INTRODUCTION
In 1907 Clément Vautel in Le Journal recounted the story of Spot, a police dog who could sniff out lies, infidelities, and all kinds of human flaws. Alarmed by this “monster,” the Parisian police prefect orders Spot to be taken to the pound and shot, thereby fulfilling his duty as a “defender of society.”Footnote 1 Vautel's article satirized effectively the claims made about the powers of France's new police dogs by journalists, canophiles, and police dog trainers, who all celebrated the important role that well-trained, intelligent, sturdy, and loyal dogs could play in securing France's urban areas from crime and protecting the law-abiding citizen from the omnipresent threats of the modern city. Intense fears of crime dovetailed with police professionalization and new understandings of animal psychology to create the conditions for the emergence of Parisian police dogs. Their abilities became a matter of public debate within the mass print culture of belle époque.Footnote 2 From front-page splashes to short fait divers news items, numerous press reports represented police dogs as emotional and intelligent individuals dedicated to fighting crime and as evidence of changing human-canine relations. In this vein, René Simon argued that using dogs for police work enabled them to fulfil their “social value” as “vigilant defender[s] and protector[s] of our security.”Footnote 3 In particular, Simon and others portrayed them as canine defenses against the much-feared Apache gangs—roaming bands of unemployed youths so-named for their supposed tribal savagery—which bourgeois commentators commonly represented as violent and unreformable obstacles to social order.Footnote 4
Having spent much of the nineteenth century combating stray dogs and the threat of canine-borne rabies, the Paris police force began deploying dogs for specialized police work in the early twentieth century, a time of increased police professionalization and expansion. Under the guidance of dynamic police prefect Louis Lépine, dogs became part of the modern police force, which was integral to the rise of “bourgeois civilization” based on liberalism, capitalism, and the protection of private property.Footnote 5 They joined customs and army dogs as creatures mobilized to protect national interests from perceived internal and external threats.Footnote 6 But although their introduction was rooted within the particular conditions of belle époque France, Parisian police dogs were part of the broader deployment of police dogs in other countries such as Belgium, Britain, Germany, and the United States, which took place through transnational connections and exchanges.
Dogs are reasonably well-represented within the emerging field of animal history, whose practitioners have shown how animals have constituted “human” societies.Footnote 7 Historians have examined police dogs to uncover representations of class and dog breeds, as well as the mechanisms of racialized state repression.Footnote 8 This article takes a different approach, and deploys police dogs, a neglected aspect of the police history and animal history of France, to explore nonhuman agency, an expanding area of scholarly inquiry across a range of disciplines.Footnote 9 I will argue that while “nonhuman agency” is an illuminating and necessary analytical tool, we also need to examine historical actors' conceptualizations of animal abilities to clarify the stakes and complexities of mobilizing purposeful and capable animals, such as police dogs.
Many philosophers and theorists have grappled with questions of agency, which Julia Adams describes as connoting “capacity, power, free will, [and] action.”Footnote 10 Despite challenges from post-structuralist and other theorists, agency remains a key concern for many historians for whom reason remains a necessary condition of agency since it allows individuals to break free, to greater or lesser extents, of their instincts, emotions, traditions, and social structures.Footnote 11 This conflation of agency with reason, and by extension with human levels of intentionality, provides a formidable obstacle to the meaningful integration of nonhumans into historical narratives. In response, animal studies scholars now persuasively ascribe agency to animals. Often drawing on the work of actor-network theorists, principally Bruno Latour, they argue that nonhumans display agency when they make a difference to human activities, societies, and identities. Agency no longer relies on human levels of intentionality or reason, and has instead emerged as a hybrid and relational achievement distributed unevenly between humans and nonhumans.Footnote 12 Alongside this decoupling of agency and human reasoning, some animal studies scholars argue that certain animals also have agency because they act with a degree of intentionality.Footnote 13 Dogs, for instance, can be agents because they have unwittingly shaped the past and because they are capable of skillful and intentional actions.Footnote 14
Uncovering nonhuman agency allows animals to be incorporated actively and non-deterministically into historical narratives.Footnote 15 However, “nonhuman agency” can become something of a monolithic concept. With this risk in mind, Susan J. Pearson and Mary Weismantel have called on scholars to ask how nonhuman agency “has been defined historically, and how agentive powers have been constructed and distributed through social formations.”Footnote 16 Frederick Cooper, meanwhile, has convincingly argued that analytical concepts such as “modernity” and “globalization” can too easily become catch-all and blunt explanatory concepts.Footnote 17 There is a danger that “nonhuman agency” will fall into the same trap.
In light of these concerns, this article historicizes nonhuman agency by exploring how human actors in early twentieth-century France conceptualized the diverse abilities of the animals they worked with. I avoid the term “nonhuman agency” throughout, for although journalists, canophiles, and police dog trainers sometimes described police dogs as “agents of the law,”Footnote 18 they did not use the terms “agency” or “agents” as scholars use them today. Instead, they discussed police dogs' intelligence, sensory skills, emotions, trainability, and physical strength, which under human guidance would allow them to act in socially-useful ways. They also repeatedly stressed the crucial and transformative experience of the training process: police dogs would emerge through trainers suppressing some canine instincts and nurturing others. Without their guidance, trainers feared that the dogs' aggressive or wayward instincts would dominate. These portrayals of dogs' multiple and contingent capabilities can help us tease out complexities and nuances that are sometimes obscured by “nonhuman agency.”
