Controlling Animals and Monitoring Citizens, or How to Police Beasts to Better Organize Humans between 1789 and 1799

This article undertakes an unprecedented study of the police of animals in Paris using the proces-verbaux of Section commissioners held at the archives of the Prefecture de Paris. This inquiry reveals the omnipresence of animals in the capital, and the worries they caused for public officials. Not only a source of accidents, and at the very center of debates about public health, in addition to having a commercial interest as meat for butchers, animals raised political questions as well. The way that animals were treated became a matter of concern for it symbolized the relationship to inferiors that the spectacle of urban life could rapidly transform into a subject of social tensions. Public order and public health, republican theater, the regulation of commerce, the protection of the weak were all questions that the policing of animals represented in the daily life of the police in the New Regime.