Abstract EN:

The French Maréchaussée was at the origin of the Gendarmerie Nationale. In the eighteen-century, the maréchaussée experienced its main reforms, which structured and militarized it and turned it into a police force present in the countryside of the realm, a feature that it retained after the French Revolution. The royalty made it a police institution at its service without depriving it from its jurisdictional character. The Company of Guyenne, as far back as 1720, settled in the généralité, the capital of which is Bordeaux. The history of the maréchaussée then became a history of its dealings with different local authorities, administrative and judicial, of the increase of its mission of police, and of the decline of its jurisdictional action, considered, wrongly, as expeditious and arbitrary. The maréchaussée had then to find a place in the institutional intricacy of the Ancient Regime, at the crossroads of the centralizing policy of the monarchy, the " judiciary imbroglio ", of the political, military and economic crises that shake the century, and of the reality of its daily practical experience.