Discussions on Parisian police dogs' abilities reflected and contributed to broader deliberations on animal and human intelligence. The early Third Republic is sometimes treated as a Cartesian moment because some Republicans celebrated René Descartes' veneration of reason. But it is a mistake to assume that the Cartesian model of the “animal-machine” dominated French thinking about animals, and the discourse on police dogs made little reference to the famous philosopher. This was not so much explicitly anti-Cartesian as it was a by-passing of Cartesian tropes altogether.Footnote 19 Discussions of police dogs' abilities had more in common with transnational debates on animal psychology, during which some early twentieth-century psychologists claimed that certain animals, including dogs and apes, possessed intelligenceFootnote 20 The history of Parisian police dogs suggests that these debates were at times highly politicized and also had a very practical dimension. It also highlights how discussions of animal intelligence were entwined with broader cultural understandings of human intelligence in the post-Darwinian world.Footnote 21
Police dogs emerged at a time of shifting animal-human relations in France as Darwinism, feelings of kinship with pets, concerns over animal welfare, and xenotransplantations all questioned the sense of an unbridgeable divide between humans and animals.Footnote 22 The question of intelligence, both human and animal, had become fundamental as influential doctors, psychiatrists, and psychologists increasingly emphasized instinct, heredity, the unconscious, and the environment as scientifically observable explanations for human behavior. These approaches had continued to gain prominence since their initial formulation during the monomania controversies of the 1820s. Amongst these alienists was Théodule Ribot, who believed that free will and reason “were mere abstractions, the subjective aspect of coordinated neurophysiological reaction.”Footnote 23 Pioneer of crowd psychology Gustave Le Bon similarly played down the role of reason “in the governing of men” in his hugely popular and influential Psychologie des foules (1895).Footnote 24 Such claims and the search for the biological causes of madness and delinquency increasingly challenged received notions of moral responsibility, human rationality, and free will. They constructed crime and other social problems as diseases to be carefully managed and contained by the medical profession as part of its struggle against national degeneration. This “revolt against rationalism,” to borrow Ruth Harris' term, turned criminals into creatures governed by harmful instinctual impulses and socially-destructive unconscious desires.Footnote 25 As doctors, psychologists, and psychiatrists animalized women, criminals, alcoholics, the insane, vagabonds, and sexual “deviants” by stripping them of their free will and reason, police dogs were conversely treated as beings whose intelligence and physical prowess could be mobilized to defend civilized society, even if fears about their violent instincts never died away. Police dogs became embroiled in the fraught deliberations over the meanings of instinct and intelligence.
As well as contributing to the wider rethinking of intelligence and human-animal boundaries in belle époque France, discussions of canine abilities formed the “agential conditions” within which police dogs operated. As Bob Carter and Nickie Charles argue, the “possibilities for action are conditioned by incorporation into human social relations. Agency is thus always Agency in relation to other Agents and to what those other Agents want to do.” Within this relational model of agency, police dogs are “agents in relation to human dominated structures.”Footnote 26 The police dogs' abilities were both enabled and constrained by the prevailing attitudes toward dogs and the training techniques of the time. The case of Parisian police dogs shows that even when humans want to enhance the abilities of animals (as opposed to seeking actively to subdue them) it is not always possible, not because of animal “resistance” or lack of skill, but rather because of deficiencies in the ways in which humans try to mobilize and harness them.Footnote 27 In their desire to de-center humans as the driving force of history by highlighting animals' roles and “resistance,” studies of nonhuman agency have arguably downplayed the conditions that structure the possibilities for animals to act, and this article attempts to redress the balance. Having covered some of the theoretical ground, I turn now to the promotion of Parisian police dogs, before analyzing training techniques and the reception of the dogs on the streets of Paris.
THE EMERGENCE OF PARISIAN POLICE DOGS
By the end of the nineteenth century many Parisians had become obsessed by crime. Fueled by lurid stories in newspapers, magazines, and novels, and following decades of urbanization, worries about criminals stalked the capital. Writers, psychologists, self-defense experts, and others portrayed the city as a dangerous place in which murders, robberies, and assaults could happen almost anywhere.Footnote 28 Press reports depicted criminals as mobile, anonymous, and violent, with Apache gangs among the most dangerous and anxiety-provoking. These gangs were first named “Apaches” in the summer of 1900, to denote their supposed savagery, threat to civilization, and refusal to conform to civilized norms. The term “Apache” reflected French fascination with the Wild West and portrayed the gangs as obstacles to social progress and Paris as a wild urban space of hunters (the police) and the hunted (Apaches).Footnote 29 A 1907 article in Le Petit Journal fretted that the capital was “in the hands of vast criminal organizations”: Apache gangs “swarmed” (pullulent) within the capital and its outskirts, outnumbering and mocking the police's ability to uphold law and order. The Apache gang member had become “the king of the street” and thrived within the Third Republic's supposedly lax criminal justice system.Footnote 30
How could the law-abiding citizen feel safe in such a fearful atmosphere? Some turned to learning self-defense techniques based on boxing and jiu-jitsu.Footnote 31 Others turned to dogs. Previously represented as loyal defenders of the private bourgeois home,Footnote 32 dogs were now refashioned by police officials and dog aficionados as allies in the fight against the criminalization of public urban space. They portrayed police dogs as part of a broader improvement in human-canine relations, and some inserted them into the broader narrative of rational progress being forged in Republican France. Paul Cunisset-Carnot, a lawyer, politician, and prolific writer on hunting matters, stated that police dogs proved that modern scientific curiosity, research, and discoveries now allowed humans to better exploit canine intelligence and capabilities.Footnote 33
Dogs seemingly possessed the necessary physical and mental attributes to become effective police auxiliaries, and even counter some of the nefarious effects of urban life on the human population. In line with biomedical theories that stressed that modern urban life caused individual and national degeneration, social problems such as alcoholism, and crime, and with the Wild West seemingly in mind, René Simon claimed that 95 percent of modern urbanites had lost the physical strength and keen senses possessed by the “ancient Indian tribes,” “valiant pioneers,” or “hardy hunters.” Yet the modern urban dweller was under constant threat from silent yet deadly criminals, such as Apaches, who had, Simon implicitly suggested, retained the savage strength of uncivilized peoples. In some areas, “the bourgeoisie dared not go out at night.” Guns and other weapons were illegal, and in any case ineffectual if their owner could not detect the threat in time to use them.
