A century and a half before England or any other European state, France had a nation-wide police force. The disquiet felt by modern British visitors to the French capital at the abrupt descents of the police into the Métro or the provocative bus-loads of policemen sitting endlessly at street corners, does not compare with the disgust felt by eighteenth-century Englishmen at the very notion of this institution, considered to be the executive arm of a foreign autocracy.

French visitors to England, on the other hand, noted sardonically that ‘the famous Turpin’ was a national hero, that the English were constantly being robbed on their practically impassable highways, but preferred such a fate to being robbed by government ministers: ‘if you ask the English the reason for these abuses, they will reply that they are unavoidable in a Land of Liberty such as theirs’. Even a sympathetic observer of the French police structure like William Mildmay concluded that ‘such an establishment is not to be imitated in our land of liberty, where the injured and oppressed are to seek for no other protection but that which the law ought only to afford, without flying for aid to a military power’.