Mass Surveillance in France & Britain: The Age of the Individual

Foreign Threats Lead to the Creation of Powerful New Agencies

By the end of the 19th century the French Revolution became an historical event rooted in the industrial era’s infancy. Policymakers in France and Britain were confident that they could control their populations and effectively ward off popular upheaval. Furthermore, the majority of men were enfranchised and organized into respectable political parties. This meant that elite policymakers attempted to sympathize with and appeal to workers, rather than control them. Yet even as domestic tensions laxed, external fears of German hegemony dominated Franco-British political thought. Finally, the rise of terrorist assassinations and bombings shifted public fears from the lower classes to international conspiracies. These three major shifts altered the priority of state mechanisms for control. Rather than monitoring and controlling the majority of their citizenry, states increasingly sought to control small cabals of radicals. Between the Franco-Prussian War and World War I France and Britain developed wholly new, professional domestic intelligence-gathering services. Both states still employed regular police services for spying purposes, yet policymakers believed these were inadequate to meet the new period’s challenges. Thus, France created the Deuxième Bureau while Britain developed Special Branch and MI5.

The Franco-Prussian War shocked France. The country believed it was the great land power of Europe, yet Prussia and its allies defeated French armies at every turn due to their industrial and intelligence-gathering superiority which allowed for the precise movement of troops throughout eastern France. The newly-declared Third Republic recognized that France was woefully behind the new German Empire and created a series of military intelligence-gathering services.[1] On 8 June, 1871 France inaugurated the Deuxième Bureau, which was in charge of domestic intelligence gathering.[2]

Within the Deuxième Bureau was the Section de Statistique, later known as the Section de Renseignements. This subdivision used spies to monitor subversive persons in France and initially had a great deal of autonomy. However, the Deuxième primarily processed information while relying on police forces and the Ministry of the Interior to gather intelligence.[3] The young Third Republic created the Deuxième Bureau as a novel organization to deal with the new challenges of the modern era. Yet, the Deuxième’s reliance on older institutions meant that their practices, ideologies and prejudices filtered in.[4] However, even as the police influenced the Deuxième, it influenced the police. As the government increasingly asked police services to monitor potential foreign spies this changed police behavior from defenders of public order to protectors of the nation itself.

The Third Republic styled itself as a liberal democracy, in contrast to the authoritarian Second Empire. Yet, it maintained many of the vestiges of its predecessor. The Third Republic initially cut funding for secret police, though it did not eliminate this practice.[5] It maintained the Sûreté Générale which boasted 200 officers intercepting mail in 1879 and 400 in 1900.[6] It collected information on all people, though primarily focused on workers and Catholic organizations, which its head, Emile-Honoré Cazelles, viewed as a threat to the Republic.[7] The Sûreté’s budget expanded after anarchist threats in the 1890s.[8] Finally the gendarmerie actively engaged in surveillance, shaping public opinion and social control.[9]

While the Franco-Prussian War disturbed British policymakers, the British people were confident in the security of their nation against internal and external threats. Then in 1873 the Long Depression hit Britain especially hard, eroding faith in democratic liberalism. In 1881 Irish nationalists engaged in a series of bombing campaigns across England and in Glasgow. Just as British paranoia of class-based revolution waned, new fears of international terrorist conspiracies rocked the country. That year the government responded to these highly-publicized attacks on civilians by creating a bureau within the London Metropolitan Police which was tasked with counter-terrorism.[10] This bureau became its own entity known as the Special Irish Branch in 1883. It changed its name to Special Branch in 1910 as it expanded its surveillance portfolio to include anarchists and suffragists. Special Branch was relatively small, with only 80 employees by 1914.[11] British policymakers understood the British public feared a French-style political police, and in the 1880s they were not yet prepared to support large-scale domestic surveillance. Britain did not create MI5, an organization analogous to the Deuxième Bureau, until 1909.