Simon identified dogs as the solution. They had the “muscular suppleness, sensory sharpness, instinctive sense of smell, [and] alert attention” that the French no longer possessed. He believed that once a dog accompanied every pedestrian, then the “bandits'” exploits would diminish.Footnote 34 Although some French canophiles fretted about the deterioration of French dog breeds,Footnote 35 for Simon dogs seemed immune from the physical and mental degeneration afflicting French society. At a time when middle-class tax payers were demanding that the police focus on securing the street from social disorder and crime, and while influential Republican thinkers such as Alfred Fouillée advanced the right of society to defend itself against hardened, incorrigible criminals,Footnote 36 dogs' sense of smell, intelligence, trainability, and physical prowess seemed to offer an effective solution to urban policing. Like police uniforms, police dogs would give policemen greater visibility on the streets and underscore the state's commitment to fighting crime.Footnote 37 A 1907 article in Nos Loisirs asserted that the dogs' skills, speed, agility, and biting jaws would strike “terror” among “wrongdoers,” and murder rates might well fall by 90 percent, as they reportedly had in Belgium.Footnote 38
The reference to Belgium highlights how the deployment of police dogs took place within an international promotion of dogs as skilled, capable, and useful police auxiliaries. British police officer William Bolton had boasted of using dogs to hunt down “social vermin” back in the 1870s,Footnote 39 but William G. Fitz-Gerald, writing in the American periodical The Century, identified “little Belgium” as the main police dog innovator. He reported how Ghent's Police Commissioner E. van Wesemael had deployed Belgian sheep dogs in the 1890s to make up for a lack of manpower. Van Wesemael had harnessed the dog's “sense of smell, its instinct that all was not right, and its remarkable jumping and swimming powers” to great effect. Declining crime rates in Ghent encouraged the spread of police dogs to other cities in Belgium, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Italy, and the United States, as well as to the colonies.Footnote 40 In France and elsewhere, dogs provided an animal dimension to the diversification of police powers. They became a key element of the modern state's expanding security apparatus at the century's turn as police officers and dog trainers exchanged knowledge about police dog training, as well as actual dogs, across national borders.Footnote 41
While dogs had been used to track down black fugitives in the South African countryside,Footnote 42 in Europe police dogs were overwhelmingly deployed in urban areas. The first dogs arrived in France in 1905 when the police commissioner of Pont-à-Mousson (Meurthe-et-Moselle), inspired by accounts of Belgian and German police dogs and encouraged by the Eastern Canine Society (Société canine de l'est), deployed two to control the town's numerous “brigands.”Footnote 43 The next year the Society organized a police dog show in Nancy at which Belgian and German dogs, along with the two from Pont-à-Mousson, were judged on their abilities to find a hidden man, defend their master from a stick-wielding assailant, and jump over obstacles, among other tasks. The display impressed a policeman from Epinal (Vosges) named Lalloué, who then obtained some German Shepherds to train for police work.Footnote 44 Meanwhile, Henri Simart, the police commissioner of the Parisian suburb of Neuilly, was inspired by a visit to study police dog training in Ghent. Hoping to better protect his men following the murder of a brigadier named Fleurant, Simart secured approval from Neuilly's Municipal Council in February 1907 to use dogs to “purge” the Bois de Boulogne of “disreputable people.”Footnote 45
As Lalloué's and Simart's actions show, local municipal initiatives took precedence over centralized and national programs during the early stages of police dog work in France, replicating the weak centralization of French policing.Footnote 46 However, national societies and clubs soon sprang up to encourage the use of police and guard dogs. This took place in conjunction with other developments in urban security, in particular the rise of self-defense clubs. It also emerged from the creation of numerous dog-breeding societies following the 1882 establishment of the French kennel club, called the Central Society for the Improvement of Dog Breeds in France (Société centrale pour l'amélioration des races de chiens en France).Footnote 47
The Police, Game-Keeper and Customs Dog Club (Club du Chien de Police, de Garde-Chasse et de Douanier) brought together members of the Central Society and individual dog breeding societies such as the Saint-Hubert-Club de France, as well as politicians and police officials (including Simart). The Club was founded in Paris on 1 January 1908 and based at the Paris headquarters of the Central Society. Its Committee of Patrons reinforced its links with the French political and social establishment and included figures with political clout such the ministers of the Interior, War, Finances, and Agriculture, and the Parisian police prefect, as well as such luminaries as Madame Heriot, Henri de Rothschild, and the Duchesse d'Uzès. The Club established a kennel on rue Chevaleret in the thirteenth arrondissement to train dogs for police work,Footnote 48 underscoring the increasing institutionalization of police dogs. This matched parallel developments in the promotion, training, and deployment of French army dogs.Footnote 49
The Club's membership made it somewhat elitist. In contrast, the Union of Guard and Police Dog Enthusiasts in France (Réunion des amateurs du chien de défense et de police en France), founded in 1910, portrayed police dog training as a useful “recreational sport” suitable for all and an effective form of self-defense fit for a democratic republic. The Union organized shows in which police dog skills could be judged. Like the dog training manuals I will discuss presently, the Union's shows treated police dogs as sensitive and capable creatures rather than like machines. Judges gave dogs points for their “general attitude” (allure générale) and could award up to forty points for such qualities as “love of work, shrewdness, brilliance (brio), intelligence, instinct, atavism, will (volonté), [and] courage.”Footnote 50 The shows were frequented by establishment figures, such as President Armand Fallières in 1909, and were the object of enthusiastic press reports.Footnote 51 They became showcases for the dogs' multiple abilities and won over at least one Le Matin journalist who, already a partial believer in canine intelligence, left one show convinced that dogs possessed “a sense of duty to the highest degree,” respect for the law, and a “love of property and a hatred for bandits.” The future, he wrote, “belongs to dogs.”Footnote 52
