts.^[178] Both armed forces and workhouses were seen as a way of ridding society of offenders - including, often, serious ones condemned to death but pardoned - while at the same time continuing to make use of their labor.

By the time Joseph II died in 1790 he had all but abolished the death penalty, replacing it with imprisonment and forced labor in the form of hauling barges along the marshy Hungarian plains. Twenty years later the criminal part of the Code Napoleon came into force; it made loss of freedom into the principal form of punishment between fines and death. From about 1800 on prisons, housed in buildings either specially con­structed or (as was frequently the case in France and Austria) confiscated from the church and adapted to their new purpose, began to dot the European countryside. As if to parody the structure of government, an elaborate hierarchy was created. Fouche himself set the example, estab­lishing maisons de police (the lowest degree of all), maisons d’arret, and maisons de correction. The top level was formed by a handful of particularly prestigious maisons centrales; in them hardened criminals and those who were considered dangerous to the state found a more or less permanent home. Once prisons had opened their gates, their appetite turned out to be insatiable. During the forty years between the fall of the ancien regime and the rise of the July Monarchy, the number of people kept under lock and key at any one time is said to have increased tenfold,^[179] a development paralleled in French-administered countries from 1794 to 1814.^[180]

With the establishment of the regular armed forces, the police (both in and out of uniform), and prisons, the proud structure of the modern state was virtually complete. A century and a half after the Thirty Years War, its domination over external conflict had grown to the point where war itself was coming to be defined as a continuation of policy by other means,⁹⁰ whereas the attempts of lesser groups or people to use violence for their ends acquired a stigma by being called civil war (if it was waged on a sufficiently large scale), rebellion, uprisings, guerrilla warfare, ban­ditry, crime, and, most recently, terrorism. Meanwhile, in the states that pleased to look on themselves as the most civilized, the violence that they directed against their own citizens did not so much diminish as disappear from public view. More and more it took place behind walls, whether of prisons or fortresses or, much later, concentration camps where - in an ironic twist that would have made Bentham shudder - ‘‘Arbeit macht frei.” Like so much else it took on a bureaucratic character with an elaborate hierarchy of administrators, offices, filing cabinets, and finally computers; governed by elaborate rules, it was known by such euphem­isms as ‘‘correction,” ‘‘discipline,” or ‘‘reeducation.” In theory at any rate all these praiseworthy activities were carried out not by, or for, some private person or persons but on behalf of the impersonal state whose understanding of how to treat criminals and other social misfits exceeded that of anybody else. And so it is to the development of that state, as reflected in political theory, that we must next turn our attention.