Foreign threats spurred the creation of new intelligence-gathering organizations. Yet, after these initial shocks both countries experienced a period of relative peace. Germany remained an existential threat for France, yet no major European war broke out for the next forty-four years. Meanwhile in Britain, the Irish bombing campaigns ended in 1885. Despite this, the new domestic intelligence-gathering organizations used the vaguely-worded directives that initially created them to expand their portfolios. In the pre-WWI period these organizations monitored their own civilians, rather than just foreign threats.

Ironically, the Deuxième expanded rapidly due to support from France’s greatest internal threat, General Georges Boulanger. Boulanger, who was appointed Minister of War 1886-1887, saw German spies everywhere and thus tried to improve domestic surveillance while imbuing xenophobia into the Section de Statistique.[12] Boulanger tripled its budget.[13] Moreover, Boulanger developed the Carnet B in 1886. The Carnet B were profiles police took of foreigners. As Deborah Bauer notes “Once an individual had a Carnet B filled out in his or her name, he or she was to be subject to increased surveillance. Finally, when the army mobilized for the inevitable war that would come, those listed on the Carnet B were slated for internment.”[14] However, “as social and political demographics changed, the military increasingly used the Carnet B to identify French subversives – particularly anarchists, socialists and anti-militarists – and add them to a list that had originally been conceived for targeting spies.”[15]

When Boulanger’s supporters threatened to overthrow the Third Republic in the late 1880s the government was far more equipped to surveille old Général Revanche.[16] Even after Boulanger died in 1891, the realistic threat he had posed to the Republic showed policymakers that internal threats could be just as dangerous as external ones. This became overwhelmingly evident during the Dreyfus Affair.

Domestic Threats force these new Agencies to turn inward

The French military General Staff and the Section de Statistique inherited Boulanger’s paranoia that German spies were everywhere. By 1894 a number of accused spies were convicted and even more were tried.[17] Lieutenant-colonel Alfred Dreyfus, an Alsatian Jew, fell victim to this paranoia when on 13 Oct. 1894 he was officially accused of treason.[18] The evidence against Dreyfus was flimsy. The Section de Statistique intercepted a letter from the German military attaché in Paris, Maximillien Schwarzkoppen, to an Italian ambassador claiming a man known only as “D” gave him the plans for Nice’s fortifications.[19] The intelligence staff narrowed down the treasonous perpetrator to an artillery officer of the General Staff. It just so happened that one of the men investigating the case, Colonel Pierre Fabre, knew Dreyfus and disliked him.[20]

While the military wanted a quiet trial and conviction the antisemitic newspaper La Libre Parole incensed the nation with its exposés on a traitorous Jew conspiring to destroy the French nation.[21] In the ensuing months new evidence severely weakened the French military’s case against Dreyfus while clearly implicating Major Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy.[22] Despite all evidence pointing towards Dreyfus’ innocence the Section de Statistique decided to deceive the French public at the first trial of Dreyfus in 1894. They did not disclose their investigation of Esterhazy during the trial. Furthermore the Section de Statistique originally covered up knowledge of when the critical petit bleu was discovered.[23] The military’s General Staff ordered the Section de Statistique to keep the Esterhazy investigation separate from the Dreyfus one, despite it being obvious that Esterhazy’s handwriting matched the original treasonous correspondence.[24] Later, when lieutenant-colonel Hubert-Joseph Henry forged a letter, supposedly by an Italian ambassador claiming to know a Jew that fed him information, this obvious forgery was presented as evidence of Dreyfus’ guilt.[25]

The General Staff and the Section de Statistique did everything in its power to ensure Dreyfus’ conviction rather than admit they had made a mistake which would damage their reputation. Furthermore, Esterhazy, the actual traitor, had previously worked in counter-intelligence before being implicated. A French counter-intelligence officer selling information to Germany proved that France’s intelligence services were compromised and ineffectual in the face of a superior foreign threat. The Section de Statistique refused to let their weakness be known and decided Dreyfus would be their scapegoat.

