“Fearful of being pursued” : environmental problems and opportunities in policing the forests of pre-revolutionary France

The forest guards and other officials who monitored and regulated the exploitation of trees and timber faced a range of significant problems in eighteenth-century France, as illustrated in the first-hand reports they drew up in the course of their duties. This article highlights some of those issues by introducing the notion of “environments of policing”. This obviously encompassed the legal and organizational environment in which forest guards operated, and also these men’s social environment. Such themes were clearly significant in shaping the effectiveness of woodland policing, and have understandably attracted the attention of previous scholars. However this article aims to take a wider view by going on to consider the natural environment where forestry officials worked — the trees, clearings, coppices, fields, moors, and riverbanks of the French countryside. These settings provided forest guards with policing challenges of a kind that were unknown to the urban police who have been the focus of most historians’ attention. Yet these men’s knowledge of the natural world could also help them to detect and solve environmental “crimes”. This study of rural law enforcement in eighteenth century France thus contributes to our broader understanding of policing history.