There was a slippage between private and public institutions in the emerging police dog world. While intellectuals, journalists, and politicians debated the role of private security organizations in securing the public space of the city for the bourgeoisie,Footnote 53 canophiles promoted the use of privately owned guard dogs and publically owned police dogs, sometimes within the same book.Footnote 54 This public-private slippage continued once Paris' Municipal Council, following a policing report by municipal councilor Emile Massard, on 30 December 1908 budgeted 8,000 francs to create a police dog service.Footnote 55 Although the police prefecture bought seven dogs of its own in 1908, six of the other dogs it deployed were privately owned and lodged with individual policemen, twenty-six were hired from the Police, Game-Keeper and Customs Dog Club from June 1909 onward (for an annual charge of 230 francs per dog), and twelve were donated by the writer, philanthropist, and entrepreneur Henri de Rothschild in October 1910.Footnote 56 The vast majority of Parisian police dogs were privately trained and owned and, in line with the view that they were most effective in helping police sparsely populated areas, they patrolled Paris' outer arrondissements where open and abandoned land was commonplace.Footnote 57
There were no firm views on what type of dog was best adapted to police work. One journalist asserted that any dog could contribute to “public defense” so long as its training was “sufficiently methodical.”Footnote 58 Most observers and practitioners, though, treated police dog abilities as dispersed unevenly and argued for particular dogs based on their breed or individual character. This view fitted with existing dog breeding narratives that stressed history, lineage, and hierarchy. The classification, standardization, and promotion of dog breeds during the nineteenth century gave police dog trainers and handlers a range of breeds to consider. In harmony with arguments put forward by noted French dog expert Paul Mégnin and France's increasingly vocal and organized pedigree dog breeders, one observer advised police commissioners that pure breeds were superior to mongrels—training was not everything, and just as good servants could not be found in “vagabond asylums” (asiles de vagabonds), dog pounds and refuges were poor places to obtain police dogs.Footnote 59 In line with breeders' claims that pure breed dogs were the product of rational selection, expert knowledge, and prestigious ancestry, Robert Gersbach (a German breeder whose police dog training manual was translated into French in 1911) advocated that police forces carefully examine any potential police dog's breed “history and development” and try to locate the breed's “elite subjects.” Better still would be to favor the offspring of successful police dogs, since they would have inherited the “moral qualities” of their parents.Footnote 60
Cartesian depictions of animals-machines were largely absent from belle époque representations of police dogs: trainers and others overwhelmingly treated them as animals rather than technologies, even if one journalist described them as a “weapon.”Footnote 61 While police dog trainers were hardly immune to anthropomorphism, they made serious attempts to know the dogs as dogs so as to better harness their abilities. They carefully considered the mental, emotional, and physical attributes of various breeds and, like the racialized classification of humans, they divided dogs into categories and established a hierarchy of their intelligence, abilities, and potential for police work.Footnote 62 Here they also echoed the growing, if contested, interest in measuring, assessing, and ranking intelligence, as pioneered in France during the early twentieth century by Alfred Binet.Footnote 63 As with period approaches to human intelligence, the police tried to assess canine intelligence on both the group and individual levels. Some stressed particular breeds, such as Lalloué, who identified five main suitable ones: Alsatians, Airedales, Dobermans, and Belgium and French sheep dogs. Each of these had their advantages and disadvantages. Dobermans, for instance, were easy to train but could be hostile to other dogs, whilst Airedales offered policemen a heightened sense of security but were poor at jumping and running long distances. But of all of them, the Alsatian was the “ideal” police dog due to its excellent sense of smell, trainability, loyalty, and “very developed intelligence.”Footnote 64 Villers, too, identified the Alsatian—or German Shepherd—as the best dog for police work due to its “intelligence,” “strength,” “agility,” and sense of smell.Footnote 65 Joseph Couplet also claimed that shepherd dogs were best, due to their history of protecting sheep from wolves.Footnote 66 The breed embodied the perfect combination of canine emotional, physical, and cognitive abilities, and had long protected settled and productive human communities from dangerous outsiders.
Other police dog experts were less concerned about breeds and placed greater stress on individual personality. Saint Laurent agreed with the suitability of German Shepherds for police work, but he emphasized that the individual dog's “personal qualities” were more important than its breed, especially since dogs of the same breed differed substantially. Rather than belonging to a particular breed, a police dog needed to be “agile,” of an “imposing physique,” “brave,” “wary of strangers,” and “attentive,” and had to possess an “excessive sense of loyalty towards its master.”Footnote 67 Breed was not a reliable identifier of a dog's aptitude for police work and so handlers needed to pay close attention to individual dogs. In contrast to the quantifying aspirations of the Binet-Simon human intelligence test, the police dog world required subjective assessments of individual dogs.
The lack of expert consensus on what type was best suited to police work partly explains why French police forces used a variety of dogs. Chance and cost also played a role. The first two police dogs in France—Achate (a bitch) and Argus (a dog)—were mongrels trained in Pont-à-Mousson in 1905. Although the Eastern Canine Society had recommended pure breeds to the town's police commissioner, he had accepted a spontaneous offer of the mongrels rather than seeking funds to buy expensive pedigree dogs.Footnote 68 In contrast, Simart used Belgian shepherd dogs in Neuilly, and when the Paris police force obtained ten dogs in 1909, nine of them were German Shepherds (the tenth was a French shepherd dog). These choices were subject to close scrutiny. According to one report, the police force had chosen German Shepherds because they were more aggressive than French dogs and therefore easier to train to attack people. L'Eleveur belge believed this to be a mistake; French shepherd dogs were “rustic” and “unpolished” but some, such as Briards, were spirited attackers if the occasion arose. German Shepherds, on the other hand, had an excellent sense of smell but were hesitant to bite, and since the French police wanted dogs for protection they were hardly an “ideal” choice.Footnote 69 The divergent views on these dogs' abilities highlight how experts treated canine qualities as diverse and as dependent on both breed and individual histories.
As with breeds, there was no consensus on the desired sex of police dogs. For instance, although male dogs took the top three places at a police dog competition in August 1908, two bitches, Foullette and Mordienne, came in fourth and fifth.Footnote 70 And though the names of certain dogs—“Garcon” and “Moustache”—contributed to the police force's culture of masculinity, police units also deployed bitches.Footnote 71 Furthermore, female dogs proved themselves effective agents in the field. They included the German Shepherd Lucie, who reportedly used her intelligence and sense of smell to pick out two fugitives from a crowded bar,Footnote 72 and Lalloué's celebrated police dog Léni was also a bitch. Rather than sex or breed, what was paramount was a dog's individual capabilities, particularly its intelligence, and its response to training.