To the military intelligence’s surprise, the case was far larger than they could have predicted. This trial struck at the contradictions that plagued the Third Republic since its inception. The Third Republic claimed it was an open democracy where all were equal before the law. Yet, this government was born in war and dominated by the military which had been given extraordinary power for the purpose of eventual vengeance against Germany for its seizure of Alsace-Moselle.[26] The military still operated secretly and unilaterally, undermining the Third Republic’s claim to liberal democracy. Additionally, the Affair revealed an undercurrent of virulent anti-Semitism against incoming Jewish migration. All of these combined to make the Affair one of the Third Republic’s greatest trials.

In 1898, four years after the first trial, internationally-known writer Émile Zola published the editorial J’Accuse! claiming that much of the General Staff was involved in a conspiracy to imprison Dreyfus. This reignited the Affair and resulted in a libel trial, which Zola wanted all along.[27] By this time the French civilian government was embarrassed by the conduct of the military and fearful of its autonomy. On 1 May 1899 the government transferred counter-espionage operations and special police forces to the civilian-run Sûreté.[28]

The officers of the Section de Statistique were outraged by the government reforms and decided to reaffirm Dreyfus’ culpability by deceiving the Rennes trial in the summer of 1899. They bribed lieutenant Eugen Lazare von Czernuski to testify against Dreyfus.[29] Even worse, they went after special police commissioner Thomas Tomps, who was part of the counter-espionage of the Sûreté. Tomps was collecting evidence of the Section de Statistique’s corruption when it leaked the information to the nationalist press, which slandered him. Thus, the military counter-intelligence bureau the Section de Statistique openly warred against the civilian Sûreté for power.[30]

The Section de Statistique’s corruption was too much for the French government. On September 12, 1899, three days after Drefyus’ second conviction at Rennes, it was reorganized and stripped of its autonomy. From then on the head of the Deuxième Bureau exercised narrow guardianship over the section, including its finances.[31] The Affair ruptured military and police relations, as the military slandered Dreyfus and defended their prerogative while the police defended Dreyfus and the constitutional framework of the Republic.[32] The Affair ensured that domestic-intelligence gathering was run by civilians rather than the military. Only the threat of invasion in 1914 ended the military and police’s mutual enmity, though civilians exercised considerably more power in the new relationship. 

The Affair showcased France’s incapability of countering subversives. While the military lost much of its power over civilian life, the special police were given more authority to survey the French population and a mandate from the government that they were now responsible for countering subversives.[33] From 1899 through WWI domestic surveillance was conducted by the Sûreté, Deuxième Bureau and local police in an overlapping web of prerogatives.

International Anarchist Violence

Beginning in the 1890s and stretching into the early 1900s Europe and America faced a wave of high-profile anarchist assassinations. In 1894, French President Sadi Camot was stabbed to death by an Italian anarchist in Lyon. In 1897, Antonio Canovas del Castillo, the Prime Minister of Spain was shot to death in Santa Águeda, Spain.  In 1898, Empress Elisabeth of Austria was stabbed to death in Geneva. In 1900, Umberto I, King of Italy was shot in Monza, Italy. Finally, in 1901, US President William McKinley, was shot in Buffalo, New York.”[34] Additionally, between March 1892 and June 1894, 11 dynamite explosions struck Paris, killing 9.[35]

Britain was largely unaffected by anarchist violence during this period. As Haia Shpayer-Makov notes, “the only person killed by an anarchist weapon in Britain was the French anarchist Martial Bourdin, who died while mishandling a bomb in Greenwich Park in 1894.”[36] But police occasionally arrested anarchists for possessing weapons or planning attacks and these were widely reported by yellow journalists.[37] Furthermore, many of the 2.4 million Russian Jews that immigrated west between 1880-1914 settled in Britain, with an especially large community in London. Since Russia experienced more anarchist activity than any other country, British people feared that Russian Jewish immigrants were potential terrorists.[38] Paranoia about international anarchist cabals that aimed at overthrowing free democracies naturally blended with anti-Semitic conspiracies in popular newspapers.[39] Special Branch monitored suspected Jewish anarchists and some agents even learned Yiddish as they attempted to infiltrate the Jewish community.[40]

One other group that Special Branch monitored were suffragettes. The suffrage movement radicalized during the late 1890s. As Stephanie J. Brown notes, between 1905 and 1914 suffragettes engaged in,

