Proposal for a special issue of Criminocorpus, coordinated by Lucie Amir (Université Grenoble-Alpes), Loïc Artiaga (Université de Pau et des Pays de l’Adour), and Dominique Jeannerod (Queen’s University Belfast).
Presentation
- 1 Dominique Kalifa, « Journalistes, policiers et magistrats à la fin du XIXe siècle : la question de (...)
- 2 Dominique Kalifa, op. cit.
- 3 Jérôme Thorel, Quand les médias filment la police : « immersions » et compromissions, https://www.a (...)
Since the nineteenth century, the representation of crime and its resolution has occupied a central place in media culture. The figure of Vidocq—criminal turned policeman, whose life inspired writers such as Balzac, Hugo, and Gaboriau— inaugurated two centuries of transactions between fact and fiction. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the rise of the reporter figure, with his “lateral instructions,” altered “the very nature of the criminal news item, which gradually shift[ed] from the wild and picturesque description of the crime to the more methodical and technical description of the investigation.” 1These narratives of crime accompanied the gradual emergence of a security-oriented rhetoric, serving states in a phase of consolidation. The image of the police at that time was generally positive in media culture, combining “good-natured imagery and heroic figures.” 2In the twentieth century, other media participated in shaping these representations. From the 1990s onward, television offered sympathetic portrayals in immersive (embedded) programs, epitomized by Fox’s reality series COPS, which now counts more than 1,200 episodes. 3
- 4 Dominique Monjardet, Ce que fait la police. Sociologie de la force publique, Paris, La Découverte, (...)
- 5 Jean-Paul Brodeur et Geneviève Ouellet, « L’enquête criminelle », Criminologie, 38-2, 2005, p. 39‑6 (...)
- 6 Marc Renneville, « Jack and Joseph: The Thwarted Media Publicization of the French Ripper », Contem (...)
These close connections foster distorted—if not misleading—representations of the police institution. While the social sciences, since Max Weber, have placed the maintenance of order at the heart of policing, media production overwhelmingly focuses on criminal investigation4. Even this portrayal is skewed: as criminologists Jean-Paul Brodeur and Geneviève Ouellet point out, “solving a murder generally takes the length of a novel or the duration of a film […], whereas more than 80% of homicides are solved within a few hours.” 5Mass culture thrives on these discrepancies: very few criminals achieve long-lasting media fame (Lacenaire, Landru, Petiot, Violette Nozière, Mesrine…)6, and the same is true for police officers, who become celebrities mostly in connection with a single case (from François Vidocq to Roger Borniche).
- 7 Michael Meyer (dir.), Médiatiser la police, policer les médias, Lausanne, Antipodes, 2012.
Understanding these distortions requires examining the fictional mechanisms of police narratives and the function of the social imaginary they nourish. Drawing on a long tradition of printed-media surveillance, police forces have long considered the media as objects of control — as evidenced in the archives of the Ministry of the Interior and the Paris Prefecture of Police. Over recent decades, the social sciences and information sciences have documented the care with which police institutions now manage and mediatize their public image7. This call for papers proposes to extend this inquiry diachronically, by documenting the connections linking police institutions and media productions since the emergence of mass culture.
- 8 Arnaud-Dominique Houte, « Policiers : Polices et gendarmeries dans l’Europe du XIXe siècle », in Ni (...)
- 9 Frédéric Chauvaud, Arnaud-Dominique Houte, « « Introduction », in Frédéric Chauvaud, Arnaud-Dominiq (...)
In the last decades, the history of policing institutions has moved away from a “legal-administrative approach,” shifting toward a social and cultural history attentive to comparison and the circulation of policing practices8. Yet, as in the media, major cases and spectacular crimes — better served by rich archives — often overshadow the ordinary9. Studies of media and fictional representations of the police, for their part, do not always have the tools to assess the gap between fiction and the reality of policing practices, or to analyze the surveillance to which media productions themselves are subjected. This issue seeks to bring material history into dialogue with the history of representations, to explore a history of policing informed by its imaginaries, as well as a history of myths informed by police practices.
Within this framework, this special issue of Criminocorpus welcomes contributions addressing the following themes:
1. Interfaces between Police and Media
- 10 Guillaume Le Saulnier (dir.), « Police & communication », Médiation & information, n° 53, Paris, L’ (...)
- 11 Paul Rocher, Que fait la police ? Et comment s’en passer, Paris, La Fabrique Éditions, 2022.