TRAINING POLICE DOGS
Police dogs were trained differently from the army and customs dogs that worked on battlefields or in remote rural borderlands, since police dogs had to operate in densely populated urban spaces where innocent citizens might be bitten. Trainers therefore emphasized the importance of adapting dogs to the urban environment, which they depicted as perilous, noisy, and teeming with dangerous criminals. For although dogs from rural breeds already lived in Paris as pets, and helped bring livestock to the capital's markets, police dog experts fretted about how well shepherd dogs used to the calm of the countryside would adapt to the bustle of the city. They therefore advised trainers to introduce their dogs to the hubbub of urban life (including cabarets, pedestrians, and vehicles) from the age of eight months, and expose them to gunshots: Saint Laurent even suggested using a revolver to announce their mealtimes.Footnote 73
Training dogs for a crime-fighting role also necessitated engaging with canine intelligence. Bitter experience had taught the Parisian police to take canine psychology seriously. From 1900, after the drowning of one of their employees, they had deployed Newfoundland dogs to rescue people from the river Seine, but the rescue dogs were not a success and became the subject of numerous critical press reports. In response, the police force asked Director of the Institute of Zoological Psychology Pierre Hachet-Souplet, author of numerous books on animal intelligence and training, to write a report on training river rescue dogs. Like certain other proponents of the emerging field of animal psychology, Hachet-Souplet viewed dogs and other animals, such as parrots,Footnote 74 as intelligent creatures whose psychology could be best understood through empirical observation. More sophisticated understandings of animal psychology would, he believed, allow humans to train dogs more effectively and so better secure their obedience. By the time Hachet-Souplet's report came out in 1907, the Parisian police had already abandoned the use of rescue dogs,Footnote 75 but it nonetheless highlights how considerations of canine psychology informed the police force's mobilization of dogs.
Now largely identified with experiments on laboratory animals, especially rats, comparative psychology was a heterogeneous discipline in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The first French chair in experimental and comparative psychology was established at the Collège de France in 1888 and the Institut Général Psychologique created a group devoted to animal psychology.Footnote 76 At stake was the question of whether or not continuities existed between human and animal minds and whether animals possessed language and intelligence. Whilst some psychologists argued that animals were intelligent creatures, others, such as Henri Piéron and Edward Lee Thorndike, dismissed their claims as anthropomorphic and subjective.Footnote 77 Police dog trainers were not trained psychologists and they did not explicitly engage with such theories. Yet the question of animal intelligence, which had entered popular culture through stories of pets endowed with incredible abilities such as telepathy, framed their attitudes toward training.Footnote 78 In contrast to comparative psychologists, trainers sought to better understand animal minds, not to prove or disprove arguments over the relationship between humans and other animals in the post-Darwinian world, but rather to mobilize better animals so as to more effectively fight crime. This was practical animal psychology tested on the fraught Parisian streets.
To hone their abilities, police dogs were expected to undergo a rigorous training regime, something like the longer and more in-depth training that human policemen received.Footnote 79 A host of training manuals laid out programs for police dog training, which their authors claimed would produce effective and able dogs. Like army dog training manuals, police ones asserted that trainers needed to work with canine characteristics in a thorough and logical way.Footnote 80 And as in the human educational system in the Third Republic, which alongside providing a universal education offered “advanced training” for future cadres in the grandes écoles and other elite institutions, dogs chosen for police dog work would, in theory, receive a level of training that far surpassed that of other working dogs.Footnote 81
The manuals presented dogs as intelligent creatures that required a methodical, sensitive, and patient trainer to bring out their best. They were not Cartesian animal-machines, but adaptable and responsive animals that could be trained to perform a range of complex tasks. The Belgian influence was once again apparent with the publication of Joseph Couplet's Le chien de garde de défense et de police (1909) and Gaston de Wael's Le Chien auxiliaire de la Police (1907). De Wael placed much emphasis on canine intelligence. In his book's preface, veterinary professor Hebrant asserted that dogs are “one of the most intelligent animals” whose “advanced functional development” placed them “at the top of the zoological scale.”Footnote 82 De Wael similarly noted that the “marvels” of their intelligence were becoming more and more apparent. Drawing on the anti-Cartesian strands contained within the writings of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz (1646–1716), and perhaps unconsciously echoing larger debates about the relationship between instinct and intelligence in nonhuman animals,Footnote 83 de Wael argued that although dogs were often governed spontaneously by instinct, they could nevertheless be trained to act intelligently. Instinct was a property that belonged to a species and could not be developed, only suppressed. Intelligence, on the other hand, was a “faculty” that could be developed in individual animals through training and experience. A dog that was constantly chained up, “whatever its race,” would “always remain in a state of stupidity.” Once a dog's intelligence had been developed, it would be able to repress those of its instincts that inhibited police work such as chasing cats and fighting other dogs. Canine intelligence was sharpened through training, for although dogs “cannot reason,” their capacity to remember events and experiences meant they could associate “ideas in an empirical way.” If a dog re-experienced something, it would expect subsequent events to reoccur. Training should therefore develop the dog's ability to “think, which is to say to know, understand, and remember,” which would allow it to “reflect” upon what to do in certain situations. The dog would therefore learn to associate finding a “wrongdoer or poacher” with receiving a treat from its owner. It could also develop the ability to calculate and assess danger in particular situations and decide whether or not to attack. De Wael's recognition of canine intelligence placed him in opposition to Descartes. But neither, he pointed out, was he a follower of Montaigne, who “lauds animals to bring down humans.” It was, after all, “human intelligence” that enabled “progress” in animals.Footnote 84
Because humans were smarter than canines, police dogs to become effective needed accomplished trainers, just as Rousseau-inspired educators argued that children needed committed and skilled teachers to realize their full potential.Footnote 85 Police dog training manuals positioned the individual human-dog relationship as the crucial foundation of any successful training regime. De Wael said that each dog should have its own master.Footnote 86 Simon agreed that trainers should only work with one dog in order to develop the “most perfect” understanding of each partner's “will.” In such a way, training would take into account the “psychology of each animal,” since every dog had a “particular soul,” by which he meant a “character, a collection of qualities and flaws which are unique [to the individual dog] and distinguishes him from his peers.”Footnote 87 Such conceptualizations of animal psychology and subjectivity were rooted in the trainers' personal experiences with and observations of dogs. In the debates on animal intelligence, police dog trainers were among those who believed that better knowledge of animal capabilities would spring from personal encounters and observations.Footnote 88 This was contrary to later approaches of experimental psychology that sought to remove the intersubjective aspect of human-animal relationships to isolate animal capabilities within the experimental environment.Footnote 89