“mass demonstrations and open-air gatherings; tax resistance; a census boycott; attacks (both rhetorical and physical) on government ministers; deputations to Parliament, cabinet ministers, and the king; window breaking; a public arson campaign; the destruction of art in public galleries; and, significantly, assaults on police officers, resisting arrest by stealth and force, and the stealing and auctioning of parts of “captured” police uniforms to raise money for the cause.”[41]

This led to public outcry from reactionaries and the expansion of Special Branch.[42] In March 1911 Special Branch covertly opened suffragettes’ letters, a breach of privacy that was unthinkable just a few decades before.[43]

Germanophobia Leads to the Creation of Professional British Spy Services

Arguably since the Middle Ages, England, then Britain followed a pattern with regards to French social control mechanisms: first they sneered, then they copied. While France’s Deuxième Bureau emerged as a national domestic intelligence-gathering service in 1871, Britain refused to establish a similar agency until 1909. Yet, once their fears overwhelmed their anti-French prejudices they copied their continental counterparts. Britain experienced an outbreak of Germanophobia due to a combination of spy hysteria and German naval buildup.

In 1906, author William Le Queux wrote a bestselling book, The Invasion of 1910, about how German spies had infiltrated nearly every branch of the British government.[44] Le Queux claimed he had sources within British intelligence who confirmed this was a realistic scenario, prompting further anti-German spy literature. In retrospect, these claims were lies by an author using scare tactics to promote a novel.[45] However, the British public soon became paranoid about a potential invasion, including Special Branch’s chief, William Melville, who promoted Le Queux’s book as accurate.[46] Spy hysteria reached a fever pitch after Germany officially announced its naval buildup in 1908, which the British saw as a direct threat to their security.[47] Soon, vacationing Germans in Britain photographing the landscape were accused of spying on behalf of the Kaiser.[48]

In 1909 Britain quietly created the Secret Services Bureau to counter German spying. This bureau originally managed foreign and domestic counter-intelligence.[49] In 1910 this organization split in two with Military Operations(t), or MO(t), handling domestic surveillance (It changed its name to MO5 as intelligence operations expanded during WWI and finally became MI5 in 1916, a name it still carries).[50] Like its French equivalent, the Deuxième Bureau, MO(t) processed data and relied on police agents to collect information and act upon it. When WWI began it only had six members and was as far from an Orwellian Big Brother ministry as one can imagine.[51] Regardless, its leader Vernon Kell was ambitious and in 1912 set up a mass registry on suspicious persons, which included foreigners and British civilians.[52] In 1911 Parliament passed The Official Secrets Act 1911 which allowed investigations into suspicious persons and shifted the burden of proof to the accused.[53] While MO(t) was a small organization with an enormous portfolio Parliament bestowed it with incredible powers to target individuals, which its leader eagerly pursued.

Our Current Age

The Age of the Masses began in Paris 1789 when a popular movement toppled the French Ancien Régime, demonstrating that the greatest threat to the governments of Europe was their discontented citizenry. The Age of the Individual began at Sedan 1870 when the Prussian army destroyed the French Second Empire, showcasing that intelligence-backed industrial warfare was the new peril for Franco-British governments. During this age the governments of France and Britain were content that the majority of their citizenry, even the working class, were patriotic and content. In contrast, governments feared that radical subversives, such as anarchists, right-wing populists, revolutionary socialists and militant suffragettes, were backed by hostile governments or international cabals (often Jewish).

The Franco-British upper and middle classes no longer feared the working-classes themselves. However, they were afraid that the lower classes were especially susceptible to foreign ideas that threatened national security. France and Britain experienced a number of high-profile miners’ strikes just prior to WWI, raising fears that subversive persons were arousing workers against their own governments.[54] Thus, policymakers concluded that it was imperative for national intelligence services to work with police to monitor, censor and separate subversive persons from the general populace.

