Luc Boltanski: Investigation, Police Procedurals, Enigmas and Conspiracies

The French sociologist, Luc Boltanski, has just brought out a new book, Enigmes et Complots, which is presented as "an investigation into investigations". In his book, he studies the associated arrivals, at the end of the 19th century, of first the police procedural and then the spy novel, and how they were both invented in reaction to the modern state's stranglehold on reality.




Below are a couple of excerpts from an interview with Luc Boltanski in today's edition of Libération.




LIBERATION: Enigmas and Conspiracies deals with a critical moment, at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, which saw the appearance of investigative literature in very different genres. How do you explain that?




BOLTANSKI: It was the result of a new sort of anxiety, of a new way of looking at the world. That period corresponded to a sort of apotheosis in the life of the Nation-State, an entity that was trying, with the help of hard science and the social sciences, to develop a God-like project: to establish a stable reality in a given territory for a given population. In other words, the State was trying to construct its own reality... Investigative literature arrived at the moment when people began to understand that it was impossible to stabilize reality, when reality began to disappoint expectations. In times of stability, there is no need for investigations.




LIBERATION: The appearance of the police procedural offered you an opportunity to investigate the historical phenomena you have in mind. You choose to compare English and French police procedurals. Why?




BOLTANSKI: If a link exists between the Nation-State and the birth of the police procedural, we should be able to see that different forms of literature are linked to different types of State organization. Sherlock Holmes has been the subject of a lot of analysis, for example by Umberto Eco or Carlo Ginzburg. Holmes is a genius at deductive analysis, confronted by criminals who are themselves, if we take the case of Moriarty, geniuses at calculation. With Sherlock Holmes, everything happens in a world of social harmony, the liberal-minded England of that time, a world in which the dominant class, the aristocracy, was not in conflict with the middle classes. Different social classes are very present, but they are handled as the natural order of things. Social equilibrium is a matter of social calculation, and the State, which remains in the background most of the time, intervenes only when somebody makes a mistake about his ability to calculate for himself.




LIBERATION: You have used Simenon to analyse the French State.




BOLTANSKI: The case of France, as it appears in Simenon's stories, is very different. France had been experiencing low-level civil war, since at least 1792, interspered by very tense, high-level periods such as 1848 or during the Commune. There was permanent tension between the social classes, in a universe which was far from being liberal-minded. Parliament was considered to be at the very heart of the corruption that plagued the country. The only source of stability was the administration (the civil service). The vision of France we can extract from the Maigret novels, is a mosaic of different social milieux which each possessed their own norms, with government bodies only intervening, like colonial powers, whenever there were murders and when they couldn't avoid getting involved. 




Holmes found himself in a pragmatic social situation, that provided signs and clues, and his investigations were centered around analysis.... Maigret, on the other hand, does not search for clues, he doesn't make calculations about situations, he immerses himself in social milieux exactly as if he were a sociologist in the French tradition of sociology; he tries to put himself inside the skin of the suspect he is pursuing.




LIBERATION: Apart from the differences, these two types of novel share one characteristic: the  doubling up (or duplication) of the hero...




BOLTANSKI: When the police procedural invented the detective, it duplicated the the investigate function, between a policeman who represents the State--and who is generally shown as a half-witted idiot limited by legal niceties--and an amateur investigator who, in the case of Holmes, finds himself suitably located to sort out the affairs of high society, while keeping them in the private sphere. 




For Maigret, this doubling up takes the shape of a split personality. That is one of the principal psychological underpinnings of his novels. On one hand, you have a civil servant, who does his duty as a policeman, and on the other hand, a man who thinks for himself, who decides, for example, that it's not very nice to send a man to the guillotine and who decides that, sometimes, it's better to let the criminal die a natural death.




LIBERATION: What did the spy novel bring, when it came along a while later?




BOLTANSKI: In the police procedural, the pleasure given to the reader comes from a sort of game with reality. A little like those pictures for children which change shape depending on the child's point of view. This reality which seems so stable is not, in fact, what it seems. The police procedural showcases the tension between a local reality, which is seemingly stable, and facts which shake the confidence we can have in that reality.




In the case of the spy novel, it is the State itself, and not just a local reality, or a village, which is destabilized. Movements and flows of unknown origin imperil the integrity of the whole territory. In the global space of a country, not one single thing can be above suspicion, even at the highest level of the State, where moles can now be found. Beginning with WWI, the spy novel became one of the pillars of nationalism and, at times, anti-Semitism.... 




You can read the whole interview (in French) with Luc Boltanski in Libération, but you'll have to pay for it! :



Enquête de stabilité- Libération