The training manuals all emphasized that trainers needed patience and “kindness.”Footnote 90 Lalloué preferred “caresses” to “the whip and violence” since training was an emotional and reciprocal process in which dog and trainer became attuned to each other. A well-trained dog would feel “happy” when it successfully completed a task because it could sense its owner's satisfaction. Furthermore, the trainer had to “love” his dog. Even if a dog failed to achieve the task set, its trainer was to only consider punishment if the dog was disobedient or acted from “bad will” (mauvaise volonté).Footnote 91 Punishment had to be used sparingly because it could physically harm the dog and damage its character, thereby undermining its suitability for police work. Gersbach warned that violence would create a “slave that seemed obedient” but would never become a “loyal companion” ready to “share danger and sacrifice themselves.”Footnote 92 The notion that a police dog's obedience to its master needed to come from emotional connection and loyalty, rather than fear, was similar to the bourgeois celebration of the loyal family dog willing to defend the inhabitants of its home. The stress Lalloué and others placed on patience and encouragement also resonated with that of educators who condemned the corporal punishment of children in late nineteenth-century France and insisted that rewards and punishments should be rational, measured, and appropriate. That said, some dog trainers may have ignored the advice issued by Lalloué and his colleagues and resorted to violence anyway, just as some parents did with their children.Footnote 93
Having set out a framework for a productive training relationship, the training manuals laid out a series of tasks that the well-trained police dog should be able to accomplish.Footnote 94 The training curriculum started with simple activities such as recall and lying down, sitting, and standing on command, and then moved on to more complex ones such as refusing to take potentially poisoned food from a stranger, barking when hearing a noise, and finding a lost object.Footnote 95 The tasks up until this point were pertinent to more than just police dog work, since hunters required their dogs to find and carry objects such as dead game, but they then became more specific. Unlike bloodhounds trained in nineteenth-century Britain and the United States for one particular aspect of police work—detecting criminals through their scentFootnote 96—the police dogs depicted in Francophone training manuals were expected to be all-rounders, and to be able to jump over walls, hedges, and ditches and defend their master. They also needed to be able to pick out an individual from a crowd and disable a fugitive and guard them until their master arrived.Footnote 97 According to de Wael, differences between individual dogs influenced how well they adapted to particular exercises. “Energetic and courageous” dogs would take better to defending their master than would “fearful” dogs.Footnote 98 When assessing a dog's abilities, therefore, one had to take account of its emotional state as well as its physical and mental attributes.
At the heart of these training manuals one encounters a tension between initiative and obedience. Although trainers stressed the need for patience and kindness, the relations between the dog and its handler were fully hierarchical. According to the Pont-à-Mousson police commissioner, training should produce a police dog that possessed an “absolute [and] passive obedience” that was instantaneous and prevented it from making unprovoked attacks.Footnote 99 As such, manuals blended Rousseauian educational methods (kindness, patience, and intelligence) with the aims of more disciplinarian educational theorists and animal psychologists such as Hachet-Souplet, who argued that obedience and automatic responses should characterize trained animals, just as they should soldiers and children.Footnote 100
Crucially, however, the training manuals did allow some space for canine initiative and individuality. They emphasized the importance of maintaining the dogs' fine-tuned sensitivity to their environment. To be an effective police auxiliary, the dog needed above all to be a “scout” (éclaireur) that sensed danger through, in particular, its nose and ears, and alerted its master immediately to any threat.Footnote 101 Police dogs were expected to adopt an alert and responsive way of being in the world, assessing risks and communicating them to their handler; hardly the actions of automata. Moreover, trainers always represented the dogs as intelligent and emotional animals and, far from seeking to eradicate these qualities, treated them as the foundation of successful police dog work. A Foucauldian reading of police dog training as a disciplinary process designed to create “docile” dogs that were obedient cogs in the state's crime and punishment system would fail to capture the situation.Footnote 102
Police dog training was marked by another tension, between nonviolent means and violent ends. While there was a discourse of sensitive and emotional connection between trainer and dog, in which punishment was used sparingly if at all, French police dogs were expected to be ready to defend their masters and attack assailants on command. In his survey of European police dogs, British dog breeder and police and army dog trainer Edwin H. Richardson identified French ones as the most violent, which he explained by the ferocity of their criminal opponents: “the low, skulking, murderous, Parisian Apache.”Footnote 103 We catch glimpses of these violent ends within the training manuals. According to Lalloué, the police dog needed to bite anyone immediately on its master's command, even if the dog knew that person well and had previously enjoyed their company.Footnote 104 Moreover, the emotional connection between dog and human was portrayed as the foundation of canine ferocity. The Pont-à-Mousson police commissioner argued that the dog's natural affection for its master was the basis of its willingness to spring to his defense.Footnote 105 Police dog training thereby drew on the nineteenth-century celebration of canine loyalty, love, and obedience and harnessed it to protect policemen through violence.
The manuals dehumanized criminals to justify these violent ends. They made it clear that training exercises should enable police dogs to identify criminal types: humans playing the part of assailants or fugitives in training exercises were encouraged to act and dress like Apaches or other criminals. Cesare Lombroso's and other criminologists' identification of “born criminals,” individuals whose psychology and physiology allegedly separated them from law-abiding citizens, and the wider cultural association of Apaches with savagery, provided the context in which the training manuals could legitimate the state-condoned violence embodied in the police dog. The dogs' capacity for violence was treated as a social defense against supposedly pathological and incorrigible criminals, who some French criminologists compared to rabid dogs or other hazardous creatures worthy only of eradication.Footnote 106 Training enabled police dogs to become socially useful animals at a time when criminologists turned criminals into dangerous beasts: the violent yet domesticated police dog stood in opposition to the animalized and vicious criminal.