When WWI broke out France and Britain were ready to institute a massive surveillance state that monitored its own citizenry unlike anything the world had yet seen. The institutions were already in place. In France domestic surveillance was the prerogative of the Deuxième Bureau, the Sûreté Générale, local police and the gendarmerie, while in Britain there was Special Branch, MO(t) and the local police. France and Britain developed police services naturally over a millennium in order to control their national populations and maintain order. Meanwhile, these countries created intelligence agencies with large portfolios and incredible authority to intrude upon civil liberties as a purposeful response to industrial-era warfare. Coordination between national intelligence services and police extended the national government’s mandate to protect the nation against attack to their civilian police services.

Only two things differed in the organizational structure of pre-WWI intelligence agencies and the modern surveillance state. First, the Deuxième Bureau and MO(t) were relatively small. Popular fears of arbitrary policing kept policymakers from expanding these organizations. Second, intelligence services were uncoordinated. Instead of a central intelligence board that handled all information, these organizations had overlapping portfolios. In France, this occurred because policymakers feared an out-of-control military intelligence service such as the Section de Statistique had been during the Dreyfus Affair. In Britain, intelligence was divided because policymakers feared an overly-powerful government capable of instituting French-style authoritarianism. When WWI broke out policymakers and the public realized that Germany was a greater threat than the power of their own intelligence agencies and supported the expansion of personnel and powers of intelligence services. The surveillance state that emerged in WWI was not imposed in secret from above but demanded from all classes as a necessary instrument of total war.

Before the late 19th century the civilian populations of France and Britain fought to abolish the secretive, arbitrarily punitive domestic surveillance services embodied by the cabinet noir and the brutal police-military repression. The result was that the central state lost its ability to arbitrarily punish individuals and quash large groups of people. Instead police and new agencies exchanged heavy-handed repression tactics with new methods that maximized intelligence-gathering while employing minimal force to sequester, control and punish subversives. At the war’s outbreak these highly-sophisticated groups were given more personnel, expanded budgets and a mandate to defend the nation at any cost with few limits to their authority.

Conclusion:

The primary goal of any organization is the security and continuance of itself. Governments are no exception, despite any pretenses they hold to serve God or the people before itself. The surest way to achieve security is through intelligence. First, threats must be identified. Second, a means of countering these threats must be outlined. Finally, the threat must be eliminated, diminished, or contained using the aforementioned intelligence.

The numerous ruling bodies of France and Britain have worked to secure themselves since their earliest incarnations until present through the accumulation, processing and application of information. This sequence of information-gathering, processing and application was dictated by the technological capacity of each period. A period’s technology dictated which groups could threaten governmental power and through what means. Conversely, these same technologies equipped governments with similar tools for observation and repression.

During the Age of Aristocrats information-gathering technology was limited by our modern standards. Transportation and communication were slow. Literacy was confined to a small elite. These limitations meant that from the Norman Conquest until the latter days of the Ancien Régime the central states of France and Britain struggled to effectively regulate their countries. These technological limitations also dictated who the states’ enemies were. Peasants and the small merchant classes had almost no capacity to organize and coordinate effectively, meaning only wealthy aristocrats could challenge the state.

Technological limitations dictated the ability for each to combat the other. Central governments could issue surveys, censuses and engage in limited spying efforts but the small size of government and the slow movement of people and messages made information collection scant and less reliable. These same limitations meant that an opportunistic aristocrat could only oppose the central state with plots involving a small cabal of like-minded people.

The latter 17th to 18th centuries were a period of unprecedented socioeconomic development in Western Europe. Wealth from the New World and scientific advancements combined with the printing press fundamentally altered European society. A sizeable economic middle class of literate, educated professionals emerged. This class initially lacked consciousness and coordination. Furthermore it took a long time for it to become a sizeable segment of the population. Yet, it continued to grow ideologically, financially and politically.