From the July Monarchy onward, police forces maintained ambiguous relationships with the press: organized leaks, supervision of court reporters, political monitoring of newsrooms. Under Prefect Lépine, who disseminated information about the modernization of his units, the police learned to work with the media, using them to issue calls for witnesses or instructions, and later — from the 1970s–1980s — through the development of genuine communication departments10. Today, these departments engage in extensive “image work,” well documented for the contemporary period in information and communication sciences. In the 2010s, media campaigns advocating increased police resources intensified, revealing new capacities for intervention in public debate11.
This issue offers an opportunity to explore the historical development of these successive innovations (press releases, “crisis communication” strategies). These evolutions speak to the long history of state control and instrumentalization of the media and help elucidate how interfaces between police institutions and mass-culture media have been shaped.
2. Mythologies of the Police
In the nineteenth century, judicial press narratives and serialized fiction constructed the figure of the infallible investigator, at the very moment when the criminal police were becoming professionalized. The police officer appears as a figure of social authority in Hugo’s work (Javert in Les Misérables, 1862) and in realist and naturalist novels (Balzac’s Une ténébreuse affaire (1841); Zola’s Germinal (1885)). He also embodies, at times, the repression of workers’ movements and social struggles, corruption (in American hardboiled fiction), or even intellectual oppression (in Kafka or Orwell).
- 12 Lucie Amir, « ‘Bon flic’ : quelques éléments sur l’image de la police dans le polar français contem (...)
Despite the persistent tropes of the brute or the “dirty cop” inherited from American hardboiled fiction, the police officer is traditionally a sympathetic character in detective fiction, as evidenced by the long-term success of the police procedural — whose contemporary renewal has been documented12.
This section invites studies of the themes, figures, and archetypes that shape representations of the police across factual and fictional genres (true crime, memoirs, reportage, genre fiction, literary fiction, etc.). Contributors may ask to what extent these representations mystify the reality of the police institution, and to what extent they function as myths — that is, as collective regulatory narratives — which requires examining their social functions.
Historicizing these representations entails articulating them with the social history of the institution and with statistical realities (clearance rates, violence indicators, public perceptions of the police). The goal is to interrogate the long-term construction of “police effectiveness” by and for the media, and to evaluate the social functions of media productions about policing.
This axis also seeks to understand which aspects of policing are emphasized in media productions, and how the diversification of formats, platforms, and temporalities reshapes the public representation of police work.
3. The Critical Function
- 13 Anthony Pregnolato, « L’espace des mobilisations contre les violences des forces de l’ordre en Fran (...)
From the late nineteenth century onward, naturalist or anarchist literature criticized police repression and corruption. Later, in the 1960s–1970s, countercultural movements offered dark portrayals of the police, accompanying mobilizations against police violence, which in France disproportionately targeted immigrant labor populations13.
- 14 Lucie Amir, « ‘Bon flic’ : quelques éléments sur l’image de la police dans le polar français contem (...)
- 15 P. Rocher, Que fait la police ?, op. cit.
- 16 Lucie Amir, op. cit.
- 17 Keivan Djavadzadeh, « L’engagement des artistes hip-hop à l’ère des réseaux socionumériques et de B (...)
Even as mass-market productions continued to project the image of the “good cop”14, the “police myth” came under attack on several fronts, with police violence increasingly denounced through the multiplication of citizen media15. Public awareness has grown regarding the gap between actual policing practices and their fictional representations16. Around the Black Lives Matter movement (2013) and its international development, new forms of engagement by pop artists emerged in the media sphere: original compositions, but also online campaigns17.
4. Formal and Ideological Continuities
- 18 Carlo Ginzburg, « Signes, traces, pistes. Racines d'un paradigme de l'indice ». Le Débat, 6(6), 3-4 (...)
- 19 Jacques Rancière, Le Partage du sensible : Esthétique et politique, Paris, La Fabrique, 2005.
- 20 Dominique Kalifa, « Usages du faux. Faits divers et romans criminels au XIX e siècle », Annales. Hi (...)
Do the police and the media not share formats, genres, and aesthetic logics? In 1980, a landmark article by Carlo Ginzburg identified in a common “paradigm of the clue” (paradigma indiziario) several social practices that emerged in the nineteenth century, including police methods and detective literature18. In Jacques Rancière’s thought, “police” designates the ensemble of techniques of government, beyond the institution proper: it is an aesthetic matrix — the official matrix of the “distribution of the sensible” 19. This section invites contributors to consider the police as a producer of discourse and content, and to examine the “vast and proliferating intertext”»20 that materializes the close ties between policing and media culture.
