At the beginning of the 19th century, the Czech-German painter Georg Emanuel Opiz portrayed scenes from everyday Viennese life. One of them is a depiction of an indignant market woman with scattered merchandise, her anger is witnessed by a police soldier (polizeisoldat), already at that time marked with an identification number on a cartridge case. A few decades ago, this figure would not have appeared in the painting. It is the emergence of the police that is the subject of the new book Beobachten, Beschreiben, Gestalten: Die Polizei im Zeitalter der Aufklärung und der Moderne Staat 1770-1820 by the FHS Vice-Dean for Research and Creative Activities, Professor Pavel Himl. It was published by Böhlau Vienna, a prestigious publishing house in the field of historiography, and the cover is adorned with a described Opitz painting. The publication was also published in Czech by Argo publishing house.
The book presents to foreign audiences the results of several years of study of the police in the Habsburg lands, and specifically Bohemia at the turn of pre-modern and modern times. It is not, however, a history of uniforms and "crime fighting". The police are conceived here not only as a new organ of order and repression but above all as a set of homogeneous practices organized from a single center to provide security and "comfort" to persons regardless of social status, while at the same time controlling them and making them citizens and objects of the modern state by administrative means.
Charles University
Faculty of Humanities
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Czech Republic