Britain had a larger proportional middle class, but the French middle class quickly became more powerful than their Anglo-Saxon counterparts. Starting with François I, French governments created a massive bureaucracy to control their tumultuous state, which was staffed by middle-class clerks. Expensive wars led to more debt, which the state paid off by creating and selling more offices. The rapid growth of a large bureaucracy meant that the state could more effectively monitor aristocrats, process information and act upon it. Furthermore, bureaucrats depended on monarchical patronage, ensuring that they were loyal to the central state rather than aristocrats. Thus, the Franco-British monarchical states experienced a century of incredible stability as the aristocrats waned and the middle class remained too small, unconscious and unorganized to threaten royal power. From the Norman Invasion to the French Wars of Religion and the English Civil War the monarchs of France and England were continuously wracked by plots to overthrow them. Then the Fronde 1648-1653 in France and the Glorious Revolution 1668-9 in England became the last major aristocrat-led threats to monarchical power in these countries.

The middle class made up for its role in the century of stability by launching a century of their own revolutions as they vied for political power. The French Revolution began The Age of the Masses, yet the middle class was as much a product of this age as it was an agent. Canals, roads, a sophisticated post office, greater literacy and ability to print pamphlets and books all led to the faster dissimilation of people and ideas. These technological and socioeconomic changes meant that the middle class naturally developed a consciousness of itself and its position as the primary administrator of state. While the middle class were not destined to oppose the state, it is unlikely that they would have continued to accept the Ancien Régimes as they were since these changes gave them the mental, organizational and financial capacity to assert political power. Meanwhile, the monarchy and its immediate subordinates underestimated or were unaware of the threat posed by this powerful new group. The central governments still mistakenly believed that secret plots by conniving aristocrats were the greatest threat to their reign and their agents dealt in court gossip and intrigue.

The Age of the Masses was a roughly ninety-year period wherein the state struggled to adapt to this new power dynamic. The French Revolution demonstrated that a class of wealthy, educated, yet disenfranchised people could lead the masses in successful revolt against established governments. Elites initially tried to suppress the middle classes but this proved counterproductive in Britain and near-impossible in France. The old mechanisms for repression, the cabinet noir and secret police, had developed over centuries to discover plots by powerful individuals. These outdated functions were mostly useless in a period when any one person out of millions could lead a popular, effective and coordinated movement against the government. Between the 1830s to 1840s both countries grudgingly accepted the middle class into power.

Through the Reform Act 1832 in Britain and concessions made during the reign of Louis Philippe, elites shared power with the middle class in exchange for their support in suppressing the lower class, which they both feared. This period fundamentally transformed the mechanisms of surveillance and social control. A professional police force monitored public spaces and published regular crime statistics. Regulations regarding hygiene ordered society and provided new avenues for state penetration into the lives of its poor subjects. The government allocated welfare to ameliorate the worst conditions of industrial labor and collect information on its poorest individuals. Finally, workhouses and prisons created spaces where continuous observation and control were exercised against troublesome individuals. Thus, the Enlightenment ethos of reason replaced religious tradition as the governing practice of society. This practice appealed to the elites and the middle class and they successfully subordinated the lower class.

The Age of the Individual created a whole new threat: the subversive. Subversives were not necessarily nationals or foreigners, but could be either. Foreign agents worked with or inspired homegrown radicals. Conversely, radical movements within one nation could draw on support from international sympathizers to deadly effect. A single person with dynamite, a sophisticated firearm or sensitive information could directly threaten the nation. France and Britain were initially caught off guard since their surveillance and control mechanisms were made to control the poor masses. Prussian spies infiltrated eastern France and facilitated favorable engagements in the Franco-Prussian War. Irish nationalists successfully bombed public markets across England and in Glasgow. Anarchists assassinated a shocking number of political leaders.

These dramatic incidences forced France and Britain to rapidly develop agencies whose entire purpose was to identify, monitor and neutralize subversives. These agencies were wholly unlike the police who controlled public spaces and responded to sudden outbursts of violence. New intelligence agencies aimed to prevent premeditated acts of anti-government activity before they could take place. Five months after the Franco-Prussian War ended the French government created the Deuxième Bureau to counter German spying. In 1881 the London Metropolitan Police created an anti-terrorist bureau that eventually became its own agency dubbed Special Branch. The Franco-British central governments created these agencies with a mandate to only focus on foreign conspiracies to assuage the public, who feared the return of secret policing and arbitrary arrest and punishment. However, anarchist violence prompted these agencies to surveille suspected subversives within their own citizenry.

