Secret Police

“When a man marries his mistress, he creates a job vacancy” is a bon mot often attributed to the financier Jimmy Goldsmith but coined in fact by the multiwedded French actor Sacha Guitry.¹²⁴ So, too, with the police.

Secret police were used against occult crimes in particular, espe­cially theological and political unorthodoxy. The ancient Greek sky and thunder god Zeus, who was not omniscient, ran a spy service of thirty thousand immortals who roamed the earth, noting unjust deeds. Aristotle recommended a system of spies to keep tabs on dissi- dents.¹²⁶ Starting in the thirteenth century, Franciscans and especially Dominicans (God's dogs) were also early covert enforcers—trained to ferret out heresy, operating Europe-wide, and answering directly to the pope.¹²⁷ Many of the techniques later perfected by the mod­ern secret police were first tested by the Inquisition: evaluating evi­dence of forbidden thoughts such as ritual practices or refusal to participate, ownership of prohibited writings, association with other suspects, statements to others. Nonheretics were obliged to report and testify; confession was extracted by threatening punishments or implying that others had already revealed all; grace periods were promised those who confessed now.¹²⁸ Under Henry VIII, Thomas Cromwell used his network of spies to report on subjects' theologi­cal shortcomings and doubts about the king's marital extravagances.

As democratic winds began to blow across Europe, the autoc­racies feared revolution. In quiet times, the secret police mostly tracked the opposition press, followed and sometimes censored books and theater, and kept an eye on political meetings. The Prus­sians banned all German-language papers imported from America, fearing democratic tendencies.¹³³ But as protest quickened, things turned nastier. The French police speciale and the tsar's Third Depart­ment, dating to the sixteenth century, were among the most noto­rious of Europe's political police forces, ruthlessly suppressing opposition.¹³4 The English Special Branch was established in 1884 in response to bombings by Irish republicans. Despite much postur­ing about French-style plainclothesmen being an arm of autocracy, even the British found them useful. In 1842, a small detective force was established surreptitiously and not publicly acknowledged until the 1870s. From the late nineteenth century on, the British police, much like their continental counterparts, made clear their interests in political enemies.¹³⁵ Before unification in the 1870s, the German states collaborated across their multiple borders to track liberals, socialists, and Communists.¹³⁶ World War I marked a water­shed, with the state now massively keeping tabs on its soldiers and citizens, including by intercepting and reading mail to measure the pulse of public opinion. If the Russian monarchy had forty-nine police officers reading the public's letters in 1913, the Soviets had ten thousand doing this work seven years later.¹³⁷

Agents provocateurs were especially resented, embroiling the state in similar questions of complicity as its use of informers and entrap­ment for regular crime.

Detective squads were also established to collect evidence and track down offenders. Detectives thus did what is commonly con­sidered police work, but precisely because most actual patrol work was not like that, separate detective outfits were needed. One of the first was the criminal investigation division set up in London in 1842. Detectives' work habits and tasks differed sharply from the regular police: no uniforms, regular beats, or schedules. Detectives were reactive, delving deeply to solve crimes post facto. They were in close contact with the underworld, so corruption and graft were common among them. Like vice control, detective work was a tan­gle of mixed motives and quasi-legal temptations.¹⁴¹

The detective quickly became star of the most popular literary genre ever, barring perhaps the romance. The public was gripped by the narrative thrust, intellectual puzzles, and dramatic punch of the common law world's courtrooms. Dueling attorneys presented competing narratives and their evidentiary backup to a jury of everymen. Starting with Edgar Allan Poe's Murders in the Rue Morgue in 1841 and Wilkie Collins's Woman in White in 1859, detective fic­tion became the reading public's staple.¹⁴² Charles Dickens is said to have invented the word detective, identifying Inspector Bucket in Bleak House (1852) as a “detective officer.”¹⁴³ Introduction of the jury trial to Russia in 1864 made possible the use of fictional court cases with their inherent drama, presented as theater, to educate citizens in the early Soviet Union.¹⁴⁴ By the mid-twentieth cen­tury, a quarter of all English-speaking fiction and television pro­grams were crime stories.¹⁴⁵ Poe's narrator may have emphasized his detective's almost preternatural reasoning, but Dupin himself pursued evidence with unbridled empiricism.¹⁴⁶ Sherlock Holmes spoke often of deduction, but his method was as inductive as scien­tific method insisted.¹⁴⁷ In A Study in Scarlet (1887), Watson noted Holmes's excellent knowledge of chemistry, anatomy, biology, and geology but also his profound ignorance of literature and philoso­phy.