The dehumanization of criminals and the tension between nonviolent means and violent ends within police dog training manuals resembled deeper contradictions within the Third Republic's criminal justice system. Despite being the first long-term democratic regime in French history, Republican tolerance towards criminality and deviance was limited. Although the Republicans liberalized the press and protected the right to free speech in public places, they campaigned against what they saw as public indecency, immoral behavior, and suspect political opinions. In supposedly delinquent areas, such as Montmartre, Republicans banned saucy cabaret posters, censored controversial press reports, and called for the police to monitor behavior in cafes and music halls. Alongside seeking to impose civic and moral standards, Republican politicians introduced draconian punishments for crimes, in collaboration with French criminologists. Driven, too, by post-Commune fears of social unrest and the seeming emergence of a strand of habitual criminals resistant to reform, they promoted solitary confinement in prisons, passed a law in 1885 to transport recidivists to the colonies, increased police surveillance of released prisoners, and retained the death sentence.Footnote 107 Police dogs became unwitting enforcers of the Third Republic's often repressive and intolerant criminal justice system.Footnote 108
But we should not assume that dog handlers followed the manuals' prescribed course of action. Dannhoffer, the policeman who trained France's first police dogs in Pont-à-Mousson, did not follow a training manual but claimed to have relied on his love of dogs and advice from dog breeders.Footnote 109 Furthermore, trained dogs did not always behave in the ways expected of them. De Wael reported how one police dog he knew of would chase cats during night patrols, catching 106 cats in 1906 alone. It was “useless” to expect too much of this dog. Trained police dogs could also be drawn into fights and the handler needed to make sure that the dog's “instinct” did not override its training. If a dog did get into a “brawl,” its handler needed to check that this did not result in the dog losing “any of its qualities.”Footnote 110 Since training was a process that could be reversed, the handler had to be vigilant to ensure that his dog remained suitable for police work.
Dogs had attributes, such as intelligence, that could be drawn out and developed through training, transforming them into police dogs with increased abilities. But these were seen as contingent qualities, expressing the more general belief that without enlightened human control and companionship dogs would degenerate, as shown by the behavior of strays. As Baron A.-C.-E. Bellier de Villiers argued, “The intelligence and the organism of the dog reflects, to the highest possible degree, the moral and physical conditions of man.”Footnote 111 Concerns that canine instinct would override intelligence, even under the guidance of skilled human handlers, became even more apparent once the dogs began to patrol Parisian streets.
POLICE DOGS IN ACTION
Policemen and sympathetic observers claimed that well-trained dogs would act as inexpensive and effective means of combating urban crime. But the Parisian press did not take such claims at face value, and newspaper reports drew police dogs and their abilities into Paris' culture of spectacle, in which the journalists scrutinized and critiqued urban life.Footnote 112 Although the press' sensationalized attention mostly centered on human individuals and institutions, it was directed in this instance toward human-nonhuman police dog partnerships.
Many articles reported how dogs helped the police to secure the city. At times it was the dogs' physical strength that made the difference. Whether fighting off attacks on the Paris-Brest postal service, defending Parisians and police officers from Apache attacks, or uncovering couples indulging in acts of public indecency, the press praised the dogs' physical prowess.Footnote 113 An article in Le Matin singled out Stop, a dog belonging to Brigadier Mitry in Saint-Mandé, an eastern suburb of Paris. Stop's speed, strength, and “fearsome jaws” enabled Mitry to become the “terror of the ‘terrors.’”Footnote 114 Elsewhere in France, dogs' abilities had reportedly helped reduce crime. In Pont-à-Mousson, the town's police commissioner said police dogs now deterred criminals from attacking officers at night and helped to secure “public tranquility.”Footnote 115 The dogs and their emboldened masters now seemed more than a match for France's hardened criminals.
Journalists reported that police dogs' threat to Paris' criminals was such that they began to mobilize their own dogs against police ones, as depicted in gory detail on a November 1907 front cover of Les Faits-divers illustrés.Footnote 116 Criminal gangs also allegedly trained their “Apache-dogs” (chiens-apaches) to bring down solitary walkers in Paris' suburbs and disable them until gang members arrived to relieve them of their possessions. As in cases of French customs officials “tussles with smugglers'” dogs, police authorities ordered their men to kill chiens-apaches.Footnote 117
Like the training manuals, the press portrayed police dog abilities as multifaceted: they possessed “remarkable intelligence” as well as physical strength.Footnote 118 This was the case with Marcel, a police dog who spotted trouble brewing during a confrontation between a group of young men and two Apaches at Lilas and managed to disable the gang members until a policeman arrived.Footnote 119 Sometimes the canine sense of smell made the difference. During a police raid on a bar near Les Halles, two dogs used their “disconcerting” sense of smell to uncover hidden guns, daggers, rubber coshes, and razors. Along with other new police techniques—two members of Bertillon's anthropometric team were also in attendance—the dogs helped capture sixty-one “suspect individuals,” including renowned Apache chief Le Chopier.Footnote 120 Villiers similarly highlighted the extraordinary ability of dogs to detect criminals. One German sheep dog reportedly tracked down a murderer over “fifty two kilometres” after sniffing his cap. Another dog had identified a murderer out of eight hundred factory workers after sniffing the body of a murdered child.Footnote 121 Such reports reinforced the narrative that police dogs' multiple abilities provided evidence of animal intelligence which human ingenuity and savoir-faire now successfully mobilized.
At other times journalists were more critical of the dogs' abilities and called on the police to explain and justify their use. In March 1907, one of Le Matin's reporters paid a visit to Max, a police dog living with Madame Thirouin on rue Nationale. Despite Thirouin's assertion that Max was an “intelligent animal,” the reporter concluded that Max was “no psychologist” as the dog mistook him for an “Apache” and began barking and straining on his lead.Footnote 122 Despite being trained by one of the foremost police dog trainers in France, Max was unable, at least in this instance, to distinguish between an Apache and a law-abiding citizen, much to Le Matin's dismay.