Since the Norman Conquest the central states of France and Britain struggled to observe and control their populations to their benefit. Advancements in technology and changes in the sociopolitical structure gave new tools to the central government and opposition alike. The rulers, the observers and the objects of observation changed through each age, yet in every age those in power had to identify threats to their rule or risk violent upheaval.

One more thing should be clear from this investigation: France and Britain’s domestic surveillance and social control mechanisms developed through the intense relationship these two shared. Whether in opposition or through coordination, these two countries forced each other to develop new intelligence-gathering agencies and mechanisms. The French-speaking Normans brought the baillis system to England and created the Domesday Book, its first national survey. The English invasion during the Hundred Years’ War inspired Louis IX, the Universal Spider, to spin a web of informants and accountants to prevent future conspiracies against him. The spymasters of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I cultivated their arts to counter French-backed Catholic conspiracies.

The first London police services emerged in 1792 specifically to monitor the Jacobin clubs. During the mid-19th century France and Britain developed public sanitation laws in tandem. Ideas crisscrossed the Channel, such as Honoré Frégier’s ‘dangerous classes’ and Thomas Malthus’ theories on societal collapse, both of which prompted governments to further control the working classes. The Dreyfus Affair raised the prospect of German spies infiltrating government agencies and inspired novels such as Le Queux’s The Invasion of 1910. All the while British fears of a French-style secret police kept them from developing large-scale surveillance agencies until WWI. Meanwhile, French people looked at the British Bobby as a respectable agent of the peace and demanded limits on police power.

France and Britain share an interconnected history that is essential to understanding how their agencies and laws developed so similarly during the First World War. Even when these two nations did not directly cooperate, the long-standing effects each had upon the other influenced their decision-making so that each developed remarkably similar agencies, practices and ideas regarding surveillance and social control.

If you want to know the next part of this story, read my book Domestic Surveillance and Social Control in Britain and France during World War I. In it, I detail how World War I rapidly transformed Britain and France, as both countries developed modern, sophisticated apparatuses for mass surveillance and social control.

[1] Deborah Susan Bauer. Marianne is Watching: Knowledge, Secrecy, Intelligence and the Origins of the French Surveillance State (1870–1914) DISS. 2013, 106.

[2] The Première Bureau handled troop movements. In 1874 four other bureaus were created. Ibid., 2

[3] Ibid., 2.

[4] Ibid., 17.

[5] Clive Emsley, “Introduction: Political Police and the European Nation-State in the Nineteenth Century,” in The Policing of Politics in the Twentieth Century, ed. Mark Mazower, (Oxford: Berghan Books, 1997), 17

[6] Olivier Forcade, La République Secrète: Histoire des services spécieux français de 1918 à 1939. (Paris : Nouveau Monde, 2008), 25.

[7] Clive Emsley, “Introduction: Political Police and the European Nation-State in the Nineteenth Century,” in The Policing of Politics in the Twentieth Century, ed. Mark Mazower, (Oxford: Berghan Books, 1997), 17-18.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Olivier Forcade, La République Secrète, 23.

[10] Bernard Porter, The Origins of the Vigilant State: The London Metropolitan Police Special Branch before the First World War (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1987), 19.

[11] Ibid., 181.

[12] Deborah Susan Bauer. Marianne is Watching: Knowledge, Secrecy, Intelligence and the Origins of the French Surveillance State (1870–1914) DISS. 2013, 209-211.

[13] Ibid., 219.

[14] Ibid., 235.

[15] Ibid., 241.

[16] Jean-Marc Bèrliere, “Republican Political Police? Political Policing in France under the Third Republic, 1875-1940” ed. Mark Mazower, The Policing of Politics in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Berghan Books, 1997), 44

[17] Jean-Denis Bredin, The Affair: The Case of Alfred Dreyfus, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (New York City: George Brazilier Inc, 1986), 47. See also Deborah Susan Bauer. Marianne is Watching: Knowledge, Secrecy, Intelligence and the Origins of the French Surveillance State (1870–1914) DISS. 2013, 311.

