Mitteilungen des Österreichischen Staatsarchivs 33. (1980)
LIANG, Hsi-Huey: International Cooperation of Political Police in Europe, 1815–1914. An Essay Based on Some Austrian Archival Sources
202 Hsi-Huey Liang ban population, unobstructed by distances and national frontiers. “For the first time news of a revolution passed from one town to another by telegraph; it no longer needed to filter through, and so to affect, the countryside”33). The governments of Europe responded with swift suppression by massive military power rather than police intervention: the speed of the revolutionary outbreak was met by the speed of soldiers rushed by railways to quell the insurgents. After the restoration of order military-style police forces were introduced in the countries most shaken by the recent uprisings, notably in Prussia the königliche Schutzmannschaft and in Austria the Sicherheitswache. As to the Eberhardt’scher Polizei-Anzeiger, which used to include only a small number of political criminals among its list of internationally wanted thugs and thieves, it came out with a new edition in 1855, still designated as Ein Handbuch für jeden deutschen Polizeibeamten, but presently filled with the names and description of hundreds of political offenders - German, French, Hungarian, Bohemian, English, Polish and Irish (though not Russian) — regardless of the divergent ideological directions of the governments which they opposed34). International police solidarity was for a moment a very persuasive doctrine as each country faced the possibility of renewed internal outbreaks and with the exception of France eschewed ambitious foreign political activities. As the historian Franyois Fejtő so rightly remarked: it was an era in which the ruling classes, protected by powerful police, had a stake in preserving the peace while the revolutionaries advocated war35). Advocating war in the mid-nineteenth century meant wanting to revise the territorial settlement of 1815, changing the existing political frontiers in search of more effective national groupings from the point of view of the economic selfsufficiency, military viability, and political cohesiveness of the state, or its “policeability”. If policing is the art 'of separating society into controllable groups by locking individuals into fixed locations like towns and villages, or into vested interest groups like guilds and corporations, the early nineteenth century saw the discovery of national communities as the strongest “policeable” social entities. Nations, however, often corresponded in size to the population of entire countries. The substitution of nations as policeable units for townships and provinces meant that the day when a police minister, a war minister, and a foreign minister would share the same task had come visibly nearer. 33) Franyois Fejtő ed. The Opening of an Era. An Historical Symposium (London 1948): Introduction XVI. 34) Friedrich Eberhardt Polizeiliche Nachrichten von Gaunern, Dieben und Landstreichern nebst deren Personal-Beschreibungen. Ein Hülfsbuch für Polizei- und Criminal-Beamte, Gensd’armen, Feldjäger und Gerichtsdiener (Coburg 1828); and Anzeiger für die politische Polizei Deutschlands auf die Zeit vom 1. Januar 1848 bis zur Gegenwart. Ein Handbuch für jeden deutschen Polizeibeamten (Dresden 1855). 35) Fejtő ed. Opening of an Era 6.