Such concerns about police dogs' competence led to the use of muzzles to supplement training. Although animal protectionists had long debated the ethics of the muzzle, with police dogs it was treated as a necessary precaution to allay public concerns about them biting innocent Parisians. A police dog bite would only be tolerated if permitted by the handler, who had the job of releasing the muzzle, and if directed toward a presumed criminal.Footnote 123 The recourse to muzzling underscored doubts about the efficacy of police dog training and the dogs' trustworthiness and intelligence. Despite recognizing that dogs possessed intelligence, many observers feared they could not be relied upon to always know the difference between a criminal and an innocent person and that the dogs' instincts would override their intelligence.
Even with the use of muzzles, the risk of police dog bites could not be eradicated entirely. Police officials therefore tried to argue that the benefits of the dogs outweighed the risk of their biting law-abiding citizens.Footnote 124 Press reports that stressed the dogs' obedience and the thoroughness of their training may have been partly intended to alleviate fears that they threatened public security. Having witnessed police dogs in training at Neuilly, one journalist reassured readers of L'Eclair that training “overcame” the “instinctive brutality of the dog.” Trainers only removed the dogs' muzzles when they were in pursuit of a known criminal, and the law abiding citizen therefore had nothing to fear from the police's well-trained canine “weapon.”Footnote 125 Despite such assurances, fears persisted that training had not completely overcome the dogs' atavistic instinct to bite, stoked by apprehensions that dog bites could lead to rabies. In 1909, a municipal councilor wrote to Lépine to protest the alleged use of dogs against political demonstrators. Similarly, the lawyer of a protester arrested at a 1909 demonstration held in honor of Spanish anarchist Francisco Ferrer at Issy-les-Moulineaux complained about the “savage violence” of the police dogs deployed against demonstrators.Footnote 126 The violent potential of the dogs highlights how nineteenth-century public concerns about police violence lingered into the twentieth century and were extended to canines.Footnote 127 To some, it seemed clear that police dogs were more likely to undermine public security than protect it.
The concerns that the dogs' abilities and intelligence were contingent and potentially reversible qualities resonated with biomedical fears that base instincts, desires, and impulses could overwhelm human intelligence and morality and lead to individual and collective degeneration. For psychologists such as Ribot, “The nervous system is liable to cumulative functional disequilibrium due to the tendency of the more fixed and stable lower levels to overrun the higher, but more fragile and recently acquired, intellectual and moral capacities.”Footnote 128 Le Bon famously applied such ideas to the crowd, in which the usually rational man became a slave to his “unconscious personality”: “He is no longer himself, but has become an automaton who has ceased to be guided by their will.” Moreover, he continued, “By the mere fact that he forms part of an organized crowd, a man descends several rungs in the ladder of civilization. Isolated, he may be a cultivated individual; in a crowd, he is a barbarian—that is, a creature acting by instinct.”Footnote 129 According to these pessimistic perspectives, frightening forces threatened to devour the fragile edifice of civilization that held back the harmful energies unleashed by mass culture and urbanization: even the highly developed rationality and finely tuned restraint of bourgeois males—the supposedly most developed and educated members of society—could be overcome by violence and deviant sexual urges. Likewise, violent impulses could overrun the highly trained and controlled police dog, perhaps the epitome of the domesticated, skillful, and useful animal. The “beast within” had not really been tamed.Footnote 130
CONCLUSION
Parisian police dogs emerged within a particular set of conditions formed by widespread fears of urban crime and insecurity, influential biomedical theories, and new understandings of animal intelligence. During this period of shifting human-animal relations, trainers, handlers, and sympathetic commentators all portrayed the dogs as intelligent, sensitive, loyal, skilled, and physically-imposing creatures that could make a difference to urban security. A series of tensions informed their deployment in Paris, including those between transnational exchanges and the specificity of Parisian urban history; between police dogs as canine manifestations of the modern security state and the portrayal of them as emotionally sensitive individual creatures; and between ideas about instinct and intelligence in both humans and animals.
In early twentieth-century France, dogs appeared to be more intelligent creatures than previously thought and humans less so. But it was believed intelligence in both canines and humans was a quality that could be lost through the re-emergence of primitive instincts and desires. Although intelligent and useful behavior could be cultivated in both animals and humans, both required careful and constant surveillance by soi-disant experts such as psychiatrists or dog handlers. And even then, public security could not be guaranteed.Footnote 131 This sense of canine intelligence's fragility was profoundly influenced by prevailing biomedical ideas about evolution and degeneration and undermined the claims that police dogs could make cities safer. The dog's ability to act effectively against crime rested on its responsiveness to training and its capacity to control and channel its aggressive instinct, all of which relied on the cultivation of its intelligence.
Police dogs' abilities and their capacity to act were viewed as provisional and brittle. This uncertainty helps explains the muzzling and eventual demise of police dogs in Paris. By 1911, 145 dogs helped police Paris and the Seine département,Footnote 132 but their number had dropped to forty in 1916 and the Paris police discontinued their use after the First World War. It only reconstituted a limited police dog service in 1950 and it was not until 1965 and the creation of a national training center that police dogs became well established in France.Footnote 133 So while police dogs are now a commonplace presence in many cities around the world, the problematic case of their use in Paris shows how the history of this canine arm of modern state power was marked by experimentation and setbacks.
The history of Parisian police dogs also highlights the importance of human ideas and institutions in framing the “agential conditions” of animals that enable and constrain their abilities. It demonstrates that assertions of animal abilities are rarely neutral or transcendent, and helps us to contemplate the political and intellectual backdrop of present-day articulations of nonhuman agency, such as developments in animal cognition research, the rise of animal rights movements, a desire to democratize history through the inclusion of a wider range of actors, and a problematization of the “human subject.”Footnote 134 The greater recognition of nonhuman agency is a significant and welcome development that better captures the hybrid qualities of history, yet there is a danger that it will crystalize as an undifferentiated and universal concept that glosses over the historically varied ways in which humans have engaged with skillful and socially-meaningful animals. In light of such concerns, the charged history of Parisian police dogs reminds us of the historical specificity of animal abilities and their mobilization.