[18] Jean-Denis Bredin, The Affair, 54-6.

[19] Ibid., 50-1.

[20] Ibid., 62-3.

[21] Ibid., 75. Note, some historians have argued that it was the military who leaked this information to La Libre Parole in order to drum up popular support for its conviction of Dreyfus in lieu of actual evidence.

[22] Ibid., 143-4

[23] Ibid., 144.

[24] Ibid., 161-3.

[25] Ibid., 173.

[26] Commonly known as Alsace-Lorraine, Moselle was a region within Lorraine that was seized rather than Lorraine entire.

[27] Jean-Denis Bredin, 248-9.

[28] Sébastien Laurent, “Aux origines de la « guerre des polices » : militaires et policiers du renseignement dans la République (1870-1914),” Revue Historique 307, 786.

[29] Ibid., 787-8.

[30] Ibid., 787-8.

[31] Ibid., 786.

[32] Ibid., 788-9.

[33] Jean-Marc Bèrliere, “Republican Political Police? Political Policing in France under the Third Republic, 1875-1940” ed. Mark Mazower, The Policing of Politics in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Berghan Books, 1997), 33

[34] Haia Shpayer-Makov, “Anarchism in British Public Opinion 1880-1914,” Victorian Studies 31, no. 4 (Summer, 1988), 490.

[35] Richard Bach Jensen, “The International Anti-Anarchist Conference of 1898 and the Origins of Interpol,”

Journal of Contemporary History 16, no. 2 (Apr., 1981), 324.

[36] Haia Shpayer-Makov, “Anarchism in British Public Opinion 1880-1914,” 490.

[37] Ibid.

[38] Paul Knepper, “The Other Invisible Hand: Jews and Anarchists in London before the First World War,” Jewish History 22, no. 3 (2008), 296-7.

[39] Ibid., 301.

[40] Clive Emsley “Introduction: Political Police and the European Nation-State in the Nineteenth Century,” in The Policing of Politics in the Twentieth Century, ed. Mark Mazower (Oxford: Berghan Books, 1997), 20.

[41] Stephanie J. Brown, “An ‘Insult to Soldiers' Wives and Mothers’: The Woman's Dreadnought's Campaign Against Surveillance on the Home Front, 1914–1915,” The Journal of Modern Periodical Studies 7, no. 1-2 (2016), 134.

[42] Richard Thurlow, The Secret State: British Internal Security in the 20th Century (New York City: Wiley-Blackwell, 1995), 20.

[43] David Vincent, “The Origins of Public Secrecy in Britain,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 1, (1991) 242.

[44] Christopher Andrew, Defend the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5. (London: Penguin Books, 2010), 8-9.

[45] And who can blame him?

[46] Ibid., 7.

[47] The Boer War was another impetus for Britain to develop intelligence services as its large military struggled to counter the guerilla fighters. Jennifer Siegel, “Training Thieves: The Instruction of “Efficient Intelligence Officers” In Pre-1914 Britain,” in Intelligence and Statecraft: The Use and Limits of Intelligence in International Society, ed.s Peter Jackson and Jennifer Siegel, (Santa Barbara, California: Praeger, 2005), 128-9.

[48] Ibid., 15-7. In some cases this was actually spy work as some Germans were caught making topographical maps of Britain. John Curry, The Security Service: The Official History 1908-1945, (London: Public Record Office, 1999), 69.

[49] Christopher Andrew, Defend the Realm, 3-5.

[50] Ibid., 25-8.

[51] Ibid., 29.

[52] Ibid., 52. Richard Thurlow, The Secret State, 42.

[53] Kevin Quinlan, The Secret War between the Wars: MI5 in the 1920s and 1930s

(Woodbridge, United Kingdom: The Boydell Press, 2014) 3.

[54] For Britain, see Richard Thurlow, The Secret State, 27-34. For France see  Odile Roynette-Gland, “L'armée dans la bataille sociale: maintien de l'ordre et grèves ouvrières dans le Nord de la France (1871-1906),” Le Mouvement Social, no. 179 (Apr.- Jun., 1997), 52-58.