- 21 Laetitia Gonon, Le fait divers criminel dans la presse quotidienne française du XIXe siècle, Paris, (...)
This involves documenting the formal circulations between modes of expression specific to police work (depositions, testimonies, reports, photographs, investigation files, etc.) and media productions — building, for example, on Laetitia Gonon’s research on interdiscursive circulations in crime reporting21.
Timeline
31 March 2026: Submission of proposals (title, 3,000–5,000-character abstract, 5 keywords, 5-line bio-bibliographical note)
15 May 2026: Notification of acceptance
15 October 2026: Submission of full articles (60,000–80,000 characters including spaces, notes, and bibliography)
Contacts: lucie.amir@univ-grenoble-alpes.fr, loic.artiaga@univ-pau.fr, d.jeannerod@qub.ac.uk
Notes
1 Dominique Kalifa, « Journalistes, policiers et magistrats à la fin du XIXe siècle : la question de l’insécurité urbaine », in Christian Delporte (dir.), Médias et villes (XVIIIe-XXe siècle), Tours, Presses universitaires François-Rabelais, 1999, p. 119‑136.
2 Dominique Kalifa, op. cit.
3 Jérôme Thorel, Quand les médias filment la police : « immersions » et compromissions, https://www.acrimed.org/Quand-les-medias-filment-la-police-immersions-et-compromissions, consulté le 29 septembre 2025.
4 Dominique Monjardet, Ce que fait la police. Sociologie de la force publique, Paris, La Découverte, 1996.
5 Jean-Paul Brodeur et Geneviève Ouellet, « L’enquête criminelle », Criminologie, 38-2, 2005, p. 39‑64.
6 Marc Renneville, « Jack and Joseph: The Thwarted Media Publicization of the French Ripper », Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, 29-1, 2025, p. 46‑65.
7 Michael Meyer (dir.), Médiatiser la police, policer les médias, Lausanne, Antipodes, 2012.
8 Arnaud-Dominique Houte, « Policiers : Polices et gendarmeries dans l’Europe du XIXe siècle », in Nicolas Delalande, Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel, Pierre Singaravélou et Marie-Bénédicte Vincent (dir.), Dictionnaire historique de la comparaison, Paris, Éditions de la Sorbonne, 2020, p. 88‑90.
9 Frédéric Chauvaud, Arnaud-Dominique Houte, « « Introduction », in Frédéric Chauvaud, Arnaud-Dominique Houte (dir.), Au voleur ! Images et représentations du vol dans la France contemporaine (XIXe-XXe siècle), Paris, Éditions de la Sorbonne, 2021.
10 Guillaume Le Saulnier (dir.), « Police & communication », Médiation & information, n° 53, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2023.
11 Paul Rocher, Que fait la police ? Et comment s’en passer, Paris, La Fabrique Éditions, 2022.
12 Lucie Amir, « ‘Bon flic’ : quelques éléments sur l’image de la police dans le polar français contemporain », Belphégor, 23-2, 2025, en ligne.
13 Anthony Pregnolato, « L’espace des mobilisations contre les violences des forces de l’ordre en France depuis les années 1990 », Mouvements, 92-4, 2017, p. 38‑47.
14 Lucie Amir, « ‘Bon flic’ : quelques éléments sur l’image de la police dans le polar français contemporain », Belphégor, 23-2, 2025, en ligne
15 P. Rocher, Que fait la police ?, op. cit.
16 Lucie Amir, op. cit.
17 Keivan Djavadzadeh, « L’engagement des artistes hip-hop à l’ère des réseaux socionumériques et de Black Lives Matter », Études de communication, 2, 2024, p. 155‑182.
18 Carlo Ginzburg, « Signes, traces, pistes. Racines d'un paradigme de l'indice ». Le Débat, 6(6), 3-44. https://doi.org/10.3917/deba.006.0003.
19 Jacques Rancière, Le Partage du sensible : Esthétique et politique, Paris, La Fabrique, 2005.
20 Dominique Kalifa, « Usages du faux. Faits divers et romans criminels au XIX e siècle », Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales, 54ᵉ année, n°6, 1999, p. 1345-1362.
21 Laetitia Gonon, Le fait divers criminel dans la presse quotidienne française du XIXe siècle, Paris, Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2012.
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