Commissaire de police

It should not be confused with the French appointment of "armed forces commissary" (commissaire des armées) which is an administrative military position.

The first four are ranks to which one is promoted, whilst the latter four are appointments made by the government, including the Director General of Police although he is usually selected from the Corps de Préfets.

It is important to note that commissaires, as commissioners, are commissioned by the government to undertake civil and administrative duties as well as some quasi-judicial roles.

But by choice and economic compulsion, they had increasingly forsaken their role of watchdogs of public security and had become somewhat discredited fee-grabbers, mainly concerned with such matters as imposing seals on the property of the deceased, taking legal inventories, serving summonses, and imposing a wide variety of fines on which they collected a lucrative percentage.

[1] The first Lieutenant General of Police of Paris, Gabriel Nicolas de la Reynie, tried to reform the commissaires, persuading the king to increase salaries and retirement benefits and restore honors formerly attached to the office in the hopes of weaning them off the corrupting system of fees, but it was "a losing battle.

Several kinds of armed, uniformed patrolmen theoretically circulated around the streets of Paris ... but in time of trouble the commissaire's house (practically all seventeenth-century officials did their work from their residences) loomed as large as Gibraltar.

Ordinarily, a criminal case began with someone knocking on the door of the nearest commissaire and lodging a complaint against a fellow citizen.

"[3] Each of them was based in a particular area of the city and thus knew and was known to the local citizens; they were generally "well educated, usually with legal training, and their job was not only to keep order but also to protect public health and safety...

"By the early years of the Restoration of the monarchy, most towns with more than five thousand inhabitants, as well as smaller municipalities on important trade routes or near frontiers, had at least one CP.