Public Ledger

The Paris Policeman's Ways and Privileges.

[Paris Cor. New York Tribune.]

Here as well as anywhere I may say a word about the Parisian policeman, with whom the foreigner, the American, at any rate, will come in contact, for good or for evil, much oftener than at home. He will find him a very different person from the guardian of the public peace he is accustomed to in New York or Boston. At first he will probably dislike the air of authority which the Parisian sergeant-de-ville possesses in common with the soldier; indeed, the policeman is doubly a soldier, for he has probably served in the regular army, and the police organization takes a military shape and has many military customs. If you are unwittingly doing something you ought not to, you will be spoken to in a tone rather sharper than you are accustomed to; the remonstrance or request addressed to you will sound very much like a command; sometimes of the most peremptory kind. But the man does not mean to offend you, and you will be wrong to take an offense; still more wrong to show it. The tone and manner are not put on for the stranger; they are such as the French policeman has employed all his life long in his dealings with the French republic.

The custom-house officer has saluted you on landing in a style not very dissimilar; even the railway conductors and the very porters have much the same habit of addressing everybody who does not wear a uniform (for a decoration)—as if they belonged to a distinctly inferior order of creation. You needn't mind it in the least. In the case of a policeman it is doubly foolish to resent it. If you don't happen to speak French he will pass you on with a smile or a growl of contempt, making you understand as best he can what you are to do or not to do. If you can keep up your end of the conversation, a few civil words and a tone of perfect coolness will go a great way. Keep your temper, no matter what happens. If you are never so right and he never so wrong, you must do what he says, unless you can make him see that he is wrong. He will listen to a reasonable explanation.

Anything like impertinence to a policeman will be apt to entail disagreeable consequences; resistance will be sure to, and nobody but a madman would think of it. A blow would be followed by rough handling (and a French policeman is never alone); by a very unpleasant night in the police cells, and by a term of imprisonment which might carry you well beyond the close of the Exhibition. The argument of the fist is not understood in France. No matter what the provocation, the man who strikes a policeman, or the man who, in a private quarrel, first strikes his adversary, is invariably held the aggressor, and adjudged in the wrong by a French magistrate, and imprisonment is the sure penalty: unless in the rare cases where the offender's absolute ignorance of the language, and of everything French, may earn the contemptuous lenity of an unusually considerate judge.