The policing of work during the ancien régime

In the Year III, during a debate on the décadi, Joseph Terral reminded the National Convention of the moral dangers of the old festivals: ‘Remember that under the ancien régime, the local fêtes, the days marked by dances, were generally the occasion for immorality, and the place of crime, especially in the Midi: fathers would keep their children away from them.’ It was not just parents who were concerned about the potential corrupting influence of such times. Much police business had traditionally concerned itself with temporal regulations, and a real continuity in policy can be detected between pre-revolutionary and revolutionary policing of work. In part this was a consequence of the departmental inheritance of the administrative and police responsibilities from the royal intendants and the parlementaire ‘police’ powers. The ancien régime bequeathed to the republic a raft of regulations restricting Sunday trade, and the police enforcement of the décadi during the Revolution can be seen as the continuation of well-established methods of controlling work-time in the interests of social order and in order to support a particular moral viewpoint. Drunkenness on the décadi affronted republican sensibilities, just as rowdiness outside the mass had affronted religious sensibilities during the ancien régime. Sometimes the comparison was explicit. In Amiens, in the Year VI, the municipal council cited the Estates General, which had decided that the ‘wise Police rules’ relating to public order should be kept.